After typically reflecting on my reading only on the yearly level, I found that breaking my habits down by quarter last year really did something for me! I felt like I had a reason to think more about the books I consumed, even if only for a few sentences in a Substack newsletter. I noticed the authors I returned to for more, and the ones that dropped away rapidly. So we’re doing it again!

This winter, I was alone a lot since my partner was away, and it was unusually cold and snowy where I live (not typically a very cold and snowy climate). We got the biggest snow the region had seen in fifty years, and the entire place shut down. Walmart was closed. The pharmacy was closed. No store had snow shovels, not because they ran out of stock but because they did not stock them in the first place. The roads were brutal, and I consider my midwestern self to be better equipped for driving in snow than most of my neighbors. The big snow coincided with the DIY writing residency my friend Rachel and I created, and I was glad to have her for company where I would otherwise have been all on my own. We spent a lot of cozy hours reading and writing, and occasionally traipsing out to the next town where there is a bookstore, when we needed to boost our spirits. When I think of this winter in the future, I’ll think of us together with our books.

In all, Q1 got us off to a respectable start, reading-wise! I read Euphoria while I waited to finally get my hands on Heart The Lover, and then read that too. Euphoria: not my fave! Writing science in fiction is hit-or-miss for me; I am often taken out of the story by wondering about the author’s research and credibility. That, and the romance didn’t move me. Heart the Lover, on the other hand, took less than ten pages for me to understand exactly why people like me loved it. Who among us has not been a sexually repressed student believing that the essays we are writing are really Doing Something?? I could to this very day tell you the thesis of all my favorite essays I wrote as a student, and how brilliant I felt while writing them. RIP to a more delusional time! Now, I just write stuff that’s obviously stupid, to save time!

I read Rufi Thorpe’s The Knockout Queen, working in reverse order after reading Margo’s Got Money Troubles last year. I loved it just as much (potentially more??). Her writing is so grippy right from the opening. You instantly buy the world she creates and want to live in it, even when it’s gonna break your heart.

I read Breathing Lessons after starting reading Anne Tyler last year, and chose this one next because it won a Pulitzer, hello! Unfortunately, I had a hard time with this one. This is a me problem—I often find novels set over a very condensed time period (a day, or a week) to be grating. Is it a fault of attention span? I loved the slow drip reveals of character development reveals in Breathing Lessons, but the result is that you mostly hate the characters and then are stuck in a claustrophobic purgatory with them until the end of the book, which you quickly realize is never going to get past the day on which it opened. It’s giving bottle episode, it’s giving “Seinfeld waits for a table at the restaurant,” and let me tell you those always make me feel claustrophobic too! Perhaps that is the intended outcome but that doesn’t mean I have to like it! Anyway, taking recommendations for next Anne Tyler if people like her, k thanks.

Private Rites by Julia Armfield feels like one in a recent spate of climate dystopia novels; I think I reached for it because it felt like every blurb praised it as a reimagining of King Lear1 and frankly I wish she had done more with that. I love a retelling, but if that’s going to be the big takeaway…..where is it? Maybe I am the idiot here! Please correct me! It’s okay that the book is doing a different thing, just like…..why are you misleading me?

I read both Sandwich and Wreck by Catherine Newman after enjoying We All Want Impossible Things a few years ago. These two are a series; of the two, I liked Wreck much more. Sandwich felt saccharine to me. I don’t want to read about parents who are so cloyingly progressive and chill and adore their children and support all their choices. Unrelatable!! Wreck drew me in more effectively, perhaps because I liked the way Newman wrote about illness and medical care in her first novel, and that’s back again here.

When my friend Rachel was here, we went out together and bought Jeannette McCurdy’s Half His Age, and Rachel enjoyed it and I did not. It’s a tricky book: an unreliable narrator telling a story that every adult can see is about gross abuse, but not portrayed as such because the narrator does not yet have the perspective of adulthood, makes for a complicated reading experience. If other people have thoughts on this one, I want to hear them.

Rachel and I also went out to buy copies of George Saunders’ Vigil when it came out. We were really coping with some things by buying books that week. I had started but never finished Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017, so now went back and whipped through it before reading Vigil. I loved both. There’s a reason we read Saunders in college. (I know I’ve already mentioned it, but I’m so intrigued about this upcoming animated adaptation of LITB.)

Oh, and I plodded through the third in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I have the fourth one next to me now. I’m ending up spending a year with these books, on and off, and I highly recommend it as a way to move through a series, especially one that sweeps over decades. (The opposite of the claustrophobia of the one-day novel form. Let me live in the world a while! Let me witness you being transformed!)

I read fourteen books in Q1 this year, so I’m on a good pace to reach my general annual goal of 50+ books or a book per week. April has been a big reading month already, but my summer is shaping up to be busy (fun! exciting!) and I’m not anticipating tons of relaxed reading time. Although, who knows. I might surprise myself.

And of course, if you are in New York on May 30th, come to our upcoming Circling event! You wanna dance AND make an art project AND have fun conversations with smart artists all the same event? This is for you. It’s going to be so weird and fun.

RSVP today!

See you soon!

xoxo

K

Q1 Reading Recap:

Euphoria by Lily King

The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe

The Faculty Lounge by Jennifer Mathieu

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

Sandwich by Catherine Newman

From Scarsdale: A Childhood by Dan O’Brien

Half His Age by Jeannette McCurdy

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Sanders

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

The Last Death of the Year by Sophie Hannah

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Vigil by George Sanders

Wreck by Catherine Newman

Maybe you have heard of it.

It took me almost three entire seasons to get on board with this show. I was barely paying attention for one third of the series. It is not remotely my genre. But now, we have one episode left. We’re going to watch the finale tonight. I know how it ends; it’s a famously ill-received series finale, and also I read spoilers. But I am so sad to see it end.

Disclaimers:

1. I have a low tolerance for torture and cruelty, and this is content from which the show does not shy away. This is one of the main things I knew about it, and everyone knows about it. It is very violent, sometimes including violence to children, sexual violence, and torture. It is sometimes gratuitous. I look away.

2. It was also heavily demonized in my religious circles in 2011 due to its nudity and sex. There is a lot of nudity; this is true. There is also very little chemistry or allure. Maybe once a season, we see a couple pair up in a way that we remotely care about, and even then it is written in a manner clunky and offhand. I think the moral panic might have obfuscated how little was going on here. Good thing they scared me away from watching for fifteen years lest I should know what boobs look like.1

3. I did not know this show was 50% about zombies. Completely missed my consciousness. My husband tells me that they are in fact not zombies but a separate class of reanimated corpse monsters. This distinction means very little to me.

So far, this makes it sound like I don’t like the show! But then, there are the characters. That’s where you’ve got me. I’ll admit it. I see what everyone was on about. I want a class on character development using this show as text. I would sign up for that class. I’m one hundred percent sure someone has had this idea, and so if you know where it is being offered, please let me know. In the meantime, I’ll be thinking about the scene I just watched in which weathered Peter Dinklage’s brother comforts him before battle by suggesting that when all of this is over he can get back to being the party party brat360 loverboy he was before, and Peter Dinklage says no, he cannot. One line, and it dawns on the viewer how the events of the story have effected change in the character. It’s succinct, it’s moving, it works for me! Okay fine, it’s a good show!

One of the ongoing conversations in our house throughout this watch has been reflecting on how much of the buzz around the final season in 2019 centered on the show’s supposed betrayal of a main character, revealing them to be cruel and reactive when perhaps the viewer had spent eight years believing they were just and reasonable. I have been on the lookout for that turn, and I’m going to say right now it creates no problem for me. Maybe I’m too gullible? It is tragic, but tragedy is a genre. We have been telling stories of powerful people’s descent into madness since Nebuchadnezzar. We’ve read King Lear! We deserve storytelling that challenges our desires and breaks our hearts sometimes.

Maybe a decade ago, we had more optimism about the potential of our leaders to be just and wise. In 2026, maybe we have less.

That being said, there is also so much about this show that is confusing and makes no sense. The character development is NOT the issue, but there are issues. For example, there are hundreds and hundreds of side characters whose names I find it impossible to retain. I checked out the day I learned (episode 1) that in a fantasy world of monsters and dragons, one thing that transcended human culture is the name “Brandon.” Brandon? Get out of here. You are making up everything else, but you cannot think of a better name for a human boy than Brandon??? They are crazy for that, and for that reason I have very little respect for these characters’ names and will not be using them.

Below are my official Top 10 Best And/Or Most Inexplicable Minor Game Of Thrones Characters.

There will be spoilers, if it constitutes a spoiler to reveal that, in a show about war, a lot of people die. These are in no certain order.

1. Arguably Not That Minor: Murder Diva Grandmother

   1. This is important to get out of the way, since she is arguably not minor in that her presence looms large and shapes the plot at a critical juncture. However, she appears in less than 25% of episodes, and so that is the limit I am using. Murder Diva Grandmother is candy.2 An utter pleasure to watch on screen. And what is the purpose of being elderly and rich if you cannot use that veneration as a shield to divert suspicion when you murder your granddaughter’s bad fiancé? That’s a woman with priorities. A woman with pizzaz. Also, this actress scored that great old-person deal which is to play a sizable role in a major property while almost entirely seated. Murder Diva Grandmother will not be put out. You’re lucky to have her. She (Diana Rigg) passed away in 2020 at the age of 82 after working right up until her death, and I hope she passed in riches and comfort. All the honor in the world to a real one.

2. Shockingly Minor, Actually: Sean Bean Dad and Jason Momoa Husband (2-for-1 going out of business fire sale)

   1. Due to some confluence of the show’s original marketing and my original awareness of the actors involved, I WILDLY misconstrued the prominence of both of these characters in the run of this show. For some reason, I thought these bros were endgame? Tentpole type fantasy bros. You’ve got your tried and true fantasy bro that your target demographic (millennial nerds) grew up with, and then you’ve got your rising star bro who is about to be a superhero merman(?)3, to keep things feeling current. Not so! These two are, in fact, in and OUT. Hilariously disposable bros. I hope they got paid fairly to sit out for the next eight years watching their fellow characters work through the fallout of their respective deaths onscreen to global acclaim, thinking “damn, that show I worked on for a few episodes in 2010 seems to be doing kind of well.”

3. Baby Bella Ramsey

   1. Did you even know that baby Bella Ramsey is in this show? I didn’t! They play the tween heir to the throne of a teeny tiny little feudal lordship with an army of 63 soldiers. This was apparently their first professional job ever! What a little star! This performance does skirt the line of the precocious child trope quagmire, but barely avoids it via comedy when Baby Bella, during an important meeting in one of her first scenes, leans over to be fed lines by an elder advisor and voila: we’re fine with it, in on the same joke. Classic brave kid role; the best of them by far in a show that admittedly loves to utilize a brave kid. Baby Bella Ramsey forever. You were courageous and noble until the very end, when you perished in child-soldier combat at the hands of a zombie giant. I cannot emphasize enough that I did not know this show was about zombies.

4. Pedro Pascal

   1. This brings us to Pedro Pascal. It’s always slightly uncanny to see an earlier performance of a guy who is now much more famous than pretty much everybody else in this show. He had the sauce! He was so young! (He was forty. His vibes are young!) My vision was clouded by 2026, and so when Papa Pedro showed up I foolishly expected him to stick around due to his inherently sexy presence. (Again, this show famously embraces racy content but makes baffling choices about it every step of the way, intent on axing it anytime it threatens to be fun.) It’s not like he was that busy, his credits directly adjacent to this one on iMDB include one episode of Homeland, and a minor part on Graceland, a show I did not know existed and which I would argue is lost to time. But poof: just as you’re relishing his presence, he is gone, his eyeballs crushed into his face in combat in front of his family and also me, though my eyeballs are viewing it from behind my hands.

5. Kit Harrington’s Girlfriend with the Chic Fur Snowsuit

   1. Here we have another character who was lost too soon. This is related to my confusion about this show’s decisions in re: sex. This is a couple that has chemistry, is delightful to watch. These actors met on this set where they are mostly portrayed trudging through a snowy wasteland, fighting for their lives and wearing seventeen layers of clothing, and got along so well they got MARRIED IN REAL LIFE. They have CHILDREN. Snow girlfriend sparkles on screen. But once again, this purportedly sexy show cares not at all for actual chemistry, and writes snowy cold girlie and her steamy hot accent right out of existence. You could argue that she, like Papa P, had served her plot function and so had not a whole lot of direction to go. I don’t care. MAKE SOMETHING UP. This is not a show that prizes faithfulness to source text. The limitations of your imagination astound me.

