What does one write about when they don’t know what to write about? When their artistic and writerly vision is blocked; blacked out by some fuzzed, amorphous dark shape. It’s times such as these that the block takes on a physical sensation: heavy and hot and paralyzing, right in the caverns of the brain. And I sit glued down, clueless and prose-deficient.

Earlier in my day, I thought about what life might be like if I were a music writer. It’s a glamorous life, the one I picture, complete with backstage passes and VIP interviews. Magazine spreads dedicated to a rock’n’roll beat. I imagine that maybe I’d be able to wax poetic about the early psychedelic sounds of the 1960s, of the heartfelt plucking from indie singer-songwriters, and the quick lyricism of rap. But, I have a deep fear. Fear of the block.

I’ve been feeling the block this entire past week, where somehow, I lived through it and wrote not one new word toward my novel. And now I’m back in my head: Can I be a novelist? Maybe short fiction is where I reside. My only strength. But I’d love to write a novel. I have written a novel, now I just have to make it better. Make it good.

I think about that famous John Steinbeck quote:

But tonight, I want to beat that saying into a pulp. A bloody pulp—picture strings of the entrails of oranges, sticky juice splattered on the counter. Dark maroon splatters against granite. That’s what I always tend to picture when I come across that phrase. ‘Bloody pulp.’ It’s fairly unserious.

And that’s sort of how I’m feeling at the moment: unserious. I’m thinking about how at the beginning of my father’s obituary, I did not write that he died or passed away or moved on or anything eloquent like that. I wrote that he ‘rested his eyes for the final time.’ A nod to what he’d always say as he laid down after work and we’d warn ‘Don’t fall asleep!’

“I’m not, I’m just resting my eyes.”

Can I say that to my novel? The daunting and seemingly impregnable manuscript that lies in my digital documents and in binders by my bed. Would it understand? But I keep thinking about it and I keep hearing people say they want to read it, and I’m trying. Maybe I need to schedule a writing retreat for myself. Somewhere, somehow.

I’m just a woman, my subconscious thinks. And a woman is not a machine.

Another part of me thinks this exhaustion works as more fodder. Yes, this half of me beckons, feel tired and sad and unworthy, feel inadequate and infuse that into the chapters. Because isn’t that how my characters feel? My protagonist, isn’t she so inexplicably tired and sad and feeling unworthy, inadequate? And she does, but I don’t want her to always feel this way.

And I don’t want to feel this way either.

It reminds me of that old adage about whether or not the most successful sad girl songwriters can still write well and be happy. I’ve heard it from my indie darling Eliza McLamb, from superstar billionaire Taylor Swift, from Olivia Rodrigo, from others I’m sure. Lorde’s Solar Power album didn’t do half as well as Melodrama did, and it didn’t leave nearly as many iconic cultural bangers.

I keep hearing the bass of ‘Perfect Places’ in the back of my mind. And now I really am wondering where they are. My instinct is to say my apartment with my husband. That’s a pretty perfect place to me right now, but what about all the parts of the world I’ve always wanted to see? I think again to the rollercoaster Pops loved riding with me. That could be a perfect place, suspended in time and free of grief. But what about all that’s happened since?

My current read is M Train by Patti Smith and I’m loving it because I love Patti Smith and I could read a thousand pages of her drinking coffee. She emboldens me to keep up this blog of personal essays, cataloging my days and my life and my thoughts as if they matter greatly to someone somewhere. I recently came across a quote from her that says something about grief becoming self-pity or something unless it’s turned into remembrance.

I want to keep ingesting this quote the way I’m manically ingesting Lorde’s “Perfect Places” while writing this (I have it on repeat through my earbuds). Somehow, my heart believes within this quote is some secret message that will spur me on to return to my novel.

I need my protagonist to have that indulgent grief. I need it to become that. And by the end, and only by the end, can she discover the rest of what Patti Smith is talking about. That beautiful transformation when you stop feeling sorry for yourself and you start just remembering the person you’ve lost for who they were, and sharing that.

So, I don’t know if I’m in the perfect place to write my novel as it is. I’m so tired and trying to have a social life and working, working, working. I don’t know if I will find the perfect place for my protagonist to hold her grief until it can boil over. Consider this essay a call into the ‘void’ which I know God will hear, and because He is the Master Artist, I’m sure He’ll guide me out from beneath the block.

I want to fancy myself an author, a poet, a wordsmith. And I guilt myself over the fact that the moon has been waxing so I should be energetic and innovative. But then again, the full moon is soon to come and we’ll be waning all over again. Four days until I have a bodily excuse to feel this way. Or maybe I’ll find that great in-between of routine and relaxation, the perfect place. We’ll see.

I have a pretty vivid memory of losing a baby tooth, of wiggling it incessantly while lying in my quilted princess bed. It was a late evening and I would not—could not—go to sleep while that tooth was left to wiggle, my saliva loosening it in the night, guiding it down my esophagus. So, I stayed awake and moved it back and forth until it came out in between my small fingers, a steady stream of spit-blood running out with it.

With the tooth out, I had nothing to worry over any longer, so to sleep I went. The next day, I woke up with a dollar from the tooth fairy and peace of mind. There’s something similar I’ve been feeling since I spent the better half of my Thursday morning in the dentist’s chair, getting temporary crowns put on my recently root-canaled teeth. I cannot stand knowing there is something temporary in my mouth—something that comes with careful instructions and warnings.

Don’t eat on that side of your mouth for two weeks. Rinse with warm saltwater regularly. No gum, no caramels, no mouth guard. Wait for our call.

I’m unsure what it is about all these dental problems that makes me think about grief and Pops. Then again, why am I surprised? Everything makes me think about him. I’m never not thinking about him. And I realize that it’s this fleeting (but stubborn) feeling of discomfort that I cannot stand. I just want to get my permanent crowns and not think about my teeth anymore.

Just after Pops died, I wanted only to finish my sadness prematurely. To skip the hard-hitting initial grief and get to the wistful remembrance of him—the way my parents looked at old photos of their grandparents and smiled, then moved on. I’m still picturing that future here and there. The one where I’m in a rocking chair and some child says “Tell us about your father.”

The future where I’ll casually sway back and forth, hold a cup of coffee to my lips (black because I’ll finally learn to love it that way) and say, “Oh, my dad was a good man. He loved a joke. He always believed in me.” And I’d show them a photograph of Evans holding a fish or a coffee cup or a hunting rifle. I’ll be stoic then. I’ll have the capacity to think of him and not fall apart.

And I can do that now, but it still lingers. Perhaps it will always linger. I talk about Pops and I write about him and I’m so happy to do so. It feels like a vital task: keeping his memory alive. Because in my writings, in my mind, in my conversations, he is immortalized. And in heaven with our Father, he is eternal. I know this. I want everyone to know this. So writing about him is good, even when it tears me apart.

And just to be clear, I’m not feeling particularly torn apart at the moment of writing this. Most of my essays I write quite clear-eyed. It’s a comfort in the moment of writing it, to sit with my thoughts and splay them open on the page, and share them. It is my hope that those experiencing hard feelings or grief or discomfort that they want to fast-forward will read these writings of mine and feel seen, heard, understood, not alone.

The above lyric is a (maybe cheesy) Gracie Abrams pull from her song “I Knew It, I Know You.” But that line has always struck me because it has always, and only, made me think of grief. I’ve sung along to it when thinking about my mother and I trying to traverse the house that suddenly became a bit emptier. When life started moving again at full speed and I didn’t want to catch up. I always thought, as I sung it through a clenched jaw in the car, that I was singing it about someone else. But really, I think it’s always been about me. I can’t sit with the hard thing.

But, I will and I do. I have some great examples. Aside from all my earthly inspirations, look at Christ. At Calvary. At him living all his thirty-three years knowing how his earthly time would end. In blood. In beatings. In not just sitting with the hard thing, but enduring it, being nailed to it. He knew the whole time what was coming, and I think about that too. Not only was the Ultimate Sacrifice made, but it was meditated on from the moment he was born. If he can do that, surely I can do this. After all, we are called to be like him.

Just last night, there was a shooting in my local downtown area. A middle school girl was caught in the crossfire. Shot in the chest and lived to tell the tale. Thank God, she is okay. She isn’t anyone I know personally, just a Facebook story, a name on the latest tragedy blotter. But I cannot stand how stalled we all are now, how desensitized to public shootings we’ve become.

I hope, and continue to pray, that somewhere there is someone working on something that will solve this issue. This rampant evil that continues to take the lives of innocents, of anyone. I know God hears my pleading, I know He feels our grief. He sees our best efforts and He rewards us. I know that girl will do something special one day. And regardless of my own life, I’ll thank Him every day that her family is not singing to Gracie Abrams, grieving her.

Jesus bared the cross so that we did not have to. I will spend my earthly time trying to find an adequate way to thank him.

☆

Sometimes I think about the fact that being twenty-three was maybe my twelve-year-old self’s worst fear. Not that I didn’t want to grow up, but I didn’t want to get older. In a perfect world, I’d have been seventeen forever with all the power and agency as a grown adult.

That is so far from my perfect world now. I love being twenty-three. I love being anything as long as I can keep being a daughter, a sister, a wife, a friend. A writer, a reader, a music listener, a thrift shop frequenter, a coffee drinker. I can go in and out with the tide of aging so long as I can age alongside the people I love and the things I love. God willing, that’s my one condition.

Lately, I’ve had another round of the old illness—the “let’s become a brand new person” rebrand ailment—which really means let’s be the same person with a different purse and a new iPhone home screen. I truly wonder if this is a me thing (a very good late-diagnosed ASD candidate thing) or something other women, or any young person, finds themselves doing from time to time.

I see it everywhere online, but as with most things, I’m inclined to be wary, to assume that I’m not intaking the information as the rest of the world is. Look at how we other ourselves before we even have reason to!

Regardless, the overworked gears in my brain are turning yet again. “Do I like the color black too much?” "Am I the type of person to have bag charms hanging from her purse?” “Should I be more or less active on social media? Which is cooler? Posting less or posting more? Is there a mysterious and perfect in-between?” “What if everything is in vain? What if I’m being too vain? What if I straightened my hair again? Where would the waves go?”

It’s clearly exhausting to exist. Something that—for me—has always made it more bearable is reading. I just finished Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent and without saying too much (saving it for my next random book roundup), it was phenomenal, made me want to write forever, and I gave it five out of five stars.1

Reading and exploring new ideas, new perspectives, and using my imagination has been one of the main constants in my life. No matter how many different ‘people’ I’ve been, I’ve always been someone who loves to read. I can’t shake that and I never hope to. With God’s grace, I will read until the very last of my days.

I’ve recently subscribed to words from eliza as a paid reader which I’m so pleased about. I’ve now had a bit of a long history with Eliza McLamb and she has no idea I exist. Well, she had an idea once, when she liked my Instagram story which was enough for me. (I suppose.)

I started listening to the podcast Binchtopia in college, probably my junior year. It was just what I wanted: two girls talking like besties talk but about really smart stuff—history and literature and pop culture and politics and psychology.

I liked engaging with their discourse, praying on parts of it that didn’t align with my own religion, but also mostly agreeing with everything else. I loved having people to listen to, and getting to be in on such good conversations without having to interject with my own smart-sounding thoughts.2

When Pops died, I could hardly hold my head on straight in the silence so if I wasn’t reading or writing or studying or talking, I was listening. And because music felt too emotional at times, I could only listen to things that had nothing to do with my life at that moment.

I relished in hearing about these two girls who struck gold in a Los Angeles apartment during the pandemic, adopting cats and getting into new relationships. I indulged in their takes on celebrity drama and historical accounts of notable women. I laughed and replayed their episodes reading Reddit queries when I was extra sad.

Sounds silly, but it became a sort of lifeline for me. In the immediate breakdown of my whole world, I had two eponymous voices to build a new world upon and I felt educated and comforted, amused and seen.

When I listened to the episode that announced Eliza was stepping back from co-hosting the show, it felt like a gut-punch. I know this is so dramatic, trust. It’s what I do! I was sitting in the office of my university’s marketing department, working as a grad assistant and attempting to pursue an MBA, and I knew I’d have to get by with the wealth of past episodes in their archive, but I was sad.

About a month later, I dropped out of grad school and intended to really and truly put my writing first. And I completed my first draft of my novel! So, it worked out. It’s still working out. And Eliza has been on more recent episodes of Binchtopia and yes, I only ever really listen to the ones she’s in, and here’s where my fascination and admiration of Eliza McLamb continues.

What started as a coping mechanism in leaning on my favorite podcast during the imminent months after my dad’s death became a reliance on and genuine love for Eliza’s music. I think Going Through It was my most replayed album that year. Particularly, Crybaby was a ballad I loved to cry to (naturally).

I combed through her back catalog and developed a real affinity for Irish Exit, which I still blare in the car and scream-sing. And as I write to you, Good Story is my most played album aside from the new Olivia Rodrigo release.

I’ve always loved connecting to smaller artists and feeling like I had this portion of the vast music world all to myself, but having known Eliza first through the podcast puts her music in a whole new context for me, one that feels personal. There’s nothing like it. I have no similar relation to any other musician, and for that, she might be my favorite? Do I have a favorite musician? Can such a thing exist? Maybe it’s too big a declaration. It scares me.

