I’m moving into my final month working at the Brookline Booksmith. On October 1st, I begin another adventure, one which I can’t announce yet (I know! The suspense is killing you all!). I’ve been reflecting a lot on my time at the Booksmith, and plan to write about it at length one of these days.

On a related-ish note, I’m excited to share that my short story, “Flowers,” comes out in the inaugural issue of The Book Shop of Beverly Hills’ literary magazine, Six Stories a Semester, on 9/22. Pre-order here. There will be a launch party and reading on 9/24 at Papercuts in Jamaica Plain! Would love to see some of your beautiful faces there before I leave town for a while.

Anyway. Back to the Booksmith. One of the best things about the job was the fact I was practically up to my neck, every day, in galleys. I was spoiled with the opportunity, time and time again, to read books that wouldn’t be out for many months. Thus, to honor this nearly finished chapter in my life, I am recommending…

“Books That Haven’t Come Out Yet!”

1. The Vanishing Family by Robert Kolker

This book, which comes out on 9/29, is a killer nonfiction saga written by a killer writer. You may know Robert Kolker as the author of Hidden Valley Road, the gorgeous epic about a family hit by the sledgehammer of schizophrenia, a true story so cinematic it was adapted into an HBO series called Six Schizophrenic Brothers. If you haven’t gotten a chance to read that, perhaps you know Bob from the sensational essay “Who Is The Bad Art Friend?” which I will always assign my students. (I’m team Dawn! Okay, turning off my comments forever! Bye!) The Vanishing Family, like Hidden Valley Road before it, is about a family that gets absolutely rocked by genetics. Namely, nearly everybody in this family develops a form of degenerative, hereditary dementia. This book sounds overwhelmingly dreary, I know, but it honestly isn’t. It’s got the delicious bite of a medical thriller, the life-affirming ache of a Tolstoyesque family epic. It’s fascinating, suspenseful, and gorgeously written. Brookline Booksmith has an event booked for pub date, mere moments after my departure, an event I will be very sorry to miss.

2. Carrying by Samantha Josephs

My friend was recently lamenting to me about how so many contemporary trans books are body horrors involving pregnancy. And, while I agree that this is a trope that will get old-- and perhaps has already gotten old-- fast, I could not help but adore Samantha Josephs’ raucous debut with my whole heart. Coming out on 10/6, Carrying is a horror-comedy about a stealth trans woman who finds herself in a biologically impossible situation. She’s pregnant. What follows is an absolute roller coaster, complete with the final boss of stupid husbands, raw chicken dinners, and gasoline enemas. Love it or hate it, this book is guaranteed to make a splash.

And… I read. A lot. I recommended many books to many people. Notably, I started writing this series. My first round of book recommendations, all the way back in October, was about the Irish lads. Well, my twenty-eighth year on earth is going to be my most feminist yet, dammit, and so the first act of my late twenties simply must be to balance the scales. This month, I am recommending books written by…

“The Irish Lad(ie)s!”

1. Thirst Trap by Gráinne O’Hare’

A group of chaotic Belfast party girls have some fun times and some bad vibes in this glittering and hilarious debut. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel by any means, and, if you don’t like books about dumb young women being frivolous and doing coke and cheating on their boyfriends, you probably won’t like this one. But, if you do (and I really, really do), it really doesn’t get any better than this.

2. Room by Emma Donoghue

And now for something completely devastating.

You probably know about this astonishingly good book by way of the astonishingly good film adaptation. Room is written from the perspective of a child, which is usually a no-go for me, but in this instance it works sublimely. The novel is about a boy who has never known life outside of “Room,” the shed where his abducted mother has been held prisoner since before he was born. It’s heartrending and beautiful and surprising and perfectly written.

My friend, who we’ll call B, worked in TV development. We’d become close as NYU Tisch undergrads, equally ambitious and competitive and obsessed with The Newsroom. At the time of this phone call, I was freshly graduated and working at the History Channel, scrubbing through episodes of American Pickers for errant swastika tattoos while I yearned to be writing the next Boogie Nights. B was an aspiring TV exec (he’d cut his teeth getting food thrown at him by Scott Rudin), and was working with a big-shot producer who we’ll call L. L had asked B if he knew any young action movie writers he could work with. B, per our pact (help each other get to the top in whatever way we could) had told him about me, and then called me, hoping I could step up to the plate. I am not an action writer.

But I gave B a flustered, “Yes, of course,” then dug through my archive, scrounging for anything that might pass as an action script. I had begun to resign myself to the fact I would have to write a full-length screenplay in a matter of days (which, if you know me at all, you know I would have done) when I remembered Sun City, a feature I’d worked on in an advanced screenwriting class. It’s about a group of adult siblings who discover that their elderly mother is keeping a hostage in the attic. It’s full of blood and guts, but is not what I would necessarily call “action.” Still, it was good, certainly better than anything I could have fired off on short notice. It would have to do.

I sent the script to B, who showed it to L. And then, a week later, B was calling me again, similarly flustered. “L loved your script,” he told me. “He wants to set up a call with you. Like, right away.”

While we worked on scheduling the call, I binge watched all of L’s movies. I had seen most of them before but, during this movie marathon, I felt overwhelmed with awe. It was the feeling I had first felt when I was in my early teens, watching all of Tarantino’s films in one breathless gulp. It was a sharp and almost painful I-just-want-to-be-a-part-of-this sensation.

We set up a Zoom for a weekday evening. I entered the virtual room early and sat nervously awaiting his arrival, a pad of paper and pen set out in front of me. When L entered, a couple minutes late, he was lying down. “Yo, yo, yo,” he said. “What’s up?”

The conversation was easy. Quickly, I forgot I was talking to one of the most influential producers in Hollywood. I was just talking to a guy. We chatted about our shared love of Lisa Kudrow, geeked out over a new English Netflix comedy. And then, abruptly, the small talk was over. He asked me to throw some ideas at him and I, perpetually over-prepared, rattled off five elevator pitches. He liked them all, but he loved one of them, which was, in essence, about stoner zombies. He loved it so much, in fact, that he sat up.

“Genius,” he said. “Write a one-pager and we’ll send it to Seth Rogen.”

We chatted through logistics, but I could barely pay attention. This was it. It was happening. I pictured myself, in six months’ time, sitting in a sunny Burbank conference room with Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, someone saying, “I think the budget needs to be really big,” Seth wondering aloud if this banger script would afford him his first Oscar nod.

“Now,” L said, snapping me back to reality, “I could pay you up front, or I could pay you after we sell the script. You’ll make a lot more money if it’s after.”

“Okay!” I said. “After sounds great.”

***

When I was in seventh grade, I gave a class presentation on why I wanted to be a screenwriter. I wrote my first feature when I was fourteen, after reading all my dad’s screenwriting how-to books: Syd Field’s Screenplay, Save the Cat, William Goldman’s raucously entertaining Adventures in the Screen Trade. I read A Whore’s Profession by David Mamet and studied screenplays, pilots, and TV show bibles religiously. When I was barely eighteen, my parents dropped me off on 10th and Broadway in Manhattan and I spent the next three years studying under iconic playwrights and TV writers and screenwriters at the NYU Tisch Department of Dramatic Writing, the best program of its kind in America. I fantasized about moving to Hollywood when I graduated, getting a job in a writer’s room. Brushing shoulders with celebrities. Racing to meet deadlines. I felt that those sunlit Burbank conference rooms were a foregone conclusion. My destiny.

I have always been a writer. There is no other career path, besides, briefly and confoundingly, dermatology, that has ever captured my interest. And I have also always loved film and TV, which made my aspiration to write for the screen feel like a no-brainer. But there was another truth about my ambition. Because, of course, there is a different path, a different kind of writing that does not take place in sunny Burbank rooms. It is the kind of writing my father, a novelist, does, alone in his dark, New England office, with only a skull engraved with “work ‘til you drop” and an alarming picture of Sartre to keep him company.