6. Ghost Uncle

   1. I am obsessed with the lack of explanation provided for how this one guy out of ALL THE WOLRD OF GUYS escapes being turned into a zombie drone, and retains his free will and consciousness after death so as to be around to help his nieces and nephews in times of need. My husband has informed me that “I did explain this to you; the children of the forest helped him.” The children of the forest helped him? Are you serious? Okay, then why didn’t they help anyone else? Only this one guy? I rest my case. That being said, when he rides in to save the day and says that as long as he can, he will use his ghost power to fight for the living, I will not pretend to be unmoved. Sure, inexplicable deus ex dead uncle. You’ve got me.

7. Cynical Doctor

   1. This guy is so useless. Here we meet the wise old expert mentoring our boy Sam (pictured left) in apparently both history and medicine. In this world, those fields of scholarship are one combined job, and all the guys with that job live together in a library/hospital/commune. But the first time Sam comes to him regarding a patient to say “I read in our book that there is a treatment for this condition,” Cynical Doctor only says “nope, can’t be done.” When Sam (spoiler) does it, Cynical Doctor apparently resigns to it immediately, looking at the patient and saying “wow it almost looks like this patient received treatment.” His whole mission is to tell people “no” and then do nothing about it. An accurate representation of academia y/n? I love an ineffectual ivory tower boffin.4

8. Fancy Merchant King

   1. By now, you know that if a character is fun, they are not long for this world. Such is the fate of Fancy Merchant King. He shows up to bestow blessing and mercy upon our protagonists, delivers every line with aplomb, and just when you are thinking “wow, this guy could really help us out and bring some needed joviality to this hellscape,” he is cut of in his prime. I want to know more about this character’s back story, as it is briefly suggested that he was an immigrant who then rose to power in the richest city in the world, and he has SWAGGER. He’s so fun! This show hates fun.

9. Guy Who Loves The Lord

   1. This guy exists for seemingly no reason at all in one episode, wherein he is establishing a settlement in the countryside, building a chapel for the lord, and leading his little posse in worship while they work, a la Mother Ann Lee herself. He’s a side character in a side quest of an already arguably side character, and then is murdered at the episode’s end, never to appear again. Why did that happen? Where did he come from? He was having such a nice life! Justice for random mister Ann Lee.

10. Bisexual Swashbuckling Sailor Sister

    1. And finally. It had to be said. Bisexual Swashbuckling Sailor Sister deserves better than the fictional family she was born into. Her family sucks.5 The most positive thing I have to say about them is that at least her evil mustache-twirly cartoon villain uncle is occasionally fun on screen. However, here we have a woman who took a bad lot in life and made it work for her. She does not get nearly as much character development as she deserves, being most often a pawn in a boring back-and-forth game of imprisonment and rescue. But she seems to have forged her way in the world, if entirely off-screen. I would obviously watch a whole show about her. Her storyline is left relatively open-ended, and so I wish for her a long and happy life with a boy or a girl in every port, depends on the port.

The end! Tell me your favorite and least favorite characters in this good and also baffling show. Whom do you hate?

xoxo

K

PS. If you made it this far, perhaps you are interested in this announcement about my upcoming Circling Studios event? Find out more here!

4

My husband suggests that I could have nominated a more noble/useful scholar doctor: this guy. He is indeed wise and helpful, but kind of one-note and so I have nothing funny to say about him.

One hundred eons ago aka in January of 2025, I expressed my goal for 2025: to be astonished by books again. My previous year’s reading was clunky, half-hearted. I wanted to be wowed! I took to Substack to outline my reading habits by the quarter — here and here and here.

And I achieved my basically one and only resolution for the year! Books can be astonishing! I read fewer books than is typical for me, but I attribute that in part to moving to a new state halfway through the year and feeling my brain totally lost from my head, and in part to reading a number of fairly long books, the slow work of attention and enjoyment. I love the gluttony of listening to an audiobook in a day, of hooking myself up to it and putting the story right in my veins, but I also love the different pleasure of sitting with the same book on my coffee table for weeks because I’m moving through it in pieces.

First, my Q4 reading recap:

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

Writers and Lovers by Lily King

Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker

Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

That Kind of Mother by Rumaan Alam

I ended the year at 48 books.1 Like many people, I recently saw this report and got all smug about being in the top reading ranks (the four percent of Americans who read 50+ books a year), only I then totally failed to make the cut this time. Left myself out in the cold with the second-tier six percent of plebes who read only between 20 and 50 books a year. Ew, gross.

Still, 2025 gave me some real gifts in reading. This year, more than many, I feel like I dipped into the work of so many new-to-me novelists whose work I can really see myself following and enjoying for years to come. Writers whose work is now stored in my brain with a tag that says “now that’s what I call a novel.” The expansion of the canon — what a feeling! What riches!

It’s the year I got into Larry McMurtry. Lonesome Dove still reigns as my favorite read of the year!

It’s the year I finally went back and read Ted Chiang’s second story collection, Exhalation. I think I was putting it off because I knew I would love it so much, and since there were seventeen years between his first and second collections, I didn’t want to rush in and then have to wait seventeen years. Now, I perhaps only have to wait ten.

This is also the year I read Hamnet and loved it before we ever knew it would lead to the year’s pet Oscar villain. I still maintain that it was such an enjoyable novel, just perhaps not great for adaptation!2

It’s the year I hitched my wagon to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. I’ve been plodding through one per season; I’m in the third one now and I weirdly feel like to it took me until book three to really appreciate how much she’s doing. (Okay, so maybe the pretentious book-reading people who were obsessed with her when I was in grad school in 2015 were on to something! Fine!)

Then, this is the year everyone went gaga for Lily King. I still have not read Heart The Lover but have it sitting in my pile because I wanted to read her others first. That’s the risk with internet book discourse, though! You dawdle a few months and the thing everyone was talking about is now….basically gone from conversation?

2025 was the year I finally got around to reading Pachinko nearly a decade late. I loved it, of course! I bought a copy of Free Food for Millionaires (TBR), and just recently found out Min Jin Lee’s latest is coming out this year. It is supposedly “a panoramic and emotionally riveting portrait of one family’s pursuit of success in a perpetually shifting world” which is a hilarious nothing-burger way to say that it is a new novel by Min Jin Lee. Sounds like I’ll probably like it!

Plus so many more authors whose novels I just started reading for the first time: Anne Tyler, Rumaan Alam, Addie Citchens (a great debut), Hernan Diaz, etc etc etc. Again, the expansion of my personal canon.

I made a joke at the beginning of the year that I wanted to get back to being who I was as a child, which is to say, the sort of person who takes a book to the toilet. Folks, I’m thrilled to report that I succeeded. I’ve read a lot of books on the toilet this year. We love to see it.

Okay, that’s all for now. Tell me your number one favorite read of 2025, ready go!

But before we jump into that, I have news!

Events:

• Join me and Circling for a 2-part virtual workshop series (January 21 and 28) in partnership with Paradice Palase to discuss How To Talk About Your Art! Session 1 will cover artist talks and speaking opportunities, while session 2 will cover writing about your work for career development. Both are free to attend, and you can attend either or both. I hope you’ll join us. xoxo

• Online Arts Admin Meetups — on the third Saturday of every month, we host a virtual coworking time for artists (and anyone!) to focus on the administrative labor that makes the rest of their work possible. You know the stuff: emails, applications, website updates. It’s everything you procrastinate and so do I. 🙃 Sign up to receive the Zoom link! Free to attend.

And now, back to . . .

The All Trades 2025 Pop Culture Awards!

✨Movies ✨

In the category of Favorite Movie From 2025:

• Winner: Sinners

  • I don’t have anything to add to the discourse, seeing as I am not an actual critic, but I really really loved this movie. The performances, the velvety visuals, the historical context, the costumes, the music, the dance(!), the atmosphere. I hardly stopped thinking about it all year. (I’m a sensitive baby viewer and sometimes intolerant of horror, so I pre-gamed by reading a plot summary ahead of my viewing and it did not lessen the experience at all.) I hope to see her win so big.

In the category of Favorite Movie From 1975:

• Winner: Jaws

  • I watched this at a 50th anniversary screening at my small-town theater, having never seen it before. A treat for the senses!! Again, atmosphere! Plus Robert Shaw cementing his place in my heart after already featuring in one of my longtime faves, The Sting, in 1973.

  • For good measure, I will also include a Jaws review from my mother, who, upon hearing the above, said “What?? You liked it? It was SO SCARY!”

✨Television ✨

In the category of Classic TV I Watched This Year:

• It’s a tie! Seinfeld and The Sopranos, both watched for the first time in our house this year.

  • You already know the impact this coat had on me.

In the category of Current TV I Just Got On Board With In Season 3:

• Winner: The Gilded Age

  • Love it. All Trades is a pro-Carrie Coon publication, as well as a pro-Louisa Streep Gummer Jacobson Getting A Paycheck While She Figures Herself Out publication.

  • Honorable mention to Carrie Coon’s 2025 performance in The White Lotus, particularly her earnest monologue at the end of the season which I have unironically quoted upon multiple occasions since!

In the category of Haven’t Watched Yet But Will When My Husband Goes Out Of Town Next Week:

• Winner: Heated Rivalry, probably!

  • I have no takes because I haven’t seen it

✨Podcasts:✨

In the category of Best Way For Me Personally To Keep Up With Pop Culture:

• Winner: Who? Weekly

  • Particularly the VIP show aka the bonus content on Patreon which costs $5 and couldn’t be a better bargain if it tried. Bobby and Lindsey taught me everything I know.

✨Books✨

In the category of Favorite Novel Published in 1985:

• Winner: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

  • You already know this because I just can’t shut up about it.

In the category of Favorite Novel I Read Earlier This Year That Has Been Made Into A Movie So It’s Topical:

• Winner: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

  • I read this by chance at the beginning of the year and then found out it was being adapted. The book had such a special atmosphere to me (shut up about atmosphere ok); I almost wonder if it was limited by the form and would have worked as an animation?? I know, nobody would make that and nobody would watch it. But I would. Anyway, I fundamentally do not get Paul Mescal as a supposed hot person/actor, and adaptation is complicated and so often underwhelming, but art about art and also grief? End of the day? My shit.

In the category of Favorite Poetry Collection Written By A Friend:

• Winner: Francesca Dons Beatrice’s Cloak by Jessie Epstein

  • A slant interpretation of a classical story is sooooooo me-coded. Jessie is out actually doing the thing! Buy her book!

✨Theater✨

In the category of Favorite Production That Closed In Disarray And Will Sadly Not Be Remembered As A Success (RIP):

• Winner: Cabaret at the KitKat Club

  • The cast recording from the London production was at the top of my Spotify wrapped, which says more about how I’m probably using Spotify wrong than anything else. But I did spend all of 2025 considering making a trip to see it again before it closed. (I didn’t. Is this why it closed?) Anyway, adore it!

In the category of Favorite Performance That I Did Not See Live But Watched On YouTube Repeatedly:

• Winner: Cynthia Erivo, “Gethsemane,” Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl

  • Cried a lot of times watching this performance this year! Can’t tell you for the life of me why there isn’t an official video.

In the category of Musical I’m Considering Getting Really Into In 2026:

• Winner: Sunday In The Park With George

  • Just spitballing

✨Music✨

In the category of Favorite New Album By A Pop Star From My Youth:

• Winner: Lady Gaga, Mayhem

  • Due to my religious predilections in high school during OG Gaga’s rise, I was under the impression at the time that she was uncouth and also sinister. I have repented of this. I think she’s a weird and sincere girlie who just loves the art! And I love that!

In the Category of I Don’t Totally Get It But I Like It:

• Winner: CMAT

  • The name of the award says it all: I don’t totally get it, but I like it. You’re gonna want to listen to this and then also her cover of Tate McCrae’s “Sports Car.”

In the Category of In My Instagram Algo This Year:

• Winner: Nathan Evans Fox, “Hillbilly Hymn”

  • In the right mood, this song also makes me cry. Honorary mention to “Landlords, Bill Lee, etc” which I listen to in protest while doing my day job where it is incumbent upon me to sometimes be deferential toward Bill Lee.

In the Category of Most Listened This Weekend While Reading In My House:

• Winner: George Winston, December Piano Solos (1982).

  • I contain multitudes.

✨Awards Ceremonies✨

In the category of Best Awards Show (Televised):

• Winner: The Las Culturistas Culture Awards

  • Obviously! Hosted by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers

  • I didn’t watch this televised but I know that it was televised so it counts.

In the category of Best Awards Show (Audio):

• The Who, Me? Awards by Who? Weekly

  • Hosted by Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger

In the category of Best Awards Show (Invite-Only):

• Winner: The Annual Ross Family Gingerbread House Decorating Awards

  • Hosted by me and my funniest uncle and cousin. Unfortunately, as mentioned, invite-only!

And that’s it! The First Annual(?) All Trades 2025 Pop Culture Awards is in the books. I can’t wait to see who’s going to win Favorite Novel Of 1985 next year!

