Dear Love and Laundry Readers,

Picture this: You are in a gondola, floating down an ancient canal in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. You pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs where the ghosts of condemned prisoners whisper lamentations into the night. It’s dusk, and the palaces and buildings and restaurants are lit with an amber glow.

It’s so beautiful it takes your breath away—

Or it would take your breath away—if you only looked up from your phone long enough to see it.

I’m back from a trip to Greece, Croatia and Italy, where instead of giving directions to lost tourists wandering the streets of historic Alexandria, Virginia, I became a lost tourist myself in someone else’s country. And while on vacation, I realized how much cell phones, or rather, the camera inside our ubiquitous cell phones, have changed travel for us all.

As we passed under the Bridge of Sighs, I saw a teenage girl sitting in another gondola starring down at her phone, oblivious to everything around her.

Once again demonstrating the ‘get off my lawn’ sensibility my children claim I am developing as I slide into my AARP era, I wanted to stand up in my gondola and yell, “Hey, Screenager! Do you have any idea how expensive this place is? Do you know how hard your parents had to work to bring you here? And did you know they’ll be gone some day and you’ll miss them? Pay attention to your parents! Pay attention to Venice! GET OFF YOUR PHONE!!!”

But this outburst would have embarrassed the teenage and young adult people riding in my own gondola. So I didn’t say any of these things out loud. But I thought them.

And to be fair, the teenage girl in the gondola was an extreme case. I am confident that most of my fellow tourists actually did see the beauty of Venice. But I think many of them witnessed this beauty second hand. Because they saw it through the small screen on their phone as they took pictures and recorded everything around them. Lips pursed, hands held high, Venice is the city that launched a thousand selfies.

And even though I fought hard against this impulse, I too was guilty. We all were. My husband set up a shared digital photo album for the trip and we uploaded every picture we took.

That album now has 1,067 pictures, taken by five people on a ten-day vacation. And I think this says something about the way cell phones and social media have changed the way we experience things.

Remember the olden days before smart phones? We carried a camera bag. We bought film and we took pictures. We came home, took that film to CVS and paid someone to develop those pictures. We exercised discretion when snapping a photo because we had a finite amount of film and developing that film cost money.

Then we picked those pictures up from CVS when we got home and we looked at them. The more Type A people among us went the extra mile and put those photos into albums. The rest of us “organized” these pictures by tossing them into a shoebox.

We took pictures then for the same reason we take them now. Because we don’t trust ourselves to accurately remember the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen. Or maybe we want proof that we really did touch the acropolis, that we really did walk where Aristotle walked.

Maybe photographs are just an ineffective attempt to capture something breathtaking and carry it with us always. Or maybe we take pictures because we’re smart enough to know these are the good old days. We’re wise enough to document this joyful time when everyone is together and healthy and happy, before the kids grow up and our parents pass away and we are no longer sturdy enough to trot the globe and see the wonders of the world firsthand.

But I think the unlimited ease of digital pictures has diminished our ability to fully inhabit the moments before and after these pictures are taken, to be completely present in the places that we’ve spent so much money and gone to so much trouble to visit.

Cell phone cameras and social media have made it impossible for us to see and eat and laugh and experience without also documenting the fact that we are seeing and eating and laughing and experiencing. It’s no longer enough to go somewhere. Now we feel compelled to show everyone where we went by taking pictures and then posting these pictures on social media. It’s almost like we aren’t going on vacation to absorb art and history and culture for ourselves. It’s like we’re going on vacation to exhaustively document these things so we can show everyone what we did and absorb them later.

But we don’t, do we? We might glance at the pictures in our phone from time to time, but we aren’t developing them, bringing them home, culling the bad shots from the good, labelling them, sliding them into protective plastic sheets, snapping them into an album, then sitting down in front of the fire to look at them later.

It costs nothing to snap a digital picture. And because it has no cost, it has less value. We snap it, post it and move on to the next sight or attraction. The next meal. The next city. We consume art and culture and history and places the same way we consume cheeseburgers in the McDonalds drive-through. Fast. Convenient. Easily acquired. Easily forgotten.

I’m grateful that I’m old enough to be aware of this compulsion to document everything with my cell phone. When I felt this impulse rising, I tried to fight against it.

Because I know that even without a picture, I will remember that gondola ride for the rest of my life. It’s the only gondola ride I’ve ever taken. It might be the only one I ever take. And I want to remember the smell of the water and sound of the waves lapping against the wooden boat. I want to remember it inside my mind, not inside my phone.

My children are growing up in a world where value is increasingly measured in quantity: the number of followers, the number of dollars earned or spent, the number of countries visited, the number of minutes saved using AI.

But value can be also measured using different criteria. Good conversations during dinner. Insights generated from a plaque at a museum. Anecdotes from a tour guide. Beautiful churches discovered when wandering lost through the winding streets of an ancient city.

The most valuable parts of a trip or a life can’t be counted, captured or preserved. The sound of my children laughing together. A healthy body to take me to the top of the acropolis. A thought-provoking comment from my husband about a book he’s currently reading. Pictures painted on a clay pot by a fellow storyteller 3,000 years ago.

One of my best memories from this vacation is decidedly un-beautiful. We were sitting jet-lagged at Heathrow at the end of a five-hour layover with unkempt hair and wrinkled clothing. We looked like influencers hired by the Just Go To Florida Instead and Avoid All International Flights Association.

As we sat there bleary-eyed, drinking a strange British version of Starbucks coffee, one of those little vehicles they use to transport people around the airport rolled by. The jet-jagged people inside had glassy eyes and frozen expressions, kind of like little Fisher Price people with plastic hair and painted on smiles. But something about their blank faces and the vehicle’s silly beeping sound struck us all as hilarious and I started laughing. Once I started I couldn’t stop. I laughed until I cried. My kids did, too. My husband, the stoic Norwegian, actually smiled.

That’s the memory I’ll cherish from this trip. No picture necessary.

I leave you today with one of the 1,067 photos we did take, this one from the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

And this is a picture I took outside our hotel. So much beauty, everywhere.

Now all that beauty and wonder is swept away, replaced with practicality and logistics as we move children into dorms in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Go, Golden Eagles!) and South Bend, Indianna (Go, Fighting Irish!) and settle our sadly neglected youngest child into her sophomore year of high school between trips to Target (Go, Cardinals!).

Once that’s done I’ll settle into the second round of edits on my third book, which releases next summer. And I’m also sifting through ideas for a fourth book. I feel like I’m enveloped by a cloud of butterflies as different ideas land on my shoulder, whisper in my ear and flutter off again. I’ll choose one and attempt to capture it for you on paper, even though the very best things can never be captured at all.

Much love,

Christine

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“It instantly had me hooked - I started reading the book but couldn’t put it down so quickly switched to the audio book so I could keep listening while I went about my day. It was a deeply entertaining story that made me laugh out loud while filling my heart at the same time.”

Happy Reviewer

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“This fast and funny page turner is so chock full of wisdom, twists and thrills it’s a joy ride - and a heartwarming tale about the power of family, friendship and community, just wonderful!”

Happy Reviewer

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“A very clever & exciting read.”

Happy Reader

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Dear Love and Laundry Readers,

I’ve been doing a lot of TV interviews lately to promote Behind White Picket Fences. And yesterday I made the mistake of watching some of these TV interviews.

Bad idea.

The last time I was on TV regularly, I was in my twenties and thirties working as a reporter, anchor and press secretary. I wasn’t married and I had no children

In other words, I had no wrinkles.

Back then, I wasn’t too worried about how I looked on TV, as long as my industrial strength bottle of Aqua Net kept my hair in place. But now, many years later, someone very different stares back at me through the screen when I do TV interviews, and once again I think about the proverbial old grey mare my dad used to sing about.

Which brings me to the latest dilemma of the modern age. Should we age gracefully, accepting the inevitable ravages of time? Or should we go into our AARP era kicking and screaming, attempting to hide our true age behind Botox, fillers, Ozempic, false eyelashes, and/or surgery?

Or to rephrase the question your mother asked when you were 15 years old: If everyone else jumped in a lake, would you do it too?

And the answer as a grown woman is...I don’t know? Maybe?

In the past, women handled the onset of age with a certain grudging dignity because we didn’t have a practical alternative. Movie stars got facelifts, and everyone else just got a bottle of Oil of Olay and accepted the passage of time.

But now we can actually do something about our aging faces and bodies, in addition to, or perhaps in place of, plastic surgery. These options can be expensive, invasive, painful, time consuming and have completely unknown long time side effects, but they are effective if you want to look younger.

I have not done any of these things. Yet. But I miss the way I used to look. I feel like I shouldn’t, and I wish I didn’t, but I do.

I recently read a review in the Atlantic Monthly for a book called Ugly, where the author states the raw facts about physical beauty. Attractive people make more money, are presumed to be smarter, and seem to have happier marriages, more friends, more professional success, etc. etc. etc.

So if you started your life as a moderately attractive person with all the benefits that go with it, wouldn’t you want to hang onto those benefits as long as possible? And if you weren’t born beautiful in the first place, wouldn’t you do everything your power to acquire beauty through any methods available to you?

When I was a teenager and very much wanted to be beautiful, my aunt told me that I was “pretty enough for all practical purposes.” I found comfort in that. I still do, except that I have reached a point where I no longer believe it’s necessarily true. I may have once been pretty enough for all practical purposes. But now? Well, now I look like an older woman.

Like if I robbed a bank and the teller were describing me to the police, she’d say, “The assailant was an older woman wearing sensible shoes and a cardigan from Talbots with a tissue tucked into the sleeve. She needed reading glasses to count all the money and at first she couldn’t remember where she put her handgun and then she realized she was holding it right there in her hand.”

Which brings us to the moral dilemma at the heart of this post. Should we spend time and money making ourselves look like something we are not? (i.e. young). Or do we gratefully accept the inevitable ravages of time?

And why do I even consider this a moral dilemma? Botox is completely legal. No one is harmed when someone chooses to get plastic surgery. Isn’t this just another choice, like coloring your hair or wearing lipstick?

I have lots of friends who use Botox. They look fantastic and they have not started running Ponzi schemes or cheating on their taxes. (As far as I know). They are still morally upstanding citizens and lovely people.

So if this is a morally sound decision and it makes you look decades younger, why am I not injecting botulinum toxin into my facial muscles, too?

Well, first, I’m a chicken. I have a whole bunch of weird auto-immune issues like ulcerative colitis and Celiac’s disease. I’m allergic to penicillin. Sometimes my body breaks into hives, just for fun.

So I’m afraid that if I start injecting weird things into my body, my entire immune system will leap up and start screaming AWOOGA AWOOGA and I will spontaneously combust into some kind of terrible hive-rash of anaphylactic doom.

The same is true of Ozempic. My digestive system is like an orchid. If I so much as ingest the wrong kind of almond the whole thing goes haywire with terrible consequences. So instead I just keep buying larger pants and trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid buttercream frosting.

In the end, this forces me to face the following question: am I a down-to-earth person content to age naturally because I am secure and comfortable in my own skin?

Or am I a somewhat resentful person who frames this as a moral issue because I would love to do all the things everyone else is doing and look ten years younger but can’t because I have a weird, messed up autoimmune system?

Sadly, it’s reason number two.

And to be honest, there’s actually a third reason, too.

I’m just too tired to care.

I had a good run. I was pretty cute in the 80’s and 90’s and the early 2000’s before I had kids. People flirted with me at parties and on airplanes. It was fun. I met my husband and got married.

And now I have someone to grow old with. Except he doesn’t look old to me. He looks exactly the way he looked the day I met him. And I very much hope he has the same form of delusional myopia when he looks at me.

My oldest friends look the same way too, whether they are Botox-ing or not Botox-ing. I see them today as I saw them in the past. I’ve known them for so long and love them so much that my eyes can only see who they actually are on the inside, instead of how they really look on the outside.