All this to say, it is rare for me to connect to an Internet Person/Micro-Celeb/Artist so consistently and wholesomely. And if this ever travels far enough into the ether that Eliza herself should find it, please do not be freaked out by my parasociality! It is less an obsession that I feel for you and certainly more of a respect.

Because I’m lucky enough to know some of the minute inner details of Eliza’s world, I get a beautiful picture of someone who, very similarly to myself, starts over again and again, and comes out better each time. From listening to her stories of jonesing for a cigarette after her shows to now not smoking at all anymore, from her eating disorder journey to her (seemingly) successful veganism, from her Instagram reels addiction to her being increasingly present offline, she’s inspiring!

And I suppose what I’m trying to say is that if I want to do what I set out to do (make others feel seen, share my work, find camaraderie) then I want to be transparent about my influences. I find Eliza McLamb to be a great writer, musician, artist, and overall good at what she does. If I could inspire one person in the ways she’s inspired me, I’ll be happy.

Postscript: I’ve been loving her Muse Pod thing she’s started where she just talks about what’s been inspiring her. I guess this is also my version of that. And Eliza, if you ever do come to find this, know that I’m praying good things for you always, every time I interact with your art. Jesus loves you (& I mean that in a really cool way, because it’s the coolest).

★

Something I truly love about books and reading is how it inspires me to live my life differently. I listen to songs because they were referenced in a book I read years ago. I enjoy particular shows and activities because I’ve read of characters who enjoyed them. There are mantras I repeat to myself to this day from a novel I read when I was thirteen and constantly dissociated.

Books, their characters, their writing styles, their themes weave their way into the very fabric of my life. Every time I pick up a new book I know that years later there will still be details banging around in my brain.

The only other art form that I’d say is as similar for me is music. The way I can automatically recite every lyric from the songs I loved in the fifth grade feels like it does come from the same power that enables me to randomly recall a line from a book I read when I was eleven years old.

Film and TV perhaps have this same affect—at least the shows and movies I really love (Lady Bird, Someone Great, Bob’s Burgers, Bojack Horseman, Gilmore Girls, New Girl). But somehow, books feels the most significant to me. It could very well be that I marvel more at how well my brain recalls details from all the books I’ve read. How real and tangible these events and characters are to me despite never seeing, hearing, or feeling them.

There’s just nothing quite like it to me, and I love that.

Book Details I Still Recall

The earliest iterations of books that I still think about today are Tinkerbell and Pixie Hollow books. I remember very fondly tracing my fingers across the whimsical and delicate illustrations, pacing around my childhood bedroom and feeling like I was in the page, in the scene, baking or making art or building things with the fairies.

In those early days, I felt very similarly about Fancy Nancy books and the slightly grown-up version of her tales, Nancy Clancy. To this day, Fancy Nancy remains some of my favorite illustrations, and I’ve never forgotten the vibe and French-infused wonder those books encouraged in my young life.

Transitioning to YA novels and more mature books happened pretty fast for me. By fifth grade, I read John Green’s Looking for Alaska and I still claim it as a favorite of mine based on pure love and nostalgia for how deeply I connected with it back then.

It was a novel all my friends had read and we were somewhat a congregation of outcasts at a private school. Reading about Pudge, the Colonel, and Alaska take on this boarding school of wealthier popular kids felt something like kinship for us. And the Hulu series adaptation actually stands as one of my favorite book adaptations ever.

One super random, off-the-wall book I have never really forgotten is called This Song Will Save Your Life. I believe I picked it up from the public library when I was in the sixth grade, and it still feels like the moment I “graduated” into reading mature content. It was like an entryway into what the world of adults was talking about, and it felt (to be dramatic) revolutionary.

I don’t remember quite as much about this book as I do Looking for Alaska because it was such a one-off read. But, I still recall it centering on the story of a lonely teenage girl who felt like an outsider. She was struggling and found music and it—as the title suggests—saves her life.

I remember she slept with a DJ in the book, and it was the first time I’d really read such a thing, and I felt both scandalized and thrilled. To be fair, I don’t know if I could imagine my nieces reading such material at only eleven years old, but for me, it felt so exciting.

There are a million more books I remember reading and devouring in one or two days. Books about love, about lost teenagers, about finding family, friends, and adventure. I indulged in every John Green novel, dabbled in the popular teen dystopian worlds of The Hunger Games and Divergent, but overall, my favorite thing to do was go to the library and just grab something.

Another book that is so random and really a deep cut for me is called Lost Stars. This was post-me having read all sorts of popular and well-acclaimed books like Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon and Panic by Lauren Oliver. But one day, I had gone to the secondhand bookstore with my parents and I was taking a really long time trying to decide what book to get.

My dad randomly grabs one of the shelf with a lime green spine and says “Just pick something and read it. Don’t overthink it. You might find something you really like that way.” The book he grabbed was Lost Stars. I loved that book so dearly and I made sure to tell him. Looking back now, I don’t doubt that my own novel which is currently in the works is inspired by that very book.

And it wasn’t the Next Great American Novel, or an award-winner, or particularly aesthetic, or even the most well-written thing, but I happened upon it at the right time. And it inspired me in ways that have shown up years and years later. There are few things as wonderful to me as that.

Here is the description for Lisa Selin Davis’ Lost Stars:

“Before her older sister, Ginny, died, Carrie was a science nerd, obsessively tracking her beloved Vira comet. But now that Ginny is gone, sixteen-year-old Carrie finds herself within the orbit of Ginny’s friends, a close-knit group of seniors who skip school, obsess over bands (not science), and party hard.

Fed up with Carrie’s behavior, her father enrolls her in a summer work camp at a local state park. Carrie actually likes the days spent in nature. And when she meets Dean, a guy who likes the real Carrie—astrophysics obsessions and all—she starts to get to the heart of who she is and who she wants to be.”

Let’s compare it to a rough description of my debut novel and current work-in-progress called Where’s Amelie?:

“After Amelie’s beloved older sister, Adelaide, dies and leaves Amelie’s family in ruin, she comes across a wealth of her sister’s journals. Using the entries to connect the dots to her sister’s secret friends and life, Amelie begins to lose herself to grief and what should’ve been.

In the 1970s southern atmosphere, Adelaide’s friends come with their own problems, but refuse to make the same mistakes that could lead to the demise of another friend.”

Again, that’s a super rough description of my novel that I wrote very off-the-cuff. It'll probably change a lot, and mercifully, I may not be the one who ultimately has to write the official synopsis anyway. But the point comes across: can’t we see the super clear influence? And just as artists like Olivia Rodrigo are incredibly forthcoming with their references and inspirations, as am I! I love seeing art in conversation with one another, unique takes on similar topics.

Books and reading have always been a huge part of my life and my identity. I genuinely would not be who I am without the wealth of literature I’ve already managed to accumulate within these 20 odd years and my body actually gets tingly with excitement at the thought of how many more books I’ll read and how much more inspiration I’ll gain.

☆

The above quote is one I jotted down in my Google docs app after leaving a beautiful visit with my husband’s grandmother. I look to her as a very religious person, a guidepost of sorts on how to commune with God. My takeaways are not something she said to me, but something I felt as we left.

And then that night, as I read Matthew 16, I asked my husband why he thought Jesus chose Peter to be the rock of his church. My husband instantly compared Peter (formerly Simon) to John the Beloved, the one disciple that never denied Jesus, who was with him at the cross.

We came to the conclusion that perhaps Jesus wanted to build his church on a foundation of forgiveness, on transformation. And doesn’t that just make the most sense? Isn’t that what believing in and following Jesus is all about? Because John loved Jesus always, and he ran faster to the empty tomb, and he held his beaten body alongside Mary, but Peter denied Christ.

Peter tested him, asked to walk on water and even standing amid the waves, he let fear seep in and started to sink. But then he proclaimed that Jesus was the Messiah. And then he denied him three times just as Jesus said he would. But, he returned. He preached the Word of Jesus, he repented. He changed. Regardless of how many times he had to get it wrong until he finally got it right, he kept showing back up.

That’s what real, true, hard faith is to me. Falling apart and returning again. Jesus does not expect us to be above our own human nature. He calls us to seek that, to strive for it, but His love has already been given. It’s not a love we had to earn. What we can do is keep coming back to Him. We can feel all the complicated mess of human emotions we want (or don’t want) to feel and still keep our faith. I think this is something God’s been showing me lately, through a multitude of tiny moments and realizations.

I’m constantly inspired by everything around me. Call it idealism, naiveté, a childlike sense of wonder, or foolishness. But, I think, anything can be a little magical if you look hard enough. This Monday morning, I worked a really lovely shift at my local coffee shop. I had time to read during the lulls (currently: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and liking it!)

I even took a walk around my neighborhood, just a simple block, water in hand, sun rays beaming and a light breeze in the noon air. There was time for lunch and laundry and dishes and loafing around in bed until I mustered up the energy to read a chapter of the Bible (Matthew 17) and get ready for my night shift at the library. I cannot complain, it’s a very charmed life I’m living.

Lately, I can’t stop thinking about something I saw online about a week ago. It said something along the lines of “If someone followed your routine life for one full day, would they meet Jesus?” And now, my mind has been preoccupied with the little ways in which my faith intersects with the world outside of it.

One of my favorite things to say is that I don’t have to make everything about God because everything already is. I don’t think I can even take credit for that original thought, it seems very much like a cutesy Pinterest graphic I’d pinned. But, that is how I’d say I approach my faith a lot these days.

This does not mean I’m passive. I’m still actively seeking out the time to read the Bible here and there, pray in the morning and at night and when I think about it throughout the day. So, I’d like to think that if someone were to follow me through a totally routine day in my life, they’d meet Jesus by overhearing my morning shower prayer.

They’d feel the warm glow emanating from me when I walk to the car with a busy mind, rattling off the day’s activities in my head. Maybe they’d meet Jesus in the way my voice sounds the best when it’s just Him and I in the car, and I can see us dancing in my imagination. In the conversations I have with my best friend who visits me at work and we talk about books over coffee.

They’d hopefully meet Him when I keep up with my family over the phone if it’s a day too busy to visit. Meet Him as I got home, cared for my apartment and myself. Spent the evening lazily lounging with my husband, perhaps reading or writing or listening to music. In the ways I think about Pops (constantly, forever) and smile because he is alive and in good hands.

Right now, it’s about seven in the evening and I’m listening to sad Noah Kahan songs while writing this essay at my library desk. Rather than sad, I just feel reflective, and again, inspired. Maybe I’m too into navel-gazing, but I do get inspired by my own forlornness. I always feel the need to analyze what it is that brings out the near-constant melancholy in me, dissect it, splay it all out on the page, and see what sticks.

The truth is that these are all my thoughts that may be of any note recently. I have a fun and somewhat busy week again of me, and I’m excited to relax my way through it. And even when worries come up, I just push myself to shrug them off because in the end, I am kept. I have faith and Jesus knows it.

So, for now, that’s my charmed life. I hope yours is well too.

Although my latest book-related post was largely about how I’ve decided to stop ‘counting’ the books I read, I do still keep track of what I’ve read. After all, I have a hefty personal library and an even larger TBR list to barrel through until the end of my days. So while I may not be shooting for a reading goal of the year or anything, I do still very much live in a world of literature and I’m ready and willing to discuss these works I’ve recently ingested.

After seeing a lot of buzz here on Substack about this read, I knew I needed to get my hands on it. Because I live in the Deep South where we have maybe two bookstores, we don’t always get the latest cool, literary reads. I was blessed enough to pick this bad boy up on my honeymoon in Austin, Texas.

After reading Project Hail Mary for my library book club, I took a hard swing around to who I really am when it comes to my reading persona. I’m just a girl in love with literary fiction, contemporary literature, weird girl lit, psychological, speculative fiction. Reading about people who are maybe slightly messed up living lives that range from slightly to largely messed up! It’s great and real and raw and I will always root for it. (In fact, I’m writing it!)

Lost Lambs is such a perfect forerunner for this muddled genre. I’m keeping it at the top of my list for maybe my best read of the year. Cash manages to do what I yearn to accomplish as an aspiring author which is create a compelling story with loveable characters, an interesting enough plot, and utilizing simple, but beautiful, language.

I tend to say I love a “no plot, just vibes” sort of book, but Lost Lambs is one of those unique reads that seem a bit on the outskirts of that description. Arguably, this novel has an insane and wacky plot—one that I personally find eerily representative of modern society in the U.S.—and at the same time, it is so character-centric.

Truthfully, the plot in this story just wouldn’t have happened if the Flynn family wasn’t made up of two dysfunctional parents lost in love, and their three daughters who have a charming penchant for trouble such as dating war criminals, engaging in online terrorism, and just being an overall menace. (Harper Flynn, you mean everything to me.) Ten out of ten, I recommend.

Now, let’s talk about a book that (quite literally) had me kicking my feet. My other favorite thing to read about aside from weird people literary fiction is music fiction—that is, bands and singers and songwriters and rock’n’roll critics. I love music so much and it’s always played a major role in my own creative process so I think it only natural that I gravitate toward tales of rockstars and musicians. After all, my favorite film at thirteen was Almost Famous.