Tell me all your 2025 culture highlights in the comments below. What successful books/movies/shows you have just recently discovered? What do you think I got wrong?

Almost the first thing I did upon moving to North Carolina was to get a library card. In adjusting to my work-from-home life, I tried hard this summer to give myself a routine — on Mondays after work, I went for a bike ride. On Tuesdays, I went to a yoga class. On Wednesdays, I went to the library to check out one book and return one book. On Thursdays, I went out to buy a cup of coffee and read my book. On weekends, I would walk down to the dock in my neighborhood with my book, or read in my back yard. I even instituted a reading time on my lunch break; this has not persisted, though it was a noble effort and I should try to get it back! But it helped me to feel settled and, as a result, I plodded through a little pile of library books this summer.

What have I been enjoying? Let me think.

Maggie O’Farrell’s books have provided diminishing returns for me this year. I read Hamnet last winter, The Marriage Portrait in the spring, and This Must Be the Place this summer, and liked them in that descending order. That being said, I will probably keep trying. I’ve made it this far!

I feel similarly about Lauren Groff. Matrix really did it for me, but the subsequent two of hers I’ve read (Fates and Furies, and now Arcadia) don’t have a lot in common with what I loved about the one I read first. Sometimes I can’t decide if I like an author or just like the ~vibe~! Matrix and Hamnet are both what I’d consider very vibey novels; they have a lot of atmosphere that for me does not transcend that specific novel’s setting or themes into the rest of the writer’s work.

They also both represent a kind of historical fiction that reminds me of childhood. It’s like candy to me. I would also put the pop-culture-y historical novels of Taylor Jenkins Reid into this bucket (lately, Malibu Rising): very different but also doing a world-building thing that scratches at a childhood itch for me!

This summer, I also reached for a couple more bulky/substantial novels that I’d had on my list for a long time — Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. I loved both of these. Pachinko is obviously exactly my lane; I love nothing more than a multigenerational epic. It is maybe my favorite thing out of all the things a novel can do. I have Min Jin Lee’s previous book requested at my library now. And My Brilliant Friend has been on my radar almost since its publication; I had read The Lost Daughter before but none of Ferrante’s longer works. There is something that tickles the brain about reading in translation; what a delight. I purchased the rest of the Neapolitan novels right away. (Also, fun to have a series ahead of me. A series also feels like childhood.)

What else? I zipped through John Green’s little book about tuberculosis; I feel loyalty to my hometown’s most successful current author, and nonfiction is what I enjoy from him. (I will continue to recommend his essay on Indianapolis!)

I saw people talking about Wild Dark Shore in my algorithm and I am going to be so honest; I did not love it! If found it tense and unsatisfying.

I picked my next Larry McMurtry arbitrarily because it was on my library shelves and let me tell you, this was a bad one. Luckily, the high of Lonesome Dove sustains me and I have plenty of others ahead of me.

Oh! I read The Three-Body Problem which I became aware of when the American adaptation came out last year, and this was an interesting one for me. Without spoiling (because if you have not read it or seen the show, it does contain some moments of revelation), the book includes both a story about scientists on earth navigating a crisis, and also, within that story or parallel, a narrative about life on a planet with its own rhythms of time, solar system, and civilization. The problem for me was that I was HOOKED on the parallel planet storyline, but bored by the earth storyline. The story within the story had some incredible and haunting moments of world-building. I would read so much more of that — it reminded me of some of what I love about Ted Chiang’s science fiction. However, the grounded story of the scientists being stressed felt claustrophobic in comparison. Anyway, there are two other books in the series, but I don’t think I will be reading them; based on where the book leaves off, I assume that the rest of the story is going to happen from earth POV, and will therefore not contain more of what interested me? Correct me if you know otherwise!

Okay, that’s mostly it. I read a novel by Elizabeth Strout (Tell Me Everything, a follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kittridge), but I found Strout’s tone irritating. Clearly people enjoy her writing, just not me. Similarly, I accidentally read the follow-up to Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto, without having read its predecessor. This is what you get when you just go to the tiny town library and pick up things that look interesting! It took me a minute to get into Crook Manifesto, but it does make me want to go back and read Harlem Shuffle. Finally, I picked up one Anne Tyler, French Braid, and found it such a pleasurable and breezy version of the multigenerational thing I love. I am going to pick up more of her books.

Those are the books I read this summer! More on my Q4 reading habits another time — it’s slow going at the moment, guess I’ve gotta get my act together. Time for some cozy reading.

What have you been reading? Do you have any kind of seasonal cycle with reading? What’s on your TBR list?

More soon,

K

Summer 2025 reading

This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

French Braid by Anne Tyler

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Tell me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Hello! If you are confused why you are subscribed to this Substack, it’s because I dashed off a stupid post about Taylor Swift that got 100x the views of my average work — a mistake I will not be making again, thank you so much to those of you who let me know you hated it!

If you’re still here, you should follow along with my actual work at Circling Studios, where we are preparing for an event in Brooklyn on October 25th. We have a truly great lineup of speakers and facilitators gathering to explore how our needs, relationships, and caregiving responsibilities both complicate and contribute to artistic practice. If you or anyone you know in the NYC area are thinking about how to be an artist while living with children, elders, illness or disability, and care work, this event is for you. Register here — pay-what-you-can option is available for anyone, no questions asked.

Register by October 12th to be entered into a book giveaway with works by some of our favorite Circling artists and writers. In addition, check out our studio sale, now running on Instagram (or message me privately). Proceeds go to providing quality honorariums to our presenters, and pay-what-you-can pricing for all.

Circling

Circling is a newsletter, online archive, and event studio charting the rhythms of the artist's life. How do you create a home in which art can survive?

By Circling Studios

In the meantime, the news in my life is that I have moved to a small town in North Carolina and now work my day job fully from home. I’ve written more about that here and here. Among other things, this has spawned a real ~situation~ around my fashion sense and dressing habits. Until now, I have always lived in cities and I have always had jobs. Getting dressed to go into the world is like one of my main interests. Suddenly, I live in the middle of nowhere, and my job takes place at this desk just off the kitchen.

I have no social compass, no one to dress for here. I do not know anyone in this town. The place where I encounter the most people during my regular life is the grocery store, which is Walmart. The two closest restaurants to my house are also gas stations, and the only store I can walk to is a Family Dollar which is one and a half miles down a winding road. In this town, there are none of the trappings of performative hobby capitalism that I’m accustomed to, the places where young-ish hip-ish people such as myself are tricked into spending money in order to feel like we are out participating in the world in a cute way. There is not one bourgeois third-wave cup of coffee to be found. There is not a museum or a theater or a bookstore. There is not a college or university, and no young professional culture to speak of. I think, after people graduate from the local high school, they either go into the military which has a base nearby, or they get a job at Walmart, or they move away. To our credit, this town does have a public library, a yarn shop, a yoga studio in a strip mall, a post office, one park, and an enormous quantity of car dealerships. There is also a thrift store called The Hem of His Garment, which, I can only assume, suggests the goods therein can heal your chronic illnesses the way that touching Jesus’s hem healed that woman in the Bible of her endometriosis(?). Huge if true. 1

All of this is to say that I am still struggling to carve out my habits in this new place, and as a result have been somewhat adrift in my dressing habits. Dressing is such a conversation! We develop tastes and preferences in relation to those we see around us — A verified Cool Girl on the street? An elegant old woman? What are they doing? Why am I noticing it? Look at that coat, those fabulous shoes! Should I be wearing more red?

Of course there are people around me, and technically they wear clothes. There is a man in my neighborhood who tends to walk his dog at the same time I walk mine; he wears commemorative t-shirts and cargo shorts. There are people in my weekly yoga class, elder divorcees in scoop necks with inspirational phrases like “choose joy” and stretchy patterned yoga pants. There is the woman who owns the yarn shop, in jewel-toned knits and jeans. There is a postal worker I have met while mailing packages; he wears a postal worker uniform. There are people in the grocery store on Sunday afternoons. They fall into three general categories that make up this community: people who work for the military/government (close-cropped hair, muscles, utility clothing), people who came here to retire in an inexpensive place near the ocean (more commemorative t-shirts, plus breezy beach-themed leisurewear, for example, a button-down with a pattern of beach chairs and lobsters), and people on vacation with their families (flip flops, short shorts, hoodies announcing the name of whatever place the wearer vacationed last year).

In general, the ecosystem of the clothes people wear around me feels completely separate from the aesthetic conversations happening on my corner of the internet. One might think that moving to a smaller town would create a peaceful unattachment from the trend cycle. Not so, I am chagrined to report; at least not immediately. If anything, unfortunately, I’m noticing the bubbling up of an embarrassed desperation, clicking links to articles to see what’s happening with the shape of boots this fall, is this the year we’re tipping the scales back to narrow-legged jeans, what’s going on with athletic wear?

It is not my lot in life to be cool; it never has been and it never will be. I lack the instinct, the budget, the access, the je ne sais quoi. I am famously a normie lady. But I am a normie lady who reads fashion writing, who has robust watchlists on secondhand sites, who scrolls Pinterest photos for color palettes and shapes of coats, who is now peering desperately into virtual windows and around internet corners to see what everyone is doing in the places I am not. Is “everyone” actually just a few people on the internet to whom I attribute inordinate parasocial power? Maybe! It is certainly not the people in the grocery store here where I actually live. It is not even necessarily my friends, stylish though they may be. It’s absolutely not remotely every real person who lives in the major cities where we think culture happens — cities are made up of predominantly normies, just more of them living in close proximity.

And yet, I miss being near those more people. I miss the stimulation of walking into a public place and observing everyone’s style, both individually and as a collective impression, a vibe. I miss having fashionable points of reference, peers, guiding lights around me IRL to get my wheels turning. I’m adrift. I recently bought a bright red vintage raincoat because I became obsessed with the one the character of George wears in Seinfeld.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got. Please indulge my desperation and tell me what you are wearing lately? What are you buying? What, if you please, is cool? TYSM.

xoxo

K

PS. If you know anyone in New York please invite them to Art x Care!

It’s August, the sticky late summer of a year that feels like a barrage of headlines that unsettle our sense of ourselves and our nation in the world. We’re seven months into Donald Trump’s presidency and are each individually reckoning with how much news we can really process. Wildfires are in the air both literally and figuratively, and there might be a hurricane coming for Puerto Rico. Taylor Swift has just announced a new album accompanied by visuals of herself covered in jewels in a bathtub. The year is 2017.

I think surprisingly often about a Vulture article written in this moment eight years ago. It’s by Mark Harris and is titled “Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ Is The First Pure Piece of Trump Era Pop Art.” Upon a reread, the article itself ephemera. But its thesis stuck with me so stubbornly that it has become part of my personal cultural lexicon for eight years. It was the first thing I thought about when the rhinestone-bedecked cover art for the upcoming Life of a Showgirl dropped1 — have we not been here before?

It is not my job to hate on art that people love (I personally love much that is basic), and I think doing so too regularly is both boring and mean. I am Taylor Swift’s exact original target demographic, and I would like to think I like her a normal amount. After all, I was a teenager at the same time she was and have grown up with her for the entirety of her career. I spent 99 cents2 a pop to download individual song files from Walmart.com onto my off-brand mp3 player and listen to them while I thought about my crush! Taylor Swift’s music was among the first I ever sought out that was ~secular~ which only makes sense as a descriptor for music if your default connotation for music is religious. (Mine was.) Later, my friend and I used to do a hilarious bit where we plumbed the depths of YouTube for the most earnest covers of “22” to send to our friends on their birthdays as we each reached that milestone — notably this one, which made us cackle. I often listen to Swift’s music when I’m writing, and have done so for many years. I love Folklore and Evermore and think Tortured Poets would be considered some of her best work if it had been culled to shall we say eleven songs instead of thirty-three. (I know, streaming metrics, yada yada yada.) Not to mention, I’m a former humanities student: I get a dopamine rush from understanding a cultural reference, and Taylor has trafficked in name-drops and allusions since the days of “Love Story.” I will probably like a song about Ophelia! It is basically made for me!

All of this is to say that I come to Taylor with charity in my heart. And also, I am afraid early-Trump-administration Taylor is our worst Taylor.

2017’s Reputation is my least favorite TS album3, and I even went back and listened to it front to back yesterday to make sure. It feels so deeply of a particular personal moment that it makes perfect sense to me that she hasn’t re-released it with the rest of the Taylor’s Versions. Doing so would probably feel like watching back a recording of a fight with a loved one wherein you believed you were making some Very True And Also Witty Arguments only to realize you were being embarrassing and also kind of mean. By all means, skip it.

