We Were Pretending Reading List

A reading list to accompany my novel

Author

Hannah Gersen
October 02, 2024

The New Novel, Winslow Homer, 1877

Hello to all my new readers, who signed up for this newsletter at the Maine Authors Book Festival. Thank you for being here, and I hope you will stick around.  I started this newsletter eight (!) years ago with the publication of my first novel, Home Field. I publish this newsletter sporadically, often to share news about my writing, but I also write about my life and what’s on my mind. Generally, I send 2-4 messages per year, though I’ve been sending more these past few months because my novel came out in August.

Today I want to share some of the books that inspired me while I was writing We Were Pretending. This is likely to be my last post about my novel for some time. I feel ready to dig into my new novelish thing, which is starting to take shape in a real way, like when you’re making lemon curd and you’re stirring, stirring, stirring, and you think…hmm this is just not coming together, I must have messed up the ingredients…and then suddenly it starts to thicken! I think it’s possible I’ve reached that point. In which case I will only have lemon curd, which is just one layer of the three-layer cake I’m envisioning, but that bright, citrusy curd is a very important ingredient. (I may have taken the cake analogy too far. But this is how you know that my newsletter is not being written by an AI well-versed in efficient marketing tactics.)

When I was putting together this reading list, I was surprised to find that most of the titles were non-fiction. Usually, when I write fiction, I turn to other fictional works, but for this book, I wanted to make some speculative guesses about technology and where the future might be going, so I ended up doing a lot of reading that wasn’t directly related to my story but helped me to get a sense of what was on the horizon. There are also a lot of books on this list related to plants, fungi, and climate change. . .

My narrator, Leigh, works for the Pentagon in an unspecified department that I very loosely modeled on DARPA, the division of the Pentagon that works on top-secret military projects. I read this book mainly because I wanted to know more about the history of the development of ARPANET, which is the precursor to today’s Internet. I’m interested in the U.S. military’s role in new technology, and I was trying to think about what kind of projects Leigh might become involved in that could help people connect to each other and to nature.  

Years ago, I read an article in The New Yorker by Michael Pollan about how psychedelics were being used to help terminally ill patients cope with death anxiety. I found myself thinking of it when I was developing the character of Leigh and casting about for some kind of alternative treatment that she could be involved with. Around the same time, Pollan published How to Change Your Mind, a book that expands on his original article, exploring the uses and history of psychedelics and other consciousness-altering medications. It was through Pollan’s book that I learned about the government’s experiments with psychedelics, and it gave me confidence that the Department of Defense might indeed be researching more fringe elements of today’s wellness culture.

As long-time readers of this newsletter may remember, I became obsessed with mushrooms while I was working on this novel. I wanted to invent a mushroom for Leigh to sell, so I had to learn a bit about the elusive fungi kingdom. I thought I would learn just enough to invent a plausible mushroom but then I just couldn’t stop reading about them. One problem was that it was hard to find books about mushrooms that were focused on their life cycle and how they fit into the ecosystem. As it turned out, Entangled Life was the book I was waiting for, but it wasn’t published until after I had done most of my research. Of course I read it anyway! It's glorious, and judging from the number of editions that have been published (including the beautiful illustrated one, linked above), I think it has found a wide readership, which makes me happy.

I sought this book out because I knew it had a chapter on mycelium, the network of delicate white threads which keep our soil healthy and produce mushrooms. I ended up reading the whole book as MacFarlane explores the underground regions that we can’t see and rarely consider.  

I read this one because I was thinking about how Leigh, in her mushroom-peddling days, was part of a network of female healers working under the radar. I wanted to know a little more about the tradition of women working in the shadows. Ehrenreich and English’s book explains how women healers—witches, midwives, and nurses—used to advise women on all aspects of sexual health, including birth control, pregnancy, and childbirth. But when medical science became professionalized, male doctors took over and used new methods, ignoring the body of knowledge developed by women.

My son went through a serious Greek myth phase while I was working on this novel and so I ended up reading a lot of these stories again. The myth of Demeter and Persephone spoke to me in a new way and I ended up incorporating elements of it into the plot.

I had an urge to reread this while I was in the midst of my second draft—an instinct I found a little odd, since I didn’t remember liking it very much when I first read it. But when I reread it, I found a much funnier book than I’d remembered, and I also realized that it had a plotline that is similar to mine: the wife in this novel seeks out a pill which takes away the fear of death.

