Twined & twisted
PURL, n., v. I am a novice knitter, so I mostly know this word as meaning “to knit a reversed stitch” or the reversed stitch itself. That sense dates back to the nineteenth century. Before that, “purl” meant “to embroider in silver or gold,” so still associated with textile arts.
Not being especially good at knitting, I am even worse at explaining it, but to purl, you stick your needle through the front of a stitch of yarn, twist a new loop around the needle, and then pull the old stitch through. So there’s a pulling and twisting action at work in purling, which makes sense because the word most likely comes from Middle English “pirlyng,” meaning revolving or twisting. Etymologists don’t know where “pirlyng” comes from. One possible connection is Italian “pirolare,” to twirl, but that only made the cut at the Online Etymology Dictionary, not the Oxford English Dictionary.
I hadn’t realized that there is a second meaning for “purl,” which is “a small stream or rill flowing with a swirling motion” or “the action or sound of water or another liquid flowing in this manner” (Oxford English). Both of these water-related usages are now rare, but they’re on my mind this week because the romance novel I was reading, A Lady’s Code of Misconduct by Meredith Duran, used the verb “purl” four times, which is more than I’ve ever seen it outside the context of knitting.
Duran is often trading on both senses—flowing water and twisting thread—when she uses “purl.” The very first use happens when our heroine realizes that her terrible cousin is about to show their awful family a piece of needlepoint she has made as a satirical political commentary: “Satisfaction purled through her. He was going for the embroidery. She knew it.” The heroine’s feeling in this moment is a little bit twisted. She knows her cousin means to shame her by revealing the inappropriately cynical image she has made, but she also wants to be recognized as a person capable of political thought—and to shock her awful family. Her embroidery plays a crucial role in the plot, disappearing and reappearing like the thread it’s made of. “Purl” is the right verb in more than one way.
The next two uses are also metaphors for the movement of emotion or physical feeling (“a delicious thrill purled through her”; “Sensation purled in waves”). Duran’s final use of “purl” is also about emotion:
A sigh from his side. The mattress creaked as his wife turned toward him in her sleep, carrying a dark curl over the joint of his elbow. He stroked it very lightly, wonder purling through him again, cleansing him of dark thoughts.
Here, Duran is playing with both senses of “purl.” The wonder moves through hero like water, “cleansing him,” and “purl” rhymes with “curl,” emphasizing that the heroine’s curly hair is a twisted, connecting thread between the two of them. He prizes her cleverness, hidden from everyone else but revealed to him when he first sees her satirical needlepoint, and he loves her hair, another quality she hides from the world but which bobs to the surface in private moments like the one above.
(“Twined and Twisted” is a song by folk and blues singer Valerie June.)
As you can already tell, I read some really fantastic small-r romance in the past two weeks:
Something Fabulous (m/m, both cis and gay, historical) by Alexis Hall. I often want to describe romance novels as “a romp,” but I try to save that type of classic movie-poster language for the books that really deserve it, so please understand how earnestly I mean it when I tell you that Something Fabulous is a romp. Playful, joyful, and wildly, delightfully, literally-everyone-you-meet-is queer, this mood-lifting historical about a closed-off, starchy duke on a frantic and improbably dramatic quest for his missing fiancée while accidentally falling in love with her twin brother is both laugh-out-loud funny and very sexy. Plus it features one of the best tropes, “characters in a romance novel read romance novels.” Content guidance from the author.
Shake Things Up (open relationship turning into polyamory, m/f + f/f, all cis and bi/pan, contemporary) by Skye Kilaen. It’s been a good reading moment for me and books that fall into the category of “delightfully queer.” This wonderful road trip romance stars Matt and Allie, a couple in an open relationship, and Noelle, a woman who gets laid off and broken up with in the same day and needs a change of pace (to shake things up, so to speak). She embarks on a road trip with her new friends Matt and Allie, and along the way they discover that all three of them may be falling for each other. I especially appreciated all the details about the city of Austin and the large, inclusive supporting cast, and all three main characters felt distinctive and developed. It’s such a treat to find well-written polyamorous relationships. Disclosure: I am friends with the author and received an advance copy. This book comes out March 22, 2022. Content guidance from the author.
A Lady’s Code of Misconduct (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Meredith Duran. I already wrote about this book above, when discussing “purl,” but I have more to say. This is not my first Meredith Duran novel, but it’s been years and years since I read one. I’m wary of het historicals because they so often feature pregnancy as a plot point, but this one doesn’t. All that to say: sometimes the heterosexuals are worth it.
I don’t usually highlight much while I read, but Duran is just so fearless in her prose. Exclamation points! Fragments. Historical vocabulary and old-school romance shit like “tumescent.” Maybe that sounds unappealing to you, but I’m agog at how well she makes it work. As discussed in a previous newsletter, a good sex scene is more than the sum of its words:
The truth is, if you can write a good enough sex scene—and Sierra Simone can—then the individual words don’t matter. I realize this is a strange position for this word-obsessed newsletter to adopt. Of course the words matter. But sex scenes are the ultimate literary gestalt. If you get most of the words mostly right, readers will enjoy the whole and stop paying such judgmental attention to the parts. (It’s how you use it that matters, you know.)
A truly superb sex scene can overcome. Meredith Duran’s prose delivers, but I wouldn’t want you to think this book is all style—it’s tightly paced, and the plot is the sleekest of engines. Duran pours in those high-octane romance tropes (amnesia, marriage of convenience) and the whole thing just purrs right along. The premise is bonkers in the best, most over-the-top romance novel way: a woman desperate to get married to access her inheritance and escape her family makes a deal with a corrupt politician who can get her a forged marriage license in exchange for a little espionage, but when he suffers a near-fatal blow to the head and is expected to die imminently, she has his name written on the marriage license, hoping to free herself by becoming his widow. Except he survives—but with no memory of the last five years. As an amnesiac, he turns out to be sweet and caring. “What if a powerful asshole man was rendered helpless and vulnerable to you, a woman who had previously been powerless” is one of the most id-tickling scenarios in romance, and it’s a rare pleasure to see it handled this delicately. Content guidance: emotional abuse, death of a child (in the past, discussed), grief, non-consensual kiss (while the hero is being an asshole in the beginning—he gets better!).
In books that are neither Romance nor romance, I finished She Who Became the Sun, Shelley Parker-Chan’s queer epic fantasy reimagining the founding of the Ming Dynasty. As I said last week, the prose is jaw-dropping, but holy wow is there a lot of suffering. My reading experience was complicated by genuinely enjoying some parts—listen, I love when a fantasy protagonist goes off to a special school/monastery and gets mentored by an eccentric type—but having real difficulty with the misogyny of one point-of-view character. I understood why it was there, and certainly the rest of the book shows it to be a false belief, but also: not how I wanna spend my time. I did find the writing compelling, and there’s a small subplot with a juicy, angsty romance between a nonbinary character and a woman.
I’m also reading Michael W. Twitty’s memoir and history The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, which is thus far really beautifully and powerfully written and I kind of want to give a spontaneous book report with every single piece of information in it to everyone I talk to, always a sign of great nonfiction. More on this once I finish!
One last note: I don’t really use Word Suitcase for promotional purposes, nor do I want to start, but I will mention that I have a co-authored book coming out February 15. It’s called Errant, Volume One and it’s two sapphic fantasy novellas following the adventures of a swordswoman and an actress. I wrote it with two longtime friends and it’s a quick, fun, trope-y read with a super slow-burn romance.