book review love and virtue

Book review: Love & Virtue, Diana Reid

Writing and Publishing

Diana Reid’s debut ‘powerfully contrasts personal shame with the relentlessness of media interrogation.’ Picture supplied.

Love & Virtue is an impressive debut novel. The prose crackles fiercely, luring readers in with phrases to mull over and taste before devouring the next delicious sentence. Couple this with slang, where people ‘fang a dart’, and the richness in the eloquent language – containing no extraneous words – is evident.

Diana Reid sends the audience down one track before pivoting on a hairpin bend, continually challenging the reader’s interpretation. The resultant feeling of restlessness alludes to no easy comfort for the well-honed characters, who sparkle through the perfect balance of description and action. Protagonist Michaela and primary antagonist Eve are very different. Eve is ‘both a person and an idea of a person’, which is ‘very important to her’. Meeting at Fairfax College, Eve seems ‘fully formed, like the final version of herself’. In contrast, Michaela opines that ‘although my potential might be my own, its realisation [is] owed very much to’ other people: this ‘deferring authorship of [her] personality to the imagined gaze of others’ exposes Michaela’s lack of self-confidence.  

Read: Book review: Wild Abandon, Emily Bitto

The protagonist is a somewhat unreliable narrator, most notably when she can’t remember details of that first drunken night in O-Week, the source of much of the discussion about morality. The setting provides an ideal context for the crossover between fiction and fact, when women speak out against abuse in university colleges in the hope that it will ‘spark sweeping cultural changes in notoriously conservative institutions’. Love & Virtue powerfully contrasts personal shame with the relentlessness of media interrogation. Female readers in particular will recognise similar situations, empathising with the characters while reflecting on their own experiences or those of a friend.

The settings – single-gender residential colleges and the wider university campus in Sydney – serve as a backdrop for attitudes associated with entitlement. The divide in social class is evident: Michaela has no option but to use her Fairfax scholarship, whereas the ‘boys’ at St Thomas’ College are ‘super entitled. Which makes [them] dangerous’. Vacuous, they hold conversations in which ‘the topics range from wantonly contentious … to contentiously wanton’, unconsciously parading their privilege and arrogance. Through these differing perspectives Reid explores objectification, penetrating social class as well as gender. 

The murky line between consent and being taken advantage of is subjected to scrutiny, with implications and consequences building in ever-widening parameters. If the women at Fairfax are unaware that abusive behaviour is ‘a totally fucked way to be treated’, they are also unable to assuage their doubts and relieve guilt, to reconcile past actions.  

Micro-aggressions that so many women will recognise – the sexist slurs and attitudes that disempower women – are dropped into the plot as casually as they are present in real life; in the era of #MeToo and Grace Tame, this is particularly vile. Michaela’s reaction to noticing her lecturer ‘gaze … over [her] body’ is to be ‘glad’ she wore her miniskirt. The protagonist does not question the pervasiveness of such actions, nor her reaction. 

The reveals in the climax cement the prevalence and normalisation of misogyny in contemporary society. The influence of sexual misdemeanour is contextualised, from the deeply personal to government-sanctioned laws. Ripples of understanding ricochet with the increasing comprehension that ‘the fact that other people might benefit from [someone’s] hurt doesn’t erase it’. Readers will be inspired to revisit earlier scenes to see if they could have found the clues to the reveals – while simultaneously pausing to draw breath, integrating all the ramifications. 

Love & Virtue is an important contribution to the growing discourse around consent, a powerful first-hand narrative which examines layers of morality, questioning where and how lines are drawn. 

Love & Virtue   by Diana Reid Publisher: Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761150111 Format: Paperback Pages: 320 pp Publication date: October 2021 RRP: $32.99

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Annabel Harz

Annabel Harz is a career teacher, burgeoning editor and an emerging writer. She released her first book in 2017. Her second release, Journey into the Shadow and the Sunshine, was released in October 2021.

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Love & Virtue by Diana Reid

Reviewed by Annie Condon

Diana Reid’s Love & Virtue is an outstanding debut novel that balances multiple issues, including female friendship, intellectual curiosity, class and gender privilege, with a coming-of-age story.

Michaela, an 18-year-old from a single-parent family in Canberra, receives a scholarship to live in a residential college at university. On arrival, she discovers that the other students are from wealthy Sydney families, wanting the ‘out of home’ experience. Reminiscent of the narrators in both Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld and How the Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland, she becomes keenly aware of this class divide. Michaela has a sharp eye, but her vision is limited by her own insecurities. This characteristic is essential to the narrative – everything Michaela sees and feels is magnified. She is awestruck by another student, Eve, who is slightly older, confident and prepared to push boundaries. Eve also knows about a disturbing event that occurred during Orientation Week, something that is revealed in the prologue, that Michaela can’t recall.

Eve and Michaela have one class together on campus – a philosophy class taught by the charismatic Professor Paul Rosen. This class introduces Michaela to a world of intellectual and critical questioning. Discussions with Eve, the professor and other friends ensue, in scenes similar to Sally Rooney’s novels where the characters discuss the failures of capitalism. The novel begins and ends with Michaela reflecting on her and Eve’s long-ago friendship. Somewhere along the way, Eve has cruelly betrayed Michaela, even as she rises to become a prominent public figure.

Reid’s novel is timely. She explores consent, and the prevalence and under- reporting of assaults on university campuses. The ‘love’ aspect of the title refers to Michaela’s personal life. There is her love and awe for Eve; the ambiguous friendships she has with students atthe all-boy residential college and her growing crush on Professor Rosen. Love & Virtue is a social, emotional and intellectual masterpiece. Choose it for your book club (make sure you have plenty of time and wine) and expect to see it on many award shortlists.

Annie Condon is a bookseller at Readings Hawthorn.

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Review: Love and Virtue

Wounded by the growing sense of distance that we currently feel from a so-called ‘normal’ campus experience, we flock to fiction to get our quick fix. We chuckle at the familiar awkwardness in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, lament in the melancholy of John William’s Stoner , are frustrated by the tumult of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and are perplexed by the mystery of Donna Tart’s The Secret History . But despite more people going to university in Australia than ever before, the national contribution to campus fiction is surprisingly paltry. Recent University of Sydney Philosophy and Law graduate, Diana Reid’s debut novel, Love and Virtue , intends to fill this gap, taking readers into the elite world of residential colleges at a fictionalised Sydney university.

Protagonist Michaela is a high-achieving scholarship student from Canberra, who is a resident at the fictional women’s-only ‘Fairfax College’. Arriving during O Week, her welcome to Sydney is fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol, ending in a non-consensual sexual encounter that becomes a thematic centrepiece in the text. Her best friend and college neighbour Eve is the picture of perfection – almost too smart and too beautiful to be human. However, their relationship exudes a Ferrate-esque competitive streak that manifests in various instances of toxicity and betrayal. 

Whilst in conversation with Honi , Reid acknowledged that such a portrayal may not be particularly good for the ‘sisterhood’, she believes that it is vitally important to depict characters that are real. But more than this, incumbent in the persistent competition is a sense of self-respect. Both Michaela and Eve are characters who are powerfully driven, their competition grounded in a will to be independent and seek academic validation, rather than a spat over a man. In this way, their rivalry is an empowering expression of female ambition, and a show of respect for their opponent’s talent and intelligence.  

