I have attempted to read Anna Karenina three times, to no avail. Also, I have never read Stephen King.
Please, don't judge me.
Before I realized that I was just another fallible human, I used to think that I was morally obligated to finish every book I had started— like some mighty omniscient was watching, scoring, docking points. I owned a bookstore for God's sake, hadn't I dutifully finished them all?
Even though I am the type of person who will endure a back spasm in silence to politely hear about your deaf dog or transplanted daylilies, I am no longer engaged in guilt-reading. I have become a selfish little brat who will put a book down immediately if it is wasting my time cuz I have less time than I've ever had on this planet and I'm already panicking that I'll never get to all of the books on my ‘Want To Read' list on Good Reads. It's at 365 and rising by at least two a week thanks to Substack.
Also— if I'm airing my full brattiness— when a book reaches a bestseller spot before I have read it, I will be damned if I’ll be goaded into it just because #BookTok says it is good. I will not be influenced by influencers because Oprah burned me a few times and ever since that scene in What About Bob?, I have understood that morning-show author interviews are a complete sham. Jenna Bush Hagar and even cutie-patoot Reese Witherspoon will not peer-pressure me into my next summer read, thankyouverymuch. I don’t even do fun beach reads.
My book club hates me, btw.
Not that I need to defend my reasons here (cuz who cares?), but this might all come up in an author interview of my own someday and I want to ‘get ahead of it.’ I’ll look away from the camera ala Cillian Murphy and say, Oh— I am not big on popularity knowing full well that I signed all of my high school yearbooks, “Save this, it might be worth money someday” followed by my big, chubby signature. Seriously. Those yearbooks might be worth a few dollars now but only because they're relics and retro and a glimpse into time before the internet— not because I have made it anywhere.
The truth is that I do want to be popular but in a more distant, mysterious, Marion Cotillard way. It is also true that I am majorly unimpressed by famous people and the amount of time spent on the viral hysterias they spawn. I blame all of this on that one time during my junior year when a cute, popular boy called me fat really loudly in front of all of his popular friends in the hallway. Instead of confronting him directly, I tossed a Big Gulp full of Mountain Dew over the open top of his Jeep Wrangler in a Taco Bell parking lot the following weekend— I will even take a Billy the Kid kind of fame if necessary.
Anyway, I was the weird girl watching Tora, Tora, Tora in 6th grade when everyone else was into Dirty Dancing. Neither a Backstreet nor a NSYNC girl— I was into Led Zeppelin and the Allmans and Blind Melon (the damn bee song aside). I was not into 90210 nor Friends nor Greys Anatomy. I didn’t even do Lost when everyone kept telling me that I looked ‘just like’ Evangeline Lily. Nope— I am more a reruns of Colombo kind-of-girl, which (side note) came in handy in my career as a therapist. When the professor of my therapeutic interventions class referenced the brilliance of Peter Falk's “Just one more thing" confrontation style as a useful therapy tool, I laughed out loud. Everyone else looked at her, and me, unamused.
Okay, okay— I will admit that I did love the uber-popular In Living Color in it’s heyday which, omg if you haven’t seen what the mainstream comedy world got away with in the 90s— YouTube, please. I just watched a throwback clip of Damon Wayans as Handy Man on Instagram in utter disbelief that it actually happened. Y’all, we did not give a damn.
That lapse in judgment aside, if something leans toward pop culture, I will lean away— not because I am better than anyone but because I do not want to be told what to like and I am hopelessly skeptical of other people's ‘sources’ of ‘inspiration.’
So, you'll understand why when
DM’d me to suggest a title for my Misfit Lit series, I approached with caution. I admire Kelly very much. She has been nothing but kind and transparent and a role model to me since Black Sheep Mom began but she had typed, “My choice for the Pulitzer” with the link and I thought, Well, we’ll see about that. I clicked her link with one eye shut, brat that I am.And there it was: The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld.
I opened Good Reads to investigate further. Turns out, it was already on my bloated ‘Want To Read’ list. Several years ago, in some rush of excitement, no doubt, I placed it on my literary to-do before I got busy with work and the birth of a child and a son in prison and then I got really sick and in all of this L-I-V-I-N, I forgot about it’s haunting, deep, and dark description:
“The enchanted place is an ancient stone prison, viewed through the eyes of a death row inmate…”
Now THAT is my type of beach read.
