The week in books

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2012)

I’ve now fully caught up on The Stacks book club picks! July’s selection was narrative nonfiction about Annawadi, a slum located near Mumbai’s international airport. The author, a white woman from the United States, lived among the people here for several years and reports their story based on her own observations. There are no footnotes or endnotes, and as a result it almost reads like fiction.

I had a hard time getting into this book. It was easy enough to read—the language isn’t overly academic or technical—but something about the pacing of the sentences kept me at a distance. And though the subtitle mentions “hope,” I struggled to find much of that at all amidst the life and death that Boo details. The account is dominated by violence, and conflict, and corruption, bad luck, despair, suicide; by the end I was left wondering… why? What was Boo trying to say through this slice of (traumatic, horribly difficult) life? I don’t have answers, but I did really enjoy listening to Traci’s conversation with Julianna Haubner about it.

Take What You Can by Naima Coster (August 4, 2026)

Naima Coster’s previous novel, What’s Mine and Yours, was a favorite when I read it back in 2021, so I was excited to find out she had another one coming!1 Take What You Can centers on two best friends, Milly and Val, whose relationship starts on a study abroad in France in the early 2000s and continues through present day. Val has just moved from her hometown in North Carolina to be near Milly in New York City—both women are pregnant and hope to raise their daughters together. We alternate between this timeline and flashbacks to the early years of their friendship, along the way learning about someone named Helène and the long-term impact she’s had on both of them.

There is so much toxicity and complication between Milly and Val, and yet they keep returning to each other. Money is a factor (Val had more of it when they were young, and now Milly is better off), but they’ve also each been affected by parental abuse or loss, and something always keeps them from reaching out at the right time or letting the other in when they should. Both of them behave in deeply frustrating ways and make choices that I don’t think I ever could. But something about their story drew me in, kept me hoping they’d eventually figure their shit out. Coster is also thinking more generally about friendship, and motherhood, codependency, marriage, polyamory, jealousy, race, class differences, the crafted personas we present on social media, and what it means to show up for someone else without fully sacrificing the self. I’ll be chewing on these ideas for quite a while.

Right now and upcoming

One of my regulars at the coffee shop surprised me on Friday with an advance copy of BECKY CHAMBERS’ NEW BOOK, so obviously I am dropping everything to read that! Sorry for the galley brag, but October will be here before we know it! Stay tuned for thoughts.

What are you reading right now?

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If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much. ♥︎

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan. I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, July 27

(This would’ve been my paternal grandmother’s 97th birthday)

I remember her
air-splitting sneeze, sharp cackle
her temper, her love

Tuesday, July 28

We’ve both been caught out
no jackets or umbrellas
so we crouch and run

Wednesday, July 29

Slowly, thoughtfully
unpack, wipe down, rearrange
Home reclaims its shape

Thursday, July 30

A clean page, erased
ready for a new story
I’ll get to plotting

Friday, July 31

The caffeine-starved hoard
at the door, en masse, roaring
COFFEE, WE MISSED YOU

Saturday, August 1

Our interruptions
frequent, joyful, unrestrained—
yes, I remember

Sunday, August 2

Awaken to damp,
street darkened with recent rain
air heavy, scent-thick

And another thing

• Nature continues to be majestic despite everything—here is possibly the first complete film of a whale birth serendipitously captured by drone.

• If you need to explode your to-read list, check out Book Riot’s best books of the year so far. I was excited to see some of my 2026 favorites there and reminded of more I want to get to in the next few months.

• This fruit crumble recipe looks like the perfect balance of easy and delicious and I’m hoping to try it soon.

Until next time

I’m not a pink person by nature, but the giant crepe myrtle in the backyard is going crazy right now and it’s my favorite place to gaze whenever I find myself in the kitchen. Excitement for autumn is starting to rear its campfire-scented head, so I appreciate the reminder to enjoy the rest of summer while it lasts.

See you next week, and until then, wheeeeee!

♥︎ Emily

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I was going to share a few before and after photos of our entire water damage repair journey here, but as I started gathering images (and knowing how wordy I can be when unchecked), I realized it would probably work better to just write a little bonus post about it for the curious. That way you can skip over it if you don’t care, and I won’t be weighing today’s already-longer-than-usual missive down any further. So keep an eye out for that soon soon soon. And for now just know that walking from room to room no longer requires unzipping a sheet of heavy plastic, our floors are no longer covered in plywood and brown paper, and I am sitting here writing to you from our proper couch and coffee table for the first time in months. We’re not fully back to normal yet, but we’re well on our way. Thank goodness.

The fortnight in books

When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman (2011)

Having enjoyed Winman’s 2018 book Tin Man, I was intrigued to find a reissued version of her debut novel while browsing Shelf Life Books in Richmond on my birthday earlier this year. This one’s a coming-of-age story about a young English girl named Eleanor, and it focuses particularly on her relationships with her brother, Joe, and her best friend, Jenny Penny. It starts very strong; Elly’s young voice is really distinct and funny, and I loved spending time with her and her family. The writing soon becomes almost too lyrical and flowery, though, and plot points get buried in the language. I found myself having to go back and re-read passages pretty frequently, as I kept feeling like I was missing things. Transitions between scenes can be abrupt, too. While aspects of the narrative are really beautiful, in retrospect I wonder if Winman is trying to do a little too much—sibling relationship, Jenny Penny, life at the family’s bed and breakfast, side characters, 9/11, magical elements, sexual assault—and as a result can’t give all of it the development and attention it deserves. I liked but didn’t love it.

Room Swept Home by Remica Bingham-Risher (2025)

Guys I finally read The Stacks book club pick from APRIL! Please clap! I bought my copy from Shelf Life on the birthday trip mentioned above, meaning I had it in hand in April, and yet. I think I literally put it off for so long just because it’s poetry? But poetry isn’t scary. I almost always enjoy it when I read it. So what is my deal? Why am I so intimidated and hesitant, every time? TBD, investigation ongoing.

But back to Room Swept Home. I would call this “poetry plus.” It’s largely centered around two of Bingham-Risher’s grandmother ancestors and structured accordingly, with photographs and documents and ephemera included throughout. There’s an enormous and beautiful family tree at the beginning. It’s almost like going to a museum, in book form. The writing is personal and powerful, gorgeously crafted with meticulous word choices and inventive layouts. A few favorite poems include:

• “Work Song”

• “Seems Like We’re Building a City”

• “25 days after I am born”

• “Where did you come from / how did you arrive?”

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (2025)

Another The Stacks pick completed, this one from May! And the timing actually worked out really well, because Wambugu’s debut novel felt like something of a mashup of When God Was a Rabbit and Dave Egger’s Contrapposto (discussed in my most recent newsletter). As in Winman’s story, here we are focused on two young female friends, Ruth and Maria, one from a slightly better economic background than the other, and following the arc of their relationship as they grow into women. The connection to Eggers appears in the role of art in these women’s lives; both are creatives, and both, but particularly Ruth, struggle to find their artistic voices and identities. There are also hints of Kiran Millwood Hargraves’ Almost Life when their relationship veers into the possibility of more-than-friendship, and strong echoes of the toxic energy between Elena and Lila in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend throughout. Though ultimately I found myself frustrated with the central characters and their seemingly endless push and pull, Lonely Crowds is a strong debut and I’ll be keeping an eye out for whatever Wambugu publishes next.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (2025)

Unless you were hiding under a rock last year, you probably saw this one everywhere. It was a Reese pick and a huge bestseller and a favorite of many readers whose taste I trust. I originally read it last December and didn’t think it quite lived up to the hype (comments are here), but I picked it up again after my book club chose it for our most recent discussion. This time around the story gripped me more quickly and I felt more invested, but I might’ve also liked it less in the end. My gripe about first person point-of-view and secret keeping still stands. And on this reading I was really confused by the simultaneous complete lack of hope (climate change is irreversible, nowhere is safe, we will all eventually drown or burn or starve) and overly sentimental optimism (~*children are the future!*~), which felt like mixed messaging. What is McConaghey trying to say here? Also, no spoilers, but must women have kids to fully know love? and must they forever sacrifice themselves for others? Can women live??

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (1988)

Okay, I’m on a roll, so let’s keep the crankiness coming. I know I read The Alchemist at some point many years ago, and I’m sure at the time I thought it was so deep, but I mostly rolled my eyes through this re-read for The Stacks book club.1 Like, if you, the author of the book I’m about to experience, spend the entirety of the foreword talking about how successful said book has been and how many awards it has won and how Rush Limbaugh liked it and how you yourself re-read it regularly,2 you’re kind of setting me up to hate it. Don’t do this.

There were one or two quotes that made me go “okay, yeah, true,” like this advice to live in the present:

“If good things are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise,” said the seer. “If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur.” (106)

But for the most part it’s giving Old Testament vibes (derogatory), and there are hardly any women besides the main character shepherd boy’s love interests (all of whom are supposed to wait for him and not have lives of their own because he’s the only one here who matters I guess?), and I didn’t particularly care for it. At least it’s short.

Dearly by Margaret Atwood (2020)

Two poetry collections in as many weeks? After what I said earlier about poetry? Man, I guess I just needed to break the seal. This one has been hanging out on my unread shelf since 2020, when I bought it as my “ticket” to a Covid-times virtual author event featuring Atwood in conversation with Madeline Miller.3 It covers a range of topics, but the most prominent overarching themes are nature, time, aging, and loss. And though they aren’t all bangers, the poems that hit really hit; she especially shines when writing about personal relationships and the natural world. A few personal favorites:

• “Ghost Cat”

• “September Mushrooms”

• “Walking in the Madman’s Wood”

• “Plasticene Suite”

• “Oh Children”

• “Mr. Lionheart”

• “Invisible Man”

Reader, I cried several times. Do recommend, especially if you’re already an Atwood fan or have followed her career for a while.

Right now and upcoming

I’m currently wrapping up my The Stacks book club catch-up effort with July’s pick, and then I’ll be turning my attention to an upcoming release about friendship and motherhood to tell you about next Monday!

It’s been a minute, so I’d love to hear what you’ve been getting into these past couple of weeks. Anything good??

Leave a comment

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much. ♥︎

This fortnight on screen

We finished the final season of The Bear and ohhhh, it’s good.

This series is not without its triggers and trauma, especially for folks who have worked in food service and/or come from complicated families. BUT, having made it through the whole thing now, I can confidently say that there is growth and redemption and that the intense moments are worth it. Every character’s ending feels satisfying and correct. I already want to rewatch from the beginning.

Until next time

Looking through my recent photo roll, I’m realizing that I haven’t used my camera much over the past two weeks. But I do have these shots, the first snapped with my phone as I set out for an evening run, and the second a gorgeous display over the highway on our way home from a baseball game in Durham last weekend. I might miss a Monday here or there but fear not, the sky remains gorgeous as always.

See you next week, and until then, oh my god, I love your plance!

♥︎ Emily

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Can I tell you about what I’ve been reading and watching recently?

The week in books

Contrapposto1 by Dave Eggers (June 9, 2026)

I’m far from being an Eggers completist, but I’ve enjoyed almost everything of his I’ve read and I was excited to see a new novel from him this year! I went into this one knowing as little as possible, but turns out it’s one of my favorite genres: a friendship saga spanning decades. The story opens on young Rob, who goes by Cricket to distance himself from Robert, his mom’s horrible boyfriend. Cricket loves to draw. As he is starting to expand his skills and horizons through art lessons with an older woman in his neighborhood, he encounters Olympia, a girl slightly older than him who shares his creative leanings. They strike up a friendship, and from there we follow them as they weave in and out of each other’s lives over the next fifty years.

This is, definitively, a book about art—all the forms it takes, its ability to foster human connection, the effect it can have on someone across the long arc of a life. Eggers is exploring a lot of big questions here, like: Is there a difference between contentment and lack of courage? How do we know if we’re truly happy or if we’re simply scared to pursue something greater (and what does “greater” even mean)? Just because a person is good at something, does that mean they should do that thing for a living? In the creative life, what do we owe ourselves and what do we owe our audience? How do hard things like addiction and abuse play into the development of an artistic voice? Does art school matter? Is art even something that can be taught?

This is also a love story, but not necessarily a romance; the ending felt correct, inevitable, and deeply sad. Though I didn’t like it as much as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the flavor is similar.

Sisters of the Midnight Sun2 by Rebecca Wright Stevens (July 14, 2026)

The publisher categorizes this as true crime, which is technically accurate, but it reads more like a memoir of Wright’s time working as a public defender in Utqiagvik, Alaska, which happens to include a case of double homicide. During the period covered in the book, she is assigned to represent Amos Lee, a member of the Native community who was out on a weekend pass from rehab when the crime occurred and is widely suspected to have committed it. This isn’t a strict run-down of the investigation and trial, though. We also experience the rest of Wright’s life in Utqiagvik—interactions with other clients, a potential romantic relationship, the widespread addiction that she watches tragically play out around her, the extreme Arctic cold,3 and even a harrowing up-close encounter with a polar bear. I enjoyed the ride, but did find the ending a bit frustrating in its open-endedness. I’d recommend this more for the memoir and cultural aspects than as a work of true crime, as I feel like fans of that genre might be left unsatisfied by the lack of definitive answers.

Right now and upcoming

I’ve just started a novel I bought on my birthday trip to Richmond earlier in the year, and later today I plan to pick up the first in a mini “catch up on Stacks book club selections” effort.4

What are you reading right now?

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If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much. ♥︎

This week on screen

Widow’s Bay (2026)

This miniseries expertly combines comedy and folk horror into something that felt legitimately unsettling and scary at times, but also had me cackle-laughing. What a feat. We’re on a spooky island that apparently doesn’t let you leave if you were born there (big yikes), whose mayor is desperately trying to increase tourism and make it the new Martha’s Vineyard as he simultaneously roots out and attempts to eradicate the evil plaguing the town. What could go wrong?5 I can’t fully explain this, but the vibes are kind of Parks and Recreation meets Yellowjackets. The series ends in a tantalizingly open way; there’s enough ambiguity to encourage theories and re-watches, but not so much that it made me mad. Do recommend.

Easy A (2010)

Ugh, remember in the late 1990s and early 2000s when this type of loose literary adaptation was everywhere? 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless, She’s the Man (The Taming of the Shrew, Emma, and Twelfth Night, respectively)? I miss those days. They simply don’t make ‘em like they used to. Anyway, this is The Scarlet Letter, kind of, but it’s also just a really satisfying teen rom-com. Emma Stone is perfectly cast as Olive, the Hester Prynne-ish main character who develops a reputation purely based on rumor, and Amanda Bynes is in peak form as the leader of the school’s clique of annoying Christians.6 And Stanley Tucci plays Olive’s platonic ideal of a dad, just the right blend of dorky and funny and supportive; the scenes at Olive’s house with her family are some of the strongest. The whole thing is so quotable and nostalgic and fun. I will now have “Pocketful of Sunshine” stuck in my head for the foreseeable future.

Me & Earl & the Dying Girl (2015)

This movie is like The Fault in Our Stars7 meets Be Kind Rewind,8 with a sprinkling of Mean Girls9 and a side dish of ANOTHER EXCELLENT MOVIE DAD to continue the accidental streak I just realized I’m on.10 There’s a girl who is dying, and a new friendship that develops right before she does, and a lot of stop-motion animation, and some significant Personal Growth™ on the part of the protagonist, a high school senior named Greg. There’s also a lie in here that really got me the first time I watched it, so just trust the title, okay? It really is what it says on the tin.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan. I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, July 6

Pleasant silence shared
among productive strangers
typing in tandem

Tuesday, July 7

How many daily
haiku can I write before
repeating myself?

