Also this summer my youngest daughter turned four. We celebrated at a little amusement part near Coney Island that is a sort of secret spot perfect for exactly her age. There were pink cupcakes and too much food and sunblock and tears and my older daughter and her friend doing the same ride a dozen times, delighted with the little bit of independence you can have at a toddler amusement park when you are eight and a little bit unstoppable, a little unleashed because really who can worry about the eight year olds on the kiddie ride when your four year old screams if there’s too long a line for the helicopter carousel.

I’ve been a mother for eight and a half years, and writing the whole time. This has required a lot of flexibility around what writing looks like. Cafes and covid, pre-dawn mornings and squeezing out words when one is on the couch with the flu or I’m also half-looking up any number of things: how to get a toddler to sleep through the night, what age is okay to get ears pierced, when a certain chess tournament is this year, how to get lice out of hair, what age it’s okay for kids to walk, talk, eat vegetables, give attitude, go to sleepaway camp, still sleep in diapers, still suck their thumb, have fights with their friends, go to a sleepover, reveal their truest selves.

The writing day is admittedly, often, a writing and googling day, a writing and logistic-ing day, a writing and fretting about something my kids are going through day. The books come into being in spite of this push-pull, and I am proud of them when they are in their finished form. While I can’t always predict their reception or invest in their perfection, I can say that when I read them each for the final time, they feel true. And really that’s all I care about. I want to write the truth.

But. While I don’t think the books in their final form have suffered, my writing process has. Or it hasn’t suffered, but it has been asked to to be under control. I have had to search for the best times to write, and the best places, and I have asked myself to find the plot, to find the character arc, to find the time to create, to find the energy to show up to the page. I have been in a state of finding.

I’ve been missing so much the getting lost.

I hadn’t really realized I was getting lost until another one of those pesky thoughts came into my head, except this time it was not about my daughters. I am not doing a good job at social media , I thought. I should be talking about writing. I should be capturing some of what I’m up to.

And then there was the next thought: what am I even up to?

For a bit, I let myself feel horrible about it. I had nothing to social media about! I had no interesting thoughts about writing, no hot takes on The Discourse, no cute new photos of me doing authorly things! I needed to be taking my work more seriously. I needed to be being a writer! I was failing!

It took me a few days to recognize the truth— I didn’t have any hot takes or pithy ways to discuss my writing because I was lost in my novel. I have been getting lost. I have been in a sort of wild that I’d forgotten was there. I am sitting down at 845 and not looking at the clock again until noon. I am realizing I wrote two thousand words when my goal was to write four hundred. I am like those eight year olds, going on whatever ride I want, while the grownups deal with other things and sort of forget I’m there. Or maybe I’m like my four year old, going down the steep hill on her new bike her first time out, not worried about falling because it’s so fun who ever cares if you crash.

Or maybe I’m just a woman in my 40s who isn’t so scared anymore. Or at least, isn’t so scared right now. (I do reserve the right to be totally scared later).

A lot of motherhood is about saying no. Often it’s out of necessity— my youngest wants Kraft mac and cheese for every meal (don’t worry, when I gave it to her last week she said she doesn’t like it anymore so actually now there’s zero meals she likes?). My oldest wants to stay up late every night playing cards or, alternately, would like to dress like a sixteen year old, have a weekday sleepover, do a lemonade stand even though it’s almost dinnertime and I have expended every last bit of energy I’ve ever had going roller skating, baking cookies, pushing someone on the swings, setting up a craft project involving some sort of plaster mixture that is dangerous to inhale or something, even though it is part of a child’s art kit and what are these people trying to do to me? Anyway. I have to say no a lot. Which leaves me wondering about saying yes.

This summer, I have been trying to say yes. Sometimes this is because I actually want to stay up late playing cards too, or I want a couples bites of the ice cream I’ll let them get if the ice cream truck is out on our walk home. Sometimes it’s because I cannot possibly take the whining of them hearing the no. But sometimes it’s because hidden in the yes is a bit of magic and I’m hungry for that and they are too. We all are. And did you know, when you are the mom, you are actually a little bit in charge or when some spontaneous magic can happen? I forgot. I’m remembering.

A few weeks ago my daughter got into her head that she would like to go to a concert, a real one. It was an irresistable ask. If you don’t have kids, know that when they ask for something absurd that you yourself also love, it is impossible to say no. I spent my adolescence at concerts, starting with Desiree and Seal and Jewel and No Doubt, moving on to Indigo Girls and Lilith Fair and Britney Spears and Barenaked Ladies and Counting Crows and Aerosmith and Paul Simon and Bob Dylan and Sting. She’s eight. She’s old enough to remember. Which meant I can be folded into the memory, into what will maybe become her own ritual, her own way of engaging with her friends. Maybe I just wanted a chance to make it ours, before it becomes, someday, just hers.

I looked up a bunch of people in our regular rotation, and of course you can’t get reasonable tickets for Olivia Rodrigo or Ariana Grande. So I looked a little harder and found that Shakira was playing nearby the next week and tickets were reasonably affordable. My daughter loves Shakira and is a night owl. I was in need of a yes, I wanted a jolt of that magic. So I got the tickets and we went. I let her wear makeup and this ridiculous pink flapper dress she bought with her own money last fall when we were going back to school shopping and she fell in love. I let her dance and sing along and lean on my shoulder during the slow songs and not really wash off the makeup and go to camp the next day with inexpertly applied day old eyeshadow and blush still all over her face.

I guess what I’m saying is that I am remembering the magic of saying yes. And suddenly I am doing it in my work too. I don’t have an outline. I have ideas, and I think I know what the book is about. Then I come into a new scene and realize wait, no, the book is about something else. Then I get excited about that, until I reach another little nook and think ohhhh wait the book is about this. I say yes, I am saying yes, I am in love with yes.

It’s a first draft of my twenty-somethingth book. It’s the summer before third grade. It’s the summer she turns four. Why not get lost, a little? Why not see if a yes brings us somewhere better, even if that better place is wobblier and wilder? Who said I can’t be in the wild?

I am the mom. I am the author. I can take an eight year old to a Shakira concert and let her have popcorn for dinner, let her get home at midnight and fall asleep in her clothes. I can sleep in the four year old’s bed when she wakes up at 2am and choose to ignore the billions of pages on sleep training, on the power of saying no. I can turn my family drama into a love story, I can wonder what happens if everything I thought the book was about is only the very very beginning.

It’s summer. The sprinklers are on at the playground. If we’re lucky the ice cream truck is there too. I’m missing bedtime. I’m in cutoffs and shirts that fall off my shoulder which my four year old hates so she keeps trying to cover me up, make me modest. I am writing an entirely different book than I set out to write. I’m at home, but I’m on an adventure.

And Shakira is 49 years old, dancing on stage with a bunch of dancers in tiger costumes.

I’m lost for the first time in years.

Please don’t come find me.

News

I’ll be showing up some places this fall, including The Brooklyn Book Festival on September 26th. More details and more tour stops to come!

The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene received mid-year best-of shout-outs from both School Library Journal and BookRiot!

I made an appearance on one of my favorite podcasts, Bad On Paper, and got to shout out to two books I’m super excited for that are coming out in the next couple months. I hope you’ll check it out!

Recommendations

I ended up absolutely loving this book, which I think is best pitched as adult Bridge to Terebithia. I was especially won over by the ending, which left me a bit breathless.

I have two kids who love board games and card games, and the older one just introduced me to this one which I am now obsessed with. It’s very much in the gin rummy vein, and if you are a gin rummy lifer like me, you will love this.

If you have a kid who’s a reader or you write for kids, you absolutely must check out Afoma Umesi’s phenomenal Substack. Not only does she have really nuanced, smart takes on all things kidlit, she also has kid reviewers who she works with in really exciting and in depth ways, and their insight is beautifully incorporated into her discussions of children’s literature. I’m obsessed.

For a moment, I understand plastic surgery and Botox and all the ozempic-ing ourselves back into our old bodies. We want what was beautiful about then AND what’s beautiful about now at the same time, in the same perfect moment. Then we’d finally— what? What is it I actually want? What will be enough? What, exactly, is the end goal here? To exist in two timelines at once?

I don’t back handspring at adult gymnastics. I show off my cartwheel that I’ve held onto and I nail jumps on the balance beam. Those feel the same. Later, video tells me they don’t look the same, they aren’t magnificent and sky high like they felt, but I decide that doesn’t matter. I’ve done it. I’ve located the feeling of knowing I can land a tuck jump on beam and in that way I am 11 and 43 at once. Who needs a face lift, when you have friends who will go to adult gymnastics with you?

A week later my daughter wants to go roller skating and I decide to put on skates too. We’re there, after all, and other parents are doing it. When I was eleven every birthday party was a roller skating party. I was only ever okay at it. My skills on beam don’t translate to roller skating. Things with wheels have never been my strength.

Still I go and I don’t fall. I have to stare at the floor, the way I stare at the end of the beam, that one bit of knowledge about being a successful performer on beam sewn into me. Permanent. Whether I’m on the beam or not, I think constantly about staring at the end of the beam to keep my balance. It is an anchoring, a way to stay steady. It’s a surprisingly transferrable skill. When I’m done skating around a dozen times, my daughter says I’ve done well. She can think I’m doing a good job even when it’s only fine, even when it’s just barely above Total Failure. This is a happy surprise. Her rexpectations for me are lower than mine for myself. I’m fairly certain this is a good thing.

When my 2019 middle grade novel got a review in the Times, I promised myself that would be enough. Same for getting a Barnes and Noble Book Club Pick this Spring. “I’ll never need more than this” I said “anything else that happens is just extra”. I’m so bad at letting go of longing for more. I’m unspeakably cruel to myself, for never finding a way to be the absolute tippity-top best. The most. The undeniable.

When I was little gymnastics was everything. I practiced routines with Kim Zmeskal, by which I mean I watched her compete on TV while I was in New Hampshire, performing acrobatics on the white couches in the basement. In my imagination, Kim and I were colleagues. In those days, anything was possible.

When she didn’t win the Olympics, it was personal for me. By my calculations she was the best. I didn’t know what to do with the reality that that day, she wasn’t.

In spite of loving it, I gave up gymnastics at 12. I was watching a news report about a bunch of 8 yr old gymnasts who were the next Olympic hopefuls. I was already not in contention. It was already too late for me.

I didn’t understand then that I could have still learned more. I could have gotten better even if being the best was already impossible. I could have perfected the skills I had. I could have progressed slowly, carefully. It wouldn’t have been the kind of triumph I’d imagined, but it would have been a certain kind of glory.

The problem with gymnastics is the same as the problem with publishing. There are metrics and they are numerical. They are certain. But you know, Kim Zmeskal is still a joy to watch, when I’m feeling nostalgic, even if she didn’t medal in any of the individual events. I’m still obsessed with her, I still surge at her power, her strength. To me, she is still the best.

And anyway, numbers don’t capture the way it feels to cartwheel at 43, stunned faces of second graders looking at you in the playground. They only care for an instant, those 8 year olds, but it’s a great instant. Those numbers don’t capture the precision of language, the ecstasy of plot points figured out. They most certainly don’t account for the rest of life that happened around my novel, both its writing and its launch into the world this spring—that my daughter moved up a level in gymnastics and my younger one started drawing flowers, writing her name, calling hand me down sweatshirts “so adorable”. The numbers don’t care that my youngest was sick on release day or that I say yes to the playground after school most days even though it’s past 5 even though it means dinner for the kids will be once again fruit and peanut butter toast. The numbers don’t care that I’ve weathered two anaphylactic events, one from each of my allergy kids, since 2026 began. No one has measured my expert use of the epipen or the fact that I let my oldest daughter practice front handsprings on the couch even though I hate it because I am an overstimulated perimenopausal mom which aligns awkwardly, beautifully, with being an artist, a novelist, a thing I dreamed of becoming.

Did you know I got a haircut I hated last August and didn’t even cry? I also forgot my best friends birthday even though it’s in my calendar, even though I know it by heart. I figured out some really good outfits. I dropped a lot of balls. It’s complicated, the work of trying to understand if I’m the best yet.

It’s about fear and safety really. Everything is for me. I’m safe if I can determine I am the best. Or, no, if I’m the best, then I will know I am finally, at last, safe. I’m told to go easy on myself, and maybe that’s why I go to gymnastics and roller skating. I can go easy on myself about those things, now. I don’t expect to be the best, I can live with being not so great, in those spaces.

I try a pullover on the bars, something I struggled with when I was young, my bars work always lightyears behind floor and beam. The instructor has to heavily spot me. But with her help I do get up and over. I cast away from the bar. That feels good, like flying. I should never have stopped. I should not have let those 8 year old gymnastics prodigies take away who I was, what felt good in my body, what I could have accomplished, just for the sake of accomplishing it.

I’m writing two books about being the best right now. One is for eleven year olds, and there are monsters. The other is for adults and there are child prodigies. I don’t know if they will be the best, in any way. I’m thinking of trying ukulele if the local music place offers it again. I won’t be the best at that either.

Maybe I’ll spend the summer watching Kim Zmeskal’s 1992 floor routine again and again and again. She did not medal for this routine in Barcelona in 1992. And here I am, watching anyway, remembering the white couches in New Hampshire so long ago, the way it felt to fly and flip and trust my body to move the way I wanted it to, the belief I had in her strong and unwavering and divorced from medals and numbers and being the best. She was the best. She is the best. I don’t care what anyone else says.

Kim Zmeskal was known for her power. Not for her perfection. The power, the strength, was what really mattered, what has stood the test of time.