University stories tend to be dipped in a familiar slew of clichés, their characters serving as exemplars of recognisable stereotypes. Love and Virtue embraces this trend quite plainly, but not always to a fault. Reid often toys with these tropes to build up readers’ expectations, developing the archetype only to slowly dismantle it as the text unfolds. This is most clearly the case in the portrayal of Professor Paul Rosen, Michaela’s first year philosophy professor.

Professor (‘call me Paul’) Rosen is deemed immensely likeable, despite his visual portrayal being rather unflattering. But still, the expectations surrounding his character are firmly grounded in the social narrative concerning his position as a professor – grounding him in the pomp and status of the institution, and accentuating his personal authority derived from being both male and white. Nonetheless, when the spark between Professor Rosen and Michaela finally develops, the result appears inconsequential – their romance fleeting, reciprocal, and in many ways, quite normal.

The anti-climactic nature of the relationship would prompt many to ask: What was the point? When reading the text, I honestly thought the same. However, in conversation with Honi, Reid proposed that this relationship serves as a parallel to that between Michaela and Eve. Although the same age and gender as the protagonist, Eve is highly manipulative, often to Michaela’s detriment. However, the manipulation reveals a prominent grey area in the realm of moral decision making, as it lies outside of the principally grounded power dynamics within the social imaginary, such as that between a man and woman, student and teacher. This reflects the ultimate aim of Reid’s text: to compel the reader to go beyond the assumption that there is always a black and white answer, and realise that things are so much more confusing than they seem.

But the most morally troubling part of the text arises from a tension in Michaela and Eve’s relationship, as Eve takes Michaela’s story of being raped during O Week as her own. Spreading the story at social events, in the student newspaper, and ultimately, writing a book about the event, Eve gets to be the martyr without any of the suffering.

In the shadow of Chanel Contos’ online publication of sexual assault victim testimonies, Reid’s book is particularly salient. However, in my view, Love and Virtue takes the conversation a step further. By paying close attention to the optics of sexual assault rather than the instance itself, Reid highlights some of the moral and emotional troubles that victims face when coming forward with their stories. But perhaps more importantly, she leaves the reader asking, why, when there are so many people suffering, must we always make the story about ourselves?

I started this review by proposing that campus fiction fills the void left behind by the lack of a ‘normal’ student experience. With this thought, I am drawn to the words of Iris Murdoch:

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality. But given the state of the world, is it wise?”

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Book Review: Love and Virtue by Diana Reid (Ultimo Press)

**This review was originally published on The AU Review on September 30 2021**

Diana Reid   was well on her way to a career in theatre, when COVID-19 saw the cancellation of  1984! The Musical , a production she co-wrote and produced. In lockdown, she decided to turn her hand to writing a book. The result is   Love & Virtue , a masterpiece of ‘millennial fiction’ which is already garnering comparisons to Sally Rooney.

The novel follows a young woman named Michaela who has moved from Canberra to Sydney to attend University. She has received a scholarship to live in Fairfax College; there she meets the enigmatic and highly opinionated Eve, who lives in the room next door to hers.

Eve is staunchly feminist, and has a personality which polarises her peers. While Michaela feels both drawn to her and intimidated by her, Eve is not a part of her ‘circle of friends’, rather she is someone she hangs out with separately. The nuances of their relationship, which is part attraction and part rivalry are explored throughout a number of incidents, with Michaela often forming her opinion on things in relation to Eve’s.

Eve is shown to be highly manipulative and her identity seems to be a kind of performance at times, such as when she returns from a trip to Europe with a shaved head, as if rejecting her beauty and privilege just to be obstinate.

Two key events drive the conflict between Eve and Michaela. The first is the revelation that one of their circle of friends is revealed to be the young man who slept with Michaela on her first night at Fairfax, when she was too drunk to consent. While Michaela feels uncomfortable about the event, Eve is militant in her insistence that his actions constituted a rape and that Michaela needs to report him to the school. Things are made complicated by the fact that this young man is now dating one of Michaela’s friends.

The other event is the beginning of a relationship between Michaela and her philosophy professor, who is twice her age. While this man is rumoured to have a history of innappropriate relationships with his students, Michaela feels that this is different because she is the one who pursued him. She derives a sense of confidence from the fact that Paul is attracted to her, when he met her in a class that also contained Eve. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions as to whether this might be the reason she is interested in the transgression in the first place.

Set against a backdrop of philosophy classes, and released into a post Me-Too world,  Love & Virtue  takes well-trodden ground and dissects it. Is the cliched plot of the jaded middle aged professor taking advantage of his impressionable undergrad love interest really as simple as television and movies have led us to believe, or is there more to be explored here? Reid cleverly pairs this aspect of the plot with the exploration of friendships in early adolescence, putting the focus not just on what Michaela and Paul are doing, but on Michaela and Eve’s relationship, ever present in the background.

Michaela may be a deeply flawed narrator, but she is also extremely easy to relate to, as she feels out of place in the new environment in which she finds herself. She is not the prettiest, not the smartest, not the coolest, but she is also not the kind of insufferable character who believes she is ugly, stupid and a loser until someone else shows her otherwise. She owns a lot of her bad behaviour, even if it’s just to herself, which cleverly keeps the book’s tag line (Are you a good person, or do you just look like one?) in the forefront of the reader’s mind.

I think the Rooney comparison is warranted. Reid’s writing has a breathtaking clarity. Her writing is sparse with adjectives, but still manages to be evocative. There is also a wryness to the voice, which seems to come from Michaela, and lends to the idea that perhaps she thinks she is more ‘special’ than she is letting on. At times, the book reminded me of the experience of reading Meg Mason’s  Sorrow and Bliss.  But, put quite simply,  Love & Virtue  is a triumph.

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Posted on 14 Apr 2022 in Fiction |

DIANA REID Love & Virtue. Reviewed by Emma Foster

Tags: Australian fiction / Australian women writers / campus novels / consent / Diana Reid / philosophy

Diana Reid’s debut novel poses some philosophical dilemmas.

University campus culture was fresh for Diana Reid when she began writing Love & Virtue . She had recently graduated from The University of Sydney in early 2020 when Covid kyboshed her plans to tour with a musical theatre production she’d co-written. So instead she sat down to pen her debut, which she describes as an ‘Australian campus novel’.

A self-confessed fan of the genre – in interviews naming favourites including Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited , Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Sally Rooney’s Normal People – Reid has been keen to emphasise that her novel is not autobiographical.

But it’s evident that the observations she injects into the issues explored in the novel – including power, privilege, sex and consent – have been given extra vitality by the currency of her own campus experiences.

For any reader who’s known campus life, whether it was two years ago like Reid or more than two decades ago, like me, Love & Virtue takes you right back to those excitingly trepidatious days.

She conjures up that heady combination of joining a new group of friends, living in each other’s pockets, experimenting and overindulging, all at a vulnerable time of life when you’re trying on new identities to find your place in the world.

The story is narrated by Michaela, a high-achieving 18 year old from Canberra who was awarded a scholarship to study philosophy and live in a residential women’s college at an elite Sydney university (unnamed, although unambiguously modelled on Reid’s own alma mater).

During orientation week, along with coming to grips with the juxtaposition of prestigious sandstone quadrangles and academic gowns with seedy drinking rituals and wearing hangover nausea ‘like a badge’, Michaela’s whip-smart confidence sees her drawn into the privileged lives of students fresh out of private school, including (intimately) the boys from a nearby college.