It’s a tortured and lonely kind of writing, just the writer and the page, suffering and slaving away in search of honesty. I was afraid of that future because it looked difficult, and not in a We-have-to-get-this-rewrite-to-Nicole-Kidman-in-two-hours way, but in an existential way, an unglamorous way. A silent office. A humble wooden desk. No. My future wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t humble. It was bright. It was chaotic. I wanted excitement. I wanted noise!

And, with L, I had finally found a way to get it.

***

The treatment was good. It was funny. It was exactly the kind of sharp and surprising and high-energy comedic writing I excelled at. I could imagine Seth Rogen reading it, belly laughing at the unexpected twists and intelligent punchlines.

I sent it to L, and we got on Zoom to discuss it. He was lying down again, eating chips. I held my breath while he chose his words, frowning a bit. “It’s a little too…” He paused and considered, crunching thoughtfully. “I don’t know. It’s a little too Seth Rogen, you know? What else have you got?”

It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t joking.

“I don’t want this to be Knocked Up funny,” he continued. “You know? I want it to be like Being John Malkovich. Completely original.”

“But you said…” I started, then stopped myself. L was the professional. He knew better. I had been stupid, perhaps, to take what he’d said about sending the treatment to Seth Rogen so literally. I nodded instead and wrote Being John Malkovich???? on my pad of paper, underlining it twice.

He told me the treatment’s proposed city setting was also a problem, that the characters were stale, expected. I suggested we set it at a high school. Stoner-prom-king-fights-off-hick-zombies?

“No,” L said. “No high school. I don’t want to make The Kissing Booth.”

I threw out a small town concept next. “No!” he cried. “I’m not doing Waiting for Guffman either.” He sat up. “What I want is for this to be original. I want people in Hollywood to read this and think, Who the hell is this Celeste Amidon? She’s a genius! I’ve never seen anything like this before! She’s the greatest writer of her generation. Do you think you can do that?”

I nodded. “Definitely.”

***

L became obsessed with the idea of our stoner apocalypse movie also being a heist. For research, I struggled through Inside Man and The Thomas Crown Affair and Rififi. (I realized quickly that I loathe heist movies, a helpful clue hinting at what was to come.)

You’ll be shocked to hear that the treatment for my stoner-heist-thriller was awful. Somebody would definitely read it and go “Who the hell is this Celeste Amidon?” but not in a good way. I couldn’t bring myself to send it to L; I pictured him, lying on his couch, frowning as he read, wondering why he had wasted his time giving me a chance in the first place. I trashed the document and shut my computer and felt my chances at those sunlit Los Angeles rooms slipping away.

I did not consider that the reason it was terrible was because my original idea had nothing to do with heists, I was not the kind of writer who could write a convincing heist, and my heart was most certainly not in it. No, I saw the treatment’s poor quality as a failing on my part. To write for the screen is to be flexible, amenable. This was my ticket. L saw me not just as an action writer, but as a writer who could do anything. And wasn’t that what I wanted to be? The kind of writer who was up for any task? My terrible treatment was not good enough. I sent L an email: I’m not good at writing treatments. Can you just let me write the whole script and send it to you? I promise it’ll be good.

A few minutes later, he responded: KK

I smiled, feeling I had staved off a crisis.

But a new one quickly emerged. I did not sleep. I barely ate. I was writing so much and so fast that my fingers would move even when I wasn’t typing, like the legs of a dog suspended above water. My eyes began running because I was holding them open for so long. I was saying lines to myself when I got up to pee, determined not to waste even three minutes of precious writing time. At the end of five days, I had a one-hundred-forty page script. I read it over, relieved to find that it was good, maybe not as good as the script my original treatment would have yielded, but good all the same. I was exhausted but, more potently, I was proud of myself for having written something that was so far out of my wheelhouse and yet was utterly solid.

“Getting there,” L said, “but I don’t want this to be Rififi. What if the main character is the president?”

I nodded eagerly. “Getting there” was the very carrot I needed. I stayed up another three nights and rewrote the script dutifully to change my lovable stoner protagonist to the president of the United States of America. “Closer,” he said when he read that version, “but what if we add some sci-fi elements? And cut the whole president stuff. This isn’t Lincoln.” Another draft, another rewrite. Another. Another. I was beginning to lose hope, or, perhaps more accurately, patience, and then I turned in a fifth version of the script, about ex-con sisters, that he seemed to really like. I remember him sitting all the way up when I entered the Zoom room, his eyes glowing.

“This is the closest we’ve gotten,” he said. “A couple tweaks, and we can be in production this summer.”

I zoned out for a moment, warm with relief. I imagined what it would feel like to quit my job, take a suitcase to LA. That glowing Burbank room was closer than ever before. I felt so grateful to L that I almost began crying. The hardship, the frustration, the sleepless nights had all been worth it.

“Oh,” he said. “Just one small change. I think they should break into Fort Knox.”

***

The breakup, in the end, was a relief. I was sitting on a balcony in Austin, Texas, when L asked if I could speak over the phone, no chummy, prone zoom call that day. He said that it was a difficult decision, but that he needed to prioritize other projects. He told me he hoped we could work together in some capacity down the line. I thanked him, hung up, then tripped and fell into a cactus. Spines created thin cuts all over my legs. Bleeding and exhausted, I felt a lot of emotions, but relief was chief among them. He added me on LinkedIn a few weeks later but, barring that, I never heard from him again.

My experience with L contributed to my falling out of love with writing for film and TV but, truth be told, the process had begun before that.

In 2018, my senior year of college, I was struggling to find an elective to fulfill my credit requirements. The options were slim; I didn’t want to take a(nother) Indian dance class, and I would be goddamned if I fell into the “maybe a psych class could be good for my writing!” trap again. On a whim, I signed up for an introductory creative writing class. Though I was a writing major, all my writing classes as an undergrad had been practical, clinical, all beat sheets and act breaks timed to the page and forensic analysis of Sex and the City episodes. I picked my creative writing professor because his website had a picture of him on a boat, and all of his books had titles like Run the Storm and The Last Harbor. I felt like he had a lot to teach me. I hadn’t written fiction since high school and, when I wrote my first short story for this workshop, it was like turning on a valve. That class changed my life.

Also that year, I reread John Irving’s miraculous novel The World According to Garp with a group of my close friends. Reading that book as an adult reignited a passion for fiction that had been lying dormant in me. As I read about Vienna and tongueless feminists and The Undertoad, a seed was planted in my mind, one that would continue to bloom the longer I spent avoiding it. Writing novels was what I wanted to do.

***

Not long after my experience with L, I got out of the film and TV business entirely. Mostly, it was so I could start making some real money. (Freelance writing? Editing for a literary magazine? MFA in Fiction? Cha-ching, bitch!). But it was also because I knew that I could not avoid the truth anymore. I was not a sitcom writer. I was not a screenwriter. I was a novelist.

It hasn’t been easy. I’ve had a lot of rejections and setbacks. I spend a lot of time in my rinky-dink bedroom office. I have friends with exciting Hollywood jobs, friends who rub shoulders with the likes of Seth Rogen. It’s hard, sometimes, for me to understand why I chose this less exciting path for myself. It only takes a bit of reflection, recalling the supine Zoom calls and the twitching fingers and the Fort Knox of my past. And then I remember that it was the easiest choice I have ever made.

Well, I’ve heard that having a Substack is cringe, so I suppose the point is moot.

Anyway, I wrote this poem a while ago, and found it last night, by accident (I was searching for another poem I wrote, which I found but decided I no longer like). I do like this one; it makes me feel nostalgic, so here it is.