I wouldn’t quite say that romance is a genre I typically seek out, but I will obsess over a well-written romance when it’s included in one of my favorite genres. I felt that way about Joe and Percy. I found their dynamic to be so interesting, from sharing a best friend who was also Joe’s former girlfriend to becoming college songwriting partners to complicated lovers to stranger to lovers again.

It’s the same great, titillating story that typically transpires between rockstars in a book. Think an early 2000’s version of Billy Dunne and Daisy Jones with way less drugs and a lot more anxiety, and instead of him having a wife, it’s the integrity of music that stands in their way.

This book also comes with a playlist of sorts. Not only are the chapters named the title of a song I definitely listened to while reading, but there are so many references to bands and albums and songs that I had to check out.

The author also created an official playlist that features every song mentioned in the whole novel which is awesome. It’ll make you feel like the cool, rock chick you secretly felt you were always supposed to be, understanding music references like you’re Lane Kim from Gilmore Girls.

The May Read for my library book club was suggested by my best friend, and like Project Hail Mary, had a movie adaptation we could watch and compare. After a streak of two heavy-hitters for me, I wasn’t in a reading slump, but this book was so slow for me to get into.

Remarkably Bright Creatures just took on a vastly different tone than what I had been reading, and I do believe the time at which you read something plays a factor in your enjoyment of it. I think perhaps it was a bit unfair to this book, coming off such a high from Lost Lambs and Deep Cuts.

The way I was finally able to get myself into this book was by listening to the audiobook on Hoopla (use that library card!) and playing Animal Crossing. The physical version sat on my desk the whole time, borrowed from my friend and opened once by me. But, I managed to feel something by the end of this story.

Suddenly, I understood the friendship between this old woman and the octopus. And, of course, I did appreciate the pretty accurate representation of grief this novel portrays. I really felt for Tova, and loved watch Sally Fields play her in the adaptation. I also found that really good on its own. A modest four, or perhaps three and a half, stars from me. A lovely, quaint read.

Okay, so this is where my reading choices got a little weird. One of my coworkers at the library was making it a point to read classic lit and compare the original material to all the film adaptations of the work, a really cool feat. While she was talking about watching the various versions of Lord of the Flies, it started to peak my interest. This was one I actually never read in school, and I always vaguely knew it was about boys stranded on an island, but that was all. So, I checked it out from our library.

As far as classics go, it’s an incredibly easy read. The language is simple and honestly quite prolific as well. I enjoyed Golding’s lush descriptions of the island. I liked the characters as well and was able to get pretty invested in their journeys, particularly Ralph’s. I’d say he was my favorite for obvious reasons. He is, after all the protagonist. I also really felt for Simon.

There should certainly be a trigger warning for violent child deaths. It makes an immense amount of sense when you know the context surrounding Golding’s writing of this book was just coming off of WWII. I do think this book should be taught in school because it explores good and evil, humanity, and animal instinct at its very core. And the central question is just too interesting to not discover what happens: What if a bunch of kids (namely, boys) had to start a society from scratch?

One could imagine that after Lord of the Flies, I needed some reprieve from agony. This was also when I came to my ‘I’m not setting a reading goal or quantifying my hobbies’ awakening, so I was really searching for peace. I needed my beloved healing fiction.

This was another book I got from my trip to Austin, Texas and it caught my attention because I hadn’t seen it anywhere else. Also, I work at a library…I’m gonna read library fiction. And this cozy read did not disappoint.

I spent pretty much all of June reading this book. It’s not really thrilling so I wasn’t anxious to keep picking it up, but it was the perfect nerve-settler for when I wanted to chill out and read. I loved the simple stories of Otoha and her job at this library that housed only the personal collections of deceased authors.

And if there’s one thing that truly sticks out to me about Japanese fiction in particular, it’s their gorgeous, lush, indulgent descriptions of food. I wanted to try every dinner Kinoshita made in this book, and that’s saying something for a notorious picky-eater like me. I loved that each dinner was book-themed. I love reading about book lovers loving books. I also really believe in supporting translated fiction so that’s a great bonus.

Last on the list, and the book I finished just yesterday (July 1st), is another book club pick! Suggested by a faithful book club member, I knew this read would be scandalizing and thrilling, and it was, but I do have some varied thoughts.

Firstly, this was published before Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid and I really don’t see any other reality aside from McFadden reading this book and thinking “What if I do this but make it just one percent more sinister?”

The only real differences between The Housemaid and this novel are that in this one, the wife is a genuine person who only utilizes her friend as her ‘replacement’ once she discovers said friend has been playing her the whole time. The abuse is also more realistic, in my opinion, where The Housemaid seemed much more horror-movie with it.

I can’t lie and say I wasn’t chomping at the bit to pick this one up over and over again. I read the e-book on my phone, something I do very rarely, and maybe it was the pure ease of having it right on my phone, but I read this book fast. I read this book essentially every chance I got—during lulls at the coffee shop, on my library shifts, in bed before falling asleep, in the bathroom when I was bored.

It’s a great, what I like to call junk read, not because I don’t think it has value but because it feels like the Little Debbie’s of books. Does this make sense to anyone else? Is this my English major snobbery showing? I enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed other books but it wasn’t necessarily enriching.

If reading nonfiction is like eating broccoli, and reading something like Lost Lambs feels like my favorite trail mix, then The Last Mrs. Parrish felt like indulging in a cosmic brownie, and who doesn’t love that here and there?

Thanks for attending my book rant. I’d love to chat it up about any of these reads if you’ve read them, and don’t be scared to leave some new recommendations too! I’m now going to attempt to start Tender Is The Flesh—frightening.

☆

When the dentist told me I needed a root canal, the first thing I thought about was my dad. I wanted him to tell me about the time he got one and how it was nothing to worry about. I wanted him to tell me that I had that in the bag. But when your dad dies, there isn’t anyone to tell you how brave you are before you even prove it.

When I had successfully endured the first of two root canals I needed, I waited for his text telling me how proud he was, how I was growing up and taking care of things the way he did when I was nineteen and went to urgent care on my own for an allergic reaction. He seemed to pride himself on my maturing, and maybe that’s why I’m so devastated he isn’t here to watch me grow up anymore.

Now, I have two fixed teeth and a credit card bill to pay. I’ve been thinking a lot about when I had terrible tooth pain and I was on Medicaid because Pops had just died a few months prior. My mother and I lost our health insurance not even a week after his heart attack. Call that adding to the heap of troubles. If his company hadn’t paid for the (futile) ambulance and the hospital bills, for the service, we’d have been in a real bind.

My stomach still twists when I think about the detriment the government leaves us grieving in amid the worst part of our lives. I’ve bonded with library patrons over losing fathers, helped them craft posters for fundraisers to pay for a funeral. I’ve traveled outside the city to see worn flyers nailed to telephone poles begging for donations so someone’s dad can afford a kidney transplant.

Any time I struggle, I know I’m not the only one.

This morning, I accidentally ran over a tiny baby turtle. It must’ve been seeking shade beneath my car, just between my raucous tires. As I reversed out of the driveway and onto the road, I noticed the small brown bump and pulled next to it to see. I may never get the image of the smushed turtle, its shell all cracked up, out of my head. I was so sad I cried all the way to the endodontist. I told my husband, my mom, my sisters, my coworkers—releasing it off my chest like it was the worst thing I ever did.

And again, I thought about Pops. I imagined him playfully scoffing, waving a hand and saying “It happens.” He’d probably make a crude joke about cooking it. How different could turtle be from frog or alligator? Whatever he’d have said, I wanted to hear it today.

Two of my sisters took my mom to Disney World this week, and something about my family is that Disney’s been practically engraved on our bones. It’s the only vacation we’d take every year of my childhood. The only place Pops wanted to visit. There, he was fun-loving and adventurous, never on the phone with a boat or buttoning up his work uniform. He’d daydream about driving the steamboat and scream with me on rollercoasters. He’d taught me to be brave.

As I lay in the endodontist chair this morning, I settled into a waking dream of Pops. I want to call it a memory, but I fear I never get all the details quite right. I could hardly remember in what order we’d taken which trip, when my last Disney trip with Pops even was. But then I’d found it, and if my mouth wasn’t wide open and full of tools, I’d have smiled at the picture.

We had our ride at Disney, Pops and I. When I was little it was Dumbo the Flying Elephant, or more so, the spinning triceratops ride in Animal Kingdom. Then, it became Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, a rollercoaster that simulates being on a crazy, runaway train in the Wild West. Pops lovingly coined it “Big T.”

And on what I’m sure was the last trip I took with him, we’d ridden it together as we always had, side by side. Our legs touching beneath the shared bar, my fingers sinking into the thick foam that covered it. He’d hooted and hollered as he always did—for fun, because Pops was never scared—and when the train trailed us beneath large fake animal bones, we reached up to try and touch them. I think Pops’ arms were just long enough that he could.

He was so happy. That’s how I remember him. And I remember the sigh he let out when we returned to my mother and she’d bought all the exclusive popcorn buckets he’d told her she didn’t need. If I had one superpower, I would simply want to be able to relive select moments from the past. I’d replay that one again and again because we were whole and we were happy.

My husband is a great man, one that I know Pops would be so fond of to this day. He held my hand that day in the hospital when we lost Pops, sat with me on the waiting room floor as tearful aunts and uncles flooded the area. He’s been there for me through it all, graciously reminding me that God can handle every emotion I feel.

One particular conversation we had weeks after Pops’ death still sticks in my mind. I’d said something about not being happy and he understood, but felt a bit hurt, which was understandable. I explained to him then that of course I was happy with him, but I wasn’t happy in general, couldn’t be when what had happened was all so fresh.

And for months afterward, I just felt inwardly jaded, already speed-running my grief, imagining the days when I’d be quietly and somberly sad on April 27th. When my depression would evolve from a gnawing, present pain to the thing that causes me to nonchalantly leave a room whenever someone mentioned dad or coffee or heart attack.

When the next year greeted me with so much progress in my personal life, I felt so conflicted. Graduating from college, getting engaged, getting my library job. I could hardly understand how one body could contain so much joy and pain at the same time. I’ve never been a Type A planner person, but even aside from that, I was a very casual, procrastinating wedding planner. It largely had to do with the fact that for the first few months of my engagement I couldn’t stop crying when I thought about walking down the aisle with him.

I think after my wedding and all the joy it brought, I was finally able to see the permanent ways in which Pops will always be a part of my life, a part of my family. His spirit was all over the place which was already riddled with fun and music and love and laughter. And I was relieved to discover that on that day, throughout that night, I wasn’t sad about what I was missing, but overjoyed and grateful for what I had.

Can you believe such a piece as this came together after such a mundane Monday? I came up with the title “dead turtles and dead teeth” while in the endodontist chair. I guess inspiration really can hit anywhere. So I may have killed a turtle today, but I also got a tooth repaired and an essay written.

I may have mourned Pops all day, but I’ve gotten this beautiful reflective piece about him out of it. I will never tire of writing about him because it’s in my words and my memories that he still lives. He is more than his death.1 And I’m still thanking God for everything he was to me, and all he is now.

☆

Yesterday was Father’s Day—third one without Pops. I slept in, wore one of his shirts, ate my sister’s lasagna, and visited my in-laws. My husband and I spent the rest of the day cozying up inside our little world—playing video games and watching tv. It was nice.

Tomorrow, I’m going to the endodontist to get a root canal, the first of two. For all the cavities I’ve had filled, I haven’t had a root canal before and I must admit I’m nervous. Lots of prayers have headed this week, and I know all will be well. It is not even a big procedure. I simply hate the dentist.

Today, I spent my morning sweating in a ninety degree coffee shop, making coffees and reading my book. We got a really sweet email from a mother who brought her daughter in this morning, which made it all worth it honestly, even more than the thirty-three dollars in cash I palmed at the end of the shift. I blessedly spent the middle of my day resting in bed until I came to sit here—where I always find myself on Monday nights—writing a Substack essay at my library desk.

I keep finding myself zooming out, analyzing my life in moodboards and color schemes, boiling my days down to formulas and recipes. Wake up, brush teeth, shower, have coffee, have breakfast, go to work, do laundry, do dishes, go to work, read, go home, brush teeth, go to sleep. Lie down, lie down, and scroll scroll scroll until my eyelids flutter shut.

I’m twenty-three so sometimes my conversations cover insurance and money, and sometimes they’re about bedazzling coasters. I try to fill my sparse empty time with love and community and art: bible studying, spending time with family, and listening to music or reading books. I try to make the little things worthwhile.

Even the moments in life when I start to feel melancholic have become infused with a dawdling sense of wonder. I keep s l o w l y working on my novel, trying to muster up the energy to put more focus on a children’s book project I recently agreed to, manage my two jobs and my essays here.

As I write this, I can feel my gears slowing. My brain turns to mush the closer it gets to nine o’clock and even though all I want to do when I get home is hang out with my husband, I know I will fall asleep fast.