And that’s the best part about getting old. We don’t do it alone. If we’re lucky, we do it with the people who knew us when we were young.

We grow old simultaneously and complain about colonoscopies and creaking joints and reading glasses scattered all over the house and raising teenagers and helping aging parents as we shake our (grey or aggressively highlighted) heads and watch an increasingly incomprehensible world change around us.

So I will not do Botox or have plastic surgery. I will not even attempt to wear false eye lashes. I’ve settled on a middle ground where I color my hair, wear lipstick and enthusiastically use the Zoom filter that makes everything a little softer.

Maybe that’s the real definition of middle age. Too tired to care a whole lot but enough energy to still care just a little.And if so, that’s a pretty comfortable place to be, even with a wrinkled forehead. Or a furrowed brow. Or a neck like Nora Ephron’s.

I leave you today with an (unfiltered) picture from a trip my daughter and I took to New York City. I can’t carry a tune, but my daughter is a fantastic singer who loves musicals, so we saw Hamilton, Maybe Happy Ending and The Outsiders and loved them all. Each one felt like a great book, with fascinating characters thrust into a fantastic story. Plus, the Battle of Yorktown as a dance-fight!!!

And speaking of fantastic stories, I’m giving away copies of my friend Aggie Blum Thompson’s excellent new book, The Neighbors Are Watching AND signed copies of Behind White Picket Fences. Just hit reply to this email and say something like “Yes, please!” or leave a comment on Substack. I’ll toss your names into a hat, pick two lucky winners and reach out to get your address.

In the meantime, best wishes for a July spent reading a book beside a peaceful body of water. I will be preparing for an upcoming Mediterranean cruise. I am packing sunscreen. And a hat. Because you know, wrinkles.

All my love,

Christine

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“It instantly had me hooked - I started reading the book but couldn’t put it down so quickly switched to the audio book so I could keep listening while I went about my day. It was a deeply entertaining story that made me laugh out loud while filling my heart at the same time.”

Happy Reviewer

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“This fast and funny page turner is so chock full of wisdom, twists and thrills it’s a joy ride - and a heartwarming tale about the power of family, friendship and community, just wonderful!”

Happy Reviewer

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“A very clever & exciting read.”

Happy Reader

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Dear Love and Laundry Readers,

Like everyone else on the planet, I’m mesmerized by the beautiful stories of global mutual admiration coming out of the World Cup. I love the Scots crowning all the statues with orange construction cones in Boston and the Norwegians rowing in the center of Times Square.

My old college roommate recently returned from the World Cup games in Kansas City, where everyone welcomed players and fans with open arms. She texted us pictures and said, “Everyone is so happy and super friendly! This is how the world SHOULD be.”

I don’t fully understand why soccer has transformed everyone on the planet into a nicer person, but I do have a theory, so here goes:

I think people have always been joyful, curious, generous, and welcoming. But I think we’ve forgotten this as we increasingly observe humanity through the filter of an angry algorithm on our phones rather than in person and in real life.

So when thousands of people leave their homes, jump on an airplane and go explore the world in person, they discover not just free re-fills at an American McDonalds, but a whole continent full of good and decent people who are also curious about them and where they come from.

I see this festival of World Cup brotherly love as reason number 899,383,939 to get off our phones.

As many of you know, I have a love-hate relationship with my phone. I try to take a break from it on Sundays, but that can make Monday even harder when I’m presented with all the messages and alerts and text messages I’ve missed.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time on social media lately as I work to promote Behind White Picket Fences. Some of this is enjoyable. But I also find that if I spend too much time scrolling, I start to develop a warped view of myself and everyone else. Because on social media, everyone is feeling “proud” or “happy” or “excited.”

And I sometimes wonder what social media would be like if we posted things like:

Feeling awkward as I stand alone at a party where I don’t know anyone.

Feeling resentful as I clean the mudroom where my children have dumped an entire school year’s worth of lunch boxes, sports equipment, and broken mechanical pencils. Feeling ancient as my joints creak each morning when I get out of bed.

So which is worse? Posts where everyone pretends to be happy all the time about all the wonderful things in their perfect lives? Or posts where everyone admits to questioning the life choices that led to being stuck in traffic on the 14th Street Bridge on a rainy Monday morning?

I don’t know the answer to that question. I just know that we are happiest when we feel connected to other people. And posts where everything looks perfect invite us to compare our insides to everyone else’s curated outsides.

And comparison is the opposite of connection.

Success is noisy. Landing on the New York Times bestseller list, getting a new job, graduating from high school or college, winning an election, getting married, having a baby.

Failure is quiet. Failure feels shameful in a way we can’t define.

We don’t post when we get fired or passed over for promotion, or don’t get into college, or break up or get divorced, even though these things happen to perfectly kind and successful people all the time.

But maybe we should post about these things. It’s so much easier to connect over a shared hardship than it is to compare ourselves to a success we might never enjoy.

Which brings us back to the World Cup. We find both victory and failure here, but the failure is witnessed and shared by thousands of people, together in the stands, groaning in unison over missed goals and lost opportunities. There’s no silence here, no shame, just shared grief.

The Scots marched to Fenway Park while playing bagpipes and cheered for the Boston Red Socks, their newly adopted home team. When Boston lost to the Texas Rangers 6 to 4, the Scots mourned with the baseball fans of Boston, sharing their defeat. The Scots basically said, ‘we’re staying in your city, you’ve made us welcome, so your losses will be become our losses, too.’

And because the people of Boston welcomed the Scots with open arms, Boston shared in Scotland’s victory on the soccer pitch.

Shared victory. Shared defeat. Connection, not comparison.

In our house, we cheer for the Norwegians when the Americans aren’t playing. We still have warm memories of our distant Norwegian cousins welcoming us to Norway with open arms when we visited a few years ago.

They told us the story of how our ancestors left the farm in Norway to seek a new life in the Dakota Territories because they were literally starving. Our ancestors had resorted to eating tree bark, and our Norwegian cousins showed us the tree the old people had warned them never to cut down in case the hard times came again.

A shared grief.

And now, four or five generations later, Norway is one of the wealthiest countries in the world (thanks to natural gas deposits) and we can visit each other and discuss our shared past over a wonderful lunch at a table filled with food.

A shared victory.

I don’t know much about soccer, so I’ll be happy no matter who wins to World Cup. There’s no grief for me, only joy. And maybe that’s the key to life. Not keeping score and not caring too much about the outcome, since we can’t control it anyway. Maybe the point of the whole exercise is to openly share both grief and joy wherever we find them and with everyone around us, even if, or perhaps especially if, they’re wearing a kilt. Or a Viking helmet.

I hope your World Cup Summer of Joy is filled with quiet time in a lawn chair, or on a boat, or at a beach. I hope you’re enjoying Behind White Picket Fences and if so, I hope you leave a rating or a review so the mean girl in the algorithm cafeteria shows the book to other readers.

I leave you today with a picture from something joyful. Renee Gage, the photographer who took my book jacket pictures for Friends with Secrets hosted a book party to celebrate the launch of Behind White Picket Fences.

It was a beautiful night with my family and wonderful friends. We even had gluten free tiramisu. It was pretty great.

Now I’m back at my desk, sifting through all the crazy ideas inside my head, searching for the next book. Thanks for sharing the joy, and perhaps more importantly, thanks for sharing the journey.

Yours till next month,

Christine

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I promise we will return to our regularly scheduled Love and Laundry programming later this month. But until then please allow me to celebrate today’s release of Behind White Picket Fences with a big thank you.

Thank you for buying and reading my first book, which made this second book possible.

Thank you for inviting me into your book clubs and into your homes both in person and by Zoom.

Thank you for the ratings or reviews that helped other readers find my books.

Thank you for signing up for this newsletter. So many of you started as strangers and have now become friends. And thank you to those who started as friends and gave me the encouragement to keep going when I was ready to give up.

As Behind White Picket Fences makes it’s way into the world, I will admit to being nervous about what the future holds for authors, and also for billions of other people, because of artificial intelligence.

AI is capable of writing an entire novel. It’s a bad novel, but it’s still a novel. And there are greedy “writers” out there who have no compunction about flooding the world with AI generated slop in an effort to make a buck. And the faster they “write,” the more money they earn.

In contrast, it takes me a full year to write a book. My publisher takes another year to exhaustively edit and format that book, design the cover, send it out for blurbs and early reviews, market the book and launch it into the world.

Some days I feel like the guy who makes wagon wheels or top hats. I feel like a craftsman who spent a long time learning a trade, and now someone has invented a machine that renders my craft obsolete. In fact, sometimes I fear that my writer friends and I are the last generation of authors.

And then I get an email from one of you. And I realize that as long as there are readers who love good books there will be a job for those of us who love the hard work of writing them. I cling to this hope as the world around me becomes a little more unrecognizable with each passing day.

In light of all this impending change, I’m trying to support the things I love so they don’t disappear.

Two of the three movie theatres near my home have now closed and I’m determined to help keep the last one open by going to movies in person this summer and buying a giant tub of buttered popcorn while I’m there.

There’s a tiny specialty bakery in Falls Church, Virginia dedicated to gluten free pastries, cakes and pies. I would weep (and be much skinnier) if they closed, so I get on the Beltway and trek out there for gluten free apple tarts whenever I can.

And after 29 years as a faithful reader, I finally cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post because it is now a skinny, typo-riddled shadow of its former self. But then I felt guilty and re-subscribed (at a lower price!) because I want the reporters who are still doing good work to have a paycheck. I doubt my lone subscription will save the Post, but I sleep better at night knowing I’m still doing what I can to support credible news gathering. Plus I missed the advice column.

So thank you for being the kind of people who value books written with painstaking care by a slow craftsman of average intelligence with a very human heart.

Thank you finding value in good writing, relatable characters, humor and a well-crafted plot. Thank you for supporting me on this long and crazy writing journey. Two books in, I still can’t believe this is my job.

Thank you for reading so I can be a writer.

All my love,

Christine

Housekeeping Items

*If you pre-ordered Behind White Picket Fences, THANK YOU!!!! It should arrive today.

*If you’d like to give a signed copy of Behind White Picket Fences as a gift, just hit reply and give me your address and the name of your recipient. I’ll send you a signed bookplate to insert on the title page, plus some fun bookish swag to include with your gift.

*Book club meetings: I am SO EXCITED to do book club meetings again! If your book club or library group would like to read and discuss Behind White Picket Fences, shoot me an email and we will get it on the schedule, either in person or by Zoom.

*If you are a social media kind of person, I’d love to see your pictures of Behind White Picket Fences “in the wild” as it makes a new home on your kitchen table, at the beach, on your nightstand, or wherever you read. Or you can hit reply and email me :-) I like to imagine it with soggy pages sitting on a beach chair as you relax on vacation :-)

I leave you today with a Gunderson family portrait from the opening night of The Mandalorian. My husband, (who believes Star Trek is infinitely superior and thinks there should be actual science in science fiction) is behind the camera taking the picture.

Till later this month!

Christine

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As you all know, it took me a very long time to become a published author, and when that miracle finally happened, one of the most satisfying moments in the entire process involved the audio book.

The audio book producer sent me audition clips from three audiobook narrators in an email. Then I pressed “play,” and heard these incredibly talented voice actors read words that I had written. It made me cry.

We repeated this process a few months ago when I once again received audio book audition clips from three different voice actors for Behind White Picket Fences. Choosing an audio book narrator is a little bit like meeting your spouse. When you find the right one, you just know. And the moment I heard Emily Norman’s voice, I knew she was the right narrator for Behind White Picket Fences.

After the contract was signed and everything was official and recorded, I reached out to ask if I could introduce her to you all with an interview for Notes on Love and Laundry. This is the incredibly kind email I received in reply.

“I actually read Friends with Secrets last year and fell in love with your writing. I remember immediately looking to see what else you had written. So, narrating Behind White Picket Fences was an absolute joy for me!”

So, without further ado, please meet Emily Norman, the incredibly talented voice actor who is narrating the audio book version of Behind White Picket Fences.