Wednesday, July 8

A quiet tea shop
wakes up in slanted sunlight
and we bear witness

Thursday, July 9

Fresh wood replacing
rot hidden for years before 
finally: repair

Friday, July 10

House a waiting room
Body a bag of coiled springs
crying out to move

Saturday, July 11

Alone here again
No one invading our space,
no obligations

Sunday, July 12

Light rain misting skin,
she sets out into the day
at an easy pace

Until next time

On Tuesday afternoon I took myself for a used bookstore browse while I waited for the carpenter crew to finish up at the house11 (do not ask me how many blu-rays I left with, that is classified information), and as I walked out, something about this scene really grabbed me. Maybe the blue sky next to the white paint. Or the stark shadows. Or the light contrast between the two faces of the building. Maybe those three windows, or the two light posts, or the staircase that appears to lead into a tree. Or maybe all of the above.

See you next week, and until then, this is the energy.

♥︎ Emily

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6

Which reminded me so much of Saved, and now do I need to re-watch Saved?

10

Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name, Stanley Tucci in Easy A as just mentioned, and now Nick Offerman, allegedly a sociology professor but maybe just a kindhearted layabout who spends all his time in flowing caftans, eating increasingly more obscure foreign foods?

In other news, it’s been quite hot here. I recently started a 5k training program on my Garmin watch and let me tell you, I’m feeling awesome about that decision right now. Thank goodness for days off, when I can get up early and get my run in before the heat gets too bad, but also a humid 85 degrees at 8am is still pretty brutal.

Quick reminder: for a couple more days, until July 8, I’m offering $1 off per month for your first year of paid subscription! If this newsletter brings you joy each week and you would like to help tangibly support it, now’s your time.

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The week in books

Bone Horn by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain (June 30, 2026)

I was hoping to talk about this one last week ahead of its release, but I didn’t quite finish it in time. On the plus side, it’s out now!2 The research fixation and literary investigation angle was what initially drew me in—the description sounded like a fictional spin on My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland, a memoir-slash-biography that I loved a few years ago. And while Bone Horn has much more of a noir energy to it, that comparison is not totally off base.

When the story opens, our unnamed narrator is grieving the sudden death of her partner and raising her young child alone, having recently left a toxic job in academia to open her own detective agency. The first call she receives as a new private investigator is from an anonymous client who offers a nice payout if she can definitively prove that Gertrude Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, had a horn. (Yes, a literal horn, protruding from her forehead.) So the book is about that quest, which takes the narrator from Paris to San Francisco and back again, with some steamy encounters along the way,3 but we’re also following her internal journey through grief and early motherhood. There is eventually an answer to the horn question, but the pace is slow and the focus more on vibes than plot. I enjoyed the writing, which occasionally caught me off-guard with its aptness and poetry:

She talked like bagpipes, a murmuring back note continuously sounding against the melody of words. (88)

Canon by Paige Lewis (May 19, 2026)

I picked up this debut novel because it’s the July selection for Gretagram book club, but reluctantly, because (sorry!) it sounded boring to me: an epic tale, in which God reveals himself to one of our main characters, Yara, and instructs them to find and kill Dominic, leader of the Bad Guys. A hero’s journey, to assassinate an anonymously evil war criminal? Not my normal lane! Snooze!

But you guys, I was wrong. This is a modern, and funny, and self-aware story, completely unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s loosely set in the 1990s,4 but in some ways it feels fully and refreshingly outside of time. And pay no attention to how thick the book is—it goes by fast and is so much fun.

The writing is insightful:

They were suddenly giddy and full of dread. It was like teetering between the delight of finding a single blue jay feather and the dismay of stumbling upon a clump of blue jay feathers. (4)

It would be nice, she thought, to stay in this moment for a lifetime. By wishing it to expand into infinity, Adrena prevented herself from enjoying the actual moment. (347)

And there are so many excellent facts, many of which are about animals:

When happy, rats also do something called boggling, which is hard to describe, but it involves wiggling—yes wiggling—their eyes. (180)

The Greek words for camel and rope were nearly indistinguishable. Knowing this made that thing in the Bible—about how a rich man getting into heaven was as likely as a camel fitting through the eye of a needle—make a lot more sense. A mistranslation. A rope through the eye. (380)

I haven’t even mentioned the giant talking whale, or the island of garbage, or the prophet Adrena, who can make things disappear by singing about them. Or the chapter written completely in haiku form, which you know I ate right up. The fighting you’d expect from a classic epic indeed shows toward the end, but it has an almost video game feeling to it that makes the gore easier to bear, and the battle scene doesn’t last too long.5 All in all I was really pleasantly surprised by this novel and I can’t wait to discuss it in book club later this month.

Perverts by Mac Crane (July 7, 2026)

I requested this short story collection on NetGalley6 because I’ve been meaning to read this author for quite some time—both of their previous books, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself (2023) and A Sharp Endless Need (2025), were well-reviewed by friends whose reading taste I trust. Concept-wise, these pieces run the gamut. A few characters work atypical jobs, like purposely getting injured at an interactive theme park for homophobes, or selling used panties online, or pretending to be a chatbot who writes erotica for some guy named Dave, or sleeping in bed with a married couple and the next morning convincing the hungover husband that they had a threesome. There are also some unexpected magical details sprinkled in, like a child born after the protagonist finds an egg in their underwear drawer and sits on it for thirty days. The narrative voice doesn’t always feel super distinct from story to story, but I enjoyed the collection all the same. It’s queer and dark and strange, with some Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and George Saunders flavor, not necessarily horror in itself, but perfect for fans of that genre.

Right now and upcoming

I’ve just started reading my early copy of a favorite author’s new novel whose release date passed me by last month (oops), and then I have a soon-to-be released nonfiction lined up, and maybe some poetry from my unread shelf after that.

How about you? What are you reading?

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If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much. ♥︎

This week on screen

I Love Boosters (2026)

Based on the trailer, I went in thinking this would be a brightly-colored comedy with some heist energy, and it definitely is that—but also oops, suddenly I’m trying to wrap my head around the specifics of teleportation, and tearing up about global unions and worker solidarity?! How unexpected, how interesting! I Love Boosters is ridiculous and funny, a visual feast, and a scathing takedown of capitalism and the rich. Oh yeah, and there are stop-motion animated people with no skin. In the end I felt kinda like I did after Everything Everywhere All at Once: overwhelmed, confused, and emotional, but very here for it.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

Come for the continuation of the 28 Years Later story, stay for the morphine-fueled bromance between Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and Samson the alpha zombie (Chi Lewis-Parry)! This installment mostly follows a tiny cult of blond wig-wearing agents of Satan who all go by the name Jimmy, so things get pretty violent and gory at times. I definitely watched a few of the gnarliest moments through a hard squint. But ultimately it’s worth it for the one scene where Fiennes performs Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” while cosplaying as the literal devil. Cinema. 🤌🏼

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

I’m back on my blu-ray watching grind!7 The recent heatwave had me hiding out inside with the lights low for several days, so what better to do than play a movie and slug it up on the couch? This is an all-timer, possibly my favorite of Wes Anderson’s efforts if I absolutely had to choose (but please don’t make me choose). There’s something about the squandered potential of the Tenenbaum children, all too relatable for a former “academically gifted” student such as myself. And the quirkiness, the messy family dynamics, the iconic soundtrack, the bittersweet yet hopeful ending, the infinitely quotable lines… it’s all truly chef’s kiss.

Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Okay, we are for sure out on Armie Hammer, and Timothee Chalamet hasn’t been the most likeable public figure lately either, BUT I’d argue that this film remains incredible. It was my selection for day two of heatwave because in my mind it just feels like summer—long days in Italy, riding bikes and swimming and reading tattered paperbacks on chaise longues in the heat. Oh, the light-colored fabrics! The early-80s analog vibes! The sexual awakening! The absolute Sufjan Stevens heartbreak! The way Elio’s dad talks to him after Oliver is gone and he’s realized the depth of their relationship is truly parenting done right. So sad, so tender. It gets me every time.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan. I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, June 29

Head to toe yellow
a monochromatic room
like swimming in light

Tuesday, June 30

We bid you farewell
Sunset for a day, a month,
a friend moving on

Wednesday, July 1

Our sushi lunch date,
improved by a chance meeting
Raw fish and friendship

Thursday, July 2

Turn discouragement
into absurd comedy
That’s how we survive

Friday, July 3

Radiohead’s wrong
Nothing is in its right place
I long for normal

Saturday, July 4

We will celebrate
veggie dogs and sauerkraut
and time together

Sunday, July 5

Sports commentary
consisting of such gems as 
“I hate that guy’s hair”

Until next time

I’ll leave you with the view from my spot at the library overlooking our downtown. A summer storm rolled through as I was sitting here writing, and the soft patter of raindrops on the window was truly next-level ASMR. I wouldn’t be mad if the distant rumbling and the drizzle continued into the evening…

See you next week, and until then, do ya wanna talk about parallel parking??

♥︎ Emily

P.S. If you especially enjoyed today’s newsletter but a paid subscription isn’t possible:

Help fix my house 🏚️

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The week in books

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (2006)

This debut novel has been on my to-read list for quite a while! It came out twenty years ago, but I remember hearing about it when it was still relatively new, on Book Riot and from friends who enjoyed it. I can’t remember what brought it back to my attention more recently, but I borrowed it on Libby, started reading on a Tuesday, and didn’t finish until a full week later (hence my not having any books to talk about in last Monday’s newsletter). Whew. I liked it okay, but I’m still pondering whether or not it was worth powering through.

The story follows Blue van Meer, a precocious high schooler whose mom passed away years back and who now travels around with her professor dad, living each season in a new town. When they finally settle down a bit for her senior year, she befriends a small group of classmates who spend time outside of school at the home of one of their teachers. Eventually there are a couple of deaths and a bit of a mystery, but the whole thing takes quite a while to build and I didn’t find the conclusion satisfying enough to justify the journey.

The vibes are a little bit Secret History and a little bit The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet—dark academia meets over-educated young prodigy who speaks exclusively in literary, scientific, and cultural references. While the parentheticals are fun at first, the book is over five hundred pages long and after a while they start to weigh the story down. I think I would have loved this had I read it when it came out, but at this point in my life I probably should have given up on it after the first few chapters.

Skin Contact by Elisa Faison (2026)

If you’ve been subscribing here or following me on Instagram for a while, you’ve already heard me talk about this one. But listen, when your friend writes a book and it’s good, you have to hype it up as much as possible. I don’t make the rules.

Skin Contact is about Ben and Frances, a married couple who are both bisexual.2 Frances has recently lost her mother and a bit of her zest for life, so in the thick of grief, in hopes of reigniting something vital within her, she and Ben decide to give polyamory a go. The narrative unfolds from their points of view and many others, almost like a novel in short stories. It’s funny, introspective, and vulnerable, investigating ideas of love, desire, friendship, physicality, motherhood, selfhood, loss, and potential.

This was my second read-through, and this time around I was much more focused on the concept of physical touch, on the ways we express emotion and create connection using our bodies, not exclusively in a romantic context but also with friends, parents, and children. Covid is present in the story and its inclusion really highlights those ideas. There’s just so much to think about and discuss here—I recommend.

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein (2026)

Jean is a forty-year-old woman with a steady job, a totally acceptable husband, and a comfortable life, but she’s also completely hung up on a summer she spent in France on study abroad twenty years ago. Back then, she had it bad for her history professor, David, and her desire was both reciprocated and consummated before their very brief affair ended abruptly. She prays to Saint Monica Lewinsky in the present day, begging for help with the lingering feelings she can’t seem to shake, and an answer comes in the form of the person herself, who then accompanies Jean back in time to observe the summer in question.

I think we can all agree that this premise goes hard! And that in lesser hands it might’ve turned out overly campy or too weird to take seriously. But Julia Langbein sticks the landing; her writing is among the funniest I’ve read, and at the same time it’s smart (I accidentally learned a few things about medieval architecture) and thoughtful and poignant. The delightfully unexpected way she puts words together stopped me in my tracks more than once.

In response to one of the other characters unabashedly singing a farewell song, a cappella, to her fellow students, Jean thinks,

I would never do anything as self-exposing as opening my throat and pouring out a desperate, earnest love song from my private fuschia-tissued uterine depth. (109)

Later she contrasts herself with her professor and his wife, who is also an academic, thusly:

They like libraries. They like to write books in librairies, where I like to sit on the quavering theremin of my vagina pretending to read. (157)

Other notable descriptions include “the Costco turkeys” of a particular nun’s “bosoms” (183) and the complete sentence “garlic is pervy” (214). Langbein’s brain is on a whole other level and I am here for it.

Right now and upcoming

I’m currently nearing the end of a queer detective story about whether or not Alice B. Toklas had a horn that’s coming out tomorrow,3 and afterward I have two other upcoming releases to dive into: one fiction and one non.

How about you? What are you reading?

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This week on screen

Nobody Wants This (2024- )

We’ve reached the end of the two available seasons and now I require more, please! Joanne and Noah are great together, of course, and I’m looking forward to seeing where things go with them, but I might be even more interested in what the future holds for Sasha, Esther, and Morgan. Season 3 is coming in September!

My So-Called Life (1994)

I very much enjoyed my first experience of this cult classic show, which was made even better by the Happy to Be Here companion episodes. It won’t be a frequent comfort re-watch for me like it is for some people who grew up with it as teens themselves, but I can understand why it’s so beloved. The vibes are quintessentially 90s, the stakes and emotions heightened in way I remember so vividly from my youth. I was reminded a little of Felicity, both aesthetically and visually, and realized that a big factor here might be W.G. Snuffy Walden,4 the composer the two shows share in common. And speaking of, maybe it’s time for a rewatch of that—I could easily imagine Felicity as the less outwardly alternative but just as intensely introspective older sister of Angela, Felicity the college manifestation of My So-Called Life’s high school battlefield…

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan. I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, June 22

Ideas flowing
with the burbling of the stream
clutter’s washed away

Tuesday, June 23

Morning fog sits low
in the pines, on the water
as the mountain wakes

Wednesday, June 24

Block this one off as
“travel recovery day”—
Do laundry and rest

Thursday, June 25

Maintain your tempo
and rage against resistence
It’s all in your head

Friday, June 26

We don’t learn music
the way our younger selves did
Those lyrics run deep

Saturday, June 27

Trio of wild things,
watch over this reader and
bless all these pages

Sunday, June 28

Nothing hits quite like
a long drink of cold water
when you wake up parched

Until next time

Tuesday morning, walking with my mom to the lodge where we were staying at Montreat, I happened to lift my gaze and spot a rainbow cutting across the dark grey cloud cover between the trees. It was there long enough for me to snap the above photo, but by the time she grabbed her phone from her bag, it had faded. And I guess that’s the tweet. Look up, or you might miss it. And also, one more time before June is over: HAPPY PRIDE.

See you next week, and until then, I got a kitty cat going to the store with me!

♥︎ Emily

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Normally I stay until Wednesday, reading books next to the waterfall or lurking by the auditorium to hear the choir practice or taking little hikes while my mom attends her conference classes here. But this summer’s visit is a bit shorter, and for an exciting reason: I’m going to my friend Elisa’s book launch event at Flyleaf tomorrow evening! Which reminds me, there’s still time for you to preorder Skin Contact, or place a library hold or purchase request for it! If you need further convincing, here’s the post where I reviewed it last fall.