Sometimes, when I go to write something, I worry over being too drab or dull. I fret about what the point of it all is, where’s the knot of this essay? Why would anyone read this? I’m deciding upon writing this that the simple knot of this very essay is a tired peek behind the curtain of my current life.

I work with two lovely teenagers at the public library. One of them keeps telling me she sees me as a cool older sister. She likes to say that I’m a cool girl, and it blows my heart up more than she knows. I’ve always wanted to be seen that way. Trust me when I say that my ‘coolness’ does not come from a lack of trying.

Everything about me has come about with great effort, and maybe at one point, that was embarrassing to admit, but it isn’t anymore. I think it is cool to want to try so hard at something, to try and be good, to work at getting better. I can hardly imagine what my life would be like without these efforts.

Perhaps I’d have never tried red meat and I’d be a full-on vegetarian now. Maybe I’d have never stopped feeling weird and othered and outside constantly. I’d have let labels like that hang over my head, not made the friends I did in high school, not date my now husband, and had been antisocial in college.

Maybe I’d have not gone to college, or I’d have dropped out at the end of my junior year when Pops died. Maybe there’s a timeline where it was all too much and I never got the degree. Never got married, never moved out, never did anything ever again. And then where would I be?

I’m thankful for the strength God’s given me, the effort I have to not just get through life but move through it, make something out of it, even out of all the tiny moments. Every day is a reminder of the effort from which I was made, effort that I take and turn into passion for living and loving and making something else.

I think about the pure effort of Jesus becoming man. Mary birthing him, raising him. The growing pains in little Jesus’ legs. The carpentry work he did with Joseph. His adult ministry filled with healing and traveling and saving. Full of effort. That’s why I’m putting my best foot (my most effortful foot) forward in the everyday. Because that’s cool, and I’m a cool girl after all.

☆

I think the rise of artificial intelligence upsets me because it separates us from reality, and I’ve fought my brain so many times over staying connected to reality. Depersonalization, derealization, OCD, anxiety—name it and I’ve dealt with it from the very young age of five, and maybe younger (I hardly remember anything before five).

In the fifth grade, I recall telling someone that I saw the world like I was watching it through a television screen. In the eighth grade, my body would start to feel separate from my brain, reddening and shaking when nothing was wrong, and I’d panic. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been clawing my way back to my senses, latching onto reality with the frailty of painter’s tape.

Of course, there’s also the factor that I was born a digital native, in 2003. I was just lucky enough to see the difference between what was technology and what was real, physical life. One of my wonderful nephews, a 2021 covid baby, once asked me if I could put a physical object in the iPad for him. Smart thinking for someone who has known that their whole lives!

I try so hard to not come off as pretentious or old woman crotchety “kids these days” about it all, but admittedly, it’s hard! This is how I feel. The older I get, the more I only see the beauty in each morsel of living. I love that we get to read big long books that take us months to finish and even longer to comprehend. I love not knowing how to do something and then learning, knowing the skill for next time.

I’m finding every minute more precious by the next. Especially when it comes to art and creative endeavors, AI should be obsolete in these fields where the output is simply the fringe benefit. The real excitement, the accomplishment, is in the doing, the process! I’m turning my mind inside out over my novel, but I love doing it, learning my characters, learning myself. And I’m just happy to see more young people understand this.

Real life is so unique and precious and art is worth taking the time to make. That being said, I’m dying to discuss my latest (very mainstream) favorite piece of human-made art. Yeah, I’m talking about the Olivia Rodrigo album.

I had the privilege of fully digesting Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, lying in bed in a Mississippi cabin next to my lovely husband. (Trust me when I say I recognize the irony of listening to some of the most heart-wrenching sad love songs next to my newlywed man.)

It’s art like Olivia’s that fills me with such beautiful hope for the world amid the ‘AI brigade.’ I’ll give you, dear reader, a peek into my journal pages after I finished streaming you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.

personal scrawled notes on the olivia album

*Lightly edited for clarity

Frankly, I’m obsessed. I immediately launched into watching a two hour long interview she had on NYT’s Popcast which was fantastic, and I did this all while lying in bed next to Thane in a cabin in Mississippi.

Olivia’s album is—I’d say—her most concept album yet. It pretty chronologically follows a relationship and its downfall in a way that feels very honest. I fell in love with the single “drop dead” the minute I heard it—the perfect song about infatuation, first looks, falling for someone. To follow it with “stupid song” was so smart in that it keeps that starry-eyed love-feeling alive.

The following songs take this wonderful, dizzying spin around the ‘honeymoon’ or light stages of love, tipping over into something deeper. I’d say there’s a little bit of a crack with “my way” as that introduces some jealousy and conflict. Then, “purple” is a true turning point saying ‘oh, this is taking a downward sprial.’

And then, yes! The ‘you seem pretty sad” part shows up! “the cure” is maybe one of the best songs ever? Is that too strong? I’m also so in love with the connective thread embedded in the whole album. From mentioning “Just Like Heaven” in the first song to titling a song “the cure” to then having an actual duet with Robert Smith is just incredible.

“begged” is one of the saddest songs ever, as is “less,” and there really is this heartbreaking sense of restraint on the later half of this album—broken up a bit by “expectations” which I found quite charming—but all in all, it feels reminiscent of what I’ve been learning slowly in my own life, and in my own writing—that less can be more, and when something is short and concise, it can actually provide more of a gut punch.

All in all, I really loved it and am feeling so inspired that there are still people making real true art in the world with a thesis and a knot. Needless to say, I’ll be listening to this record a lot, and it’ll probably be in my next Substack essay!

Thanks for coming to my rant/TedTalk/download about music and being anti-ai and older and creative. Please direct me to more human-made works of art!

The last few of books I’ve read (or tried reading) haven’t been doing it for me. Some might call this a slump, but I think it’s different, I think my reading habits are just…changing. When reading is a super large part of your personality, you feel anxious at that idea. But, I denounce that superficial anxiety.

Originally, I set my reading goal on Fable to be 48 books total this year, aiming for four books per month. I started out super strong, fell down to three a month for March and April (almost like I got married then), and even less for May. And since June’s begun, it’s been crawling around in the back of mind, the idea that I need to read more, pick up the pace.

I started reading when I was about four. I know it was early and I remember taking to it instantly—a match made in heaven. In grade school, I could run through a book a day. I spent all my free time pacing around my childhood home with a book in my hands. It was a habit my parents always praised, particularly Pops. And it made me feel proud.

I still feel proud to be a reader. I literally went to college for reading. I have a bachelor’s degree in Reader Snobbery. Literature and books are strong foundations on which I’ve built an intricate life. I’ll never give that up. And I greatly encourage literacy and the right to knowledge.

All that being said, I’ve been a rather slow reader since high school, really since my social life started kicking up. Books had originally been a ready form of escape for me, and places to exercise my already well-endowed imagination. When I was bored or scared or sad, I could find solace in some inked up pages.

But as my outer life became fuller, my reading speed decreased. My love for reading has remained the same, and with my slower pace, the result has been a strange disappointment in myself. But now, sitting at my library desk and writing this as a married twenty-three year old, I’m beginning to feel a brand new take blossom.

Lately, I’ve been seeing so many great content creators debunk the whole “Booktok",” “Bookstagram” identity where people seemingly read forty books a week. It’s been a refreshing turn of events. And I’ve really been leaning into it, agreeing, and championing that anyone is a read if they read. Not if they read twenty books a year. Performative reading has had its moment in the limelight this past year, but I’m yearning for a return to fully digesting what you’ve read.

My point is that I know my reading habits have changed, and are changing still, and I’m no longer going to guilt myself over it. I’d rather read five good books that i really paid attention to in a year than reach my hefty goal of 48 books by December. Of course, if someone can read and fully digest 50 books or more in a year, props to them.

There are so many ways I’ve tried to alter my reading habits to mirror those aesthetic ones I’ve seen constantly online. I’ve had to accept that I don’t really enjoy physically annotating books page by page, unless maybe it’s a second reading of the work. I am not someone who can commit to sticking their novels full of color-coded tabs. I don’t often like to read multiple books at a time anymore, and I only like audiobooks sometimes.

Honesty in reading, and in any hobby or interest or niche you have, can feel so refreshing. It’s so strange that in today’s culture we have to remind ourselves that we are actually not performing everything for the content millage of the internet. We can simply enjoy things how we want to enjoy them.

So, I’ll keep reading as much or as little as I want on a given day. If a book isn’t interesting me, I’ll move on. If something moves me so much to the point that I do feel like underlining it with a pen, then I will. I’m going to do whatever I want! I don’t know why I get so caught up in feeling like I’m doing something or being something the “wrong way.”

I most enjoy books that mirror my experience. What once was a method of deep escapism became a search for relatability and voicing the things I’ve felt but couldn’t say. My coworkers have gawked at me over how I could read books about a dead father just after Pops’ died, but I sought them out. I wanted to experience how universal yet unique my grief experience is. We are never alone, you just haven’t read a book by someone who wrote about going through the same thing yet.

And on a sweeter note, I’ve found that the only reason I might spend less time reading in a day is because I’m working (making lattes for sweet strangers and hosting free public library programs), visiting with my loved ones, playing games, ingesting stories in another format (movies, music), praying, studying the Bible, eating, sleeping, living. I still have a whole lot of life to live outside of the pages, and that’s how I get to relating to my favorite books in the first place. That’s how I write them.

So, I’m done quantifying my hobbies. Reading has never been about numbers for me. It has always largely been about feeling.

When I was seventeen, the world was packed away. Quarantine—due to the Covid-19 pandemic—left many stuck in there childhood bedrooms, stuffed in the house with their families like sardines. I was one of them, and so one might imagine I did not have the most rebellious teen years. When I was seventeen, one of the most scandalous things I did was watch HBO Max, specifically, Euphoria.

Refusing to indulge a full-on summary of this show that I have such a strained relationship with, I’ll allow the reader a moment to catch up. Now that you’ve looked up what the show is, vaguely recognize it, or have watched the finale in the last 48 hours, let’s talk.

glitter and drugs

What mostly captivated my teenage brain about Euphoria was 1. the aesthetic, 2. the actors, and 3. the raw intensity. I grew up watching Zendaya dance around on Disney channel with Bella Thorne, and I was frankly, amazed to see her growth as a talented actress. I was gripped by this story that followed a young woman’s journey battling a drug addiction that began due to her various mental illnesses and dead father.1

The rest of the cast presented an interesting enough background to round out the show. The girl overcoming fatphobia, the quiet A student, the mean girl with the abusive boyfriend, the drug dealer, the new kid. It was fine fodder for the B and C plotlines of a show mostly about addiction. And yes, many believed it romanticized addiction, but that’s contentious.

While the aesthetic was gorgeous, and maybe to some naive and unmonitored thirteen year old, the hazy swirls of purple and silver, the glitter and beautiful Labyrinth score could seem like something to aspire to. But anyone with an ounce of literacy can watch the show and see that drugs are ruining Rue’s life. If anything, Euphoria and creepy Sam Levinson in particular, are guilty of romanticizing underage sex. That’s not what this essay is about.

my lone, kitchen, post-finale rant

*Spoilers for the Euphoria Season 3 finale

Immediately upon finishing the finale, I felt at once weeping and full of quiet rage. I’d been discussing the season with my coworkers for weeks now—all of my disappointments and ruminations, who I thought should die and who shouldn’t. In every conversation, we all figured Rue’s character would not survive the finale. “Because how else could it end, right?”

But then, I saw a post (and later, many posts) comparing the finale to the Stranger Things season 5 finale, and I let loose an outraged, out-loud rant to myself in my kitchen.2 And I thought about the fact that I was so upset over Rue’s ending despite knowing it would happen. I thought about that question—how else could it end?—and wondered why is modern television conditioning us to believe the only way out for broken, traumatized women is death?

suffering and dying girls

In order to hold my hand down this road, you’re going to have to be someone willing to accept what I’ve accepted about the Stranger Things finale: that Eleven is not alive. The hard truth is that the Duffer Brothers failed to end this monumental show in a way that honored the characters we spent five harrowing seasons with, and at the end of the day, the female protagonist gets the shaft. Because that makes sense, right? It makes total sense that Will is fine despite being connected to the Upside Down the whole series and also having powers. Eleven had to go.

Eleven’s death rattled me in particular as this was a show I loved so much and previously thought of as so clever, and to watch it crumble and fall into the very trap I wrote my 30 page college thesis3 on was so lackluster. We watched her suffer season after season, watched her hope and love and grow, all for what? To watch her meet a tragic end.

The ways in which Rue’s death parallels this is almost comical. I guess we never should’ve expected something more radical than the main character who struggles with drug addition the whole series ultimately dying of an overdose. And the especially heartbreaking part? She hadn’t been using. She took a painkiller given to her by one of the heinous drug lords she’d gotten wrapped up with, and he’d killed her with fentanyl lacing.

I have one question for Sam Levinson and the Duffers: where is hope? Why is your message to struggling women that all they can do is die?

the season one finale vs. final season parallel

Both Euphoria and Stranger Things’ first seasons became television giants, marking their places in pop culture history as some of the biggest shows ever. And interestingly enough, their first seasons end similarly to their last—with the female protagonist “dying or disappearing,” really meeting an unknown end that the viewer can decide for themselves. In Stranger Things, Eleven disappears along with the Demogorgon once the boys defeat it. In Euphoria, Rue seemingly overdoses in a gorgeous (visually and sonically) montage.