The lesson I’ve been trying to learn my entire adult life, right there in my New Hampshire basement, on the shitty 90s TV set I miss so much, when I was still not really ready to hear it.

I am trying to be ready now.

News

I’m going to be at Rough Draft in Kingston, NY on Tuesday June 16th at 6pm for their beloved Night School Reading series! I’m excited to join some incredible authors, and I hope to see you there!

Summer reading time is here and I’ve got books for every age!

My adult debut is quite literally perfect for summer, the cover tells you everything you need to know. If you’re here, there’s a good chance you’ve purchased it, but maybe a friend needs something juicy to break a reading rut? Spreads the word!

My most recent middle grade novel is a good summer read— a princess and a theatre kid switching places in order to fight each others’ dragons.

And for your younger kid, the third and final Zoomi and Zoe is out— this one set at a kooky camp where friendships get tricky but the silliness abounds. The bunk beds tell knock knock jokes, need I say more?

If you have a moment to write reviews for any of the books on Amazon/Goodreads/Barnes and Noble, I would so appreciate it!

Recommendations

I have loved spending time with this essay collection/memoir that I listened to on audio. I think if you were into the Lindy and Lena of it all this spring, you’ll enjoy this wonderfully written take on marriage and divorce and navigating the world.

Are you local to or visiting NYC? We recently discovered this yummy restaurant.

We rewatched this movie over the weekend. I love a rewatch and this is such a fun cast and if you’re having hard days that require real unwinding at the end of them, this is the thing to watch.

The result is an exuberant show so alive with creativity I could have stayed in the single room all afternoon. The Tower Show is exactly what it promises to be— a living example of the value of voice in art, an ode to the understanding that what makes art special and unique is not the subject matter but rather the artist and their own point of view.

Here are a few of our favorite pieces:

I’ve been thinking about The Tower Show a lot lately, as I work on two new books and feel the familiar anxiety of not knowing if they are interesting enough, not knowing if they are big enough, not knowing if they have a compelling enough hook. Right now, the parts that are coming the most easily for me are the tiny details in these worlds and between these characters, and the stories themselves feel hazy and far away. I am writing and writing and finding so many little moments, but the big story is wild, impossible to pin down or fully understand, yet. The Tower Show tells me this is maybe okay. The hyper-focus on what is small and accessible, tangible and human, the belief in a million scenes eventually clarifying into a singular story is enough.

Maybe this is not exactly a profound thought. It is not a new revelation. It’s more of a worn understanding, a truth that I lose track of in the ambition and worry of sustaining a creative career. I am so often looking for something monumental that will change everything, a new step that will make me into a different (better) kind of writer, that will help me write a bigger, juicier more commercial, more important, more worthy sort of story.

This is not an uncovering of that magical thing.

One artist in the show made the water tower into a clock. Another did a whole thing with invisible ink and a special light that exposed what had been invisibly written. Yet another reimagined the water tower as a bouquet of flowers, and another as a coffee cup.

What was special about the show was understanding what each artist saw as something deeply human. Immediately upon seeing the pieces, I wanted to know more about their lives. Why does their mind work that way? Is this the way they want to see the world? Is it what they wish were there? Did it come easily, this vision, or did they play with a dozen wrong ideas first? Is The Tower Show about dreams or hope, imagination or desire, whimsy or precision? The art asks questions about the artist. And of course, has us wondering what our own tower would look like. I know immediately that mine would be something that tried too hard to tell a story, that needed too many angles and wanted to fit too much in. There would be people sitting inside the water tower, there would be an argument or the hint of a love story. There would be another tower in the distance they were looking longingly at. I’d want speech bubbles and bits of a poem. I’d get too focused on the tiny people perched on the tower and forget all about the tower itself. Then I’d go write a novel about it because I am a terrible visual artist and I’d be so annoyed that my vision wouldn’t accurately come to life on canvas.

Then there’s my daughter, who is so literal that as a preschooler, when she did watercolors, she would diligently apply the colors in the order that they were laid out in the little water color box. She would not deviate. It was as if there was some implied rule embedded in the order of those little circles of paints and she was certainly not going to mess with it.

When we got home from The Tower Show, she painted the water tower on a tiny little piece of canvas. As I suspected, it was a literal representation, and beautiful, too. It was nothing I would have ever done.

She is the artist she is. I am the artist I am. She is willing to use the paints out of order now, and I know how to edit down my books over time, narrow their focus. But as I’m first working on my novels, they get bigger, more unwieldy, the ideas piling up. And ultimately she wants to paint something that already exists, not invent a new world. Loving her art— which I do— means learning to love the limitations of my own too. It means understanding those limitations to be a certain kind of strength.

I miss my daughter’s way of using the watercolors one by one. It was such a celebration of practicality. It was a story only she could tell.

I am learning to love my own unruly process too.

News

The third book in my Zoomi and Zoe series comes on this coming Tuesday, May 12th! In this one, Zoomi and Zoe go to camp together… and experience some serious friendship jealousy while they make star friendship bracelets and eat the camp classic, s’muchmuchsmores. This series is beautifully illustrated by Anne Appert and is great for both readalouds and independent reading. My three year old will happily listen to a few chapters a night. My eight year old enjoys reading these on her own. I think of the sweet spot as Kindergarten with the series having a lot of appeal for ages 4-8. They are deeply silly and the covers have GLITTER.

I have some upcoming events-

TOMORROW Friday, May 8th at 6pm I’ll be at the Park Slope Barnes and Noble in conversation with the fantastic EJ Dickson, whose non-fiction exploration of motherhood and its representations in pop culture is absolutely FANTASTIC. Just in time for Mother’s Day we’re going to be talking about motherhood in all its fraught, confusing, impossible versions.

Next weekend, I’ll be in Gaithersburg, Maryland at the Gaithersburg Literary Festival talking about THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY AUDEN GREENE. If you’re local, I’d love to see you there!

And of course, if you need a last minute gift for a mom in your life— mine has it right there in the title, People Magazine called it a “searing page-turner”, so what more do you need to know? If you’ve read the book, please do take a moment to review it on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads.

Also if you haven’t yet checked out my new podcast with Sara Zarr, this week is the one to listen to. We share some exciting emails we’ve been getting, and things get unexpected and hilarious.

Recommendations

For everyone in constant hair confusion, here’s a great wave spray I’ve been using to try to find some sort of space between naturally curly hair and fully straightened hair. I’ve had some great hair days with it!

I’m obsessed with this smoothie, which I make with some tweaks but is in fact exactly what I want after working out.

This incredible, breathless, beautiful YA novel, by one of my favorite writers/people.

It’s strange, to know you are in an especially sweet time, to know there is an alignment of the things you have always wanted and the particular ways those things have lined up and become their brightest selves.

The publication of Mothers and Other Strangers has been one of those especially sweet times. The book has gotten accolades and buzz I would have been too scared to dream of. Chosen as the Barnes and Noble April Book Club pick. Chosen as People Magazine’s Book of the Week. An interview in The Boston Globe. An essay at People. Starred reviews and promising sales and support from my publisher, support from booksellers, support from librarians and of course from readers.

These things are a zoom of excitement, reminding me of other big career moments. The Eventown review in the Times. Going to BEA for OCD Love Story. Going on tour for Rules for Stealing Stars.

But it’s different now, in part I think because of age. I can see it all, now, in ways that were harder to fully grasp in my 20s and 30s. The accomplishments are maybe bigger, too, but I really don’t think it’s that.

It’s how clear it all is.

On the playground, my younger daughter is running around with two little boys. She’s sunburned because we’ve been at the playground for eight hours and I haven’t yet taken on the spring and summer time task of adding sunscreen to my bag of goldfish and matchbox cars and chocolate chip banana bread from the coffee shop I am possibly too emotionally invested in and a change of clothes for all the many ways a toddler can render their clothing unwearable. There are moms on benches talking and when one of my closest neighborhood friends appears, she pitches my book to them, eventually running home to get extra copies she’d bought at the launch.

She’d tried to buy so many that the bookstore had to tell her she’d reached her limit.

At one book event there’s a book club attending and they are raucous, wonderful. They are eclectic in their ages but universal in their relaxed, easy way with one another. They remember one another’s favorite reads. They guess at who will like what. One woman tells me my book sounds wonderful. She hopes, she really really hopes, it doesn’t disappoint her. I love this comment, which is bare and unbothered by my response. I share her hope.

My cousin (in law) DMs me at 430 in the morning when she gets to a particular revelation that surprises her. Her joy is palpable. She wants this for me in a way that is unfettered. Happiness for others is so much more reachable these days, one of the things about my 40s that has surprised me. I feel it too— triumphant when a friend gets a new job hosting midday radio in her town; overjoyed to see another friend wearing an outfit that she clearly feels at home in— it doesn’t matter the scope of the accomplishment, we know, now, how much work it takes, how much commitment, to locate joy, to move forward, to be comfortable.

In Boston, I stop in the sweetest bookshop and they have my book on the big table in the center of the store, and the bookseller I talk to loves my recent middle grade, too. I buy a Make Way for Ducklings shirt for my youngest daughter. I ride the T and remember when I lived here. Later, childhood neighbors and carpool buddies come to my book event. They look exactly the same and I hope there will be a next time, where we get cocktails or coffee, and talk about teaching and kids and books and our parents because it feels so nice, to feel that old neighborhood feeling.

While I’m at the playground with my youngest, my oldest daughter plays in the Girl’s National Chess Tournament. I get updates from my husband, and we refresh the website that tells us who she’ll be playing next. It’s addictive, exciting, to witness the competition. Maybe I should rethink everything I have rejected about sports. She wins against opponents much more highly rated than she is and I think it is almost better than my book succeeding, to feel this kind of pride (almost).

On release day, my youngest daughter is sick with a fever and she lays on top of me the entire day. If I try to extract myself even briefly, she wails. Lately she is always wanting me close. So I stay there, and she dozes and I watch pictures of my book in big piles at bookstores of all sizes fill my feed, and it is not how I planned to spend the day but it is two things at once, mothering and authoring, and that’s what everything is, lately.

I’m at the American Dream Mall with my older daughter and nieces and brother and sister in law, and my older daughter shocks me when she joins her cousins on a very large roller coaster. She sprints away from us up the stairs— she doesn’t want to be left behind. Later, I’ll tell them all about the guy I went on a date with twenty years ago who spoke about himself in the third person. Hopefully, they’ll all remember the story years later, on their own awkward first dates. That’s the point of stories, anyway, that we’re never really alone.

In Rhode Island, I get dinner with an old college friend. I feel it for him too— waves of joy at things he has done, unexpected ways his life has come together. I write an essay for People and when it publishes, he remembers so many beats of the old story that he can correct other friends, who get it wrong. There is the sureness that I have been known, am known.

On the way to school drop off, moms let me know they read my book on the beach, on the train, at the pool during spring break. My childhood best friend texts me her thoughts. So does her mom. My kids’ teachers want copies, because they’ve heard from my daughters all about it. The older one gets it— sees the piles of books, goes into stores with me when I sign. She threatens to read it, because she can, as she says, read everything now. Luckily, she’s too sidelined by Sideways Stories from Wayside School and an American Girl book about a gymnast to actually go through with her threat. The younger one is working it out “who’s reading your book?” she asks, straining to imagine a world outside of ours, a book written for someone other than herself. When she sees my kids books, she beams, “you wrote me another book!” and that is true enough. But this one isn’t for her.

This one, really, was for me.

Or maybe for me, and every single friend I’ve ever had and the glory of that, the having had them, the having them still. Friendship is still a shock to me sometimes, that we get to fill our lives with these people we love and try to understand their lives and do it alongside them, when we can, as best we can. That we make light of heavy things and order mushroom tartines and cocktails or coffees and croissants and check in on how a new medication or job or baby or hairstyle is going. That’s it. That’s all I really need, actually.

In DC the bookstore is filled with people and the conversation is fun, roaming, exciting. In the middle, I find myself talking about that time I worked at a comedy club in Times Square that was kind of sort of a cover for a sex shop. I didn’t know I’d end up there, it’s never my plan to talk about sex shops, but there I was. Great conversation is like that. Being in a room of people nodding along and wanting you to succeed is like that. After, I get dinner with three women I have known a long time, and the laugher is deep, endless. I find myself remembering how that same laughter, from that same person’s dry, perfect humor, kept me afloat at twenty years old in ways I didn’t understand at the time but I do now.

This is what I wrote the book about. Friendship, and the way it weaves through time, the way it finds you when you need it, and the joy of finding it again, the same and changed. In some ways, that friend who makes me laugh so much is the only person that knows that exact twenty-year old, east village version of me, and at forty-three, that’s a pleasure, that’s a joy, that’s a secret to life or something.

When I’m teaching, one of my biggest pieces of advice is to make more of something. A student will write a scene about something they’ve deemed small— a slightly awkward interaction between two friends as they negotiate the planning of a third friend’s birthday party, let’s say. And I’ll write in the margins— make more of this! Make a mountain out of this molehill! Let it be big! Let it be everything, in this moment!

I was made for this work. Not every complicated part of it, not every step of the way. But I was made for the making it big. It’s all big, to me. Lately, it is all so very, very big.

And my job, my actual real job, is to show you why.

What incredible luck.

News

It was a thrilling release week for MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS! It was chosen as the Barnes and Noble April Book Club pick! It was chosen as People Magazine’s Book of the week, in which they called it “A searing page turner”! If you haven’t gotten it yet— I hope you will!

There are some more chances to see me— I’ll be at Gaithersburg Literary Festival on May 16th! I’ll be talking about my middle grade novel, THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY AUDEN GREENE.