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The week in books

Y’all, my current read is longer than I realized when I checked it out on Libby and I’m making my way through it at a slower pace than usual, so I haven’t finished anything this week to tell you about! But I’m planning to wrap this one up today or tomorrow and be back next time with some thoughts.

Right now and upcoming

It is Pride month and I feel like I haven’t read nearly enough queer books (or books in general, for that matter—I’m at almost four for June, which is low for me)! Whatever I pick up next, whether a re-read of aforementioned friend’s new novel, a gift I received for my birthday earlier this year, or a classic that’s been on my shelf for ages…

(Justin Timberlake voice)

It’s gonna be gay.

Tell me: what are you reading now, or looking forward to starting soon?

Leave a comment

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Seen and heard this week

Imagine if Airplane! (1980) was set on a train, a very queer, very fabulous train full of drag queens. What a dream, right? Well guess what, it exists. I witnessed it and lived to tell the tale. Stop! That! Train! (2026) is about two besties who become stewardesses on the super chic Glamazonian Express after losing their jobs at budget alternative Stank Rail when it goes under. Their first day at Glamazonian, however, they are faced with an emergency: the brakes have failed and the train is headed full speed toward a terrible hybrid super-Stormaganza! They must join forces with the conductors (Chris Parnell and Brian Jordan Alvarez), other stewardesses, and even the President of the United States (RuPaul) to avert disaster!! The humor here is punny and literal, with tons of visual gags and nods to drag culture. It’s not capital-c Cinema by any means, but it’s a whole lot of fun.

Jordan and I took a little field trip to Charlotte on Tuesday to see The Beths, and their newest album Straight Line Was a Lie (2025) has been on heavy rotation ever since. It’s New Zealand power pop that deals with some serious topics but sounds like summer; talk about right up my alley. The title track is one of my favorites, and man, if you’ve ever dealt with grief, or mental health issues, or growth of any kind, I bet you can relate:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I thought I was getting better
but I’m back to where I started
And the straight line was a circle
yeah, the straight line was a lie

I’ve also been looping the hell out of “Til My Heart Stops,” which lead singer Liz Stokes calls “a longing song,” all about “wanting to be in the world, wanting to feel like a part of it, when I feel like so often I've walled myself off from the people that I love, or from experiences that I wanna have.” I just watched the music video for the first time and let me tell you, absolutely no one here is crying.

The Beths is the kind of band that just makes you feel good, even when they’re singing about hard things. They are humans who clearly like each other and work well together and like what they do, and witnessing that (not to mention listening to their charming accents when they banter) is pure joy.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan. I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, June 15

Chilly morning air
without a hint of moisture
A fine thing indeed

Tuesday, June 16

All is still in this
quiet copse, like a secret
I keep with the birds

Wednesday, June 17

Bless all the carers,
their gentle instructions and 
reassuring hands

Thursday, June 18

Tiny rasping cry
of disbelief, or pleading
See me, world! I’m here!

Friday, June 19

Launching forward with
a sense of purpose, a goal
That new project boost

Saturday, June 20

The thought of distance
still sparks a melancholy
Listen: I like you

Sunday, June 21

Roaring waterfall
is nature’s white noise machine
Heal me, sweet static

And another thing

• Lambda Literary announced their 2026 award winners and my to-read list immediately expanded!

• After you listen to that Beths album I mentioned, you can read about how those songs came to be.

• I’ve recently been on a quest to find a pocket notebook and teeny pen, because I’m sick of taking out my phone to jot a reminder only to get sucked into Mark Zuckerberg’s hellscape of notifications and distractions. I’ll report back after using them more, but so far I’m happy with this little A7 dot grid guy and clear protective cover, and this impossibly small ballpoint that I customized with a gel ink refill.

• Speaking of school supplies, if you’re a stationery girlie like me and you find yourself in the vicinity of Charlotte, North Carolina, you simply must check out Good Postage. I visited for the first time this week and I WILL BE BACK.

Until next time

Before The Beths show on Tuesday, I got to spend some time wandering around Carolina Raptor Center1 and the nature preserve where it’s located. There were lots of overlapping walking trails, a lake, plenty of benches, and abundant quiet. The morning was very good for my soul. Sending some of those restful and restorative vibes your way this week.

See you next Monday, and until then you can find me locked in on this yo-yo man.

♥︎ Emily

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The week in books

My most recent reading has been a true exercise in polar opposites—today I’m starting with a nonfiction book I really didn’t like and following that with a novel I loved.

Because The ADHD Field Guide for Adults was such a slam-dunk a few weeks back,1 I went into ADHD is Awesome by married couple Penn & Kim Holderness with high hopes. It’s centered on the same topic and I saw it generally well-reviewed during a recent online hunt for books about ADHD and autism. But man, this one was not for me, and here are a few reasons why:

• Despite acknowledging that everyone experiences ADHD slightly differently, Penn (the book’s main author and the member of the couple who has ADHD himself) goes on to constantly generalize about “we ADHDers” when it’s clear he’s just talking about his own symptoms and tendencies.

• The early sections of the book are mainly about how ADHD is great and you shouldn’t feel bad for having it, and how with the help of systems and techniques for managing it, you can totally thrive. But when I got to said advice in the later sections, I found it to be pretty surface-level and specific to the author, less “here are some ideas to try if you have x, y, or z symptom” and more “here’s how I’ve dealt with this” without much detail. For example, Penn mentions that he used to be chronically late, but then he made a whiteboard with “it has now been ___ days since I was late for something,” and now he hasn’t been late in like ten years. Okay, but what did you do to help yourself be more on time? There’s no explanation given.

• On one hand, Penn says that people with ADHD shouldn’t use the condition as an excuse for behaving badly or inconveniencing others. But then he turns around and describes all the things he asks of his wife, how she’s just “had to get used to” how he is as a result of ADHD, aka compromise almost all of her own preferences and needs and take on the majority of the mental and emotional load for their household. Ew. I spent much of my reading time feeling uncomfortable about their dynamic and upset on her behalf.

• In a section offering advice for becoming a better listener and staying present in conversations, Penn literally recommends using the phrase “whoa, that’s crazy” if you’ve fully spaced out and missed everything someone just said to you. “It works 87% of the time,” he promises, and covers a multitude of situations and emotions. WHAT?! I can’t imagine anything more hurtful or dismissive than pouring my heart out to a friend, updating them on something serious, or excitedly telling them about recent or anticipated upcoming events, and them going “whoa… that’s crazy” with no idea what just came out of my mouth. Simply be honest and say you got distracted, and ask the person to repeat themself! My god.

• And finally, in the kindest way possible, the tone here is simply too corny for me to take seriously. Look up The Holderness Family on socials and perhaps you will see what I mean.

Alas, can’t win ‘em all. On the plus side, I did feel seen a few times, and I learned some fun facts, like that ADHD used to be called “clumsy child syndrome” and “morbid defect of moral control.” Overall, though, if you’re interested in this topic, The ADHD Field Guide for Adults does it much better and I will continue to heartily recommend that one instead.

Oh, but Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

This is the story of Laure and Erica, who meet in Paris in the 1970s and weave in and out of each other’s orbits for the rest of their lives. The former is a Parisian doctorate student, smoking cigarettes and reading Roland Barthe’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse) on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur when the latter, a seventeen-year-old tourist, strikes up a conversation. What follows is an emotional saga spanning decades, full of romance and miscommunication and heartbreak and friendship and beauty and illness and longing. The longing!

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, and she said it to herself, for it felt as though she offered Erica her heart on a plate, bloody and beating, raw and precious meat. “There is nothing we could not do together.”

And the writing! It took me a while to sink into the story, and I do think the pacing is a bit slow at the beginning, but once I got to know these two women, I was hooked. Hargrave’s prose is perfectly matched to her subject matter here—it feels languid and full of desire, like an endless summer day in Paris spent drinking wine and debating art and philosophy with a group of queer young intellectuals. She expertly captures the bittersweet sense of nostalgia that comes with getting older and pondering what could have been.

The world held them in stillness, the pause between heartbeats, and there was only the two of them balanced on this patch of earth, like the bright dress against the sand.

Without spoiling any plot details, I will say that certain aspects of Almost Life reminded me of Call Me By Your Name, The Great Believers, and Heart the Lover. If you were a fan of any of those books, or you enjoy slow-paced, emotional stories of young love and how its effects ripple through adulthood and beyond, absolutely give this one a try.

Right now and upcoming

I’m in that blessed moment between books, excited to decide what’s next. Perhaps last month’s The Stacks pick, which looks to share a few thematic elements with Almost Life? Or should I go on a cruise ship vacation via an anticipated 2026 release that I bought back in April for my birthday? I could also reach farther back on my unread shelf, maybe for nonfiction about lesbians in the woods?? The options are so plentiful.

Tell me: what are you reading now, or looking forward to starting soon?

Leave a comment

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much. ♥︎

The week on screen

I rewatched Adventureland (2009) with some friends this week. It’s the story of James (Jesse Eisenberg), a recent college graduate who has to get a summer gig at the local theme park after his dad loses his job and can no longer fund the international trip he’d been planning. While we’re supposed to be focused on James and pulling for him as he deals with his white boy problems, the real stars here are Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as Adventureland management team Bobby and Paulette.

There’s also Kristen Stewart as Em, James’s coworker and love interest. A friend pointed out that she’s basically just Bella from Twilight in this movie and now I can’t unsee it. We joked about a drinking game where we’d take a sip every time she touched her hair in an angsty or brooding way, but I don’t think anybody was trying to get that turnt on a Monday.

Our local cheap theater screened The Birdcage (1996) this past week in celebration of its 30th anniversary, so I was lucky enough to see this cult classic for the first time on the big screen! What a delight. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as romantic partners and co-owners of a gay club in South Beach are just chef’s kiss—their individual aesthetics, their personality dynamic, the way they both complement and play off of each other, all perfect.

And don’t get me started on Hank Azaria as their housekeeper, and his inability to wear shoes. Imagine this, with your best friend cackle-laughing in the seat next to you:

This is the perfect summer movie. There’s physical comedy, exaggerated stakes, plenty of dancing, and a real tenderness underneath it all. Would watch again.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan. I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, June 8

The lighting is dim
I nestle in my corner,
feel myself unclench

Tuesday, June 9

A brief connection:
“Oh, I know just what you mean”
I will treasure this

Wednesday, June 10

Get ready early
sit on the stoop waiting for
your best friend taxi

Thursday, June 11

“Do you want to hear
a bit of silly gossip?”
Yes, every time. Yes.

Friday, June 12

Perfectly timed glance
turns window into canvas
Eggplant, mauve, slate blue

Saturday, June 13

These colors don’t run
They shout, they dance, they glitter,
immune to your hate

Sunday, June 14

If there is no plan,
left to our own devices
we’ll come up with one

Until next time

Our Pride parade and street fair were this weekend, and though there are a number of photos I could share here, I think this accidental one is my favorite. I didn’t even know it existed until I loaded Saturday’s images onto my phone; I must’ve pressed the shutter without realizing, while moving to put the camera back in my bag. But it’s so perfect! The bright overexposure, the colors, the blurred confetti, the joyful sense of movement. This really is what the day felt like: a sparkling and kaleidoscopic dance as we melted in the summer sun. Happy Pride, friends.

See you next week, and until then, I do be nosy.

♥︎ Emily

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Demolition inside the house is finished for now, and as the walls and ceiling in the office and dining room sit with their rotted innards bared, we’re at a decision point about how to move forward with reconstruction. Every option is double-digit thousands expensive. The end, when work is done and our living space is back to normal, feels far away and I’ll confess to being a little overwhelmed at the moment. But we will figure it out and we will make it through. Zippered plastic doorways and plywood floors are! not! forever!

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The week in books

It’s a true bummer that life circumstances prevented me from attending my book club meeting on Wednesday,2 because Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is something that absolutely demands to be discussed. As you might already know,3 it’s the story of Natalie Heller Mills, a trad wife influencer on Instagram who suddenly finds herself in an actual homesteading situation and has to figure out how to survive without the modern conveniences she’s accustomed to. I was intrigued by this premise, if a little hesitant to engage—social media feels exhausting most of the time these days, and if reading is the hobby I do to relax and ground myself, I don’t love the idea of conservative influencers invading that headspace. But it started off strong and drew me in pretty quickly, and though the middle dragged a bit, I was back in for the reveal at the end.

It’s been a few days since I finished this one, but I’m still trying to untangle my feelings about it. Popular advice for writing book reviews recommends evaluating how well the author achieved their goals, but the problem is that I’m not exactly sure what Burke was trying to do here. Was she hoping to portray the negative effects of the influencer lifestyle on adults who choose this path, or on the children that they feature in their content? If so, yeah, check and check. Was she trying to show how the (white, Christian) patriarchy harms (white, Christian) women and forces them to make strategic choices in order to stay alive and get ahead in the world? Because there’s that, too.

And there’s also secret substance abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, mental illness, the co-mingling of Christian idealogy and political power, the impossibility of actually living out an off-the-grid life, the ways women judge each other, the literal and metaphorical invisibility of household help, the unreasonable demands placed on mothers and wives, the line between protecting from danger and withholding crucial information and experiences, the harmful effects of comparison, how easy it is to manipulate the version of ourselves we show to the word, and so much more.

So ultimately, I guess don’t completely know what I thought of it!

The reading experience is gripping and gossipy; Yesteryear is certainly a page-turner. But the more I think about it, the more depressing it gets. Have you read this one? If so, let’s talk!

Leave a comment

Right now and upcoming

I’m currently in the middle of a new release that I impulsively checked out from the library on a recent visit, set in late-70s and early-80s Paris and perfect for summer. After that, I’ll probably pick up another nonfiction about ADHD (oops, I went down a rabbit hole and placed a bunch of holds on the same topic, classic) before it’s due.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much. ♥︎

The week on screen

Lately I’ve been slowly making my way through a couple of shows I missed when they originally aired!

I started My So-Called Life (1994) so I could listen through Greta Johnsen’s recap discussions on Happy to Be Here. The vibes remind me of Felicity, which I did experience back in the early 2000s when it was A Thing, and it’s been so fun to alternate between episodes of the show and the podcast. I don’t understand the appeal of Jordan Catalano at all, but also I’m not fourteen!

Reading Lena Dunham’s memoir recently was what got me interested in Girls (2012). Parts of it are definitely cringy in hindsight, but I’m enjoying it for the most part. My favorite scene in the (season 1) episode I just watched features Shoshanna accidentally smoking crack at a party and sprinting through the streets of Bushwick trying to escape the person assigned to take care of her while she’s high. There is… so much I could unpack there, but I’m going to leave that for another day.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, June 1

You and I, just ants
searching for tasty crumbs, then
alerting our friends

Tuesday, June 2

The urge to get up
is, unfortunately, bested
by two warm lap cats

Wednesday, June 3

They aren’t my color
but fuck it, I’m buying these
giant heart-shaped shades

Thursday, June 4

Creativity
can manifest anywhere
including salad

Friday, June 5

Step back, remember
why you started doing this
and what makes you stay

Saturday, June 6

To be spotted and
recognized from a distance,
greeted with a shout

Sunday, June 7

The realest ones will
listen, empathize, advise,
then feed you pizza

Until next time

As I’ve mentioned previously, one of the ways I’m coping with construction chaos at home is to be outside as much as possible. Recently that included writing last Monday’s newsletter on my strollway bench and spotting the beautiful red-shouldered hawk pictured above, who rested for a good several minutes on a branch overlooking the creek before being chased off by a persistent blue jay. And on Saturday we met up with extended family for a summer reunion, part of which Jordan and I spent on a rented paddle boat piloted by our 6-year-old nephew. My quads were really feeling it by the time we went home, but ultimately I have no regrets.

