Monday Miscellany: I came out of isolation with a joyous yawp

Notes from July 7 - 13

Jul 14, 2025

Hello from the end of ten full days spent in isolation at home! Like it was 2021 or something, Covid busted in out of nowhere and completely claimed the first third of my July, first infecting Jordan and then taking me down too. Rude! However, we were lucky with pretty mild cases, and the pause from real life gave me plentiful time to read (it’s kind of all I did), so I made it through FOUR books last week. Please forgive the resulting length of this first section—I’ll try to keep it as brief as possible!

Read this week

Action-packed thrillers aren’t usually among my go-to genres, but when I saw No Body No Crime by Tess Sharpe pitched as “Veronica Mars meets Yellowjackets,” I said okay, I’m interested! Plus it’s queer, and published by one of my favorite imprints, MCD? Yes please! The story starts off right after a plane crash, and what we know is that two young women have survived: Mel, a private investigator, and Chloe, her assignment. The two know each other from years prior, when they had a very brief thing, and now Mel is tasked with collecting Chloe and bringing her home to her family. Oh, and there are random men in the woods trying to kill both of them??

What follows is a narrative in multiple timelines and points of view, which gradually fills in the circumstances leading up to the crash while simultaneously extending outward from it toward a tense and dramatic conclusion. Mel and Chloe have to fill one another in on some crucial missing information and work together to evade a group of baddies that they’ve termed the Bag of Dicks, all while sorting through their shared history and lingering feelings for each other. There’s excitement! and humor! and yearning! and archery (sexy)! If you’re looking for a plot-driven rollercoaster ride of a novel to blitz through in one sitting on a summer afternoon, this is your guy. It comes out tomorrow!1

After finishing No Body No Crime in approximately a day and starting to realize how much nothing was on my immediate horizon, I decided to use the extra free time to knock out a couple of library loans that had been lingering on my shelf for a while. First, So Gay For You by Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig, a sweet dual memoir from the actors who played Alice and Shane on The L Word. I enjoyed reading about their childhoods,2 early experiences in the entertainment industry,3 and of course, how they ended up on the show I know them from, and how they became close lifelong friends.4 There are not one, not two, but THREE photo inserts in the book, which were a delight to flip through. I don’t know that this would appeal as strongly to folks who haven’t seen The L Word (the original, that is),5 but I thought it was a fun and poignant peek behind the scenes, and it definitely made me want to rewatch the series ASAP.

The next day I dug into Melissa Febos’s new memoir, The Dry Season. I read her previous release, an essay collection called Girlhood, several years ago and LOVED IT, so I was highly anticipating this one, subtitled “A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex.” As it says on the tin, Febos decides at the beginning of this chronicled experience to be celibate for a while—just three months at first, though she ends up extending the time frame—because she realizes that she has never been truly by herself and she doesn’t like the way she has come to rely on flirtation, seduction, and romantic relationships. She uses this period to dig into the history of celibacy and solitude and to find pleasure in previously overlooked aspects of being alone. She luxuriates in bed, enjoys food more fully, spends time with friends, follows her curiosity, revels in her work, and finally starts to understand what she might want her romantic life to look like moving forward. As an admirer of Febos’s mind and a lover of her writing style, I thought this account was simply excellent.

On Friday, Jordan off to work and a couple of solo days ahead of me with, still, nowhere to go, I threw caution to the wind and dove into The Fraud by Zadie Smith, a 454-page historical fiction behemoth that has been staring at me intimidatingly from my shelf for almost a year. Based on some real events and people, this one is about Eliza Touchet, who lives with her cousin, writer William Harrison Ainsworth from roughly the 1830s to the 1870s. The story hops around quite a bit within that time frame, extensively covering the famous Tichborne trial and detouring for a while into the life story of one of the witnesses, who grew up in Jamaica. Smith spends a good deal of time with Ainsworth’s contemporaries and friends, a group that includes Charles Dickens, and through Eliza’s interest and involvement we also learn about the movement to abolish slavery that was also happening during that era. Because it’s doing so much, this is definitely a book that I’ll need to think about and sit with a while. It’s my IRL book club’s pick for this month and I imagine that having other readers to discuss and unpack everything with will be really helpful.

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And another thing

Yesterday I came out of isolation with a joyous yawp, that is, by going with Jordan and my parents to an incredible outdoor I’m With Her and Iron & Wine show. We got to the amphitheater when doors opened at 5pm and had a glorious hour and a half to claim a good spot on the lawn, get something to eat, and take in the late summer afternoon ambiance before the concert started. Ken Pomeroy opened, who is not an older white man as I assumed from the name, but a 22-year-old Cherokee woman with insane guitar picking skills and a voice that is honey smooth. She mentioned during her set that a couple of her songs had been featured on Reservation Dogs, which means I’ve definitely heard her music before without realizing it. I was so happy to be formally reintroduced.

Look at my parents and their binoculars ♥︎

And then I’m With Her, my god! I know I’ve already gone on at length in previous newsletters about their new album and how much I love it, so I’ll try not to gush too much here. Just… they are some of the rare musicians whose voices and instrumental abilities are as astounding in person as they are in recordings. Listening to them harmonize in real time, witnessing their chemistry with each other on stage, and feeling the palpable joy they took in performing together, it was all so deeply fulfilling. And how special to share this experience with my parents, who are also musicians and lovers of song. My mom is hard of hearing, so I had the idea to pull up lyrics on my phone at the beginning of each song so she could read along and better understand. And my dad, well, I grew up listening to the singer-songwriters he loved, like Nanci Griffith and John Prine, so one of my favorite moments of the night was finding out together that “Wild and Clear and Blue” was written as a tribute to those two greats, inspired by their passing in 2020-2021.

I like Iron & Wine as much as the next indie kid of my generation, and their set was perfectly enjoyable, but the real treat was at the end of the show, when everyone came back out for a few final encore songs together. Including a little tune you might know called “Right Back to It,” by a little band you might’ve heard of called WAXAHATCHEE?! Musicians I love, honoring and admiring other musicians I love, and doing it all beautifully to a summer soundtrack of cicadas and tree frogs?? COME ON. I died.

What a welcome back to civilization.

Haiku round-up

Haiku is a poetic form that originated in Japan, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern. At the beginning of 2024, I started writing one every day, and while traditional examples include thematic reference to the seasons, mine tend to be a bit more all over the place. Here are this week’s efforts—enjoy!