I’ll also be at the Park Slope Barnes and Noble May 8th in at 630 pm in conversation with EJ Dickson , author of One Bad Mother!

I have a few more events coming up — one upstate in the summer, and one in Virginia next year. Details to follow, and hopefully more events to come!

If you have read MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS, or any of my books, it can help The Algorithm if you take a moment to give it a rating and review on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, or anywhere else. Thank you so much for taking the time!

Recommendations

I really love the honesty and vulnerability of this essay.

This book was structurally fascinating and a great audiobook companion on my recent travel.

I’m going to need a second color in these comfortable, cute heels.

My kids are finally asleep and my husband is out watching some sort of sport—basketball, I think?-- which means I’ve been given time to listen to Lindy West’s new memoir, Adult Braces. I’ve been waiting to listen, having always loved her work (if you haven’t read her takedown of Love, Actually, this is a huge oversight on your part and needs to be fixed immediately). I’ve been ensconced in The Discourse about the memoir, and I assumed I would find myself aligned with most people, as I am prone to being aligned with people. I like being aligned. It’s cozy.

And in some ways, sure, I am. Her husband’s email to the writer of a Slate profile about Lindy was extreme and reminded me, and everyone, of a dozen guys I’ve known and found challenging and frustrating and toxic. There are things about her marriage that make me uncomfortable. I hope she is okay. I want the best for Lindy, we all do, I think.

What I was struck by as I was reading, so much more than The Discourse, or even my personal thoughts on any of it, is the gift of her bravery, and the way the haters in particular, but everyone really, seems to take for granted what she gives us, by opening her life in such ways. In the age of AI, I guess what I am struck by so so much is that in being uniquely brave and vulnerable, Lindy West gives us what stories are meant to give us and what we take for granted—something to respond to. In all the vitriol and concern for Lindy (should I be calling her Ms. West? So many millennial feminists feel we know her, she is Lindy, she is someone who has shepherded us and shown us things for all our formative years. She has made us laugh), I almost feel like the point is being missed. We are allowed our responses because she is telling the story of herself, and in the wake of her realness, we get the opportunity to clarify how we feel about love and marriage and trust and betrayal and our bodies and the bodies of the people we love or envy or worry we are not enough like.

That is not nothing. It is, actually, everything. I have been in and out of therapy for years—currently, I’m out, and I’m sure eventually I’ll be back in. So much of therapy is the reckoning with past and present selves and trying to reach some new, different understanding than your previously held ones. This is hard work, and often, there is a wall, a plateau, an only so much you can do. But then there is a book, or a piece of art of any kind, and a different kind of reckoning can be shaken out, a new set of understandings can emerge.

The artist puts themselves out there to be criticized. But the gift of the work isn’t whether or not we like it, it is the opportunity to respond to it—with brains and hearts, the opportunity to get to know ourselves, the space to remember and rethink.

I am less interested, in some ways, in the juicy parts of Lindy’s latest memoir. I mean, I picked it up for that don’t get me wrong. But in the listening I am so struck by her observations of her emotional life, and I’m so moved by how imperfect and still undone she lets herself be on the page. And in falling in love with her for that, I can fall in love with that in me too.

Even I, a person with two fine arts degrees, forget that putting art into the world is not just an act of ego but one of courage, a thing not everyone is willing to do. It is an offering of connection, and sometimes the response will be brutal, but the reviewers, the readers voicing even their distaste are getting the opportunity to investigate why they didn’t like this or that part, why they judge or where they align. I don’t know. It’s all really obvious, but here I am just bowled over by her generosity and wishing that was being celebrated as much as anything else. There is an air of pity around the memoir, and again, I have maybe felt some portion of that—is she okay and why is this okay with her and what is going on in her relationships and the rest of it. But I don’t know. It also feels a little bit absurd, really, to pity someone with a generational courage to share the softest parts of herself, the least evolved, the tenderest, the parts I connect to the most, the places I can see my own questioning, unsure, out of body self.

I can’t say if she should stay or leave her marriage. But I can say that her work, her ability to open up, is spectacular, and there is so much more to admire, here, than there is to pity.

Lindy West does not owe us a perfect understanding, even, of what she is doing. She has already given something so much more meaningful and rare—an example of the struggle, an acknowledgment that even if you write a whole book about the thing you are going through, you still might not totally be right-side up about it all. We’re waiting for a tidier epiphany and I’m not sure one exists, really, in anyone’s life.

The day after I wrote the bulk of this essay, I emailed myself something to add onto it: what if no one really knows the key to life?

That was it. That was the whole email. Maybe we’ve been reading books wrong, thinking the authors know something solid and sure. But I think the work I’m drawn to is more about the investigation and the questioning, rather than the certainty. Really, really—what if no one knows the key to life? Not Lindy West, not anyone responding to Lindy West, not anyone at all, not even a little.

If you do know something certain, great, I guess? But I won’t be staying up late to read the story of the way you know everything, of the way you are sure. That kind of story won’t make me feel less alone. I would much rather find myself in the shared space of the ongoing shakiness of what it is to be a person, in the world.

I hope, I hope, I hope, that’s what my readers are looking for too.

Last weekend, my oldest daughter turned eight. She wore a ballgown, of course. We had a tea party and a bunch of kids watching a movie at our house, which turned into less of watching a movie when they all agreed to play Werewolf, which seems to be a sort of offshoot of Mafia, a game that inspired my current favorite reality TV show, The Traitors. So I was on board of course, although mostly the playing of this game amounted to arguing about how to play the game.

It reminded me of that time my friend (lightly!) punched me in the stomach because we disagreed about the rules of a game we were going to play at a slumber party. Or maybe I punched her. Hard to say. Either way, I stand by it. I’m a real stickler for rules of games that other people might perceive as “just for fun”.

Later, my daughter’s cousin and longtime best friend slept over in our living room, and it felt a little like passing some kind of a torch. The next day she and the friend got their ears pierced together, and there it was too, the ushering of my kid into the next phase of girlhood, the making of childhood memories, the way they sort of paper over my own, until these shared moments we both have, in different timelines, sort of collapse onto one another, their meaning made from the way they echo across decades.

Except— she is not the only one with a friend she met in preschool. She is not the sole keeper of friendships, and she is still untested, in her ability to hold onto and lovingly tend to longterm friendships into adulthood and, eventually, middle age (though I am optimistic that this will be a calling of hers, just as it has been for me)

I don’t remember who I got my ears pierced with, if anyone at all. I seem to remember being at the Natick Mall, upstairs at the stand by the Annie’s, where surely I would later get a pretzel. I think I was ten. I remember the sting, the heat of it. My daughter asked what my earrings looked like, and I couldn’t remember. Maybe just little gold balls? I don’t remember having a particular affinity for any kind of jewelry. There’s a picture of me in a choker with a black and white bead on it— homemade from a kind of clay that was very popular. Like so many details, the name of that kind of clay escapes me. Maybe it starts with an F?

But actually it’s fine, to not remember. I don’t have to. I have exactly one close friend from childhood, one from high school, a few from college, and then the post-college ones, themselves not even new anymore. There’s Anna, who is working on a cruise somewhere in maybe Europe right now, and she used to be my new friend, but according to my calculations, we met twenty-one years ago at a black and white themed party. I could have worn that old choker with the bead. She liked my shoes. I liked her smile.

I don’t have to remember what that special kind of clay is called, not because I will look it up online. I won’t. I will ask Dana, who always knows the sorts of things I forget. Not just the brands of craft supplies, but who I had for second grade, or the name of the friend who threw the best slumber parties. She is a keeper of history, hers, but mine too, and because they are entwined, my memories are safe. She’ll know who punched who. And she’ll find it just as funny as I do.

Julia, who I met in college, is the same, but with different categories. She won’t remember when it was we first started watching Drop Dead Fred or how it became a tradition to have a sleepover on December 23rd that involved watching Christmas movies. But she has a catalogue of people I dated and uncomfortable moments in our theatre training program, friendships that curdled and faded and hurt me, memories of what we ate at that vegan restaurant that used to be on Union Square that we went to even though I’m pretty sure none of us were vegan. If I’m unsure about 9/11 and whether our yoga teacher did, in fact, wheel a TV into our acting studio to watch the moments after the fallen towers, before we went out in a group, maybe holding hands, to navigate the dust and despair— she’ll be able to stabilize the memories, clarify them.

I could write a hundred odes to friendship. In some ways, I have, through books, and the almost-on-bookshelves debut adult novel most of all. But it’s impossible to actually capture what it is, to have the grounding of a shared history.

For complicated reasons, I have a tendency to doubt my own perception of things. I wonder if I’m remembering something wrong all the time, I’m doubting the facts of what happened. Of all the billions of things I get from these friendships, one of the biggest ones is a sense of reality. We lived through things together. I can verify truth in a firsthand way. My memories are made real, certain, because my friends, these cherished ones I’ve held onto, have been there with me.

In novels about friends, these memories have to break apart, the shared reality made complex and ill-fitting and divergent. But in my real life, even the divergences are valued information, a thing we can reconstruct, a puzzle we are sorting out together. Friendship is not just the act of holding the memories, but the conversation that happens around the recalling of them. We wonder aloud wait what did that guy say in class that made us really mad? and one friend remembers what exactly it was, and we recreate it, moment by moment— oh right, and then I said this, and then we went out to La Marg and got drunk and Tina or was it Kerry made that joke and then remember the Christmas tree in the dorm? Remember that one Mask class after Halloween, remember when I got a C in Mask for being on time too much, remember? remember? the heartbreak, the falling apart, the ways we recovered, how it colored our younger lives, how it maybe is still hanging around today in unexpected corners. Ghost hurts, ghost insecurities. We are detectives for one another, knowing why, maybe, we are so distraught over this one off-handed comment our parent made on the phone today, because in keeping each other’s memories, we are also able to offer explanation and evidence and logic. You are this way, because these things have happened. You feel this, because you have been here, and here and here. Don’t worry, I remember. I was there too.

This is what it is to be known, in the forever way. You get to be not a fragmented part of yourself, not even the current, more evolved part of yourself. You get to be your whole self, and still loved for it. God, what a gift.

I was writing another essay recently (more on that soon), and was looking through my emails to try to remember some details. I came across an email titled Not the Best Mass Email Ever. It was an announcement of my breakup with a guy who I would later go through another breakup with like a year or two later. It was, as were all emails from that early 2000s-ish time, absolutely humiliating to read. I was self-centered and too earnest, dramatic and pretentious.

And yet— there they came. My friends, offering to get coffee or a drink, saying how sorry they were, reminding me how much that guy actually sucked. I’m not sure I understood then, how lucky I was. But I see it now.

Because here they still are— so many of those same friends, laughing at the people we were, remembering what that time was like, filling in the gaps, the parts we’ve forgotten or pushed aside, the essential details that make it all make sense. That make us make sense.

And maybe it doesn’t matter, what that clay was called, that we made the beads with. But isn’t it glorious, that someone will remember with me, will know who was the best at it and who fought about it and why we loved it so much? And there in that reckoning, is love. Love, being, as it is, the careful considering of one another. The work of paying attention. The delight in one another’s most mundane moments. The caring about something so small that it doesn’t matter at all, except of course it does, because as any novelist will tell you, the details, the tiny parts, are what matter most of all. Are what make a life.

And here I am remembering the purple jacket I’m positive Julia had freshman year. How she sat in the second row of the bleachers in our acting studio. That she wore her hair in a ponytail. The name of her high school boyfriend. What dorm she lived in, and with who. Which scene she most hated working on in acting class. What she looked like when she changed her mind about any matter of things, how it hurt, to realize you wanted something different than you thought. And here I am, knowing that matters.

News

It is really getting so close, the release of my adult debut novel! There is absolutely some more news to come, but right now there’s no news I can share, except a reminder to preorder, as preorders help the success of a book SO MUCH, and also to re-share the information about my upcoming TOUR, now updated with some exciting in-conversation partners! I really do hope to see you all there— whether it’s here in NYC (I’ll be at the MONTAGUE location of Books are Magic) or on the road!

I am thrilled to share that author and pal Sara Zarr approached me about what is sort of a spin-off of her really wonderful podcast, This Creative Life. She wanted to keep talking about writing and process and how it all intersects with our regular lives and how we make it work, but with a cohost to have a regular, ongoing conversation with. Turns out, I really wanted this too! The off-shoot podcast is called Still Writing, and I hope you’ll give it a listen— Sara is one of the people with whom I most like talking about writing (and also pop culture and books and family dynamics, amongst other things), and having a twice a month chat about what we’re working on and why we’re working on it and most importantly how we are managing to work on it has already been a lovely addition to my creative life. I think it will appeal to writers at all stages of career, and anyone wondering how one pursues a creative life while also living a regular life. The first episode is up now wherever you listen to podcasts! And if you are somehow unfamiliar with Sara Zarr’s incredible scope of work, this YA and this middle grade are not only two of my favorites from her, but two of my all time favorites in their respective genres.

Recommendations

Anyone who knows me knows I am a longtime Bachelor fan, although fan is sort of the wrong word. I would now say I am a fan of Bachelor podcasts, like this one, and therefore watch the show so that I can continue imagining myself in conversation with the hosts of these beloved podcasts, rather than actually enjoying the show itself. There’s a new podcast out, not a recap show, but what is more like a true crime podcast covering a paternity scandal that took over one former lead’s life for a period of time. I’m really captivated so far, and I think it holds up whether or not you are a Bachelor person.

My older daughter recently read a book that she said I simply HAD to read, so of course I did. Written by the author of one of my personal favorite graphic novels, PLAIN JANE AND THE MERMAID is really exceptional— unique and sad and haunting and gripping. I was joking with students at a recent school visit that the one thing I haven’t done yet is graphic novels, and gosh do I love them. Maybe someday!!