You don’t know about disasters

The plant was dead when we came back for it

It was not a metaphor

It was a cheap succulent that I’d left on my bookshelf, March 15, 2020

It had turned soft from neglect, leaves flaccid like used bandaids

When I left I had thought I’d be gone for just a weekend so I only brought my toothbrush and the book I was reading— A Prayer for Owen Meany— and some underwear

My mother and I came back to the apartment two months later so that I could pack my stuff and move out

I wore a blue medical mask, the vegetal smell of my own breath making my eyes feel hot

I looked around, searching for clues, what happened

What I found was the beginning of the month of March, fossilized in what was left behind

A cardigan draped over the plastic kitchen chair

An empty wine glass with a kiss of lipstick— I drank it with my roommate before sending her off on a terrible date

A bottle of Excedrin

An empty fish tank; I’ll spare you the beta fish’s fate

Like an archaeologist I sifted

The cans and cans of bean soup I’d gotten from Gristedes back when we hadn’t known what this was

When we thought it would come for the paper towels

When we were scared to touch but didn’t think about the air

I took the posters off my wall

The books off my bookshelf

The graduation cap

The succulent, which wasn’t a metaphor

I wanted to throw it away

My mother put it in the bath and doused it with so much water that pearls of dirt bubbled up and spilled into the tub

She said we were taking it back to Massachusetts

I told her she didn’t know about disasters

She said I didn’t either

We left New York with a U-Haul attached to the car

I looked in the rear mirror, watched it sway in the wind

My mother put the succulent in the kitchen by the hanging bowls of potatoes

It was not a metaphor

It came back to life

And then I knocked it over, out of its pot

Its roots like a newborn hand

You don’t know about disasters, it told me

I asked it about resilience

It was a plant so it didn’t respond

But. Enough about me! You’re not here for a travel itinerary. You’re here for book recommendations. Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about memoirs lately, what with the spring/ early summer’s unbeatable and fast-selling triumvirate (Strangers, Famesick, The Land and Its People). A memoir, like a pie, is a tricky thing to get right. It has to be sweet but not saccharine. Balanced. Firm. Does this metaphor make sense? Not really. Hmm. Anyway. What makes a good memoir good? Well, I’m not entirely sure how to answer that succinctly, so, instead, I will suggest a pair that I think do exactly what a good memoir should. They defy. They surprise. They invent. They have the perfect balance of rhubarb and strawberry. No, that’s pies. Sorry. Perhaps most importantly, a good memoir intimately captures one person’s perspective, yes, but it also, simultaneously, captures an era, a culture, a world.

This month, I am recommending a pair of…

“Memoirs That Rock”

1. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

This wholly original and profoundly affecting book detailing Machado’s abusive relationship is a masterclass in memoir writing. Effortlessly inventive and perceptive, Machado is a fearlessly good writer. You may love Her Body and Other Parties (I don’t), but you have to admit that she is at the absolute top of her game here.

I read most of In the Dream House behind the counter when I was working as a bookseller/ bartender at a store in Austin. I remember my coworker joking that this was an insane thing for me to be reading in public, and I laughed, and then, later, I had to put the book down because I felt so wracked with emotion that I was becoming completely unmoored, almost physically unable to do my job when customers came sporadically in. I texted her about it later, and she replied with a shrugging emoji, like… I told you so.

2. Consent by Jill Ciment

I picked this memoir up after reading Ciment’s short and wonderful novel, The Body in Question. Ciment wrote Consent after her husband of forty-seven years passed away. He was her art teacher. They got together when she was seventeen and he was forty-six. The memoir is about their life together, though it’s not just about that. It’s also about growing up in poverty and what it was like to go to art school in the seventies as a woman (literally insane) and learning how to type and the nature of archive.

One of the most interesting things about this memoir is the fact that Ciment came out with a memoir in 1996 called Half a Life that details much of what she excavates in Consent. In Consent, however, she corrects a lot of what she wrote in Half a Life. It’s not as though she was fabricating in her first memoir. It is simply that she has grown to see her life more clearly in the years since, and, perhaps especially, with the benefit of her main subject being deceased.

In this sense, Consent is, perhaps, the ultimate memoir. A rewriting and retelling, a reminder that our stories and histories are not fixed, never fully told, and the best that we can do is reexamine, clarify, and, in some lucky instances, relive through writing.

PS: My friend Lauren shamed me for slacking on my Substack output recently. I’m sorry, Lauren! And, thank you, Lauren. Because of you, I’ve been working on an essay about my most unhinged Hollywood experience that I’ll put out into the world very soon.

‘Til then xx

Now, to the topic at hand. Okay, so I’ve recently been accused of only reading extremely dreary books. And, while I do love a tedious journey through the annals of human misery, I’m here to prove that I like funny books, too, okay? This month, I am recommending a pair of…

“Books That Will Make You Laugh Out Loud”

1. Worry by Alexandra Tanner

This 2024 debut had me laughing my absolute ass off. It was one of my favorite books of that year, and I still think about it often.

Worry follows a pair of deeply neurotic sisters who move in to an apartment in Brooklyn together. There are epic bickering sessions and Kafkaesque email jobs and a nasty dog named Amy Klobuchar, oh my! As a sister and an ex New Yorker and a Gen Zilennial cusper, part of the reason I love this book is because I recognize myself in the paralyzing anxiety, the pathetic situationship with the ex, the scene where the main character gets really high and buys an expensive bed and never unpacks it. But, despite my intimate understanding of the protagonist’s situation, I do feel that this book is universal in its ability to crystalize what makes the modern era so stupid, and so funny. In short, I think everybody should read it.

2. Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

This is the first book in the Patrick Melrose series, a semi-autobiographical pentalogy written by Edward St. Aubyn. These books require a certain, shall we say… British sense of humor?

The saga was adapted— quite successfully, actually— into a mini series starring our favorite politely angry bicyclist, Benedict Cumberbatch. Never Mind is the first and perhaps even the best book in the series, (though I’m reserving a special shoutout for Some Hope and its hilarious Princess Margaret cameo).

Never Mind follows the titular Patrick as a little boy having a very bad day. His father is a pedophile narcissist and his mother is a cowardly alcoholic. I’m doing a terrible job of making it sound funny, aren’t I? The truth is, the humor lies in the wickedness, the lampooning of the wretched and soulless English upper class. “After all,” St. Aubyn writes, “what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about.”

Indeed!

“Cannibalism!”

1. Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

A profound and nihilistic twist on the dystopian horror, this 2017 novel translated into English from Spanish imagines a world where all animal meat is diseased, and humans are bred for consumption. This novel is so incredibly deft in its social commentary, it’s almost like a Rorschach test. Is it an allegory about Argentina’s fraught political climate? The ethics of pet ownership? The (im)morality of eating meat? A warning about what it’s like to become quietly complicit in a corrupt government? Some combination of the above?

On top of the brilliant commentary, this is simply a really good horror novel. I— shall I say— devoured it? It’s wicked and twisted and suspenseful and upsetting and viscerally graphic and written in a chillingly matter-of-fact tone. It also has the best final page of any book I have ever read. I’ll be chasing that particular chilling high for life.

2. The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown

A true story of cannibalism, this brilliantly researched and empathetically told book tells the profoundly tragic story of the Donner Party. A book that is just as much about the flaws of the American Dream as it is about barbecuing human flesh, The Indifferent Stars Above is at once a tale of wilderness survival, an autopsy of a quest gone horribly wrong, a journey into utter bleakness, and a deft and loving character study.

I’ve written about this book before in an essay examining my Covid-era obsession with the Donner Party and the ways in which the story of this tragedy felt gruesomely relatable to me, as my own (albeit more quaint) attempts at charting a great future for myself were knocked unceremoniously and somewhat brutally off-course, not by weather and hubris but by a virus (and hubris). I read another of Brown’s books, called Under a Flaming Sky, about the Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894, and, while there is no doubt that he is a great and scrupulous writer, his magnum opus remains this chilling tale of the indifferent stars above aligning catastrophically to create a maelstrom of epic and sobering proportions.

