TO-READ l Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures

5 good reasons to read Emma Straub's debut novel Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures

1. Emma Straub's a bookseller in Brooklyn. How cool is that! You'll never know unless you read her book, I guess.

2. Molly Ringwald read and loved it. Said so herself last night. Come to think of it, Molly also mentioned loving Raymond Carver. Coincidence? LOVED it. 

3. Emma Straub is reading at The Loft tomorrow night at 7. You can get your copy signed probably and leave it out around the house so friends think to ask about it. "Oh, that?" you can say. "That's Emma Straub's new book that I had signed because I loved it. Molly Ringwald loved it, too. Oh, nothing. I've just been getting out a lot to all these fun and free events, opening my mind and such. Oh that? It's just this $100 bill I found. Hmm. What's new with you?"

4. Laura Lamont (aka, Elsa Emerson) is a more sincere and involvedly written character than most. And yet, the details of her loneliness, like parts inside an engine, read essentially unmanufactured, nor, like a carapace, in service strictly to her disposition later on for taking on the part of life accustomed to the spotlight. Emma Straub does what great writers do and gets out of the way. Lamont's "life" on the screen thus comes as full of promise back to earth, unguided by cheap spectacle or blow-pop drama like a box poked full of tragic holes for air. The breath in Emerson's becoming, rather, feels more fundamental than thought through, commensurate with the exemplary and sorrowful dimensions of our humanness, as far as what we're made to show and learn to hide. 

5. I got my picture taken with Molly Ringwald last night!!! Yes, I realize that's in some ways not related to the book in question here. But check me out! Christmas card 2012 is done!