Ever feel the need to really, really impressive an eight year old? I often do, and for my older daughter’s 8th birthday I wanted to make a custom word search for her and her friends do do at the tea party. It turns out this was incredibly easy— so easy that I googled to make sure this website is not powered by AI. Good news, it doesn’t appear to be! It is just a very cool thing a human did. It was a huge hit, my daughter is still talking about hers.

One other thing I used to add some pizazz to the tea party was this packet of games from Etsy that was great. I think the Bingo style game was especially fun, and made kids who didn’t know each other interact a lot as an extra bonus!

Midwest Immigration Bond Fund

Community Aid Network MN

Central Area Neighborhood Development

In one of the biggest career years of my life, I have been thinking a lot about failure.

I don’t like that word. So maybe not failure. I have been thinking about the way success is non-linear and disappointments are painful but not actually predictive. Which is impossible to believe in the moment, where a let down feels like a destiny, a vision of the way things will always be, a verification of the impossibility of your dreams coming true.

In some ways, when I am asked about my journey to becoming a writer, the story is straightforward. A lifelong bookworm. A love of writing starting preternaturally early, by third grade filling up journals with thoughts and feelings and a long and rambling series on the people who I imagined living inside my body, making things work. This was a spirited but scientifically misguided years-long project that is at once embarrassing and also exactly who I have always been. Whimsical. Scientifically questionable. Idea heavy. Uninterested in the exact stipulations of reality.

In this story, I minor in creative writing in college while earning my fancy BFA in Theatre, and then I take an internship at a literary agency while I am in the process of exiting my actor life. Doors open. Certainty takes hold. I am a writer, as I have always been, but now officially so, signing my first book deal before I turned 30.

But did you know (no, you wouldn’t), that I was never once published in my high school’s literary journal? The fact of this was fraught. I remember a poem written by someone I was locked into a kind of rivalry with getting chosen, her work getting picked over and over, and mine getting dismissed. She was profound and beautiful and worthy. I was a silly girl with a journal and a mean boyfriend.

In college, one had to apply to creative writing courses, and I struggled to be accepted into the fiction classes. I was eventually waitlisted in a fiction class taught by a novelist who had a serious, thoughtful style. Eventually, I was let in right before the course began because someone better than me dropped out, and I was sure everyone knew I hadn’t actually been admitted at the right time, and was, on some level, a categorically lesser writer. The course started out rocky. My subject matter didn’t seem to align with my classmates’ and I could tell my work had something floral and overwrought about it that made it seem unserious and unworthy.

I was twenty, and had read The Beauty Myth (a book that meant so much to me at the time but whose meaning has been obscured in more recent years due to the author’s viewpoints and methodology). I was experiencing near hourly sexual harassment walking down the street, much of which was directed at an interest in verifying my age, which seemed to mystify strangers— some combination of my body type and energy seemed to indicate I was confusingly straddling an awkward line where I could have been fifteen or twenty-five and this seemed to require near constant clarifications and commentary from random men. I was in the process of moving on from my high school boyfriend and wondering what dating in New York City might look like. I was entering an industry largely centered on the way people looked— and what is the casting process for a young woman if not a reckoning with your place in the world by way of the symmetry of your face and the shape of your body.

I wrote a story about the way it felt to exist in my body in the world, and a sort of cyclone of shame and pride and unease that I was finding it difficult to navigate. The class was filled with young men, their applications I suppose being the ones the professor understood more readily, their perspectives being the ones I was trying to live up to. I felt so silly, trying to be deep in a room I had only barely been allowed into.

When the story was workshopped, there was the usual criticism about aspects of my writing that felt undeveloped and immature. There were questions about plot beats and the point of the story and the forward momentum. There was confusion, about why the character felt so many conflicting things, and if that was allowed.

Near the end of the workshop, a guy who I remember as being t-shirted and curly haired spoke. “This really made me think,” he said. It was a different kind of comment than everyone else was giving. “I hadn’t thought about any of this, and it really is blowing my mind a little. I feel like I’m understanding something new and I feel sort of uncomfortable about it, but in I think a good way.”

On some level, that is the moment I felt maybe I could be a writer.

Later, the professor had end of semester meetings with all of us. He sat down with me in his office, and his face looked the same as the guy in class. Thoughtful. Sort of baffled. Apologetic. “You know,” he said. “I know I didn’t let you into the class originally. I was wrong. I was really wrong.”

This is not a perfect story. In my academic career there were other moments of being dismissed and rejected and brushed aside and told no. In my publishing career too, of course. It is not linear. It is not just a climb uphill to the summit. It’s an ongoing… let’s call it an adventure because I am prone to glass-half-full-ism. It’s also not a perfect story because I sort of hate that the two people who gave me such deep and meaningful validation were men, and I have been working my whole life to disinvest in the belief that I need validation from men to be taken seriously.

Still. These were two men whose minds were willing to be changed, and I feel such gratitude and awe for that, such excitement, that minds can be changed, that words can do that changing, that things aren’t all stagnant and that story can prove it. In that writing class that I was only barely allowed into, I came to understand that the work is not to tell a perfect story, or at least that is not the work that interests me. The work that interests me is to tell a story that shifts someone’s thinking, that shakes up someone’s notions, that unlocks some new path for the reader to travel down.

There’s sometimes a question about an ideal reader. And I’ve answered that question different ways over the years— myself, at eleven is often the answer. A kid who needs honesty. My own daughters. My best friend. Myself, today.

But another answer is that I’m writing for that college kid, in his t-shirt and his unsettled face, his rumpled hair, his way of huddling over a printed out manuscript. I am writing for him, for the way he let his mind be changed, and the hope that he kept on his investigations into what it was, to be not-him. How beautiful, to be open to change. How unusual, to say it out loud.

How powerful, to prove someone wrong.

I hope you love my books, yes, of course.

But I hope you think something different, after you read them. I hope they change your mind.

And okay, fine, I hope they change my high school literary journal’s mind too.

NEWS

Exciting news for my adult debut novel, MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS keeps on pouring in!

MOTHERS was chosen as a Buzz Books Selection with Publisher’s Marketplace for Spring/Summer!

Booklist reviewed the book and gave it a star!

My most recent middle grade novel, THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY AUDEN GREENE is now officially out in the world, and hopefully finding its readers! If you have a reader in your life who is 9-14 years old, consider grabbing them (or yourself!) a copy! I will be at Gaithersburg Book Festival in May to talk about it and meet readers!

If you have even younger readers in your life, my ZOOMI AND ZOE series has a third book coming out in May, and just in time for summer vacation Zoomi and Zoe go to camp together. It’s more wackiness, this time looking at some friendship jealousy. At the very least, go check out this ADORABLE cover, by Anne Appert.

On top of Gaithersburg, I have some big school visits this spring. If you’d ever like me to come to your school, please reach out— I do have some openings, and I do presentations for grades K-12.

And here’s your reminder of my tour for MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS, where I’ll be headed to Brooklyn, Boston, And DC. I’d love to see all of you there!

RECOMENDATIONS

I read and truly could not put down this book, which is about a lot of things, but I resonated so strongly with the depiction of a toxic/abusive relationship and the incredible power of friendship, and how life saving it really is.

As a lifelong Counting Crows fan, I really loved the recent documentary about them, which is also very much about fame and mental health and made me fall in love all over again. Essay pending! I also really enjoyed this ranking of their songs, which brought me back and again, just validated and clarified their artistry and importance to me.

Lastly, I think I have recommended this podcast before, but they did a retrospective on Friends, looking at the show through a variety of thematic lenses, and they just so brilliantly discuss and respect pop culture in a way I adore. The series is, perfectly, called Friends Through a Lens.

CHECKING IN ON MY ONE POEM A DAY FOR 2026 CHALLENGE

I am really sticking with this! I don’t get to the poems every day, but I certainly do most days, and sometimes that means scribbling something down in 30 seconds before bed, but that still counts.

Here’s one I like

January 9, 2026

Yes
this is a poem about that time
in college
when
you came to my birthday party
glands swollen from
strep
 
						did you think I’d forget?

and also
that we now rock our babies to sleep
at the same too late part of the night
miles away from one another

unslept and
in love with their littleness their
separate sillinesses

you are still
now
the person I am most sure understands the cozy torture
of bedtime
of getting the baby to sleep
or the person who best knows how it feels
for me
how it is particular and also
mundane
how it is
somehow
exactly the same as the way it feels for you
								or at least that it’s okay
								to tell myself that it’s the same for you
								you know how I hate to feel
								alone

this is a poem about best friends.

Have a good weekend, all, and please do donate at the links above, or to your favorite fascism fighting and community supporting organization.

Stay warm!

My ponderings about lightly magical middle grade and me have been bubbling up again, as my oldest daughter just starts to stick her toe into middle grade fiction. I have been, so far, unsuccessful at convincing her to do read-alouds of my favorites, especially Mandy, which is my long time favorite and which I bought a first edition of when I was pregnant with her. For reasons I’ll never understand, she’ll read fiction on her own but wants to spend her read-aloud time with me reading non-fiction about the American Revolution and the Thai cave rescue and the Salem Witch Trials.

A stark believer in fiction and whimsey, her interest in things like facts is hard to manage, and possibly the only part of her I don’t relate to at all. I’m your girl if you want to create an imaginary world. I am extremely not your girl for, say, trivia night.

And while I wish she wanted me to read Bridge to Terebithia to her, I think I also love that we approach reading for different reasons. I want a place to escape to and a place to be understood. She wants a place to learn and gather information, to put the world into some greater context.

I’m thinking about these reasons for reading as I’ve reached the One Week Until Release day for my next (6th?) middle grade novel. I’m thinking about the way maybe the best books, or at least the books I aspire to write, do a bit of both. Offer escape and whimsey and emotional understanding and give some kind of greater, factual context to the world. I’ve been thinking about my first middle-grade novel, in this context as well, not just because it’s been ten years but because I’ve returned, in The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene, to the topic of a mother struggling with alcoholism, which was also a large part of Rules for Stealing Stars.

I’ve made a bit of a habit of writing for readers aged 8-12 about things that sometimes people don’t want to talk to kids aged 8-12 about. There’s times I wish maybe I’d chosen some other, less fraught, more commercial space for myself, but at other moments— like right now, I’m excited to carve out a little literary pocket of understanding. There’s write what you know, of course, and also write what you believe in, and I do have a heavy belief that kids are ready to know about things like addiction by age eight, and that there’s nothing inherently dangerous about writing stories about realities that many, many kids are actually living in.

It’s a funny thing, the pushback to letting a kid read a book that features an alcoholic parent. In real life we are not shielding kids from alcohol itself— 8 year olds know about beer and wine and cocktails. They see grownups consume alcohol, they pass by bars, they spend time in restaurants where people are drinking, they go to family parties, they see the insides of their refrigerators. It seems to be widely accepted that it is fine for a kid of any age to know about the existence of alcohol. They also all more or less know alcohol is not for kids but is for grownups.

So why is it, exactly, that we are straining so hard to not answer any sort of follow-up?

I think about it a lot, and I suspect it has something to do with the idea of childhood innocence, and wanting to be in some way in control of it. The existence of alcoholism means that something that seems normal— adults having wine at dinner— can have a dark underside. And if something that normal can have something bad lurking underneath it, what else upsetting and heartbreaking and painful is traipsing around the most average bits and pieces of our world?

I mean, we all know the answer to this. We all live in the world. Kind of a lot, actually!

Still I understand the impulse to hide that from kids, while I also feel absolutely positive that kids aged 8-12 (and younger) know, and have experienced, that things that are normal and lovely can have difficult, scary, unsettling, wrong sides to them. And that actually our job as the grownups who more deeply know this isn’t to shield them from this but to give them some sort of path to a hopeful place, to let them know that dark underside is there but that there are ways to navigate it, ways to protect yourself within it, ways to not get swallowed up by it.

But my books aren’t lessons and The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene didn’t start as a book about having a family in crisis. It started as a story about a girl in the real world switching places with a girl in a fairy tale world. And when the girl in the fairy tale world was asked to fight dragons, I knew the girl in the real world would need to fight her own kind of dragons, too. And alcoholism is a dragon I understand.

We accept that kids love fairy tales and stories about chosen ones and saving kingdoms or whole worlds. Kids like superheroes and princesses and young characters with unexpected magical powers that can change everything. I think maybe it’s because so many of us, as kids, are asked to do things that feel outsized, that feel too hard for a kid, that feel too big for childhood, that are exceptional, or even just hard in a big way. We put these kids through active shooter drills. They went through Covid. They hear a narrative about how saving the environment is actually up to them, now. They hear snippets of the news. And that’s just the stuff that’s happening in the world at large, let alone in their own homes.

We’re always back to this essential split in worldview. We protect kids from some Ideas while refusing to protect them from guns. And then speaking about it is considered, somehow political.

So yes, I think it’s wonderful to give kids the outlet to explore the feeling of doing the impossible when you are just ten years old through something fun and zany and magical and unreal. I think it makes sense that they get superheroes and princesses and incredible feats of strength and power.

But I’m more interested in validating that maybe, actually, saving the world— or saving a family— isn’t a kid’s job.

The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene isn’t, actually, a book about alcohol, in spite of what I know some grownups will worry about. It is a book about turning twelve, and being told twelve is old enough to save a kingdom and to save a family. It is a book about watching your friends grow up, and trying to stay in childhood just a few moments longer. It’s about a friendship breaking apart, it’s about getting the lead role in the school musical, it’s about getting a chance to try being someone else, it’s about understanding the challenging things everyone is up against, and it’s about writing a fantastical world into a diary and hoping it comes to life… then realizing maybe you shouldn’t have hoped so hard for that after all.

