Slippery and a bit opaque (though fully self-aware of this) largely due to its fragmentary structure, THE OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE is a thought-provoking read. I am happy McCalden was able to get this off her heart and into the world, but the format--coupled with the matter-of-fact tone--made this feel a bit too detached for me to truly sink my teeth into for a good chunk of the book. That said, she was successful in what she set out to do (and I appreciated seeing how things came together by the end), so I'll be keeping an eye out for future work from her; I'm particularly curious to see what an attempt at fiction would look like from her.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My Selling Pitch:
Do you want to read an art piece on grief that connects viruses to technology and tries to find the humanness in there? A sad girl’s take on Halt and Catch Fire with only a fraction of the depth.

Pre-reading:
I have no idea what this is about. I just know that the cover is stunning.

Thick of it:
This writing is gorgeous. It immediately reminds me of Dyscalculia, Maeve Fly, and Death Valley.

ebullient

It reminds me of Halt and Catch Fire

I never knew the Minitel existed.

I have not seen any of these movies.

I really, really like this book.

Memoirs built like musey collages of art and science and life are my faveeee

I think you need to do this book in one go as an audiobook or you will not like it.

etiological

Girlypop comparing herself to Cicero is ballsy as hell, and I respect it.

Also, I am so ill while I’m reading this book and it is immaculate at putting me to sleep. It’s monotone. It’s interesting. It’s callback-y. She keeps making me nod off, but every time I wake up, I’m like goddamn I love this.

Ischemic

I read a lot of books that reference Arthurian legends for a bitch who has never read about Arthur or even watched the movie.

C. J. Leede would like to talk about the story of the eye hahaha

Is this spoilers for True Detective? Because rude. And if you’re like Samantha, that show came out years ago. You should’ve watched it by now. I’m aware. I just haven’t.

We’re getting a little boring at this midpoint. It’s a little too much science, not enough emotional callback. There’s no personalization.

I am loving these short stories.
Oh, are they summaries of popular TV episodes and I just don’t get it because I’m uncultured swine? (I think it’s probably that.)

I think this book might be too long.

Title drop

I'm getting bored again.

A Sam!

It's Normal People-y.

I know this is a memoir, but I would love to read the story about girlypop in the diner, and the waitress, and the cowboy. That was gorgeous writing.

God, that's a relatable conversation. I can't do it. I won't settle like that. They get dumped. I'd rather be alone. I want a partner who dresses up too.

Oh god yeah, the polarizing feelings and being alone. That is exactly it.

Ugh, see, like I don't want a memoir from this author. Give me the contemporary bittersweet romance lit fic. She'd kill it. Sally Rooney, Sam, Dyscalculia, Piglet, Come and Get It.

This writer is going on my follow list. I want a fiction book from her.

I think this is too broad and too slow. She needed an edit. It kind of reads like I put research time into this, so I need to include it in my book, but like we didn’t need all of it, girlypop.

Girl, fuck that therapist.

This book started out so strong, and we’re dropping into three-star territory. It’s just getting unfocused and rambly. Yes, it’s still doing callbacks, but they’re not very strong. It’s almost like they’re callbacks for the sake of being callbacks.

I'm getting bored again.

This last 25% of the novel does not need to exist.

How? Very easily. I don’t care if he’s nice to the neighbors that he can benefit from. If he’s going to deny the suffering of millions of people, that’s not exactly hard math. Nazis can get fucked.

Shit ending.

Post-reading:
Man, this book is so conflicting. It started off so strong, but it’s way too long. Someone needed to trim this and make the argument more pointed.

The author can clearly write. When we do get scenes from her life, they are so evocative and vivid and like an A24 film. I would love to read a contemporary fiction novel from her. I think it would be on par with Ottessa Moshfegh, and Sally Rooney, and Melissa Broder. There’s an angry, sad girl book in here.

On its own though, this book is trying to do too much. You know me. I love a callback. I love character parallelism. This went too far. There was too much. It felt a lot like I did research on this tangent, so I have to include it in my book, whether or not it adds to my point because otherwise I wasted my time. Girl, let it go. Not everything that you put time and energy into will serve you.