But by far the most dazzling person she meets is Eve, her ‘radiantly intelligent’ next-door neighbour in college.

Captivating from the outset, with ‘high, prominent cheekbones that assert themselves like contradictions’, Eve introduces Michaela to thinkers like Susan Sontag, ushers her to Women in Philosophy events, and debates with her the feminist merits of casual sex and the need for women to ‘cultivate a masculine frankness about their success’.

Michaela is inwardly thrilled to enter the intellectual world of her articulate and brilliant new friend.   

Yet, as their bond tightens, Michaela also finds she is repelled by Eve’s contradictions – like her penchant for lamenting capitalism while wearing ‘vegan leather sneakers [that] cost several hundred dollars’ – and her proclivity to steer all conversations around to her own experiences in order to be seen as the smartest person in the room.

An undercurrent of competitive toxicity begins to swell between these two very different but equally gifted young women, and this becomes the catalyst for the novel’s narrative.

Aside from the absorbing events that unfold, these two characters become Reid’s vehicles for exploring the ‘grey’ in some age-old social dilemmas – like the corrupting forces of privilege and imbalanced power dynamics; and the highly topical and often distressing fine line between rape and consent, victimhood and empowerment.

In an ironic twist, and to underscore the greyness, Reid ultimately introduces a breach of consent between the two young women as the catalyst to bring about cultural change in the privileged institutions that have enabled breaches of consent to thrive.       

While all that sounds terribly heavy, it’s wrapped in Reid’s witty, fast-paced prose among a cast of bright, complex, well-formed young characters.

As a debut, Love & Virtue is quite a triumph for Reid.

However, I couldn’t help feeling some plot points were a little forced, almost as though Reid had only included them to be able to raise philosophical dilemmas. For example, a clandestine sexual relationship between a student and a professor is introduced, which did its job of exploring the moral ambiguities swirling around power and choice, but personally I wished Reid had fashioned a less clichéd (and tiring!) scenario. 

That aside, for those interested in the grey areas that pervade our society as seen through the eyes of young Australians caught up in contemporary campus culture, Love & Virtue delivers a nuanced view.

Diana Reid Love & Virtue Ultimo Press 2021 PB 320pp $32.99

Emma Foster is a writer and reviewer. Her musings can be found at welltold.com.au .

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Mrs B's Book Reviews

Book reviews and recommendations from a self confessed book geek, new release book review: love & virtue by diana reid.

Title:  Love & Virtue

Author:  Diana Reid

Published:  September 29th 2021

Publisher:  Ultimo Press

Pages:  320

Genres:  Fiction, Contemporary

RRP:  $32.99

Rating:  4 stars

Feminism, power and sex play out through the eyes of young Australian uni students in a contemporary narrative that is fiercely authentic

Whenever I say I was at university with Eve, people ask me what she was like, sceptical perhaps that she could have always been as whole and self-assured as she now appears. To which I say something like: ‘People are infinitely complex.’ But I say it in such a way—so pregnant with misanthropy—that it’s obvious I hate her.

​ Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular – the other uncertain and eager-to-please. But something happens one night in O-week – a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power.

​Initially bonded by their wit and sharp eye for the colleges’ mix of material wealth and moral poverty, Michaela and Eve soon discover how fragile friendship is, and how capable of betrayal they both are.

​ Written with a strikingly contemporary voice that is both wickedly clever and incisive, issues of consent, class and institutional privilege, and feminism become provocations for enduring philosophical questions we face today. 

A real, raw and unflinching fictional account of life as a first-year university student in Sydney, Love & Virtue is the dynamic debut novel from Diana Reid. Bravely taking on themes of power, class, privilege, feminism and consent, Diana’s Reid’s first book is destined to become one of the most talked about titles of 2021.

Diana Reid introduces two late teen girls to head her first novel, Love & Virtue . Michaela and Eve become firm friends when they are placed in nearby rooms on campus at their new university home. It doesn’t take long before these two girls strike up a strong but precarious relationship. Personality wise, the two girls differ greatly. One is bright and bubbly, while the other is more understated. But an unforgettable sexual encounter occurs which throws the friendship off kilter. The girls most consider the cost of friendship, power, status and consent following this assault. While they to forge ahead with their studies and future plans, both discover the true meaning of friendship, alliances and betrayal. Narrated with depth, truth and reality, Love & Virtue is the startling first novel from a progressive new writer in the publishing world.

The author of Love & Virtue , Diana Reid, is a recent graduate of the University of Sydney.  It is understandable that this Sydney based writer felt the need to pen a manuscript during the COVID-19 lockdown on life as a college student in the capital of New South Wales. Love & Virt ue is a bold, poised and analytical novel that tackles the culture of higher education settings. With themes of power, feminism, gender, class and status all coming into play, Diane Reid’s debut is a very timely novel.

Overall, there were many aspects of Love & Virtue that I valued. I think ultimately that this book has come a little too late for me, as I experienced the university scene over two decades ago now. I wish this book was released around 2000, which is when I was in the thick of my university course experiences. However, there was a touch of nostalgia that came with reading and listening to this one via Audible (my chosen format for this one). It is good to see a fresh new author emerge who is willing to tackle this college life setting from an Australian angle. I think Reid did an excellent job of portraying the typical life of a first-year university student in Australia, via the cast of this story.

It was interesting to observe the direction and tone of this novel come from an almost philosophical angle, which was quite unique for a contemporary Australian novel. Reid also bravely takes on debatable themes of ownership of experiences, sharing stories, power, privilege, status, consent, morality, opportunity, love, authority, secrets, friendships, loss and feminism. I thought the situations and scenarios Reid placed her cast members in throughout the novel were extremely credible. Even though I am much older than the protagonists featured in Love & Virtue , I was able to step into their shoes and weigh up how I would respond to the same problems. It felt uncomfortable at times, but Love & Virtue is a book that will test you, instead of leaving you content. We definitely need mores stories out there that tackle the issues that Reid is so willing to critically interrogate. Hopefully this is just the start of a new trend or style of books that challenge current ideas around social privilege and class structures.

I fear there is a lot more to be said about this one, but I think I will keep this review short and sweet. The amount of social media buzz this impressive debut has received since this book was published just over a month ago says it all. Love & Virtue is definitely an icebreaker and a conversation starter. I am happy to recommend Diana Reid’s fierce debut novel to contemporary fiction readers.

Love & Virtue by Diana Reid is published on 29th September 2021 by Ultimo Press. Details on how to purchase the book can be found  here .

Love & Virtue is book #100 of the 2021 Australian Women Writers Challenge

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Morality, consent and picking fact from fiction with Australian author Diana Reid

By Bianca Farmakis | 3 years ago

One of the stronger conversation starters I came up with in my late 20s, when social events transitioned from "gatherings" to wine-swirling, adult-impersonating bashes, was "what is a social cause you feel pressured to care about that you truly don't?"

It's a question better articulated in debut novelist Diana Reid's book Love and Virtue. The story takes us into the elite world of Sydney's private university colleges — a setting few have experienced first-hand, but many have encountered the people they produce.

Global leaders, finance professionals, doctors, high profile members of society have walked down the halls of the (semi-)fictionalised place Reid's book is set in, raising the question: what responsibility does an institution play in creating good, virtuous people, and what role does it play when they are corrupted?