So, how come these endings would’ve worked at the end of one season and not at the end of the series? Because carrying on with these characters, giving them futures and hopes and dreams implies hope. Hell, even the more open-ended season one endings imply hope! If neither show got renewed for a second season, you could think “Maybe Rue didn’t overdose and she gets clean.” “Maybe Eleven is okay and will return to that box Hopper left the Eggos at.” But Stranger Things season five and Euphoria season three end and rip that hope away.

the anti-hope message

I think more than this being any sort of intelligent cinema analysis, it’s the emotional gripes of a young woman who has struggled and who has potentially seen no end to those struggles, watching the thread of media tell her to give up.

As an unmedicated, anxious teen, I related to Rue and her issues that led her to her drug addiction. I’ve been that nervous young girl she was in her backstory—passing out, counting the ceiling tiles. And in retrospect, I’ve since been that crying, inconsolable young woman grieving her dad. I related to Eleven being an awkward, antisocial kid trying to find herself, and become her own person. Putting everyone before herself.

Maybe some will think it silly to place so much moral emphasis on shows that feature such outlandish events like alternate dimensions and western drug lord battles, but it’s the knot of the stories that I look for. That I think we all, as viewers and consumers of stories, unintentionally latch onto.

And you’re going to craft years worth of a young woman’s story, her journey of being destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again, all for it to end the way it would’ve if nothing had changed? And the girls, the women, they don’t even get their peace—not for a moment. Eleven sacrifices herself amid the chaos of destroying the Upside Down. She never got to be free of that.

Rue overdoses immediately after returning from what was her last drug run, sober and with a plan to go to that farm in Texas. She was listening to the Bible as she died. And what’s the Bible if not like the manual for resurrection? The book that tells you ‘it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, where you’ve been, you can be made new.’

Why couldn’t my girls be made new? Where is there happy ending? I need new media to stop ending women’s stories this way. Let us keep our hope. You’ll have to take mine with claw marks. Good thing you never will.

Often, I cover this blog in my most spur-of-the-moment thoughts and latest bemusements. But, it began as a wholehearted attempt at connecting with others through the hardest human experience I’ve ever had to live through: losing my dad. Two years later, and there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t think about him. Even if the writing here changes sometimes, my heart and mind still harbor the same memories and heartache as the earliest pieces of this blog commemorate.

It’s Memorial Day weekend, so naturally, the family is getting together. My eldest sister is having us all over at her house, in a small part of town that Dad would’ve made fun of her for moving to. And my paran (godfather, Pops’ brother) sent me a photo today of himself wearing a t-shirt that pictured Bigfoot holding an American flag. He said, “Representing Brother Bro.” That’s what him and my dad called each other. I always loved the hard bounce of the B’s leaving their lips. It had always been said so jovially.

The last essay I wrote here about Pops, I lamented over how badly I wish he could be here for his grandchildren. Tonight, the night before Memorial Day, I’m grieving who Pops was to his older brother, one of the best men I’ve always known, my Paran. Of course, reading this, he’s probably thinking ‘Don’t be sad for me, Evie. Have a good night! Have a fun weekend!’ I am, Paran, I promise. Writing about my dad is one of my most favorite things to do.

When I was small, and my dad felt a million years away even sitting in the next room, I used to picture us closer. I’d pace around the dimly lit kitchen in the long evenings and wonder how it could be possible. Looking back, I admit it’s a strange dynamic to have as a young girl looking at her father.

But, for most of my young life, I felt almost too near to my dad for us to be a “close father-daughter duo.” He was like one of those campfires you start out of a pile of tree branches and old wood in your backyard, but then every so often, it’d spill out—bright burning orange ash dropping onto bare feet. And I’d been too close, got singed a bit by the licking flames. So, I figured, if I were to ever really know my dad the way I always wanted to, I’d have to be something different to him.

During the span of time when he did not live with us, and I spent my childhood nights consoling my weeping mother on the dirty floor of my kid bedroom, I had a very specific vision that I’ve never explicitly shared. I’d lie in bed and imagine I could become a grown man, just for an afternoon. Just long enough for me to walk up to my Mawmaw’s house or that trailer or wherever Pops was staying at the time, rap on the door and ask Pops to come out and talk—man to man—and tell me just what was going on.

I couldn’t quite express my momentary disappointment in being a little girl during such a tumultuous familial era. I wanted someone to stand in front of me, not looking down but straight ahead, and tell me what was happening like I was a man capable of solving it, of taking care of everything. And ever since then, I’ve had this small sense of that in my bones, the longing to take care of the ones I love. This is partly why I love things like Jo March and Taylor Swift’s “Father Figure.”

Tonight, as I reflect on this, I realize there’s maybe even more to it than what was originally there. Before, this daydream was to solve a conflict. I felt like I needed to be someone who actually had the power to make things better. But now, I’m still clinging to this idea, and I just want to be a witness.

I want to have grown up with Pops, to know who he was before he ever had to be anything. I wish I could be privy to all his moments. The awkward teen stage when he had hair about the length of mine now, the days he played ball and started hunting, sharing a two bedroom house with his six siblings.

Tonight, I’m thinking about how I’ve had the privilege of waking up every weekday morning to the low chatter of Pops and Paran talking in the kitchen over a 5AM cup of coffee. I didn’t understand the honor it was when I was little, but the older I got, I’d make it a point to sneak in there and make breakfast, get milk from the fridge, grab my lunchbox in time to catch the tail-end of their memory lane.

Pops was such a hard worker, and I knew he’d have the same anxious, restless feelings I did on a Sunday night knowing he’d have to go to work all over again. When I couldn’t sleep as a kid, he’s the one who told me about the Sunday scaries, and he’d rub my belly until I fell asleep. I wish I could’ve repaid him. For everything. But, I know having coffee with my paran was the best part of Pops’ mornings.

And so tonight, I’m thinking that if I could’ve been anyone at all to my dad, I’d love to have been his brother. I’d love to have coffee with him before the southern sun even rose, hearing his cackle under the warm sink light, the steam from the fresh black brew swirling in our nostrils (matching, huge). I’d send him pictures of shirts I know he’d like, make plans to go hunting and fishing—all the things I did not want to do as his daughter.

Maybe this is why we’re stupid and human and forget the people we love aren’t invincible because if I’d have felt the way I feel now, I’d have shot deer and ducks with him my whole life, and I’d be a different person now. But, I’m who I am, so instead I spent my childhood reading and shopping with Mom, and now I’ll go to sleep with somber, but grateful, tears over how much I feel like I could’ve excelled at being my dad’s brother. Maybe I wouldn’t want to buy every purse I see (thank you Mom).

I don’t know if I was always the best daughter, and in fact, I’m positive there were things I could’ve done better. I’d have a million more conversations with Pops if I could go back. I’d go sit in the living room next to his recliner, ask him about the western or history doc he was watching. I’d have told him when I watched Lord of the Rings for the first time and cried over it, and we could’ve bonded over it. We could’ve watched it all again together, extended cuts, and gained twelve more hours.

I know I can’t do any of that, and I can’t be a brother to my dad, and I can’t grow up with him, and I’ll never know him like I want to. So I’ll do what I can and think about him and love him and write about him. I’ll share the kind of love he had for the people in our lives and make sure they feel it. Because one thing I’ll always know about Pops is how much he loved his family. And, oh my gosh, I can only half glimpse how excited he is to show us around his new place one day. Maybe then, we’ll talk like brothers.

♡

Would it sound extremely neurodivergent if I told you I often like to get my clothing and possessions in the color black purely due to its sleek simplicity? It goes with everything, it will always look chic, and when something is too busy I almost feel nauseous. Overwhelmed, just by the sight of something so loud.

Lately, I’ve been contemplating the concept of minimalism. Some buzz words I’ve been seeing on the Internet all year so far have been “digital minimalism” which I believe is linked to the analog/physical media trend. Typically, I’m not one to write think pieces on trends, and this piece will surely stray from those borders, but I’ve really been swirling these thoughts around the old noggin.

digital minimalism is a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else1

It makes great sense to me that as digital natives, my generation has grown up to become incredibly wary and resistant to the constant Internet access that’s been engrained into daily life. So I don’t totally fault the whole physical media trend, and have even felt a pull toward it at times. But now, I have a bit of a different take.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the truth of ‘less is more.’

simplicity and/or minimalism

I can’t quite pinpoint when this certain shift happened in my personal taste, just that it came in flooding waves. As a teenager, my bedroom walls were eclectic and covered with anything I could find to tape onto it. Coffee cozies, shopping bags, postcards, necklaces, leaves, and of course, the music posters and college brochures I collected.

Even recently, just before I moved into my apartment, my bedroom walls were thoroughly and aimlessly decorated. If you’d have asked me in high school, I’d have called myself a full on maximalist with my bright yellow denim jacket and colorful social media feed. Throughout college, I really started developing my own sense of style and it turned out to be a bit darker, moodier, grungier than fifteen year old me would’ve expected. But, it felt right.

Three months in, and my husband and I are just getting around to putting stuff on the walls of our apartment. Our collective style is very vintage and eclectic and I think what is decorated of our apartment reflects that. But at the same time, I don’t find myself particularly chomping at the bit to cover the place in stuff. The thought gives my insides a twist. Maybe moving was just that much of a hassle.

Keeping it simple makes me feel like I’m able to think clearer. And as someone whose favorite holiday is New Year’s, I’ve always appreciated a clean slate. As I write this, I also realize that more space equals more room for opportunities, and maybe that’s really what I find so comforting in the simple.

sharp and concise writing

What really led me to craft this essay idea at all was revising my novel. I tend to be quite wordy and long-winded in my writing, especially my fiction, and so I’ve been particularly exacting in my edits. It feels so, so refreshing! I get a bit of a thrill out of killing all my darlings, knowing the work as a whole will benefit from it.

As much as I love words and language, I can’t stand purple prose like I did when I was thirteen. I want to be sharp and concise, get the image in the readers’ heads in the instant. Skip the complications and get right to the feeling. So not only physically, do I find less to be more, but it’s really been a mantra for me in writing.

physical media

Because of all this ‘less is more’ talk, I’ve developed what might be a contentious opinion on going analog. I kind of like not owning things.

In my last year of college, I wound up in an engaging conversation with a local friar who explained to me the philosophy of purposely having zero possessions. I was fascinated.

And honestly, maybe this is something that’s change with grief. I had something, could hug it and hold it, and it was taken from me. When you lose someone like that, I think we also lose how important it seems to touch and hold and see things. But I still have Pops, and I’ve always had Jesus, and I don’t need to physically have them here with me to know that.

One of the biggest arguments I’ve seen in support of physical media is the idea of owning your favorite music and films and books, etc. And I cannot be a hypocrite, I have a lot of books. I love housing my favorite books. I love collecting. But, lately, I’ve been thinking about how beautiful it can be for something to be fleeting.

When things are fleeting I find we appreciate them a bit more. So, yes, the streaming service could remove my favorite movie, an artist or record company could pull their music from the apps, but the mark it’s made on those who love it does not disappear with it. There is beauty in fleeting things, in borrowing a book from the library knowing many have read it before you and many will read it after, that very same copy.

We are a fleeting thing. This Earth, this life is fleeting, but that is why it’s precious and why we feel the need to make things simple so we can get back to living it. I don’t know, I don’t mind getting and giving away.

1

The Analog Family

What Is Digital Minimalism?

I like to describe myself as a "digital minimalist." This wonderful term comes from Cal Newport's book by the same title, published in 2019, that has had a major influence on my thinking about technology's role in our lives. Newport defines digital minimalism as…

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a year ago · 98 likes · 10 comments · Katherine Martinko

There are very few moments in life when my usually stubby fingers stretch over the keyboard and I like the way they look. Today, writing from my apartment after an early rainstorm, I’m really pleased with how my hands look. Slender, almost wiry. The matured lady-hands of an intellectual writer.

Perhaps they knew my essay topic and are playing the part perfectly. (Gosh, everything is performance, isn’t it?!) Anyway, I’ve recently returned from a two-day advocacy conference with my eldest sister and it was lovely. I wore a blazer and a pencil-ish skirt, took diligent notes, and ate all my meals at a white-clothed roundtable. I felt very professional even though I attended the conference as a volunteer.

Aside from some really meaningful takeaways and habits that I will try my hardest to implement in my volunteer work, the atmosphere seemed to also inspire a sort of studious streak within me. Well, this studious streak has always been present somewhere inside my person, if not a bit dysfunctional or always on a smoke break.

But lately, I’ve been wanting to read everything, write everything, journal, and consume things of a similar nature. I’ve been glued to creative writing curriculums and library displays on Instagram, idealist journaling practices on Pinterest, and reading about books and writing technique here on Substack. It’s been absolutely refreshing.

real intellect

Something I’ve seen on the Cool Girl Internet™️ for quite some time has been the wide (exclusive) world of intellectualism. Wikipedia says:

Basically, people who think a lot and like to think and come up with conjectures, I suppose? It seems like such an elusive and exclusionary term, but really I think everyone is an intellectual in some right—and if not yet, they can be.

