Monday Miscellany: And and and and
Notes from May 11 - 17
Good afternoon and welcome to a new week! It feels like summer where I am (high of 91° today and tomorrow), but I’m out on the front porch under a ceiling fan with a glass of cold water and I truly can’t complain.
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.
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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