.SOMETIMES RAW.

Hey guys,

I love a gem-like book and the satisfaction of devouring a story all in one gulp. Here are seven favourites, besides, of course, the ones I have written which are short, crispy essays.

A new-to-me author: The English Understand Wool

If you spot this book in a store, you’ll feel the magnetic pull of its silver spine, drool-inducing Thiebaud cover, and declarative title. The story begins with Marguerite, our teenage heroine, explaining the finer things in life. She’s learned from the best, her exacting maman. At seven, Marguerite begins to play bridge – “one cannot always assume that a child can be kept out of sight” – and her mother’s friends soon request Marguerite as a partner, “especially if there were to be interesting stakes.” But then, at 17, Marguerite learns something her maman had failed to mention, and it’s way higher stakes than what hotel to visit in Paris.

The crowd pleaser: Mr. Salary (more copies here)

Faber Stories is a British series, but you can find their short-story collection online. For five bucks, each edition costs less than an iced latte (in New York). Mr. Salary was the first piece of fiction that Sally Rooney published — before Normal People and Conversations With Friends — so it’s fun to look back at an earlier work of hers and see her signature style developing. There’s an illicit will-they-won’t-they aspect to the narrator’s relationship with the titular Mr. Salary, an older family friend she moves in with at age 19 and later comes back to visit when her dad is dying. I started it in the pool and then had to finish it before getting dressed again.

Nonfiction gems: 300 Arguments and Tell Me How It Ends

I’ll read anything Sarah Manguso publishes, but 300 Arguments is a true delight. “Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” she explains. Pack it for a park hang and then discuss your favorite aphorisms with friends. Here’s one: “Aspiring to fame is aspiring to a life of small talk.”

Next, in her extended essay Tell Me How It Ends, Valeria Luiselli (whose 2019 novel you may have read) goes through the 40 questions she asked migrant children while volunteering as a court interpreter in New York. Of five- and seven-year-old sisters from Guatemala, Luiselli writes, “The day before they left, their grandmother sewed a ten-digit telephone number on the collars of the dress each girl would wear throughout the entire trip. It was a ten-digit number the girls had not been able to memorize, as hard as she tried to get them to, so she had decided to embroider it on their dresses, and repeat, over and over, a single instruction: they should never take this dress off, not even to sleep, and as soon as they reached America, as soon as they met the first American policeman, they were to show the inside of the dress’s collar to him. He would then dial the number and let them speak to their mother. The rest would follow.” 

Luiselli encounters these girls after they’ve crossed the border, spent time in custody (“they didn’t remember how many days, but they said they were colder there than they had ever been”), lived for weeks in a shelter, and then flew to New York to reunite with their mom, stepdad, and baby brother. “But of course, it doesn’t end there,” she writes. “That’s just where it begins, with a court summons: a first Notice to Appear.” Though the volume is slim, she takes on the massive U.S. border crisis in a way that is clear and immediate. It’s a heart-wrenching look into the lives of children before and after they cross into the U.S.

Best in class: Kick the Latch and Aug 9 — Fog

Kathryn Scanlan writes some of my favourite little books. Kick the Latch tells the life story of professional “racetracker” Sonia, drawn from a series of interviews Scanlan did with a real horse trainer of the same name. It’s an immersive look into a brutal and sometimes beautiful way of life, told in a series of vignettes. “You live at the track, your life is full,” Sonia explains. Horse legs are “wheels,” jockeys sit in their cars blasting the heat while wrapped in cling wrap to try to “make weight” for a race, and a galloping horse spends “a lot of his time suspended in the air — flying, really — or on one foot.” That foot lands with “a thousand pounds of pressure held up by that one thin leg, that little hoof the size of a hand-held ashtray.” You don’t need to be a former horse girl to find it fascinating.

Aug 9 – Fog, also by Scanlan, has a slower, sleepier feel, but it’s no less compelling. The source material was the five-year diary of an 86-year-old woman living in a small town in the 1960s. Decades later, Scanlan found the diary at an estate sale. She took it home and typed out some of her favorite sentences, arranging and rearranging them over the course of several years. As Scanlan writes in the intro, after spending so much time with a stranger’s writing, the diarist’s voice has become part of her own. “Often I say to myself, ‘some hot nite’ or ‘flowers coming fast’ or ‘grass sure growing’ or ‘everything loose is traveling.’” This spare and beautiful portrait of a woman might inspire you to take another stab at diary life.

A French favorite: Happening 

In New York, I was in an Annie Ernaux reading group that was formed after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We gathered every six weeks or so for wine, cheese, and Annie talk. We’ve read six of her books so far, and this is the one I suggest whenever friends ask for an Ernaux rec. With her signature removed, she explores the shame of an unwanted pregnancy, her near-death experience, and her strongest memories of the period. If you like it, you’re in luck, because several more of her books have been translated into English — Seven Stories sells a whole set.

Now it’s your turn: what books or short stories do you love? I’m always looking to add books to my overstuffed bookshelf.

Aim to get better every day. Get rid of all the negative elements stopping you from being more focused or content. This could be people, relationships or environments. I think you are an amalgamation of the five people you spend the most time with, so now is your opportunity to assess those characters closely and distance yourself where necessary. The chances are, if these people are sucking the joy out of their own lives like a human Hoover, they are doing the same to yours. Surround yourself with people you admire, respect and want to emulate. Their qualities will rub off on you. For free.