That said, I’m excited to welcome April, which is National Short Story Month, according to me. I love short stories. How could I not? That said, I think it’s very difficult to find a short story collection that works as a whole. Often, they are either uneven or repetitive or both. With that in mind, I am recommending two short story collections that are utter magic, start to finish. In April, we’re taking about…

“Short Story Collections That Do Not Miss”

1. Bear and His Daughter by Robert Stone

This collection is tough-as-nails, bleak-as-fuck, and a pleasure to read. Stone spends the book’s duration mud-wrestling with themes of religion, masculinity, and addiction. Bear and His Daughter is like if Jesus’ Son and A Good Man is Hard to Find had a baby, and that baby was raised by Charles Bukowski.

The collection starts with “Miserere,” an absolutely brutal story about a librarian who “rescues” aborted fetuses so that they can have a proper burial. (When I was teaching at BU, I told my dad about my plans to give the story to my undergrads. “What?!” he said. “Do not do that!” I didn’t.) The second story, “Absence of Mercy,” is the cold and miserable tale of a man who slips through society’s cracks, a story that made Atticus Lish, one of my all time favs, want to become a writer. (And thank God he did.) This collection features gorgeously ironic tales of adventure in “Porque no Tiene, Porque la Falta” and “Under the Pitons,” a slam-dunk powerhouse about a bender from hell in “Helping,” a bizarre interlude about Nazi dolphins (yes, really) in “Aquarius Obscured,” and a stunning bravura finale in “Bear and His Daughter,” a heartbreaking tale of love, failure, and incest (what else?) that will leave you saying… haha… hahaha… what the fuck?

Read it.

2. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

Bad Behavior— along with The World According to Garp, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and The Easter Parade—is one of the books that made me want to write fiction for a living. (A “living”… lol…!)

In 1988, tha queen Mary Gaitskill exploded onto the scene and said, “I think it’s high time we support women’s wrongs.” I actually did teach one of these stories to my students, and the reviews were… mixed! Just kidding, they were bad. My students did not like it.

Bad Behavior opens with a brilliant and peculiarly (for Gaitskill) sweet story called “Daisy’s Valentine” about an affair between two losers. It then careens quickly off a cliff into mayhem with “A Romantic Weekend,” one of the most chaotic and cynical stories I’ve ever read, about an S&M meet-up gone deliciously wrong. Gaitskill, who was a sex worker before she made it as a writer, writes frequently about prostitutes, in stories like “Something Nice” and the beautifully sad “Trying to Be.” She writes about failed connections in “Other Factors” and “An Affair, Edited,” and reprises her obsession with the sour side of BDSM in the iconic “Secretary” which is the story my students almost assassinated me for assigning. You may know “Secretary” from the film adaptation, which, I’ll have you know, is so wildly different from the book, it’s like comparing Jaws and Avalanche Sharks. Like, yes, they’re both about sharks, buuuut…

Bad Behavior finishes with a beautiful departure from Gaitskill’s typically zoomed-in eye with “Heaven,” a sprawling and intergenerational tragedy set not in the grungy Greenwich Village but in the ‘burbs. A masterclass.

Let me know how you’re spending National Short Story Month <3

Speaking of… it’s time for another round of book recommendations. I’ve talked before about how every book these days seems to be about badly behaved women. The problem I have isn’t with the genre itself, but rather the fact that all these unhinged literary girls tend to be pretty, well, hinged. With that in mind, and with International Women’s Day right around the corner, I’m recommending books about…

“Ladies Who Are Actually Fucking Crazy”

1. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

This novel about a very naughty girl from Newcastle is as funny as it is sickening, as shocking as it is inevitable. Rini is an unbelievably toxic photographer who begins to spiral when she is offered an exhibition in London. Someone on Goodreads called this novel the lovechild of Brett Easton Ellis and Ottessa Moshfegh in a one star review. Hello? Like that’s a bad thing? My dream date…

Seriously, this book has everything: stunningly accurate hangover sequences, a deliciously self-absorbed mother, a tragic Tesco employee, art world satire that actually works, and blood, lots and lots of blood. And yet, it’s still, at its core, about a ridiculous English party girl who can’t stop sabotaging herself. It’s like a Dolly Alderton book if Dolly was a highly functioning sexual sadist.

2. Animal by Lisa Taddeo

   

   Lisa Taddeo’s 2021 powerhouse novel starts with a (literal) bang and does not, for a nano-second, relent. It’s about a woman who goes to Los Angeles in an attempt to untangle the traumatizing mystery of her past. This book, like Boy Parts— and New York’s hottest club— has everything. A dynamic and compelling female friendship. A sickening flashback involving a swimming pool. A sweet himbo who lives in a yurt. A sequence featuring coyotes that will make you want to reach behind your eyes and pull them out and then put them in a blender. I don’t do trigger warnings, but if you really want one, just assume it’s “all of them.”

   Happy reading!

“Books That Will Radicalize You”

1. Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

This novel is one of my all-time favorites, and it really could not be more relevant. Preparation for the Next Life follows two misfits on a harrowing journey through New York City’s grimy and unrelenting underbelly. Zou Lei, a Uighur immigrant, meets Skinner, a brain damaged Iraq war veteran, and they become one of the great, unlikely love stories in contemporary literature. Written by Atticus Lish (son of theeee Gordon), this bravura novel addresses themes of immigration and displacement, as well as identity-based persecution, severe poverty, and the harrowing ripple effects of the military industrial complex. Cheerful, it is not. Brilliant, it is. Read this book, then listen to “Hypnotize” by System of a Down if you want to catch a vibe (and catch a charge).

2. Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond’s 2016 sociological powerhouse is one of the best non-fiction books and, actually, one of the best books I’ve ever read. It tells the real stories of people in the Milwaukee renters’ market— from landlords to trailer park inhabitants to homeless mothers trying to find shelter with a record of evictions. It is a glaringly tragic portrait of the ways in which our capitalist structure sets the most vulnerable Americans up to fail. This is a devastating and important read for everyone, but especially those who haven’t quite wrapped their heads around the importance of intersectionality. Desmond outlines precisely and painfully the ways in which the American renters’ system disenfranchises Black people and, most of all, Black women. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods,” Desmond writes, “eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

***

It’s not too late to join our Wuthering Heights book club!

You may have opinions on whether or not the book itself is radical. I think it is. Regardless of the content, I think it’s radical to dedicate your time to reading a classic and discussing literature when you could be, like, watching a video of a dog eating broccoli on TikTok or using FanDuel to bet all your money on the Lakers game.

If you can’t swing the club, you’re still welcome to attend the movie premiere screening at the Angelika on February 12th. Email me for more information on securing a ticket.

We are also hosting a Charli XCX album listening party in Brooklyn! Deetz below. All are welcome. xoxoxo

My brilliant friend Taeler and I are hosting a free, virtual Wuthering Heights book club this month. Whether you’re a hopeless romantic, a freak for Elordi, or have always been dying to know what Kate Bush was yapping about, we would love to see you there. We will have three Zoom meetings, plus an album release party, and a movie debrief.

Text me or email me (ciamidon@gmail.com) if you’d like to join. See you on the wily, windy moors!

“English Professors Who Have Ill-Advised Affairs”

1. Stoner by John Williams

This is a bit of a hear-me-out novel. It’s almost impossible to explain what makes it so utterly magical; when attempting to describe the plot, I usually bore even myself. How do I explain the fact I stayed up quite literally all night reading it? Or why I started crying while listening to “The Subway” by Chappell Roan, because it made me think of my darling John Stoner? This 1965 novel by John Williams, often considered a forgotten classic (The New Yorker called it “the greatest American novel you’ve never heard of”), is the quiet tale of a Missouri English professor’s life. Spoiler alert: he does fall madly in love with a graduate student. But this book is so much more than a love story. It’s a tale about what it really means to love literature, about the consequences of being a passive actor in one’s life, about the things that industrialization left behind. It’s a novel that will have me asking: “What did you expect?” for the rest of my life.

2. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee’s stunning 1999 novel is not for the faint of heart. It follows a Cape Town English professor who disgraces himself when he sleeps with a student. He escapes to his daughter’s glum farm on the Eastern Cape. There, something very bad happens. I will say no more.