I’ve linked this essay in an older post of mine, but I run it back every so often, and so I’ll direct you readers back to it here. Ayan Artan’s words here are honestly what made me take three steps back and reconsider how I too was thinking of intellectualism. One of the star quotes from this essay is this one:

Thus, the crux of my own little essay was born. Intellectualism is for everybody. In my early years, I’d pride myself on how well-read I was. Reading at a sixth grade level in the first grade, always imagining detailed stories in my little head. Books and reading, storytelling, felt like a safe haven just for me. And growing older, I met the discovery of other readers and writers both with joy and contempt.

I think it’s natural to feel a bit territorial over something you’ve defined as yours for so long. That’s what literature was for me throughout most of my school days. Even when I had friends who liked to read, I felt an undeniable sense of (now I know, false) superiority for my taste. I pondered over esoteric, literary fiction since middle school when my friends were reading fantasies and sci-fi. Of course, I read those books too, but I was “versatile.”

In college, I pretty much turned all the way around. I wanted to be punk. A story someone wrote on a napkin using only three letter words was quality literature to me when I was nineteen. I was so ashamed of that old superiority complex I’d held, so afraid of coming off as pretentious, that I fully denounced it. I didn’t care, then, that half of my friends read James Joyce and half didn’t read at all. I smiled widely at my peers cracking open the fourteenth book in a Sarah J. Maas series. I even tried reading Colleen Hoover.

But soon enough, as an English major, you reach a point in your literature curriculum where you learn about origins and themes and technique and you have the thought. “Oh, I can’t ever not be a little pretentious about how much I care about this.”

So from my literature professors to the friends and peers I looked up to, all the way to essays like Ayan’s even, I found my way to the soft-ish spot I’m in now. I’m just happy to see anyone reading. Full stop. But, I highly encourage everyone to seek out some quality literature whether that be a killer science-fiction with a beautiful real-world, overarching metaphor, or an introspective literary fiction, or an old classic.

I still very much have a hard time with getting into classics, but audiobooks help, and audiobooks count. Listening to literature told orally is literally how it was first consumed. You’re not lazy, you’re harkening back to an old Greek tradition. (And probably elsewhere too.)

what i’m doing now

To reiterate, I’m not a perfect anything, much less a star intellectual. But, I figure, why can’t I aspire to be? Just because I’m working two part-time jobs, a very small Substack writer who likes music and getting herself in an Instagram reel hole, doesn’t mean I can’t at least try and devote more of my time to reading essays, multiple books at once, analysis.

So, let me tell you about my latest reading system I’m trying out. I’d like to start carrying multiple books around with me again. (I did do this before, but not in years.) One fiction read, one nonfiction, and one audiobook. I’ve decided the audiobook can be either genre.

The current lineup? Thanks for asking:

• Fiction: “What It’s Like In Words” by Eliza Moss

• Nonfiction: “Girl in a Band” by Kim Gordon

• Audiobook: “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt

I’d be interested in your lineup too, dear reader. Let me know. Give me some recs. See you later, with pencils in our buns and smart girl glasses on.

essay written to the soundtrack of

I’ve been sat here at my desk in the library, working the night shift, for only about an hour. And the slow passage of time comforts me because I’m again in that headspace where I feel petrified at the idea of my own inadequacy.

There’s a list of various article ideas housed in my Notes app. I thought I’d be expanding on one of those tonight, but none are appealing to me right now. I’d say this is perhaps a quality that makes me a poorly disciplined writer, but allows me to feel like a truer artist.

Of course, every tip, guide, listicle online warns against leaning on motivation and inspiration for writing, for art, for anything. And I think at one point that made sense to me, but it’s not computing anymore. Why wouldn’t I rely on inspiration to create? Who wants a bland essay stuffed with the things I felt I was “supposed” to write because Evie from two weeks ago had a fleeting idea?

Maybe it’s a fine line I’m walking here, but I’ve always found it extremely difficult to write or create anything worthwhile when I really, really, really am not in the mood for it. Is that a crime? Must I set strict guidelines and boundaries to churn my passion into a consistent, profitable scheme?

the depression hack

To be fair and honest, I understand the line of thinking that you should build good habits. You should write everyday if you’re trying to improve, if you want to finish a project, if you really love it.

As someone diagnosed with moderate depression and who experiences the (more than occasional) executive dysfunction, I do think sometimes it’s these ailments that become the cause of my defunctness. I can’t lie and say that absolutely isn’t the case while writing this.

Regardless of my outer circumstances, my brain has its moods when suddenly nothing is appealing. I don’t want to pick up a book or sit down to write or even listen to music. None of the things I enjoy. And if you’ve experienced depression like this, you probably know it’s truly a physical sensation.

Not only do I lack the motivation I shouldn’t be chasing anyway, but I feel physically heavy all over. My brain is swapped out for a cinderblock, and it’s probably one that was holding up an old car because it’s these cinderblocks that stand in the way of ambition. (Get it? An old car on cinderblocks? Lost potential?)

It’s this specific situation in which I’m not just uninspired, but ebbing and flowing with the state of my mentality, that I make myself push forward. Hence, why I’m writing this essay anyway. And that takes effort. I might not even read my book after this because writing this right now feels like pulling teeth. I’m making my brain work and all it wants to do is be numb, check out.

I’ll feel accomplished and splendidly sleepy once I press schedule post. And I’ll be able to go to bed (after my night shift) happy because there will be a Tuesday post after all. I can do it depressed, I can do it numb, I can do it!

craft over everything

I suppose the argument could be made that if everyone just waited until true inspiration or motivation hit then would we have nearly as many books, films, songs, artworks that we do now. I don’t know. I’ll never know and I’m not really worried about it. The best works anyway are usually the ones bleeding passion and enthusiasm.

Lately, I’ve been discussing creating things as a storyteller with my husband (one of my favorite things to do ever). I find myself reiterating the same central point which is to say that one has to really enjoy the crafting of a story, the making of the art. Otherwise, it will show in the results.

I stand by that. And I can’t think about creation without thinking about God—the Ultimate, Original, Master Artist. I think about His creation: you, me and the world, and how active of a creation it is. It is ongoing. God literally created us to live forever. Although His art proved to be a bit self destructive—and not exactly invincible—paper rips, ink smudges, pencil marks fade. Our art can defy us too, but that doesn’t mean we stop trying or we stop loving it.

I like to think about Creation and all the fun God must’ve had doing the creating. Genesis admittedly doesn’t offer a ton of intimate insight, but after each part, God looks and says it is good. I think that shows some accomplishment, contentment, and love of the game. And hey, even God needed his moment to be sleepy and unmotivated. On the seventh day, He rested.

So if you find yourself in the position to create something, if you feel pressure to produce, my kind advice would be to first be sure it is you in your soul that wants to or doesn’t want to create something, and if it’s not—live your life and gain that inspiration, and when it dawns on you, milk it for all it’s got until it’s time to rest and then the next motivation spikes.

When none of your ideas are cutting it, you find something new. God took dust and gave it life, gave it meaning. You give meaning to what you create.

Two long, wandering, and listless years have passed since my father—Evans Gerald Cressoine—passed away. His spirit fled heaven with the same sort of fervor usually reserved to his hard work ethic.

And for a long while afterward, it really seemed impossible that we would survive the loss of him. Me, my sisters, my mother, his brothers, sisters, friends.

Yet, here we are. The picture looks different now, not necessarily empty, but full in a new way. We’ve since celebrated a new baby, a new marriage, new jobs, new milestones. The thing about life is it really does keep going, even when we can’t possibly see how it will.

For the two year anniversary of the most terrifying day of my life, I wanted to commemorate Pops’ legacy with a small, sweet portrait of him. The portrait of a mighty man, coffee cup in hand, a strong stand with a little lean. My dad.

The man I was named after is a January baby, winter boy who grew up sharing a two-bedroom house with six siblings and sturdy parents. From what I’ve heard: a God-fearing woman I only knew up until the age of eight, and a hardworking man who crossed the veil as I crossed the threshold.

He told me he used to hate his name, just like I used to dislike mine. And what odd conundrums for us to find ourselves in. A surname as a first; a boy’s name for a girl. I loved having that in common with him just like I loved that we shared a nickname. I’m Evie and he’s Uncle Evie.

It gave me the small sensation that we shared some sort of consciousness. As though part of me was present in my own body, but something was there in him too—walking around as a hardy man, 5’9, with a salt and pepper beard. I suppose I felt stronger for that. I still do.

I don’t know much about my father before I was born, only what I’ve heard. No firsthand accounts before he was in his forties. But I’ve heard he was fun, silly, hardworking as always. My eldest sister talked of how he taught her to treat everyone with equal kindness. My second oldest sister would call him when she had a panic attack. He’d halt a work meeting for that.

My third sister still talks about him like she’s that same cheesy-smiled kid from the photo albums. I think her and I are really similar in our cling to him. Family waters got rough for some years and we wanted more of our dad than we felt was given to us. I guess—I’ll never not feel that way now.

To my mother, I know he was many things, played many roles. But above them all, her lasting grief proves that he was her husband. Half of her soul who she loves and will always love. She mentioned a quote from a movie she’d recently watched at lunch today, something along the lines of “He’s just in the other room.”

I agree. That’s what it feels like.

In my child eyes, my dad was very tall and very quick-tempered. He was a working man through and through, blood red to blue, working for us to have all we had, and more too. He liked watching westerns at top volume on the living room flat screen. He slept a lot.1 It was never not a good time for a nap.

Pops always said his favorite color was red, and maybe that’s because his favorite football team’s colors were burgundy and yellow, but I tend to associate him with blue. His blue lunchbox he grabbed off the kitchen counter every morning before work, his blue button down shirts, his navy blue pants, his weekend blue jeans. The blue truck they bought when I was ten, except it isn’t “blue”, it’s maximum steel. Yes, Pops, I remember.

Always the outdoorsmen, he liked hunting ducks and deer, fishing and crabbing, football. He threw the occasional ball in the yard with his sons-in-law and grandkids. Oh, the grandkids. I’d bet most of my money that they were the light of his whole life.

Pops lit up like I’d never seen him before when he became a grandfather. It seemed like it was so naturally meant to be for him. He was doting, sweet, thoughtful, excited. Asking for pictures of my sisters’ kids when we hadn’t seen them all day. Going to their sports games and dance recitals and participating in things like an Autism Walk.

With years of professional experience, the kids naturally gravitated toward his cozy belly for naptime. I can’t remember when I took my last nap on his lap, my head on his shoulder, but I miss it when I think about it. And now, when he visits in my dreams, my dream-self is always sure to cuddle him like I’m five again.

And of course, I love Pops and I miss him for who he was to me: a father, dependable and steady. Encouraging. The person I most wanted to read my writings. I was anxious for his feedback like it was my gold star. And he never had a bad thing to say. I don’t know if I could’ve kept writing so proudly if it wasn’t for his constant assurance. That’s why when I write, I like to write under my nickname, Evie, because it’s both of us. Spirit and soul.

But at the two year mark, I find my heart aches most for all the people around me. I really—more than anything—wish his grandkids could’ve grown up having him in their corner here on earth. I resent how young they are because I remember so little of my grandparents who I lost at ages two and eight. They’re just delicate memories, fading wisps of recollected stories, pictures in the scrapbooks and not much more.

But, I need Henry and Luke to grow up knowing how many games Pops went to, how loud he cheered for them, how hopeful he was for their futures. All the cozy naps he provided, the pats on the back, the hugs, kisses, prayers.

I need Rose to know he adored her. And he loved her for who she is, encouraging all her quirks just like he did mine. Oh, how he’d change the whole world to cater to her. Archer should recall his pawpaw who would’ve taken him fishing and hunting. He would’ve played dinosaurs and been just wowed at how well he speaks. I already know he’d love Arlo because for all we can assume, he may have sent him to us.

Pops would probably secretly shed tears over how grown and beautiful Stella is. He’d be so proud of her, and I know she’ll remember him the most, but I wish she didn’t have to remember. I wish she’d just have him.

And my husband who doesn’t get a father-in-law. Do conversations work the same as films in that the best ones never happen? I want to go to dinner with them, watch a talk about history and politics and everything else under the sun intently, my head back and forth like I’m at a tennis match. There’s just so much space left for him to fill. And two years later, I’m still feeling the vacuous space. The wide expanse.

Pops’ hearty laugh rings through my ears as clear as daylight sears the eyes. I’m happy to report that what I was scared of may never happen. I don’t think I could ever forget his voice, his tight grip when he’d hug me, the roughness of his steady hand.

In my dreams, he still comes to me, and most of my waking days are spent blissfully with the beautiful acceptance that he’s simply in heaven, and I’ll reunite with him fully soon enough.

His spirit permeates my world through music, through the soft night skies, in fleeting instances where someone says something he would’ve said. I still feel him everywhere. I hope that never goes away.

