Buddy Reads with Annie B. Jones

In which I discuss my reading journey with Annie B. Jones and celebrate the upcoming release of her debut!

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

I first met Annie B. Jones in the summer of 2014. Earlier that day, I’d gone up to Thomasville to visit my Granny. I love my Granny, but being with her for more than an hour rattles my nerves—we’re a family of high strung individuals, and there are years of unresolved tension and trauma to account for—and I decided to stop by The Bookshelf, my hometown bookstore, to decompress. I’d been shopping at The Bookshelf since I was nine, and had come to see it as a safe haven in the same way I saw the library or a single-occupancy bathroom. Every time I got bullied at the Christian school or embarrassed myself at Hong Yip or fought with my Granny, I ran to The Bookshelf, went up the stairs (when it was at its old location) and attempted to read Anna Karenina until I had calmed down. When I stopped there on this day in 2014, I just planned on browsing the shelves.

There have always been short, brunette women at The Bookshelf, so seeing one scampering around was not new. I walked in, the bell announcing my entrance, and in less than a minute, was greeted by this new brunette who asked how she could help me today. What I really needed was therapy, but because I was in a bookstore and this was a relative stranger, I answered that I was just browsing, that I didn’t really have anything in mind.

“What’s the last book you loved?” she asked.

“Honestly,” I answered, “I know everyone’s saying this, but I just haven’t found anything that’s grabbed me like Gone Girl. I want the next Gone Girl.”

I knew this was the most basic answer I could have given, but I had been in a reading rut for a while. I’d spent months before this trying to be an intellectual, only reading books that had won the Pulitzer Prize, and was in desperate need of pure entertainment. “Follow me,” Annie said, and went over to an end cap where she plucked a copy of The Fever by Megan Abbott from the little white book stand. “Have you read this?” she asked. “It’s not quite as twisty as Gillian Flynn, but she’s a great writer and I had a hard time putting this one down.”

I still remember how excited I was that she had pronounced Gillian’s name correctly—you’d be surprised by how many people get it wrong. We didn’t chat much more after that, she just rang me up and I went back home. I started the book a few days later, and I did, in fact, have the hardest time putting the book down. I finished it in one afternoon, thrilled to have discovered a new writer who made me so uneasy and who had such delicious, glittering sentences. The next time I was in Thomasville, I stopped by, hoping to see Annie there, to tell her how much I loved the book. I spoke to the woman at the desk, described Annie to her, and the woman explained that Annie was the new owner. I asked if she was there. She wasn’t. I felt like a stalker, with this sudden frequency with which I popped into The Bookshelf, tilting my head around to see if I could spot her brown bob again. It was another month before I got to tell her how much I loved the book, and she happily offered me more recommendations.

I knew very quickly that I wanted Annie to be my friend. Whenever I stopped in and chatted about books, I always overstayed my welcome, went on too many tangents, overshared life stories that I had always thought were funny but which she just found traumatic. I’ve always been too eager to make friends, tried too hard. Annie was good about maintaining the boundary between business owner and customer—after all, you hear someone make a joke about taking up residence under the floorboards of your store, your smartest choice is to keep them at arms length.

In October of that year, I was sent on a scavenger hunt. I arrived at the apartment I shared with my boyfriend and was met by one of his friends, who told me to change into something cute and she would explain from there. I put on a dress shirt and a pair of skinny jeans, and the woman handed me a card with a clue. As mentioned above, I was a big fan of Gone Girl, and I knew that a scavenger hunt could only mean one thing—my boyfriend had been murdered, and this friend was the one who’d done it. She took me around from place to place, me sneakily texting my possibly-dead boyfriend who did not answer, and we eventually landed in a park at night where I had to dig a hole (for my grave?) but that revealed my next clue, which was to head to The Bookshelf. This woman drove me to downtown Thomasville in the late evening—when I knew for a fact that The Bookshelf was closed—and we parked across the street. Through the car window, I saw the back of a woman’s head, brown bob, which made me think of Amy Dunne’s bob, which made me think that I was the next to be murdered, and I mentally prepared myself for the great beyond. Then the woman turned around and it was none other than Annie B. Jones, offering me my last clue, which was to walk inside.

This isn’t a story about how I got engaged, this is a story of my friendship with Annie B. Jones—but I love that, even before we were close friends, she had become someone significant in my life.

Not long after my engagement, my fiancé and I moved back to my hometown. I started school there, got a job there, and spent whatever free time I had at The Bookshelf. You hang around somewhere long enough and people find a good use for you. Annie eventually suggested I come on as a guest for the podcast, From The Front Porch. I think it might have been because I was selected as their very first ‘Customer of the Month’—do they even still do this? I can’t be sure—and I had an end cap that featured some of my favorite books, and I had my picture displayed with a caption explaining why I chose them. Annie and I discussed small town life and my reading journey, and after it was done, she said we should do it again.

Love It or Loathe It started at the beginning of 2016, with me, Annie, and Rebekah Arwood. We’d all read this book called Perfect Days by Raphael Montes, which had been pitched by publishers as Brazil’s Gone Girl. I can’t remember which came first, the buddy read or the podcast, but it was this book that ended up being the focus of our first episode. I still remember reading it while at Great Clips—the cover of the ARC mentioned a specific page that supposedly had a shocking event, and I rushed through this book I was quickly losing interest in, wondering what exactly was supposed to make me gasp or faint. I’m pretty sure the consensus was that we all loathed it.