However, it feels we are spiritually in a very similar place as eight years ago, Taylor-wise4 (and also otherwise, obviously). We have as a collective been worried for years about the increasingly ouroboric nature of Taylor Swift’s need to recount her feelings about her own fame and career. In Reputation, obviously, but also in “Anti-hero”5 and now cemented by back to back releases that name versions of her own job in the album title. Are we discussing this enough?? This is weird!6

Is she swirling into a black hole where her experience is so unrelatable and constricted by fame that she can’t write like a normal person anymore? (Probably.) Where does it end? (In dark moments, I think about how I cannot picture Taylor Swift existing as an old person, and worry that this forbodes some kind of tragedy — people have crumbled under the weight of far less fame.) How many songs can you realistically write about your own personal feelings about how you, a celebrity, are perceived in the world? (How many times can you get away with being photographed swathed in jewels in the bath, because I would have thought the answer was zero-to-one and now we are at at least two and that’s just off the top of my head.)

Every time a Taylor Swift album comes out, there is a general flurry of “have we as a culture had enough of Taylor Swift already?” And the answer is always apparently no, and then we throw a bajillion dollars at her.

But whatever else she does, Taylor swift reflects us back to ourselves.

You can almost map her albums based on the locus of power in a given moment — she rose as a twangy pickup-truck-riding country dollface in the down-home-coded Bush administration, and then during the halcyon yuppie optimism7 of the Obama years decided to pack up and move to the city and write girl-power pop. During the first Trump presidency she threw herself headlong into gaudy maximalism — after all, when Donald Trump is president, you can be showy about being rich because the rich have won. This is when she really found her calling as a purveyor of content about what she thought about what other people thought of her. When she perhaps realized that the jewel-encrusted victim complex was not a great look for a leader of the youths, she benefitted from a documentary about her brave coming out as . . . a liberal white woman(?). Then, as the pandemic forced much of the country (though by no means all) into a reflective solitude within the walls of home, Taylor Swift took herself to the woods where she braided her hair and wore sweaters like a relatable queen, and released my favorites of her albums in the process.

Taylor Swift is being formed by the world, just as we all are. Even Taylor Swift lives in a society. She is creating in reaction to her own experience of living on planet earth, as is everyone. This is not special; it is normal. It is maybe the most normal thing about her.

But in most other ways, Taylor Swift is not normal. Once you become a billionaire, being a billionaire overshadows being an artist. It fosters a myopia in which every idea the billionaire has is good simply because it is possible. Taylor Swift (or her copywriting team) love to talk about whatever she is doing as a boon for the fans, but this late in the game, it seems improbable she is considering what we the people want. (I think we mostly want her to be well and happy and to maybe do less.) She is ostensibly considering what she herself wants, or will make her richer. Many such cases.

It is absurd to expect your billionaires to act nobly and in good faith, whether they are Jeff Bezos sending stupid rockets to almost-space or Taylor Swift releasing four sets of paraphernalia for the same album, complete with little metal charms that will probably discolor your skin when you wear them. Taylor Swift is not on our side. Taylor Swift is a billionaire selling work from which she will only get richer; we just keep buying it.

In the Vulture article that haunts me from 2017, Mark Harris writes:

“I have no idea what Swift’s politics are, but I’ve heard enough of her songs over the years so that of course I know what her politics are: I win, but for the record I’m the victim of haters and losers. As we’ve learned, you can go a long way with that, and she has. If nothing else, “Look What You Made Me Do” finds a new way to commercialize self-exoneration. It’s perfect for a world in which our chief executive’s chief subject of fascination is his own size, his reach, and the way in which he is received . . . . None of this exists without our complicity. We may smirk at it, but it smirks right back, lets us know we’re in no position to judge, and leaves us with this sour revelation: This is also our fault. Look what we made us do.”

And now, we are in some ways reliving 2017 and so, perhaps, is Taylor Swift. In her new album art, she is once again performing languidness amid gaudy trappings, weary with decadence, overworked by the show of it all. Is this new album about her experiences on the biggest pop tour in history going to do something new? Is her reluctance to re-release her most polarizing album going to bear out in artistic growth in this new one eight years later? Is the recycling of the bathtub-jewels imagery intentional, setting up a path for her to purposefully play with the resonance? Or will it be exactly how it seems, another album about how Taylor Swift feels about how other people feel about Taylor Swift, ad infinitum until she finally swings too close too close to the black hole and topples into oblivion.

I feel truly ambivalent about this album, but I cannot say it doesn’t make sense. It feels a lot like what she gave us this time last Trump, and perhaps it is what our current moment deserves. I am holding out hope that the pendulum will once again swing back and maybe in 2028 she will put out another vibey acoustic album that will be great background music for writing stupid Substack posts like this one. Maybe she will one day swear off the spotlight for real and go away to that nice cabin(?) type place she seemed to be in for the Folklore/Evermore photoshoots, accompanied by her boyfriend whom I really really hope does not have CTE from his time in the sports8. They can maybe make a nice haven using her piles of gold gained from decades of selling thirty-seven different versions of the same stuff to people who don’t need it.

Deep to my core, I want only what is good for us all, and I want only what is good for Taylor Swift.

Is this it?

PS.

What have I been watching this week instead of Taylor Swift’s two-hour podcast debut appearance? This bootleg of Cynthia Erivo singing “Gethsemane” from Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. I am wrecked.

Apologies for my absence from this little corner of the internet. I MOVED and all my attention has been sucked into setting up my house, transitioning into doing my day job remotely, and figuring out where to find anything at all in my new town.

However, I did read some books this spring. The momentum of Q1’s several excellent reads propelled me into the spring with some new stamina — I found myself ready to dive into some long books and/or ones I’ve had on my shelf for some time. I didn’t read nearly as many books as in the first three months of the year, which I think is fair given that I also packed up my entire life and moved to a new state. However, I did read a couple of long ones.

The first Long Book was The Overstory by Richard Powers, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and has, I would guess, been sitting unread on a number of well-meaning citizens’ shelves for the intervening six years, as it has on mine, due to being a brick of a book. But in 2025 we are fighting for our attention spans, and so this April I put this book in my bag and carried it around with me, reading in waiting rooms and in coffee shops and in my parked car and in my living room. And do you know what? I plodded through it in one respectable week. Reading this book well after its fanfare had subsided, I wished I was paying more attention at the time to what people loved about it at the time, not just that they loved it. Personally, I was more impressed with the form than the plot. But I loved the form! The prose, the scope, the characterization! This is what long books can do!

Around the time I finished The Overstory, I saw that Substack icon Fran Hoepfner announced Lonesome Dove for her annual online book club in May, and this felt meant to be. The perfect next long book! And this, my friends, was the highlight of the spring’s reading and maybe the whole year’s. I fckin loved Lonesome Dove. Fran’s book club allotted us five weeks to allow a steady pace for discussion (again, a brick, my copy nearing 900 pages) but I absolutely breezed through, hooked from page 1. Larry McMurtry feels almost like a cult classic to me in 2025, like an ~ if you know you know~. I do know that he is incredibly famous, but I didn’t think westerns were my genre, and I was too young to see Brokeback Mountain when it came out, and you just have to be in the right headspace to commit to 900 pages of men complaining about being hot/cold/thirsty/tired.

Anyway, in May of the year of our lord 2025 I read Lonesome Dove and I will never be the same. I didn’t know it was going to be funny! I didn’t know that it would make me cry. I didn’t know it would make me purchase blue cowboy boots from eBay, okay? I didn’t know it would make me reckon with the human experience of mortality ??

It strikes me that one thing both of these novels have in common is their reverence for the natural world, but in vastly different ways.

The Overstory, concerned essentially with the life and destruction of trees, is described as a work of activism, and I have mixed feelings about that. Powers’ work has an agitated feeling to it even as it calls for stillness, for the cessation of extraction and reverence for the long-living creatures that surround us. For all the title suggests a zooming out to a scope above the human perspective, human activity looms large in The Overstory, both as culpable for all the destruction and responsible to work for repair. It poses as a nature-centric story but felt to me actually very human-centric, framing people as powerful creatures on earth, little gods creating and destroying the world in our own image, and deserving to be held to account. Again, this book was great, but the plot was not what awed me. Its strengths shone for me in other places.

In contrast, the way McMurtry writes about the natural world makes that world feel actually, vibrantly, big — and the human life small in it. The genre of “western” suggests that the place is what makes it, and since I’m new to the genre, it stunned me with the intimacy of the character development balanced with the scope and realism of a brutal wilderness. My copy of the book contains a blurb from the LA Times Book Review that says Lonesome Dove “celebrates a world abundant with calamity,” and I have not stopped thinking about that as a framing for crisis. We live in a world abundant with calamity. The mechanisms of fatality may have shifted — from the lifespans of our ancestors kept short by hunger, disease, violence, and vulnerability to our artificial sense that longevity is our birthright and disaster an aberration. But the abundance of calamity has never wavered.

It’s the old problem of scale — one death is a sorrow but a million is just a number on a page. I don’t need fiction to remind me of the specific ways the world is currently in crisis and endangering us all; that is too big for me. What I always need is fiction to help me reckon up close with my own mortality, and with the idiosyncrasy and inevitable loss of each person I love. Part of McMurtry’s gift was to create characters so real their breath stank, and then look clear-eyed and calmly at their death at the hands of a calamitous world. He didn’t need to preach or tell you what to feel; his writing just brings you gently to the edge of human experience and kind of drops you off to fend for yourself. It makes room for great pleasure and great grief, and I loved reading it.

Lonesome Dove is the best book I’ll read this year, so maybe we should all just close up shop. I guess our work here is done.

The short list of books I read this spring ~

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Olive Street Transfer by Pat Schneider (poetry collection)

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

Self Care by Leigh Stein

Trust by Hernan Diaz1

Besides which, I re-listened through thirteen Agatha Christie audiobooks, which are comfort listens I reach for in times of stress and transition, but feel like a separate thing.

K bye! Happy Summer! Tell me your reading!

Making clothes is my favorite thing that I do. I have almost no technical skill, I refuse to acquire any except by osmosis, and I mostly make things just for myself. But this year, I am trying to improve my relationship with the clothes I make — to utilize them less as a novelty and more as real wardrobe items. That is the premise of Me-Made May, a longtime internet challenge for people who make clothes. The internet has changed a lot since this was started (in 2010!), such that it seems a little like a vestige of a different time, but this year it go in my head and I went for it.

My goal was to wear something handmade every day in May — I think I did so on 27 days; there were a couple of days I forgot to take a photo, and a couple more I just did not feel like strategizing a handmade outfit given the demands of the day. To fill out the numbers, I am including a couple of looks from late April and early June. I’m also tracking which things are recent makes; I felt a big creative itch this spring and made a lot of things. It’s also part of the process that some things I make just as practice, and then maybe only wear a few times. This makes me sad from a consumption angle, but it is also an unavoidable part of making. Sometimes I’m just trying something out! I don’t always know what’s going to work long-term! When I can, I repurpose fabrics. When I can’t, I give away.

Anyway! Here is all the stuff I wore!

Clockwise from top left — Me-made black jersey jumpsuit (spring 2024). I loved this when I made it last spring; in the intervening year+ my body has changed some and now I’m less into the fit. Might not keep. Black loungey linen-feel pants (2023), a staple, wear often! Purple ruffle skirt (winter 2025) — this year I am embracing volume, and acknowledging that in certain contexts I really like length and flow. Pink ruffle top (spring 2025); hard to see here but up close it ha a fun retro geometric pattern that is my favorite thing about it. Blue cape dress (spring 2025): now here is a garment that thrills me. I’m having a thing with bright cobalt-almost-electric-not-quite-royal blue, and made this dress to suit. It’s a fun design with hidden waist ties inside that cinch the front while letting the back drape. It also has a PLUNGING neckline, which works as either a layer over something else or as a bold decorative bralette/boobs look. Invite me somewhere to wear this dress! Yellow pants (spring 2025); these are heavier material similar to canvas, with a lining, which gives them a real trouser structure. Pleats and ties give lots of room in the waist and thighs which is my mission in life and sewing. Black dress (spring 2025), not much to say, but have worn multiple times since making this spring. Grey gingham top is part of a two-piece set with pants below (spring 2025), but I’m worried that wearing both looks TOO much like pajamas. Center, a black wrap top that is the oldest/earliest make pictured here that is still part of my wardrobe! Made in early pandemic in my studio apartment in Indianapolis.