Christine: How long does it take you to narrate an audio book?

Emily: I read the book all the way through before I start narrating to get to know the characters and the story. When I’m recording, it takes me 2 hours to get 1 finished hour of audio. Because it needs to be word perfect with no background noise (my stomach is often the culprit), there is a lot of stopping and starting!

Christine: Do you have a favorite genre or type of project?

Emily: If the book makes me laugh or cry, count me in! I am all about heartwarming stories and relatable characters.

Christine: What’s the hardest thing about narrating an audio book?

Emily: Because it’s a marathon, it takes a lot of focus and emotional and mental energy. I want the book to come to life for the listener, so I need to be dialed in!

Christine: What other forms of creativity do you enjoy?

Emily: Acting has always been my happy place. I’ve done a lot of theater and musical theater, but narrating audiobooks has been my favorite type of acting. I’m also a trained opera singer and used to be a professional calligrapher.

Christine: Do you really get to work from home in your pajamas?

Emily: As long as they don’t crinkle!

I became hooked on audio books back in the olden days when they were cassette tapes you could check out from the library and play on a tape recorder or a boom box or a Walkman. Remember those days?

I once listened to I, Claudius by Robert Graves on an interminable drive from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to Grand Forks, North Dakota, an entirely straight, four hour shot northward on I-29. I still think of ancient Rome whenever I drive that particular stretch of prairie.

These days I actually listen to more books than I read, because I spend a lot of time in the car. I also listen to books whenever I’m doing anything mundane, like walking the dog or unloading the dishwasher or making dinner.

Some people claim that listening to a book does not count as reading a book, and I’m curious to know what you guys think. Do you listen to audio books or do you prefer a physical book? Or do you read on a Kindle? My husband switched over to Kindle years ago, and I have a Kindle, but I don’t love it. I still prefer to either listen or read a physical book.

In my fantasies, readers decide they just can’t choose, and they purchase all three forms of Behind White Picket Fences. Print! Kindle! Audio! But I will be extremely grateful to anyone who buys it in even just one format :-)

So, that’s what happening this month here at the Gunderson Ranch. I have to admit, I’m a little stressed right now. I’m doing podcast interviews to promote Behind White Picket Fences, waking up in the middle of the night twitching when I realize that I have a plot hole in Book #3 that needs to be fixed before I turn it in I turn it in to my editor on June 15th.

Plus I’m trying to ascertain as graduation day approaches if my son has dress shoes, and if so, where are they? And if they do exist and he can actually find them, do they still fit? But I think I should be given an enormous amount of credit for asking these questions now rather than waiting until the morning of graduation.

So. A lot going on, and (most) of it good, which I keep reminding myself when I veer into headless chicken mode. I leave you today with one of those good things.

As many of you know, I fantasize about being a gardener, cavorting among the bees in my suburban back yard in a large hat with a basket made from willow branches, sort of like Scarlett O’Hara with a garden trowel and a can of Miracle Grow. But in reality, I’m about as good at gardening as I am at algebra, which is really saying something.

However, this spring the peonies I planted two years ago finally bloomed, and they are magnificent.

Which proves that sometimes if we’re lucky, hope triumphs over skill.

Wishing you a wonderful May filled with both peonies and hope.

Much love,

Christine

This is both a shameless plea and a not very subtle reminder to please, please order yourself, and all your friends, relatives, and neighbors a copy of Behind White Picket Fences, which you can do by clicking HERE!

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Maybe you’ve experienced this. You have your heart set on this one really specific thing. You want it desperately. You would literally cut off your right arm if you could only have this one thing.

And then you actually get it.

You are blissfully happy. You are the luckiest person in the world. You are blessed. You are joyful. You are content.

For awhile.

And then a few weeks, or months or years later, this thing you wanted so desperately isn’t quite enough. You want...something more.

For example, maybe you want—no, you need—a bigger house with a better yard and more bedrooms for the kids. So you move. And for a while it’s great. But it turns out those kitchen cabinets in your new house are actually quite old. Wouldn’t it be better to have the kind of drawers that pull out? And an island? And double wall ovens?

So you renovate the kitchen. And it’s fantastic. Nothing falls on your head when you reach into the new pantry for a can of soup. You are happy. You are content.

But now the rest of the house looks shabby compared to your beautiful new kitchen. That old bathtub-shower combo is really irksome. You want one of those walk-in showers with a glass door. Obviously you need to renovate the bathroom, too.

But after you renovate the bathroom you realize you can’t sit on your deck in the morning after it rains and enjoy a cup of coffee because the furniture is wet. Clearly, you need a screened-in porch, plus some trees and landscaping. And maybe a pool would be nice too, as long as you’re doing the landscaping.

And so it goes, forever and ever until we run out of money, die, or become the kind of spiritual, enlightened people who never watch HGTV or look at houses on Pinterest.

I call it Creeping Discontent and it can strike suddenly, like spring allergies. That’s what happened to me recently.

I was just going about my business, happy to be a finally be a published author. When Friends with Secrets came out, I thought I’d never want anything ever again. I was joyful. I was grateful, deep in my soul. I was content.

Best of all, having a book in the world brought me to new events and new places like book festivals, writing conferences, and panel discussions. It brought me wonderful new writing friends.

Then I started looking around. And I noticed that other people have things that I don’t have.

Like film agents. European book tours. Novels sold at auction in bidding wars. Deals with Hollywood studios to have their books adapted for film and television.

I should point out here that Creeping Discontent is not the same as jealousy. I am not jealous of skinny people who exercise all the time and deny themselves dessert, for example, because they work really hard at being skinny (something I am clearly unwilling to do).

So I can honestly say that I am happy for the friends who have the things I don’t have because they worked really hard for a very long time to get these things. And they are also incredibly talented. So Creeping Discontent it isn’t jealousy, or even envy.

It’s more like being happy to have a vanilla ice cream cone because you thought ice cream only came in vanilla, but you now realize that mint-chocolate chip, strawberry, and fudge ripple are also options.

And now you really want fudge ripple, too.

Creeping Discontent is wanting more than you already have instead of resting in gratitude with the things you’ve been given.

If handled responsibly, this can be good. Scientists think Creeping Discontent might be the human trait that caused homo sapiens to leave the savannah, cross the land bridge and populate the earth.

Instead of being happy sleeping on the ground next to a perfectly good watering hole and eating berries, someone realized that those people over there had caves and loin cloths, plus fire. And who doesn’t want fire? So they figured out how to get it.

Creeping Discontent can spur us to greater heights, make us work harder. Some people might say it’s good to want more.

But I’d rather learn how to be happy with enough. Because I actually have enough. More than enough. I think most of us do. And I think the internet and social media are working overtime every single day to make us forget this.

Many years ago at a romance writer’s luncheon, I sat next to a legendary writer named Beverly Jenkins. And she told me something I’ve never forgotten. She said, “No one is entitled to someone else’s blessings.”

I think about that a lot.

When my head is screwed on straight, I recognize that I always get the blessings I need at the moment I most need them. I believe a loving creator is running the show, and this benevolent power apportions out blessings according to our situation. And right now, a TV deal is a blessing with someone else’s name on the tag. It’s not meant for me right now.

Maybe it will be later. Maybe it won’t. Because if I don’t get a particular blessing, it’s because I don’t need it. And maybe that’s because I got something else instead, like an unremarkable mammogram or healthy kids or a spouse who makes me laugh. And maybe there’s a wonderful blessing in my future, like a seven-studio bidding war for my next book and a winning lottery ticket. Who knows?

Sometimes it seems like the blessings aren’t ladled out evenly. Some people seem to get second or even third helpings in the blessing cafeteria, plus free dessert and an extra glass of milk, like movie stars who are beautiful and rich and successful and have a loving spouse and a swimming pool and who are always described by an anonymous friend in People Magazine as being “in a really good place right now, emotionally and spiritually.”

Why can’t the rest of us have that, too?

I don’t know. In my case, I suspect it’s because I couldn’t handle all that with anything resembling humility. I’d walk around in an I Just Won An Oscar t-shirt and hit innocent bystanders in the eye with my luxuriant hair, which I would fling nonchalantly over my shoulder while buying Gucci purses and cloning my dog.

I think my benevolent creator knows it’s best for me (and for the world at large) if I do not have some of these things because I couldn’t handle them. Beauty and fabulous riches would make me a worse person.

It’s kind of like the magnet my mother had on our fridge when I was growing up. It said, “Some luck lies in not getting what we want, but in getting what have, which is what we would have wanted in the first place, had we known.”

That pretty much sums it up. I’m lucky to have what I have, which is everything I could possibly need. Some days I’m smart enough to know this.

And sometimes I forget. Which is why I am writing about this. Because writing helps me remember the important things when I spend too much time on the internet and too much time reading the news, things like gratitude for this newsletter and the kind people who read it, my health and my family, and my really cute dog. Plus a book coming out in June and another next year, which is the gravy on top of the mashed potatoes of a good life.

And perhaps someday I will peruse multiple film and tv offers while I sit beside my swimming pool being skinny with luxuriant hair and a cloned dog.

Until then however, I’m finishing up Book #3, doing podcasts interviews and other promotional things to prepare for the launch of Behind White Picket Fences on June 9, hiding Easter eggs in the backyard for “kids” who are now in high school and college, but who still love chocolate, finishing up a wonderful trip to California to see my in-laws, and getting ready for the Women’s Fiction Writer’s conference here in Alexandria at the end of April.

A good, full life, even without a Netflix-Paramount bidding war. May you spend the month of April being happy with your own good life as the flowers bloom and spring returns.

Much love,

Christine

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Don’t forget to preorder your copy of Behind White Picket Fences!

You can check it out HERE.

Happy New Year Love and Laundry Readers!

I have big news to share today! About an hour ago, People previewed the cover for my next book!

Yes, that’s right. People. It’s almost like I’m hanging out in a very hip and intimidating nightclub with Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Aniston, and Kate Middleton. As one does. Because we have so much in common, obviously.

Maybe they’ll ask about my super cool winter boots and I’ll tell them I’m wearing a designer named Kirkland from my favorite clothier, the House of Costco.

Of course, it’s actually just my book cover hanging out at People, and not me at all, but still. I’m VERY excited about this. And best of all, I can finally share all the details!!!

Please cue the orchestra inside your head and play the theme music to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Raise the velvet curtain!!! Here it comes!!! Da Da Da——-DA DUM!!!!

It’s called Behind White Picket Fences.

It comes out on June 9th.

The pre-order link is now live on Amazon, and you can actually pre-order it right now.

Check it out

Isn’t it glorious? I love this cover SO MUCH and I’m so honored by this shout out today.

But what, you may ask, is this book actually about?

Well.

Kiersten Cleaver feels like she’s flunking Motherhood 101. Exhausted by travel sports, homework, and her son’s dyslexia, she joins forces with her neighbors, Rosamond and Piper, to drop out of the scholastic rat race and all activities for one year.

Together, they start the Beaverbrook Academy for Inquiring Minds in Kiersten’s kitchen, embarking on a journey back to the idyllic life they experienced as children, when phones were attached to the wall and kids played outside until the streetlights came on at dusk.

But the women quickly realize fractions aren’t their only problem. A sixty-year-old diary discovered in Kiersten’s basement raises unsettling questions about their neighborhood, their safety and the seemingly simpler past.

Their picture-perfect suburb disguises deadly secrets—and someone wants to keep them hidden. As unsettling events rattle their fragile utopia, Kiersten, Rosamund, and Piper face an impossible choice. And if they expose the truth, they put everything at risk: their children, their friendship, and their newfound community.

You’ll spot some of your friends from Friends with Secrets inside these pages. Once again, the story is set on the shores of the Potomac River in the Washinton DC suburbs, and once again, moms are the heroes of the story. Because as we all know, moms are the heroes of every story.

I think you’ll love it.

And that part—the wanting you to love it part—that was actually the hardest thing about writing this book.