Be more Bee. Twenty percent of bees don’t obey the waggle dance (how they tell each other where to find food and water). These ‘rebel’ bees choose instead to explore the areas where most of the bees aren’t going. If every bee obeyed the waggle dance the hive would get trapped in a local maximum. What would be the benefit of 100 percent of the bees exploring the same area day in and day out? Without the 20 percent of rogue explorer bees, the hive would never discover anything new and it wouldn’t be capable of adapting. It is okay to do your own thing, that’s where discovery and new ideas happen. So, be more bee.

A daily work reminder: A bad boss creates a culture that mimics from the top down. There is a bit of a ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ attitude. It takes people a long time to recover from a bad boss. The positive? It teaches us how not to behave if we are ever to become a boss ourselves.

A Fat Lie: Here is a home truth that might sting a little: Many of us were raised by our parents to believe we could be anything we wanted. That anything we set our minds to is achievable. Unfortunately, the real world is tough and unpredictable. Sometimes working hard isn’t enough. Opportunities don’t come knocking at your door, you have to go out and find them. When you are raised to believe you are destined for success and the world is your oyster, of course, you are going to feel like you have failed when things don’t turn out the way you had expected. Have a little self-compassion.

What are you good at? Age-old advice tells us to do what we love. While it is true that no one should ever give up on their passion, if it feels like you are not getting anywhere, it might be wise to pursue what you are good at, rather than what you obsess over. If you are good at what you are passionate about, you have hit the jackpot.

On success: If there is something you want to learn, pursue and attack it in the most unconventional way, so it takes deep root in your soul. Keep goals short-term. The best strategy is high intention and low expectation. Remain as flexible as possible. Your only concerns are the things you can control which are your thoughts and your actions.

On destiny: The narrative of ‘believe in yourself, follow your heart, ignore the haters, follow your vision and you will have the destiny you choose’, all that is the typical tale told by successful business gurus. But it is also a recipe for devastating failure. It completely ignores the role of fortune, of luck, of what life throws at you.

On luck: Develop your talent, develop the energy with which you get it out there and the rest is all luck. If you get the first two bits right, you are nudging the third bit to work in your favour.

Assumption is the mother of all fuckups: Ask, clarify, ask again. Don’t fall into the trap of nodding your head and pretending you have understood something when you haven’t.

On money: It is worth remembering that money makes you happier only to the point you don’t have to worry about it. Beyond that amount, money does not make you happier the more you earn.

Things will always pass. Things pass, it is just one thing after another. Don’t work so hard to impress people.

Let your mind be your playground. It’s where I work and have fun. I don’t often let people in, but when I do, I make sure it’s for a fleeting and confusing period that we both quickly agree was a mistake.

On solitude: I’m not into crowds; I’m into clouds. I’m not into clubs; I’m into shrubs. I prefer the predictable rhythms of photosynthesis and convection to the shocking neediness of people who start conversations. I never feel obligated to attend house parties, dinner parties, or godawful weddings when I have books just begging to be re-organized. I practice the Walden technique: If too many social invitations pile up, I go live by an abandoned pond for a year.

Genuine connection is ease. It is peace. When you find it you will know. You will feel seen, you will feel like you are being mirrored back to yourself like you are discovering the shadow of your own heart in another human being.

Slowly, through loving the right people, you will come to realize that the human beings who are meant for you in this world will not exhaust you, or hollow you out, or leave you feeling like you are hard to love. Slowly, you will come to realize that you do not have to romanticize the things in this life that hurt. You do not have to run towards the fire. Love does not have to feel like a fight, does not have to feel like battle, does not have to wound.

Slowly, you will learn how to lay down your arms. How to walk away from those who will only ever love you in halves. Slowly, you will learn that you cannot love someone into loving you, or being ready, if they are not. You cannot close their hands around your heart if they are not willing to hold it themselves. You have to let them go. You have to focus on the people in your life who bring you back home to yourself. You have to focus on standing up for that kind of connection, on honoring that calm, because it exists.

Learn to trust that, because when you come across it, when you ultimately experience it, it feels as if you are standing at a door you finally have the keys for. You enter it with ease. There is no fumbling through your jacket pocket trying to find the right way in. There is no desperately reaching into your bag trying to uncover the point of access. You are no longer banging your fists against the door, asking to be invited in. You walk through. Soundlessly. Softly. Relief washes over you. You take off your shoes. You hang your coat in the closet. You put on a pot of coffee. You’re home.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

can I please have your attention for this public service announcement: I did it again. My sixth book has been published. 

What the book is about

Like my previous books, I have written essays on my life in general; and ideas on how to create a passionate life for you and the people you love to spend time with. You will find inspiration, health tips, and how to be a better version of yourself. This time, more focus is placed on deeper thought, humour, and of course, cake because cake is always awesome!

What I hope to achieve with my book is that you get comfortable, enjoy a glass of beverage of choice, send your kid(s) to bed, and read my book in silence and peace. I hope it will transfer you into a relaxed, thought-provoking, or inspirational mode, make you reflect and most importantly think. Always think outside the box. 

I really want to thank my family, friends, and blog readers, and the support I have gotten to make this happen. I will have book signings coming up in Vienna at independent bookstores. Announcements and dates will be shared on this website. 

To sum this book up according to Morawa/Buchschmiede Publisher: 

A new rip-roaring essay collection from the smart, edgy, hilarious, unabashedly raunchy author Daniela Henry. She published successful books and loves to write mostly in her beautiful garden near the pond in the countryside. The essays in this collection draw on the raw, hilarious particulars of Henry’s life, experiences and observations. “I Was Told There Would Be Cake” is Henry at her most unflinching, riotous, and relatable.

Order your copy here, here, or in any bookstore. I would love to hear your thoughts about the book and anything else you like to share.

Thank you for reading my stuff and buying my books. <3