Reid penned the book after her plans to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival were cancelled due to coronavirus.

"Writing a novel was something that I had sort of thought I might try and do, like, before I died," she tells 9Honey. "In 2020 I had literally nothing else to do, so I was like, 'Well, if I can't write a novel under these conditions, then it's just not something I'm capable of'."

As a former resident at the University of Sydney's colleges, Reid's fictionalised version of events that happen in the microcosm of (high) society that is on-campus living is a less a question of how we learn to be moral beings, and more a negotiation of what happens when we compromise our own values.

In a story exploring consent, sex, power and the misuse of them all, Reid's book, which paints a portrait of extremely familiar settings and events, flirts with being scandalous, but ultimately delivers a powerful commentary on the state of Australia's future leaders.

Below is a conversation unpacking question — with a few spoiler alerts.

Given the book's title, how do you define virtue?

"One way to think about virtue is it's like a set of rules that you adhere to. And then another way to think about it is it's about character. It's about what values you yourself adhere to, and whether your actions align with those values."

"I guess it's based on how you perceive the world around you and how sensitive you are to the complex nature that can entail."

Love and Virtue explores sex, consent, power structures and the influence elite, predominantly private school-occupied colleges have on producing future leaders of the country. Given the year of news that's been, including a nationwide reckoning on sexual assault culture, how much of your story is based on real life?

"Honestly, I do hasten to tell people that I actually wrote it in the first half of 2020, before any of the allegations looming over parliaments, school, everything actually emerged. But it's very much fiction, if anyone's wondering.

"I'm not someone who's writing from personal experience. My worst fear is that people would think that I saw what was happening in the Australian Parliament and used that as inspiration. So the settings I took from real life, like the lecture theatre, or the formal or, like a boozy Thai dinner, but all of the events in it are completely made up. Michaela, the narrator, studies philosophy and has an affair with a professor. I can confirm I did study philosophy but never had an affair with a professor."

READ MORE: How a broke 20-year-old made Forbes' 30 under 30 rich list: 'I haven't reinvented the wheel'

What do you think we can learn about society reading about the elite world university colleges are said to have?

"I must say, that's something that I really grappled with. While I was writing it ... I never expected it to be published. And one of the things I thought, while I was writing, was 'these characters are in such a privileged minority. Like, who cares?'

"But there's a part in the book where the characters have a conversation about where you derive morality from in a modern world — whether that's in social groups, institutions, so on, and it made me realise institutions do create their own ethical systems, and they do create their own cultures and conduct which can seem appropriate in that small sphere, that elsewhere wouldn't seem appropriate at all."

"I also believe that while these colleges are very small, insular places that only deal with a very privileged minority, those people do go on to wield a lot of power. The way that people grow up in those institutions and the conduct that they learn from them, and the ethics that they take away, can go on to affect all of us... especially if they end up in Parliament."

How do you think people grapple with their sense of self when these institutions fail them?

"I think the problem is that I think people tie so much of their identity to the places where they spend their formative years. And that's totally understandable, because I think those places do change you. So I think that people are right to take criticisms of the institutions as criticisms of themselves."

"I wanted to write a book about how morality is hard, if that makes sense, and people — good or bad — are always complicated. I would say that, I certainly don't feel as though I've got to the bottom of morality by any means. The more I engage with it, the more complex it becomes."

What do you hope people gain from reading your book?

"Okay, so it doesn't sound fun. But I want them to be more confused about 'right and wrong'. I want them to feel at the end that they are less sure in their judgments of the characters and of the situations than they were at the outset. Having said that, I appreciate the being like this book will be confusing is not a very good sell, so I also hope that is they laugh and are entertained."

Love and Virtue is available for purchase now.

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Diana Reid on Sally Rooney, Love & Virtue and her fast follow-up: ‘Lockdown gave me freedom to fail’

Seeing Other People comes just 12 months after Reid’s acclaimed debut and follows two sisters enthralled by the same woman – and the pull between duty and desire

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Getting published was a “dream come true” for Diana Reid.

“You know when you’re a kid so excited for Christmas Day that you wake up really early?” she says. “For a month after I found out I was being published, I woke up unnaturally early every day because I was so excited to live my life.”

The Sydney author was just 24 when she started writing in 2020, as a lockdown project. She didn’t think anything would come of it – but it went on to become her critically acclaimed debut, Love & Virtue.

That 2021 novel, set at a prestigious Sydney campus, tapped into the zeitgeist from all sides: exploring feminism, female friendship, privilege, rape culture and consent. It became a bestseller, winning the ABIA Book of the Year award, the Sydney Morning Herald’s best young novelist and a Bookseller’s Choice fiction award – and endorsements from Helen Garner, Hannah Kent and Annabel Crabb.

“It definitely was something I always wanted to do in a very pipe-dreamy, I-loved-reading-and-I-thought-it would-be-such-a bucket-list-thing-to-try, [but] if it weren’t for that lockdown, I know I would not have done it,” she says. “I felt there was the freedom to fail, because I was like, ‘If I write a book and nothing happens, then it won’t make a difference because no one else is doing anything anyway.’”

Reid has since been able to quit her graduate role at a law firm for the coveted gig of full-time writer – and just 12 months after her debut, she is already releasing a follow-up. Out this month, Seeing Other People is a wry examination of two sisters in their early 20s, and their respective, sometimes intoxicating, attraction to the same woman; told from all three perspectives, it’s a gripping and tense read.

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Underpinned by Reid’s take on the difference between infatuation and love, the story is delivered with a cutting appraisal of her generation, with characters who are both performative in the way they act, and profoundly ethically aware. The younger sister, Charlie, an actor, fantasises about the social currency of dating Helen, a director who commands admiration from every room she steps into. While the older sister, Eleanor – fresh from a break-up with the nondescript Mark – is gripped by the intensity of her feelings and a growing dread of what it would look like if she acted on them.

Seeing Other People is similar in tone and style to Love & Virtue (“I wanted people to feel like they were reading a Diana Reid book,” she says): a think novel with a moral dilemma at its heart. But the characters feel like older, more evolved versions of the university students of her campus novel. Reid says her education (she went to the elite Ascham school in Sydney’s east, before studying Law and Philosophy at the University of Sydney) gave her the permission and confidence to question everything – an “exhausting but useful practice” that sees her begin the drafting process with a moral question she would like to explore.

It’s this emotionally analytical undertone of her work – as experienced by young, erudite, mostly white, middle-class characters – that has drawn numerous comparisons to Sally Rooney, who Reid says has been “hugely influential”.

“I guess the more politically conscious [response] is that it’s reductive to equate women because they’re of a similar age and demographic – but I love Sally Rooney so much that I don’t care; I find it really flattering,” she says. “I read Conversations with Friends in 2019, in the year before I wrote Love & Virtue. It [was] the first book I’d read that I felt really reflected my social world … the first time that I realised that lives like mine were worthy of a literary rendering, which sounds like a crazy thing to say because as you say, I am white and university-educated, so I am not shy of representation at all.

“I think it’s more that it was treated so seriously as a piece of literature. I am not naive to the fact that my book sold so much better because Normal People had been so successful, and so publishers saw, ‘campus novel written by a young woman – we know that sells.’”