And yes, okay, it’s a book about what it feels like to have a parent in crisis when you are too young to fix it but people think maybe you should be able to fix it. And actually, maybe surprising some of those people who don’t want their kids reading my books, it is a book that is adamant and passionate and absolutely certain that a kid shouldn’t be asked to do the saving of kingdoms or families. Acknowledging the existence of addiction isn’t the same as telling a kid to solve it. Actually, as the author, that’s kind of my job. I write the ending. I show the way out, I give a path and a map and way for the characters to move through the story. I am not leaving it up to a kid to solve the problems in the kingdom of Sorrowfeld. I’m leaving it up to me.

And I don’t really know the way out either, but I know, at least, where to look for hope while the work goes on and on.

It’s a work of fiction and escape, and also a book that is the truth, that puts the facts of the world into context (I hope), and so maybe my daughter and I are both right, about what a book is for.

News

• As mentioned above, my next middle grade novel is out NEXT WEEK, January 13th, and I’m so proud of it. It’s an adventure story and a fairy tale and a book about theatre kids and a book about friendship and a book about a family navigating addiction, written with young readers in mind. If you loved Rules for Stealing Stars back in the day, I know this one is for you too. I hope you’ll check it out, or gift it to a kid in your life.

• Thrillingly, the book got its SECOND STARRED REVIEW! School Library Journal says: “Haydu’s compelling tale of friendship, family trauma, and magic is an emotional and beautifully crafted story. The plot is utterly immersive, and readers come to understand that both girls must face their distinct dragons in their own ways. An emotionally rich narrative of two girls facing tremendous stakes and learning how to trust themselves even in the chaos; a must-read.”

  A must read!!!!

• Speaking of stars, my debut adult novel also received its first review, and it was also a STAR! PW calls Mothers and Other Strangers a “wonderful adult debut” and ays “Haydu expertly seeds the narrative with clues… and stacks the plot with surprises. It’s a beautiful tale of complicated friendships.” a beautiful tale!!!

• Mothers and Other Strangers also received another incredible blurb from an author I love. Olivia Muenter (Such a Bad Influence and the upcoming Little One) says: “A stunning portrait of friendship and motherhood. One of the most tender and gorgeously written books I've read in a long time. MOTHERS & OTHER STRANGERS is spectacular.”

Recommendations

• okay, I know I just recommended sweater pants, but actually now THESE are the most comfortable thing I own/have ever owned, they’re perfect I love them so much.

• I have been absolutely loving Natalie Serber’s Substack, especially this incredible essay.

• Who would I be if I were not a person who is interested in both poetry and reality TV? For reality TV, I am going to absolutely have to recommend this unhinged show which I gulped down so fast.

And for poetry? A new segment:

Checking in on my One Poem a Day for 2026 Goal.

I mentioned in my last newsletter I was setting a goal to write a poem every day in 2026. I actually got inspired and started on December 7th, and in one month have written 26 poems, mostly all terrible. I am loving it. I am seeing the potential for poetry in everything. As part of my challenge I’ll share some here every newsletter so you can see what writing a poem a day looks like and what there is to notice.

December 22, 2025

one middle school girl says to another
middle school girl
how are your grandparents?

do they know
how badly
I needed something to
believe in?

December 29, 2025

I almost forgot
about the birds squawking and
flying in a V
while I got coffee
and the girls
in awe
at the sound and
swish of them
at the shape in the
sky
and those two birds
lagging
behind—

“at least they have each other” my older one said
her sweetness so 
true so
tragic

Happy 2026 all!

Please take a moment to preorder my 2026 books at the links above!

And remember to save the dates for my Mothers and Other Strangers tour!

March 31st, 7pm, Books Are Magic, Brooklyn

April 8th, 7pm, Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA

April 14th, 7pm East City Bookshop, Washington DC

It is, I suspect, unsurprising, that I was that girl reading and writing poetry in high school. I was a Sylvia Plath girl, of course, and also e.e. cummings and Rumi, and, I’m un-embarassed to add, Jewel. I copied these poems into my journals, and wrote my own. I held onto slivers of them so tightly they became identity. I brought Sylvia Plath’s unabridged diaries to college. I used my single most favorite line of poetry, from the poem Elm, as a chant in a particularly emotionally evocative exercise early in my acting training. I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

I think a lot about getting a tattoo and all I can ever think to get is that bit of poetry, and my daughters’ early drawings of people. Maybe there is a tattoo artist that can wrap that all into one. I am accepting suggestions and recommendations.

So, back to 2024. When I wrote those poems I had the idea to write a poem every week and I began a document called 52 poems. I am sorry to say that document has twelve poems in it. It was not, apparently, the right time to take on the meditative and emotionally connected work of weekly poetry writing.

Now it is the end of 2025, a year the began with my adult novel finding an incredible home with Sally Kim at Little, Brown and Trump getting sworn into office again while enacting devastating and harmful policies. These things happened at roughly the exact same time, and so it is that the year has been threaded with joy and despair, the way, I guess, every year is on some level. I went to the North Fork to celebrate my birthday and Chicago to see my cousin and bring my daughter to the Girl’s National Chess Tournament. I went to Boston to see family a few times and Cape Cod with friends where we watched fireworks from an empty golf course and had drinks at the beach after the kids— properly popsicled and chlorine-haired—went to sleep. I went to Puerto Rico where we hiked on slippery rocks and played ping pong and my youngest daughter experimented with how spectacularly she could disrupt our sleep. I went to Nashville to do the best thrift store shopping of my life with my friend and upstate and Pennsylvania for things like saunas and cheese plates and deer and wine.

I read deeply, I donated relentlessly, I voted, I struggled to understand the social dynamics of seven year olds, I had weekly coffees, I spent hours at the playground. I accidentally communicated to a hair stylist that I wanted all my hair cut off, but that wasn’t quite what I meant. I watched soccer games in Prospect Park and went to toddler art classes where we made masterpieces out of shaving cream and stick-on-jewels. I went to the library so many times I couldn’t begin to count, lugging graphic novels and books about child prodigies for a project I’m working on that might end up having nothing to do with child prodigies after all, because what if it’s really more of a love story. In between library trips I got to talk to librarians about my adult novel and it was a special kind of shimmery thrill. I read to first and second graders from my chapter books, making sure to always read the chapter with the fart jokes. I re-read for the millionth (and final) time my upcoming middle grade novel and felt proud of the story, which I wrote in some kind of trance because I came up with the idea when I was newly post-partum and the books I come up with when I am newly post-partum are often both some of my favorites and also the ones that feel the most like someone else wrote them, someone I like very much and am a little bit impressed by. I ate at a favorite restaurant that is closing and I group-texted about perimenopause and what book I had just finished and voice-noted about things that were too complicated to text. I did not, this year, finish a draft of a book, but I worked hard on a few and maybe 2026 is the year of finishing what I’ve begun. I tried to lower my cholesterol and then avoided the bloodwork to find out if I actually did. I filled the frames that have been empty on my kitchen wall for eight years. They were empty on purpose, a design decision that was whimsical and fun but I suddenly wanted to have my children’s artwork on my wall instead of just empty circles and squares. I read forty books and might squeeze in one or two more. I worried existentially, monumentally, and also about off-handed things I said to strangers.

But again, I have to make clear, I did not write much poetry.

Maybe I do better when I announce things to the world. Or, more accurately to the people who read this newsletter. Maybe I needed a bigger goal than weekly poetry, because weeks go by slow or fast depending on so many things like whether or not my children are demanding too many snacks and if I have had time to go to hot yoga or if I have a new sweater that makes me truly and deeply happy or whether I am able to find the amount of writing time I really and truly need. Weeks take on different shapes, depending on what I see in the news about ICE or food stamps, and what I have figured out I can do that might have some sort of positive effect in the world and whether my kids are happy or sleeping well or are suddenly obsessed with Monopoly, friendship bracelets, cutting big pieces of paper into tiny pieces of paper.

So in 2026 I am going to strive to write a poem every day. This is a terrible idea, except that I think a poem can be three words, if I need it to be. Also we’re all working on self-compassion these days, I think, so if I fail it will be a great opportunity to practice that.

A poem can be a meditation, if you look at it through the right sort of light. And I know meditation works because it lowered my numbers when I had gestational diabetes, but I have not been able to convince myself to meditate ever since I delivered my youngest daughter and stopped having to take my blood four times a day. But I like poetry more than I like that Scottish guy who does the meditations on that app everyone uses, so surely I can do it?

I think what I’m trying to say is that I am in need of distilling a great deal of information and agony and joy and hope and terror and pride and mundanity into something small and holdable and mine. And poetry is, I’m pretty sure, the only way to do that.

I’m forty-two. Maybe writing a poem every day for a year is my mid-life crisis. Maybe I’ll give up and buy a porsche or something. I’d have to re-learn how to drive, though, and that seems unlikely and possibly dangerous. So poetry it is. Wish me luck. I’ll try to share some here. I would welcome friends on this journey with me, with their own poetry goals. Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Send me yours. Let’s poem through the year to figure it all out.

NEWS

Oh there is so much! Let’s break it down by book!

*MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS has been getting incredible blurbs from some of my very favorite authors.

If you haven’t read books by these authors, please fix that immediately. They are all compassionate, heart-forward, exciting, and beautiful writers that I’m honored have read my work.

I also want to announce I am going on tour in the spring! As of now, I will be talking about MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS in the following places:

Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, NY, March 31st

Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA, April 8th

East City Bookshop, Washington DC, April 14th

It would mean the absolute world to me to see you at these events. Bring your friends! Bring your family! Bring, most of all, your book club!

Speaking of book clubs— do you have one? I’d love to talk to you about your book club (or your sister’s book club or your friend’s book club or a book club you have thought about starting but haven’t yet). As early readers start to leave reviews, one of the first things many of them are saying is that MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS is the perfect book club read. If your book club preorders some copies of the book, I’d love to zoom in (or stop in if you’re local) and answer questions and chat about mothers, daughters, best friends, MLMs, art, and dollhouses.

*The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Green

I’ll be traveling for my next middle grade novel, out January 13th as well! I’ll be at Gaithersburg Book Festival on May 16th. I’ve been to this event before and it’s a lot of fun, so I’d love to see you there!

Reviews are starting to come in, and the very first one was a coveted STARRED REVIEW from Kirkus:

“Even antagonistic characters are given nuance. Both girls find their way through their problems with courage, compassion, and creativity. The parallels between the story arcs shine, lending authenticity even to the most fantastical elements and adding emotional weight as the girls, who are cued white, grapple with the destructive aspects of grief and expectations. The ending emphasizes heart and understanding. Come for the fun, magical premise; stay for the hopeful, beautiful story”

Publisher’s Weekly also gave it a wonderful review:

“Haydu (The Widely Unknown Myth of Apple & Dorothy) tackles a bevy of complicated subjects involving substance reliance and peer pressure as the characters search for the strength to stand up for themselves. Fantastical, high-adrenaline action sequences sow fun throughout and juxtapose the weighty themes.”

It was also chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, which is an extra exciting thing because it means it will be available in many libraries!

It doesn’t come out until after the holidays, but I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it, maybe as a little surprise for a kid who feels blue in mid-January when all the holiday hoopla is done?

* Zoomi and Zoe

It was SUCH a happy surprise to find Zoomi and Zoe on School Library Journal’s Best of 2025 list! There is a third Zoomi and Zoe coming out in May, and if you haven’t started this zany little series yet, might I suggest ordering the first two as a present for the 4-8 year old in your life, and pre-ordering number 3, which takes place at camp, coming out just in time for summer? These were pitched as Princess in Black meets Monsters Inc., and I really found my silly side in this series.

Recommendations

• I am absolutely obsessed with these cozy sweater pants, which are cute enough to wear outside the house for drop off or grabbing coffee or really anything you’re doing out and about while also being the number one thing I want to hang out at home in.

• It’s soup season! This one’s my new fave.

• Everyone’s reading it, and for good reason. This is a top book of the year for me, a sort of perfect read in my opinion, a crowd pleaser, delicately and heartfully and just beautifully done, a really special read I can’t recommend enough.

• And for the non-fiction loving kid in your life, my non-fiction loving kid is super into this excellent series, which takes on topics that kids are drawn to and unpacks them in ways that are fun and captivating. We started with this one.

• Lastly, my niece came to visit with this card game and for some reason I absolutely love it? It’s math-y and silly and sort of hard to parse at first but then just totally satisfying and fun and addictive.

Lastly!

I only want one thing for Christmas this year, and that is for my 2026 books to find their readers. Pre-orders HUGELY help authors not just by adding to sales, but also by signaling to publishers and booksellers that these books are eagerly anticipated and ready to soar. I hope you’ll use the preorder links above and help me get the word out!

Have a wonderful holiday season, whatever that looks like, and most of all I hope it is absolutely filled to the brim with books!

See you in 2026!

Most obvious, of course, are the piles of kid’s books. The board books that say you no longer have a tiny baby or toddler. The mountain of Bob books that indicate your child is now reading more on their own. Piles of certain series that speak to the way kids go through intense— and sometimes fleeting— phases.

My younger kid is in just such a phase, and that phase is Arthur. This phase has been prolonged, and has no limits when it comes to medium— she loves the TV show. She loves the podcast. She loves her Arthur pajamas. And she loves Arthur books. So when I came across the pile of books yesterday, and saw two Arthur ones sitting on top, I had no choice but to bring them home. They were not too battered, only moderately dated, and in spite of us having more books than you’d think could fit inside a New York City apartment, I knew she would light up at the sight of them.

