The Yearner's Shelf
With Jacqueline King
Reminder: If you want to join Open Book Club IRL in July there are only 9 tickets left! Get one here.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: maintaining a crush at all times is one of the most important things you can do in this life. To yearn is to live. Especially in Cancer season. But I will not leave you yearning for the list. Read on.
The Yearner's Shelf
I’ve always been a yearner. Not just for love or for answers, but for sensation: for beauty that hurts a little, for moments that feel stolen from time, for the impossible feeling of being understood without having to explain yourself. This isn’t a list of books about romance, exactly, but about longing. The in-between. The ache. The wanting. These are books that have mirrored something tender and unspoken in me.
If you’ve ever sat alone on a fire escape wishing or wanting or waiting…
this list is for you.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
A fever dream of a novel set in French colonial Vietnam, The Lover tells the story of a teenage girl’s affair with an older man. The prose is spare, dreamy, and devastating.
My friend Britt recommended this to me (she has a gift for seeing my inner ache). I read it after flying across an ocean to see my lover last summer, alone in his bed, wrapped in his grey sheets, feeling both adored and ignored. It was poetic. It was a little cursed.
It’s a book about sex, yes, but also about power, silence, what it feels like to be looked at—intensely, hungrily—and the pain of not being fully seen. I wasn’t ready, and I loved it.
Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz
Jacaranda floats through 1970s L.A., in a haze of booze, books, and beach days trying to figure out if she’s meant to be a writer or just good at playing the part.
Had to include this one (forgive me!). Having grown up in LA, I recognized the undertow immediately. I knew the salt-slick freedom of the ocean and the high of the Hollywood glow. I also knew the parties that were rarely as good as the idea of them; the men who were charming and terrible in ways you don’t realize until years later.
I too ran away from LA, convinced it was all sweat and surface and shimmer. Running under all that gloss is a glittering restlessness; the quiet panic under all that sun. The longing to make something that matters. To be loved. To write. To live a little more on purpose. And yet somehow the whole afternoon slips away to the weather, a phone call, the wrong man!
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
A short, fragmented meditation on heartbreak, pain, and the color blue. Part essay, part lyric confession.
Short but unforgettable. It’s about the ache of wanting something that’s lost or maybe was never really yours, and how the wanting stays and shapes days. How obsession can color every corner of your life (literally, in this case); how it becomes a way of ordering the pain. That kind of longing isn’t naïve—it’s a form of devotion, deliberate. A practice. A pulse.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar chronicles the slow, internal unraveling of Esther Greenwood, a bright promising young woman drifting into depression and away from the life she’s expected to want.
Plath’s bell jar is more than a metaphor for depression; it’s a portrait of a specific kind of yearning that builds and buckles beneath the suffocating pressures of femininity and achievement. I read this as a teenager and it was almost spectral how beautifully it captures the restive experience of wanting something more but not knowing what that something is. Of being caught between ambition and collapse. The dissonance of being a girl with everything ahead of her and no desire to keep going.
There’s the quieter grief eventually: the longing to even feel again. To want again. To find something that could pierce the numbness and remind you you’re real.
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
A teenage girl spends the summer on the French Riviera with her charming, careless father and his new lover. What unfolds is a story of manipulation, desire, and existential ennui.
This book is hot and cruel and sad in the way summer can be. I love how Sagan lets girlhood be both soft and monstrous. Cécile aches to be adored, transformed, in control, lingering just outside of it all with a cigarette and a smirk.
Recently, I saw Durga Chew-Bose’s adaptation at a screening (merci, Cecilia & Elissa, for the spare ticket!). Watching it unfold on screen was like being pulled into the mood of the book all over again: sun-bleached surfaces, dark undercurrents, and that longing to be seen, to control the game, to grow into some imagined version of yourself before the summer ends. ☀︎༄.°.
Thank you for having me, Liz!
Thank you, Jacqueline!
Liz
P.S. I leave you with this. Lmk thoughts.
Death to nonchalance. Bring back yearning 🥀🥀
Good morning this fed my soul