See you next week, and until then, I’m hoping to get stuck in this type of traffic jam.

♥︎ Emily

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Because the demolition crew returned to do a bit more work on our house this morning,1 I had to make myself scarce, aka go read a book on the patio at the coffee shop, then do some journaling on the outdoor balcony at the library,2 and then get a wrap from Trader Joe’s and eat it on my strollway bench. It’s hard work, but somebody’s gotta do it.

A very speckled dog walked by while I was sitting here writing, and later a red-shouldered hawk landed on a branch overlooking the creek, where it stayed and kept me company for a solid several minutes. Both of those things feel like good omens, don’t you think? I hope your week is off to a solid start too!

The week in books

Today’s accidental reading theme is Novels Being Released June 2nd. 🎉

To start, we have been blessed with another one from Daniel Lavery! His newest, Meeting New People,3 is about Barbara, a divorcée in her late fifties who lives alone and has just been dumped by her best friend, Susan. She’s a bit blindsided. First of all, what is she supposed to do with the nice dinner she had thoughtfully cooked for the two of them, which now sits untouched in the kitchen after Susan has run through her well-rehearsed list of parting grievances and stormed out? How should she react to these complaints against her character? And most important, who’s going to be her best friend now?? Pondering these questions, Barbara embarks on a journey of improving herself, fixing her relationship with her grown son, and finding a new bestie, and what a ride it is.

By nature, she’s a little crotchety and set in her ways, preferring things just so.

“If I’m going to be a crank, it’s better to be honest about it and look for the kind of person who wants to be a crank with me.”

She knows a lot about food and cooking,

“The key to a good celery salad is to trim the hell out of it. Keep as many of the leaves you can, but be ruthless about brown spots and laciness. Any celery leaf that is not scrupulously perfect has to go. Get rid of the tops and tails, as well as most of the outer stalks, anything that is even slightly too thick or too coarse. Pair whatever stalks have survived the culling with a good, sharp knife, or use a vegetable peeler if you’ve got one. There should not be a single thread left. Celery is a perfectly good vegetable, but if you don’t peel it first, you might as well dump dental floss into your salad.”

and she has strong opinions about everything from religious leaders

“I don’t know when that happened, but in my admittedly limited experience, most Episcopalian pastors are lesbians now, or else a stout little gay fellow named Hank, all of them as peaceful and unobtrusive and harmless as bathtime.”

to age gaps in friendships, to how to properly spend a day off.

“You don’t always have to be productive; you just have to feel productive enough that the anxious part of your brain that asks, ‘Am I being productive?’ is quiet and satisfied for a few hours.”

The best part about this book is the voice, which Lavery simply nails; being in Barbara’s head for these almost three hundred pages is an absolute delight. You won’t find high-stakes plot or exciting twists here, but if a complicated character’s rich inner life, written in smart, stylish, wryly funny prose is your thing, run don’t walk.

Also releasing tomorrow is Hunger & Thirst by one of my favorite writers, Claire Fuller.4 I was intrigued to see this one marketed as horror, since Fuller usually stays more in the “literary fiction about complex families” zone, but ultimately I don’t think it falls that far afield of her previous novels, most of which include mysterious, psychological, or gothic elements. The main character here is Ursula, a young woman who grew up in foster care and is now a teenager, recently set up with a new job in the mail room of an art school. She quickly befriends her coworker Sue and shortly afterward moves into an abandoned house to squat with Sue’s boyfriend Vince. The thing is, the house might be haunted. Or at best, the vibes are terribly off. Whatever the case, something isn’t right, and as the atmosphere of dread slowly builds, we learn more about Ursula’s past, details that both add context to the unease she’s feeling and raise questions about the reliability of her experiences. It’s a really slow burn and the terror is subtle, which might make some readers push back against the “horror” categorization. The pace drags a bit toward the middle, and there are no easy answers at the end. But overall I think Fuller achieves her goal, which is not only to create a sinister sense of tension, but also to expose and examine the dark side of female friendship, adoption, family, and longing.

Right now and upcoming

My book club is meeting on Wednesday to discuss that one book everyone’s been talking about lately, and though I just started it this morning, I’ll probably be finished by tomorrow (if nothing else, it’s a page-turner)! Next up, I have a few library loans that I need to knock out before their due dates.

What are you reading right now?

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The week on screen

We’re still pretty early in season 1, but Jordan and I started Nobody Wants This recently and it has been such a bright spot during these weeks of construction chaos at home. Comforting, warm, funny, well-acted, and just so easy to watch. A true retreat for the brain, which is exactly what I want and need right now.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, May 25

Yard apparition
slipping silent between stems,
forked black tongue flashing

Tuesday, May 26

Intentions are sound
but the couch is comfy and
rabbit holes beckon

Wednesday, May 27

Possibility
becomes official accord
with a firm handshake

Thursday, May 28

Erase all traces
of an outsider’s presence
and settle back in

Friday, May 29

My whole self shout-sings,
“Do every stupid thing that
makes you feel alive”

Saturday, May 30

Bright sun, gentle breeze,
a sandwich and a cold beer
enjoyed among friends

Sunday, May 31

Coffee oreo:
crunchy, bitter, sweet, and cold
A revelation!

Until next time

Our new local stationery store had its grand opening this weekend, so I met some friends there for a browse on Sunday afternoon. Even in its slightly picked-over state, there was so much goodness to take in! I left with a few greeting cards, some smiley face washi tape, and this absolutely perfect sticker. Just being in the bright and colorful space made me itchy to draw and write and MAKE THINGS. We went for ice cream afterward and ate it outside in the sun. What a perfect few hours.

Highly recommend finding ways to spark your creativity. Highly recommend little treats. Here’s to a summer full of both.

See you next week, and until then I’ll be trying to learn how to do whatever this is.5

♥︎ Emily

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The inside of our house is still complete chaos, so I’ve set up shop out here in my child-sized IKEA chair for the day. The normal mix of birds have kept me company for most of the morning—cardinals, doves, various wrens and finches—but the most exciting moment was when I spotted a huge rat snake making its way across the front yard. Fair warning: there’s a photo farther down, in case you need to scroll past!

The week in books

I was very aware of The Third Gilmore Girl by Kelly Bishop when it came out in 2024, but for whatever reason I didn’t jump on it immediately. So I was very grateful to for writing about it recently, which nudged me to check Libby, find that the audiobook was available with no wait, and check it out! Man, I just tore through this one. Kelly recounts her life in show business pretty linearly, so listening felt like sitting down with my grandma to learn what she was like as a young person, knowing where she’d end up (and eagerly awaiting those stories) but equally as engrossed in the experiences that got her there. What a sassy, classy lady. What a lesson in both self-confidence and gratitude. This is definitely a must-read for Gilmore Girls fans, theater kids, and anyone who wonders if it’s possible to keep doing what they love well into old age (spoiler: it is). I will echo Rosamond and say that audio is the way to go if you have access to that!

Speaking of memoir, Libby came through for me again this past week with Lena Dunham’s new one, Famesick. I didn’t watch Girls when it originally aired,1 but I liked her film Tiny Furniture and her book of essays, Not That Kind of Girl, and I remember the general online attitude toward her during the early 2010s, so I was very curious to hear what she had to say fifteen years later. Let me tell you: she’s been through some shit. Learning about all of the health struggles and surgeries she was dealing with in the background during her sudden rise to fame made me feel so sad about the way the public treated her at the time. When Girls premiered, she was so YOUNG (twenty-six!), and inexperienced, and hard-working, and under so much pressure. Not to mention dealing with a body that was at best barely cooperating and at worst fully disintegrating; I don’t know how anyone in that situation could have been expected to keep going. And still, she discusses her chronic illness not as an excuse, but to provide context—I appreciates that she addresses and owns up to her mistakes as well. This memoir won’t be for everyone, just like Lena Dunham herself might not be, and that’s okay, but if you’ve followed her work for any amount of time and/or are interested in how fame can interact with physical and mental health, I recommend it.

My favorite of the week, one that you might’ve already seen me posting about in my instagram stories if you follow me there, was The ADHD Field Guide For Adults by Cate Osborn and Erik Gude. This is, as it says on the tin, a nonfiction book all about ADHD, written for adults, particularly those who were diagnosed or have self-identified the condition in adulthood. It’s specifically written and formatted in ADHD-friendly ways: short chunks, important concepts in bold, etc. And it covers so many topics and areas of life! I was especially fascinated by the section about comorbidities, in which Cate and Erik discuss the overlaps between ADHD and other diagnoses like Autism, depression, anxiety, and more. And the part about how hormonal shifts, both short- and long-term, interact with ADHD. And the chapter on creating systems to make life easier, from thinking through home layout, to counting backward in order to be on time, to strategies for remembering to brush teeth and do other hygiene tasks. There are so many tips and suggestions, both from the authors and from their online followers who wrote in with contributions. I could go on and on about how seen and affirmed this book made me feel, and how hopeful. The copy I read was from the library, but I will absolutely be buying this one to have on hand for future reference.

Right now and upcoming

Staring down the end of one month and the beginning of another, I have several directions I could go with my reading.

• Do I pick up something from my older unread shelf, since I haven’t checked that box off for May yet? I’d probably choose this one, especially since there’s a recent Zero to Well-Read episode about it that I could listen to as a companion piece.

• Do I read the Stacks book club pick for May before the discussion episode about it comes out on Wednesday?

• Do I dive into my early copy of Daniel Lavery’s new novel so I can hype it up ahead of its June 2nd release date?

• Or do I go for my IRL book club’s choice before our meeting on June 3rd, one that I’m having to borrow from a friend because the library wait list is so dang long?

What would you choose, friends?? What are you reading right now and loving?

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On the screen and in my ears

After seeing 28 Days Later back in January, it was fun to finally experience the follow-up, 28 Years Later (2025), this week with the same friends. And wow, still zombies, but what a difference. I liked the gimmick of this one (that it was shot exclusively on iPhone) and for whatever reason enjoyed the storyline a bit more than its predecessor. So visceral! Such skull pile! The ending had me laughing with delighted confusion. Guess we’ll have to watch 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple sooner rather than later.

The limited series Wayward (2025), created by and starring Mae Martin, has been on my radar since a friend who is a fan of theirs told me about it last year. The show opens with Martin’s character, Alex, moving to a small community in Vermont with his pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon), for a fresh start. Evelyn (our queen Toni Collette), Laura’s mentor and head teacher at the eponymous local Tall Pines Academy, sets them up with a house, but they quickly start to suspect that all is not well there. In Alex’s new job as a local police officer, he starts digging into the place’s history and feels increasingly uneasy the more he uncovers. We’re simultaneously following Leila and Abbie, two students sent to Tall Pines against their will and desperate to escape, which they’re hoping to do with Alex’s help. The atmosphere of this show is everything—dark, mysterious, deeply unsettling and creepy, with a dollop of culty vibes—but I’m still chewing on the ending, which to me felt largely unsatisfying. The more I think about it, the more I suppose that anything different would’ve been unrealistic, but I can’t help being frustrated by its extreme bleakness. If you’ve seen this show, please talk to me!

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And looping back to Margo’s Got Money Troubles (2026), which I briefly mentioned in a recent newsletter: all episodes are out now! I loved the book when I read it a couple years ago, so I was a bit apprehensive to see it adapted, but I’m happy and relieved to report that they did a wonderful job with the show. The plot is pretty faithful to the source material from what I remember, the cast is incredible (Nick Offerman as Jinx is just chef’s kiss), and the cinematography is stunning, especially the scenes where Margo and her friends are filming content for her OnlyFans. Plus a quirky opening credits sequence featuring a Robyn song? Come on. If you won’t take my word for it, go read ’s thoughts about it and listen to her interview with author Rufi Thorpe and let them convince you!

GRETAGRAM

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This week on HTBH: The Margo’s Got Money Troubles TV show is VERY GOOD, and Rufi Thorpe agrees…

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Finally, a reminder that the new Francis of Delirium album is coming this Friday! I got to listen through it once this weekend and loved it. There are airy vocals and driving guitars, lush harmonies and even some French horn! I know these songs will be on repeat for me all summer, and I can’t wait to get myself a copy on vinyl when I see the band live in November. Stay tuned for more about this one after it’s out and I’ve gotten more familiar with it.

(Here comes the snake)

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, May 18

An inconvenience
can become second nature
given enough time

Tuesday, May 19

Turn all the lights off
Pull the door closed behind you
Keep the heat at bay

Wednesday, May 20

I’m back in Chile,
“Adventures in Solitude”
blasting through headphones

Thursday, May 21

Soup warms my insides
here beneath the patter of
long-awaited rain

Friday, May 22

A surprising gift,
to arrive and be met with
excitement and warmth

Saturday, May 23

Cold, dreary drizzle
means veggie chili tonight
I don’t make the rules

Sunday, May 24

Visual progress
is such a motivator
to keep pressing on

Until next time

Thanks to The ADHD Field Guide For Adults, I fell asleep last night thinking about systems and brainstorming ways to make certain parts of my life smoother and easier. I realized that I’ve already created a few without consciously categorizing them as such, like setting out my clothes for the next day before I go to bed, or always doing my pre-shift morning routine the same way so I know exactly how long it will take, or even working through my New York Times puzzles in a set order2 each time. Our brains are so fascinating. I think I want to write a post all about this idea of habits and routines—is this interesting to anyone else, or just me?

See you next week, and until then, go absorb some nature!

♥︎ Emily

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Enough small talk, though. Let’s get into the good stuff:

The week in books

I’ve had Can’t Even by Anne Helen Petersen on my to-read list since it came out in 2020. A book about my generation and how we got to where we are today (overworked, exhausted, desperate for fulfillment and connection, forever attempting to find meaning in our lives)? Put it in my veins! Of course, like anything I know I will love, I put it off, in this case for a quick six years, but here we finally are. And of course, I was right, I ate it up.

Petersen touches on the expected formative milestones for millennials, like the stranger danger panic of the 80s and 90s and the horrible economic recession of 2008. But she also reaches farther back in history, illustrating how our identity as the self-centered “me me me” generation stems from our boomer parents and how they were raised. Spoiler: far from lazy, we are actually insanely hard-working (because we have to be, please see Petersen’s statistics about pensions and benefits and the gig economy), and even if the stereotypes older folks throw around about us are true, Y’ALL MADE US THIS WAY. This book made me feel both vindicated and pissed off in equal measure and I highly recommend it.

But that’s the reality of millennial, internet-ridden life: I need to be an insanely productive writer and be funny on Slack and post good links on Twitter and keep the house clean and cook a fun new recipe from Pinterest and track my exercise on MapMyRun and text my friends to ask questions about their growing children and check in with my mom and grow tomatoes in the backyard and enjoy Montana and Instagram myself enjoying Montana and shower and put on cute clothes for that thirty-minute video call with my coworkers and and and and.