This was true. She immediately started talking about reading them for bedtime, which we did, and I know she will ask for them again tonight, tomorrow night, and for many nights, until something else crosses her path that gives her that same oh this is just right for me feeling.

What I was less prepared for was what she asked for when the lights were off and I was rocking her to sleep. (This is not a parenting advice newsletter. I am rocking my three year old to sleep still. She’s a BABY, okay? A literal baby! Please go elsewhere for your toddler sleep tips).

“Tell me the story of bringing me books,” she said.

I am a professional storyteller. The story of bringing home books was not going to be my best work, but I gave it a shot. Instinctually I added conflict— I had no purse, where would I put the books?— but I’m not sure how necessary that was for her. My youngest daughter likes to hear her joy retold to her in story form. For her, story is a way to relive what makes her happy, to relax into it, to hang onto it just a little longer.

Long time readers may remember that this is not the role story played for my older daughter, when she was approximately this age. My older daughter likes stories where we can share in shame and sadness, where she can be decidedly not alone with the things that make her feel worst. She wants to know the stories of my bad days, my friendship conflicts, my disappointments. When she was in pre-k I was once greeted by her teacher, “Oh I heard all about how you didn’t get cast as Simba in the Lion King at camp when you were eleven.” My oldest daughter loved that story, every time I Just Can’t Wait to be King came on, she’d look at me, knowingly. “You never got to sing this,” she’d say. We’d feel the pain of that loss together.

It has to be said, I still sing the hell out of that song.

My youngest daughter, though, has me tell the story of going to Coney Island, her playdate at her best friend’s house, scooting at the playground, coming home to two new Arthur books.

Every reader is different in this way. And maybe every writer too. I can say, though, that I am partial not to a happy or a sad story, but to the way these two types of stories wind around each other. I am a believer in the truth of both the shame and the joy, the heartbreak and the tiny delights. It’s so funny that my daughters so perfectly divide what I believe makes a perfect story— a deep excavation of the things that hurt us, and a careful revealing of the ordinary beauty of living through it anyway.

I am fascinated by the way they have that singular focus, when to me the two sides are so precisely entwined, but maybe that is only the wisdom of living past the ages of three and seven. I can’t help myself— when I tell the story of not getting to play Simba in the Lion King, I want her to also know that the same director who robbed me of my star turn also had us do a beautiful rendition of Dead Man’s Hill by the Indigo Girls at another camp performance. I want her to hear the song, I want her to understand the way it felt to be allowed to sing something dark and grownup and haunting.

And when I tell the younger one the story of finding the Arthur books, I let her know that for a moment I almost didn’t get them. I picked them up, then put them down, walked halfway down the block, thinking they weren’t necessary, they were annoying, we didn’t need them. Then I turned back around. That I had to choose the joy, I had to go out of my way to remember to lean into it. I want her to know how easy it is to let it pass you by.

It is this way in my books, too. I let the line between happiness and heartbreak be narrow, and maybe the reader never knows exactly what side of it they’re on, in any moment, or which side of it the story itself will land on.

Neither, I think is the answer. Both.

In my upcoming adult debut novel, I think I am doing a dance back and forth over that line the entire time. Things are glorious. They are broken. They are idyllic. They are shattering. It is a story about family and friendship— mothers and daughters and best, best pals. I don’t know any other way to write any of those things, except as a leap back and forth over that little line that separates the ways we are lifted up and let down, the ongoing reckoning between hope and pain, the wondering which will win out, the scale that simply will not balance, the map I can’t ever seem to accurately read.

Later today, I will tell the story of the Arthur books again. And tomorrow morning, I might be called upon to tell the story of the time my friends all got invited to a party that I didn’t get invited to. Both stories will be true.

But the truest stories, I think, are the ones that have both— crushing loneliness and surprise gifts. Arthur books and missing party invitations. How lucky I am, to be asked, constantly, to remember both.

How To Support My Work

• I have a few books available for preorder! It would mean the absolute world to me if you’d take a moment to preorder one or both. Preorders can really impact the reach of a book, and I would love to see my adult debut novel, MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS, reach lots and lots of readers. If you like this newsletter, I think you will also like the book. And it would be a great pick for a book club, or just a buddy read with a friend.

• My other book available for preorder is my next middle grade novel, THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY AUDEN GREENE. I wrote a book pitched as “fairy tale Freaky Friday” before I even knew my beloved Freaky Friday was going to have a serious MOMENT because of the long awaited sequel hitting theaters. If you have an 9-13 year old reader in your life who loved that movie, still holds a candle for anything with princesses and dragons, or just wants a good story, this one’s for them.

• Lastly, for your 4-8 year old, there are now *two* books available in my early chapter books series, ZOOMI AND ZOE. The newest one is perfect for any kid who has a new sibling entering their life… or just likes some silliness. Think Princess in Black meets Monsters, Inc. With some of the cutest illustrations you’ll ever see.

Recommendations

• I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS BOOK. It was pitched as Love Island meets Lord of the Flies which I think is exactly right, and if you watched any amount of reality TV or are always waiting for a book to make you feel that feeling you felt when you first read Lord of the Flies, this is your book. It made me so stressed out, I could not put it down, it will break a reading slump, and it’s a really unusual, juicy read.

• If I have not previously recommended this podcast, especially it’s delightful and ultimately cerebral— nearly academic!- look at Sex and the City, then I apologize for not getting it to you sooner. With the end of And Just Like That, Sentimental in the City is over, but it is so worth a full listen, from season one of SATC all the way through.

• I was late to engaging with SNL’s 50th anniversary, but WOW did I absolutely adore this four episode series, which is essentially four short films with wildly different voices and tones, that each tackle one small and essential part of the SNL universe. Each one is really unique and surprising, and I loved them all. A must watch.

At the tail end of my first pregnancy, I found out my best friend from childhood was also pregnant with her first child. This was by design. Dana was dedicated to making sure we both knew we were overlapping in our pregnancies, and she was right to do so. This incredibly short period of time was grounding, joyful, and felt, there is no other word for it, right. I gave birth to my first daughter, and 7 months later, Dana gave birth to hers. We don’t live in the same city or share the same friends or have extensive routines around how we see each other and keep in touch. But that doesn’t really matter. We are on a road together. Which is everything, because we have always been on a road together. Being on a road together makes me feel centered in a way not much else does.

The story of my childhood friendship with Dana is a largely idyllic one. In a stroke of fantastic luck, we were drawn to each other at three years old, and somehow that pull was rooted in something real and ongoing. Dana and I talked fast, had a billion really smart and impossible to execute ideas, loved Oldies 103.3, musical theatre, refusing to participate in team sports, and each other. Of course there were fights and periods of losing and regaining touch. If memory serves we were only allowed to be in the same class at school every other year because we could get too explosive with one another, in a sisterly sort of way. And who could forget when beautiful, California-born Lizzie came in 6th grade and almost ruined everything! But ultimately, all of that was pretty small potatoes. Any little past hurt has turned funny, something for us to cry-laugh over, the idea of us screaming at each other makes me feel deep gratitude for the intimacy that allows for meltdowns— thank goodness I had someone I could scream at without lasting consequence— childhood is hard! Kids need to scream!

So yes, it did feel a little like destiny that Dana and I would be in this shared space together. The space of motherhood. What unbelievable luck. How desperately right it was.

The idea for MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS came the way many of my ideas do. I take something real, and play with it, like my personal history is some sort of rubik’s cube, and if I align it in new and unexpected and precise ways, some other type of story will emerge.

I knew the story of my childhood best friend and I having daughters around the same time was not the makings of a novel. There was no conflict. The jealousies and competitions and friendship hierarchies of childhood are so long behind us, there’s nothing to cull, from the way we know each other, store memories for one another, delight in grappling with motherhood in the same moment in time. It is, at last, entirely uncomplicated. It is an essay, not a novel.

But what if it hadn’t been so filled with ease? That’s the thought that nudged into my brain as I smiled about the unlikely perfectness of becoming a mother at the same time as Dana. What if two childhood best friends confronted motherhood at the same time… but their history was heavy, fraught, still being made? What if new motherhood was a reckoning, not a solidifying? What if an idyllic childhood friendship was only half of the story, and the other half was how forces outside that friendship cause it to strain, shift, erode and explode?

MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS took me many, many years to write. I was writing in the in-between times. Early mornings and off-deadline weeks and moments when I needed something special for myself. I was writing motherhood as I was learning motherhood, and certain scenes, certain moments became fuller, more alive, as I came to understand new things, gained more perspective, had more and more and more to say. My hope is that the book is alive with what I know about the ferocious love of childhood friendship, the exhaustion and awareness of new motherhood, and every stage of friendship that connects the two. I hope it is also alive with what I imagine it would feel like to have it all spectacularly fall apart, and to need to find a way to rebuild again in ways that are at once beautiful and dangerous, necessary and impossible.

I think the cover captures, somehow, all of this— what is beautiful, what is hidden, what feels familiar and what might be obscured. I love the yellow of the hat, the shade it casts over her face, her inscrutable expression, and how this one face is allowed to take up the entire cover, how central and whole she is here. In short, I’m absolutely obsessed with the way the cover is both simple and profound, grounded and mysterious. It’s a little bit of perfection, and I am bowled over by how one singular image can suggest so much. I hope it speaks to you in the same way!

The book is now available for preorder, and you’ll hear it again and again because it is so true— preorders are HUGELY important to the success of a book, and it would mean the world to me if you’d preorder MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS. So many of you have been supporting me for such a long time, and I hope you’ll join me as I enter the adult space— a dream I’ve had for a long time that I wasn’t sure would ever come to fruition. I’m overjoyed to have this book— which is about everything I care about, and which also, I think, is a pretty propulsive, tense, exciting read— be my first foray into the adult literary space. And I thank you SO, SO MUCH for joining me there, and continuing to support my work with preorders and telling your friends about the book. I can’t wait to hear what you all think of this one….

Then of course there are the later reads— from revisions big and small and later still during copyedits and first pass pages, parts of the publishing process that involve checking and double checking to make sure the manuscript is tidy and sensical, that things line up right, that I’m not repeating myself too much, that what I’ve built works both logistically and grammatically.

Which is all to say that by the time a book is a book in the world, I’m pretty done with it. I’ll read a select chapter at book launches and school visits, but that’s about it. And my brain is not one that holds onto things. I have a brain built for letting go.

And this is why the process of reading The Someday Suitcase to my seven-year-old has been exciting and unsettling and surprising. She has, for years, begged to read some of my novel-length books. The cover of Rules for Stealing Stars really caught her eye when she saw it in her school library, and later she got interested in what I told her of the story of The Widely Unknown Myth of Apple and Dorothy when it came out almost two years ago. She loves mythology and I told her the basic beats of that friendship story rooted in gods and goddesses and my personal favorite, Pandora. But it is The Someday Suitcase that I always point to as my best book for kids on the younger end of the middle grade spectrum. So we started there.

It is a sad book, I have to lead with that when I pitch it to grownups or kids or in this case, my daughter. As I’ve said over and over, I conceived of the book when I asked myself how I could write a book that made someone feel the way the movie My Girl made me feel. And in a lot of ways, the story of Clover and Danny, I think, I hope, captures some of that.

But really that’s all I remembered about the book. The basic concept, how I talk about it, the first few chapters I’ve read so many times both in the writing of and the promoting of the book. The rest was lost to time. It’s been about ten years since I wrote the book, which came out a few days after I found out I was pregnant with my now seven year old. But suddenly, I find myself reading a chapter or two a night to my daughters, one of whom just turned three and is definitely not the audience for my novel about grief and codependency and how similar science and magic and love all are. But she listens anyway, just to spend time in our bed. Sometimes, she asks for the book about the boy with the cough. We try to convince her to read her other current picture book faves that are more suited for a three year old, like this or this or this instead. And she eventually wanders away to read one of those, thoughts of Danny and Clover and coughing and science fairs bouncing around in her head.

Then my seven year old and I can continue on.

There’s a sense of nostalgia in reading The Someday Suitcase. The book centers so tightly on just its two main characters and you get to know them so deliciously well. I remember the writing of the book, in my old apartment in Carroll Gardens, notecards laid out on the table, my brain straining, still, to understand storytelling and novel writing, my understanding of what it was I was doing still deeply instinctual rather than intentional.

I admire in the book its clarity of purpose and so many choices I made about side characters that I barely remembered until they popped up and reintroduced themselves to me. Clover’s little brother Jake, her truck driving dad, her friends Elsa and Levi who she’s drawn to but avoids out of duty to her sick best friend Danny.

It is the strangest sensation, to know I wrote the book, but to have forgotten so much about the particulars.

I know what it’s like— I grew up in a small town and a few years ago I drove through. My neighborhood was sort of idyllic, THE place to go trick-or-treating, bike-riding, lemonade-stand-ing. It was so strange to drive through after so many years— decades, I think, maybe two of them?—away, and remember the length of my driveway, and the rock out front I loved to play imaginary games on. The rock was shaped like a bed, sort of, like a throne, kind of, and there it was, but not mine anymore. Maybe whoever lives there now doesn’t even think of the rock, doesn’t use it to imagine themselves a fairy princess, a queen, a ruler of the land. The thought sort of devastates me, honestly. I want there to be American Girl dolls in the playroom and in the backyard a shitty swingset with a swing you straddle that looks, from the right angle, like a horse that will take you away. I want the house to be rich with imaginary friends and a closet called The Office that is decorated with puffy paint and the translation key for a secret hieroglyphics-adjacent language written out on one of the shelves. But maybe the people who live there don’t need that kind of escape. Maybe they play Monopoly and use the closet for clothes and write in a regular alphabet and the rest is only mine.