This is a glorious and deeply upsetting work about post-Apartheid South Africa, a deft and unflinching look at how racism, class disparity, nationalism, and misogyny intersect to create one mess of a country (sound familiar?). But endlessly bleak it actually isn’t. There’s some hope to be found in watching the deeply flawed protagonist figure out how to help the people he loves and learn how understanding, or at least trying to understand, can be an act of immense power.

It’s a new year, and things in this world are deeply dire. But they don’t have to be! I invite you all to read these stunning masterworks and consider them a somewhat deranged guiding light for a good 2026.

After The Bride puts her daughter to bed, she and Bill sit down in Bill’s tasteful living room, where Bill promptly shoots The Bride in the knee with a truth serum and interrogates her. She admits, through gritted teeth, that she wanted her new life as a normie in El Paso to work, even if she knew it wouldn’t. She tells him she excommunicated from his squad of deadly assassins when she realized she was pregnant. Bill, in turn, tells her some truths of his own. He admits that he brutally massacred everyone she loved because he was heartbroken that she left him. He tells her that she is a killer, and will never be anything else.

They finally have it out in a relatively quick and contained fight sequence. The Bride administers the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, an elusive kill method which Bill told her about during a lovey-dovey campfire flashback scene. He is shocked and delighted that she has learned it. It’s almost a gift to him, a sweet surprise, an act of love. He tells her that she is a good person, she cries and tells him he looks “ready” to die, and then he staggers out into the beautiful Mexico night, collapsing to his death after five contemplative steps. It’s easily the best scene in the movie (or two movies, depending on how you look at it, but more of that to come), a deeply moving emotional sucker punch that makes the actual sucker punches preceding it look rather flimsy.

I felt a bit unmoored as I left the Alamo Drafthouse, surrounded by fans dressed in yellow jumpsuits and men patiently explaining what a movie is to their girlfriends. Fingers covered in churro popcorn dust, legs cramping fiercely, I asked myself: Did I really just tear up at the end of a Tarantino movie? My boyfriend and I talked about the new cut on the way home, what worked, what didn’t . But one thing I was wrestling with, that I didn’t say out loud, was that I had gained a new perspective on the story of The Bride that night, a story I had watched unfold many times, even if in its original, bifurcated form. Kill Bill was, I realized, a love story.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is… long! This four hour and thirty-five minute event is not for the weak, nor is it for the casual Tarantino viewer. The supercut of both volumes of Kill Bill has been in the making for quite some time. Indeed, it’s how Tarantino wanted the story to be told the first time, and he only sliced it in two because the producers felt that people would not want to sit through a nearly five hour film. What were they thinking?!

As I watched, I was surprised by how few changes had been made to this new edition. The anime sequence that provides O-Ren Ishii’s backstory is considerably longer, and the iconic House of Blue Leaves fight sequence is in color. There’s more gore, now that nobody is afraid of the dreaded NC-17 label. We see The Bride slice off Sofie’s other arm in a characteristically funny and Tarantinoesque moment of stunning violence. Gone is the reveal, at the end of Volume One, that The Bride’s little girl is, in fact, still alive. This reveal is saved for the final scene, and I think it’s the right choice, especially since viewers of The Whole Bloody Affair don’t need a juicy cliffhanger any longer. They’re there for the duration, for better or worse.

Much like Sofie’s arm, Tarantino has lopped off the intro to Vol.2, which features The Bride providing a goofy here’s-what-you-missed-on-Glee monologue getting viewers up to speed on the contents of Vol. 1. There’s also, apparently, a Fortnite tie-in post-credits sequence now? For the purposes of this piece, and our collective sanity, I will be pretending said sequence does not exist.

Save for those changes, the movies are, by and large, the same. So, what, really, do we gain from watching them back to back? Technically speaking, the new cut doesn’t work. These simply are two separate films, whether Tarantino wanted it that way or not. On a basic level, Vol. 2 is unable to maintain the momentum of Vol. 1. Watching the two films stitched together, we go from the epic House of Blue Leaves sequence to Michael Madsen arguing with his boss at the strip club about whether or not he can wear a hat.

Despite the lack of momentum, there is something to be gained here, beyond a reinforced notion of Tarantino’s self-indulgence. As a Tarantino ex-communicate, I was jaded going in. Which is why I was so surprised by my reaction. By the fact I can’t stop thinking about Bill and The Bride’s goodbye. What does it mean?

I have a complicated relationship with Quentin Tarantino. I’ve written about it before, how I was a devotee of his films for so long, but fell out of love with much of his work in my early twenties. As I matured, I began to see the films that I loved so dearly as what they were, mainly shallow and vapid pastiche. A few films continued to hold my attention, including the smart and profound Jackie Brown, the surprisingly nuanced Inglorious Basterds. But, overall, I began to find Tarantino’s films immature and self-aggrandizing.

The recent Paul Dano discourse has reminded me why I find Tarantino insufferable as a person, too. I believe fiercely in separating the art from the artist, but that’s a lofty challenge when the artist insists upon himself so constantly in his work. Tarantino is self-obsessed and tiresome, a film nerd in the worst possible way. During job interviews, I used to pick him as my who-would-you-have-dinner-with answer. Now, you couldn’t pay me.

But it’s also Tarantino’s flaws, as an artist and as a person, that made Kill Bill an unexpected gem for a disillusioned viewer like myself.

My late mentor used to say that his job as a writing professor was similar to that of a detective. It was his responsibility, he felt, to “follow the good writing.” Only in the good writing would he discover what his students were really interested in. Oftentimes, this process was brutal. He could read an entire story about bison hunting and tell us that the only good writing in the piece was a single paragraph where the protagonist makes himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “The writer is interested in the horror of the domestic,” he would announce. “Cut all the hunting crap!” He did this to me, once. I wrote a story about a woman who has a miscarriage, and he lampooned it in front of my classmates. He said that the only good writing in the story was about the protagonist’s relationship with a woman she sells a painting to. “That’s what you really want to write about,” he said. “Not all this hormonal hijinks.”

Sitting in the Alamo that Friday night, I followed the good filmmaking. And it led me to a very unexpected place. Tarantino, I realized, is not at his best when he thinks he’s at his best. He’s not at his best when he’s referencing Lash LaRue, or ripping off Karate Kiba, or nodding cheekily to the Macaroni Combat genre. He’s not at his best when he’s wielding swords and meteor hammers and shotguns, wagging his knowledge of propaganda flicks and obscure 60’s variety shows around like a tomahawk. He’s at his best when he’s exploring love. Not shallow, facile love, like the galling, kill-me-now Butch and Fabienne scenes in Pulp Fiction. Not even the love between a mother and daughter, which comes across as thin and underdeveloped in Kill Bill, a symbolic motivation at best. He’s at the top of his game when he is writing about and filming two deeply flawed and complicated people who love each other, and who hurt each other, over and over again.

He explores these kinds of relationships more than the average Tarantino-head probably realizes. The element that makes Jackie Brown stand out for me is the love story between Max Cherry and Jackie Brown. And, no, I’m not just a sap! Really, I tend to actively avoid reading and watching romances. But there’s something about these tremendously nuanced characters coming together, loving each other in their flawed ways, and then our heroine choosing herself, that results in pure, unadulterated movie magic. Think, also, of Shoshanna and Marcel in Inglourious Basterds, two broken outsiders. Shoshanna’s hubris and anger tears them apart (but also tears down the Third Reich, so, you know, priorities), but not before she gives Marcel a tearful, triumphant, devastating kiss. These moments of goodbye, between Cherry and Jackie, between Shoshanna and Marcel, create cinematic fireworks in a way that a spurting neck wound cannot come close to. But nothing, for me, anyway, approaches the emotional gravity of Bill and The Bride confessing their love for each other, then fighting to the death.