Of the similarities between the characters in her own novels, Reid says: “I am always interested in the dynamic of female relationships, where it’s a grey area between knowing whether you want to be like someone, or be with them. In Love & Virtue, the main character is obsessed with this Eve figure, but because they’re in a heteronormative environment, she ultimately channels it into this competition for male attention instead. It’s what [philosopher] Adrienne Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality.

“I guess I was not done with that dynamic and I wanted to explore it a bit more. In Seeing Other People, it’s more queer, more diverse, and they’re in that artistic environment, so that kind of obsession is channelled more into a romance rather than this sort of toxic competition.”

Centering queer stories was also a byproduct of another decision: to make the main characters sisters which, Reid believes, can be a more fraught and intense bond than that between brothers and sisters. She won’t comment on whether those characters’ sexualities come from a place of experience; she hopes the book’s merit is taken on its own terms.

“I was so conscious of really powerful queer literature which looks at [queerness] from the context of oppression, which is really real and worthwhile,” she says. But her own story consciously refrains from the politics, normalising queerness to the point that one sister’s move from a straight relationship to a queer one, for instance, is barely commented on by those around her. “What I wanted was to tell a love story, where love was the subject, and the moral dilemmas were the subject, and where queerness was an aspect of the story but not the subject of the story.”

Seeing Other People by Diana Reid is out now through Ultimo Press

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Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and JFK Jr.: Inside Their Tempestuous Love Affair and Final Days: New Book (Exclusive)

In 'Once Upon a Time' author Elizabeth Beller details the couple's meet-cute, fiery relationship and tragic end

Liz McNeil is an Editor at Large at PEOPLE, where she's worked for over 30 years.

JOY E. SCHELLER/ CAROLYN BESSETTE JOHN F KENNEDY JR ARCHIVE IMAGES; Gallery Books

Nearly 25 years after her death, there's still an air of mystery about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the enigmatic woman who married John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1996.

After her death on July 16, 1999, at age 33, when the plane piloted by John, 38, also carrying her sister Lauren, 34, crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, she remains celebrated as a style icon on countless Instagram accounts.

But as Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller reveals, there was so much more to who she truly was. “People wrote about her so harshly and cast her as icy,” says Beller, “but she was a lioness, effervescent, warm and so full of life.” 

After graduating from Boston University with a degree in education, she worked in the city's Calvin Klein boutique and then moved to New York in 1989, where she began working in VIP sales for the minimalist designer. That's where she first came across JFK Jr. Below, read an exclusive excerpt from Beller's book about what happened from there.

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In spring 1992, Calvin Klein was just getting back into menswear. None other than John F. Kennedy Jr. had an appointment for a fitting and [Calvin decided] Carolyn should show John the selection. He came out of the meeting smitten, with a few suits and Carolyn’s number.

“John invited her to join his group at a gala dinner,” recalled [Calvin’s assistant.] “Sitting next  to him was another woman that Carolyn either mistook as his date, or actually was his date.” It was unclear, and Carolyn wasn’t pleased. 

But when they met again at a May 18 fundraiser, they were spotted in deep conversation at the bar. 

John and Carolyn stayed there for over an hour, never looking away from each other. Lightning had struck.

After the benefit, John and Carolyn continued to see each other, in a haze of sultry dinners, dancing, and walks in Central Park. John even brought Carolyn to Sea Song, the Long Island, home he rented with his cousin, Anthony Radziwill.

The week after that, Carolyn met John for dinner at El Teddy’s, where he presented Carolyn with a letter [from] a friend of his. The letter claimed Carolyn was a user, a partier, that she was out for fame and fortune [and] “dated guys around town.” John casually tossed the piece of paper at her, stood, and walked out the door. Carolyn stared in shock at John as he departed.

John meanwhile, had been spotted about town with Daryl Hannah that fall—all documented in the press. Granted, Carolyn knew she wasn’t his only option. When she came across a pair of [former girlfriend] Julie Baker’s duck boots in John’s apartment, despite them being a size too small, she made a point of wearing them. 

For more on Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe  here .

But Carolyn became increasingly irked that he wouldn’t introduce her to his mother. “I took him to meet my mom,” Carolyn told a friend. 

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“John called all the time,” says [a] Carolyn friend, “[We recorded] an outgoing message on her answering machine.” Anyone who called would get Carolyn saying, “Hey, hon, I’ll be back by seven o’clock, can’t wait to see you!” The idea was that John would hear it and assume she’d moved on. John did—and he called even more.

But behind closed doors, Carolyn and John were developing a real kind of intimacy.

The weekend of July 4, 1995, he asked her to go fishing in Martha’s Vineyard—and proposed.  

He turned to Carolyn and said, “Fishing is so much better with a partner.” Then he put a platinum band of diamonds and sapphires on her finger. Carolyn told him, “I’ll think about it.”

This was also the time when Carolyn lost weight, and plucked her eyebrows to small wisps.  And so when Carolyn stepped into the [Municipal Art Society] gala on John’s arm [on Feb  27, 1996], she had metamorphosed to a platinum siren.

JOY E. SCHELLER/CAROLYN BESSETTE JOHN F KENNEDY JR ARCHIVE IMAGES 

She planned their Sept 21 wedding on Cumberland Island, off the Georgia coast, and flew to Paris where her friend, Narciso Rodriguez designed her pearl-colored silk crepe dress.

The ceremony was scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. John had misplaced his shirt, and Carolyn  tried to put her dress on in the car. She forgot that she needed to put the dress on before doing her hair and makeup, which meant redoing both. Just before sunset, Carolyn arrived and was walked down the aisle by her stepfather, Dr. Freeman, as a gospel singer sang “Amazing Grace.”

They returned from their honeymoon to a ravenous press, and the pressure only intensified from there. 

Almost a year later, Princess Diana was killed in a car accident as the result of her driver trying to outrun the paparazzi.  Carolyn was terrified. [She] tried to get John to call Princes William and Harry to give his condolences when it came out that Diana had hoped for her sons to emulate John’s modesty in the face of media obsession. He demurred, as he didn’t know them and thought that their situations greatly differed. 

John earned his pilot’s license in 1998. 

“The only person I’ve been able to get up to go with me, who looks forward to it as much as I do, is my wife,” he [told USA Today]. That she loved flying was probably a reach, [recalls] Bruce Weber. “We both spoke of our dread of flying, especially over those islands off the coast of Massachusetts, because the weather can change so quickly.” 

They began marriage counseling in the spring of 1999. 

A week [after July 4], John had told several friends and colleagues that he and Carolyn were splitting up. Yet, others noted they seemed very happy together, even the weekend before.

After initially refusing to attend his cousin Rory’s July 17 wedding, Carolyn agreed. John would  also fly Carolyn’s sister Lauren from New York to Martha’s Vineyard on their way to Hyannis Port.

Tabloids put forth an alleged timeline in which Carolyn lingered for hours getting a pedicure. Yet an eyewitness report has her leaving the pedicurist by 5 p.m. She went to Saks to buy a dress for the wedding and picked out a black Yves Saint Laurent evening dress. After the purchase, the salesgirl wished Carolyn good luck. “Thanks,” Carolyn replied. “I’m going to need it.”