I’ve done hard things and I can do them again. Pops has done hard things and earned his keep up there. And because that interconnectedness doesn’t really go away, I’m still here carrying around our name. I don’t need to wonder if I’m making him proud because I picture his face—and I already know I am.

One of my favorite, and most commendable, hobbies has always been reading. From the time I learned how to, I’ve just never stopped. Stories, words, language, and literature are so important to me and have been continuous pillars in my life. All to say that this year I set a goal to read at least 48 books, four books a month (technically).

Let me tell you about the thirteen I’ve read so far…

A more recent interest of mine has been healing fiction which happens to be mostly fiction translated from Japanese or Korean or Vietnamese (at least in my experience so far). This genre acts as a great palette cleanser between my strange, esoteric, weird girl literary fiction I tend to gravitate toward.

The Healing Season of Pottery was a welcome way to start this year in reading. Jungmin was very relatable and I had such a heart for her and the side characters she meets within the pottery studio. After reading this, I found myself passing vases and ceramics on store shelves and admiring them a bit more than before, thinking of the hands that’d formed the clay.

I think this book is the perfect fit for someone looking for a genuinely relaxing read. It very much centers on themes of slowing down and appreciating smaller things in life you may not have otherwise paid mind too and places a beautiful emphasis on community and growth.

Something that I started around the end of 2025 was listening to nonfiction audiobooks to pass the time. This was specifically when I worked at the bookstore and needed something to fill the long silences when I’d work mostly alone, but I’d like to try and keep up this habit. It made me feel smart.

The first nonfiction audiobook I listened to was wordslut by Amanda Montell, and I just loved how conversational the narration was, and so I was excited to dive into another of her books.

Cultish was a fantastic read that kept me more hooked than I’d ever thought a nonfic could. I found the organization of the book to be really effective and she just hit all the right points. From scientology to Jonestown to modern multi-level marketing schemes to Disney adults, she covers so much ground and I was sat for all of it.

It was the perfect thing to listen to in order to feel intellectual, but in a beautifully girly way, like I was having important discourse in a cohort of gorgeous women, having lattes and laughing between earth-shattering realizations. I may even revisit this audiobook sooner or later.

It was only after reading a lot of discourse about Anais Nin here on Substack that I was inspired to pick up a book by her, and I’m really glad I did. She’s a writer I’ll definitely look for more of. I found her whole aura and diary writing so aesthetic and aspirational, and overall just interesting.

A Spy in the House of Love was such a quick and easy read. I was enamored with the story and following this morally gray main character actively seeking out affairs while having a quite doting husband. It was certainly more of a profile-esque story, and I still can’t get her clandestine rendezvous with the aviator out of my head. There were some beautiful metaphors of people needing to be unattached, ungrounded.

This is one novel I’ve read so far that I can’t stop thinking about. I’ve brought it up constantly, using it in examples and continuously pulling from its wacky plot. If there is one thing I can really appreciate in literature, it’s when things are beautifully strange and weird in a way that’s not actually too outlandish to believe. Not only was the writing top-notch in my opinion, but the plot had my head spinning in circles.

My favorite aspect of Kittentits by far is the narration of ten year old Molly. Her voice is so specific and cutting, raw and exacting. I loved, loved, loved the atmosphere of the whole novel—this dingy nowhere place crawling with fire victims, felons, the hopeless and wandering. I probably could’ve been content with a much more picturesque novel of Molly’s everyday activities, although the wild plot was a fun ride. I was always kept guessing and even still when I try to explain it to someone I sound insane. (Obsessed with the results.)

This was another nonfic audiobook read for me that I felt compelled to read, especially in lieu of current events. As someone who only knows life as this little white girl from the South, I know and rely on the importance of literature to expand my knowledge and empathy.

Jose Antonio Vargas’s narration is so heartfelt and studious. I felt physically in the room with him, brought along every step of the way from discovering he was an undocumented citizen when he was around sixteen to the long journey that followed. I especially appreciate there being personal accounts such as his out there for us to read because emotion and empathy are things much more easily understood than facts and statistics, especially for someone like me.

Dear America shined a super bright light on the inside of so many situations I’ll never have to experience: the United States’ immigration process, life as an undocumented person, what they leave behind, what they hide, what they feel they must do to survive, and the end goal of what they’re striving for is to belong to the place they already call home. I recommend this read to everyone.

This was the first book club pick of the year for the Story Craft Club which is a program I run at the public library. I picked it, wanting to start us off with something I deemed foolproof, believing everyone would fall for Taylor Jenkins Reid’s lovable prose, realistic characters, and amazing pacing. I was successful in that mission!

Having loved and heavily advocated for TJR’s other books such as Daisy Jones and the Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, I knew I could trust her with this one—even if I knew nothing of tennis and sports tends to be the last thing on my mind. I fell so in love with Carrie as a character, her attitude, her gall, her passion! I also always appreciate a bit of dad trauma in a story I won’t lie, I love to relate. As with everything TJR writes, I recommend. Even if you don’t normally read a lot, I find her to be the perfect medium uniting readers and non-readers alike.

Alright—the topic of a lot of contention has officially come to pass on my Substack: Wuthering Heights. To be super vulnerable, this is a book I’ve harbored a physical copy of for the longest time and had never read. Even as the Emerald Fennell film approached, I couldn’t bring myself past the first couple of pages, finding the text just so daunting and dense.

I just kept wishing I’d have studied this text in a British lit class in college because discussing it with my professor and peers would’ve given me the thrill and motivation necessary for such a tome. But alas, I did second (or maybe third) best and listened to an abridged audiobook. Yes, yes abridged. It is oh so long! I needed the gist and to be fair, I knew a lot about it already.

But my oh my, I’m so glad I took even that small amount of time to read the book before I went to see that abomination of a “film adaptation.” The wildest part is that the movie stands on its own fairly well: the shots were beautiful, set and costumes decadent, and acting pretty good (aside from Elordi’s everchanging accent). But calling it Wuthering Heights, even in quotes, felt very much like a slap in the face. Don’t even get me started on what they did to Isabella…

Movie critiques aside, the actual classic novel is weird. Naturally, classics are all a bit weird and out of date, and so I wasn’t exactly surprised. I appreciate all Emily Bronte has brought to the literary zeitgeist and all, but it’s truly not one of those I’d necessarily write home about. I’m glad to have read it and that’s about all.

Okay, so this is a bit of a tale, but I had the privilege of getting my hands on an ARC (advanced reader copy) of Yesteryear. Because of this, I read it in late February/early March while it did not officially publish until this month! One of the perks of being employed by big corp Books-a-million, but alas, no longer.

I really enjoyed reading Yesteryear, and yet, I remember having so many mixed emotions during my time reading it. The main character is clearly a strange person full of some sort of sick malice, but it brought into my mind the usual discourse that these Mormon tradwife influencers usually do.

Because they tend to be so linked with Christianity, my own religion, I kept running into a twisted feeling, having to constantly decipher whether or not the book was poking fun at my faith or exposing the truth which is that people like the main character don’t actually follow what they say they believe. After reading it, I do believe this book was more so about the latter.

Morality aside though, it was freaking interesting! I was on the edge of my seat, wondering so many things about time and relationships and appearances, etc. When the twist was revealed and the end finally came, it settled itself as a very high ranking book, and I can totally see this book gaining a lot of traction. It’s not only so topical, but it really is done so well.

This book actually caused me to write an entirely separate essay on Joan Didion alone (see “i’ve been thinking about joan didion again”). I just love her, what can I say? I’m that basic literary aspiring-it girl who loves her some Didion. It’s a stereotype for a reason. Her prose is so exacting, so concise and yet fully descriptive. And the fact that this audiobook was narrated by Maya Hawke who happens to have a voice I really like listening to was just an added perk.

Many essays in this collection are so popular that I’d actually read them singularly before listening to this book, but what drew my attention more were the ones I hadn’t even heard of. I remember particularly being enthralled by the first half of this collection, on her writings about the ‘60s counterculture and such. Legend, she is.

My first Freida McFadden and it hooked me. This was the second pick of the year for my book club, suggested by my sister, and this audiobook had me entangled in it all day long. I listened to it while building furniture in my apartment for five hours straight, the various voices playing like an entertaining Lifetime thriller in my ears.

I was honestly a bit addicted, all I wanted to do was listen to this book, and when it ended, I was shocked and even a little sad that there was no more book to listen to. For someone not super into thrillers, mysteries, or the like, I found this really entertaining—another good palette cleanser of sorts from works that can often take themselves too seriously.

In fact, I was so enthralled by this first McFadden read that I moved onto…

And in one fell swoop, I ignited and killed my Freida McFadden phase, just like that. Not really, I’m sure one day I’ll be in the right mood again and tune into another audiobook, or even pick up a physical copy, but The Teacher was a bit…much for me.

It had the same entertaining quality as Dear Debbie did what with the ease factor of the numerous narrators in the audiobook, but the plot and material were pretty downright despicable. This whole book details teachers being evil and having sexual relationships with minors.

It’s not one I particularly think back to or liked, and rated it firmly on writing prowess alone because it’s just not a subject matter I care to explore, especially in such a way as this book is written which is for shock value. The twist at the end turned my entire perception of this book on it’s head…in a bad way.

Now this book was sort of a contentious read for me. I’ve personally grown up watching Haley Pham’s Youtube videos. From her dancing videos all the way to her turn into a full-on Booktuber, I’ve been there, subscribed maybe not from day one, but certainly day seven.

It’s no surprise to me that she eventually decided to write her own book, and it was no surprise to me that she went with a romance. It was especially no surprise to me how quickly she’d gotten an editor and a publishing deal, etc. due to her already established online audience. Admittedly, maybe part of my feelings about this book are biased and affected by a bit of envy.

Generally, I’m not a pure romance reader. Any romance I’ve read and loved has been a subplot in the midst of a twisted literary fiction, so already, the genre was not one i connected with well. It was very Hallmark to me, which can be really feel good, although it did have a big focus on grief in ways that I can’t say were totally inaccurate. If anything, I thought the grief wasn’t explored enough to be realistic.

I’ve seen Haley get loads of flack for her amateur writing online, and I don’t want to contribute, if for nothing else than being someone also currently working on a novel. It is hard work and intimidating to put your words out there, so I must commend her for the act alone. And clearly there’s a market for it, she’s already a bestseller. Overall, I just found the story to be quite unrealistic and that gave me a sour feeling toward the characters.

This sensation really hit when I’d read a sentence that explained something along the lines of the main character having to choose between staying in a beautiful beach town where she’d been left a fully paid off home or going to New York City where she had a cushy, well-paying job awaiting her. And to this character, it was like the end of the world, which was so unbecoming to me. It’s just not a situation the average reader finds themselves in, especially now as prices keep rising and many struggle to even make ends meet.

Although, I’ll admit that it was through reading this book I realized I’m really not a reader who likes to escape through fiction. I appreciate most when fiction highlights the nitty-gritty of real life, the hardships and relatability of it all. But, that’s of course not Haley Pham’s fault.

Ending my reading list with this one feels so correct because I’m awaiting a weekend with my friends and husband to see the film adaptation. This was actually our third book club pick, again suggested by my sister, and I’m very glad I read this. The audiobook was good, and very, very long.

I’ll admit there were times I did not want to turn it on at all because it was so dense and filled to the brim with scientific jargon. I also found the voice of the character a bit too cringe here and there, very much “That’s gonna leave a mark!” sort of cliche, and I just don’t think it fit very well with the dire situation at hand. But, maybe that’s me being a hater.

Overall, I gave it a high rating because it’s nothing if not an impressive feat of writing and the ending really charmed me. I can’t wait to see the movie, and I know Ryan Gosling is about to play this character way more charismatic than I think he came off in the novel.

And with that, the thirteen books I’ve read so far, I leave you. All of my audiobooks (except for Project Hail Mary which I bought on sale at Audible) are through Hoopla, checked out with my public library card so I encourage everyone to get on that! Reading can be cool and free.

Thanks for reading and feel free to share what your year in books looks like so far.

from, evie

I remember having one of those super cool, purple plastic diaries that unlocked with a spoken code word; the ones from every kid commercial. Just hearing the little latch release upon hearing the word ‘starfish’ excited me.

But, I never really wrote in it. For a girl whose whole identity is essentially about writing, I never wrote about myself much. And if I did, it would be angry, tear-streaked Notes app poetry. In fact, starting this Substack after Pops’ death—trying to process my grief—was really the first time I wrote regularly about my own feelings, my own experiences. I’ve not been a great diarist although I’ve always longed to be one, especially lately.

I will say that I’ve become increasingly impressed with how quickly and easily I can fill up a journal. Although, that’s only due to most pages housing brief to-do lists, messy finance tracking, and unfinished one-liners. Most of my scrawling doesn’t even touch the bottom margin. Does this mean I’m a cheater at diary-keeping?

In full transparency, I have this ideal version of myself in my head who is equal parts whimsical and intellectual. I want to be an exacting writer, determined and sharp like Didion, but also someone indulgently dreamlike as if I were a modern Anais Nin. At the end of the day, though, I know what I want—what I need—is simple:

Whatever God asks of me. Whatever writer He is calling me to be, I’ll be it. I’ll throw myself into it. Wholeheartedly.