But, there it was, beneath several years of newer recommendations— which made me feel bad as an aging woman because I wouldn’t want the author to know that I had passed her up for the flirts du jour. I am slightly embarrassed that when newer criminal justice books like Framed by John Grisham (highly recommend) and Long Bright River by Liz Moore came into my lusting peripheral, I was lured elsewhere. I also recently read A River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb (yes, I know it's a bestseller and an Oprah Book Club pick) and Free by
. I had even succumbed to our book club’s underwhelming pick I Have Some Questions for You, allowing it to bury The Enchanted for another year. What a shame.Humbly, I would also submit The Enchanted for the Pulitzer, and Kelly, please send me the rest of your reading list. We are now BFFs.
Because I was traveling a lot last month, I opted for the audio version. In my brain, forevermore, this book will be synonymous with Upstate New York and with the many foreboding prison-compounds that I passed while listening. It helps that the voiceover was devastatingly competent.
Though the author describes the book’s setting to be within a "stone fortress" among walls that “weep from the omnipresent Pacific Northwest moisture”— it matters not. An old, stone American prison is an old, stone American prison. Death row is death row. The regrets and limitations and aches of prison life are hard and fixed from coast to coast.
But— before you wander into this book you should be warned.
It will feel like a descent into hell. Each sentence leads to another like a walk down a dark, narrow, sparsely-lit hallway. You will spend hours in a dungeon where you cannot see more than a few feet in front of you, and it is claustrophobic. You will question your own mind and judgment. You may even start to wonder why you deserve such richness in this life, even if you haven’t ever killed anyone.
This book is slow and cautious— offering no courtesies nor explanations. The plot is subtle. The characters, though mostly nameless (e.g., The Lady), are people whom you have met in your own life and, if you think about it too long, you'll realize that you didn't bother to name them either.
Where this book lacks in sunshine, it makes up in a jungle-dense lusciousness of language. The author makes an art of describing the indescribable: the inner workings of a prison, the inner thoughts of a man on death row, the fragility of our shared human condition. There are moments of tenderness that take you awhile to get over and there are horrors that make you hate that you know what other human beings are capable of.
While this book is a devastating triste of human depravity, it manages— somehow— to be an artifact of hope while avoiding the ‘inspirational’ trope or attempting to employ flat ironies and dumb metaphor. The Enchanted stands alone as the most haunting prison fiction that I have ever, and may ever, read.
Of course, I had to research Rene Denfeld half-way through. She knew too much to have just interviewed some folks or visited a prison— I knew, instinctively, that she had lived it. You can’t describe prison walls like that nor know of the complication of conversations with the incarcerated unless you have actually sat with them in the flesh. She is one of us, I thought.
And she is.
Not only did Ms. Denfeld spend two decades working as a licensed investigator (once for a public defender’s office), she held a caseload of death row inmates and sex-trafficked individuals during her career. In addition to those professional horrors, she comes from Capital T trauma of her own and her stepdad is a sex-offender, so, we have that in common too.
Snooty, anti-fan girl that I am, I admit to completely fan-girling over here. As an author, she has so completely depressed me that I shall either give up now and call this whole living thing a lost effort or pinky promise myself to keep writing, to keep talking about all that I've seen being in and around American prisons. Because, while The Enchanted is fiction, I assure you that it is not.
*If you have read this one, please tell us what you thought in the comments (even if you disagree with my ravings). If you want to create a thread over this or any other thing, please take it to our chat! Know that I am still working on a Live book club option, mostly likely for this Fall. 🖤 Lastly, if you want more in-your-face honesty, please check out Kelly Thompson's Substack: There Is Nothing Wrong With You and There Never Was.
Bridget, I don’t even know where to begin except as a fellow bibliophile and voracious reader since age 4, I resonated with every word. Nothing excites me more than connecting with another reader’s reader. I, too, care nothing for beach reads or the book du jour touted by whomever. I’ll be the judge, thank you very much - and this is why life-changing books and authors find me with astonishing frequency. I had the honor of interviewing Rene Denfeld and can even call her a friend - we’re kindred souls - and I instantly recognized you as one of a kind and a compadre. There’s nothing I love more than sharing a good book - in this case, Pulitzer worthy. Thank you for the shout out.
That was beautifully written and a compelling case to go buy the book.