Monday Miscellany: Switch off the safety, breathe out

Notes from February 16 - 22

Feb 24, 2026

Good evening! It’s Monday! I’m sending the newsletter out later than usual, but I hope you are safe and warm (especially if you’re dealing with winter storm Hernando) and have plenty of reading material and entertainment to keep you company. Among other things, I’m excited to tell you about a couple of brand new books releasing tomorrow, so let’s get into it—

Read this week

If you know the name Tayari Jones, I’m betting it’s because of her breakout novel An American Marriage, which released in 2018 and was chosen for Oprah’s book club. That was my first introduction, too, thanks to my local bookstore’s signed first edition club. After being deliciously ripped apart by Celestial and Roy’s story, a heartbreaking look at what happens when a Black man is wrongfully convicted of a crime and subsequently imprisoned for years, I went back and read Silver Sparrow, which centers on two half-sisters from the same father, one “legitimate” and one kept secret. I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a writer as masterful as Jones at handling nuance and complexity. She puts her readers right into her characters’ heads, making us feel like we know them intimately, like their motivations are our own—which makes conflict and misfortune extra heartbreaking in the end because we can see and empathize with all sides. In her newest book, Kin,1 she has pulled off the same impressive trick, this time with two orphaned “cradle friends,” Annie and Niecy, who met as babies and bonded over their shared lack of a mother, quickly coming to rely on each other as family.

Though their lives diverge when Annie unexpectedly escapes their small Louisiana town for new adventures in Memphis, their bond remains strong through letters, occasional visits, and the kind of loving support that one can just feel in the air, radiating across miles. Together, apart, they weather disappointments, fall in love, face new experiences in school or at their jobs, navigate relationships and breakups, contemplate marriage and pregnancy, and forever long for the mamas they’ve never had and always needed.

The plot is important, but Jones’ characterization of these two women is what truly shines in this book; what happens to them provides the canvas, and they are the paint. What we’re left with at the end is a years-long portrait of two overlapping lives, full of heartbreak but also a glorious testament to the beauty of deep and lasting friendship.

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley is another examination of a close relationship between girls, in this case biological sisters Georgie and Agatha Krishna. They live in rural Wyoming during the late 1980s, where their Indian family is singular amidst a majority white population and thus has to deal with invasive questions and microaggressions on a regular basis. When some of their relatives come over from India and temporarily move in with them, the girls face a new danger in the form of a sexually abusive uncle—and like Earl in the classic Chicks song, Vinny Uncle has to die. As you might guess from this setup, the content of Georgie’s story goes to some pretty dark places.

Killing my uncle was like screaming. And we had to scream. At the end of the day, we knew that no acknowledgment, no apology, no rewriting of our history could ever change how we felt. We didn’t want a sorry. We wanted it to stop. (137)

But for the most part, the tone of the writing is on the lighter side, with fourth-wall-breaking chapters addressed to “you” (the reader) and teen magazine style quizzes interspersed among the chronological narrative. I wasn’t always clear on what Nina McConigley was trying to accomplish with certain elements of this novel, but on the whole I enjoyed the reading experience2 and had a good time discussing it in Gretagram book club. I would recommend it especially to folks who enjoyed My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite.

Finally, I finished a memoir yesterday that will be releasing tomorrow3 alongside Kin, which I was drawn to because it’s about the author’s experience hiking the Camino in Spain.4 Everything Changes Everything by Lauren Kessler starts out on the path before drifting back in time to explain how Kessler ended up there—her husband and daughter have both died, and in their absence she is desperate for a challenge that will tire her body and quiet her mind.

There is a heft to grief […] that cannot be explained or therapized (or written) away. It must be borne. Like the damned backpack.

Several narratives emerge, one following her present-day progress as a pilgrim headed for Santiago de Compostela, the others in her memory, tracing the arcs of her husband’s illness and her daughter’s addiction. All of it is filled with difficulty and doubt and heartbreak.5 But I couldn’t put this book down. The way she describes the physical and mental struggles of so much walking, but the moments of trail magic too, put me right there with her. Her process of working through guilt and grief, of coming to terms with the losses she and her family suffered, is immediate and tangible and relatable.

This, also, is a lesson of the Camino that translates directly to life: that occasionally and gloriously, there are true aha moments, but mostly there is the long slog toward making sense of who you are.

If partner illness and death, addiction, abusive relationships, or child death are dealbreakers for you, absolutely skip it, but if you’re in a place where you can read about these difficult subjects, knowing that there is healing and hope on the other side, I highly recommend this memoir.

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Watched this week

About six months ago, we somewhat impulsively launched into a rewatch of the original Dexter in its entirety, which we finally finished a few weeks ago. Parts of it definitely didn’t hold up,6 but, and I think this is a direct quote of what I said to some friends about it, “murder-wise, it still hits.” I remembered the general arc of the series but had forgotten so many details about the individual seasons that I got to feel shocked and scared all over again. Do recommend having a terrible memory of particulars for this exact reason—what a lovely gift to yourself, to revisit an old favorite piece of media and experience it as if for the first time!

All that to say: when we finished the first eight seasons, obviously the move was to then explore the rest of the franchise, which now includes three separate spin-offs.

First up, Dexter: New Blood (2021). This mini series picks up about ten years after the events of the original Dexter finale, and finds Dexter living in Iron Lake, NY and going by the name Jim Lindsay. He hasn’t killed in a decade and he’s living a simple life—working at a hunting supply store, maintaining his cabin in the woods, dating the local police chief. He’s known and loved in his community. And then, someone shows up in town whose presence sets off a whole chain of increasingly troubling events, quickly turning Dexter’s quiet life into a terrifying mess. There are some plot holes and inconsistencies with the original show that annoy me a little if I think about them too hard,7 but generally I like what New Blood is doing and I appreciated its surprising yet deeply correct ending.8

Also! During the credits of one of the early New Blood episodes, I went “WAIT, is that Michael C. Hall singing?” and reader, yes, it was. I’d come across this information before, but had since forgotten—my dude is in a band called Princess Goes (formerly Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum), and the song was “Ketamine.” This realization cued up a lengthy Wikipedia rabbit hole about Hall’s life so far, which has been surprisingly eclectic and interesting. If you have ten minutes to kill, there are worse ways you could spend them.