The manicure monologue and a radical vision for the novel in Kate Briggs’ The Long Form for 4Columns

Briggs’ first novel is capacious and generous wherein an Amazon delivery driver finds new words for love, and Briggs’ breaks open the novel. It is in her hands capacious and curious. It is also 24 hours in the day of a new mom with a new baby, which could be 10 months after we get the yes from Molly Bloom. Read more here at 4Columns, and it begins with my mother rocking me to sleep below:

When I was an infant, my mom would read as she rocked me to sleep. After she died, I found the list of books she finished the year I was born. On it was Agatha Christie’s Endless Night, which starts: “Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one’s finger and say: ‘It all began that day . . . with such an incident?’ ” See my mom in her nightgown, comforted by murder mysteries; me in her arms, maybe crying; and Christie, the crime writer, stymied by plot. She can’t reduce the story to the inciting incident, to a gun on the wall, to the kind of details a writer is supposed to include only if they are essential to a character’s development. Neither can Kate Briggs.