[John, Carolyn and Lauren] were stuck in traffic and didn’t make it to the airport until after 8 p.m. Before they took off, Carolyn called Carole Radziwill, and they talked about Sunday-night dinner. “The plan,” Carole wrote in What Remains , “was grilled steaks and peach pie.”

When they hadn’t arrived by 10 pm, friends began to worry. 

Carole called the Hyannis Port Airport, Caldwell Airport, Martha’s Vineyard, then the Coast Guard. 

Then, Carole called Ann Freeman and her husband Dick. Dr. Freeman answered, and Carole explained that Carolyn and John hadn’t arrived and there was a search underway. Ann immediately called her back.  “Well, everything’s okay, right? Was anyone else on the plane with them?” Carole was silent. Long enough for Ann to scream. 

For the July 24 Memorial Service in Greenwich, CT, Ann asked Carole to eulogize Carolyn.

She was wild and vivid in a cautious and pale world. Always burning a little more brightly than any of us around her. Then I remembered a story written by Henry James. It was the story of a young girl named Isabel [in Portrait of a Lady]. A girl who was as brave as she was beautiful, who was pure of heart and as unafraid to love...I wondered how it was possible for him to have known her.

From Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller. Copyright © 2024 by Elizabeth Beller. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller is on sale May 21 and available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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The 2024 Pulitzer Prize–Winning Books, Reviewed

The 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on May 6 in New York City. Read our reviews of this year's winning works of fiction, general nonfiction, history, biography, and memoir and autobiography.

Night Watch

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era

King: A Life

Master Slave Husband Wife: An American Love Story

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice

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Bridgerton Season 3 vs. the books: Differences in Colin and Penelope's love story

Spoiler alert: This story includes details of the first four episodes of Netflix's "Bridgerton" Season 3 (now streaming).

Bridgerton is back on Netflix , bringing with it the tension, twists and steamy stories fans of both the show and Julia Quinn book series love.

Season 3 is based on “ Romancing Mr. Bridgerton ,” the fourth novel of Quinn’s series, and focuses on Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) and Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan). Showrunners skipped Benedict’s love story, the third book, and allowed him to continue in his rakish ways – for now.

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The show stays faithful to many of the novel’s Regency-era plot points. As in the book, Penelope helping Colin after he cuts his hand is a pivotal moment in his changing perception of a longtime friend. Her request for him to be her first kiss - “I do not wish to die without ever having been kissed” – rings true and that carriage scene is spot-on sexy .  

But there are significant differences as well. Fan favorite character Queen Charlotte doesn’t exist in the books, neither do the Mondrichs. Lady Tilley Arnold is not Benedict’s lover, nor is there a Lord Marcus Anderson with eyes for Violet, the Bridgerton matriarch. Cressida certainly has no redeeming moments in the books.  

Here’s a look at the biggest difference between the Bridgerton books and the first four episodes of Season 3:

Colin doesn’t help Penelope look for a husband

In the book and show, it takes Colin time to realize his feelings for Penelope have changed. Even after he proposes in the books, he grapples with knowing if he’s in love with Penelope and seeks out Daphne for advice.

But what he never does is try to help Penelope stoke affection in another man. And while Penelope wants to get married and build a life away from her family home, she’s resigned to a life of spinsterhood due to her age and awkwardness around strangers.

There is no Lord Debling

Bridgerton the show loves a love triangle. In Season 1, Prince Friedrich was the right angle between Daphne Bridgerton and Simon Basset. Season 2 saw Anthony Bridgerton marry Kate Sharma after a brief courtship of her sister, Edwina.

This time around, the “other guy” is Lord Debling (Sam Phillips), an eligible new suitor looking for a wife. Only there’s nary another suitor in the book, let alone a full-blown love triangle.

Eloise and Cressida aren’t friends

Cressida Cowper is the worst, and Eloise would never befriend her in the books.

TV Cressida (Jessica Madsen) is a more complex and sympathetic character than book Cressida, who’s basically evil. In the show, Cressida suffers under the weight of her strict father and cherishes Eloise (Claudia Jessie) as a true friend. In the books, she only gets more horrible as the entitled wife of Lord Twombley.

Francesca’s suitors  

Francesca (Hannah Dodd) is the secondary love story in Season 3. The Queen selects Marquis Samadani (David Mumeni) as her suitor, but she’s drawn to the reserved and dignified John Stirling, Earl of Kilmartin (Victor Alli).

Francesca is already widowed in “Romancing Mr. Bridgerton,” with her husband having died two years into their marriage. Readers don’t get her full story until the sixth book, “ When He Was Wicked, ” when she finds a second true love.

The unmasking of Lady Whistledown

Viewers find out the identity of Lady Whistledown at the end of Season 1. Readers don’t yet know Penelope is the mastermind writer until the fourth book. Then, it’s Colin who finds out first and Eloise, while surprised, offers her friend congratulations.

The books have a wonderful challenge to unearth Lady Whistledown’s real name and we’ll be waiting to see how that plays out and if Colin makes the Lady Whistledown discovery in the second part of the series, airing June 13.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bridgerton Season 3 vs. the books: Differences in Colin and Penelope's love story

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In a Poem, Just Who Is ‘the Speaker,’ Anyway?

Critics and readers love the term, but it can be awfully slippery to pin down. That’s what makes it so fun to try.

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By Elisa Gabbert

Elisa Gabbert’s collections of poetry and essays include, most recently, “Normal Distance” and the forthcoming “Any Person Is the Only Self.” Her On Poetry columns appear four times a year.

The pages of “A Little White Shadow,” by Mary Ruefle, house a lyric “I” — the ghost voice that emerges so often from what we call a poem. Yet the I belonged first to another book, a Christian text of the same name published in 1890, by Emily Malbone Morgan.

Ruefle “erased” most words of Morgan’s text with white paint, leaving what look like lines of verse on the yellowed pages: “my brain/grows weary/just thinking how to make/thought.” (My virgules are approximate — should I read all white gaps as line breaks, even if the words are in the same line of prose? Are larger gaps meant to form stanzas?)

On another page, we read (can I say Ruefle writes ?): “I was brought in contact/with the phenomenon/peculiar to/’A/shadow.’” It would be difficult to read Ruefle’s book without attributing that I to the author, to Ruefle, one way or another, although the book’s I existed long before she did.

This method of finding an I out there, already typed, to identify with, seems to me not much different from typing an I . An I on the page is abstract, symbolic, and not the same I as in speech, which in itself is not the same I as the I in the mind.

When an old friend asked me recently if I didn’t find the idea of “the speaker” to be somewhat underexamined, I was surprised by the force of the YES that rose up in me. I too had been following the critical convention of referring to whatever point of view a poem seems to generate as “the speaker” — a useful convention in that it (supposedly) prevents us from ascribing the views of the poem to its author. But in that moment I realized I feel a little fraudulent doing so. Why is that?

Perhaps because I never think of a “speaker” when writing a poem. I don’t posit some paper-doll self that I can make say things. It’s more true to say that the poem always gives my own I, my mind’s I, the magic ability to say things I wouldn’t in speech or in prose.

It’s not just that the poem, like a play or a novel, is fictive — that these genres offer plausible deniability, though they do. It’s also that formal constraints have the power to give us new thoughts. Sometimes, in order to make a line sound good, to fit the shape of the poem, I’m forced to cut a word or choose a different word, and what I thought I wanted to say gets more interesting. The poem has more surprising thoughts than I do.