Likewise clockwise: A light yellow top (spring 2025). This was not a very fun outfit. Gauzy mauve(?) wide-leg pants (summer 2024). These were the ones that started my fixation on big fat pants! My favorite type of garment to make and wear this year. Next, these are the grey gingham pants that go with the top above (spring 2025), plus a brown ruffle top (winter 2024-2025) concealed somewhat here under a sweater tied around my waist. I loved this outfit. A yellow apron/dress (spring 2025). I was experimenting with side ties here, to allow me to either tie loosely with openings on the sides, or wrap the ties underneath to close the gap and overlap the panels. I am excited to wear this dress more. Bottom left, truly great wide pants (spring 2025) in an electric yellow and black floral. I love this material and I love these pants. When I wore them out, someone stopped me to ask about them, and then I had to tell her I made them, and the she asked if I sell them, and I said sometimes but not really but you can follow me on Instagram, and then she did, and then I went on an Instagram break. Sorry to this woman. But you have a great eye for pants!! Next, depressing outfit on an unseasonably cold day while staying in a hotel to visit our new town and find a house, but I did made this black t-shirt (fall 2023). Bright green pants (spring 2025), part of the continued pants revolution of 2025. Our pants are dramatic and they are spacious. Love the pleats and ballooning here. In contrast *dark* green pants (summer 2023) are less drama but still flowy. Center, bright yellow top (spring 2025). We wear primary colors in 2025!

From top left, wide white pants (winter 2025), tragically in need of a steam, and a gauzy sheer white top (2023?). Black linen pants (2023) but different than the ones above! Loose black pants are useful in multiples. Blue top with tie (spring 2025). Cream white top, summer 2024 — I feel like this needs altering. Maybe crop? Huge grey gingham pants again! The first black pants again! Ruffle dress (summer 2024), I love. Blue top again, black skirt (spring 2025). Bright green pants again, and a different blue top (spring 2025); this one has a fun color-blocking up close.

Deciding ahead of time to reach for the clothes I’ve made did successfully effect a change in my brain. I have wanted to continue wearing them. Also, there is a big difference between something I wear out of a sense of duty for having made it and a garment I LOVE to wear. I think I love ruffles right now, I love heavier-duty materials, I love bright colors. I love all my multitude of huge pants! More big fat pants!

Okay, got to pack up my life now. What u been wearing?

xoxo

I was the child of people who went places.

By the time I was born, my parents had lived in four states and six countries between them. They spoke multiple languages. They were accustomed to the navigation of unfamiliar cities, of trains and airplanes and roads, of learning to communicate and adapting when you cannot, of starting over with jobs in new places, of the formative power of being a stranger in a strange land. And so it is no surprise that I have interpreted going places as a fulcrum of success and fulfillment. It was a streak of upper-class priorities in my financially lower-class childhood. I studied abroad in college. I went on service trips. I visited friends all over the map. For grad school, I moved from Indianapolis to Chicago – the trajectory of the aspiring young thing! You leave your smaller city and move to a bigger one because you have Potential!

When I began dating my now-husband, it was with the knowledge that we would continue being the going-places type. Cody went to medical school on a scholarship through the US Navy, which, among other things, is an institution that hires doctors: in exchange for his tuition, he would get through medical school in this one city, and then through residency in a different one, and then he would go to work for a number of years on a military base, or potentially on multiple bases, or potentially on bases in between periods of deployment to provide medical care.1

By the time he was finishing medical school in Indianapolis I truly wanted to get out of my hometown and never live there again. I felt claustrophobic, trapped, perceived, exhausted. I thought we might be leaving forever. I roved the map in my brain, calling to mind cities that were not Indianapolis, where one might hypothetically settle. I could live in Atlanta, I thought. I could live in Chicago again. I could live in New York (though my husband, to be fair, could not).

On residency match day – a nationwide ritual in which graduating medical students all simultaneously find out where they will spend the next three to seven years, like a deck of cards shuffled up and strewn on the floor – our card skittered us over to Memphis, Tennessee. This is where we live now. It is a place that has been very good to us. I got a day job that is not my passion but suits me. Cody in turn got really good at his job, gaining a level of experience that places him in the top tier of emergency physicians nationwide. We have both settled into ourselves in this phase of our careers, our relationship, our values, our interests. And now, this is the place we are about to leave. The next portion of Cody’s job assigned us to North Carolina, which is an outcome about which I have mixed feelings. But we are the going-places type, and we will adapt to this next place.

However, in the past year, while we figuratively twiddled our thumbs waiting for the powers that be to tell us where we must live, something else happened.

Some friends of ours at home decided to sell their house and pack up to move closer to family in another state. And, one night as I walked past the couch to the bedroom, my partner looked up and said “hey . . . what if we bought their house?”

And without a single hesitance in my spirit I said “yes.”

* * *

The years away have effected a change in my attitude toward my hometown.

I do not feel defined by the place where I grew up, in a way I uncomfortably did when I still lived there and wanted to leave. I have at times felt an embarrassment regarding the Midwest, the sense that choosing to live there makes a person by definition hokey and unambitious. (But actually, even if I did believe that, it does not follow that being hokey and unambitious is a cardinal sin. There are manifold worse things one could be, like a billionaire, or a racist, or someone who does not respect either old trees or young children.) True, it is not sexy to be from Indianapolis. There is perhaps no unsexier place. It has absolutely no glamor at all, and when a comedian I follow on the internet mentioned coming to town and asked for recommendations for what to do in town, I found myself thinking, damn, I really don’t know.

But you have to live in a place.

You have to live somewhere, as the moving truck man told writer John Green, when he moved back to Indianapolis in 2007. He tells the story in an essay about the city, now collected in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed – an essay I have never once read through without tears rising to my eyes, and I have read it many, many times. (You can listen to an earlier version of this essay in its radio form, here.)

You have to live in a place, and, regardless of its sexiness or glitz, you may come to feel uniquely compelled by the place you know best. I think it is so funny when people express loyalty to their hometowns through the lens of it being the best place. No place is the best place; that is not even a metric that makes sense at all. But you are allowed to love the one that formed you.

The same goes for sports teams, universities, and friend groups.

The same goes for religions. I no longer believe in the absolutism of the religion that formed me, the supremacy of it both as True and as the best way to conduct a human life. But it is the one that formed me nevertheless. I have read and reread Aminatou Sow’s reflections on Ramadan and Eid this year2, comforted to no end by her playful engagement with the gravitational pull of the religion that raised her – not because it is the best or truest one, but because it is the one endowed upon her by accident of birth. Her relationship with Islam is far less about God or Mohammed than it is about her mother. And, a little behind her mother but still ahead of Mohammed, it is also about her West African heritage, her commitment to an ethic, a sense of smallness in a universe that is big.

I love the lucidity of Aminatou’s perspective, it’s anti-angst. I appreciate the reminder that my human angst would not be salved by a different religion, any more than my ambivalence about my midsize midwestern hometown indicates that I would be more fulfilled living somewhere else instead. There is not a supremacy to places any more than there is to religions. I am shedding the skin of the bright young thing who supposed that I’d probably better move to The Big City . . . just so that people would know I am the kind of person who would (??).

No. I am not special. This place is not special. I feel so much less defined by this town than I did when I was twenty-five, but I feel more inspired to love a given place. And this is, after all, the place that life gave me to love.

Indianapolis is the town where several of my closest friends live. Where they, too, have now become professional adults who own houses and seem inclined to stay awhile, barring the collapse of all civil rights in middle America. As a woman in my thirties who still cannot decide whether/when to have a child, I at least know that I would prefer to do so in this place. After all, this is not only the town where I was a child, and the town where people I love are already parenting, but also the town where I have spent the most time as a caregiver. When I envision the logistics of childhood, I envision them in Indianapolis. There is something in the devil you know.

Slowly, I realized how my vision for my life and home overlayed quite well on this exact house in this exact town. I want to live in an old house with nooks and crannies but also abundant windows and, if possible, a sun room. My partner wants a big plot of land, and I want a garden. I want space for a studio. I want rambling rooms – no to open concept, multi-purpose nonsense. I want to be close to my friends, close enough to run errands or help with chores or share a meal on a weeknight. I want a city resourced enough to have lots of hospitals and universities, a robust public library system, parks, coffee shops, museums, and theaters. And yet, I also want trees and birds. I want neighbors. I want space for guests.

This place provides, improbably, all of those things.3

The housing market in this country is in some ways out of control, but I am here to tell you that there are select pockets in midwestern cities where you can find forgotten old houses on forgotten old plots of land around which the sprawling city has scrabbled its way out of the ground over the course of a hundred years.

I know they exist, because one of them is mine.

* * *

I do not know how to buy a house. I hardly envisioned myself as a person who would ever own one.4 The idea arrived in early November, and it took us until March 21st to close the deal. It appeared to come crashing down multiple times. Buying a house in 2025 is no small feat. If you cannot ever buy a house; if you can only buy one with help from family; if you cannot get help from family but can qualify for a first-time-buyer assistance program; if you can do none of the above but are scrimping and saving regardless, you are normal. If you own a house that you bought in a prior decade, god damn I hope you get to live in it forever and make a killing on it when you are old. We would never have been able to buy this one without a true confluence of luck, generosity, patience, and stubbornness.

And so, on what I thought was fittingly the first day of spring but was actually the second day of spring, we signed a mountain of papers and the house became our own. We camped out inside it on an air mattress, and ate takeout pizza with our friends. We started talking about projects – taking up some old carpet here, what to plant there. We clocked which trees by the driveway were getting ready to bloom, and how we would not get to see them this spring but would in lots of future springs to come. Springs ad nauseum. Springs galore.

Because, of course, after the commemorative weekend we got back into our car and came back to our current apartment in this different state where we actually live. But now we have a secret, like a mother who has not yet told people about her pregnancy, but knows it is happening. Now, when we have to reckon with moving for this next job and the selling of our souls and the starting over of our habits, when our friends back home are having parties without us, when I feel uninspired by my boring rented home with its dim light and soulless affect, when I consider if or when to quit my day job, when I bemoan the long travel distances required to see anyone I love – it is now with a caveat. An asterisk, a safety net, a promise. Yes, and, we have Indiana. Yes, and, we have a house.

Yes, and, we have a future.

* * *

As we told our friends about the house – which, to be clear, we will not be able to live in full-time for several years yet – more than one of them said to me, “I thought you never wanted to go back to live in Indiana.”

And I have said, “I know. I didn’t. And now my wants have changed.”

Life is long, and there is something to be said for the swell of universal human experience, patterns writ large across each lifetime. I like the feeling that people pretty much do all the same stupid stuff. I still don’t know if I want a baby, but I respect the universality of it, the thought of being awake at night with your own baby just like billions of other mothers have been awake, too, under the same night, lit by the same moon, crouched in desperation on the same planet as it spins into another morning. We are not special, neither uniquely depraved nor singularly enlightened. We are all just puttering around repeating the behaviors of our ancestors as if we invented them. Starting fights and making up. Falling in love and growing old. Raising children and letting them go. Creating and building. Losing and grieving. Setting out to die on some hill and then, slowly and with cramps in our legs, climbing back down.

In John Green’s essay on Indianapolis that makes me cry, he evokes the words of Kurt Vonnegut, who said that the most daring thing young people could do with their lives in the decades to come was “to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

I am choosing not what I think is the best city, nor even, in some abstract algorithmic way, the best one for my tastes or personality. But I am choosing one where I have a shot at stable community, at the lifelong maintenance work of alleviating the human disease. And to do that, I am returning home.

Leaving home and then returning is the damn way of things. It is, as a species, one of our favorite stories. It is why, for some reason, we are getting a Christopher Nolan adaptation of The Odyssey just crammed full of famous people, to a degree only rivaled by how it will be crammed full of computer animation. Does the culture need that? Of course not. But I will watch it.

For as long as people have been leaving, they have been returning. We age a little, and we warm once again to the way the light hits the land in whichever place we spent our childhood, to the specific flowers that bloom there in the spring. We reach back toward something that made us and try, as if we are the first to think of it, to make it again.

It is a tale as old as time. And I am right on time.

At the end of last year, I reflected on my reading habits and felt uninspired. Going into this year, I had a deep desire to be astonished by a book. I wanted to put down a book and feel like I had been changed. I wanted to live in a book. I wanted a book to make me feel the way I did when I was a child, when I was voracious and undiscerning and easily awed.

And I am here to report that it has happened. The tide has changed, thank God. Books are good again in 2025!

It started with Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which I listed to on audiobook the first weekend of January, while I did my chores and ran errands and pawed through all the racks of clothes in my suburban Salvation Army store. That was a charmed day. I found my best jeans, and I felt pulled in to a story exactly the way I would have been at 12 years old. When I was a child, this was exactly my genre — smart historical fiction built on real life references. I don’t read those books as an adult, but are people in fact writing them? Are they good? If so, please recommend.

My next intention was to read more books in hard copy — I have a relentless audiobook habit, which I will not give up. However, I wanted to sit on my couch by the window and drink a cup of tea and flip pages and turn the book upside down on the surface of the seat to hold my place so that the pages end up all wonky and the spine weirdly creased. I wanted to see my books in my house as my friends — again, as in childhood.