Journalist Bill McKibben published this book in 1989 to explain the stakes of global warming to the general public. I read it to remind myself of how people thought about climate change in 1990s, because a portion of We Were Pretending looks back on that era. It was depressing to read McKibben’s book thirty years later, knowing that the past few decades have been the worst in terms of the volume of fossil fuel emissions. McKibben’s suggestions for policy changes for the 1990s seem quite reasonable, and I think now most Americans would be on board with them, but unfortunately much more drastic action is needed at this point. 

Okay, this one is not for the faint of heart. It’s about people who are trying to outsmart climate change with new technologies. The title refers to a proposed geoengineering technique which would blast particulate matter into the sky, mimicking what happens after large volcanic explosions, when bits of ash hang in atmosphere, blocking the sun and cooling the planet. If employed on a large scale, it would give the sky a white appearance. Geoengineering is just one of the strategies Kolbert writes about in this series of articles about the consequences of trying to manipulate and control nature. I like her journalism because she doesn’t get carried away by fantasies of world-saving ideas; she’s very focused on the here and now and lays out the pros and cons of the various technologies in development.

This is a good book to peruse if you are feeling down about the climate crisis. It doesn’t ignore what has been lost, but there’s a focus on solutions, and it’s written with a real love for life on Earth. It’s also written from a feminist perspective, centering the work of women scientists and activists whose ideas of community, maintenance, repair, and interdependence are a welcome antidote to the bombast we often hear from wealthy individuals and corporate entities who plan to save the world with new technology and rivers of cash.

I read this collection of essays about moss because I wanted to understand why and how moss grows on tree trunks. The power of these essays is cumulative as each one deepens your understanding of moss’s special role in the ecosystem. I came away from it with a new appreciation for moss, and for the intelligence of plants, in general.

This is an unusual book, a mix of sociology, anthropology, and biology. The subhead kind of says it all. It’s about the economy that has developed around the fruiting of rare, matsutake mushrooms, which have a special cultural meaning in Japan. Tsing writes about the transient workers who make their living picking the mushroom in the Pacific Northwest, about the people who transport the mushrooms to Japan, about the middlemen who buy and sell the mushroom, and about the mushrooms themselves. My big takeaway from this book was that mushrooms are going to be on this planet no matter what happens, because they do very well in disturbed landscapes and in times of transition. And I found that oddly comforting.

How do you write about nature in an era of mass extinction and habitat destruction and tiny pieces of plastic everywhere? Do you ignore the pieces of synthetic twine that a bird has woven into its nest or do you mention it—and if you describe the twine, do you regard it as an authentic part of the nest or an aberration from what is natural and good? (What if the twine looks kind of cool? Can you admit that?) Nature writer Charles Hood’s essay collection is about loving the natural world as you find it—loving it even as you are aware, and possibly in despair, about its survival. His writing is very funny, very warm, and also, he’s just better than most writers at getting at what the natural world looks and feels like right now, as humans encroach on more and more ecosystems. I liked this book so much that I reviewed it for The Millions.

This essay collection was waiting for me on my shelf for a long time. I picked it up at a used bookstore years ago, figuring I’d read it one day, when I inevitably got into gardening. (After age 45 you get into either gardening or meditation. Or pickleball.) I actually wasn’t into gardening when I started to read this book (I wasn’t 45 yet); instead, I took it off my shelf because I was looking for something that was about plants. I started reading it and, as always happens with Jamaica Kincaid, I was carried away by her prose style and finished in just a couple of days. In these personal essays, Kincaid takes up gardening in midlife and before she knows it, she’s a seed collector, journeying all the way to China to harvest rare specimens.

I’m not a fan of social media. It brings out my most neurotic tendencies and makes socializing feel like administrative work. I like Jaron Lanier’s book (manifesto?) because it explains in plain terms how social media has become a system of behavior modification, manipulating users without their understanding or consent. In my novel I was thinking about how social media, particularly image-based platforms like Instagram, can distort your perception of other people and lead you astray.

I read this novel in one night. It felt like a long phone conversation with an old friend. It was also one of the only contemporary novels that I read during the pandemic years that seemed relevant. Although it was written before the pandemic, Listi captures what it feels like to live in a politically and ecologically volatile era. He writes about parenting, marriage, community, friendship, love, and literary ambition.  It’s an anxious book but it’s also very funny. Although it gets classified as “autofiction,” it doesn’t fit easily into that category and like many of my favorite books, it’s very hard to pin down. 

That’s it! You have reached the end of my book list. If for some reason, you’d like to know more about my inspirations, I wrote a post about the movies that inspired me for my other newsletter, Thelma & Alice.

Thanks for reading this far and a huge thank you to any of you who have left a review or star rating on my Amazon or Goodreads page. It really helps spread the word. I’ll be back in a couple of months with some end-of-the-year thoughts.

Until then,

Hannah