Purse Book is a weekly newsletter about reading hot little books & being a gal on the go.
The ideal Purse Book is 7 inches long, 5 inches wide, and less than an inch thick. A Purse Book can fit in almost every purse, every satchel, every tiny backpack, and sometimes a pants’ pocket if everyone is lucky.
The best type of Purse Book is a book like Jen George’s slim oddball The Babysitter at Rest. Published in 2016, it is 7 inches long, 5.5 inches wide, .5 inches thick, and 163 pages long. It could snuggle into almost any purse and astonish almost any sensibility.
Through five profane short stories, we klutz around social minefields: we try to host a cool party, we conduct an affair with an art professor, we want to have a new baby, we are a babysitter at rest. It’s surreal and provocative, but casual about it. I’ve read it over and over. This book makes a mess of me every time.
The figures in The Babysitter at Rest contort themselves on the sidelines: of love, family, pregnancy, knowledge. Like the archetypal babysitter, there’s always an adjacency at play. It’s understudy unease: the situation is high-stakes but temporary, very close but off stage, overlooked but burdened.
And then, the book is about forgetting all that in order to flirt with optimism and its consequences:
The Babysitter at Rest—such a resigned misfit—is also a hothead and it has endless energy for a good narrative frolic like this. It’s absolutely bouncy about how dark it is. And like the best of personal, comedic projects, The Babysitter at Rest oscillates wildly around the question: am I weird or is the world weird? It’s so extremely sensitive to the way that being a person is strange that it comes all the way around and shouts: no, the world is strange! Then it starts all over again, forgetting and remembering.
Can you imagine a book that, on every page, is this destabilizing? That’s this one!
It is this strong flavor that makes The Babysitter at Rest a Perfect Purse Book. It’s got an alluring title and ghoulishly femme cover art. There’s a punchline every moment, so it tickles at every possible chance you might have to read a few pages. A Purse Book must pack a punch. This one is breezy and dead-serious and intoxicating. Abstract! Tactless! Glorious!
What an exciting first week of Purse Book! Do you have a purse that requires a Purse Book? Send your dimensions over to pursebookletter@gmail.com.