Weekend Reads: Promise Me Sunshine

on voice, first pages, and the elusive necessity that makes me love a book

Those who follow me over on Instagram know I’ve kept a mostly-weekly ritual of annotating a page from a book I’m loving (we call it Marginalia Monday) but I am a yappy girl and that darn caption limit has been cutting me off a lot these days. So trying out a sporadic little column here for when I have a lot to say!

For better or worse, I usually know within a few sentences of a novel just how compelling I’ll find it.

It’s all about the voice. I described myself as a “voice snob” to a friend recently (probably the only thing I’m snobby about in my very omnivorous reading habits!). That doesn’t mean it needs to be anything erudite or “highbrow”—merely that it needs to be distinct. It needs to be doing something!

Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about this once, and it’s stuck with me ever since:

“I can’t write a story or an essay until I can, by revision after revision, get the opening tone right. Sometimes it seems to take forever, but when I have it I can usually go on. It’s a matter of the voice, how you are going to approach the task at hand. It’s all language and rhythm and the establishment of the relation to the material, of who’s speaking, not speaking as a person exactly, but as a mind, a sensibility.”

—in a 1985 interview with Darryl Pinckney, published in The Paris Review

Language. Rhythm. What words and images do they use, and how do they string them together? Is their internal cadence choppy, fluid? Aggressive, reflective? Melancholy, playful?

And “the relation to the material”—a perspective, if you will. A lens through which someone sees the world. Which is so much of why I read: to see my surroundings through a point of view I can’t access otherwise. My favorite books change the way I look at the world forever after.

Like Hardwick, I often labor to get the voice of a piece just right, and am tormented by half-finished projects where I’m just not certain I ever got there. But when I open a book and read the first page and get that clear ping of certainty that yes, there is a voice here, there’s someone breathing inside this book…. well, there is simply nothing better.

My first Cara Bastone book was Ready or Not, which I devoured last year. It made me love an accidental-baby plotline, y’all. One of my greatest fears, so not exactly my favorite trope. But Bastone pulled it off—and that was in no small part because of the voice. (BTW, the people of the internet agree with me on this one. Please check it out if you haven’t.)

Promise Me Sunshine is no different. It came out this week, and I was honestly a little apprehensive—Ready or Not left such a big impression on my heart that I was afraid her latest wouldn’t measure up.

But the one-page test was passed with flying colors.

First line?

“This baby will not stop judging me.”

Our story opens on the subway, narrator en route to a babysitting gig, and in just a few paragraphs, we learn how open-hearted she is to joy (she pulls a number of ridiculous faces in public just to get that baby to laugh) despite the way she’s been recently battered by loss—perhaps because of it. Our narrator’s first actions are to show the baby “there is a soul in this scraped-out husk of mine after all,” and indeed, the next few chapters will go on to show us the whimsy and spontaneity and creativity that she summons in order to help her small charge not just survive, but enjoy a weekend with her mom out of town. The establishing shot gives us everything we need to know about the project of the book: this is a woman coping with grief, but it won’t mean the pages are heavy. No, we’ll get plenty of hilarity as she compartmentalizes, pushing her own feelings aside for the children around her (until, of course, she doesn’t).

“But the thing about losing the person you love the most on earth is—somehow—you still have to do mundane things like tie your shoes and make enough money to continue to exist in this punishing world… Here in the worst six months of my life, the only thing that’s brought me even a hint of happiness has been hanging out with the kids I babysit.”

All of this, of course, is a pleasure that grows over the course of the novel. The quick hook, for those who need a few gems to pull them onward, are the no less than three bangers (by my count) on the VERY FIRST PAGE that made me stop in my tracks, reread to marvel, or laugh out loud:

• “In a last-minute bid to be judged human”

• “It’s dog-breath hot out here”

• “Just to keep the Fruit Loops on the table”

What makes these so good??

It’s the specificity, of course—of the Fruit Loops, the dog-breath—but also the lightness of tone, the way the heavy (our humanity, our soul, our survival) is juxtaposed with the light (a tiny baby passing judgment on us, relying on Fruit Loops for sustenance as an adult woman—though hey, no judgment here). The language and rhythm Hardwick mentions are both there: quick, quippy, vivid, and full of morbid humor.

And they all feel like the product of a very specific viewpoint. Of an experience I want to read more about.

I simply have so many questions! Does anyone know how much this woman is struggling? Does she put so much weight on the opinion of the tiny children around her because they can’t tell how deep her suffering is? How does she have the fortitude to move with such joy even through loss? Was her light even brighter before her grief, or did it emerge as a coping mechanism? When and how will we penetrate this laughing surface—which only offers us brief dips into the depth of sorrow below—for the fathomless feelings she’s grappling with?

I have a crystal clear grasp on “the mind, the sensibility,” as Hardwick would say. And I cannot wait to spend a whole book with her and learn everything I can.

That’s it for today. Please pick this one up, and drop a note with your thoughts if you do! And if you have other thoughts on what makes a voice undeniable for you, please share below—it always feels simultaneously so elusive and so central, and I’d genuinely love to chat more. My dream in life is basically for this comments section to be our own little literary salon.

With great gratitude for the voices that keep me turning pages and get me out of my own head,

🤍 Emily