And this, too, has happened! Bless us, we live in the Bad Place but the books still work.

I have read seven books in hard copy in the last three months — I was aiming for a modest two per month.

First, I reached for old standby authors to get me out of a funk — Barbara Kingsolver and Ann Patchett. I read Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, which was good enough, though not my favorite of hers. It felt so deeply 2016 in its social commentary. So much of what I love about Kingsolver is her timelessness, the ability to evoke a precise and realized moment without being limited by it. I felt claustrophobic in her 2016.1

Then I read Ann Patchett’s Taft, one of her early novels which takes place in my own town of Memphis, TN. It was also, I would say, not my favorite of hers, but that is the thing about being such a devoted completionist regarding my favorite writers — it’s all a part of it. It is fun to see one’s town depicted in fiction, in a way that feels exactly like reading books as a child — yes! this is a place where a thing would happen! you are right to think so!

Then there came a weekend day when I woke up and knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to whip through a short novel in one morning and feel something. And I found the perfect one on my shelf. Akwaeke Emezi’s novel The Death of Vivek Oji, about a genderqueer Nigerian teenager and the community that surrounds them, really grabbed me. The use of POV, the sensory details. One climactic moment, kept secret for most of the book, did weirdly underwhelm me in a way that gave first-draft energy, but did not ruin it for me. I’ll be reading more of Emezi’s work.

Finally, in March, I stumbled into a sublime book pairing. I’ve had Ted Chiang’s short story collection, Exhalation, on my shelf for probably five years ever since loving the first one.2 I don’t reach for short stories, and so even though I had great trust that I would like it, I hadn’t felt in the mood. But in my new year of reading good books, it was time. I’m far from the first to say so, but Chiang’s stories are uniquely gorgeous, inventive, humane. I don’t even love all of them, but I believe that all of them are good. This collection does the thing I craved from a book this winter: it astonishes, it stays with me, it makes me feel changed. It makes me feel so grateful to be a living human on earth.

And that brings me to the pairing. This same month, on Circling, we were featuring a long-awaited (by us) visual poetry book by artist Madeleine Jubilee Saito. I had already cried tears over the digital advance copy I’d seen, but this month I got to hold the book in my hands and turn the thick pages and cry again. Madeleine’s book, entitled You Are A Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in a Climate Crisis does the same thing as Ted Chiang’s short stories: makes me feel grateful to be a human living on earth. It is rare to read a book that elucidates the preciousness, the brevity, the singularity of being alive in a great big spinning universe full of cruelty and full of hope. It is rarer to encounter two of them in the same month.

I would like to prescribe this pairing of books for all our ills in 2025.3

Let’s see. What else.

I listened to Lucy Jones’s Matrescence on audiobook. I am grateful to live in a time rich with substantive books about motherhood. I read them like it is my job. I listened to the audiobook of a second Maggie O’Farrell after loving the first so much — The Marriage Portrait, good; less particularly gripping to me. I read Jenny Slate’s second essay collection, Life Form, after being - yes! - astonished by her first some years ago. I enjoyed it, even if it was less surprising because it was basically what I expected. I do want Jenny Slate to keep writing essays until she is old and wrinkled and grumpy, and I do think she would respect that characterization and aspire to it.

Okay.

What are you reading in 2025? Tell me everything.

The Full Q1 List

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

The Innocence of Father Brown by GK Chesterton4

Valley of the Dolls by Jaqueline Susan

Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood by Lucy Jones

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

American Bulk: Essays on Excess by Emily Mester5

Taft by Ann Patchett

Life Form by Jenny Slate

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

James by Percival Everett

Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World by Mark Aldridge6

Magic Enuff by Tara Stringfellow

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

You Are A Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in a Climate Crisis by Madeleine Jubilee Saito

Every so often, the internet goes abuzz with an Art that might change the world due to What It Has To Say. Due to it being Important or perhaps Speaking Truth To Power.

A few weeks ago, it was Kendrick Lamar’s super bowl performance. A few weeks before that, it almost might have been Emilia Perez and its thirteen Oscar nominations, but alas.1 For about one minute last year, I think Justin Baldoni truly thought it would be It Ends With Us.2

In 2023 it was the Barbie movie, which was going to make people realize that being a woman is hard, actually, because America Ferrara said so in her little speech.3 If I had a dollar for every person who told me how a hypothetical misogynist would be able to take his daughter to this movie and be enlightened, I would have several dollars — not a lot, but a weird amount nonetheless since nobody can tell me of a real person this has happened to.

I wanted to like the Barbie movie. I really loved Lady Bird. Little Women is a pillar of my childhood as both a novel and a Winona Ryder vehicle, and I thought the Gerwig adaptation was competent and beautiful.4 I did not like Frances Ha, but I think I might have if I’d seen it at the right age. And obviously I grew up steeped in the Chronicles of Narnia and am cautiously curious about what she’ll do with that.5

The Barbie movie made me sad.

This is not even to do with the capitalism-monster of it all. If that’s your bag, I see you, I respect you. It is also not to do with the production design, the dance numbers, or the comedy, because I am only human. If the movie was content to only be silly and gorgeous, I would have been so pleased!

What made me nauseous was the mass delusion in summer 2023 that this movie had Something To Say. That to like it was our birthright. That to disdain it was unsympathetic to the trauma the patriarchy hath wrought. But I think we all know by now that Barbie had nothing to say.

The cultural praise and defense of Barbie was obsessed with this straw-misogynist who was going to see it and be changed. When I admitted feeling sad, disappointed, empty after seeing it, my relations and coworkers repeatedly and independently told me “well, okay, you didn’t need this movie to convince or inform you. But someone does. This is someone’s entry point to feminism.”

But . . . whose?

I’m not convinced anyone’s minds have ever been changed by art created with the ambition to change their minds, or which people on one side of a question celebrate for how it will hypothetically impact/change/inform strangers on the other side of the question. I did not like the Barbie movie, but the number of people who gushed to me about how it would open someone’s mind struck me as so fundamentally smug and out of touch. That is not how art works, and it’s not how people work.

We are rarely changed by art designed to chance our minds, and yet we have each, thank goodness, been changed by art. Not with a bludgeon but with a whisper, art sneaks into our open ears and eyes and hearts and instills in us language, feeling, imagination we did not previously know how to access.

My friend Elise reminded me of this the other day. I was on a variation on the above tirade, and she pointed out that we both can name art that has literally changed out minds — not in that we flipped from one side of an issue to a binary other, but in that our minds are different than they were before. The landscape of our imaginations has rumbled and resettled into new formations, and art has made it happen.

Elise cites the example of the 2022 novel The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton, which imagines a near future in which Florida becomes virtually uninhabitable due to climate disaster, and yet people keep inhabiting it. It’s sad and scary and magical and impossibly hopeful. In Elise’s words, it asks, what if the end of the world was not the end of the world?

My control group is predisposed to apocalyptic thinking, but I know what she means because I have had the same experience. I too have felt art cracking open a door to hope and possibility when my instinct is despair.

For me, this happened when I saw the 2016 adaptation of Arrival6. The film, it is true, does not completely hold up to the magic of the first viewing upon subsequent rewatches, though I will continue rewatching it. (There’s a twist that, if you don’t know it, dawns on you in a quiet way I really love). But the first viewing was enough to change me. It haunts me. It looms large in my imaginative worldview.7 It might be my favorite movie, which always feels like such a risky thing to admit — how dorky to love something!! How predictable to love this in particular! How deeply uncool!

Like Elise’s experience with The Light Pirate, here is a premise that could be summed up in a bone-chilling soundbite. (There is a climate disaster.) (There is an alien invasion.) In other words, it’s the end of the world.

And yet, Arrival asks of the viewer, what if the unfamiliar could also be benevolent? What if our tenderness is important? What if we can learn new things? What if we can be changed? What if we have choices? What if we do not need to be afraid?

The first time I saw Arrival, I felt transfixed. I felt invited into a new existence that I had not previously imagined. Yes, this is a story about language, about motherhood and the choice whether to have a child, about grief, about curiosity — truly Krystiana-core almost to excess.

But the door that it cracked open inside me was, specifically, what if the end of the world was not the end of the world. This happens in the story on at least two levels that flow in and out of each other.

Aliens have arrived on earth and we assume this to be a death sentence. You want to have a child and your child will die.

The way these vectors of fundamental terror8 strike a one-two punch to my gut makes me feel stripped open, revealed, seen to my core. And then, once I am all squishy and naked, the story invites me to loosen my grip, to imagine not the worst but the best outcome available.

It was as if it knew something about me.

If you do not live, as I do, with a sense of the world being on the brink of collapse at all times (and a bonus but not unrelated terror about childbearing, ha), I cannot explain to you how numinous the experience of this movie is to me.

I want everyone to have this experience with art. The capacity to be changed is one of my favorite things about human life, and the capacity to make art is another. God, we’re incredible.

So in short — stop telling me how particular art will change some external imaginary person, and tell me what has changed you.

What is your Light Pirate, what is your Arrival? What stripped you to your most afraid core and then invited you to hope? What rumbled through your landscape?

What has made you new?

Think about your two closest friends. You know where they live, their favorite foods, the gory details of their family drama, their work frustrations, their preferred nail color and lipstick shade, and maybe even the last three people they’ve slept with^.

But do you know how much money they have? Have you ever asked? Do they have debt? Is their lifestyle supplemented with gifts from their parents? Would you share your tax return or bank balance with your friends? My guess is no.

I do know and love the details of my friends’ family drama, jobs, eating habits, and maybe even the last three people they’ve slept with1. I even know that my friend bought new nail polish this very week.

However, I also DO know how much money they have. In the last week I told not one but three different friends the exact dollar details related to an upcoming change in my partner’s job and how I’m feeling about it.

I know how my friend who recently bought her first house made her down payment (stocks from her job). I know how my friend who is currently in the process of buying her house is making hers (aggressive saving habits and a contribution from a family member). I knew my friend’s salary at a job she liked but didn’t love, I knew when she got laid off and had to navigate unemployment benefits, I found out when she (finally, after an interminable search) found another job making a little more than her previous one, and I found out when she got laid off, again, unbelievably, heartbreakingly, for the second time in two years. I know how my friend with a very stressful job is grateful for the way her pay has increased as she has moved up the ranks, and also how she still wonders every day if the job is worth the stress. I know which of my friends has a grad school loan and how hard she works to pay it off.

Once, I was actually filing my taxes on my laptop at a friend’s house, and when I had a question about a line item, my friend came over to look at the W-2 and I thought “welp, I guess now they know for sure.”2 Last year when I took on more work in order to accomplish a small financial goal (paying off a credit card balance, starting a savings cushion) I kept my friends painstakingly up to speed.

I could pinpoint each of my best friends’ salaries with, I think, considerable accuracy.

There might be a few factors at play here — for instance, it is possible that most of my friends are neurodivergent people with a tendency toward frankness and away from arbitrary social mores. I also feel passionate about excavating shame, and money is a major source of shame for almost everyone. I will neutralize the thing that makes me feel less-than by talking about it with abandon. My grocery bill does not reflect my character! I also am lucky to have a handful of really good friendships. I have multiple dear friends of 10+ years with whom I am in touch weekly if not daily, despite living hundreds of miles from any of them. It is the gift of my whole life.

So no, I don’t advertise my spending habits to every acquaintance. But again to echo Ally Jane Ayers’s point — if I we know a decade of each other’s family tensions and jobs and griefs, this friendship will not implode over finding out each other’s savings accounts or lack thereof. I already know I love you — unless you are about to tell me that your job is fake and you have secretly been in the mob this whole time and now you have to kill me so I don’t report you to the FBI3, what details of your finances would meaningfully change how I feel about you?

If we cannot talk to our friends about our real worries and victories and concerns and embarrassments . . . literally, and I mean this so sincerely, what are friends for?

The commitment to transparency in my relationships, while my dream scenario, is not exactly always without tension. The people who make more money sometimes feel a little self-conscious about their situation around the people who make less. The people who make less carry a little more day-to-day anxiety and stress in their bodies that people who make more money do not. Sometimes our conversations feel tricky.

When a friend picked a spendy restaurant for a meetup, I chose but did not technically enjoy the vulnerability of saying, “I love you, and also you make twice as much money as I do. $75 at this restaurant feels to me how $150 would feel to you — mentally double the dollar amount, and see if your palms feel a little sweaty at the thought of forking it over.” And guess what? My friend got it. Instantly. She is kind and she loves me and she was not mad or offended. She is mindful of the dynamics in others’ lives that are different than her own, just as I would try to be.