Whidbey by T Kira Madden is the Gretagram book club selection this month and thanks to a library due date, I finished it well ahead of the discussion (please clap)! You might recognize the author’s name from her 2019 memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls—this is her fiction debut and it’s been quite buzzy, at least in the corners of the internet I inhabit. Whidbey is an island near Seattle where one of the protagonists, Birdie Chang, goes for a mental health retreat after the man who sexually abused her when she was a child, Calvin Boyer, begins contacting her again. The story also follows Linzie King, another of Calvin’s victims, who has just released a tell-all memoir that includes part of Birdie’s story; and Mary-Beth Boyer, Calvin’s mother, who is in full denial and loyal to her son at all costs. A mystery element is introduced when Calvin turns up dead, struck by a vehicle on the road right outside the group home where he’s been living. The general premise and multiple perspective structure reminded me a bit of Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka from a few years ago.

Madden’s strength here is complexity. Given the simple facts of the situation, we might be tempted to categorize certain characters as “good” or “innocent” and others as “bad” or “guilty,” but she muddies the waters masterfully. By the end of the novel I’d alternated between feeling sorry for and utterly repulsed by each of these women at least several times over. All of them are up against horrible circumstances that would spark anyone’s sympathy, and yet they also make truly atrocious choices at various moments during the story, to the point where I’m having trouble teasing apart my reactions to the characters from my overall opinion of the book. At the very least, I think Madden is successful at what she’s trying to do here! I’m very much looking forward to talking through this one with other readers, and if you have thoughts I’d love to hear them.

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Finally, I’m sliding Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata (trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori) into this week’s newsletter since I finished it with my coffee this morning. What a premise, y’all. In the world of the novel, babies are almost exclusively conceived by artificial insemination, not sexual intercourse. In fact, it’s considered weird, even gross, to have sex with one’s spouse, because marriage makes them family and therefore, ew, incest. Instead, people marry for convenience and stability, to raise children together as a unit, but they fulfill their sexual and romantic needs outside the marriage. A newly developed community called Experiment City (or Paradise-Eden) takes this idea several steps further. There, people of all genders are chosen by a lottery system to be impregnated, and when the babies are born they are raised by everyone. Love and romance are at best old-fashioned relics and at worst dangerous inconveniences.

We experience this world through main character Amane’s eyes. She herself was conceived and born through traditional means, raised by a mother who instilled in her the value of love, sex, and family. Unlike many of her friends, she usually sleeps with the people she dates, even if she doesn’t always fully understand why. But the longer she is immersed in her society’s newer way of doing things, the more she questions her upbringing and feels her formerly well-established mindset start to slip away. I absolutely tore through this fever dream of a novel and it has left me with so much food for thought. The New York Times called it “The Handmaid’s Tale on acid” and I don’t think they’re far off, though the reason for the birthing system and the population’s response to it in Murata’s story are pretty distinct from the situation in Margaret Atwood classic. A dystopia, yes, but of a different kind. A subtler dystopia, a sneakier one. This is another book I can’t wait to discuss—let me know if you’ve read it!

Right now and upcoming

I’m currently nearing the end of The Third Gilmore Girl by Kelly Bishop on audio, which has been super compelling and an utter delight, and after that I plan to dive into my library loan of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick.

I’d love to hear what you’re reading right now or looking forward to picking up!

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On the screen and in my ears

Was it the unparalleled cinema experience at my local indie, the friends I was with, the quality of the movie, or a magical combination of all of the above? We’ll never know for sure, but I saw Hokum (2026) last week and LOVED it. It’s about Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a famous horror author who is skeptical and rude and generally kind of an asshole. He books a trip to a small inn in Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes and maybe get some writing done, but things immediately get a little weird and spooky—and then a lot weird and spooky. Adam Scott is so good at playing this character, and his subtle, gradual shift from haughty to humble is skillfully done. The atmosphere is perfect, too. Excellent visuals and cinematography, several exquisite jump scares (the creepiest of which made one of my friends audibly shriek and left the rest of us cackling with laughter), delightful Irish accents, memorable side characters, deep fear balanced by moments of humor. If you like horror films, definitely see this one!

On the music front, I’ve been really into Ratboys’ new album, Singin’ to an Empty Chair (2026) lately. It’s a little bit rock, a little bit americana, a sound that brings to mind bands like Mount Moriah, Waxahatchee, and The Beths. The perfect soundtrack for this coming summer, when you’re floating down the river in an inner tube with your best friends and a cooler full of PBRs. My favorite tracks are “Penny in the Lake,” “Open Up,” and “Anywhere.”

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, May 11

One side quest on pause
to launch into another
Sometimes that’s just life

Tuesday, May 12

Hang back, eyes open
Figure out this obstacle
and then: break through it

Wednesday, May 13

Fingers in the dirt
meticulously tracing,
rooting out evil

Thursday, May 14

Today’s objective:
Lie as still as possible,
let the body rest

Friday, May 15

Breeze on creek’s surface
creates hypnotic ripples
silences the mind

Saturday, May 16

Anyone else feel
the presence of god in this
TJ’s parking lot?

Sunday, May 17

Hands chopping, stirring
while we catch up on our lives—
Feels like home to me

Until next time

Conditions in our open-face household remain largely the same, but the cats have mostly adjusted to their new plastic-sheeted lifestyle and all the strange sounds (whooshing! crinkling! ghosts??) that come with it. Personally, I’m coping by spending as much time as possible outdoors. I dug up about half a backyard’s worth of poison ivy on Wednesday and it gave me a sense of agency, like even if the inside is under construction with a question-mark end date, at least I can be improving the outside in the meantime. And, you know, the fresh air is always nice.

See you next week, and until then, things could always be worse!!

♥︎ Emily

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The week in books

Here’s a silly little fact about me: I never found a new dentist when I moved away from home. So every six months I drive an hour over to Durham for the day; my parents and I schedule our dental cleaning appointments back-to-back-to-back in the morning, then we go to lunch together and hang out for a few hours before I have to return home. This time, my IRL book club (which meets in the Durham / Chapel Hill area) happened to schedule our meeting for that same evening, which meant I didn’t have to rush back to Winston and could instead linger a little longer in my childhood home. Guess how I spent a good chunk of that extra time? Yep, finishing the book for said book club meeting. I felt like a kid again, slouched in one of the living room chairs turning page after page while the rhythms of the house hummed pleasantly in the background, Mom quietly balancing her checkbook,1 Dad doing puzzles on his phone and occasionally popping out to work in the garden or look for their cat.

As for the book in question, The Lilac People by Milo Todd is historical fiction about trans and queer folks in Germany during World War II. There are two timelines: one in 1933 pre-war Berlin and the other in the smaller city of Ulm, 1945, as American soldiers are liberating the camps. Main character Bertie is a trans man2 who works for Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science). After Hitler is named chancellor, work camps are established, and things start getting bad for Bertie and his friends—culminating in the Night of the Long Knives and the looting of the Institute3—he flees with his partner, Sofie, to a farm in Ulm where they might safely wait out the war. In the 1945 timeline, we see them still there when the end is declared, their routine upended by the appearance of a younger trans man named Karl who has escaped Dachau.

There’s a bit of a mystery element here. We meet Bertie’s best friend Gert in the earlier timeline and we know that the farm in the later one belonged to Gert’s grandparents, but something has happened to Gert for which Bertie feels a sense of guilt. I won’t spoil the reveal, but I will say that it wasn’t in proportion with the buildup and narratively felt like a bit of a letdown. The pace also dragged in the middle and I wish Todd had used the pages to round out his characters, some of whom were lacking in dimension, more fully. But small quibbles aside, it was exciting to learn about a well-documented period of history from a new angle. I always love when a novel sends me down Google rabbit holes, and this one definitely did that.

The other book I finished this week was one I’d been very slowly chipping away at for three or four months. When I reached my last allowed library loan renewal, I knew it was finally time to knock it out. Original Sins by Eve L. Ewing is about, as the subtitle perfectly summarizes, “the (mis)education of Black and Native children and the construction of American racism.” It’s been on my radar since it was featured on The Stacks in February 2025 and I got an extra push to pick it up when Greta Johnsen chose it for her book club earlier this year, but it proved to be more of an endeavor than I expected.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a very thoroughly-researched and well-written book and the subject matter is fascinating and important! Ewing opened my eyes to a lot of ideas I hadn’t considered before and I learned a lot about how American schools of today came to be. I guess I just wasn’t prepared for the density of information. There are numerous endnotes, some quite long, and the whole thing reads more like a textbook than the type of narrative nonfiction I normally gravitate toward. I recommend this one, especially for educators and parents, but I do advise the “small chunks” approach if you, like me, don’t have a brain for name- and date-heavy history.

Right now and upcoming

I’m in the middle of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen and finding it equally compelling and horrifying. On one hand, affirmation: it’s not just me! But on the other, despair: our systems of employment in this country are completely wrecked!

Gretagram book club is reading T Kira Madden’s new novel, Whidbey, this month and I recently got a digital copy from the library, so I think that will be next for me.

What are you reading or looking forward to picking up soon?

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If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

The week on screen

Jordan and I just finished the first season of Big Mistakes (2026), Dan Levy’s new crime comedy show on Netflix, and I really liked it. At the start, Nick (Dan Levy) and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega) are sent by their mother to buy a gift for their dying grandmother, but in the process they accidentally get caught up in some shady dealings. The situation spirals from there, becoming more and more chaotic and out of control with every episode. Meanwhile their mom is running for mayor and their younger sister is managing her campaign, Nick is hanging on by a thread as pastor of his church with a secret boyfriend on the side, and Morgan is getting bored of the clingy dude she’s been dating since she was seventeen. The vibes are a perfect balance of high stakes and hilarity, like Weeds meets Good Girls, with the chaotic sibling energy of Schitt’s Creek and the completely unhinged mom from The Bear. I hope there’s a second season because I need to know what happens next.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, May 4

Impatience nudges
at the body from within:
get up, move around

Tuesday, May 5

Oh, the sweet relief
of reestablished routine,
a balance restored

Wednesday, May 6

Best part of childhood:
lazy afternoon hours
lost inside pages

Thursday, May 7

For being too small
and curling up too cutely
you’re under arrest

Friday, May 8

How can one convince
their galloping heart to slow
when it wants to fly?

Saturday, May 9

Trading punny jokes
and layering melodies
We’re improvising

Sunday, May 10

All our belongings
cleared out in preparation
for house surgery

Until next time

We’ve been on a bit of a journey here at our old house. It started with what we thought would be a pretty straightforward water damage remediation project but has since snowballed as other underlying issues have been discovered. Long story short, a crew was here today cutting into the dining room wall to check for wood rot in the support beams, and they had to stop early after finding existing termite damage (unclear if there’s current activity) and roaches living in the wall.

So now we gotta get somebody else in here to do some bug murder, so we can get back to the wall-busting and rotten wood replacing, so at some point we might have a dry and intact home once again. In the meantime, it’s protective plywood on the floors and possessions crammed wherever they’ll fit4 and the futon from the porch brought inside as temporary furniture. And zippered plastic in three different doorways! Moving from room to room right now is like going in and out of a tent. People who camp, you know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, on one hand it feels like a lot, and on the other, I have a home and I definitely don’t take that fact for granted. I’m just looking forward to everything being fixed and back where it should be, to not worrying that the ceiling might cave in on us at any moment. 🙏🏼

See you next week, and until then, here’s a montage of people falling down.

♥︎ Emily

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Read this week

In my ongoing quest to stop buying books only to leave them languishing and gathering metaphorical dust on the shelf, I started the week with something from my Richmond birthday stack,1 Skye Falling by Mia McKenzie. This is a contemporary novel about Skye, a free-spirited Philly native who owns and operates a Black tourism business called We Outchea. She’s almost forty with no partner, kids, or permanent residence—when she’s back in town every month or two between international trips, she stays at her best friend’s bed and breakfast. Everything changes, though, when twelve-year-old Vicky shows up claiming to be the result of an egg that Skye donated back in her twenties. Suddenly she is forced to reckon with past trauma and repair the bridges she has burned, in the process rediscovering her roots and opening herself up to a world of new love.

This is just a really good story. It’s sweet but not saccharine, and funny, and sharp, and it addresses the timely issues of gentrification and police brutality but also the timeless themes of aging and family and queerness and commitment. Skye’s voice is completely her own and it charmed me immediately. She makes some questionable decisions on her journey, but even in her messy moments she’s a true delight to be around; Skye Falling is one of those books that I never wanted to put down, that I was actively thinking about in the gaps between reading sessions and looking forward to picking up again. If you need an easy read that will make you laugh and restore some of your faith in humanity, give this one a try.

I first encountered Manoush Zomorodi’s work back in 2015, when she introduced the “Bored and Brilliant” series on her podcast, Note to Self, a project which was published in book form a few years later (highly recommend). Participating in this process, the main goal of which was to reclaim idle moments for the brain’s creative and restorative processes, was transformative for me at the time. I really appreciated Zomorodi’s attitude toward technology: realistic about its necessity and curious about its potential but also emphatic in her call for boundaries around its usage. So when I saw that she had a new book on its way this month, I couldn’t request a copy fast enough.2

Body Electric, releasing tomorrow (May 5), is also nonfiction, with the subtitle “The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being.” In short, it’s about the dangers of our modern sedentary lifestyles, how sitting for long uninterrupted stretches can cause or worsen problems ranging from physical aches and pains to anxiety, heart disease, high cholesterol, depression, strokes, increased risk of dementia, and more. Drawing on abundant medical research, Zomorodi explains the science in very accessible and easy-to-understand language that isn’t woo-woo or preachy. I felt personally attacked to find out that even “active” people like me, who exercise vigorously several times per week, are just as vulnerable to these risks if they spend their downtime parked at a desk or lounging on the couch.

Luckily, the solution is incredibly simple: once every half hour, get up and move around for a few minutes. The science shows that folks who do this see all sorts of health benefits, both mental and physical, in both the short and long term. Anxiety decreases, creativity and productivity are boosted, risk of heart disease and stroke plummet, brain fog dissipates, chance of dementia goes down, and blood sugar regulates,3 just to name a few.4 It doesn’t need to be strenuous, either, just consistent. A little bit of movement at a time, at regular points throughout the day.

I’m giving it a shot myself as I sit here writing this newsletter, and I can confirm that, though the frequent interruptions have required some getting used to, it’s a pretty easy system. Especially since the “25 minutes seated / 5 minutes up and moving around” pattern really lends itself to the pomodoro technique and gives me lots of built-in opportunities to use the bathroom, let my mind wander, bother my cats, get a snack, or work out what I want to say next. When I sit down again I feel ready to dive right back into what I was doing, and it’s easier to stay focused when I know my brain can take another break soon.

As I tore through Body Electric, I was highlighting all over the place, composing a mental list of all the people I love that I’m going to buy a copy for.5 It’s not a long read but the impact, if we pay attention and implement Zomorodi’s advice, could be enormous. If you, like so many people in this era of screens and devices, spend most of your day seated, please please please read this book (or listen to the podcast)! I can’t recommend it highly enough.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Seen and heard this week

The timing of The Devil Wears Prada 2’s release was truly perfect—I ended up seeing a matinee showing with one of my best friends on her birthday and we had a great time. This sequel begins with Andy Sachs, now a journalist, losing her job and, through a combination of coincidence and necessity, ending up back at Runway magazine. The plot is updated for our “print media is dying” times, but the general arc and the emotional beats here are very similar to those of the original; there’s the “Miranda Priestly gets vulnerable and we almost feel bad for her” scene, the “Andy tries to warn her boss of something but finds out that she knew about it all along” scene, the “Nigel raids the magazine’s wardrobe department to give Andy fancy new clothes to wear” scene, and so on. It felt fresh enough to be interesting but familiar enough to be comforting, like seeing an old friend again after many years apart. I wasn’t completely blown away, but it was pretty much what I was expecting and I liked it!