I loved this early period of being on the podcast, because it meant I got to go over to Annie’s house to record. She lived in the most adorable home, with a porch swing out front and a beautifully kept lawn—I finished one of our picks, Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood, while sitting on that swing, listening to Annie play the piano through the screen door. I knew, even back then, with the smell of freshly mown grass and the giggling of children from the school across the way, that this experience was something special, something not to be taken for granted.

One night around this time, Annie and I had dinner together—we got Arby’s (don’t judge), and went back to her house, where I tried to get her to start the show United States of Tara. If you’ve ever seen the first episode, you’ll know it starts off pretty raunchy, and in these early days, Annie wasn’t quite prepared to hear Toni Collette simulate an orgasm while playing a 16-year-old trapped in the body of a 40 year old mom with DID. Her husband, Jordan, walked in right when this was happening, which I’m sure mortified her. But she was kind, and sat through the episode until it was over.

I remember being so anxious about doing or saying the wrong thing. While Annie has always been an open and loving person, my years getting kicked out of various churches had made me weary of Christians, and I was terrified of her faith or my life getting in the way.

A month or two later, Annie invited me to the movies, to see Bad Moms. We sat behind a row of loud moms who cackled and pointed at the screen in agreement the whole time, and Annie and I gleefully observed from the sidelines. When Annie invited me again, I figured I’d done something right. We went to see La La Land—before the infamous Oscar debacle, or before it was even much of a discussion at all—and on the drive home, Annie and I had an unexpected conversation, with the topics ranging from abortion to masturbation to the gender of God. Her wisdom and curiosity and openness to what was unknown to her or what she didn’t have answers to excited me, and made me feel like I was in a safe space. I remember looking up to the sky when I got out of her car, thanking whatever higher power was willing to listen that I had managed to make such an amazing friend.

The Love It or Loathe It series went from 2016 to 2018. Partway through, Rebekah left and we introduced a new voice with Emily McKenna. This is just the nature of things, where people move away and you learn to accept the change. I’ll be honest, I’d always seen Annie as the Beyonce of the trio, and being the one to stick around through all of the changes made me feel like the Kelly Rowland, which I was thrilled by. The series got a rebrand in 2019, now titled Backlist Book Club, where Annie, Emily, and I discussed books that had long been on our radar, and switched the discussion from whether we loved it or loathed it to how we were actually engaging with the work. It opened us up for better discussions. A few episodes in, it shifted to being just Annie and me.

At the end of 2019, Annie pitched a new idea to me: what if we selected a classic novel, one we had always wanted to read, and discussed one section a month throughout the course of the year. At this point, she hadn’t even picked the title of this series—it was between Conquer A Classic and Tackling Tomes. I loved the idea, because it guaranteed that I would have a year long buddy read with one of my best friends.

We chose Anna Karenina because it was a book that both of us had wanted to read for a long time. After all, this was the first book I associated with The Bookshelf, because it was the book I had been trying to read from there since I was nine. We started the year off meeting in the living room of her new home—a beautiful place that I was even more envious of than the last—and discussed the drama happening with Anna and Vronsky, who I likened to Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big.

Our last in-person recording was in March of 2020. The world was shutting down, but we didn’t yet know what that was going to mean for us. We switched our recordings over to Vidster (and eventually another new program) and we discussed the book from my bedroom and her dining room, some of the only contact we had. While lockdown was hard for both of us, for many reasons, I think this project was also life saving. Checking in with each other every month, discussing a book together, being able to catch up before each recording, deepened our beautiful friendship.

We’re currently in our sixth year of Conquer A Classic. Every month, we meet on a video call, we grumble and complain and check in with each other, and then we hit record. This is one of the most life giving parts of my existence.

Later this month, Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put—Annie’s new book—makes its way into the world. My friendship with Annie has been built on books, discussing them with her, sharing our works-in-progress with each other. It’s exciting to be able to have her book be a building block in my friendship with others, by being able to gift it to people and discuss it with people once they’ve read it. Her essays actually feel a bit like the conversations she and I have had over Sonny’s BBQ or in car rides from Tallahassee to Thomasville or over video calls before recording the podcast. These essays are filled with her humor and wisdom and the questions she and I have discussed for years now, and it’s so exciting that her mind gets to be shared with the world.

People always say that reading is an isolated act, and I know that is technically true. But reading has brought me closer to people than almost any other activity in my life. Discussing the books we read offers us the chance to have hard conversations with a clearer focus, to commiserate, to argue, to consider things from a new perspective. I don’t know what I would do without the friendships I’ve built from reading. I don’t know if Annie and I would even be that close, if we hadn’t shared so many reading experiences together…and I don’t know what I would do without my friendship to Annie B. Jones.

If you haven’t pre-ordered her book yet, I highly recommend, it’s one of my favorites this year so far. I know I have discussed it a lot since it was first announced, but I am just so proud of My Brilliant Friend, copyright Elena Ferrante.

Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed.

Until next time,

XOXO