And then once transparency is established, sometimes you don’t even have to ask. When navigating expenses for our collaborative project and the money we spend traveling back and forth to each other’s cities, a friend offered that we count travel costs as a shared expense of our friendship, knowing that a plane ticket is a bigger chunk out of my paycheck than it is out of hers. This is something I would not even have thought to request. Her kindness makes me feel held.

This is so, so, so precious to me.

And so here is what I have to say: if your best friends do not talk about money details with you and you wish they did, be the one to start. Say “I’m feeling stressed. I left my last job making $50k and now have had to start my new one at $40k — it’s the right choice, but this pay cut is making me feel so stressed.” (This was a thing that happened to me.)

Or say “I know people are supposed to have a three-month emergency savings built up, but I have never had that in my whole life and it makes me feel embarrassed, like I’m not doing it right. I’m trying to start building my savings account. So far I have $500.” (This was also a thing that happened to me.)

Or say “I’m reckoning with the feelings about how my life is going to change soon; I’ve been with my partner since he was a roughly penniless medical student and now after eleven years of education he is about to have the job he trained for and our income will change drastically. I’m worried a change in my financial situation will change my friendships.” (This is the thing that is currently happening to me.)4

I have made a concerted effort in the past couple of years to practice transparency about the details of my money life with trusted friends, in part because I want to have the habit of this transparency before I have much money, and then continue practicing the same transparency if the numbers get bigger. It’s not too hard to share salaries when my friend works for one nonprofit and I work for another nonprofit and we both love our jobs but scrape by on similarly modest amounts. It might become a lot harder as people’s career evolve on divergent trajectories and we begin taking different things for granted. But it will be easier with trust.5

I love the money conversations happening on Substack, almost as much as I love the money conversations happening every day in my real life. I remain hungry for the details and data about people’s actual lived experience. I, like everyone, want to know that I am not alone, that I am not uniquely incompetent, that I am okay. This is one small way to live in actual caring community.

I’m so glad to be here with you.

If I had a dollar for every reading round-up I’ve gotten from internet writers in recent weeks, I would have at least enough dollars to buy a book — and yet, I never tire of reading them. I want to know what everyone is reading, just like I want to know what everyone is wearing and cooking and making and buying, at all times.

2024 wasn’t a banner reading year for me. My attention felt fragmented; I chased down books that buzzed around the internet and then felt underwhelmed by them. I just . . . read a lot of books I didn’t like. I mostly listened to audiobooks, which does count to me as a way to engage with books, but I also miss a little bit of what sit-down reading does in my brain. Maybe more sit-down reading in 2025?

Anyway, here are all the books I read in 2024, chronologically. Besides the below, I did re-listen to my usual spate of Agatha Christie mystery novels to keep me company when I work, the way some people might play reruns of Friends on their TV in the background. I’m not re-listing those here, because I’ve listed them before and that’s boring — however, if you want recommendations, hmu.

Please please please, tell me the best books you read this year. And if you loved ones I hated, tell me why! You’re probably right!

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (reread). In January, I developed a little hyper-fixation on Jane Eyre as emblematic of an overly scrupulous, earnest, neurodivergent protagonist in classic literature. I wrote about it, and got paid $100 for a guest essay from another Substack writer I admire. It made me feel so good.

2. Emily of New Moon by Lucy Maude Montgomery (reread). As part of the above, I also chased down a couple of other examples of the same archetype from my childhood.

3. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (reread). Also related. I love this book.

4. Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant. I read this book because my boss recommended it, and because I am doomed forever to be a pleasure to have in class.

5. The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Woman by Shannon Harris. This book was not that fun!

6. Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson. I will always read books centered on families and houses. I liked this book a lot.

7. The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Follow up to Care Work, which I also liked, and I’m glad it exists.

8. Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck. This book was fine, and also not quite what I wished it could be.

9. Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life by Sharon Blackie. I wanted to love this book, but I think maybe it caught me at a bad time and/or the audiobook reader was deeply irritating and/or I’m just tragically not the witchy type.

10. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. It was 2024.

11. Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith. I heart Virginia Sole-Smith.

12. And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I was Ready by Meaghan O’Connell. I read books about motherhood as if they will inoculate me against the destabilization if I ever become a mother. As if the destabilization wasn’t much of the point.

13. Agatha Christie by Lucie Worsley. This was a really, really good biography. Biographies always sound so boring to me in principle, but a good one really does draw me in.

14. This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz. This book made me feel frustrated and sad, and also glad to be married to a relatively nice person, I suppose?

15. Happy Place by Emily Henry. A few years ago, I decided to try to be the sort of person who reads chatty romance novels. You know, a fun person. EmHen’s are pretty good, though this wasn’t my favorite. Plot lines dependent on people keeping secrets usually make me want to pull my own teeth out.

16. Dolls of Our Lives: Why We Can’t Quit American Girl by Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney. This was the follow-up to the remarkable podcast by the same name, which I loved so much. I loved the book less, but still I’m glad it was written.

17. Wellness by Nathan Hill. This novel had a couple of moments that really stick with me – an illuminating vignette about, of all things, an old man being radicalized on Facebook which was so compassionate and lucid. Also, the description of the unmatched fury of being an adult trying to feed a child who won’t eat.

18. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Children’s literature still feels like my academic area, and I wanted to refresh on the source material for Wicked lol.

19. Financial Feminist by Tory Dunlap. I exist in a chronic state of anxiety and shame about money and guess what: so does everyone. This book is helpful and clear, if written with a little bit of “hello, fellow kids” energy.

20. The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity by Catherine Ricketts. This was my favorite new book of 2024 and probably my most recommended. I loved it. It’s better than it even needed to be.

21. Hey Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies behind Multi-Level Marketing by Emily Lin Paulson. This book was pure gossip / schadenfreude but I am not immune to gossip and schadenfreude.

22. Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Mixed feelings about this book. The internet seemed to love it, and I still can’t tell if I did – and, if I didn’t, why not. The ending really blew it for me.

23. Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s by Sarah Ditum. I love pop culture scholarship; this book was fine but not more.

24. Normal People by Sally Rooney. I know Sally Rooney being controversial is a trope but ugh I think I don’t like her?!

25. Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm by Emmeline Clein. Second in a trifecta of books on eating disorders and/or diet culture read this year.

26. Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage. This book is gay (complimentary) but unfortunately it is also stressful (derogatory).

27. Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer by Barbara Ehrenreich. File under my ongoing compulsion to read books about death! See above re: motherhood and inoculation lol.

28. Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy by Cait West. I think Cait might subscribe to me and, if so — thank you for writing this book, Cait.

29. Never Ever Getting Back Together by Sophie Gonzales. See above re: mostly failed attempts to be a fun person who reads romance.

30. Joyful Recollections of Trauma by Paul Scheer. I love a sad/funny memoir, and I read fewer of them this year than usual. Thumbs up.

31. One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In by Kate Kennedy. Again, I love a pop culture history. And, separately, Kennedy’s puns and wordplay make me feel like I’m being dragged across gravel behind a moving vehicle. Not an insult, just a matter of taste ok!!

32. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Had been on my list for some time, and I really liked it. I return to her Argos metaphor in my mind a lot.

33. The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. This book had such potential to be a silly mystery romp right up my alley, but I truly did not like it.

34. Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human by Cole Arthur Riley. Riley is a gift to our generation.

35. Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James. I am so sorry, but I guess I am now a person who will read a mystery fanfic!!

36. The Color Purple by Alice Walker. A classic on my list for a long time and wow I loved so much.

37. The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bourgh by Claudia Gray. See above!!!!!! I accidentally read this series backwards because I just grabbed the first one available from the library, and unfortunately this one was the best.

38. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. <3

39. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Another book I read because it was 2024 and I’m a person on the internet and wow this book was not my cup of tea.

40. Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy. Again, I will read books about new motherhood. This one was really good, and also left me with a weird feeling. Which I think is part of what was good.

41. The Late Mrs Willoughby by Claudia Gray. See above!

42. The Murder of Mr Wickham by Claudia Gray. I’m so sorry!

43. The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir by Michele Harper. I’m so grateful for medical professionals who are also skilled writers. Tender and vivid. I recommend.

44. Broken Waters by Amy Borman. Such a beautiful second poetry collection from an internet friend. I hope Amy writes poems forever.

45. Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by Davd Sedaris. Catching up on the early catalog. Dare I say, I also hope David Sedaris keeps writing forever. (Wow, hot take.)

46. Interesting Facts about Space by Emily Austin. This is the second book I’ve read by Austin, and she writes neuroses well. I enjoyed this book.

47. Good Girls: A Study and Story of Anorexia by Hadley Freeman. Third in the accidental trifecta, also quite good.

48. Funny Story by Emily Henry. I already had this book on my shelf so I pushed through, but I think my aspirational identity as a fun romance reader might be wearing thin.

49. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. Basically what’s happening here is that I feel bad for re-listening to the same canon of Agatha Christie novels all the time while I work, so I google mystery novels. Unfortunately, this book was SO dull.

50. Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing. Also on my radar (wow, weather pun) for some time before and I happened to read it the week of the election which was kind of a good news/bad news situation.

51. A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan. I don’t know why this book was so annoying to me but it was so annoying to me. Multiple-POV can be such a gamble – a win when it works, and insufferable when it doesn’t.

52. Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. Jones is excellent. I loved An American Marriage years ago, and this one also held up.

53. How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin. I know this is getting so embarrassing, but I am who I am in re: my appetite for mystery novels! Not great!

54. Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe. The internet recommended this book and I really enjoyed it.

55. The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett. At the end of a year of so many books I didn’t love, I was itching for just a normal good novel, and so I went where I always go: to Ann Patchett. I hadn’t read this one (her debut), and in retrospect it foreshadows her later novels so beautifully. Incidentally, AP does some of the best multiple-POV.

56. Four Squares by Bobby Finger. I have, embarrassingly, listened to perhaps thousands(?) of hours of Bobby’s podcast, and finally decided to jump into his novels – they’re good! I hope he keeps writing them! Gay (complimentary) and also about old people (complimentary)!

57. We Loved it All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet. I think I loved the concept of this book about nature, climate crisis, and mythology more than the actual experience of it. But I also liked the experience of it.

58. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. See above. This one was not my favorite of Ann Patchett, but still – a Patchett novel is pretty good regardless.

59. The Old Place by Bobby Finger. See above, again! I think possibly Four Squares (his second) was technically stronger, but as a debut this one bodes so so well and was indisputably right up my alley. I really loved it.

Wow I have so many unearned opinions about books for a person who has never written one, yikes!

Happy new year!

In recent weeks I have taken two very different trips, and I decided to round up what I wore on each of them as a style snapshot.

The first trip was a many years belated honeymoon (2020 pandemic wedding cohort, represent) to Iceland and England over a week. The weather was moderately cold, we did a lot of hiking and walking, and the fits were comfy and utilitarian when they needed to be, and mostly handmade when not, reaching for a balance of utility and personality. (I was also seeing a friend who has incredibly fun style, and I didn’t want to just be wearing, like, hiking leggings full-time. I am merely a social animal!)

The second trip was to visit my friend and creative partner in New York for five days, in bea-u-ti-ful crisp fall weather, to see some theater and look at some art and do almost nothing else. The clothes were a degree more dressed-up than on the previous trip, but we also walked a lot, so they had to be deeply wearable.

TRIP #1

The first three days in Iceland were cold and outdoors-heavy, I wore slight variations on the exact same outfit and felt only mostly like a bundled snowman.

The first day’s outfit was for travel, and had to last most of two whole days all told. The second and third were variations on the same theme for lots of walking and lots of cold rain. (layers, leggings, boots). The core items here are:

1. Amazing raincoat thrifted over the summer in anticipation of fall hikes (Bass brand).

2. Two different beanie hats (one yellow, one beige) that I bought last winter and have worn at least 100 days. I am wearing one now.

3. Secondhand cream-colored Babaa cardigan purchased recently off an internet friend.

4. Long sweatshirt and black leggings previously documented here.

5. One handmade scarf, and one that is just a strip of fabric, probably from FabScrap.

6. Fanny pack from Target several years ago.

7. Rain boots, a panic purchase before this trip. See above!

This day, we went to the national gallery and then to a hot springs spa, which was VERY fancy and fun. I wore a me-made cotton jersey jumpsuit in a burnt orange, with the faithful raincoat and scarf.

Travel day to England — by this day, I was thrilled to be in a warmer climate and get to wear more fun clothes. This is a me-made top out of vintage cotton (sourced from the preserved edges of a thrift store bedsheet. Truly pretty prints are few and far between on the thrift store racks, but I love this one. I wish there was so much more of it). Me-made double gauze pants. Secondhand Dankso clogs that are a tried and true part of my wardrobe for many years — I wore a first (secondhand) pair until they literally fell apart, and then went hunting for a new pair. They never let me down.