And now for my musical obsession of the week: a twenty-year-old college a cappella album by a group at a school I didn’t even go to. Hear me out.

I was randomly reminded this week of “When We Are One,” a song that Jordan and I used to blast in the car and belt along to, but when I opened my a cappella playlist6 on Qobuz and couldn’t find it,7 I worried I’d never be able to track it down again. I couldn’t remember who performed it and my googling was not turning anything up. After thinking on it for a day or two, I could eventually picture an album cover that looked like zooming into the distance and a title that was something like “xenophobia,” and the group’s name, Off the Beat, popped into my head shortly after. Turns out some of their releases are on Qobuz, but not this one (actually called Kenophobia), so I paid ten American dollars to buy it on iTunes8 and then listened to it twice in a row while I baked Jordan a ginger stout cake for his birthday.9

Y’all, it still slaps! If you are a fellow a cappella fan, you know that the main appeal of the art form is marveling at how well (or cringing at how poorly) a group covers a song that you already know. But though I had never heard “When We Are One” before encountering it on this album back in the day, I was immediately into it. I subsequently looked up the original (by Gabriel Mann) and still liked this one better. That, folks, is an indicator of greatness. Kenophobia contains covers of plenty of familiar songs too, like “Question!” (System of a Down), “Fix You” (Coldplay), “Sugar We’re Going Down” (Fall Out Boy), “Because of You” (Kelly Clarkson), and “All These Things That I’ve Done” (The Killers). But my favorite tracks (besides “When We Are One”) are the last two, “The Crowing” (Coheed and Cambria) and “Hide and Seek” (Imogen Heap).

I mean, this song clocks in at almost seven minutes. Do you know how hard it is to stay on pitch and maintain tempo with a whole choir of other humans for that long? Not to mention Coheed’s signature syncopations and changes in rhythm! It’s a marvel of coordination and endurance if nothing else.

TLDR; I am a nerd, and I used to do this kind of singing in college10 and I miss it. This rediscovery brought me a lot of joy.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, April 27

Trying really hard
to hide all of the effort,
make it look easy

Tuesday, April 28

Each little plate full
of discovery, delight
We laugh and we feast

Wednesday, April 29

Just a wee critter,
but her yelps boom and echo
to voice her dismay

Thursday, April 30

When the bass comes in,
the friction of harmony
vibrating the air

Friday, May 1

Bring down the house lights
feel yourself relax into
an imagined world

Saturday, May 2

Rainbow of ribbons,
a hypnotic tapestry
we weave as we dance

Sunday, May 3

Porch time only ends
at sunset if you let it
Grab a blanket, stay

Until next time

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve taken a bath, and I think that’s where I’m headed as soon as I hit “publish.” I hope Monday has been kind to you so far and maybe you have something fun on deck for this evening. I’d love to hear about what’s been bringing you life lately if you’re willing to share!

Leave a comment

See you next week, and if you need me before then, check the country roads that are almost certainly taking me home.

♥︎ Emily

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10

December 2007. That’s me on the mic and Jordan beatboxing in the back:

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↑ If so, I would love to hear of your adventures and the bounty you took home! ↑

Read this week

When I realized partway through Patrick Cottrell’s new novel that it takes place in the same world as his debut, I decided to go back and treat myself to a re-read of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. Sorry was originally published in 2017 and follows a pre-transition Dan Moran as he copes with the immediate grief and emotional aftermath of his younger brother’s death by suicide. Though he hasn’t seen his parents in a number of years, he returns to his childhood home to provide support and maybe also investigate the circumstances surrounding the tragedy. These were my thoughts when I read it in 2019:

This is a deep dive into a grieving person's brain, and it is strange and funny and sad and it doesn't always make sense. It took me to a surreal headspace very similar to the one I visited while reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh and The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg. I'm not sure that I completely "got" it, but I'd read it again.

Upon revisiting, I’d say it’s much funnier and more absurd than I originally picked up on. Whereas past Emily was focused more on the seriousness of the situation and the mental illness of the protagonist, this time around I could better recognize the narrator’s unreliability and laugh at the resulting miscommunications and awkward or uncomfortable scenes. If you’re interested in Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, I would recommend treating these two books like a duology and starting with Sorry to Disrupt the Peace.

Alas, though important and satisfying, my re-read side quest meant that I didn’t start House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones) for NCMA book club until the day before our meeting. And despite a marathon several-hour reading session after my coffee shop shift on Thursday, I showed up for the discussion that evening with about ten pages left to go. Luckily, this is a very vibey, theme- and character-based novel without much of an overarching plot, so I didn’t miss any last-minute reveals or have the ending spoiled for me.

The focus here is a small Polish village where an unnamed narrator settles with her husband. We learn about the land and the community through a tapestry of chapters that alternate between first-person observations, conversations with the protagonist’s mysterious old neighbor, leaps backward in time, and a story-in-parts about a young monk writing about the life of a saint. There’s so much to dig into I can’t possibly do it justice here but the tone and ensemble structure reminded me a bit of Herscht 07769 and When I Sing, Mountains Dance. One of the standout topics that came up in our book club discussion was the idea of binaries or boundaries—life/death, asleep/awake, male/female, Germany/Poland—and the nebulous space between them. I think we could have talked for another hour or more, easy.

And then, whoops, I started Vigil by George Saunders too late to finish it for Gretagram book club on Saturday afternoon,2 but here I come after the fact with some thoughts! This is about a ghost whose job is to comfort people as they’re actively dying so their transition to the afterlife is as smooth as possible. Her newest assignment is K.J. Boone, an old white oil tycoon and climate change denier who is now on his death bed, refusing to acknowledge or apologize for any of the terrible things he did during his career. And here’s my hot take: this should’ve been a short story. Even at only 192 pages, it feels too long, it drags, the message gets repetitive. Don’t get me wrong, George, I agree, climate change is very real, and dire, and people like K.J. need to face the damage they’ve done and continue to do, but like… tighten it up. We get it.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Seen and heard this week

I caught two last feature films on Thursday and Friday as the second week of RiverRun International Film Festival came to a close:

Over Your Dead Body (2026) is a horror comedy about a married couple who set off for a weekend at a lake cabin, ostensibly to relax together and repair their rapidly disintegrating relationship. But a secret murder plan is afoot, one that immediately goes awry, setting off a whole chain of unexpected and increasingly bloody events. It starts out ridiculous, and every time I thought the chaos had peaked I was proven wrong. The gore and special effects in this movie are not for the faint of heart/stomach, but they are balanced by a lot of funny moments. The vibes reminded me of Ready or Not (2019)3 and Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010). This one is in theaters nationwide right now and I highly recommend seeing it on the big screen—the best part of the experience for me was gasping and laughing and reacting in community. What a ride.

In Transit (2025) tells the story of Lucy, a young bartender in Maine who meets a visiting artist one night at work and agrees to be a model for some new sketches and paintings she’s creating. Their encounters stir up unexamined feelings in both women and ultimately lead to a crossroads moment for Lucy—what does she really want to do with her life? This is a quiet film, shot beautifully and acted well, but the ending left me hanging, desperate to know what came next.4

I’ve only listened to it all the way through once so I don’t have capital-o Opinions just yet, but METRIC’S NEW ALBUM IS OUT! It’s called Romanticize the Dive and it’s easily one of my most anticipated releases of the year, especially since Jordan and I got tickets to their “All the Feelings” tour with Broken Social Scene and Stars this summer. For now I will just say that the song I immediately latched onto during my first play-through was “Tremolo,” which is all about resisting the “what if?” rabbit hole (a struggle I personally know very well).

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

With the tremolo soft and the guitar clean
I can take your mind off what could have been

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Why didn't I take another path at the crossroads?
Crystal ball nobody can see
All of these question marks, what could've been
Leave it on the slippery dance floor, dance with me

Ugh, it resonates so much. I think Emily Haines might’ve written this one specifically for me.

New vocab just dropped

And now a short list of unfamiliar words I’ve encountered in my recent reading, because why not?

• Klatsch (noun): Gossip or casual conversation

• Persipan (noun): A confection made from marzipan and fruit puree, typically used in cakes and pastries

• Gamelan (noun): An Indonesian musical ensemble usually featuring a variety of metal percussion instruments

• Truculent (adjective): Aggressively savage or ferocious

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, April 20

Must finish my work
in time to take a hot bath
ahead of dinner

Tuesday, April 21

Ordering online
could never replace browsing
in a local shop

Wednesday, April 22

This Earth Day birthday
is fitting; you’re my planet
my haven, my home

Thursday, April 23

Past the bounds of fear
lies quiet satisfaction
if you stay open

Friday, April 24

These feet will take me
wherever I need to go
The city is mine

Saturday, April 25

Turn another page
as raindrops patter on glass
and tea warms your bones

Sunday, April 26

It’s transformative,
the warmth and weight of feeling
truly seen and loved

Until next time

In an email about Romanticize the Dive’s release, Emily Haines5 wrote of “Tremolo”:

It’s about breaking free of a fixation on what could have been and accepting how things are, how little we can control and the painfully arbitrary nature of fate.

This is something I’ve been stewing on for a long time, sparked anew by her words. We only get one run-through, yes? And by the nature of choices, there will always be alternate lives, billions of them, branching off from the path we’re taking. I used to feel oppressed picturing all of these possibilities, paralyzed any time I was presented with multiple options and forced to pick between them, because what if I went with the wrong one? Is this where I’m supposed to be? Am I doing it right?

But, hello, there is no “supposed to”! There is no “right”! I’m starting to understand the freedom in embracing this type of unknown. One timeline vs. another: neither one is superior, both simply different, which means my time is best spent not ruminating or panicking, but welcoming with curiosity and openness the experiences that arise as a result of life’s mysterious blend of personal agency and random chance. Here I find myself, doing this. What if I accepted my reality instead of resisting it? Could I explore its details and edges, settle in, be present, and even enjoy myself?

Easier said than done sometimes, I know, but damn it, I’m out here trying.

See you next week, and until then, let’s all throw our phones into the sea.6

♥︎ Emily

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Mild ear infection and sense of disorientation aside, it’s been a pretty solid week for me. Jordan and I took a quick trip to Richmond for my birthday, I finished a couple of good books, and RiverRun International Film Festival kicked off here in Winston, which is always an exciting time.

Read this week

I’m not a Lauren Groff completist quite yet,2 but she is absolutely one of my auto-read authors and I’ve been eagerly anticipating Brawler, her newest story collection that came out in February. Let me tell you: it did not disappoint, and in fact might have exceeded my expectations??

Each of these stories is distinct in its characters and plot details, but they all share a tinge of darkness that I found really tasty. There’s violence, generational trauma, bad choices regarding substances, and a lot of packing up and running away. As a collection it’s just so deliciously scrappy. Every piece pulled me in immediately and made me feel like part of the world Groff was creating; there were truly no skips and no misses.

In other 2026 release news, Patrick Cottrell’s sophomore novel, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, comes out tomorrow and I was lucky enough to read an early copy.3 This one caught me by surprise a month or two ago—I remember enjoying his 2017 debut, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, back in 2019, but had been blissfully unaware that another one was coming.

Afternoon Hours has autobiographical elements but is fiction, existing in the same world as Cottrell’s previous book. Protagonist Dan Moran is a trans, Korean teacher and writer and amateur detective whose adoptive brother died by suicide five years earlier (which is the central subject of Sorry). Here we find him returning to his childhood home for the anniversary of this sad event, hoping to uncover more information about exactly what happened to cause the death. His family, most of whom he hasn’t seen in the intervening years, don’t know how to act around him. Many of them misgender him, and some don’t even realize who he is at first. The interactions are uncomfortable, Dan’s loneliness and grief still very palpable. And yet there’s a dry humor underneath it all that I really appreciated, a certain quality to Dan’s voice that compelled me to keep reading. As soon as I finished this one I picked up a copy of its predecessor to revisit; I’ll tell you about it next time.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Currently watching

This week featured a nice balance of comfort rewatches and brand new films! First, the familiar stuff:

If you’re a fan of The Lonely Island, or such classic SNL digital shorts as Lazy Sunday, Natalie Raps, Threw it on the Ground, etc and you somehow missed Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016), fling whatever device you’re reading this on aside and go watch. It’s a mockumentary about Conner 4 Real, a former member of pop group The Style Boyz who has gone solo and been insanely successful—until his newest record flops and his life falls apart and he has to reckon with and repair the bridges he has burned. The humor is deeply stupid but right up my alley, the songs are hilariously problematic and catchy as hell, the cast is insane, and at one point Seal gets attacked by wolves. What else could one want in these trying times?

Perhaps a bit of tenderness, you might respond? Okay, sure. In that case, get thee to Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020) posthaste. This is maybe THE funniest and most heartwarming show I’ve ever seen. If you’re unfamiliar, it follows the Rose family, formerly rich but brought low by the devious misdeeds of their onetime business manager, forced to make a new home in the small town of Schitt’s Creek. Though initially resistant, they eventually come to befriend their neighbors, the type of people they used to make fun of and look down on, all the while strengthening their bond as a family and figuring out a way forward.

Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy are masters of endearing comedy and their group dynamic with Annie Murphy and Dan Levy is spot on. Just thinking about certain scenes from this show can make me laugh and/or well up. Seriously, if you somehow haven’t seen it yet, GET ON THAT.

And now for a few RiverRun delights!

If I Go Will They Miss Me (2026) was one of the festival’s opening films on Friday night. It’s largely focused on Lil Ant, a young Black boy living in Los Angeles whose father, Big Ant, has just returned home from prison. The two have a complicated relationship: Lil Ant idolizes his dad and only wants his approval and love, but Big Ant doesn’t know how to fill this role and ends up withdrawing in response to the attention. I found the airplane imagery to be a little heavy-handed, but the cinematography is gorgeous and I loved the soundtrack and the tenderness of the story.

Of the very strong short film program I saw Saturday night, Scissors (2026) was a stand-out favorite. It’s a horror comedy about a male would-be slasher who makes the mistake of invading a house full of lesbians. The legitimately tense moments are balanced by perfectly-delivered lines, self-aware gestures to queer archetypes, and visual humor. RiverRun is screening this whole late-night lineup virtually through May 3 and you can buy tickets here.

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably at least somewhat plugged into the book world and have heard about all the bans and attempted bans happening in school libraries over the past few years. That’s what the documentary The Librarians (2025) is about, with a particular focus on the origins of this upsetting wave of activity in Texas circa 2021. To those of us who value acceptance, safety, and intellectual freedom, it is discouraging and heavy. But the heroic librarians being highlighted here also serve as a hopeful reminder that even during dark times, even in hate-filled spaces where logic and reason seem to have completely vanished, there are people speaking up and fighting for what is right. This is such an important film.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, April 13

Office for the day
doesn’t have walls or ceiling,
just green leaves, fresh air

Tuesday, April 14

Hurry, pack a bag
We’re off on an aventure,
to see what unfolds

Wednesday, April 15

All I ever want
for my birthday is freedom
to follow my whims

Thursday, April 16

Thin, crisp layers of
buttery, golden pastry
filled with chocolat

Friday, April 17

Theater abuzz
with the hum of audience
eager to begin

Saturday, April 18

Might I recommend
a glass of vinho verde
and a bookstore browse

Sunday, April 19

Imagine your life
being threatened for helping
children find good books

Until next time

One of the best parts of our brief stay in Richmond was wandering down a hill at Maymont and discovering a Japanese garden, nestled around a small lake and tucked away like a secret. With so much to look at and take in, I nearly missed the enormous bullfrog hidden amongst the cypress knees. But once I spotted it, I noticed another one, and another, then three more a few feet farther down the path, and I don’t know why, but these little guys absolutely made my day. Oh, to be belly-deep in cool water on a ninety-degree afternoon.