“The speaker,” as a concept, makes two strong suggestions. One is that the voice of a poem is a kind of persona. In fact, when I looked for an entry on the subject in our New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (a tome if there ever was one, at 1,383 pages), I found only: “Speaker: See PERSONA.” This latter term is an “ancient distinction,” writes the scholar Fabian Gudas, between poems in the poet’s “own voice” and those in which “characters” are speaking.

But, as the entry goes on to note, 20th-century critics have questioned whether we can ever look at a poem as “the direct utterance of its author.” While persona seems too strong to apply to some first-person lyrics, the speaker implies all lyrics wear a veil of persona, at least, if not a full mask.

The second implication is that the voice is a voice — that a poem has spokenness , even just lying there silent on the page.

The question here, the one I think my friend was asking, is this: Does our use of “the speaker” as shorthand — for responsible readership, respectful acknowledgment of distance between poet and text — sort of let us off the hook? Does it give us an excuse to think less deeply than we might about degrees of persona and spokenness in any given poem?

Take Louise Glück’s “The Wild Iris,” “a book in which flowers speak,” as Glück herself described it. One flower speaks this, in “Trillium”: “I woke up ignorant in a forest;/only a moment ago, I didn’t know my voice/if one were given me/would be so full of grief.” (I find a note that I’ve stuck on this page, at some point: The flowers give permission to express .)

“Flowers don’t have voices,” James Longenbach writes, in his essay “The Spokenness of Poetry” — “but it takes a flower to remind us that poems don’t really have voices either.”

They’re more like scores for voices, maybe. A score isn’t music — it’s paper, not sound — and, as Jos Charles writes in an essay in “Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most,” “the written poem is often mistaken for the poem itself.” A poem, like a piece of music, she writes, “is neither its score nor any one performance,” but what is repeatable across all performances. Any reader reading a poem performs it — we channel the ghost voice.

There are poems that have almost no spokenness — such as Aram Saroyan’s “minimal poems,” which might consist of a single nonword on the page (“lighght,” most famously, but see also “morni,ng” or “Blod”). Or consider Paul Violi’s “Index,” whose first line is “Hudney, Sutej IX, X, XI, 7, 9, 25, 58, 60, 61, 64.” Is anyone speaking the page numbers?

And there are poems that have almost no persona, as in the microgenre whose speaker is a poetry instructor (see “Introduction to Poetry,” by Billy Collins).

Yet I’m not interested only in edge cases. There are so many subtle gradations of “speaker” in the middle, so much room for permission. A speaker may seem threatening, as in June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights”: “from now on my resistance … may very well cost you your life.” A speaker may seem dishonest — Tove Ditlevsen’s first published poem was called “To My Dead Child,” addressing a stillborn infant who had in fact never existed.

Auden would say it’s hard not to “tell lies” in a poem, where “all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.” So, we might say, the “speaker” is the vessel for the full range of lies that the poet is willing to tell.

“Poetry is not for personal confessions,” George Seferis wrote in a journal; “it expresses another personality that belongs to everyone.” This suggests poetry comes from some underlying self. If, by invoking “the speaker,” I avoid a conflation of the I and its author, I may also crowd the page with more figures than I need: a speaker and an author, both outside the poem. I wonder sometimes if there’s anyone there, when I’m reading. Does the speaker speak the poem? Or does the poem just speak?

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Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

As book bans have surged in Florida, the novelist Lauren Groff has opened a bookstore called The Lynx, a hub for author readings, book club gatherings and workshops , where banned titles are prominently displayed.

Eighteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, in the categories of history, memoir, poetry, general nonfiction, fiction and biography, which had two winners. Here’s a full list of the winners .

Montreal is a city as appealing for its beauty as for its shadows. Here, t he novelist Mona Awad recommends books  that are “both dreamy and uncompromising.”

The complicated, generous life  of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Book Reviews

Two new novels investigate what makes magic, what is real and imagined.

Marcela Davison Avilés

In an enchanted world, where does mystery begin? Two authors pose this question in new novels out this spring.

In Pages of Mourning by the Mexican magical realism interrogator-author Diego Gerard Morrison, the protagonist is a Mexican writer named Aureliano Más II who is at war with his memory of familial sorrow and — you guessed it — magical realism. And the protagonist Alma Cruz in Julia Alvarez's latest novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is also a writer. Alma seeks to bury her unpublished stories in a graveyard of her own making, in order to find peace in their repose — and meaning from the vulnerability that comes from unheard stories.

Both of these novels, one from an emerging writer and one from a long celebrated author, walk an open road of remembering love, grief, and fate. Both find a destiny not in death, but in the reality of abandonment and in dreams that come from a hope for reunion. At this intersection of memory and meaning, their storytelling diverges.

Pages of Mourning

Pages of Mourning, out this month, is set in 2017, three years after 43 students disappear from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College after being abducted in Iguala , Guerrero, Mexico. The main character, Aureliano, is attempting to write the Great Mexican Novel that reflects this crisis and his mother's own unexplained disappearance when he was a boy. He's also struggling with the idea of magical realism as literary genre — he holds resentment over being named after the protagonist in 100 Years of Solitude, which fits squarely within it. He sets out on a journey with his maternal aunt to find his father, ask questions about his mother, and deal with his drinking problem and various earthquakes.

Morrison's voice reflects his work as a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City, who seeks to interrogate "the concept of dissonance" through blended art forms such as poetry and fiction, translation and criticism. His story could be seen as an archetype, criticism, or a reflection through linguistic cadence on Pan American literature. His novel name drops and alludes to American, Mexican and Latin American writers including Walt Whitman, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Garcia Márquez — and even himself. There's an earnest use of adjectives to accompany the lived dissonance of his characters.

There's nothing magical, in the genre sense, in Morrison's story. There are no magical rivers, enchanted messages, babies born with tails. Morrison's dissonance is real — people get disappeared, they suffer addictions, writer's block, crazy parents, crazier shamans, blank pages, corruption, the loss of loved ones. In this depiction of real Pan-American life — because all of this we are also explicitly suffering up North — Morrison finds his magic. His Aureliano is our Aureliano. He's someone we know. Probably someone we loved — someone trying so hard to live.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories

From the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents , The Cemetery of Untold Stories is Julia Alvarez's seventh novel. It's a story that's both languorous and urgent in conjuring a world from magical happenings. The source of these happenings, in a graveyard in the Dominican Republic, is the confrontation between memories and lived agendas. Alvarez is an acclaimed storyteller and teacher, a writer of poetry, non-fiction and children's books, honored in 2013 with the National Medal of Arts . She continues her luminous virtuosity with the story of Alma Cruz.

Author Interviews

Julia alvarez: literature tells us 'we can make it through'.

Alma, the writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , has a goal - not to go crazy from the delayed promise of cartons of unpublished stories she has stored away. When she inherits land in her origin country — the Dominican Republic — she decides to retire there, and design a graveyard to bury her manuscript drafts, along with the characters whose fictional lives demand their own unrequited recompense. Her sisters think she's nuts, and wasting their inheritance. Filomena, a local woman Alma hires to watch over the cemetery, finds solace in a steady paycheck and her unusual workplace.

Alma wants peace for herself and her characters. But they have their own agendas and, once buried, begin to make them known: They speak to each other and Filomena, rewriting and revising Alma's creativity in order to reclaim themselves.