I think the author chickened out writing her ending. I think there was more to say about her grief and complicated relationship with her grandmother. Instead, it felt like grandma got brushed aside in favor of her trying to make peace with her dad. And you have to sit there reading it the whole time like girl, you don’t have to make peace with a Nazi. You just don’t. You’re not unique for having a shitty and absent dad.

And it’s disappointing because when this author has points to make, they're spot on. They’re worth highlighting. They’re worth showing to another person. They’re relatable. But people aren’t going to get to read those quotes when they have to slog through a lot of the filler in this novel. We are in a DNF-ing epidemic. If you can’t hold the reader’s attention span, you’re not gonna get finished. And that would be a shame because I think this book has something. I just don’t think it had time to fully develop it.

I think the disclaimer at the beginning of this book-the author’s guide for how to read it- is vital to your enjoyment of this book. I think you have to pick it up as an audiobook and listen to it in one go. I think that’s your best chance for enjoying it. I think if you pick it up and put it down, you’re going to get lost, and you’re going to miss the callbacks. It’s going to feel very pointless. The audiobook is also read by the author and while she’s pretty monotone, how she presents the facts and where she hesitates, I think adds to the experience.

The ending lost me. It felt a bit fetishistic and cliché. There’s something yucky about a sage old drag queen advising the beautiful young sad girl to live her life in spite of her pain. I think the author was trying to end on a hopeful note, but it came off kind of tone-deaf and after-school special-y.

The book’s concept reminded me so much of Halt and Catch Fire, which is my favorite show of all time. It’s all parallelism and character growth and the humanness behind technological advancement, but that show does it so much better.

This book is worth the read if you’re nerdy and you like musey, atmospheric books. If you’re not down for a thought experiment, you’re gonna hate this.

Who should read this:
Halt and Catch Fire fans
Art Piece book fans
Quirky Memoir fans
Thought experiment fans

Do I want to reread this:
Maybe? I feel like there’s more I could get out of this, but my TBR is also very long.

Similar books:
* Dyscalculia by Camonghne Felix-unconventional writing style memoir, angry, sad girl book
* My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh-OG angry, sad girl book
* Sam by Allegra Goodman-coming of age, angry, sad girl book
* Death Valley by Melissa Broder-fever dream of a novel, grief think piece
* I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins-fictional-ish memoir, sad girl book
* Like Neon Mornings by Shiloh Sloane-angry, sad girl book, lyrical writing
* Maeve Fly by C. J. Leede-hear me out-in addition to being a horror novel, it’s also an atmospheric love letter to LA
* Big Swiss by Jen Beagin-messy, sad girl book
* Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny-angry, sad girl short stories
* In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado-unconventional memoir, basically an art piece on writing styles and genres
* Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney-miserable character study
* Laid and Confused by Maria Yagoda-memoire-ish research on why the author girlypop has bad sex, spoiler alert it’s low self-esteem
* Come and Get It by Kiley Reid-slice of life character study, social commentary

really fabulous and inventive new take on memoir in essays! thinky! smart! i think lit fic readers will get a lot from this.

This was very thought provoking though at times the way the book was organized was a bit tough to follow. There were multiple timelines without clear enough distinction between when in the times the author was describing so it felt a little disorienting. I do feel like I left reading this book feeling smarter. This book felt like a passion project of the author and definitely felt like a way for her to process her grief. I would put it in the category of books by artists that use the writing to parse out the loss of a loved one akin to Blue nights by Joan Didion. This book however is less effective than Didion. I felt at times like I could connect the dots for the train of thoughts but it felt like I was standing in front of a conspiracy theory board with all the red string. I loved the end button of the book that was the conversation with drag queen.

𝙄 𝙠𝙚𝙚𝙥 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙙𝙚𝙖𝙙 𝙞𝙨 𝙟𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩, 𝙖 𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚, 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙢𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙨𝙚𝙥𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨.