When I wrote Friends with Secrets I’d been rejected so many times that I wasn’t really worried about what people might think of my book if it ever got published. Real readers seemed more like an impossible dream than an imminent reality. So I just wrote the book I wanted to read and hoped for the best.

And then Friends with Secrets became an Amazon bestseller and I signed a contract for two more books, and suddenly I felt the weight of expectations.

I thought about the incredibly kind emails I received from readers, from many of you in fact, strangers I now consider friends, and I thought about how I wanted you to enjoy this next book as much as you enjoyed Friends with Secrets. I thought about how I wanted this new book to sell as many copies as my last book so my publisher will keep giving me contracts to write more books.

And I thought about how awful it would be if I disappointed you or my publisher or myself. And when I thought about that, about expectations and the potential for disappointing people, it became really hard to write.

Writers call it the Curse of the Sophomore Novel. The second book under contract is often the hardest book any author will write, no matter how many unpublished novels we’ve written before. Because with the second book, we must learn how to be creative on a schedule with a looming deadline while carrying a fifty-pound pack of expectations.

For about two months, I was kind of paralyzed. I couldn’t write anything that seemed good enough.

And then a friend reminded me that expectations are resentments waiting to happen.

Expectations almost always set us up for failure. We can expect a nice Christmas, and then the whole family gets the stomach flu. We can expect a relaxing vacation at a beautiful resort and then our flights are cancelled and we end up sleeping on the floor at the airport instead.

We saddle the people we love with expectations when we want them to love the things that we love, instead of just allowing them to be who they are.

I’ve done this to my husband and children so many times. If only they’d just try Jane Austen or the Great British Baking Show or my Nespresso coffee machine, I know they’d love these things, because I love them.

My husband does this when he tries to convince me to stop using my paper planner and add all my activities to the electronic family calendar instead. That’s right. Electronic calendars for a luddite who is utterly mystified by both Instagram and the airplane mode function on my phone. (By the way, what exactly is airplane mode? Why do we have it? Will I crash the plane if I leave it off? And if regular cell phone mode is so dangerous, why are we all carrying it around in our pocket?)

My teenage sons do it when they tell me to take the short cut, even though it forces me to risk my life making a complicated left hand turn across two lanes of traffic in order to save a whole three minutes on the drive home.

And I do it to myself every January when I make the same insane resolutions, when I expect this year to be different.

Or worse yet, when I expect that this year I’ll somehow be different, that I will magically transform into the kind of person who exercises, loses weight, likes vegetables, gets organized, stops swearing, and remembers to bring those environmentally-friendly, re-useable shopping bags into the grocery store instead of just leaving them in the trunk, even though I have never, ever in all my years been this type of person.

I once worked in a newsroom with a man who sincerely believed that if you expect nothing, you’ll never be disappointed. He smoked a lot, and wore a trenchcoat, and thought that every elected official he interviewed was embezzling money and doing nefarious things. He was wrong about (most) of that, but I think he was right about expectations.

Freedom lies in letting go of other people’s expectations for us, and of our expectations for other people. And maybe most importantly, freedom lies in letting go of the completely unrealistic expectations we so often have for ourselves as women, as mothers, as workers, as children, as siblings, as friends, and as humans.

And that’s what I had to do in order to write this second book. I had to chuck all my expectations and shift my thinking.

I started thinking about my novel the way I think about this newsletter. Rather than worrying about disappointing people, I tried to think about giving people something instead.

Behind White Picket Fences began to feel like a present I was making for a friend, a homemade gift filled with all the things people said they liked about the first book. Humor. Suspense. Friendship. Relatable characters who feel like real people.

And as I wrote, I started to love my new book as much as I loved my old one. When I finished writing it, I printed the whole thing out. I sat down in a chair and started reading and realized that even though I knew exactly what was going to happen next (because I wrote it) I still wanted to keep turning the pages to find out what happened next. And that’s when I knew everything would be okay.

Thinking about the book as a present helped so much. Because as any mom will tell you, it’s hard to do something nice for yourself, but it’s easy to do something nice for the people you care about.

Thank you for being the people I care about. I hope you love the book I made for you with the construction paper and glitter glue of my imagination.

I also hope your most important resolutions are still alive and well as we push onward into 2026. This year I’ve decided to handle mid-January by just pretending I never made resolutions in the first place.

The notable exception is my resolution to eat more dark chocolate. I’m nailing this one.

And because dark chocolate is good for us, perhaps 2026 will deliver a rock-solid scientific study on the heretofore undiscovered positive health outcomes of buttercream frosting, lemon meringue pie, and Nutella.

We can always hope. It’s 2026 after all. We have AI chat bots, self-driving cars and robot- taxis. Anything is possible—and for this reason, the future is perhaps best regarded from a comfortable chair with a good book, a cup of tea, and very low expectations.

All my love,

Christine

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Hello Love and Laundry Readers,

I live in a house with three Christmas trees.

Two of these trees are beautiful, festive and normal. “Regular normal,” as my kids used to say.

One of them is not.

Over the years, I’ve tried to emulate the Christmas trees I see in the Ballard Designs and Front Gate catalogs. I stuff the branches with fun things I find at Michaels, like fake birds and fake poinsettias and pics and spikes and spears and beads and glass ornaments from HomeGoods.

By the time I’m done, these first and second Christmas trees look pretty good. They bear at least a passing resemblance to the professionally decorated trees I see in fancy hotel lobbies or on Pinterest.

However, our Third Christmas Tree is another story.

This tree is not normal or even regular normal. For engineering reasons no one fully understands, it lists to one side, like an ocean liner with a crack in the hull. And there’s a dark patch where the lights no longer light-up. I compensate by adding extra lights, which then creates a sort of weird and uneven Glob of Illumination at the bottom.

And then we have the ornaments.

Most of the decorations on this tree were crafted by my children using pasta, Elmer’s Glue and their bare hands. You probably have ornaments like this on your own tree.

Years of Advent-related craft projects in Catholic school have given us innumerable nativity scenes created from macaroni and/or popsicle sticks with Baby Jesus represented by a cotton ball. We also have preschool ornaments reflecting our years in the prestigious Hedgehog and Bumblebee rooms.

This Third Christmas Tree also wears all the kitschy ornaments we buy in low-rent tourist traps while on vacation. A plastic statue of Liberty from a trip to New York. A garish sunset from our trip to the British Virgin Islands last summer.

If this were a Hallmark Christmas special, I’d say that because these ornaments are handcrafted with love, our Third Christmas Tree is the most beautiful tree in our house.

But this just isn’t true. Our Third Tree is really and truly tacky.

This tree is also a billboard for our many low-brow passions, from Star Wars to the Washington Commanders to lefse, a Norwegian-style tortilla my mother imports from Minnesota in her suitcase each year.

Our Third Tree is kind of like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, if the Charlie Brown tree were artificial, crooked, and decked out in Mandalorian themed décor. Meanwhile, the First Tree in the family room with the fake turtle doves from Michaels looks beautiful.

And I think this says something about the world we live in right now.

My beautiful First and Second Christmas Trees are sort of like social media. Nice to look at but lacking in heart. Lacking in history. It’s not legit, as my kids like to say.

These beautiful trees hold no memories. They show no progress. But when I look at a decidedly inelegant ornament made from pipe cleaners and pasta, I see the passage of time.

My macaroni painters have become kind, interesting, funny people. These highly imperfect ornaments demonstrate how my kids have grown. The tacky tourist bulbs remind me where we’ve been and what we’ve done.

A few months ago, I got tired of all the perfect images on Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook. Every time I scrolled through social media, I felt sort of sticky and unsatisfied, like I’d just eaten a whole spool of cotton candy. So I quit. I stopped scrolling and I stopped posting.

After about a month offline, I found myself noticing real things. Like the perfect circle of sky framed by the tree branches in my back yard. The way a huge flock of little birds will swoop and dive like a living cloud before landing on the grass. The way the leaves flutter like confetti as they fall from the trees. Fox prints through the snow in my back yard.

These real things aren’t perfect. I’m terrified that fox is going to run off with my tiny little dog. But being away from social media makes it easier to muster gratitude for the real life I have, instead of the perfect life I don’t.

My Third Tree reminds me that real life is paint and macaroni, patched together to create something imperfect with a history behind it and a story ahead, filled with meaning, even when it doesn’t look the way we think it should.

I’m getting back on social media in January. I wish I could just write this newsletter, which I love so much, and write my books and call it a day, but I can’t. Being on social media is part of my job as an author. So I’ll climb back on the horse. But maybe after taking a break from Pinterest and Instagram I’ll feel less pressure to make everything look perfect and give myself permission to slap a little glitter on a popsicle stick and call it an ornament.

So I won’t wish you a perfect holiday season. Instead I wish you a holiday season where you embrace the overcooked turkey, the family pictures where children refuse to smile at the camera, the dry tree that prematurely drops all its needles, and the dog that eats wrapping paper.

Because this is real. And real beats perfect every time.

Happy Holidays with all my love,

Christine

Christine Gunderson blogs about writing, parenting, and the ups and downs of the writing life.

She is the author of FRIENDS WITH SECRETS.

Okay, I admit it. The title of this post is a little misleading. It makes it sound like I, a sensible woman in a Talbots cardigan, might be engaging in some kind of illicit activity.

In reality, Girl Scout cookies are the only items I’ve ever attempted to sell on a street corner.

But now that I have your (prurient) attention, I can dive into the real topic of this month’s newsletter, and that topic is Easy Joy.

About two years ago, we moved a whole five minutes away, to a new house in a different neighborhood.

Our new neighborhood doesn’t have much traffic, so the streets are like a superhighway for people pushing baby strollers and walking dogs.

Everyone is friendly. Everyone stops to talk when you get your mail or haul in your trash cans. I met one of my neighbors this way and we started a book club. And at this book club, I realized that I like these ladies so much that I wanted the see them more than just once a month.

So I temporarily banished all my 7th grade insecurities and announced that I would stand on a particular street corner in our neighborhood every Friday morning at 8 a.m. and if anyone wanted to walk, we would walk.

Yes, I was afraid that no one would join me. And yes, I was afraid I’d stand there alone for ten minutes and then go slinking off down the street by myself.

But fortunately for my (fragile) self-esteem that didn’t happen. A couple ladies came. Then a couple more. Now we have a small group that walks together every Friday morning at 8.m.

A gang of middle-aged streetwalkers. There’s a novel in here somewhere.

It’s good exercise. We laugh, we talk, and these ladies have become friends as well as neighbors.

It works because its easy. There are no tickets or reservations involved. We just sort of roll up and start walking. I look forward to it every week. It makes my life sweeter. Easy Joy.

Emboldened by this success with standing on a street corner, I am now trying to expand Easy Joy into other areas of my life.

I went to Target and finally bought myself a Nespresso coffee maker. I LOVE it. Every cup is delicious (once I finally called customer service and figured out why it wasn’t working). It’s little treat, every morning when I wake up. Like Starbucks in my own kitchen. Easy Joy.

I got some Crazy Glue and fixed this tennis trophy my father-in-law won in Arrowhead, Minnesota in 1950. Bernie is no longer with us, but he was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. He played tennis until he was 82, often beating “rookies” who were only 75. Now his trophy is the first thing you see when you enter our house. It makes me smile. Easy Joy.

As we career from one holiday to the next, I’m thinking a lot about gratitude and joy.

For example, I’m grateful that I don’t have a real boss who sits in the office next door and keeps track of my productivity because I completely forgot to send out this newsletter in November.

Actually I didn’t really forget per se, I just sort of failed to realize that Thanksgiving was late this year and came like, two days before December, which should not even be legal.

Once again I’d like to write a sternly worded letter to whomever is charge of the time portion of the space-time continuum and demand more of it.

Obviously Ainsley should be in charge of writing Notes on Love and Laundry, but instead you’re stuck me, and sadly, I am Nikki to the core.