See you next week, and until then, please enjoy this pygmy slow loris moment of zen.

♥︎ Emily

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□ The Monsters of Templeton
□ Delicate Edible Birds (stories)
□ Arcadia 
⌧ Fates and Furies
⌧ Florida (stories)
⌧ Matrix
⌧ The Vaster Wilds
⌧ Brawler (stories)

Once again I’m thinking about free will, this time in the context of aging, of shedding a bit more self-consciousness with each passing year, of following my whims when it comes to appearance and figuring out how to feel more and more like myself as I get older. Life is short, I’m realizing. So I got bangs!

Read this week

It’s been a decade since Maria Semple released a novel, and a little more than that since I first read and fell in love with her breakout Where’d You Go, Bernadette. So I am delighted to tell you about her new one, Go Gentle, which comes out tomorrow!1 Like Bernadette, this one has a bit of a mystery at its core. And it’s very quirky. It won’t be for everyone, but I had a good time.

Go Gentle follows Adora Hazzard, a middle-aged philosopher, mother, and divorcée, who lives in a historic old building in New York with her “coven” of fellow single women2 and serves as moral tutor to the twin sons of an extremely rich and famous family. Her focus is Stoicism, and any time a problem arises, she has the exact Epictetus, Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius quote necessary to solve it. But when she meets a handsome stranger seemingly by chance, in line for the ballet of all places, she suddenly feels something unfamiliar, something that flies in the face of her beloved Stoics: desire. And as she learns more about this man, how he might be connected to her employers, a suspicious art deal they’re brokering, and even her own past, she has to figure out how her emotions fit in to her previously simple and cerebral life.

I don’t know that I ever fully came to understand Adora as a character, but I love how weird and smart and multi-faceted she is. While scrolling Maria Semple’s wikipedia page I found out that she wrote for Arrested Development and had a tiny part in I Heart Huckabees, and now I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Go Gentle gets adapted because the vibes are totally in line with both of those things and I could absolutely see it as a movie.

Having somehow met almost all my April release deadlines (one more to go, but that’s for next week), I took a break after Go Gentle to read something from my older unread shelf: Dig by A.S. King. This was a used bookstore find back in 2021 and is freshly on my radar because the author will be visiting my local bookstore for an event this week.3

Dig is the story of a family, kind of, but a super dysfunctional and fragmented one. We bounce between multiple different perspectives as identities are slowly revealed and connections gradually established. It’s about whiteness, racism, privilege, and complicity, and though sometimes those themes felt a little forced or heavy-handed, I liked the emphasis on breaking generational cycles and being the change. There is also a bit of magic at play, which adds intrigue and keeps the pages turning. I think I would’ve really eaten this up as a teenager.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Watched this week

Let me add my voice to the chorus: Project Hail Mary (2026) is so good! The adaptation is pretty faithful, hitting most of the major plot points of the book and not changing anything too egregiously. The casting is spot-on, Ryan Gosling simultaneously smart and funny and self-deprecating and earnest, his friendship with Rocky silly and tender. The visuals and music are stunning. I loved the addition of Carl, played by Lionel Boyce from The Bear. At 2 hours and 36 minutes, it’s a long film, but I was captivated throughout and never once checked my watch. Andy Weir’s blend of high stakes, humor, and emotion translates perfectly to the screen, and I left the theater teary and smiling, with my hand on my heart. I can’t wait to see it again.

This week I made it my beeswax to watch The Devil Wears Prada (2006) since the sequel is opening in a few short weeks! It was as I remembered: an upsetting amount of fat jokes,4 but also Meryl Streep serving peak ice queen, a classic Anne Hathaway glow-up montage featuring Stanley Tucci as fairy godmother of the Runway sample closet, a super nostalgic early 2000s soundtrack, and so many excellent Emily Blunt moments. It holds up. Now I kind of want to re-read the book, too.

I recently found The Lego Movie (2014) on blu-ray for cheap at the used bookstore and snatched it up to finally watch since I remember hearing good things about it when it came out.5 And yeah, ‘twas fun! Full disclosure, I got too cozy on the couch and might have drifted off a little toward the end, but the 92% I was conscious for was a great time. I liked the characters, and the lego animation, and how the live action section pulled everything together in a heartwarming way. And it was nice, after having known the song “Everything is Awesome” for many years, to experience it in its original context.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, April 6

Good morning! Lock in!
Let your focus waver not.
We’ve a job to do.

Tuesday, April 7

Nervous excitement
Deep breath in, then hard exhale
Face, freshly adorned

Wednesday, April 8

This body is yours,
so settle in, decorate,
make it feel like you

Thursday, April 9

It’s never as hard
when you face it together
Don’t be a hero

Friday, April 10

Almost forty and
still trying to make you proud—
I hope it’s working

Saturday, April 11

Your long limbs wrapped tight,
the koala to my tree
standing strong and sure

Sunday, April 12

We order takeout,
I nod off during a film:
A perfect evening

Until next time

One of the little things that brings me joy this time of year is completing the transition from flannel sheets to cool cotton. There’s simply nothing better than the smell of a fresh set, the feeling of sliding into their welcoming chill at the end of a humid spring day, under the lazy spinning of a ceiling fan. Sending you the nighttime serenade of crickets, owls, and tree frogs through an open window, and sweet, restful slumbers.

That’s it for now! See you Monday, boss.

♥︎ Emily

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But before I launch (accidental space pun) into it, what have you been enjoying lately—books, music, podcasts, hobbies, recipes, etc? How are you staying alive and sane?

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Read this week

Alas, I haven’t gotten around to seeing the movie yet, but as I hinted in last week’s newsletter, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir was a truly delightful reading experience. I went into it relatively unspoiled and liked it that way, so I won’t say too much about the plot—only that the story begins with our protagonist waking up from a coma and slowly piecing together who and where he is, which turns out to be a middle school science teacher named Ryland Grace, on a space ship headed toward a distant star. And maybe he has to figure out how to save all of humanity back on Earth?? It’s casual. Andy Weir has a real talent for including lots of Technical Science Stuff without it being overwhelming to Non-Science People (me) or distracting from the emotional core of the narrative, and for perfectly balancing high stakes with humor. I can’t wait to see Ryland’s adventures played out on the big screen.

My book club’s pick for this month’s meeting was Culpability by Bruce Holsinger. As the title suggests, this is a novel all about blame and responsibility, and it centers around a collision that the Cassidy-Shaw family experiences in their autonomous minivan, one that is unfortunately fatal for the elderly couple in the other car. Teenage son Charlie is in the driver’s seat, dad Noah is the passenger up front, and mom Lorelai is in back with daughters Izzy and Alice, and right before impact Charlie jerks the wheel to avoid a hazard, which disables the vehicle’s self-driving system. So who is at fault here? The answer might seem clear at first, but over the course of the book we find out more about each family member and their potential contribution to what happened, and things become much murkier. Holsinger is taking a subtly suspenseful look at a timely topic, which I summed up at our club conversation as “compelling but also kinda made me want to die?”1 This is a page-turner for sure, with plenty to discuss.

Speaking of wanting to die,2 I was so locked into Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead by Mai Nguyen that I went out to read on the front porch after my nephew’s birthday party on Saturday, just planning on “a few minutes before I make dinner,” and then accidentally stayed a full hour and a half to finish it. The premise is heartbreaking (content warning for loss of an infant): Cleo and her best friend Paloma both become pregnant around the same time and, even luckier, go into labor almost simultaneously—but while Paloma comes home with a healthy baby, Cleo’s does not survive. To put it mildly, she is wrecked. She isn’t due back at work for a year, but she doesn’t know how to fill her days; being in the house near the well-stocked nursery full of things her daughter will never use feels impossible. So when a new job opportunity pops up unexpectedly, assistant to the director at the funeral home where they held her baby’s service, Cleo figures why the hell not and accepts. While terrible, her journey through grief is also tender, and bizarre, and sometimes funny, and ultimately full of warmth and hope. The vibes reminded me a little of Emily Austin’s work, which of course I adore, and if you’re a fan of hers, or of tough-but-rewarding stories about lovable weirdos, I definitely recommend checking it out when it releases on April 14.3

So remember last Monday when I said I might’ve overcommitted re: early copies of upcoming releases for this month? Well after I finished that post, two more that I’d forgotten requesting showed up in the mail, both of which come out tomorrow, and damned if I didn’t make it through them in less than 48 hours combined. 😅 Fortunately they were short!

The jacket copy calls Body Double by Hanna Johansson4 (translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson) “a Hitchcockian literary thriller,” but I would summarize it a bit more crassly as “the best kind of mindfuck.” It’s about a couple of women, Naomi and Laura, who meet by chance in a department store when one of them accicentally takes the other’s nearly identical coat. From there we alternate between their perspectives as they go about their daily lives, one working at a radio station and the other typing up transcriptions for a ghostwriter, the two coincidentally crossing paths a few more times before eventually becoming friends (or more?) and moving in together. It gets weird! Time is wobbly—is this linear, or are certain sections flashbacks? Naomi and Laura start to look more alike, but who is imitating whom, and why? What is going on here?? And the best part is that there are no clear answers! Just delicious ambiguity and the opportunity for intense speculation. YUM. Everyone go read this and let’s talk.

Last but not least, I made my way through Transcription by Ben Lerner in one sitting this morning and figured I’d go ahead and tell you about it since it’s coming out tomorrow! I was encouraged to request it from the publisher5 after reading ’s intriguing review, which mentions memory, technology, and the crisis of a broken phone. Indeed, the opening section—one of three, each centered around and named for a different hotel, something I haven’t yet cracked the meaning of but am pondering—is immediately gripping in its urgency. The narrator, right before a final interview with his 90-year-old mentor and former professor, drops his phone in the hotel sink, rendering it unusable and stranding himself without a recording device to capture the conversation. His instant sense of panic, of being completely unmoored, is tangible and upsettingly relatable.6 What follows is largely thought- and dialogue-based and reminded me a bit of Larisa Pham’s Discipline from earlier this year; but where Pham muses about art, nostalgia, and the passage of time, Lerner is more focused on memory, technology, and truth. It’s only 130 pages, but there’s a lot to think about here and I can see myself mulling over these ideas for quite a while to come.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Recent listening

When it rains, it pours! For the last few weeks I’ve been working through a backlog of new episodes from the podcasts I subscribe to, but now that I’m caught up, I have more headphone time available for music. Which is good because there’s a freaking BOUNTY of it right now. This little round-up of four new and new-to-me albums barely scratches the surface of what’s on my list to check out.

Bleeds by Wednesday has been in heavy rotation this week because they played a show in Winston last night7 and I had to prepare! What impressed me most about these songs was their range—one minute the vibes are down-tempo folksy americana (“Elderberry Wine,” “The Way Love Goes”) and the next everything is distortion and yelling (“Pick Up That Knife,” “Wasp”). Something for everyone, indeed. In her September 2025 review for NPR, a really thoughtful and beautifully written piece, Ann Powers estimated it to be the rock album of the year. If you’re a fan of Waxahatchee you will definitely like Wednesday.

In other concert-prep news, The New Pornographers’ new album, The Former Site Of, released on March 26 and I really like it! The songs are uptempo and poppy but the slightest bit subdued compared to some of their earlier releases. The vocal harmonies are bright and perfect. The vibes are akin to Challengers, maybe my favorite of their records, and though I can’t explain exactly why, it’s bringing me a lot of joy. I’m looking forward to many more listens as next month’s show at Haw River Ballroom gets closer.

VOLUMES: ONE by Bon Iver is finally here and I’m sure “Heavenly Father” is relieved for its siblings to be out in the world and available to share the burden of my enthusiasm.8 Now I can also obsessively listen to masterful live performances of “666,” “Man Like U,” “Hey, Ma,” and “33 ‘GOD’,” just to name a few! The two Bon Iver shows I’ve been lucky enough to experience have been some of the most impressive and memorable of my adult life so far—and so what a treasure, the feeling of being there preserved on vinyl to revisit whenever I wish. I hope that, as the title suggests, there will be more to come in this curated live series.

I had no idea that a new Robyn album was on its way, so when I opened Qobuz a couple Fridays ago and saw Sexistential among the new releases, I literally gasped in surprise and delight. Our tiny otherworldly robot queen! Yes!! Even though these tracks are all about middle age and motherhood and other such Serious Topics, they are just as catchy as her songs of yore. Give them a listen and if you don’t instantly find yourself illuminated by purple flashing lights doing the electric slide on the surface of the moon, I owe you $5.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, March 30

Echoing across,
chuckle like a ringing bell
from your yard to mine

Tuesday, March 31

If you stay inside
what is known, your comfort zone
you’ll miss the expanse

Wednesday, April 1

The combination
of espresso and cocoa
is simply unmatched

Thursday, April 2

What a relief, to
move unhurried through a chore
to resist the rush

Friday, April 3

Wandering, aimless
guided by impulses, not
written agenda

Saturday, April 4

Gap-toothed, beanpole boy
I lift you up, spin around
Please don’t outgrow me

Sunday, April 5

Heads bob and pit churns
This gathering of heathens—
just what I needed

Until next time

We are in prime running season right now: it’s sunny enough for shorts but cool enough to prevent sweating to death. And my favorite greenway trail is lined with beautiful blooming trees! Since it won’t get dark for another couple of hours, perhaps I’ll go for a little jog after I post this newsletter. I hope you have something to look forward to this evening, too. Sending blue skies and cherry blossoms your way.

See you next Monday, and until then, the doctor prescribes Chopin and abundant rest.

♥︎ Emily

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But I’m here now, and I’m excited to tell you about the one sentence1 I read this week, and the jams that literally made me run faster, and all the stuff I’m looking forward to in the near future.

Read this week

Honestly, Herscht 07769 by Lásló Krasznahorkai is not something I would’ve picked up on my own. It’s long, and in translation, and comprised of one extended run-on sentence, and the cover isn’t really giving “book I’d be into.” But it was chosen for art museum book club, and we know I’m a dork who loves a homework assignment, so I buckled up and gave it a try.

I’d call this an ensemble piece. It most closely follows Florian Herscht, the “gentle giant” of his east German town, who has been taking night classes in physics and is now convinced that the universe could end at any moment. When he isn’t at his day job erasing graffiti with his father-figure Boss (who is also a Nazi on the side!), he is writing letters to Angela Merkel, the only one he thinks can help save the world from imminent disaster. But the narrative jumps seamlessly between many other people in Florian’s world too, detailing the minutiae of their days and exploring the connections between them. In that aspect, it reminded me a bit of Toni Morrison’s Paradise.

There’s so much going on here—a disappearance or two, a serial graffiti vandal, a wolf attack, an obsession with J.S. Bach, an overabundance of honey for sale. Krasznahorkai uses the lack of sentence breaks to create a frenetic sense of urgency that builds on itself as the book progresses, and the cycling of characters into and out of the reader’s field of vision mimics the behavior of subatomic particles.2 The frequent transitions from person to person bring Virginia Woolf’s writing to mind; I love how the focus on a large group of individuals not only provides insights into each of them but also simultaneously builds a tapestry-like understanding of the community as a whole.