My entire childhood, I wrote fiction. Fiction has always been, what I’ve considered to be, my forte. Whether it changed from stories about fairies and flamingoes to anxious teen girls seeking adventure, my prose was always carefully shrouded in a layer of make believe. I’m still a woman very much dwelling in fiction. I’ve only just begun the process of reading through my manuscript for my debut novel. I even still write the occasional short story, submitting to literary magazines when I find the energy, time, and mental fortitude.

In college, gaining my creative writing degree, I think I really found my niche, my “writing strong suit.” Portrait writing. My hands-down favorite way to write is to take an image and describe it in the most sensory detail possible, but to describe it in the way I want the reader to picture it—romantic or grimy, bleak or ethereal. I’ve been influenced greatly by Sarah Broom, a New Orleans-born writer whose book The Yellow House really inspired me. I’ve actually had the pleasure of getting to tell her that in person.

If I were to try and write a portrait-esque scene of my current state of being, I’d describe the bite marks at the end of my ink pen, gnawed by consuming concentration. I could take great care in categorizing the tabs I have open on the library desktop: visions, moodboards, essays, and color schemes.

Please—sit back and relax as I intimately share the slight creasing of my brow, the heavy-leaden feeling I get in my lungs when I worry my literary pursuits may be directionless.

In many ways, I’m an enigma to myself, but then again, maybe I’m just thinking about it all too much. And maybe that’s why I find myself resistant to thinking one hundred percent, twenty-four seven.

Ever since I watched Jess on Gilmore Girls and heard of people writing their own annotations in the margins of books, I’ve been captivated by the idea.

And now, the act is still an unintentional marker I hold for intelligence. My brain sees those aesthetically pleasing photos on Pinterest of books with their pages decked out—neat script in deep black ink, their edges outfitted in color-coded tabs and page-markers—and I get a minor inferiority complex. I’ve annotated a few books in my day, tried to live up to this very particular “lit girl fantasy” and…I don’t really like doing it.1

I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that I don’t like to annotate a book as I read it. Not because I care about marking a book up2, but because it tends to break my immersion. When I read, the story unfolds before me like a film I’m watching in real time. I cast the characters, hear their voices, feel their emotions all through the page. It’s a beautiful experience, one that’s interrupted when I make myself stop to feign a “totally natural thought” I just had to write down in the margin.

I think my most authentic version of marginalia is underlining a sentence or word choice that I find truly too good to go unrecognized in some way. I have no qualms with that, but otherwise, I’m done performing for my books, trying to hold some intellectual superiority complex when reading goes hand in hand with feeling for me. We all feel, so why do we need to fake it?

No doubt, with the rising trend of being a “literary girl,” a “performative reader,” etc., etc. (read Poser ethics by Rayne Fisher-Quann), the pressure is on for us naturally bookish and word-inclined women to want to prove that we are better at reading, at literary analysis, at whatever. But I’m resiting fad culture and turning reading back into a thing I love to do. I do not need to gamify it all.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a crazy resistant tug between two versions of myself. Version A wants to do the things I know I love: reading, writing, journaling, documenting life. But there’s nefarious Version B who wants to curl up in bed and scroll, scroll, scroll until my eyeballs dry up and roll right out of my head.

Version B would be totally content to watch other women write their books, read the latest releases, and post cutesy pics of them. But Version A wants to be one of those women. And I’m willing to bet there’s a Version B to all of these perfect Substack girlies only putting forward their Version A online, so I’m ending this piece with an open call: HOW DO WE CHOOSE VERSION A?

Or even better: How can we let ourselves choose Version B sometimes without compromising Version A’s ability to bounce back?

Get back to me.

from, evie

On a slow-moving, mid-morning library shift, I wrote and posted an essay about Joan Didion. Now, it’s been a month. I’ve taken a Substack Break and my whole life feels different…and the same?

I had the honor and privilege of marrying one of my very best friends on a Friday the 13th. This June will mark our seventh year together, about our fourteenth year of knowing each other, and now—our third month married.

It’s a time in my life where even the simplest routines feel full of love and happiness. Shopping for the groceries, loading the dishwasher, organizing the apartment. Each act is a romantic beginning of a ritual, the malleable parts of life soon to be patterned with well-worn grooves.

In lieu of New Years’ resolutions, I tend to opt for a Word of the Year. I believe last year’s was healing. And in January 2026, I couldn’t quite figure out what this vital milestone year in my life’s word would be, but now—post wedding, post honeymoon—I realize it can only be one thing: Love.

all that has changed

I know adults don’t often call themselves grown-ups, but I like calling myself a grown-up. It showcases the action right there in the term. I’ve grown up. A feat I once truly feared I’d never accomplish. Now, my heart is full with the sentiment of looking at frightened eight-year-old me and going, “Oh, Little Evie, of course you are going to grow up, and it will be wonderful!”

My twenty-two year old ADULT self is married with a beautiful husband, an apartment on a quaint little street in my hometown, two jobs that keep me surrounded by literature, and a list in my journal of bills to pay. And while my checking account is lower than ever, having just paid another month’s rent, I’m still in the phase where I’m loving it.

I’m embracing my natural curly hair again, trying to get back into a writing routine, feeling very Carrie Bradshaw but much better because I’m not in love with someone like Big. I’ve been getting an onslaught of Sex and the City content online for some reason.

I’ve found myself in a situation that I love to be in, but one that admittedly stresses me out nonetheless. A transitionary period, a rapid whirlpool of change, the kind that says “Hold on because it’s happening, and it won’t slow down for you to catch your breath.” As much as I fancy myself a spontaneous person, I do take a couple weeks to reboot, to get grounded in a new routine.

Luckily, I get to do with that with my new husband—a man God has blessed me with, a lifelong best friend and companion, a creative partner encouraging all my literary pursuits, a man who cooks and cleans and goes to work and takes care of me, protects me. I could go on and on, and I will.

Some may call me delusional or even religiously psychotic, but I don’t fret when I say I know God has orchestrated our lives so we’d end up together this way. From meeting as two shy and awkward nine-year-olds to reconnecting senior year of high school to marrying each other at twenty-two, I stand firmly on the belief that we were meant to be. Call it a fairytale, I’m blessed enough to call it reality.

and all which has remained

This past weekend was Easter so I got in a load of family time, and that is something that hasn’t changed. I’m quite thankful for that. I wouldn’t be who I am without my family. I still get to accompany my beautiful goddaughter to her girl scout meetings and art classes, still get to listen to the wily shrieks of my toddling nephews and make funny faces at the baby.

My husband enthralls them with his history knowledge that reminds us all of Pops, and I get to hug and chat with his family too. It’s a wonderful little village we have down here. So far, I’ve only really cried once post-wedding shenanigans over Pops, and it was a beautiful cry. But, you know, who’s keeping count on all that?

I’m still working at the library, praying with everything in me that I just get a full-time position soon so I can have one job that I love and write, write, write. But for now, I’m still in retail purgatory at the bookstore—which isn’t bad. A privileged problem, I know. As my husband told me today while I was tired, slumped on the couch between shifts, “Don’t stress yourself out. Life is good.”

He’s right.

As always, I’m feeling both ambitious and distressingly lackadaisical. With one week of this new(ish) life behind me, I’m still settling into new routines, but this week I will kick myself back into writing gear. I’m even daring to start combing through my manuscript and my beta readers’ notes (terrifying).

It all starts here. Thanks for coming back.

from, evie ♡

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I couldn’t seem to rub the sleep from my eyes this morning. At least, not in a timely manner. My hair was unruly, my shoulder strained during its slumber, and I didn’t like my outfit options. Laundry is long overdue. Despite all of this, I made it to my shift at the bookstore about five minutes early and got to do my favorite thing: sit in my car, listen to music, and scroll Pinterest and/or Substack.

During my shift, I began to listen to a new audiobook, one seemingly born out of my dreams. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, narrated by Maya Hawke. I’ll take it. The first fifty minutes were all I was able to get through on the clock, but I was consistently riveted.

I’ve long since had a special affection for Maya Hawke’s voice since Stranger Things season three and the song “Therese.” And to have her voice read Joan’s words? It fit too well. I felt the energy through my arms and found myself flapping my hands in the specific sensation of satisfaction.

I’ve lately been trying to listen to more music than podcasts. While I love learning things and hearing stories, I’ve noticed lately that podcasts tend to drown out my own thoughts, whereas music tends to bring them up to the surface. It’s why I often write to music, so that my own ideas and reflections can bubble up to a boiling point just so that they spill out onto the page. And since that’s been my plight today, I have some introspection to interrogate.

joan, the literary it-girl

To tell you the truth, dear reader, I have no idea when I first heard of Joan Didion. I can’t recall whether it was high school or college, because of the podcast Binchtopia or prior, because of my English college courses? She exists to me now much like Spongebob Squarepants existed to me in childhood, so familiar, sewn into the fabric of my life.

I could never remember my childhood prior to watching Sponegbob, is what I mean, and now it’s the same with Mrs. Didion-Dunne. But would you believe it if I said I only started reading her about two years ago? That’s right, perhaps it was Pops’ death that officially drove me between Joan’s book pages.

My first read by her was, naturally, The Year of Magical Thinking. John Gregory Dunne, her husband, died in a very similar way to my father. A sudden heart attack—completely normal one minute and gone the next. I cried while reading Joan’s account. I painfully agreed over her fretting of the shoddy work of paramedics.1

Life does indeed change in the instant. One day, I was eleven and I couldn’t play the trumpet and I had a crush on a classmate and I didn’t know who Joan Didion was. Then, I was twenty-one giving a presentation on the assumed rivalry between Babitz and Didion, wondering how on earth Joan even needed an intro slide. Who doesn’t know Joan Didion?

The second book I read by her was, of course, Play It As It Lays. I had to see what the fiction was about, and it was…trippy, odd, starving prose. I still find myself amazed at how eloquently it seems Didion can write something while being so cutthroat and concise with her language. I liked the novel, lent it out to a friend, and bought more of her books I have yet to read. I considered myself an official enough fan.

Of course, I've read a few essays from Didion here and there, in class, on Pinterest. When I hit it in the audiobook of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I will smile at the familiar language of “On Keeping a Notebook” and “On Going Home.” I have yet to purchase the full book of The White Album, but I dissected what she wrote about Jim Morrison.

What I didn’t know about Bethlehem is that the title is inspired from the very same Yeats poem that another book I adore is: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Hearing Maya Hawke recite that poem back to me felt like hugging an old friend. It brought some warmth to my barren Monday morning.

All of this to say, I’ve been wondering where Joan Didion would be put in today’s context. Having only died recently2, in 2021, she’s still studied and widely revered as an essayist and journalist. I can admit that I admire a lot of her work, her language, her storytelling structure. I mean, what precocious young girl grows up to be a Substack writer and doesn’t love Joan Didion?

Upon reading an article called “The lies we tell about Joan Didion,” writer Nicholas Clairmont states Didion is the “the greatest American writer since Mark Twain.” Now, most of this article critiques the biography The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell which I’ve yet to read, but it also raises questions on whether or not Joan Didion would be considered a problematic icon for feminism considering her 1972 essay, “The Women’s Movement.”

From what I know and what I’ve read, “The Women’s Movement” doesn’t come off great if we’re trying to attribute it to feminism, but also, I look at her actions, what she actually did which is become a really integral name to journalism and literature at a time when that was mostly men’s domain.

Of course, Joan Didion was raised as a conservative in California. She wrote for the National Review, upheld many right-wing ideals in her career. However, around 1970, Didion actually registered as a Democrat. Now, briefly on the subject of politics, I disagree pretty wholly with the whole system we have in the first place. I don’t attribute morality to either one party nor do I think one is “the Christian party” or anything like that.

But, I bring up Joan’s political standing because at the end of Clairmont’s article, he rises an interesting and peculiar point. He writes that “the literary is so much higher and more important than the political” and so he essentially adds it up to not mattering, a non sequitur. Would Joan be considered a problematic icon today? Maybe so—actually—undoubtedly by someone out there.

“The point is that if you want to actually identify what is unique about a writer at the level of Joan Didion, you have to be able to think beyond right and left and even beyond right and wrong.” -Nicholas Clairmont, “The lies we tell about Joan Didion”

This last quote intrigued me, and I think I agree. Forgive my impatience, allow me some time to ponder and the grace to maybe later change my perspective, but as of writing, I think I can get onboard with it. The same way that I can get onboard with the mere existence of Nabokov’s infamous Lolita which many take issue with: art and literature are meant to expose readers to worlds they either couldn’t or wouldn’t explore in their real lives.

I believe I can admire Joan Didion for her talent and writing prowess and clear knack for becoming a hugely revered literary icon while not agreeing with every one of her ideas. I can have read Lolita, liked it, wrote a short story with a character named after it, and still believe the subject matter is perverse beyond measure, jail-worthy (which the book does agree with).

Perhaps this is a miniscule part of a bigger conversation, one where we as a culture must stop equating whose music someone listens to, whose books they read with their exact worldview. Oops, did I just stumble onto the “separate the art from the artist” conversation? Let me do my research and get back to you on that one…