However, this means you’ll get TWO Love and Laundry’s in December. I have a sticky note right here on my computer to remind me.

So here’s hoping you remember to do all the things you need to do before the holidays. I hope at least some of those tasks are easy, and I hope each one brings you joy :-)

Much love,

Christine

The Star Award

Friends with Secrets is the 2025 Winner of the Women’s Fiction Writer’s Association STAR Award for Best Debut Novel. It is a huge honor to win this award from my fellow women’s fiction writers. AND the award comes with a $500 prize...still trying to figure out how I want to spend it. Star, of course, thinks the award is all about her.

The Next Book

It’s done. It’s copy edited. I get to make one final pass in December and then it goes into production. I hope to have a cover and a title and a release date to share very soon. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the early concept for the cover of this book. Hopefully you will love the words and characters inside the cover, too. Stay tuned...

Meanwhile, back at the writing ranch...I’m about 25,000 words into the Book #3, which I turn into my publisher on June 1. I actually laughed out loud while I was writing yesterday, which is always a good sign ☺

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I had one of those existential mornings lately. The alarm went off. I opened my eyes and my brain automatically asked, “This? Again?”

Life can feel that way sometimes, especially as we hurtle into the darker days of autumn. It feels like the world is in turmoil and maybe the AI robots are one update away from taking over the planet and sometimes it just feels like...well, like...This? Again?

But there is one person in my life who is never jaded or tired or pessimistic about the world in general and humanity in particular, one person who seems have unearthed the key to happiness.

And that person is my dog.

Her name is Star. She’s seven years old and here’s what she’s teaching me during my recent This? Again? era as the days grow cold and the darkness falls early.

Rule #1: Live in the Moment

Star hates going to the vet. She is horrified at being left behind with the pet sitter when we go on vacation. And she’s terrified by the Scary Cleaning Ladies who come every two weeks wielding the Diabolical Vacuum of Doom, that loud and terrible machine they use to suck things out of the carpet.

But my dog does not dread these visits, because my dog has no sense of time. Star lives perpetually in the present. She’s even happy in the car on the way to the vet because she doesn’t even know we’re going to the vet...until we get there.

And if we follow the wisdom of dog logic, dreading the vet doesn’t negate the need for the annual rabies shot, so it’s pointless to allow the upcoming rabies shot to infringe on her current happiness. That’s Star’s philosophy.

I on the other hand will spend weeks dreading a dentist appointment. I waste precious minutes wishing I didn’t have to go, hoping against hope to somehow find a Dental-Enterologist, a sort of dentist crossed with a gastroenterologist, a mystical, unicorn-like medical professional who puts you under for a colonoscopy and then also performs all necessary dental work while you are blissfully sedated.

Tragically, these creatures don’t exist, so I am left with dread, allowing a future unpleasantness to mar the pleasure of an otherwise lovely day, staining today’s joy with tomorrow’s dread. My dog on the other hand, lives in the moment, so she’s always happy. At least until the suitcases come out, and then she knows something is up.

Rule #2: Put People First

My dog’s only goal in life is to sit in whatever room I happen to be sitting in. That’s it. Full stop.

She doesn’t want to be rich or famous. She doesn’t want to be thinner or shaggier or bigger or smaller or have a larger dog bed. She just wants to be near me, all the time.

Why?

Because she loves me.

If a genie appeared from a bottle and gave Star three wishes, this is what she would ask for:

1. To lay on the couch with me.

2. To go for a walk with me.

3. To eat salmon, cheese and peanut butter with me.

Maybe eating salmon, cheese and peanut butter with people I love should be my primary goal in life, too.

But unfortunately, it isn’t. My goals and distractions are far less noble, and I seem to spend most of my time pursuing them. If I made laying on the couch with the people I love my primary objective every day, I’d be less productive but much happier.

Rule #3: If you love someone, let them know

When I get home, even if I’ve only been gone for ten minutes, Star makes an effort. She jumps up and runs to the door. She wags her tail. She says, “I am SO GLAD to see you AGAIN! I am SO GLAD you came BACK! I missed you SO MUCH!

Do I do this when my husband and children come home? No. I do not. I greet them, of course, and ask about their day. But what if I jumped out of my chair and hugged them and yelled, “I love you SO MUCH and I’m SO GLAD you’re home!!!”

Wouldn’t that be nice? Of course, they’d probably be alarmed, and the teenagers would be like, “Mom, are you crashing out?” (This is a new slang word I just learned from my kids. As far as I can tell, ‘Crashing out’ is what we used to call ‘having a nervous breakdown.’)

But I think deep down, we’d all like to be greeted this way when we return home at the end of a long day. We just want to know our absence was noted, and that someone is glad we’ve returned home to the nest where we belong.

Rule #4: I am loved for who I am, not for what I produce

My dog never says, “Oh gosh, I should get up an hour earlier each day so I can go to the gym,” or “I know I should go to bed right now but I really to need to send this one last email.”

Nope. Star says, “I’m really tired from barking at the Amazon Man this morning and now I’m going to sleep for the rest of the day.” And then she just lays down and takes a nap. Multiple naps. She takes naps to prepare for her naps. She accomplishes pretty much nothing all day long. And you know what?

We love her anyway.

We do not love Star for what she produces or what she accomplishes. We do not love her for what she does. Because she doesn’t really do anything.

We just love her for who she is.

When the days are dark and the world is chaotic, I think it helps to remember that we too have people in our life who love us for who we are, and not for what we accomplish.

So we should go ahead and take that nap. We should live in the moment and put our people first and we should show them we love them, every single day, and if we accomplish nothing more than lying beside them on the couch, that will be enough.

Because it’s enough for my dog, and she’s the happiest person I know.

So I’m hoping you spend at least a few hours this month eating salmon and peanut butter on the couch with the people you love, both human and otherwise, as the leaves fall from the sky, acorns ping the roof, and scent of woodsmoke fills the air.

And please stay tuned. Because next month I’m going to propose something radical. And I’m going to ask you to join me. Until then...

Much love,

Christine

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Has this ever happened to you?

You sit down at your desk to do something important (like write a book).

Suddenly the dog barks.

You check on the dog and find an Amazon package on your doorstep.

You bring the package inside and open it.

The picture hanging hooks you ordered have arrived. Now you can hang that picture that’s been sitting on a chair in your bedroom for the last seven months.

You go down to the basement to find the hammer.

You discover that your children have left nine completely empty, almost empty, and half empty water glasses in the basement.

You carry the glasses up to the kitchen. This takes two trips. Then you remember you still need the hammer. Then someone says, “Can you order Beowulf for my English class?”

You know that you will forget to order Beowulf unless you order Beowulf RIGHT NOW.

You go back to your desk to order Beowulf on Amazon.

Your phone pings with a New York Times alert and you read it.

Suddenly you are on Facebook, where you learn that your friend from high school is vacationing in Prague. You look at her beautiful pictures from Prague. You wonder if you could go to Prague? You Google, Trips to Prague and see Viking Riverboat cruises.

The word ‘Viking’ makes you think of Beowulf, so you go to Amazon to order the book. Amazon shows you blue toile placemats.

You love blue and you love toile. How does Amazon know this? Maybe you could host a fancy dinner party!

You aren’t the kind of person who hosts fancy dinner parties, but maybe you could become this kind of person if you had the right placemats?

You order the blue toile placements. What would you serve at your fancy dinner party?

Surely you have the perfect recipe somewhere in your extensive collection of Barefoot Contessa Cookbooks?

You go back to the kitchen.

It’s lunchtime now. You’re hungry. You’ve hung zero pictures. You’ve ordered zero Beowulf’s. And you’ve written zero words.

Welcome to the squirrel maze of my mind. Perhaps you have a squirrel maze inside your mind too? And maybe your squirrels are also addicted to amphetamines?

If so, I have a solution. Sort of. And that solution, as usual, comes from a book.

This one is called Deep Work by Cal Newport. It came out in 2016, but I pulled it off the shelf now because I’m desperate to find a solution to the chaos churning inside me and in the world around me.

Last month I talked about how wonderful it was to have uninterrupted reading time on my vacation. But this vacation experience also served as a giant spotlight and here’s the ugly truth it illuminated:

My attention span is shrinking.

I find it hard to focus on one thing for even a short period of time.

Even though I dislike social media, I get sucked into it the moment I open Instagram or Facebook.

Finally, and this is a big one: I am overwhelmed by the news of the day, yet I cannot look away.

I have a feeling I’m not the only person who feels this way. And because my job involves focusing without distraction for long periods of time on something that takes fierce concentration, I need to fix this problem.

And my search for a solution brought me to Deep Work by Cal Newport.

Here’s the premise: some tasks are shallow and easy and others are hard and difficult. The hard tasks require deep concentration, or deep work. But when we multi-task or constantly seek out entertainment or distraction, we erode our ability to do deep work.

So how do we regain our diminishing ability to focus and concentrate?

First, we build up our concentration muscles by resisting the need for distraction. Then, we build a wall around the time we need to do our deep work.

In practical terms, it looks like this: I’m waiting in line at the post office. But instead of pulling out my phone, I just stand there and do nothing. I let my mind wander. I observe the things and people around me. Maybe I talk to the person in line next to me, like we did in the olden days before we had smart phones.

I resist the urge to distract myself with something more interesting while waiting. I resist the urge to “multi-task” and catch up on emails or texts while standing in line. I fight tooth and nail against my need to be entertained or stimulated by new information every waking moment of my life, including those mundane moments spent standing in line at the post office.

Or I go for a walk and I do not listen to a book or a podcast. I just walk and think. No distractions. No entertainment. Maybe I ponder a problem I’m trying to solve. But I do that alone. Just me and my own boring brain.

This is shockingly HARD. Just try it. I dare you. Find the longest line at Costco, stand there, and leave your phone in your pocket the whole time.

Seriously. I double dare you. And let me know it goes. I’m curious to know if this is truly hard for everyone, or if I just have less self-control than more normal and well-adjusted people.

As I’ve tried to do this over the last few weeks, I’ve realized that it isn’t efficiency that drives me to pull out my phone whenever I have three seconds to spare in line or while running errands. We like to tell ourselves that. We pretend we’re multi-tasking or making the best possible use of every spare moment.

But this is a lie.

In reality, I pull out my phone in line at the post office because of my intense craving for distraction and entertainment.

Being honest about this is important, because my inability to be bored for even three seconds means I can no longer concentrate for three solid hours.

What’s happening now? What am I missing? What can I buy? Where is everyone going? What is everyone doing?

I don’t really need to know any of these things. And I want to get to a place where I don’t even want to know these things, because ultimately, I can’t do anything about most of it anyway, or it’s none of my business, or I have more stuff than I need, or because angry people screaming at each other on the internet does nothing to enrich my life or make me happier.

But like so many things in life, this is easier said than done.

I’ve had more success with Cal Newport’s other recommendation, which is to set aside time for deep work and then build a wall around that time.

I’ve always tried to do this, at least in theory. I put my phone in the closet when I sit down to write. I tell myself I’ll write for three hours and then I’ll check email. Or I check email first thing in the morning to make sure nothing is on fire, and then I respond in the afternoon, after the writing is done.

I am “smartest” in the morning. So I try to do my hardest work, my deep work, before 2 p.m. when my mind is fresh and focused. After reading Deep Work, I’m consciously trying to build a wall around my time for deep work by scheduling appointments and doing non-creative tasks the afternoon. These things are “shallow” work. Emails and trips to the dentist don’t require intense concentration. But writing a new chapter in a new book requires everything I’ve got, both mentally and creatively, because it’s hard.

You might be the opposite. Maybe you’re a night owl, so your deep work could be done later in the day, and you could get the shallow work out of the way in the morning. Part of this exercise is figuring out when your mind and body work best.

So that’s what I’m up to in September. I feel like I’m wrestling with the world, trying to resist the algorithms and siren songs of modern life. But I’m David and Instagram, Pinterest, and New York Times news alerts are Goliath, and we’re engaged in an epic battle for my mind and attention.

