Monday Miscellany: Positively effervescent with hope

Notes from March 16 - 22

Mar 23, 2026

Friends, I finished my first five-star book of the year and I’m so excited to tell you about it today (I don’t ever mention ratings here, but I think you’ll know which one I mean when you get to it)! Between that and a beautiful morning spent outside on my porch, featuring coffee and incense and another first of the year—a swallowtail sighting—I’m feeling content and ready to launch into the week. Beep beep, let’s go!

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.

One successful selfie and one even more successful selfie

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.

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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