This Is Your Sign To Read A Cozy Mystery
Writer Nina Renata Aron confesses that these days, she's indulging in the sweet pleasures of her childhood — including this addictive book genre.
Published
Guilty Pleasures is a monthly interview series, featuring a conversation with one artist about their so-called guilty pleasure.
For this month’s Guilty Pleasure interview, I spoke with Nina Renata Aron. Nina writes about books, food, art, and gender. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Poetry Foundation, The New Republic, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. She writes a newsletter about books called Dollface. She is the author of Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls, a memoir and cultural history of codependency.
Janet S. Frishberg: So, what was the guilty pleasure that came to mind when I reached out to you?
Nina Renata Aron: Well, I started by interrogating the category itself because it feels nostalgic or very 20th century. When that phrase was used really frequently, in the ‘90s or the time when I grew up, maybe there were clearer distinctions between high and low culture. A guilty pleasure was something that a person of culture would experience, but you had to know that you were consuming low culture in a slightly winky or ironic mode. Now I feel like those distinctions have collapsed so much. I was asking myself, do we still feel guilt about those things? At this stage of capitalism, it seems understood that we're all worked to death, living precariously. And if an edible and six episodes of Selling Sunset will get you through the night, so be it.
JSF: Do you feel guilt around consuming low culture, or have you deconstructed it enough that you're post-guilt?
NRA: That's what I’ve been thinking about! It’s not really guilt; I think it's more like a spiritual film that you can never wash away. It’s just the terms of living in this world right now. We've all agreed to live with that film of the Kardashians or whatever it is all over us (laughs). And because of the internet, there's no outside. You can try to escape that, but you can't actually. The guilty pleasure I want to talk about, though, is this genre of books I read called "cozy mysteries."