But I am making some progress. The Next Book is heading into copy edits after three rounds of revisions and developmental edits. This one is ambitious, with two points of view from moms in the present, plus a diary from 1965.

The word “un-putdownable” is always my goal and I’m grateful to have editors who help me find the right path through the wilderness of words. I’ll have a title and a cover to share soon and it will release in the summer of 2026.

And speaking of editors, here’s a picture from a rooftop party in New York City this month hosted by my publisher, Lake Union, for their 2025 and 2026 list authors.

I felt very glamorous flying up to New York on the Delta shuttle, albeit in Zone 8 at the very back of coach where my non-Platinum-Diamond-Ruby status always lands me.

I’m also a few chapters into The Third Book, which comes out in 2027. This is the book that required a cruise for research, and I’m having a ton of fun with it.

So that’s what I’m up to. I leave you today something that makes me happy.

Last year my sister-in-law gave me this beautiful glass pumpkin. She’s one of the people who has confidence in me when I don’t have confidence in myself. And now that it’s autumn again, the pumpkin is back in my kitchen, reminding me how lucky I am to have people who support me when (not if, but when) I get stuck.

Reminders like this are the opposite of distractions. They lead our minds gently back to the good. That’s where I hope your hours are spent in the coming days as leaves tumble from the sky... living in the good.

All my love,

Christine

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I learned something on vacation this year. I read a book called 4,000 Weeks-Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, and I learned that the average human lives for approximately 4,000 weeks.

This assumes you live to be roughly 80 years old. Your mileage may vary. You may get more weeks, or fewer, but 4,000 weeks is the average for most humans.

This surprised me. 4,000 weeks doesn’t seem like enough time to grow up, get married, raise a family, work, retire and grow old. But if we’re lucky, 4,000 weeks is the amount of time we’re given to live a meaningful life.

I read this book because I have a fixation with time management. If you want me to buy a magazine, put the words, “Ten Tips for Time Management,” or “Secret Systems to Help You Get Organized NOW” on the cover and I’ll buy it.

For years, I labored under the delusion that if I just managed my time well, I could accomplish everything I needed to accomplish.

But as I get older, I’m learning this is simply not true. And this book reinforced the idea that our goal is not to “manage” time. The goal is to enjoy time.

Admittedly this is a weird conclusion for a book on time management. It’s kind of an anti-management time management book, which is why I liked it so much.

As many of us hurl ourselves into the back-to-school vortex of insanity this week, I’d like to share one more deceptively simple insight from this wise book.

We can have gas in our car. We can have money in our wallet. But we can never really “have” time.

We are not guaranteed 4,000 weeks. We could have more time. Or we could have significantly less.

So working really hard to accomplish things now so we can relax or be happy “later” doesn’t make sense. Because we don’t “have” later.

There is no guarantee that later will ever come. We only have now.

We do this all the time. We think, ‘I’ll do X, Y, or Z when the kids are older, or when I retire, or when I get through this project at work, or tax season ends, or the baby starts sleeping through the night, or the bar exam is over, or grad school is finished, or I get a new job, or the holidays are done, on and on, for 4,000 weeks.

Then life ends unexpectedly at 3,547 weeks, and we never do the thing we were planning to do “later.”

Because later never comes.

I think we all have things in our life that we’re putting off until we have “more time.” Good things. Enriching things. Positive things that we refuse to give ourselves permission to do right now because we’re too busy.

What is the thing in your life that you’re putting off until you “have more time?” Is it gardening or writing or learning Italian or playing the piano or mastering pie crust?

Maybe there’s something bigger you’ve been putting off, like forgiving someone or repairing a breach, or re-connecting with someone who’s company you love, but who drifted away because you both got busy?

What good things can we do today that we normally put off until tomorrow?

This is the opposite of procrastination because these are things we like to do. And oddly, we fail to do them because we like them.

4,000 Weeks-Time Management for Mortals is one of six books I read during a week-long vacation with my husband.

This is the biggest chunk of uninterrupted reading time I’ve had in years, primarily because I’m now busy writing. Which is crazy, because reading has been one of the great joys of my life since I picked up Charlotte’s Web in second grade. And I’d forgotten that.

So since returning from vacation, I’ve tried to spend one hour each day reading a book. Not listening to a book on Audible while unloading the dishwasher, which is what I normally do. Not reading in bed for half-an-hour before I fall asleep. Not reading my phone or a magazine, but a book. In a chair. In the middle of the day. With tea, like a civilized person. I’ve been trying to practice anti-procrastination. And this week it worked! Sort of. I sat in a chair and read a book for an hour every single day...for two whole days!

I’m not always succeeding, but I’m always trying.

This is what I love most about fall. It’s the season of trying again. Because even though last year the mudroom became a horrifying labyrinth of lost football cleats and volleyball knee pads and sweatshirts from schools no one in our house even attends...this could be the year people hang things up. This could be the year people put things away. This could be the year my children rise early enough to eat breakfast. This year everything could be different.

Fall is the real season of hope. And that’s why I love it.

I’m wishing you all a wonderful fall, whether you are sending kids off to school, moving them into dorms, or just enjoying the passing of summer. I leave you today with some pictures from my vacation, and some book recommendations.

And as we say here in Virginia, happy fall, y’all.

All my love,

Christine

My husband and I sailing around the British Virgin Islands, just the two of us, thanks in large part to Grandma, who came to stay at our house with all the teenagers while we were gone. Sailing might sound glamorous, but it’s sort of like camping on a boat. We ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but the stars and the water were breathtaking.

Four of the best books I read on vacation. I highly recommend them all. I loved each one for different reasons.

I recommend this book if you, too, are obsessed with time management. If you are not...well, then read Abby Jimenez instead.

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For many years now, I’ve tried to make do with my tragically unhip Lands End swim wardrobe. But I have a vacation coming up where swimsuits are necessary (more on that next month) so I screwed my courage to the sticking place and began the search for a new suit.

It was a harrowing experience. I’ve had more enjoyable trips to the dentist. And you all know how I feel about the dentist.

Therefore, as a service to humanity, I have decided to invent my own line of swimwear.

I’ll call it OGM Swimwear for the (Middle) Ages.

For those who aren’t familiar, OGM is a reference to the Old Grey Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be from the familiar folk song. My dad used to sing this song on the farm while he fixed the tractor. It’s a classic.

I identify, quite often lately, with this famous equine creature. Her noble grey head will serve as my corporate logo.

I will travel to Silicon Valley and pitch my swimwear line to venture capitalists who are currently wasting all their money inventing AI chatbots, which no one even asked for.

My swimsuits, by contrast, will make the world a better place for womankind. I might even win the Nobel Peace Prize. Here’s a small sample from my proposal:

The Summer of ‘86 Time Machine Slender Suit: Using nanotechnology, and possibly a Delorean, The ’Summer of ‘86 Time Machine Slender Suit will magically transform your current body into the body you had in 1986. Or 1976, ‘66, ’96 or 2006. You decide.

Each suit comes with a bottle of baby oil, a boom box, a Def Leppard cassette tape, and a melanoma. When worn, the suit releases the scent of Sun-In, lemon juice, and coconuts, and plays the jingle from that old suntan lotion commercial... “Bain de Soleil for the San Tropez tan...” (Full body skin check and suspicious mole removal not included.)

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Thunder Suit: This suit features a fringed bra top, short shorts and white pleather flip-flop cowboy boots.

The Thunder Suit emits hypnotic, AI-generated statements through a mini loudspeaker hidden inside the bra top, to the tune of Thunderstruck, from the cheerleader’s iconic, game-opening dance routine.

This AI voice sounds just like the lead singer for AC/DC (permission pending). Using subliminal messages and the power of suggestion, this AI voice convinces onlookers that you have lustrous hair, powerful American thighs and the ability to leap into jump splits at any given moment, which adds an aura of drama to any beach or pool excursion.

When activated by a hidden button in your flip-flop cowboy boots, this AI voice broadcasts a subliminal message to anyone within a five-mile radius.

These are the hypnotic words emitted by the (patent pending) microfibers in your bra-top:

Harken, onlookers, to this nubile woman. Her name is Fruition. Her hair is like buttered spaghetti. Her body is slender, like the finest popsicle.

She does not have the slumped shoulders of a woman who spends all her time in the driver’s seat of a minivan yelling at people to “Pipe Down Back There.” She does not have the haggard visage of a crone who hounds teenagers to write college admissions essays.

Bow down before this woman who is old enough to be a grandmother, yet due to her powerful magic and good moisturizer, looks like she understands both Tik Tok and why her offspring insist on referring to her as ‘Bruh.’ (AI bra-speaker AA batteries not included. Void where prohibited.)

The Paris Hilton Hologram Suit: This comfortable, full coverage swimsuit resembles your favorite sweatpants and that old ratty cardigan you wear around the office when it gets cold.

However, the moment you don this swimsuit, a drone emerges from your modestly draped nether regions, flies overhead, and projects a hologram of Paris Hilton in a bikini onto your body and follows you wherever you go.

Stroll down the beach unconcerned by varicose veins, c-section scars and cellulite while you gaze adoringly at the little dog in your beach bag and bat your false eyelashes at lifeguards who are no longer age appropriate. (Miniature chihuahua included with purchase, limit one per customer.)

So that’s it, friends. I’m sure you’re as excited as I am about this incredible opportunity to get in on the ground floor and invest in OGM Swimwear for the (Middle) Ages. I’ll circle back once I get buy in from my Silicon Valley stakeholders.

But until that happens, I should probably keep writing.

So farewell until next month. May you find adventure if you travel, serenity if you stay home, and at least one swimsuit that makes you look like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. Or an approximation thereof.

All my love,

Christine

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Some people pause to note the passage of time on New Year's Day. This makes sense, from a calendar perspective. But I always mark the passage of time at the end of the school year, which leads to the lazy pause of summer before something new begins again.

In June, my youngest child will graduate from 8th grade, ending our time at the school where her oldest sibling started out in pre-k, fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years is a long time. I was relatively young when we started at this school. Now I'm...not. I had a stroller, diapers, and an infant in a car seat when we dropped my oldest son off for his first day of pre-k 15 years ago.

Now that little boy is going to India this summer to study abroad. I can remind him, gently, once or maybe even twice, to take his malaria medication and get his yellow fever shots, but I am no longer in charge of making sure these things actually happen. And that's hard.

Being the mother of teenagers and young adults is sort of like being Cassandra from the old Greek myth. You have the gift of prophecy. You can see what will happen next. But you're condemned to have your prophecies ignored by those around you.

So that's what happens when we trade the stroller for a driver's license and the pacifier for a passport. It's both liberating and terrifying. Time rushes onward, and now we're in a whole new phase.

I think the strangest thing about the passage of time is the fact that we cannot feel it passing. It's not like driving in a car with the windows open, the days and months and years whooshing past, blowing your hair.

Instead the passage of time is static, made invisible through repetition, especially when you're raising children. Days, months, even decades, of chicken nuggets and homework, laundry and dishwasher loading, walking to the bus stop or driving to and from elementary and middle school. Day in, day out, for years. Fifteen years in my case.

And suddenly, it's over.

So that's what I'm thinking about during this month of Mother's Day, which I got to celebrate at my favorite gluten free restaurant with all three of my kids and my husband and my own mother, who came to town to see my daughter perform as Ariel in her middle school production of The Little Mermaid.

I got to meet up with some writer friends and some wonderful readers at the Gaithersburg Book Festival.

And now I am locking myself in my office to put the finishing touches on my next book, which is due to my acquiring editor on June 1.

Until then, I'm hoping any milestones you experience this spring are more sweet than bittersweet. And I hope you had a wonderful Mother's Day.

I leave you today with a picture of a botanical miracle. I love to garden, but I have more enthusiasm than skill. Below is a picture of the arbor in my backyard and the roses that did not bloom last year but are finally blooming now.

