“Hole” by Jen Beagin, excerpted from PRETEND I’M DEAD and recommended by Emily Books
AN INTRODUCTION BY EMILY GOULD
As Jen Beagin’s story begins, we meet a narrator who dresses up for her shift at a needle exchange because she’s eager to see a junkie she has a crush on, a man she’s mentally nicknamed “Mr. Disgusting.” By the second page, they’ve finally struck up a conversation. Mona is alive to the minutiae of Mr. Disgusting’s physical presence, which is, as you’d expect, disgusting—but, we immediately understand, also endearing. “He was wearing the leather jacket she liked—once white, now scuffed and weatherworn, with a cryptic tire mark running up the back. There was a dead leaf in his hair she didn’t have the nerve to pluck out.”
I fell in love with Jen’s writing in much the same way Mona falls for Mr. Disgusting. I was wary. Even though this book came to me from a trusted friend, the great writer Elisa Albert, I wasn’t expecting to like it. It had been a long time since I’d read a novel. I was a new parent, exhausted and low on patience, and the only books I’d read for weeks had Baby or Sleep in the title, usually both.
But as I read these first few pages I found myself noticing details that hooked me, and then all of a sudden I was in deep, unable to stop reading. I had to find out what happened to Mr. Disgusting (spoiler: nothing good!) and, more importantly, to Mona. What else would a woman whose romantic type is “obviously doomed” go on to do in these pages? The answer is totally unexpected.
This book is the magical kind that illuminate a small, self-contained interior world so completely that you feel that you’ve experienced another life within your own. As I closed Pretend I’m Dead, I felt unaccountably sad—not because of what happens in the story, which is a little bit sad, but because I wanted to keep spending time with Mona, and stay inside her head. The excerpt here is only the beginning of the story, and this book is the beginning of a literary career I’ll be watching closely, hoping to fall in love again with something or someone disgusting, compelling, funny and real, like all of us truly are.
Emily Gould
Co-Founder, Emily Books
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Excerpted from PRETEND I’M DEAD
Recommended by Emily Books
He lived downtown, in a residential hotel called the Hawthorne, a six-story brick building sandwiched between a dry-cleaning plant and a Cambodian restaurant. When she arrived three Cambodian gang members were loitering in front of the restaurant. It was broad daylight and she felt overdressed in her black kimono shirt and slacks. She also felt whiter and richer than she was. The sixty bucks in her pocket felt like six hundred.
The lobby had the charm of a check-cashing kiosk. A security guard stood at the door and a pasty fat man sat in a booth behind thick, wavy bullet-proof glass. Mona slipped her ID through the slot.
She gave him Mr. Disgusting’s name.
“Really?” he asked, looking her up and down.
“Yeah, really,” she answered.
Mr. Disgusting came down a few minutes later, wearing gray postal-worker pants and a green t-shirt that said “Lowell Sucks.”
“You look nice,” she said.
“I scraped my face for you.” He took her hand and brought it to his bare cheek and then clumsily kissed the tip of her thumb. She blushed, glanced at the fat man behind the desk, who studied them with open disgust. “You get your ID back when you leave the building,” he said into his microphone.
They shared the elevator with a couple of crackheads she recognized from the neighborhood. Mr. Disgusting kept beaming at her as if he’d just won the lottery. For the first time in years, she felt beautiful, like a real prize. They got off on the third floor.
“It’s quiet right now, but this place is a total nuthouse,” he said.
“Doesn’t seem so bad,” she lied.
“Wait until dark,” he said, pulling out his keys.
His room smelled like coffee, cough drops, and Old Spice. All she saw was dirt at first, one of the main hazards of her occupation. She spotted grime on the windowsill and blinds, dust on the television screen, a streaked mirror over a yellowed porcelain sink. The fake Oriental rug needed vacuuming, along with the green corduroy easy chair he directed her to sit in.
Once seated, she switched off her dirt radar and took in the rest of the room. She’d expected something bare and cell-like, but the room was large, warm, and carefully decorated. He had good taste in lamps. Real paintings rather than prints hung on the walls; an Indian textile covered the double bed. He owned a cappuccino machine, an antique typewriter, a sturdy wooden desk, and a couple of bookcases filled with mostly existential and Russian novels, some textbooks, and what looked like an extensive collection of foreign dictionaries.
“Are you a linguist or something?” she asked.
“No, I just like dictionaries.” He sat directly across from her, on the edge of the bed, and crossed his legs. “I find them comforting, I guess. Most of these I found on the street.”
He shrugged. “I’m a slut for garbage.”
“Your vocabulary must be pretty impressive,” she said. “Do you have a favorite word?”
He thought about it for a second. “I’ve always liked the word ‘cleave’ because it has two opposite meanings: to split or divide and to adhere or cling. Those two tendencies have been operating in me simultaneously for as long as I can remember. In fact, I can feel a battle raging right now.” He clutched his stomach theatrically.
She smiled. It was rare for her to find someone attractive physically and also to like what came out of their mouths.
“What’s your least favorite word?” he asked.
He nodded and scratched his chin.
“I wasn’t born like this,” he said suddenly. “Moving into this hellhole did quite a number on me—you know, spiritually or whatever. I haven’t felt like myself in a long time.”