Tarantino would call Kill Bill a love letter to filmmaking, but I disagree. I think it’s a delicate and nuanced look at his own relationships. That is not to say that the dynamic between Bill and The Bride is inherently romantic. Indeed, I’m old enough to know that a man shooting his ex in the head isn’t #couplegoals. But I think it’s perhaps as honest as Tarantino gets in the entire marathon film experience. One watches the great Uma Thurman’s face contort in anguish as she says goodbye to Bill, and then steel itself again in pride as she realizes she has done what she set out to do, and can’t help but wonder if this film isn’t about Tarantino’s relationship with Uma Thurman. The ways in which they hurt each other or, perhaps more precisely, the ways in which he hurt her. Maybe this moment feels so real compared to the others because it’s an apology. For a director who’s so exact about every moment in his filmmaking, is that really so much of a stretch?

If you don’t know, Tarantino and Thurman’s artist-muse relationship hit a profound snag during the filming of Kill Bill. In a nutshell, Tarantino pressured Thurman into a stunt she wasn’t comfortable with, and she ended up with permanent back and knee damage. Instead of taking the blame, Tarantino doubled down, and Miramax agreed to release the footage of the accident to Thurman only if she absolved them of all wrongdoing. Thurman finally spoke up about this years later, saying that, “I had really always felt a connection to the greater good in my work with Quentin and most of what I allowed to happen to me and what I participated in was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother. But at least I had some say, you know?… I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”

There’s a scene toward the end of the film, right before The Bride’s reunion with Bill, that is particularly sickening. The Bride tracks down Bill’s father figure, a pimp named Esteban Vihaio. Vihaio chides Bill’s methods. “I would have just cut your face,” he says. A girl appears in the same scene, delivering him a drink, her beautiful face slashed and scarred grotesquely. This moment, perhaps even more so than the climactic ending, serves as the film’s delicate thesis. In a film that is deeply empowering, but still punctuated by punchlines about misogynistic violence (see: Buck pimping out The Bride’s comatose body), the scar moment is deadly serious. It is not played for laughs. It is sobering and depressing, a commentary on the power misogyny and patriarchy, whether Tarantino wanted it to be or not. And I think he did.

Here, I believe Tarantino is acknowledging the ways in which he uses people to get what he wants. The way he sacrifices the women he cares for in service of his art. His penchant for choking and spitting on his actresses on camera to “get the right shot,” a technique he has curiously never used on Kurt Russell or Leonardo DiCaprio. His ability to pressure his muse and collaborator to perform a stunt that leaves her, in a sense, disfigured. In this scene, he shines a light on the ugly side of control. And, in her recognition, he allows The Bride to be vulnerable.

In the end, though, fuck vulnerability, The Bride gets to be Tarantino. She manipulates and calls the shots and kills Bill so beautifully and perfectly that he can’t even be mad about it. She happily cuddles her daughter on the motel bed and the camera fades to black. Trauma gone, Thurman and The Bride are one and the same. What a lovely fantasy it is. Was it worth it?

When I was fifteen, at the peak of my Tarantino obsession, I watched Bennett Miller’s Capote with my parents, a film written, as it happens, by my late mentor’s son-in-law. During the scene where Capote returns to Kansas to witness the execution of the killers he has grown close to, my dad turned to me and said, “Tarantino could never do this.” I was so mad at him for saying that, but I understand the sentiment now. Miller looked at quiet, honest moments and created movie magic without any bells and whistles. Just real, complicated humans muddling through honest challenges.

Except, I do believe, every so often, Tarantino can do what Miller did in Capote. When Tarantino turns in the opposite direction of his worst impulses, he can draw out magic. Don’t believe me? Watch one of his movies. Follow the good filmmaking. It will lead you to a moment that you could never have expected.

In November, I recommended books about unusual amor. In October, I wrote about Irish lads. This month, I’m suggesting two novels that both feature…

“Dancing Bear Sequences That Will Change Your Life”

1. The World According to Garp by John Irving

John Irving’s fourth novel is his masterpiece. Written in 1978, The World According to Garp tells the story of a writer whose mother is a controversial feminist icon.

Now, Irving is a writer of habit. He writes about the same themes over and over: wrestling, infidelity, New Hampshire, Vienna, and, yes, bears. In fact, in a review of his later novel, A Widow for One Year, Michiko Kakutani wrote: “The good news about John Irving’s new novel ‘A Widow for One Year’ is that it not only lacks those annoyingly winsome bears that have popped up so frequently in his earlier fiction, but that the lack of bears is also indicative of a new maturity in Irving’s work, a taming of his exclamatory style and adolescent malice.”

I, for one, love the bears in Irving’s writing. In The World According to Garp, the bear shows up in one of our hero’s short stories, “The Pension Grillparzer,” about a circus family and the unicycle-riding bear that becomes a part of their life. It may sound whimsical and annoying, but it works beautifully as a small piece of the great, formidable tapestry that is this book, a book about fatherhood and social mores. About anxiety, gender politics, and all the ways in which we punish ourselves. The ways in which we don’t.

This book is special to me for many reasons. It’s one of the first “adult” books I came to love. I read it as a college freshman and remember, distinctly, that niggling feeling that this was what I should be doing, writing things like this, a feeling I shoved deep down in service of my dream to write for late night TV, goddammit! It’s also the book that solidified a group of friends I am still close with to this day. We all read Garp together and discussed it at the Cava in Union Square. I still think about those book club sessions when I think about Garp. How lifelong friendships can be formed and held together by literature.

2. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

And now, for something completely different!

I read this book in October of this year. I can still remember finishing it, late at night, closing the book, staring at the wall, and wondering: “Will I go a day for the rest of my life without thinking about this book?” In the month since I finished, I have thought about it every single day. I have been so obsessed that I sent my old Milton professor a manic email comparing BM and Paradise Lost. She left me on delivered </3

Blood Meridian follows a nameless kid on a harrowing journey through the American West. A runaway, he joins a corrupt gang of scalpers. This is a Western, sure, but there’s no friendly saloon here. No hooker with a heart of gold. This book is bleak and relentless and has the greatest villain I’ve come across in literature: the intelligent, psychopathic, and hairless Judge Holden.

The bear comes in at the end, and I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s dark. The bear’s anthropomorphism immediately made me think of Garp, of what the bear represents to Irving, which, if you’ve read an interview with him, is… nothing. (He grew up in New Hampshire and likes bears). However, to me, the bears in Garp represent a writer grappling with something that interests him again and again until he gets it right. Some call it self-stealing (yawn), I call it the true work of an artist. And, indeed, McCarthy, too, says what he truly wants to say at the end of Blood Meridian with the bear. Ultimately, both novels can be synthesized to one point: the moment where a bear feels more real than a human does. In two very different novels that are both about the ways in which humankind fucks things up again and again, I find this similarity to be a striking comfort.

Most of all, the thing that these novels share, besides their bear sequences, is their importance to me. I don’t know who I would be as an artist without The World According to Garp, and, although I only just finished Blood Meridian, I have a feeling this book is going to be similarly important to me. I invite you to exit this miserable year reading one of my favorite books. If you do, send me a message! I’d love to discuss it together.

And, if you’re my Milton professor… plz respond to me >:(

On a lighter note…

Back in June, I had the honor of participating in the GBH Stories From the Stage “Glorious Food” episode. Watch me talk about lobster and make fun of my parents here.

“Weird Love”

1. Lobster by Guillaume Lecasble

Lobster falls in love with woman. Lobster becomes separated from woman. Lobster will stop at nothing to find her. Oh, did I mention they met on the Titanic?

This slip of a novel from 2003 is French in the best way (and there are bad ways to be French, y’all). At once surreal and grounded, hilarious and tragic, Lobster is titillating, surprising, and remarkably convincing as a love story.

Lobster was published by Dedalus as a part of their Euro Shorts books collection, a series of teeny novels meant to be read on puddle jumpers. “There was a Lobster-shaped hole in world literature that has now been neatly filled by this remarkable work,” wrote Nicholas Lezard. I wholly agree.

2. Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

Woman falls in love with airplane. Woman wants to fuck airplane. Woman wants to marry airplane (read: die in a plane crash). Folk pulls off a remarkable feat with this 2025 novel, the elevator pitch of which reads like a joke, a dare. This book is funny and strange and moving and peculiarly life affirming as well.

Both books, though unconventional, are love stories in their purest form. They do what any good romance should do. They confound. They challenge. They invigorate.

Winter is coming, and your jaded heart is ice-cold. You may be surprised to find that a lobster claw or the wing of a plane is just the thing you need to thaw it.

“You have a gap between your front teeth,” he told me.

Do I? I thought. I hadn’t noticed.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

I wasn’t surprised by his line of questioning. I’d been interrogated by dentists about my gap since I was a child. Yes, I like my gap, I thought. Do not touch it. I nodded curtly, heart aching from the trauma of my breakup, not interested in further chit-chat.

“Good,” the dentist replied. “Listen. Don’t ever let anybody make you feel insecure about your gap. Okay? Because, hey, you know who else has a gap?”

“Who?”

“David Letterman.”

I couldn’t help but smile. It was the exact thing every insecure, heartbroken teenage girl wants to hear. My doppelgänger was David Letterman and everything was going to be okay.

***

The gap started off small, but it gets wider every year. Such is the nature of the gap tooth. Neither of my parents has a gap, but my older sister does— we call it The London Look, after Georgia May Jagger’s somewhat unsettling mascara commercial. I have always liked my gap, in large part because I think it looks très chic on my big sister. But, ever since I was a kid, dentists have been bullying the fuck out of me for it.

An example: When I was fifteen, my family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb known for its pressed juiceries and its ivy league feeder high school and its WASPy hatefulness. I was already insecure, nerdy and unruly-looking, and the surplus of blonde, leggy Olivias and Natalies surrounding me did not help the matter. I went to a new dentist before school started and he told me I would need braces. I blanched, my mind immediately conjuring an image of myself, sitting alone in the school cafeteria, headgear like a succubus attached to my face.

“For what reason?” I asked.

He looked irritated. “Cosmetic.”

“What do you mean?”

He shoved a hand mirror up to my face. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “When you look in the mirror, do you like what you see?”

Well, no, I did not, in fact, like what I saw. But it had very little to do with my teeth.

I never returned to this particular dentist, and it became a point of pride for me to avoid orthodontics. Even as I went from my teens to my twenties, and dentists told me that there were reasons (beyond the obvious aesthetic ones) for me to get Invisalign or braces, I remained staunchly against it. My British mother derided the “horrid, flat Orthodontic faces of American girls” which added, at least in part, to my decision. But the truth was that my teeth were a mess. My bite was, in the words of another dentist, “extremely complex.” My top teeth were paper thin. My bottom teeth were a crowded mess, worn down by simple chewing, by anxious night grinding. I was getting cavities constantly, despite the fact I flossed and brushed scrupulously. My mouth was a ticking time bomb, one that I chose to ignore.

***

When my twin sister and I were babies, we were declared fraternal. When our teeth began to grow in, x-rays told a different story. We both had permanent baby teeth in the same spot, a rarity that proved, beyond of a shadow of a doubt, that we were identical. Yes, it was our teeth that showed us who we really were. Identical twins.

Teeth can tell us a lot about ourselves. They reveal information about our ancestry. They tell us about our lifestyles. Our habits. Some believe that teeth are similar to horoscopes in what they reveal about somebody’s personality. Anthropologists can determine age, sex, and socioeconomic status, all by looking at teeth. Our teeth are also intrinsically linked to our self-esteem. Mewing-obsessed looksmaxxing incels try to make their jaws appear manlier by gnawing on mastic gum. Celebrities file their teeth down to little nubs so that they can wear a set of horsey veneers in hopes of looking slightly more like Kim K.

It’s miraculous, I think, that these tiny little mouth-bones can reveal so much about us, and that they can cause so much trouble. Save for the baby teeth, my twin sister’s mouth differs from mine. She has no gap, and she rarely gets cavities. Her bite, next to my extremely complex one, is strikingly ordinary. In fact, our dental paths seemed to be diverging. That is, until our freshman year in college.

***

Home for Christmas break. Eating home cooked meals and re-watching Mad Men and seeing our exes out of boredom. I started to feel acute pain when drinking liquids. I went to my dentist, and he told me I had to get my wisdom teeth removed, then proceeded to show me an utterly terrifying video. (Seriously. Like, why?) My mother scheduled back-to-back appointments for my twin and me (her mouth was hurting in an identical way, and we both needed all four wisdom teeth removed at once). I spent the next two weeks terrified. I had never had surgery before, and, though a minor one, wisdom tooth removal is a surgery. Often, massive sections of bone are removed. I had been obsessed with the idea of “anesthesia awareness” since I was young, a phenomenon where a patient remains conscious but paralyzed during surgery. They feel everything, but are unable to move. It’s probably a myth, but I was, and still am, convinced that it will definitely happen to me.

When I went in to the maxillofacial office for my removal that day, I was very clear: I did not want to be put all the way under. I wanted to be numbed and sedated, but I did not want to go to sleep.

My twin was sent in to the operating room first. I sat with my mother in the waiting room, watching Steve Harvey. Eventually, a dental assistant walked me in to my own separate room. They were inserting the IV when I heard a commotion behind me. I turned to see my twin, freshly out of surgery, rolling down the hall in a wheelchair. “Celeste!!!!” she shouted, mouth stuffed with bloody gauze. “Wait!!!! I wanna do it again!!!! Please, let me do it again!!!” I looked back at the dental assistant in alarm, but she didn’t seem to register what was happening. She started pushing liquid through the bag, and I blacked out.

When I came to, the maxillofacial surgeon was looking down at me, eyebrows knitted together. “You have to stop talking,” he said. “Please stop talking.”

Despite my explicit request, they had put me to sleep, and I was extremely fucking out of it. When the surgery was done, they put me in a wheelchair and took me out into the hall, where they gave me water and I trembled like an orphaned kitten. Without warning, I got up from the wheelchair and started to run; my twin, seeing me, got up as well and began running in the opposite direction. According to my mother, we used to do this as toddlers.

At home, we lay on the couch together. The drugs wore off, and soon we were both in utter agony. By nightfall, we were a wreck, and, by morning, we looked like depressed chipmunks. Our faces were swollen beyond what was typical for wisdom tooth surgery recovery. We could barely open our mouths. My stitches came unravelled like shoelaces and I was bleeding so much that I was spitting unsightly wads of red into the sink every few minutes. When we called the office to discuss our symptoms, the dental assistant seemed unconcerned. “Just stuff some teabags in there,” she said in her heavy Roxbury accent. I chewed bags of chai. It didn’t help.

My mother became convinced my sister and I were damaged beyond repair. She slathered cocoa butter on our cheeks in a vain attempt at preventing stretch marks. Her anxiety was infectious. I had dreams where my face became so swollen that it split open, my London look quickly morphing into a Glasgow look. I wondered what they had done to me while I was unconscious. I pictured them hacking uncaringly at my jaw bone. I felt certain that, if they’d let me stay awake like I’d asked, I wouldn’t be in this position right now. Painfully spooning yogurt into my mouth at 2am with my antibiotics, I thought that this was surely the worst dental emergency I’d ever have to endure.

Oh, how wrong I was.

***

My mistake was leaving my night guard at home. It was approximately seven years after the wisdom tooth incident. My face had, miraculously, returned to its prior shape, no stretch marks or Glasgow smiles to speak of. But things had only gotten more complicated inside my mouth. My teeth were an art installation of fillings drilled in and patched up and pulled out and redone by various dentists. Often, after a filling, I’d have to return to the dentist because I was having problems with my bite, and this made me feel paranoid, silly, like I was imagining a problem that wasn’t there. My grinding at night was getting worse and worse— if I slept without my night guard, I woke up with a gritty tongue and an ache in my ears. I spent hundred of dollars on various contraptions to wear at night. I was, frankly, exhausted. Every time I thought about my teeth, my heart rate elevated. Every time I heard a buzzing noise— a tattoo gun, a mosquito— I started to sweat. At my lowest, I fantasized about having all my teeth removed like George Washington. This was a constant problem, and I was tired. How could something so small cause so many issues?