Oxford, UK — I wore me-made pink cotton pants out of thrifted fabric, a (hidden) me-made top out of a soft cotton from a craft supply swap in my town, and another secondhand raincoat. This one is lighter, more windbreaker-like but still surprisingly waterproof, purchased from Poshmark over the summer. Baseball cap from Target — in retrospect, this was the year I embraced the neutral hat as a regular outfit feature. (This may also be because it was a year I had some difficult haircuts. C’est la vie!

Travel day home — another outfit that had to hold up for well over 24 hours. Thrifted sweater, the same hat and plaid scarf, and me-made double gauze wide-leg pants. I am in love with these pants. They are so weird and so comfy and I want to make ten of them.

And that brings us to:

TRIP #2

First theater day! I wore a weird gold velour skirt that I made just before the trip, and frankly, I love. It’s wacky and showy but because it’s soft it’s secretly incredibly comfortable. The top is made out of a thick vintage cotton that I think was a tablecloth. Vintage blazer — blazers are having a moment in my wardrobe. Black boots are Nisolo, leather crossbody bag was a gift from my sister-in-law many years ago.

Second theater day! I wore a me-made checked cotton dress — I originally made this dress shorter, ending at the second ruffle. I wore it this way, but then decided it didn’t feel right. I added the third ruffle and I’m thrilled with it. It feels great, and is one of my favorite me-made garments right now. Me-made sweater. I am capital-letter Not A Good Knitter. Knitting *barely* counts as a skill that I possess, given that I learned the basic stitch around age seven and have absolutely refused to learn another thing about knitting ever again. I refuse to read a pattern, and I am very slow, but I can make a boxy little sweater vest. These heels are my favorite fancy shoes. The toe box is wide which makes them much more comfortable than any heels I have worn before. They feel dramatic, while still being wearable.

Thrifted black dress that has rouching on top, wacky puffed sleeves, and a drop waist. It’s a little out of character for me, but I’m experimenting with it. Layered, it is much diluted. Same blazer, same shoes, and a silky scarf my brother got me as a souvenir on a trip over ten years ago. One of my longest owned clothing objects!

The way home. A secondhand Henley shirt, new jeans bought off the clearance rack, me-made sweater, Nisolo boots. The tiredness of airports and longs days (happy ones!) extremely visible on my face.

Okay, that’s all! It’s still election week! Tell me about your outfits!

There was a cabaret and there was a Master of Cerеmonies.

And there was a city callеd Berlin in a country called Germany.

And it was the end of the world

-Cabaret

Like many people, but not everyone, I had an extremely religious childhood. The kind that removed me from participation in all of my generation’s popular culture from tip to tail. The kind that taught me early and well to prize martyrdom and virtue. The kind that primed me to see the world as always on the brink of apocalypse. This is a complicated childhood to explain to anyone who did not live it. It also frames my entire life in a before and an after – I was in one world, and then that world ended. My whole world ended. And then I found I had to live in a different world. 

As an adult, I sift through every influence and interest in my childhood that was not specifically colored with religious angst, and reclaim them as belonging to me, to feel the continuity and comfort of having loved something for my whole life. One thing I practice reclaiming is musical theater. I jog around my neighborhood to my playlist of showtunes. I have gradually, with penny-pinching slowness, made my way to one live performance here, another there. When I moved to a new town, I splurged on a discounted season ticket package to a year of Broadway touring productions, and through that year came to acknowledge what has always been true but did not have a place in my childhood: that I love live theater more than almost anything in the world. Slowly, ungracefully, I am making up for lost time. 

And that is why I recently saw the revival of Cabaret with almost no background knowledge. When asked what it was about, I said “it’s about a nightclub in Nazi Germany . .  . I think.” I didn’t refresh my memory, I didn’t beef up beforehand. I brought my best friend. The renovated August Wilson Theater as the Kit Kat Club is a treat for the senses. I loved it from the first moment. The show began and, three hours later, while the rest of the audience applauded and cheered and chatted their way out into the street, I walked like one stricken, lurching into the street like the walking dead – speechless the entire way down two blocks to the subway.

The performance caught me off guard with its sorrow. I felt broken open, and I wanted to rest in that brokenness for a long, long time.

What a gift, I thought over and over, like a mantra. Like a refrain. It was all I could think. What a gift to be moved. What a gift, what a gift. 

At the risk of spoiling, the premise of Cabaret is, I think, quite well known. (After this point, there will be spoilers for the following things that everyone has already known about for decades: Cabaret. Wicked. Fiddler on the Roof.)

It is the year 1930 in Berlin, and the cast converges around a nightclub called the Kit Kat Club. An American writer is new in town and needs a place to stay; an acquaintance from the train introduces introduces him to a German landlady. An English dancer loses her job and moves in as well. An elderly Jewish merchant courts his longtime love, the landlady. The American needs money badly, finds out about a gig running errands for a political party . . .

And, of course, as the tragedy unfolds, the characters learn what the audience has known from the start. The Nazis are on the rise. This world will soon be over. The Jewish lover is doomed for sure. The entire club full of jubilant queerness and counterculture, definitely. The dissenters, the accomplices . . . actually, everyone. They will all probably die. And we know it. And we cannot save them.

Leaving the theater in the haze of grief, I knew right away this would live in my pantheon of beloved theater, perhaps for the rest of my life. And the thing is, I should have known. I love theater as a medium for exploring apocalypse. 

Whatever my childhood might have taken from me, it gave me much in terms of vocabulary. The word “apocalypse” comes from Greek, meaning “unveiling.” A revealing of something that has long been, but been hidden. This is what the final book of the Bible is called in the Catholic versions, where Protestants call it the Book of Revelation. Either way, it signifies the moment when the world ends: when what is behind the curtain is revealed, when your paradigm shifts, when you suddenly understand how things really are. The moment after which you can never go back to the way things were before. If apocalypse can be called a genre, particularly in theater, it is my favorite genre. 

For as long as I can remember, my favorite piece of musical theater has been Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler on the Roof slaps, and also, it is incredibly bleak. Tevye the milkman introduces us to his Jewish village in late imperial Russia, using the metaphor of playing a fiddle on top of a roof to describe his community’s precarious life – they are poor, the world is changing, and they are subject to increasing danger and harassment. The only thing that keeps them balanced is their adherence to tradition: faithfulness to the religion that has held them for millennia, given order to their lives, a context to their troubles. When all else is uncertain, this constancy sustains Tevye: his faith, his village, his family of five children following in the ways of their forefathers. If only this remains, all else will be well. 

But of course it does not remain. His children, one by one, challenge the ways of their parents as they strike out: one wants to marry the person she loves instead of relying on the village matchmaker. The next wants to leave the village entirely to be with her future husband who is a political dissident. The third pushes Tevye most of all, when she falls in love with someone who is not Jewish. And he cannot take it. He turns his back on her rather than compromise his ideals. This is the core moment, and what endears Tevye to us is his humanity. He is only flesh and blood. He can only bend so far. He is an antihero, a pious Lear who will lose his children because he wants what he wants, and what he wants is for everything to stay the same. Has there ever been a more human instinct? Finally, the paradigm itself is challenged when Tevye and his community are evicted from their village. We end watching them walk away down the road, refugees seeking homes in places they have never seen. Their whole world is packed up and displaced. It will never be the same again. 

The third piece of theater culture that arguably would have fit perfectly into my childhood (especially since it is actually for children), but did not, is 2003’s Wicked. This means that I didn’t get to find it until I was an adult, but when I did, I felt like it was made just for me: a breadcrumb left for me by a childhood I did not have. Because, of course, Wicked is another story about the end of the world. 

In this now-iconic adaptation telling a secret history of the witches of Oz, we follow primarily the perspective of Elphaba, an ostracized and overly earnest young girl with a violent sensitivity to injustice and a wholehearted belief in the mythology of the eponymous wizard of Oz. Believing him to be the arbiter of goodness who will come to her rescue and defend the oppressed, she dreams of meeting him. Of course, we as the audience know what Elphaba does not – that the famed wizard is perhaps but a pokey little man behind a curtain. And we are right. When ultimately they meet, Elphaba is betrayed by the thing she most believed in. 

Not only is the wizard, strictly speaking, powerless, but he is also a totalitarian perpetrator of injustice. Her world dashed to pieces, Elphaba flees the wizard’s presence to become a political fugitive and try to counter his violence against the vulnerable, becoming immediately the target of his propaganda: the Wicked Witch of the West. An effective story has the power to be about many things, and so this one for me feels like it is about a crisis of faith: orienting your whole life in devotion to the power you believe will fight for the vulnerable, only to find that you were deceived. This power does not care for the vulnerable. And this power will see you torn to pieces rather than change.

Parallel to Elphaba runs the story of Glinda the Good Witch of the North. While Elphaba experiences the unveiling of the wizard’s true regime as a one-and-done crisis and throws it all away, Glinda holds on longer. While Elphaba might be the apostate daughter, Glinda might be Tevye – desperate to make her belief system continue to make sense, certain that it must still be redeemable because it is all she has. If Elphaba’s core moments are characterized by her anger and power, Glinda’s are characterized by her grief. And true to who I am, while the power and anger of the witches of Wicked is stunning and a balm, it is their sorrow that captures me. By the end of the story, both have lost everything. Their world is over, and it cannot be gotten back. 

 What makes each of these, my canon of theater for the apocalypse, particularly rewarding to watch is the way each makes use of an echo: a circling back at the end of the tragedy to the music and the words of the first moments. To the time when we were innocent, and did not yet know that the world was ending.

In Fiddler on the Roof, it is Tevye’s return in the finale to the tradition he outlined for us at the beginning – soon, this community will have to celebrate their rituals in a foreign land. Even the practice of head-covering to show devotion to God, introduced in the opening number, comes back when a neighbor reminds Tevye, our forefathers have been forced out of many, many places at a moment's notice. That’s right. Tevye reasons, maybe that's why we always wear our hats. All through, he fights to make sense. The world will never be the same again, and yet he has to make his way in this world the only way he knows how: with his tradition.

In Wicked, the curtain opens on celebration that the wicked witch is dead, and while Glinda joins the chorus, she seems unsure. But we trust her, and we go along as she pulls back the curtain to take us through the story in flashback. By the end, when we have circled back to the original moment once again, we know the truth: while the townspeople clamor that no one mourns the wicked, Glinda is in fact standing here bereft. She is grieving not just her dearest friend but also her entire worldview that is now gone, and it is up to her to begin again. Between that first moment when we meet her in her secret heartbreak and the final notes as she faces her subjects before the curtain goes down, Glinda’s grief has become ours. 

Finally, in Cabaret, the club’s master of ceremonies welcomes us at first to a site of revelry. Leave your troubles outside, he tells us. In here, life is beautiful! The girls are beautiful. Even the orchestra is beautiful! And it is beautiful. We fall in love with this place and all its tragic misfits, and then we watch and realize that in this grim new world they will surely be destroyed. By the end, we see this club, its dancers, its master of ceremonies stripped of their original sparkle. But still the master of ceremonies struggles to his feet to play his part – the rebel now conscripted in service to the empire, the sad clown still bound to perform. Where are your troubles now? He asks. Forgotten? I told you so. We have no troubles here. 1

And that is how he leaves us. Just like Tevye making sense of losing his children, his village, his home; like Glinda holding back tears while the crowd bellows its schadenfreude – each of them, living through the apocalypse. Each of them, forced to make sense of the grief. And by sharing their grief, they give us the chance to exercise the muscle of our own. 

Of course, this is part of why people love theater. I am a latecomer to so much, and when I think about a childhood where I might have engaged with art that I loved on my own, my primary feeling is jealousy for access to a model of grief. 

Like many devoted young evangelicals who subsequently lost that confident faith, I did not leave because I did not believe enough – and frankly, I do not think many people do. I believed far too much. I had impossibly high expectations for this church to do what it said it was doing, to be what it claimed to be. When it betrayed me, when I could no longer stomach the way it pretended to be the side of good but acted from cruelty and self-preservation time and time again; when I realized the way the idea of god had been weaponized against the most earnest among us; when it simply and irrevocably stopped ringing true; when I lost the love of my life – believe me when I tell you that my world ended, and it did not go gently. 

When I return again and again to my favorite stories in theater, this is what I come back for. I wonder what might have happened if I had had access to more stories about grief in the time before grief came for me: more chances to face the end of the world, and then to exit the theater, still alive.

In a time when the world feels, once again, like it is ending – because it is always ending – I want to hold this feeling close. Every day, the world ends. Every morning, it is made new. The world we had yesterday or last year or in childhood will never, ever come back. The new one might kill us. But it definitely will if we do not exercise the practice of grief, if we do not accustom ourselves to having our ego stripped by apocalypse.

I tell you this

to break your heart,

by which I mean only

that it break open and never close again

to the rest of the world.

-Mary Oliver