I know they won't last long, but I'm grateful nonetheless for this temporary explosion of beauty. Maybe that's the secret to a happy life, somehow managing to enjoy the blooming roses, all the while knowing they will eventually fade and fall, giving way to the next season.

All my love,

Christine

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Shakespeare said it best: "Merrily, merrily shall I live now, under the blossom that hangs on the bough."

Catching up with my lovely friend and Lake Union sister, Rosa Kwon Easton at the Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Read Friends With Secrets

Have you ever wanted to run away?

I know. Silly question, right?

I think everyone wants to run away sometimes, like my friend who came home from an exhausting business trip to discover that all three of her children had both headlice and the flu.

There are days and months and seasons of life when our responsibilities feel more like burdens than blessings. And when that happens, I think of that old TV commercial. I want to press my wrist to my beleaguered brow and moan, "Calgon, take me away."

Well friends, I finally had my Calgon moment. In January, I ran away on a cruise ship, courtesy of my friend Susan Whitson, an old friend who is now the founder of Whitson Travel. I told her needed to do some research on cruise ships for a book I'm working on. (Faithful readers of Love and Laundry will eventually find out why this arduous research was necessary).

I'd never been on a cruise, so Susan found the perfect ship and also supplied her five closest girlfriends from college who happened to be booked on the same cruise. We even did a book club meeting on the ship.

The World's Greatest Husband made this trip possible by valiantly offering to stay in the rear with the gear (i.e. the kids and the dog) so I could go all by myself.

I'm still a little stunned by this breathtaking act of escapism. Moms don't do anything by themselves, except maybe worry.

It was honestly one of the best weeks I've ever had.

I wrote. I read books. I ate...a lot. I binged Season 7 of Friends, the one where Phoebe gives birth to triplets.

People brought breakfast to my room each morning on a silver tray, and I felt like a heroine in a regency romance novel. And then I drank my coffee while gazing at the ocean in silence.

The whole thing was so very Calgon.

So as I wrap up today's newsletter, I'm trying to find a moral to this story. And I'm realizing that Go Float Around the Ocean While Eating Really Good Desserts and Then Call It Research isn't exactly a moral, per se.

But I will say this. Before I went on my Arduous Research Cruise, I was tired, and I was having a very hard time writing this next book. And after the cruise, I have both energy and ideas again. And I know those two things are directly connected to rest and relaxation. Our brains can't work if our bodies are tired, and our bodies can't re-charge when our brains are overwhelmed.

I almost didn't go on this trip, for all the usual reasons. I'm too busy. It costs too much. What if my kids can't find their school uniforms without me? What if someone forgets to pick someone up somewhere at a certain time? And most importantly, what if the dog faints from separation anxiety?

The dog almost did pass out from separation anxiety. But everyone else managed just fine. The whole exercise made me realize that I'm always full of excuses when it it's time to try something new, even if that new thing is a lot of fun.

Why? Because new things are hard. New jobs, new schools, new babies, new homes, new phases of life. New things always involve change and change forces us to turn off the autopilot of daily life and really think about where we are going and what we are doing and why we are doing it. It brings up fear. Am I heading in the wrong direction? Am I going to look stupid? Am I am making a mistake?

New things force us to leave the comfort of our routine, the safety of our rut and put ourselves in a place where all kinds of things can go wrong.

And things did go wrong. My flights home were delayed and cancelled and delayed again. I had to roll with it, improvise and be patient, three things I'm not very good at doing.

But if we don't do new things we become fearful and inflexible...and before we know it, we've handicapped ourselves in a way, making it impossible to take that trip or try that class or accept that promotion or investigate that new hobby, even when we really want to.

Because that scary new thing might be wonderful. But we won't know until we trade the comfort of the couch for the discomfort of the middle seat in Economy Minus, where I always seem to end up because I have zero status on any airline.

So this trip taught me to say yes more often and "gosh, I'd really love to but..." less often.

Because I won't remember the trips I didn't take. But I will always remember the week I spent writing into the endless horizon, surrounded by the sound of the sea.

Yours Back Home Where the Coffee Is Not Served on a Silver Tray,

Christine

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Happy New Year! I am so excited to start 2025 by sharing some fantastic news.

Lake Union made me an offer for two more books, which I joyfully accepted. The contract is now signed, the ink is dry, and I am writing my heart out to meet my June 1 deadline.

July of 2026 is the tentative release date for the next book, with July of 2027 for the third book. Both books are women's book club fiction dealing with motherhood and friendship with a healthy dose of humor and suspense, just like Friends with Secrets. I'll share more details as I flesh them out, but right now The Next Book looks like this:

And like this:

In writer world, we have Pantsers, or people who write by the seat of their pants and have no idea what's going to happen until they write it, and we have Plotters, organized people who plot the whole book out before they write it.

I am a Pantser who is trying to become a Plotter, because when you sell your book to a publisher based on a synopsis and the first three chapters (which is called a proposal) you need to make sure the book you finish writing is actually the book you promised your publisher you would write.

And you need to do this on a deadline, so you don't have time to wander in the wilderness for 50,000 words and then scrap everything you've written because you suddenly realize you made a wrong turn. So I'm trying to plot this book out from start to finish to make sure the mystery and suspense are both mysterious and suspenseful.

I also have to admit that because Friends with Secrets was an Amazon bestseller, I feel a lot of pressure to make the next book as good as Friends. I want to give those of you who were kind enough to write a review or send me an email even more of what you loved in Friends. But pressure, self-imposed or otherwise, is not helpful when you're trying to be creative.

So I'm going back to what I've done before. I like to get up at four or five a.m. and write while the house is dark and quiet. I take the dog out, make my coffee, sit down at my desk and immediately start writing. I don't check social media or email or even change out of my pajamas. And if I'm very lucky, I'll suddenly realize it's noon and I've been writing for six or seven hours.

Once school starts up again, that won't be possible. So I'll try to get up early and write for a couple hours before I drive my 8th grader to school at 7:30 a.m. Then I try to get back into the zone for a few more hours when I return home.

But sometimes the dishwasher and the dog and the house and the grocery store beckon for my attention and that's always dangerous. Stopping at Target on the way home is really dangerous. Target is next door to HomeGoods, which is even more dangerous. Next thing I know three hours have gone by and instead of new words on the page I have detergent pods, a table runner, a lamp, and yet another scented candle.

So I will keep you posted as I move through the process of creating this next book. I do have one very exciting adventure lined up as research for the third book. More on that soon.

Until then, let me say this. When I'm writing, I'm about as happy as it's possible for a human being to be. I'm unaware of everything around me. I am no longer in my body or at my desk. It's almost like entering into a new state of consciousness.

All my liabilities and inadequacies fall away, and I'm in a place where the only thing that exists is this gift that I was given by my Creator. A gift that brings happiness to the people who read it, just as it brings me happiness as I write it.

So in 2025, I'd like to challenge you make time to use your gift. And if you haven't found it yet, I challenge you to make time to find it. Because you have a gift. We all have a gift.

Mine is sort of obvious because frankly, it's the only gift I have. You might have lots of gifts, so it's harder to see it. But it's in there somewhere and you deserve to use it. And it isn't selfish to spend time using it, because when you use your gift you're putting something into the world that brings other people joy. And that's why we were created. That's why we're all here. That's why you're here.

Sorry about all the italics. But I feel so strongly about this. So as I am sitting at my desk in the wee hours writing this next book, I hope you are painting or gardening or knitting or pottery-ing, or maybe writing yourself. And if you need encouragement, please hit reply and I promise to supply it.

Give this new year the gift of your gift. And if you do, amazing things will follow.

All my love,

Christine

As Christmas and Hannukah draw near, I would like to share a brief list of Holiday Resolutions. This is my way of providing authorization, just in case you feel like you need it, to skip without guilt all those tasks which the world (well, Pinterest and Instagram) tell us are vitally important for a joyous holiday season.

Things I will NOT do this Holiday Season

I will NOT open the first Christmas card of the season featuring a beautiful family on the beach in the Outer Banks at sunset in matching blue outfits and then panic-Google local photographers to see if it's possible to schedule a family photo in time for Christmas. Because it is not possible. And I will once again end up hunting through all the photos on my phone searching for that one time my family was gathered together at the same time in the same place wearing something other than the clothes we slept in, and call that our Holiday Portrait.

I will not attempt to "elevate my gift-wrapping game" as suggested by an article in the Washington Post. I will not embrace the Japanese tradition of furoshiki and spend hours watching YouTube videos to learn how to artfully wrap my gifts in silk, linen and cotton fabric. I will not spend hours ironing paper bags to create rustic and environmentally friendly wrapping paper. I will not attach festive candy canes to the outside of each package so my dog can eat them and get sick. Instead I will continue to cover gifts in paper from the eternal roll of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer jumbo wrap I purchased five years ago at Target, and which still has not run out, probably because it is so ugly.

I will not forage in my backyard for magnolia leaves, then staple them to a board, then hunt through the bins at Michaels for wired ribbon and fake holly berries to create festive Bundles of Joy to adorn my window boxes, which I do not even have, for the holiday season.

I will not watch as Sarah Whitby, a vicar's wife from a place with a name like Berwick-Upon-Tweed somewhere in England, makes a gingerbread nativity for her Showstopper on the Great British Baking Show, complete with cattle that low and angels that herald, and then tell myself that surely I can do the same, because she makes it look so easy. Because it is not easy, and I cannot do the same because I am terrible at baking. I know this now. And this holiday season, I will not be fooled into thinking otherwise.

I will not feel guilty about the fact that in our family we email each other Amazon links, and then we click on the links and buy the items, and then we wrap them, and then we call this exchange of presents we've all chosen for ourselves the sharing of meaningful gifts from the heart. It works, and I will not feel bad about it any longer.

I will not put lone electric candles in each window because I have accepted that I am not smart enough to figure out how to set the complicated timing devices that turn the candles on at dusk. Instead I turn them on once, forget about them, then run down the batteries, causing their light to die approximately two days before Christmas. And this year, I am okay with it.

So this holiday season, please accept my heartfelt wishes for the peace that comes from accepting our limitations, and the joy that comes from being who we really are.

In 2025, I hope you travel to new places with old friends. I hope you sit before a warming fire with purring cats and sleeping dogs. I hope you spend more time reading good books and less time scrolling through bad news. I hope you have days filled with hope and moments of deep joy.

All my love,

Christine

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Feeling a little hopeless and not particularly grateful as Thanksgiving approaches this year? Worried about divisiveness, polarization and the fate of western civilization?

Fear not. I have the antidote. And it's right here, under your nose, down the street, and in your own back yard.

The cure for pessimism, gloom, and ennui lies in... your neighborhood book club.

It's true.

I've spent the last four months going to book club meetings. If you are

kind enough to buy and read my book, then I am brave enough to head west on I-66 during rush hour to attend your book club meeting.

I've attended Zoom book club meetings all over the country, and in-person meetings in Manassas, Springfield, and Vienna Virginia, plus meetings here in my own back yard in Fort Hunt, Old Town, Stratford Landing, Waynewood, and Beverly Hills in Alexandria.

And here's what I've found:

People who read books are nice to each other.

People who read books know and value their neighbors.

People who read books form friendships that last for decades.

And, people who read books make really great appetizers.

One of my favorite book clubs started with a group of women who met volunteering at the bake sales and concession stands that make up the lives of elementary school mothers all over America.

Now those kids are grown up and married and these mothers have become grandmothers. And they still meet once a month to read and discuss books.

Other books groups are still firmly rooted in the little kids years, offering each other advice and support as they move through the science fair volcano/book report/spelling test/long division and multiplication table phase of motherhood. These women don't have time to read, but somehow they make time to read anyway.

I attended a book club meeting at a Barnes and Noble in Springfield where the members have nothing in common but books. They are old, young, male, and female, couples and single people, and they meet at Barnes and Noble once a month because they love to read and discuss mysteries.