The Observable Universe is memoir that leaves me with a disjointed feeling just like grief and trying to make sense of life does. The directions for how to read the book tells us it is an album about grief, ‘every fragment like a track on a record’… the writing is beautiful, but the subject is painful. Where are the ghosts of one’s history hiding, why is fate a pointed gun aimed at some people and a shower of blessings for others? Is it all chaos? How do we know people who disappeared from our lives, who death took, before our most formidable moments? What happens to the organic matter that they were made of? How in the hell do we observe life, let alone ourselves? Can we grieve a connection, a thing we never had? Must we be content with grasping at ghosts, trying to make sense of fragments that can’t provide us the entire picture?

Aids has run parallel to artist Heather McCalden’s life, its emergence in1981 (she was born in 1982) and her parents’ death from AIDS-related complications in the early nineties. She writes about viruses, ‘they have changed us, and we have changed them,’ and the rise of the internet (the same can be said about that strange world). The hunt for lineage is one thing, but how do we know what someone thought, felt, how they truly lived with stale facts? Raised by her grandmother Nivia, they were of different natures, a woman who was steely, and intelligent but ‘had no time for poetry.’ Artifacts from her mother and father’s lives were scarce, the things her grandmother kept were useless, like the crumbling make-up. It was an erasure, and it wasn’t until her grandmother’s death that any artifacts that remained could truly be dug up, researched but often to dead ends. How can one locate moments that happened before they were born? It is heartbreaking to know more about what killed them than to know about one’s own parents but that is a large part of what haunts this memoir.

The journey I have been on, in reading this book, is living a moment inside an artist’s mind. One who has lived years without the anchor so many of us take for granted, who has been absorbing grief and trying to find connections between viruses, “the spread of ideas”, what going viral means, its power, the entity that is a place that both exists and doesn’t- not really, it’s not of flesh, but then neither is our memories. It is a collage that includes society, dreams, history, the future, the past, investigations, excavations, our instincts, preservation of ourselves and others. There is really no way to describe Heather McCalden’s book, but a crack in her heart. It evoked a strange mess of sensations in me, I found myself thinking about life, this moment right here, having been born in 1975 I too was witness to the internet, all that free information, filling us and often emptying something too. Can we rely on memory, so often a trick? McCalden spends her time throwing a line into the past, hoping to catch something that can connect her to her mother and father. What do you do with what you discover if that person is no longer around to question? To explain? There is no one to ask, her grandmother was too practical to stew in memories while she was alive, the keeper of her inheritance.

I know I do not make sense, there is so much to take in, science, art, networking, a Japanese phone booth, the dead, the living, man made worlds, disease, medicine, lineage… Just read it. I spent a month thinking about it all before I could attempt this review.

Publication Date: March 19, 2024

Random House

Hogarth

This is certainly a unique direction to take in a memoir about grief, that reads like a history book. A well-researched one according to the eight pages of bibliography. A brief history of the internet paralleled with the evolution of a virus, interspersed with personal anecdotes of the author’s life. So many pieces to this story, but it meandered and seemed to be unconnected making it difficult to follow. Thank you NetGalley for providing the ARC.

I ended up DNF’ing after 20 pages or so. This book seems very whimsical and is a stream-of-consciousness kind of writing, but the style was not something that appealed to me at all. I hope that this book finds its community that can have its adoring fans!

I am so thankful to Hogarth Books, Heather McCalden, and Netgalley for granting me advanced audio and digital access to this title before it hits shelves on March 19, 2024. I really enjoyed the dialogue and narratives of this book and look forward to more of this artist's work to come.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Nonfiction

The Observable Universe is a melancholic and poignant memoir that explores the evolution of the AIDS virus and the internet in parallel timelines. In the early 1990s, the author suffered the loss of her parents to AIDS and became an orphan at the age of ten. Her grandmother in Los Angeles then took care of her.

The connection between HIV and the internet is interestingly made through the use of multiple mediums, like scientific studies, TV shows, Wikipedia, and other studies. Along with all this, the author put a lot of her own experiences into this to make it more personal.

I believe that the most appealing aspect of this book is the author's willingness to expose her unfiltered vulnerability, which allows readers to be drawn into her world. Her examination of how she deals with grief comes across as genuine and sympathetic. The use of parallel narratives is another one of the book’s strengths in this situation. It is something so unique that I have not read anything like that before.

