Monday Miscellany: My love language, this

Notes from October 13 - 19

Oct 20, 2025

Welcome to a new week! I’m coming to you today from our downtown library, where I walked after dropping my car off at the shop for service. The chill brought me inside, but I started out on the lovely third-floor balcony, one of my favorite places in the city to sit and read or write.

Something hasn’t felt quite October about this October so far, and though I can’t put my finger on exactly why, I think it might be finally settling into place. Good, since it’s already two-thirds over! I’m trying to squeeze as much goodness as possible out of what remains of my favorite month: these perfectly not-too-sweet pumpkin lattes, plenty of walking outside, hopefully some reading on my bench while the surrounding leaves are at their fiery orange best, and of course Halloween night with my best friend and favorite 5-year-old. How are you, friends? What’s bringing you life this autumn?

Read this week

I almost tried to wedge a fourth book into last week’s newsletter, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee, because I finished it Monday morning before I started writing, and it made such an interesting accidental pairing with Stone Yard Devotional. Like Stone Yard, it’s a novel in fragments, written from an unnamed woman’s perspective, loosely about what happens after the dissolution of a marriage, but the tone is very different. Where Charlotte Wood’s main character retreats to a community of nuns, musing on life’s big issues from a place that almost feels outside of time, the protagonist of Maggie is tethered to her Real Life by her children and her best friend, and does her deep thinking from the epicenter of her chaotic daily existence.

Maggie starts out with a dinner date, at which the narrator’s husband tells her that he’s been having an affair and that their marriage is over. Not long after, as the process of separating their combined life into two is really getting going, she discovers a lump in her breast that turns out to be a tumor—which she names Maggie, after the woman her husband is leaving her for. Based on the book’s bright cover design and the few reviews I’d seen floating around, I went in anticipating a light tone, a humorous take on a sad subject. And while there is wit, there’s also a lot more depth than I expected. Yee has a particular talent for descriptions of the mundane that are somehow also achingly poignant, like this bit of detail concerning the divvying up of possessions which made me cry in the space of two sentences:

From the hooks in our bathroom, we pull our whimsical, hooded terry-cloth towel, spoils from a drunken voyage to Target in our youth—me the shark and he the lion—and they too say their goodbyes. These wild things we used to be. (127)

But these moments are perfectly balanced by levity:

I think if enough bad things pile up, they inevitably cross over into comedy. […] A woman gets left for another woman—it’s tragic! She gets cancer on top of it—what else is there to do but throw your arms up in surrender, throw your head back and laugh? The hits just keep on coming. (159)

And also a TREE FACT to add to my collection!1

The largest, heaviest, most dense living organism ever found is the Pando tree, located in Utah. It looks like a forest, but it’s actually a single cohesive being. It is a forest of one. Clocking in at an estimated thirteen million pounds, it encompasses over 106 acres. It has a massive underground root system, which the experts guess started at the end of the last Ice Age. (186)

I just loved this reading experience and wouldn’t be surprised if Maggie ended up on my list of favorite books of the year.

Flesh by David Szalay was this month’s pick for my local art museum’s book club, and while our discussion definitely increased my appreciation for what Szalay is doing here, I think ultimately this one wasn’t for me. It’s all about István, a teenager when the novel opens, whose life just kind of happens to him, a series of disappointments and opportunities that he passively accepts and allows. We follow him up to middle age, at which point he has stumbled into wealth and a family, and the story closes with a few more unforeseen events that cast the whole book in a pretty bleak light.

To be clear, Szalay is a skilled writer and I didn’t have any major qualms with Flesh as a piece of literature. I think what didn’t work for me was István as a person. He certainly isn’t likable, but that’s not something I need in order to enjoy a book, and it would an oversimplification here in the first place. He isn’t really hateable either. He isn’t anything. He speaks in monosyllabic responses most of the time. Okay, yeah. He doesn’t seem to have any real opinions or ideas or personality at all. And this nothingness just left me feeling empty.

Skin Contact by Elisa Faison,2 though, is filled with characters that are nothing but personality and opinions and feelings. I inhaled it. This is the story of Frances and Ben, two young thirty-somethings who decide to open their marriage and explore queer polyamory before they try to have children. It isn’t just told from their perspective, though; there are chapters focusing on people they’re dating, several of their friends, Frances’ mother, and more. I’ve only read a few books before that use this technique, but I really like it—almost like interconnected short stories, or a patchwork quilt, the heart of the narrative slowly revealed from every possible angle. It’s visceral and sad and sexy and tender, filled with longing and possibility.

Skin Contact doesn’t come out until June of next year,3 but it’s available now for preorder. I highly recommend it if you like reading about marriage, relationships, queerness, friendship, societal expectations, and getting older—it plays well with books like All Fours by Miranda July, Luster by Raven Leilani, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, and Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker. And if you want a little preview taste, go read Faison’s short story “Group Sex,” which appears as a chapter in the novel!

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Seen and heard this week

To summarize One of Them Days (2025), I could just recycle the Katie Yee quote I included above: “I think if enough bad things pile up, they inevitably cross over into comedy.” Dreux and Alyssa, best friends and roommates, are behind on their rent and their landlord is threatening to evict them if they don’t catch up by the end of the day. The problem is, Alyssa has erroneously put her trust in a fuckboy, Dreux has a job interview at 4pm, and everything that could possibly go wrong—during every step of their madcap and ill-fated quest to get the money together in time—does. The stakes are high but the tone is silly, and I had a really good time cheering for Dreux and Alyssa as they clawed their way through this single day of misadventure.

I haven’t been listening to a ton of music lately, but on a meta note, I have been researching streaming services that aren’t Spotify! A few resources I’ve found helpful over the past week, in case you’re in the same boat: this Instagram reel, this Guardian article, this Reddit thread, and this blog post. So far I’m leaning Qobuz, but there are a lot of factors to consider: streaming quality, catalog size, artist payment, app design, discoverability features, and on and on. I’m also looking into the feasibility of simply buying my favorite albums in digital form and hosting them locally, a la the early days of iTunes and iPods. If you have any advice or experience to share, please do!

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!