Which would be okay too, perhaps.

I guess reading an old book is a little like that. I spent years with Danny and Clover, and then that was it, I moved on to other neighborhoods, and coming back to it is familiar and unfamiliar and a little sad, too. I’d like to live there again, I’d like to invent their friendship one more time, but it’s done, it’s written, it belongs to other kids now. And one of those kids is my own.

Sometimes, in the midst of reading it, I’m mad at how good it is, and I’m worried what I’m working on now isn’t as lovely. Other times, I want to cut entire chapters, pick up the pace, cure myself of my ongoing forever issue of repeating myself, desperate, always, in writing and in life, to try to be understood. I am a person who will say three versions of the same thing, waiting for the listener’s face to change in a way that satisfies me, that tells me they finally get it. I do it in my writing too, finding multiple metaphors, similar beats, wanting the reader to be with me. Not because I want to control them, but because I don’t want to be alone.

And now, reading it to my daughter(s), I sometimes find the connection with myself. Not always in the emotional beats, but sometimes in pictures I painted of parenthood and childhood that now exist in my home. “Attitude,” Clover’s mother cautions her, when she’s getting sassy. And I smile reading it to my daughter, because it’s what I say to her, now, when she’s doing the same. Which makes all the sense in the world and no sense at all— as if I was parenting Clover before I was parenting my own real kids. When I wrote that bit of dialogue, was I writing the kind of mother I hoped I’d become? I wish I knew. I wish I remembered. Clover loves science and order and has sort of unstoppable confidence that my older daughter has too. In reading her, I fall even more in love with my own kid, and some kind of time and space and imaginary and real life dynamics collapses all around me.

And you know what, yes, I feel less alone, in communion with my old self.

Strangely, just yesterday, I got, for the first time in years, a snail mail fan letter for The Someday Suitcase and I let my daughter read it to me, cautioning her that it would contain spoilers. I don’t know what it means, but it was strange and otherworldly and perfect. And once again, the opposite of lonely.

What I do know, is I wrote books for my daughters before I ever had daughters, and I wrote books for my childood self long after she was gone, and someone else lives on Village Hill Road, now, and I cannot write my old books again for the first time, but I can write new ones, with that same curiosity and bravery I had ten and fifteen years ago I hope, and a little more sense of pace and restraint, if I’m lucky, if I really push myself.

And maybe re-reading my earlier books is like re-reading the first chapters of my works in progress. Maybe in there are hints of ideas, things to pursue, the answers to questions on what should come next. I am coming into a new season of my work, in some ways, and I am revisiting what was, so I can understand where I’m going. I am getting in the zone. I am trusting that I dropped some breadcrumbs, all those years ago. I am believing that at forty-two those breadcrumbs and seeds will mean something different than they did at twenty-nine.

I am thinking of that rock in my old front lawn. The perfect shape of it. The way it could become a whole kingdom, when I needed it most. How that kingdom, too, means something different to me now, than it did then. It is a place I can return to, a feeling I can remember, a story I can write, again and again, across the ages, because it will always mean something new. An act of hope, like I said. A way to be understood. A place to feel less alone.

News

• My upcoming debut adult novel, MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS has a pub date! It will be hitting shelves on March 31st, 2026. Just about 8 months away believe it or not! (I, personally, do not). It is even available for preorder!!!!

• Also available for preorder? My next middle grade novel, out January 13th, which is actually about an imagined kingdom (maybe a seed I dropped for myself way back when!). ANNNNND it has a COVER! I happen to love this cover, illustrated by Matt Rockefeller, for how distinctly and spectacularly it captures the book, pitched as fairy tale Freaky Friday. I mean! Look at this beauty!

  

• Want something out even sooner???? The second Zoomi and Zoe— ZOOMIE AND ZOE AND THE SIBLING SITUATION is out August 19th and if you have a kid who has sibling coming into their life or a little sibling already there— this is for them. Zoomi and Zoe both have new babies in their homes… but they aren’t very happy with them, so they plot to send the babies to baby school, of course. It’s a fun one that got a starred review from SLJ!

Recomendations

• I have a fair amount of dresses with necklines that I haven’t been able to figure out, and I purchased this extremely inexpensive lace bodysuit that is just high cut enough to give some coverage but cute enough to look perfect peeking out of any sort of neckline, and I couldn’t be happier with how it solves the problem of all the shirts and dresses that are too low cut or are meant to have something cute under them but I’ve never figured out WHAT.

• For some reason I only give birth to kids who hate independent play and love board games, and my younger daughter needs ones that she can easily enjoy with us. Mostly it’s been all zingo all the time, until my mother bought this one for us, after I sent this photo of my daughter.

  

  It’s a total hit, it’s a little boring for those of us who like legit board and card games, as most toddler games are, but the silliness of the squirrel keeps me upbeat about it, it’s packable, and she loves it and understands it perfectly (she just turned 3).

• My older daughter is finally figuring out the pleasure of reading alone, and though mostly she’s drawn to graphic novels, which I love, this early chapter book series seemed to thread the needle in a really appealing way for her, and it seems so charming and fun.

• For grownup reading, this one is propulsive, interior, urgent, voicey and memorable. This one is intimate and fraught and just tightly written relationship exploration that I really got immersed in. And I’m currently reading some Patchett backlist inspired by a favorite bookish podcast!

• Lastly, because it’s summer, I have to insist you make this salad (imo hearty enough for dinner), which is perfect, the most delicious thing in the world, and easy.

But these things can lure one into a false sense of security, an idea that we are the same when in reality we disconnect at vital places, and it is in those places that we have to invent and reinvent our connection.

The biggest difference between us is in our relationship with reality.

Mine is hazy. Not that I don’t accept reality, I do, but I am a Pollyanna optimist underneath it all, with a brain not built for holding onto the tangible things. I write imaginary worlds, I create imaginary people, I make a living in stories, and some of my strongest childhood memories are of the journals I scribbled into, not just trying to capture what was, but also writing detailed character profiles for my many imaginary friends, a clique of well-dressed teenagers led by, I am horrified to admit, an imaginary girl named Acoreya, who was an angel of the non-religious variety, who looked as you might imagine, quite a lot like me.

My daughter’s relationship with reality is sturdier. When we walk places, which we do always, living in the city and me not being a driver, I have to ask her where we are and how to get where we’re going because I honestly don’t know. She’s seven, and I could take this as something for me to be embarrassed about but I choose instead to not be ashamed of my own shortcomings, just proud of her ability to counteract them. Parenthood can ease or amplify shame, and when possible I choose to let it be a salve.

She likes chess and math. She likes facts, which she integrates easily, speedily. This week she reported that the bread we baked was under-baked, because Jacques Torres, host of Nailed It who she considers a major celebrity, said something about holes in bread denoting underbaked-ness. She told me this with such confidence I didn’t bother to google, even though I did not remember Jacques Torres saying any such thing. When we visited the Museum of Natural History last summer, she told me all about cookie cutter sharks and bioluminesence. I’m not sure she’s even particularly interested in the ocean, but she’d come across some facts while listening to audiobooks, so of course she’d memorized them. Over the course of my education, I have done research projects on hippopotamuses, Eva Perón, and Theatre of Cruelty. But I could really only tell you, now, how those subjects made me feel, and what else they remind me of, how they connect together in my head in interesting ways. When it comes to anything concrete, I come up empty. It’s not how my brain works. I understand things, generally speaking but I don’t know facts.

Basically, if you are putting together a team for a trivia night, you’re going to want my daughter. Whereas I, avid bookworm, person with a masters degree, adult human navigating the world for over 40 years, cannot be relied upon to know, well, really anything in particular.

I don’t mean this as an insult to myself. I have equal fondness for my loose grip on reality as I do my daughter’s ferocious adherence to it. I find it all beautiful. Of course I do. I find most things beautiful.

Interestingly enough, and for I think wildly different reasons, so does my daughter.

I operate in feelings and vibes, and in the ability to make things up, to invent worlds, to come up with, for instance, a place called GlumbleGlibble where children meet up with lively, glittery, real life versions of their beloved stuffies to help them through life’s trickiest moments. I can imagine, with ease, a rainbow mud slide as a place to cement a best friendship, a pineapple portal that moves children from one world to the other, and a class at school called Me-Being. I wrote in a game called ice cream chess, for the books set in GlumbleGlibble, and my daughter looked worried when I mentioned it, trying to understand if the pawns and rooks would be in the shape of ice cream and what would happen if the ice cream melted, did it effect the rules of the game? She looked suspicious, concerned, a little, that I had brought my whimsy to her serious game.

When my younger daughter started playing a game where she imagined herself going to work, carrying a shopping bag, sunglasses, and a prized sticker, my older daughter found it difficult to play along. “But you’re not going to work,” she said, not meanly, just frankly. “And you need shoes on if you’re going to work. You’re not a grownup.”

My younger daughter was unfazed. “Bye bye, I go to work now!” she said, walking to the bathroom, then returning moments later, beaming “I back from work!”

“But work lasts all day,” my older daughter said, truly flummoxed. Even as a toddler, she liked art projects, cooking projects, legos. She likes what is literal, what is really there. She was not a haver of imaginary friends.

But damn if she doesn’t know what a monopoly is and how that’s related to the Rockefeller family. Damn if it doesn’t fill her with happiness, to know how to tell time, how to count things by 2s or 5s or 10s. She lives for a schedule, andcan understand and know forever, immediately, the rules of any and every game. Recently, I tried to read her a kid’s version of the Iliad. She seemed antsy and disengaged, and I figured it wasn’t fun enough, that she wasn’t quite ready for it. “No,” she said, “it’s just that I know all of this from Greeking Out,” referencing one of her favorite podcasts which tells the stories of Greek mythologies. She knows each story fluently. I have listened to them all dozens of times alongside her, and have also extensively researched them when I wrote THE WIDELY UNKNOWN MYTH OF APPLE AND DOROTHY. But at the end of the day, I just know those stories make me feel cozy and alive and curious, some of my favorite ways to feel. I like Echo and Narcissus, even though I’d have to read the myth again today to remember the details. I love most of all Pandora, for opening the box. I wear a necklace featuring her around my neck as a reminder for the way bringing truth to light is important, but even that beloved story, in all its detailed glory is still as elusive as everything else. It’s an excited feeling, a story that reminds me of other stories, a way of getting across the complicated truth of the world. Because while I struggle to grasp facts, I care a great deal about truth. And beauty, of course.

But my daughter finds just as much beauty in the way she sees the world, in her way of understanding truth— as a collection of concrete facts that live inside her, that she can collect like postage stamps, like tiny spoons. They make her feel as safe as my dreamy way of engaging with the world makes me feel.

And in this way, she reminds me how to walk home after gymnastics, always knowing which streets to take, and she surprises me with facts about the world, and I confuse her with my ungrounded but brightly colored impressions of it, and we both fall in love with it in our own ways.

Because it is this, really, that we have in common, and that I am sure lives in my younger daughter too, with her exuberant goofball sensibilities, her way of finding jokes in absolutely everything. We love the world. We love it for the way it is, and the way it feels and the way it makes us laugh.

We love it, each of us, in the way that makes the most sense to us. Concrete facts and dreamy ideas and impish jokes, big truths and tiny details. We all just want to feel those connections— with truth, with facts, with each other.

I hope you have your own way, too.

NEWS

• The first book in my new ZOOMI AND ZOE series comes out in a few weeks, June 3rd, and if you haven’t ordered for yourself or a beloved reader, aged 4-8, please do! Preorder help authors a great deal, and this book has glitter on the cover and the aforementioned ice cream chess and pineapple portal. It’s zany and silly and trying to speak to kid’s feelings and sense of fun all at once.

• I will be doing a storytime event to celebrate the launch of ZOOMI AND ZOE on June 14th at 11:30, at the Montague Street Books Are Magic. I hope you and your kids can join me there!

• The second book in the series will be out in August, and is the one that makes me laugh out loud the most, because Zoomi and Zoe decide they need to start a baby school for their new baby siblings, since they don’t like the stinky, crying, blobby ways brand new babies behave. Please consider preordering that one as well!

• The second book in the series also received a STARRED REVIEW from School Library Journal: “Haydu is readily attuned to young peoples’ feelings about life’s big transitions…The story is enhanced by the author’s thoughtful sensitivity in expressing human emotions. Appert’s lovely digital watercolor illustrations depict the gentle magic of the world, and will help readers follow the plot. VERDICT A solid, heartwarming addition to early chapter book collections.”

• My new middle grade novel, THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY AUDEN GREENE is coming out February 3rd, 2026, and you can also preorder that and learn more about it— the copy says “The magical beasts of Impossible Creatures meet the body-swap of Freaky Friday, set in a world as fantastical as Wicked’s Oz!” Beautiful cover forthcoming!

• I hope to have more to share very soon about my upcoming debut novel for grown-ups, MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS, which will be coming out next year from Little, Brown!

Recommendations

• I took my father to go see this on Broadway last week as part of our long standing tradition of going to musicals together. I’m not sure I’ve seen better performances… ever? And in particular the last song of the first act was so moving, so beautiful, and so deeply felt. If you have a chance to see these brilliant performers, I suggest you try to go.

• I am a newish subscriber to Youngna Park’s substack, Making it Work. Her recent post, Four Vignettes on Urgency spoke to me in particular.