However, where this memoir suffers is in its pacing. There are times when the story wanders off course and loses its concentration. There are some sections that could be improved by more stringent editing. In addition, it took me some time to start putting things together and getting used to the flow of the narrative in this instance. A few more narrowly focused topics would have been of great assistance. Regardless of the cons, this is still a fascinating memoir.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book.

The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden is a beautifully written memoir.
Such a compelling and thought provoking read.
I really enjoyed McCalden’s writing. And the more I read I became more emotional throughout.
A wonderful nonfiction novel that sucked me in.

Thank You NetGalley and Random House & Hogarth for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!

Thought-provoking and brilliant. I was a little confused at times because of the structure of the book, but I ended up appreciating that in the end. I can recommend this.

A really beautiful and exploratory piece of fragmented memoir. Formally dynamic in a series of brief vignettes, McCalden manages to use conversational prose to weave between the history of the internet, the history of viruses, and her own complicated personal history. This book feels both reminiscent of other similar modern writers who balance complex research with personal history in the format of vignettes (I imagine this work will find itself in conversation with Maggie Nelson), but there was something fresh and unique about its exploration of science as well as the exploration from the point of view of a non-expert. McCalden is neither an epidemiologist nor is she a computer programmer or internet historian, she is a writer on a personal mission. The fact that she acknowledges and does not shy away from that fact makes a lot of this work and adds to the underlying narrative and the readability. I did have to put this one down and pick it up a few times, and I am going with 4.5 stars instead of 5 (rounded up to 5 stars on netgalley) simply because it didn't 100% come together for me as a book I see myself returning to over and over. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful work, one I would recommend.

Thanks NetGalley and Hogarth/Random House for the early look!

a fragmentary exploration of grief and the concept of the virus, both online and in the body. it follows a lot of different threads (many of the sections being only a paragraph or a few pages long), discussing virology, the history of the internet, her own memories, and detective tv shows. and the book is her own foray into detective work in a way - both of heather mccalden’s passed away from HIV/AIDS when she was incredibly young, shattering her life. the observable universe is her attempt to put the pieces back together and figure out who her parents were, how the disease that took them came to be, and how to cope with the reality of what she finds. 3.5 stars!

i got along really well with the longer pieces in the book and will keep an eye out for mccalden’s future work, but i did struggle to get into it at first because of how much it jumps around. i would recommend this if any of the themes sound interesting - the medical/technological themes feel unique for this kind of creative nonfiction. lots of beautiful sentences and thought provoking ideas in here.

I wasn't in love with this book, but the idea of it was attractive. I read a ton of memoirs and this one seemed like a bunch of super short stories. I didn't make a connection with the author. Great cover though. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

This book basically asks the question - how do we, as humans, deal and grow in a world that is increasingly relying on technology and yet, a real virus develops in the world and we see how easily our society can be thrown to the wolves.

This book is hard to read because there is such an undertone of everlasting sadness. It is a memoir and the author brings up some very interesting things - making me look at life after one of the most difficult periods of human life.

Pacing is good and I was engaged, including all my emotions, reading this book.

This book is a DNF for me. I was so excited to read a novel about HIV/AIDS because I love learning more and more about it. But I could not finish this book at all because I felt that it was not organized at all. Especially with the author's writing style I just could not get into the book at all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Observable Universe is the memoir of debut author Heather McCalden. Containing compelling writing, an exploration of universal concepts and interesting parallels and ideas, and an unconventional format, I did find it to be a bit meandering in the middle, but the strong themes of identity, grief, absence and loss resonated strongly and carried me through. And perhaps it's a play on the process of grief itself, something that is too easy to get lost in, or overcome by, or to mistake it for the end in itself?

I was surprised and ultimately delighted by the unexpected golden thread that wove its way into this darker themed tapestry; a message of hope, of overcoming pain and trauma, not letting them completely co-opt one's life trajectory—and the encouragement that you too can do this—was deftly handled.
If you've grappled with grief, suffering, uncertainty or pain...you might enjoy these deftly woven together fragments in this memorable book which I had a hard time putting down and whose pieces I keep turning over and over in my mind.

Heather McCalden is an author to watch and I look forward to reading more of her work.