And while I’d call this more of a plot book than a language one, I did write down some good out-of-context quotes:

• “there’s nothing better than tomatoes on the vine, he said to Jacob-Friedrich, for this it is worthwhile to survive the winter”

• “not too long ago he had discovered the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and he felt that contained within this discovery were instructions in the event of a catastrophe, but he only felt this, he didn’t know the exact contents of these instructions”

• “I don’t believe in the kind of life that’s being forced on us, always buying new stuff and then tossing it out, well what kind of behavior is that? what kind of thinking is that?!”

• “there was no cure for weeping and it was not regulated by any kind of law”

Herscht 07769 is not an easy read, but it’s less intimidating than I initially feared, and really compelling in both granular and big-picture ways—it left me thinking about order and chaos and evil and complicity, and it made me itch to sit down at the piano and re-learn some of my old favorite Bach inventions.3 Group conversation definitely improved my understanding and appreciation of it, so if you’re interested in tackling this one, maybe rope a friend or two into book-clubbing it with you!

On the horizon…

• After wrapping up Project Hail Mary this morning, I’m looking forward to catching the adaptation in theaters soon so I can hopefully talk about both book and movie next week

• I might’ve slightly over-committed myself, but here are the April releases I have early copies of that I’ll be telling you about in the next little bit:

  • Body Double by Hanna Johansson (trans. Kira Josefsson)

  • Go Gentle by Maria Semple

  • Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead by Mai Nguyen

  • Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell

• Jenny Lawson’s new book, How to Be Okay When Nothing is Okay is coming out tomorrow! It snuck up on me but I’m so pumped and will be buying a copy immediately! I simply love her.

• I found out JUST THIS MORNING that another of my favorite authors, Dave Eggers, has a new release coming in June! And I might have snagged an early copy, so stay tuned for thoughts—I doubt I’ll be able to wait very long before diving into it.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Seen and heard this week

I’ve mentioned that Jordan and I rewatched the original run of Dexter and have been working our way through the spinoffs and continuations that came after, but I forgot to share our most recent update! We finished Dexter: Original Sin, which is only ten episodes. The whole thing is a flashback to Dexter’s early twenties as he’s just getting started on his serial killer journey, and the interior monologue voiceovers are Michael C. Hall but the younger versions of all the original characters are played by new actors. It’s… fine? I enjoyed the novelty of it for an episode or two, but after that I just wanted the “real” versions of all my people back. And by the end I was annoyed that the initial framing of the show, that is, a near-death Dexter at the end of New Blood having a life-flashing-before-his-eyes experience, was completely discarded? or forgotten? Anyway. Onwards and upwards to Dexter: Resurrection, which picks up where New Blood left off and feels much truer to the show I know and love.

On the music front: do you guys remember Girl Talk?? My friend Caleb just reminded me of the album Night Ripper (2007) and revisiting it made me so happy. If you’re unfamiliar, this is basically forty-two minutes of nonstop, seamless mashup medleys, featuring pop, hip-hop, rap, and alternative hits from the early 2000s. It took me right back to my college days. And, fun fact that I learned when I blasted it in my earbuds on a recent run, the first several tracks match my stride almost exactly. After months of exclusively listening to podcasts while I exercised, this shaved a full minute off my average mile pace. Okay!

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, March 23

Human becomes art
a living installation
in this golden light

Tuesday, March 24

Each deviation
makes returning to routine
all the more welcome

Wednesday, March 25

Solving one problem
unearths a new looming threat
In all things, balance

Thursday, March 26

An endurance read,
a marathon of phrases
Where is my trophy?

Friday, March 27

Heart light and feet quick
propelled by nostalgia and
beats that just won’t quit

Saturday, March 28

It’s easy to purge
possessions when they’re covered
in fine plaster dust

Sunday, March 29

Change into real clothes
venture out into the world
in search of a scent

Until next time

Truly all I want to do these days is sit on my porch with a snack and a book and a stick of incense. If you need to find me, check here.

See you next Monday, and until then, take it easy, big dog.

♥︎ Emily

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Read this week

“I don’t know by what accident the builders had managed it, but instead of a remodeled bathroom attached to my bedroom, they had installed a prison cell.” So begins The Renovation by Kenan Orhan, the story of a woman named Dilara whose home improvement project, necessitated by her father moving in so she can care for him as his Alzheimer’s progresses, goes awry. She calls her contractor to report the mistake and have it corrected, but when she repeatedly fails to get an answer she eventually gives up and the prison cell slowly becomes part of her life. Through its strange constant presence and Dilara’s evolving relationship to it, Orhan delves into ideas about exile, home, fascism, womanhood, family, community, and longing. What I appreciated most about this book, though, and what left the biggest impression, probably due to my own family’s history with dementia, were the beautiful meditations on language, communication, caregiving, and memory. This observation about Dilara’s father hit hard, as it’s something I’ve noticed and felt during conversations with my own mom:

His thoughts had become slippery as eels in silvery rivers and the words to wrangle them had wriggled out of his head, leaving precious few phrases that now had to stand in for so much more, for all the sputtering thoughts that he could no longer articulate. (16)

And as I continue my gradual education in French, spanning many years at this point and still ongoing, I’m thinking about how that knowledge might be fundamentally changing who I am:

As we learn a new language, [an article that Dilara recalls reading in a psychology newsletter] explained, we become a different person. As we access different linguistic structures, our personalities shift: to reflect the different concepts available to us through different words, but also because of the new company we keep in a new language, and because of our preconceived notions about the language—all these things alter who we become under it. (34)

For Dilara the idea of language comes into play because she and her family are political exiles from their home country of Turkey, transplanted in Italy and slowly losing their native Turkish as they rely more frequently on Italian. The way this weaves together with her father’s medical loss of memory and increasing inability to communicate is masterful. The other aspect of The Renovation that felt especially relatable and timely in this moment was its focus on authoritarianism and political unrest. As the United States becomes an ever scarier and less predictable place by the day, I’m holding onto this tentative yet stubborn sense of optimism:

I was positively effervescent with hope. The country needed desperation, it needed resentment and rage, to shake it out of its fatal apathy. (173)

Note to self: don’t let the onslaught of worsening news numb you. Keep fighting, keep feeling.

Speaking of feeling—I finished Lindy West’s new memoir, Adult Braces, yesterday and it punched me squarely in my emotions in the VERY BEST WAY. I first fell in love with Lindy West when I read Shrill in 2019 and watched the Hulu adaptation with my friend Anna shortly after. Later that same year, The Witches are Coming was released and I gobbled that one up as well. Lindy1 is my favorite kind of writer: funny as hell (like, actual laughter), but also smart, and sharp, and deeply lovable too. She cares about a lot of the same things I do and it’s clear that she just gets it. I haven’t yet read her third book, Shit, Actually, and I kind of lost track of her during the weird time warp years of COVID, so it was extra exciting to find out a few months ago that not only was a new one on its way, but also SHE HERSELF would be stopping in my city on book tour.

First let me tell you about the event, since that happened on Tuesday, before I started Adult Braces. Lindy and her conversation partner, Ron, rolled into town a few minutes late, so the whole thing started with a slightly chaotic, out-of-breath energy and there was a lot of laughter as she read a section of the “Adult Braces” chapter aloud. I was immediately charmed. The discussion went so many great places after that—figuring out who you are apart from your relationship(s), learning not to just tolerate but to love your body (and to feel sexy even?!), taking inspiration from other media,2 going on a road trip and becoming “part girl, part van” followed by the bittersweetness of returning home afterward, being able to write this latest book in “a normal adult way” instead of during a panicked all-nighter right before deadline, taking immense pride in good work despite the discourse in response to it. And no one (me) cried when she talked about how, before receiving an ADHD diagnosis in adulthood, she always just thought she was a lazy person who couldn’t follow through on anything!!

Despite our shared anxious tendencies and general signing line ambivalence, Anna and I got our books personalized and chatted with Lindy for a few minutes after the event, and I’m so glad we did. I hadn’t had the best day, but this hour was exactly the medicine I needed; I left feeling positively buoyant.

So obviously I had to ride this high and dive into Adult Braces as soon as possible.3 Let me tell you, if I didn’t have a “job” and “responsibilities,” I would have inhaled this book in one sitting. It is hard—the whole thing is that, after finding out that her husband has been acting on his polyamorous nature without her knowledge for some time, and then having something of a midlife identity crisis as she approaches forty,4 she rents a van and embarks on a solo roadtrip from her home in Seattle to Key West and back. Along the way she wrestles with a lot of emotional buildup and codependent tendencies5 and feelings about her body and doubts about herself. But I will say again: it’s SO FUNNY. And so vulnerable, and so real. Just a big-hearted, deeply affirming, expansively hopeful, truly good time. I was sad when it ended. I already want to start it again. Please, go read this book.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, March 16

Stay present, stay calm
Don’t jump to catastrophe
when none yet exists

Tuesday, March 17

When a stranger’s words—
so familiar, so pointed—
could have been your own

Wednesday, March 18

Cry it all out, then
wake up from disappointment
and begin anew

Thursday, March 19

There’s something tender
to transitional moments—
these, the good old days

Friday, March 20

Birdsong at sundown
darkening bruise-purple sky
and me, on my porch

Saturday, March 21

A cake so tasty
that a thief couldn’t resist
absconding with it

Sunday, March 22

I become machine—
keen eye detects blemishes,
rag wipes them away

Until next time

“See America while crying!” on the side of Lindy West’s tour van made me giggle, but it has also stuck with me. As a sensitive person who is sometimes depressed, I often make decisions about my day based on my mindset and emotions. Do I feel good enough to do that? Do I have the energy? Am I capable? But now I’m wondering, what if I did the thing anyway—saw the metaphorical country despite my metaphorical tears, through my metaphorical tears, and let the experience change me, likely for the better? Maybe easier said than done, especially from my current vantage point of relatively stable mental health. I’ll be thinking about it, though, next time my brain chemistry tries to keep me wallowing inside. If Lindy can do it…

See you next Monday, and until then, LOOK UPON THESE BABY SAND CATS!!

♥︎ Emily

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Read this week

I had missed the fact that Nedra Glover Tawwab put a new book out, but when I saw a slightly damaged copy on the shelf of prizes at book trivia last month, I snatched it right up. This one’s called The Balancing Act and it’s about how we connect with the people in our lives, be they friends, family members, romantic partners, or acquaintances. There are chapters about different types of dependency, enmeshed relationships, how past trauma can affect our present-day attachment styles, surface connections versus deep ones, balancing independence with dependence, and more.

My favorite section is focused on the importance of vulnerability and asking for support; I’m not always the best in those areas, but as with her other books, Tawwab provides lots of ideas and specific examples to make real-life application of the information easy and straightforward. I wouldn’t call anything here groundbreaking, but there are many good reminders and tidbits, laid out simply and intuitively, and I know this book will be a useful reference to return to in the future when I need a refresher. If you ever find yourself overthinking your interactions, questioning certain relationships, or worrying that you’re too dependent (or too detached), it might also be just what you need.

It’s Toni Morrison month in The Stacks book club and this year we’re reading Paradise, the story of an all-Black town in Oklahoma, a small nearby community of outcast women, and the ways the two interact, both amongst themselves and with each other, the situation eventually building to a violent conclusion. From this complete banger of an opening sentence, the ending scene is set:

They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.

We then jump back in time and Morrison gradually shows us how things got to this point. Because I checked out a digital copy from the library, I didn’t realize how long it was until I was a good ways in—but I ended up taking it slowly, over the course of the whole week, really getting familiar with the world she has created in these pages. There are lots of characters and seemingly infinite relationships between them: siblings, married couples, friends, cousins, newcomers, family. If I ever read this one again, I will do so with a pen in my hand so I can draw a sprawling tree of these connections and maybe have a chance of keeping them all straight in my head. As it was, I did sometimes end up just letting sections of prose wash over me when I couldn’t quite remember who a character was or how they tied into what was going on; it would usually come back within a page or two and I’d be able to reorient myself once again in the complex web of the Ruby and Convent communities.

This is definitely one of the more challenging Morrison novels that I’ve read so far, but it’s rich and rewarding, too. I’m looking forward to listening to the Stacks discussion episode later this month and hopefully filling in some gaps in my personal understanding of it.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Currently listening

As predicted last time, I spent some time with Francis of Delirium’s new single, “It’s a Beautiful Life,” this week. Musically it’s a little faster paced than a lot of her other songs, with an almost frenetic, unhinged vibe to it. And lyrically that makes sense, because it’s about the crazy-making parts of existence and our reactions to them, the way extreme heat and doomscrolling take us out of ourselves, the feeling of wanting to run away from everything or cut off all your hair. And yet, and yet. We keep going.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

All alone stuck in my room
Scrolling through hell,
inhaling doom
Oh, loneliness is rife
It’s a beautiful life

In other upcoming album and new single news: we finally have a widely available recording of “Heavenly Father” by Bon Iver!!! This is one of my FAVORITE things Justin Vernon has ever done, but I believe it was originally created for the film Wish I Was Here (2014) and never released outside of that soundtrack, which has been frustratingly hard to find on streaming platforms.1 So that’s why this is so exciting—an incredible live version is the first single off of Volumes: One, a compilation of selections from Bon Iver’s shows between 2019 and 2023 that’ll be out early next month. And friends, it is good! My “undefeated in making me cry” playlist heartily welcomes the new addition.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I just been up here for goddamn years
(can you see now?)
filling up hulls with goddamn fears
(I am free now) 
I know about it darling,
I been standing here
Heavenly father
is all that he offers
a safety in the end?

And finally, a moment of serendipity at the used bookstore yesterday afternoon:

My eyes drifted over to the new arrivals in the vinyl section, landing on an album cover that looked instantly familiar. When I approached and picked it up for inspection, I think I audibly gasped—it was Metric’s Art of Doubt (2018), an album of theirs that I’m less familiar with and didn’t yet own in physical form. Since we’re seeing them live this summer,2 what a perfect time to add it to my collection and get to know it better! I listened immediately when I got home and recognized some of the tracks (“Dark Saturday,” “Now or Never Now”), but also found some new-to-me favorites (“Underline the Black,” “Risk”). This will definitely be on heavy rotation as the concert gets closer.

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan and traditionally includes thematic reference to the seasons. Mine vary in topic, but I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, March 9

Measure a morning
in accumulating ash,
in vanilla smoke

Tuesday, March 10

Left alone to sit
illuminated aslant
in day’s final glow

Wednesday, March 11

Eyes might’ve slid past
this imperfection in bark,
but look closer: frog!

Thursday, March 12

Rise up from the grave
of foregone conclusions and
claim your agency

Friday, March 13

Why not take a chance?
Maybe this time it works out,
the exact right thing

Saturday, March 14

Bleary-eyed, giddy,
the path awash in high-beams
On my way to you

Sunday, March 15

Jagged white outline
on background of solid black
has me in its thrall

Until next time

When Jordan got home on Saturday night from a week or so of travel, one of the first things he said was “the daffodils are blooming!” And yes, I didn’t realize it had happened so suddenly, but spring seems to have arrived3 here in North Carolina. The forsythia bushes are covered in the most perfect yellow, the crocuses have popped up, and there is new growth on our hydrangea. There are still cold days here and there (and stormy ones, like today),4 but for the most part I just want to be out on the front porch, all the time. This is the delicious window between the cold and depression of winter and the existential dread-inducing heat of summer, when it’s just warm enough to be pleasant, all the plants are coming alive, and the mosquitos haven’t yet gotten the memo that it’s time to once again ruin my life on the daily. Gotta take advantage while I can.

See you next Monday, and until then, ockooo!

♥︎ Emily

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