Code Switch

How julia alvarez wrote her many selves into existence.

In this new story, Alvarez creates a world where everyone is on a quest to achieve a dream — retirement, literary fame, a steady job, peace of mind, authenticity. Things get complicated during the rewrites, when ambitions and memories bump into the reality of no money, getting arrested, no imagination, jealousy, and the grace of humble competence. Alma's sisters, Filomena, the townspeople — all make a claim over Alma's aspiration to find a final resting place for her memories. Alvarez sprinkles their journey with dialogue and phrases in Spanish and one — " no hay mal que por bien no venga " (there is goodness in every woe) — emerges as the oral talisman of her story. There is always something magical to discover in a story, and that is especially true in Alvarez's landing place.

Marcela Davison Avilés is a writer and independent producer living in Northern California.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s up-close view of JFK and LBJ

In “An Unfinished Love Story,” the best-selling historian writes about her marriage to Richard Goodwin and the couple’s prolonged debate about the legacies of the presidents they served.

We live in dangerous times. But nothing we’re feeling can rival the convulsions of the years between 1961 and 1969.

For a brief moment when everything seemed possible but only some of it was, Americans of all colors fought and bled and died to redeem the promise of emancipation that remained massively unfulfilled 100 years after the official end of the Civil War. No one was more important to those battles, or to America’s imagination, than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Each of them inspired the greatest possible hope, and then the worst imaginable despair.

The Kennedys and King were assassinated. The end of Johnson’s public life was closer to suicide. Using what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin calls “a formidable combination of will, conviction, and energy” to produce “an unnerving force field of persuasive power,” famously known as “the treatment,” Johnson relentlessly hammered members of Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, immigration reform, Medicare, Medicaid and the first federally funded aid program for higher education. Then he laid waste to the rest of his presidency by deepening America’s efforts in the Vietnam War.

There are hundreds of books about the politics of this period, including several by writers blessed with (and tilted by) special access to their subjects: Theodore H. White’s “The Making of the President 1960,” Theodore Sorensen’s and Arthur Schlesinger’s accounts of Kennedy’s New Frontier, and, especially, Lady Bird Johnson’s tremendous “White House Diary.”

But despite so many predecessors, Goodwin’s new book, “ An Unfinished Love Story ,” manages to be different than anything that has come before. Goodwin and her husband, Richard, were both extremely close to the Kennedys and Johnson, and each of them held on to their fierce and competing loyalties to the presidents through four decades of marriage.

Richard Goodwin was the Zelig of Democratic politics in the 1950s and ’60s. After serving as president of the Harvard Law Review and clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, he led the congressional investigation that revealed Charles Van Doren had won $129,000 on the quiz show “Twenty-One” by being fed all of the answers by the show’s producers. The next year, 1960, Goodwin became deputy speechwriter for John Kennedy’s presidential campaign (and his constant companion on the plane), and later a White House aide and speechwriter, deputy assistant secretary of state, and director of the International Peace Corps.

Goodwin, who died in 2018 at 86 , had 300 boxes full of documents from his life with the Kennedys and Johnson. The boxes had remained untouched until 2011, when Goodwin turned 80 and told his wife that it was time for them to mine the archives together . This book is the product of that mining.

In 1968, Goodwin became even closer to Bobby Kennedy than he had been to Jack, when he joined the younger Kennedy’s campaign for president. He was with the senator in the Ambassador Hotel when he was murdered.

But after Jack and before Bobby, Goodwin returned to the White House to write many of Johnson’s greatest speeches, including his vision for a new “Great Society” and the “We Shall Overcome” address, delivered eight days after Alabama police brutally beat 67 marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

A taped conversation between Johnson and his aide Bill Moyers captures the moment when the new president decided to ask Goodwin back to write for him. Moyers told Johnson that Goodwin was the only one who could provide the “rhythm” Johnson wanted for his first major speech about the War on Poverty. The speech, delivered at the University of Michigan’s commencement in 1964, was filled with peak ’60s idealism. It presented the Great Society as “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

After the triumph of the speech, Johnson showed its writer more warmth than Goodwin had ever felt from Kennedy. “You’re going to be my voice, my alter ego,” Johnson told him.

Barely a month later, Goodwin was treated to Johnson’s much less pleasant side. The president became enraged when a Time magazine reporter learned that Goodwin had coined the phrase Great Society. “As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the Ann Arbor speech,” Johnson told the baffled journalist.

In the fall, Johnson was reelected in a landslide, carrying 44 states, and Democrats won supermajorities in the House and Senate. But just 10 months later, Johnson’s growing escalation of the war in Vietnam led Goodwin to leave the White House. By 1967, he was writing pseudonymous pieces attacking the president in the New Yorker.

It was also in 1967 that a 24-year-old Doris Kearns applied to be a fellow in Johnson’s White House. Though she did not yet know her future husband (they wouldn’t meet until 1972), she shared his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In May of that year, she learned she had been picked for the fellowship and attended a celebration at the White House where Johnson danced with the three women among the 16 new fellows. “He whirled me with surprising grace around the floor,” Goodwin writes.

The following week, her name was one of two bylines on a piece for the New Republic titled “How to Remove LBJ in 1968,” which argued that a new third party could prevent Johnson’s reelection. She was certain her fellowship would be rescinded. But the president was apparently as impressed with her dance moves as she was with his. After demanding to see her FBI file, Johnson stunned his aides by telling them she could keep her new job. “Bring her down here for a year, and if I can’t win her over, no one can,” he said.

This was the beginning of a friendship that continued after Johnson left the White House, when Kearns agreed to visit him regularly at his Texas ranch to help him write his memoir. There they were in such close proximity — she used to “sit in a chair in his walk-in closet” during his afternoon nap, in case he needed anything — that a “suggestive” magazine piece eventually appeared questioning her frequent visits to Texas. Johnson told her “not to give such chattering nonsense a second thought.” And Lady Bird either believed her to be innocent or was supernaturally forgiving. “You give comfort to my husband,” Lady Bird told her, “and that is all that matters.”

Kearns gives us hundreds of interesting vignettes about the time she and her husband spent with these historic characters. But the spine of the book is the eternal debate about who deserved more credit for the landmark legislative accomplishments of the ’60s — JFK or LBJ.

Doris argued that nearly all of Kennedy’s domestic promises were realized only by Johnson, while Dick would counter by starting to conjecture about how Vietnam would have turned out had Kennedy lived. But he would stop himself and say, “Who knows?” Goodwin writes that “tremors from this division” continued throughout their marriage.

The truth is that Johnson masterfully catalyzed the country’s grief after Kennedy’s assassination to accomplish more than any other president since Franklin Roosevelt. In his first speech to Congress, five days after Kennedy was killed, Johnson declared that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”

In the end, the Goodwins decided that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was possible only because of Kennedy’s inspiration and Johnson’s execution. But Doris correctly identifies “the most profound force” behind the bill as the grass-roots movement itself: “By touching the conscience of the country, the Civil Rights Movement transformed public sentiment and drove Congress to act.” That’s the noblest ’60s legacy of all.

Charles Kaiser is the author of “ 1968 in America ,” “ The Gay Metropolis ” and “ The Cost of Courage .”

An Unfinished Love Story

A Personal History of the 1960s

By Doris Kearns Goodwin

467 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35

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