This is very much my week for conversations with relatives gone wrong

[layangabi]

Note to self: never EVER...catch yourself in a situation where you will have to explain your love for science fiction and other fabulist fiction to your uncles and aunts. Regardless of how well meaning and lovely they are, when they inquire into your literary interests, they bloody well haven't picked up a book since *high school.* Further, you know very well that describing the fiction you like will only make them worry about your soul and provoke more well-meaning and awkward offers to “save it.” Hence, you will find yourself stopping yourself before even describing the books you like. How do you explain the elegant beauty of Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and bypass the gender-shifting nature of the folk of Geneth, and the idea that gender is fluid, changeable, that it defines us and then again, doesn’t, and that love transcends it? How do you explain the general-fuck-uppery and appeal of the Oankanli to people who’d have aneurisms at their three member partnerships, five, if the Oankali decided to have human/other alien mates? Jim Grimsley’s Comfort & Joy is the closest thing I have which they might relate: a perfectly lovely, ordinary couple trying to deal with each other and their families. Except that I KNOW my mother's brothers and sisters, and "perfectly ordinary, lovely" would somehow be overshadowed by the fact that the couple in question are Ford and Dan, and not Ford and Danielle. (Uncle Manny = Ford's Daddy/Mummy? *eyes Uncle* Yup. So yup.)

So! With this is mind. Dear aunt: am so avoiding you in the future. What did you think was going to happen when after what you put me through, you said: “Elaine, you need to tell us the stories of the books you read!” Er...Auntie? You don't like books. You don't like *stories*. And the thing with books is that you *read* them. And I think avoiding this conversation is necessary for both our sanities.