It was October and my brother was getting married in Virginia, and I had forgotten to pack my night guard. I woke on the day with a familiar gritty feeling in my mouth. When I looked in the mirror, I did not like what I saw. I had chipped a corner off my front tooth. It was noticeable, but, really, only to me. I spat into the sink and saw little sparkling gems of tooth mixed in with saliva.

The ceremony was lovely. Afterwards, we took family photos, then ate canapés in the setting sun. I bit into a cracker and my twin sister gasped. “Oh my God,” she said. “Your teeth!”

I looked in my phone camera. My front teeth were broken; it was like somebody had taken a little spoon and gouged large chunks of the dentin out. It was so shocking, it would have been funny. Yes, it would have been very funny if I didn’t have to give a toast in an hour.

I had given up alcohol about a year prior, and so I didn’t even have liquid courage to get me through this. I sipped a coffee and checked my teeth obsessively. I’m not a vain person, but there’s something about looking like a side character in Deliverance before you have to give a toast at your brother’s wedding that’s a little, well, unnerving. But when I got up there, I was so full of adrenaline that I forgot all about my teeth. And, if people noticed, they didn’t let on. They were too busy laughing as my sister and I told stories about growing up with a singularly daring and energetic older brother.

While removing my makeup that night, I fashioned a hideous smile in the mirror and thought of the events of the evening. Me and my twin walking the bride’s elderly dog down the aisle. Me and my older sister dancing to early 2000’s throwbacks at the reception. Getting up and telling stories that made people laugh, really laugh.

When you look in the mirror, do you like what you see?

Well, it’s complicated.

Back in Austin, I booked an emergency session with my dentist, who looked with a frown at my decimated teeth. “Obviously,” she said, “the priority here is fixing your gap.”

***

My front teeth were saved. I ditched that dentist and went to one who gave me painful x-rays, told me I had to get six fillings, and, when I said “Wow,” he shrugged and said, “That’s not that many.” I got a second opinion and found I actually had zero cavities. “Almost every time people come in for a second opinion,” this new dentist told me, “there’s nothing actually wrong. There are a lot of dishonest dentists out there.”

Indeed, I have become increasingly paranoid about the scam artistry that is American dentistry. In a brilliant article in The Atlantic called “The Truth About Dentistry,” Ferris Jabr explains how, “Common dental procedures are not always as safe, effective, or durable as we are meant to believe. As a profession, dentistry has not yet applied the same level of self-scrutiny as medicine, or embraced as sweeping an emphasis on scientific evidence.” Of the conundrum faced by patients, he laments: “The general dearth of rigorous research on dental interventions gives dentists even more leverage over their patients. Should a patient somehow muster the gumption to question an initial diagnosis and consult the scientific literature, she would probably not find much to help her. When we submit to a dentist’s examination, we are putting a great deal of trust in that dentist’s experience and intuition—and, of course, integrity.”

I, like most people reading this, have been ground down by the American healthcare system. I’ve been charged $100 for a “nicotine consult” by my physician (“Do you smoke?” Nope!”), I’ve had my insurance retroactively rescind payment for no discernible reason, I’ve been asked by an emergency room receptionist if I had secondary insurance while blood coursed down my arms.

And, yet, it’s the instances of dental malpractice that bother me more. It feels personal: the Wellesley dentist shoving a mirror in my fifteen-year-old face and asking me if I liked what I saw. It feels predatory: a surgeon putting me to sleep against my wishes so that he could hack at my jaw with abandon.

***

This morning, my friend asked me what I was writing about.

“Teeth,” I said.

“That’s random,” she replied.

But it sort of isn’t. Teeth are both personal and universal. They are a cultural bellwether— from mewing to the proliferation of veneers, they reveal our worst instincts time and again. They are also the source of one of humanity’s most common collective nightmares. My teeth have caused me more psychic aggravation and physical torment than the rest of my body put together (and I have a rare disease that makes my chin look weird sometimes, I’ll have you know!).

Whenever I feel despair about this, I try to practice gratitude instead. I think about how lucky I am to have a story to tell through my teeth. A genetic story, an ancestral story. There is something so deeply human about it. The white flash of our smiles. Those weird little bone-like pillars we all have inside our mouths that macerate food. Our teeth— we clench them tight together when we’re scared, when we’re upset. They chatter involuntarily when we are cold. Our mothers, if we’re lucky, teach us how to brush them, teach us that they are ours to take care of for the rest of our lives. In her poem “Tincture,” the late Andrea Gibson wrote: Imagine, when a human dies/ the soul misses the body… the stubbed toe, the loose tooth, the funny bone. Yes, we are lucky, I am lucky, to have these deeply corporeal experiences, these cavities and this gap that I would miss so much if they ceased to exist. This jumble of bottom teeth that I am rubbing my tongue against as I write this.

I am lucky that I have a physical reminder of who I am. That I have a story I can share with the people who look just like me.

And, no, I’m not talking about my twin sister. I’m talking about David Letterman.

I considered suggesting some spooky books for this spooky month, but that felt too easy. I recently returned from Dublin, and Irish lit has been very much on the brain for me. Thus, my October recs are two contemporary Irish novels which I found funny, moving, thought-provoking, and engaging. While they have striking differences, they also have a lot in common. Namely, they are both about…

“The Irish Lads!!!!”

1. Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh

This 2025 debut novel follows young John during the summer after his secondary school graduation. John lives on a small, claustrophobic island on the Irish West Coast. He navigates friendships, his parents’ looming divorce, a maddening situationship with his coworker, Amber, and his position on the local Gaelic football team, all while trying to figure out what he wants his future to look like.

If you are reading my Substack, it’s unlikely that you were ever a teenage boy in Ireland (never say never, though). However, we’ve all been teenagers, and I, for one, related to the deliciously flawed John more than I should probably admit. When John overreacted to a slight at a party and walked home because he was too stubborn to apologize, I cringed in recognition. When he confronted his friend for getting into a better college than him, I had to put the book down and do some deep breathing exercises.

2. Close to Home by Michael Magee

This 2023 novel mirrors Fun and Games in many ways. It’s about another liminal moment, though instead of the summer after secondary school graduation, it dives in to the year after university graduation. And instead of the West Coast of Ireland, Close to Home is set in Belfast, where The Troubles haunts the narrative like Laura Palmer. Instead of spotty, horny John, we have impoverished and traumatized Sean, who is waiting for the other shoe to drop after assaulting a posh kid at a party. And instead of Amber we have Mairéad, Sean’s childhood friend who is trying to balance her rough-and-tumble Belfast childhood with her new, hoity toity Queens University social life. Sean kicks around at dead end jobs, suffers housing instability, and explores, ever so tepidly, his unquenchable love of literature, which is about as en vogue in his Belfastian, hardscrabble circles as being BFFs with a police officer (f.k.a. “peeler.”) would be. Where Fun and Games is a story of the transition into adulthood, Close to Home is a vivid tale of intergenerational trauma at its most raw. Both are beautifully complex depictions of young men coming into their own, discovering the good in themselves against all odds.

Both of these wildly popular novels speak to a larger trend in Irish literature. In America, the unhinged girl novel is all you can find at bookstores. Meanwhile, the classic man-book-about-man-shit is decidedly out of fashion. But in Ireland and The North, the male bildungsroman is more popular than it’s been since Stephen Daedalus was having hooker-related panic attacks in Dublin. I’ll say Sláinte to that!

PS: As a bonus this month, I'm also recommending (gasp) a short story. Little Prayer by Emerson Archer just came out in The Forge. It’s not about Irish lads, but it is about a lad going through a crisis, and I think it’s right at home here… or, at least, CLOSE to home ;) It’s a moving, tense story that you don’t want to miss.