PATTERN Reads with Liz Foster

The Eastside of Indianapolis is home to many long-time residents and a flourishing art scene. Local restaurants, stores, and entertainment all live here. One particularly special place is Dear Mom. Dear Mom is a shop dedicated to beautifully designed publications, an eclectic selection of records, and an essentials market. It’s an ephemera and tangible media lover’s dream store. Liz Foster opened Dear Mom in June 2021. For this month’s PATTERN Reads we headed over to the shop to hear about her favorite books. As we expected from someone who has an eye for quality design and compelling storytelling she delivered excellent recommendations. Keep up with Foster and the shop on Instagram.

One of my favorite books is called Cruddy and it’s by a woman named Lynda Barry. I can’t remember when she wrote it. I feel like it was the late 90s or early 2000s maybe. Anyway, it’s a really cool work of fiction. It’s really dark, and now that I’m looking at this list a lot of them are really dark. (Laughs) It’s about this spunky little girl that runs away from home. It’s got everything. It’s got murder, and it’s funny. It’s really well written. Lynda Barry is a great author. Her artwork is weird and cool, too. That’s one of my favorite books.

There’s a book called Please Kill Me, which is one of my favorite books. I’ve read it like a million times. It’s by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil, it’s an oral history of punk rock. It taught me so much about music, and the stories are so cool. The stories are told by the musicians themselves, and the people who are around them. I learned so much about so many different people, and it kind of put me on a cool windy path to discover new music and get deeper into a scene that is so broad. The stories are just great and they’re really crazy. Everything was so connected and it was such a tight scene.

There’s an author called Diane di Prima and she was in the Beat scene. First and foremost she was a really cool social activist. She was also a writer, and she’s got this collection of poems called Dinners and Nightmares. It’s so good. It’s another one that you can just flip through, open it to any page, and read it. It’s weird because it could have been written yesterday. If you don’t know and you flipped through it you’d be like, “Oh, this is a modern author.” It came out in 1961. It’s a beautiful little collection of poetry. She was a really cool artist, and author, and she really held her own in that whole Beat scene which was predominantly male. She’s got some great titles. There’s this poem, it’s called “Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife,” it was an anti-war thing. She was a badass. I really do love her. 

I love Tom Robbins. I really love all his books, but one of my favorite books that he’s written is Skinny Legs and All. It’s sort of a satirical apocalyptic novel. His writing is witty and fun to read and it’s one of a kind.

I was like do I do a Kurt Vonnegut book or do I not? But Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorites. It’s so good. He wrote it in 1976. It’s so good, it’s weird, it’s all over the place. It’s kind of post-apocalyptic too. There’s death and it’s science fictiony, and it’s really sort of family-centered. There are these twins in it. I read an interview with him or something where he’s talking about the writing of the book, and a lot of it had to do with his relationship with his own sister who died. It’s a really cool book. Funny, dark, it’s really sweet too. You should read it. I love it. When I met my partner, we’ve been together for over ten years now, that’s something we bonded on because that’s his favorite too.

There’s this author named Ottessa Moshfegh. I saw David Sedaris a few years ago at Clowes Memorial Hall. When he got on stage he said, “My favorite author right now is Ottessa Moshfegh. She’s got this book called Eileen and it’s my favorite book of the year.” I went out and got it immediately. It’s pretty dark. She’s really funny… really dark. Eileen is a novel, and then she’s got a collection of short stories called Homesick For Another World. She’s either love it or hate it. You know what I mean? But yeah, they’re both great. 

Johnny Got His Gun is one of my favorites. Another anti-war, coming of age, pretty relevant for the times book. It was written in 1938 by Dalton Trumbo and I remember reading it as a young person and being like, “Oh my god.” It’s a solid anti-war book.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. That’s my funny one. It’s a comedy. I don’t even really know what to say about it, other than it’s great, and it’s unlike the other ones that I’ve said.

Commercial Article is a local publication. They are really cool. My friend Katie told me about these before I opened the shop. I had no idea they existed. She said, “Hey, you got to look into this because these are really cool publications that my friend does.”There’s fourteen of them total and each volume is based off of a different aspect of Indiana design. So they’re all Indiana-centric. Man, I learned so much from reading them. The contributors are all great. The formatting is so pretty. They go really in depth about stuff that I had no clue about.

The Little Prince is one of my favorite books. It’s by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It’s classic. This guy crashes his plane in the desert. This little prince appears and they wander the desert together. The little prince is talking about his planet; there’s all these other planets and he’s trying to get home to his planet. Long story short, the little prince disappears back to his planet. It’s a good metaphor for death. It’s a children’s book. It’s really pretty and the illustrations are really cute and so sweet. That’s one of my faves.

Honorable Mentions: Just Kids by Patti Smith and I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp by Richard Hell