The newest book group I attended is right here on my own street. I was getting the mail one day when I ran into my neighbor walking her dog. I told her how much fun I'm having attending book club meetings, and she said maybe we should start one right here in our neighborhood.

So we did. And because she is the most organized person on the planet, our first meeting was fantastic. And for our second meeting, we're reading a great novel about Marjorie Merriweather Post and we're visiting her estate at Hillwood in Washington D.C. How cool is that?

I'd like to point out that no one ever discusses politics at these meetings. They don't need to, because books offer all the drama and intrigue we need in our daily lives. Instead, people discuss the things they love most, the things that bring us together rather than push apart, things like kids, pets and the characters we meet between the papers of a book, imaginary people who are often far more lovable and real that the characters we've forced to follow in an endless series of attack ads during the course of a political campaign.

So this Thanksgiving season I'm grateful for book clubs. I'm grateful to be invited into the homes and discussions of thoughtful readers. I'm especially grateful when these readers allow me to ask them questions about what they like and don't like, how they find books and why they choose them. Listening to feedback from avid readers makes me a better writer, which allows me to write even better books to fuel the next discussion.

So until then, thank you for reading this month's issue of Notes on Love and Laundry. I hope your November is filled with three of the very best things in life, and those things are, obviously, apple pie, mashed potatoes, and the corn casserole my mother makes.

AND (dramatic drum roll), please tune in next month when I will at long last be at liberty to share some VERY BIG NEWS!!!

Yours with love and heartfelt wishes for a wonderful Thanksgiving,

Christine

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If you've never been, the Grand Canyon is a gigantic, awe-inspiring 3-mile-deep gash in the earth. It's also the world's scariest tourist attraction if you're afraid of heights, which I am.

Because the Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, it's impossible for the National Park Service to fence the entire thing. So there are lots of places all along the Grand Canyon viewing area where you could accidentally plunge to your death.

Really.

If you got too close to the edge and slipped, you would die.

If you were taking a selfie and not paying attention to where you were standing, you would die.

If you owed money to the Russian mafia and they wanted to kill you and make it look like an accident, they could simply pretend to bump into you, knock you over the edge, and you would die.

Now, none of these things happened, obviously, since I lived to write this newsletter post.

But it could have happened. And this is where the teenage boys come in.

I am a middle-aged woman by virtue of the fact that I managed to live until middle age.

Those of us who reach middle age do so through a combination of luck and by saying no thank you, quite firmly, whenever anyone invites us to go hang gliding, bridge jumping, rock climbing, or sky diving. I avoid poisonous snakes, small twin engine planes, and war zones. In other words, I have common sense.

Teenage boys do not.

Instead they have something else. I'm not even sure there's a word for it. Anti-common sense? Testosterone? An intrinsic desire to break things, including themselves?

While at the Grand Canyon, haranguing my teenage sons to stay away from the edge, I noticed a woman with a baby strapped to her chest, and a strange feeling stirred my heart.

Jealousy.

Normally I don't envy people with babies. If parenthood were an Olympic sport, babies would not be curling or cross-country skiing. Babies would be ski jumping, that sport where athletes like Eddie the Eagle fly off a monstrous ski jump into thin air and then try to land on their skis, but instead go crashing into the Rolex sign at the finish line and become part of that terrible montage they used to play at the beginning of the ABC News Wide World of Sports.

Babies are hard. But you know what else is hard?

Having teenage boys who are big enough and old enough to wander right up to the edge of the Grand Canyon. And you can't do anything to stop them.

Or protect them.

You can't wrap them up and strap them to your chest in a Bjorn because now they weigh more than you do, and they're taller. You can't put them in a crib or buckle them into a car seat while you drive slowly, carefully home from the hospital. You can't even hold their hand when they cross the street because they would find this deeply mortifying.

All you can do is say things like, "For the love of all that is Holy, please don't stand so close to the edge." And they'll give you an exasperated, but tolerant smile, and say, "Mom. It's fine. Don't worry."

As I stood there at the Grand Canyon thinking these thoughts and staring at the woman with the baby strapped to her chest, it occurred to me that this is all a metaphor for That Big Thing that was about to happen in the fall.

My oldest child leaving for college.

As I stood starring down at the abyss beneath my feet, I realized that my days of herding children away from danger will end in just a few more years when the last child leaves the nest.

All I can do is hope and pray that the good judgement, common sense and luck that carried me into middle age somehow transfers to them thru some sort of umbilical or environmental osmosis.

It's an odd feeling, knowing that this first phase of motherhood is coming to an end with my oldest child, and I wonder what the next phase will bring.

So far, it's going well. My oldest seems to enjoy being fully in charge of his own life.

And this knowledge has allowed me to peek around the corner at the stage beyond, a phase where my sons remind a little old lady with white hair and osteoporosis to be careful, to go slowly, to watch her step.

It's the phase where I'm the little old lady. And they're the adults.

I'm reasonably confident that when we get to that point, they'll watch over me with the same love and care I've shown them.

If they do, I'll be okay.

And I think they'll be okay too, even when I'm not there to warn them away from the edge.

Here we are at the Grand Canyon. 

I'm the person in the middle wearing a parka because I'm always cold.

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Happy Fall! All across the land, the Nikki's of America are back at Target with school supply shopping lists, searching for that clear, plastic, six-inch ruler and the red folder without prongs.

In addition to the mysteries of the Oddly and Irritatingly Specific School Supply List, I offer another mystery for you to ponder.

If you know the answer, hit reply and tell me, because I have spent a great deal of time over the past few years trying to unravel (cue the dramatic and creepy music) ...

The Strange and Mysterious Death of Pantyhose

Let me set the scene:

We were getting ready to attend a funeral. My mother came into the living room appropriately attired for this solemn occasion in a dress and heels.

Clearly, my mother hadn't gotten the news.

I laid a hand on her shoulder. "Mom, we don't have to do that anymore."

"It's over," my sister whispered.

My mother looked alarmed. "What's over?"

"Pantyhose," we said in unison.

My mother gasped. "You mean I can go to a funeral without wearing pantyhose?"

I gave my mother a solemn nod. "Our long national nightmare is finally over."

My mother sat down on the sofa, clearly stunned. "But...how did this happen?"

My sister and I didn't know the answer. No one does.

But somehow, somewhere, someone liberated us all from the Tyranny of Pantyhose. 

My mother rose from the sofa, went into the bedroom, removed her pantyhose and threw them in the trash. "That's the best news I've heard all day."

No one knows exactly when it happened. There isn't a National Let's All Stop Wearing Pantyhose Day on the calendar.

There were no mass demonstrations on the National Mall in D.C. where women set fire to their Barely There or Natural Nude or Shimmering Pearl pantyhose.

No one pelted the president or members of Congress with plastic L'eggs Eggs (remember those?) demanding a constitutional amendment outlawing pantyhose.

And there is no Joan of Arc of Pantyhose who stormed the barricades singing that song from Les Misérables.

But something happened. Because during my working years, pantyhose were an essential part of the work wardrobe, just like black pumps and a suit from Ann Taylor.

We wore pantyhose in the newsroom when we anchored and reported. We wore them on Capitol Hill as we carried press releases and bills onto the floor of the House and Senate, and we wore them at the Department of Commerce when we travelled to China for trade talks.

All kinds of work, done everywhere by women clad in pantyhose.

Then I "retired" to stay home with my children. And at some mysterious point between then, and now, a quiet revolution sprang to life in the world of women's undergarments.

Let's pause for a moment to reflect on the sheer awfulness (pun intended) of pantyhose.

During World War II, both silk and nylon were vital to the war effort, and women's stockings were in short supply, which led women to draw lines down the back of their bare legs to mimic the seams on silk stockings.

But after the war, "improvements" in nylon technology led a man named Allen E. Gant to invent something he called "Panti-legs." And nylon pantyhose were born.

As we all vividly recall, nylon pantyhose were prone to "runs" or a little ladder of torn material that started small and then grew, running up your leg from your big toe, broadcasting to the world that you were not the polished, put-together woman you wanted everyone to think you were.

We tried, ineffectually, to fix these runs with nail polish or hairspray in the ladies room when we discovered them ten minutes after arriving at work.

But those nylon pantyhose with their snags and runs always got the best of us. They lay coiled and tangled in everyone's underwear drawer like a den of snakes, just waiting for an opportunity to make you dash into CVS on the way to work to buy a new pair when you were already running late.

Pantyhose were hot in the summer. They bagged around the knees. They bunched around the waist. They were an awful and required part of being a grown woman with a real job.

I know so many women who've described a certain period of their lives this way. "I had to drive downtown to the office every day, and I had to wear pantyhose."

"I had to wear pantyhose" is shorthand for "I had a tough job with a tough boss. I had zero flexibility, no work-life balance, and a ton of stress." That's what "and I had to wear pantyhose" really means.

And now...it's done. Gone. Bare legs for everyone. Except apparently Kate Middleton. I've heard she is still required by the duties of the crown to wear pantyhose.

I've always loved Kate Middleton, and I've always wanted to be a member of the Royal family, waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace in an enormous hat on major public holidays.

But now I'm not so sure. Would I rather be a commoner with bare legs or a member of the royal family with a vacation home on the island of Mustique in pantyhose?

I honestly have to think about that.

Perhaps it's enough to know that my 14-year-old daughter will graduate from 8th grade and have confirmation this year, two major life events commemorated without pantyhose. The cycle of discomfort and L'eggs Eggs is broken at last.

So let us raise our coffee cups this morning and toast the unknown woman who liberated us from the corset, the anonymous woman who ended the tyranny of the girdle, and the valiant and unsung woman who liberated us from pantyhose. On behalf of a grateful nation, we salute you.

Book News

I just sent a few chapters of The Next Book off to my agent. She's been reading and sending me thoughts. I'm typing as fast as I can between back-to-school nights, flu, strep, and Covid tests, and college move-in trips.

I'll admit that coming up with this next book has been hard. I want The Next Book to include all the humor and suspense and relatability everyone loves in Friends with Secrets. So many of you have sent me lovely emails or took the time to leave a positive review and I'm determined to repay all that cosmic kindness with the best Next Book possible. No pressure or anything :-)

So keep your fingers crossed, say a prayer, and stay tuned :-)

Band of Mothers

My mom friends (without secrets) have hosted a number of wonderful launch events for Friends with Secrets here in Alexandria, Virginia where I live and where the book is set.

I'm also having a total blast (as we used to say in the '80's) attending book club meetings. If you enjoyed Friends with Secrets,  please consider choosing it for your book club.

I can Zoom into your meeting, or I can attend in person bearing cookies if you live in Virginia, Maryland, or D.C.

So, that's all the news that's fit to print, a probably a great deal that isn't. Thank you so much for subscribing to Notes on Love and Laundry. If you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter, feel free to forward and pass it on.

Next month I'll be including scenes cut from Friends with Secrets, including one where Nikki explains why she always eats dessert first.

Until then, enjoy this increasingly cozy weather, and the books and cups of tea that go with it...Jane Austen weather, as the dog and I like to call it.

As ever,

Christine

Reunited with beloved friends from my Pantyhose Era at the Friends with Secrets book launch party.

The fabulous hostesses of the book launch party. We met when our kids started kindergarten. Now those kids are college freshman and high school juniors. We of course, have not aged :-)

Beautiful book launch event hosted by Lisa Camooso-Miller of the Friday Reporter Podcast, a fellow mom and friend from my Durable Goods/GDP days at the Commerce Department.

With Phyllis and Brittany Patterson, fabulous mother-daughter entrepreneurs at a book event in historic, Old Town Alexandria. George Washington didn't necessarily sleep here, but he definitely slept in one of the buildings down the block.

Band of Mothers: A wonderful event wedged in between Back-to-School nights in my friend Lee's beautiful backyard in Old Town. We talked about writing and the publishing process and making time to do what you love while microwaving chicken nuggets and raising a family.

Read Friends With Secrets