• As a long time watcher of reality TV dating shows, I have recently turned to reality TV game shows after discovering The Traitors. While of course The Traitors is perfection, I have tested out some of the other new dupes, and I am sorry to say I like them all, including this one, which is ridiculous and fun and escapist in a way that only reality TV can be.

• Lastly, I had been waiting for the right time to read this one by a favorite writer, and it really was engrossing, beautiful, and pointed in ways that really had me breathless. A very special, raw, brilliant memoir.

Still, it is a true fact, and so much of what I know about writing— and myself— is actually really from what I learned about acting— and myself— in those dusty studios on those long eight hour days, when other kids were learning, I don’t know, philosophy or physics and I was learning, I think, mostly how to be.

The bulk of my time in the conservatory training program was spent on the Meisner technique, which deserves its own newsletter and which I’ve lectured about as a faculty member at VCFA and which is a part of me in a deep down sort of way, an identity as solid as having grown up in New England, being a bookworm, having had a hard time in high school. But after my two years of Meisner training, I had to choose something new to study my junior year, and one of those things I chose was a methodology called Viewpoints.

I’m not sure I am the person to distill Viewpoints into something entirely solid and understandable to anyone who didn’t spend their college days rolling around on the floor of a studio on Broadway and 19th street shouting I have no apologies! before sinking deep into their emotional reservoirs to perform scenes from Top Girls by Caryl Churchill (both, I want to be clear, entirely valuable parts of my education, things that I am proud were part of my becoming). I did find a quick explainer here. Suffice to say it is a physicality-based method, and that one of the exercises that stuck with me was one where we were asked, one by one, to come to the front of the room, sit in a chair and just exist.

We were explicitly NOT supposed to act, during this exercise. We weren’t meant to be putting on a show. It wasn’t clear exactly what we were meant to do, except to be. And it was up to the teacher to determine whether or not we had done this correctly.

A lot of acting school was like this— being asked to do things without a totally clear understanding of what it would look like to succeed. Art is that way, I guess, although I could have done without getting a C in Mask class because I was too punctual.

This was even more elusive, though, and I truly couldn’t tell what it was the teacher was looking for as person after person went to sit in the chair, and person after person was told no, they were not just being, they were doing something. You can imagine that in a room full of actors, people brought quite a bit to the chair. In the previous two years of our training we had been praised and rewarded for opening ourselves up emotionally, finding ways to let out tears and rage, for being quick to extreme vulnerability and, honestly, controlled breakdowns. Or uncontrolled breakdowns. People sat in the chair and sobbed. They sat in the chair and moved their bodies in ways that indicated authenticity. They held back tears. They played with their hair. They tried to appear present. And maybe some of them really were. I can’t say. I was not the arbiter of being-ness. I was just a twenty-year old with big dreams, like everyone else in the room.

When it was my turn, I felt something in between nervous and excited. I was tired, honestly, of overthinking about dialects and emotional preparation and memorizing monologues to try to show off my authenticity. I hadn’t had the success I’d imagined and hoped for, when I’d moved to New York to pursue my dreams. And not just because of the C in Mask class. I didn’t know how to stand out in a sea of performers. I didn’t know how to make what I did memorable, worthy.

So I sat in the chair and felt happy that I didn’t have to say any lines, that I wasn’t getting asked to walk or talk like a character, that maybe in this situation I couldn’t be criticized for the way I looked or the foggy goals I did or did not meet. I sat in the chair. I did not tear up or hold back or explore the feelings that came up. I didn’t really do anything. I sat in the chair and let that be enough.

After a few minutes— 5? 10?— the teacher applauded. “YES,” she said “YES. That is exactly right. That was beautiful. Just beautiful. Really, really special. See? See???”

The room nodded. I practically levitated with glory.

It has been more than twenty years since that moment, and I still feel the pride but also the bemusement, both of which are deep and gratifying and airy. I went to a fancy acting school and I wanted to be good so badly and I never was seen the way I wanted to be and the only thing I was ever best at for all those years was sitting in a chair and being. And somehow here I am, in my forties, feeling honestly a little self-satisfied! Still! I sat in the chair, guys! I was. I didn’t do. I met an invisible standard perfectly! Why am I still glowing from the praise?

Acting school is strange. So many of you were out there, I don’t know, memorizing the periodic table of elements? Writing research papers on the political landscape of the 1800s? I don’t know. I’ll never really know.

I sat in a chair and just was. And honestly, at the time I wanted to succeed in such things as getting a leading role or landing an agent, but from where I sit now— as a parent working to sit with the feelings of two young girls, as a person navigating the rage and worry of the world we live in, grappling with scraps of my past, reckoning with dreams for the future, writing, writing, writing writing— I am heartened by the accomplishment. I sat. I was. I didn’t try to be. I just… be-ed. It is silly. It is deeply absurd. I still surge with pride from the praise. I still, somehow, ridiculously, optimistically, ruefully, longingly, stubbornly think it matters.

I hope my writing reflects that. The feeling of being and not trying to be, of being and not doing. Of existing without proving the worthiness of the existence.

I got that C in Mask, I never got a lead role in a college play, I didn’t land a fancy agent or get cast in anything but a Samsung commercial where I made out with a hipster dude, but I authentically was for at least 5 minutes, maybe 10, in a chair in the early 2000s. And I don’t know. That’s kind of a lot to ask for a person, isn’t it?

News!

There’s so much!

In really overwhelmingly joyful news, my debut adult novel recently sold to Sally Kim at Little Brown, and I am over the moon. I’m so excited to enter this new-to-me space with a book I’ve been slowly working on for years and years, and I’m thrilled it’s found the perfect home at Little, Brown. From the announcement in Publisher’s Marketplace: MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS is “about two women, best friends since childhood, who reunite as expectant mothers after a mysterious falling out between their mothers (also best friends) keeps them apart for years, and who must finally contend with the secrets between them”

More soon!!

My upcoming early reader chapter book series, ZOOMI AND ZOE, comes out this summer.

The first book ZOOMI AND ZOE AND THE TRICKY TURNAROUND on June 3rd, with ZOOMI AND ZOE AND THE SIBLING SITUATION to follow in August. The first book got a lovely review from Publishers Weekly— “In this earnest early reader chapter book series opener, Haydu (A Place for Feelings) sweetly addresses the importance of communication and compromise in fostering positive relationships. Brightly colored illustrations packed with whimsical details by Appert (What If You Wish?) amplify Zoe and Zoomi’s tender emotional journey.”

And coming in February 2026 is my next middle grade novel, THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY AUDEN GREENE. This one was pitched as a fairy tale Freaky Friday, and follows two girls, both named Auden Greene, who switch places— Auden (Denny) heads to the fairytale land of Sorrowfeld where she must save a kingdom from dragons, and Princess Auden winds up in Denny’s town of Magnolia Bend, where she wants to get the lead in the Spring musical… and help her mother’s tenuous mental health, another sort of battle with dragons.

Recommendations

My first grader recently got very into a debate show podcast called Smash Boom Best that takes on such divisive topics as Donuts vs. Bagels, Bluey vs. Elmo and, yes, even Sneezing vs. Farting. It’s a really smartly done show, it’s funny and informative, and it’s a nice interactive listening experience where everyone can think about where they’d land on the hot button issues.

I recently spent a cold night at a wine bar finishing my reading of The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya, a stunning, tight, tense, sharp novel about a father-daughter relationship and the things we draw on in our personal life when making art. I found it beautifully written and unusual in its scope and intimacy. A really special book.

If you, like me, are thinking about the ways in which you consume, and what that means both politically and environmentally and also financially, I really suggest watching the movie Buy Now on Netflix, which had a real impact on me and my ongoing effort to buy less, consume less, and have more awareness about what I’m buying, and where I’m buying it from. If you feel like you need a bit of a kick in the pants on the subject, this is a good place to start.

I see why, now, and how this was not labor but pleasure, fun. It is harder to fully invest in the interests of my youngest daughter, as her main interest is putting things into and taking things out of containers, but I try to imagine what it is she likes about this activity, and I wonder at how it will twist and turn into something more concrete, eventually. And I support her with empty backpacks, dresses with pockets, easy access to the tupperware drawer.

My oldest daughter has a passion for princesses and long dresses and gymnastics and stories and art. And also, somehow, chess. I am a board game and card game enthusiast, so we have always shared that, but chess has too much to do with spatial organizing, patterns, numbers, math, navigation for me to actually enjoy it. And while her father has these math and spatial skills, he too is new to the game, unlearned in such things as castling and rook-rollers and the art of notating, which my daughter does in tiny neat handwriting, little codes that I don’t understand even remotely.

She also loves competing, another thing I don’t fully understand, competing being my least favorite part of any activity. Although the rush of winning— that I understand. Sometimes, when I’m blue, I return to the moment in ninth grade when the cast list for Oliver! went up and my name was at the top of it, assigned the role of Oliver, unexpectedly the lead in the Spring musical as a freshman. It remains a pure moment, one of the happiest in my life. I was shocked, I was overjoyed, I honestly couldn’t believe something so fantastic had happened to me. I can pull it up in my chest now— the pride. The joy. The way it was all mine.

I never did get another lead role in a musical theatre production, so sometimes returning to the moment is bittersweet, followed up with questions about what happened, what I did wrong, how and why the trajectory had shifted.

But. That rush of winning. That I understand.

This past weekend, my daughter— six years old, sporting glasses and pigtails and a smile with two missing front teeth— competed in the national chess championships. She was on a team with three other amazing first graders from her school, hoping to break the top ten for first grade teams in the country.

The tournament was brutal. She was paired against very tough competitors and the losses were adding up. After each one she briefly cried, then asked to go to the team room to review her game with her coach, to understand what had happened. On the third day, she played her longest ever game, 90 full minutes. When she got out, I asked for details of what had happened. In chess tournaments if you win a game you get a point for your team, and if you draw each competitor gets a half a point. In the course of the 90 mintues, my daughter got asked twice for a draw. In spite of two days of losses, she did not accept the offer. Two times she was asked, and two times she said no, believing, somehow, that she could win.

And she did. She won that 90 minute game. Because of what she did on the board, sure. But really because she said no drawing. She did not want to settle. She knew something about herself, she believed something about herself, in spite of so many reasons to lose faith. And she said no to drawing for the hope of the win, for the belief that it was hers.

At times, this year has been hard. The election, yes. And out in the writing world, too, where I have unmet goals, disappointments, so many close-but-not-quite-there moments that I have lost faith, at times. I have been embarrassed, even, at having believed in myself. I have not wanted to meet up with my coach to review my losses. Losses are embarrassing, I have wanted not to show them. To curdle in the shame of them.

But there she is— losing and losing and losing, then entering each new game renewed, saying no to anything less than a win, knowing something about herself without it having to be proven out. And that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? That you can know and believe something about yourself BEFORE the world has checked it off for you, before it has been made concrete and real.

You cannot win if you draw. You cannot win if you accept less than you actually want.

Is it my mantra for 2025? Maybe. I am looking for that moment of seeing the cast list, I am looking for my name at the top. I am waiting to feel the way she did coming out of the ballroom where she competes— on her own, while I wait outside the closed doors— skipping, beaming, I won I won I won, basking in the knowledge that she bet on herself, that she believed in something unproven, that she could do it.

There are chess prodigies and there are writers who debut with wildly successful books and the fanfare never stops. There is an alternate universe where Kamala Harris won, where Roe still stands. I would love that for us. Of course I would. That is all I have ever wanted. To win and win and win.

But I am a writer of books about magic, and magic is the other thing. It is the believing in spite of it all. It is the glory of that one moment. It is the rush, the shock, the disappointments followed by, somehow, some way, something beautiful and yours and right and good. Magic is whatever it is that pushed her to say no to the draw. Magic is starting the next book before the one before it has sold. Magic is The States Project, advocacy, activism, the rare politician who uses the power of their office to stand strong, to not give in, to find the way. Magic is the fizz, the fight, the toughness.

Magic, too, is what we need in 2025. What we will need going forward. In our personal lives, in our political world, which is personal too. Not the lazy kind of magic, where you wait for it to visit you. The other kind. Where you fight. Where you believe in a better thing, not because it is right there for you to take, but because you are ready to do battle for it.

Magic is a six year old 90 minutes into a chess game after losing for two days straight, saying no to the draw.

And the rest of us too. Saying no to not enough. Believing in something better. Being the kind of tough only a girl with no front teeth and pigtails and glasses and an extra large helping of grit can be.

This has always been a substack about the intersection of parenting and creativity, and I was blown away by the support I got after it also became a substack about poetry and politics crashing into those things as well.

This is still not a poetry substack. This isn’t a poem. But parenting is poetry anyway. Toughness is poetry. Chess is poetry. Writing, of course, poetry. Democracy, too. Justice. Poetry, all of it. If you are brave enough to believe in it. If you can face it head-on. If you can show up after the loss, believing there is a win.

The first grade team came in 11th. So close to the top ten, and so incredible in and of itself. It isn’t always quite exactly how you want it to be. But you fight anyway. That’s the magic. That’s the work. That’s the whole goddamn thing and I guess it’s easier for a 6 year old to see it than the rest of us.

Instead of News, links

Look, it’s the season of gift-giving and I would be remiss not to suggest some of my books. If you enjoy this newsletter, I would so appreciate you ordering one of my books as a gift or preordering an upcoming book. I’m including the Books are Magic link. If you order from them (or from Books of Wonder, Terrace Books, or Lofty Pigeon), I am happy to go in and personalize the book, just contact the store to let them know to reach out to me)

For the teen in your life who likes moody music and journaling and fighting the patriarchy— RISE Honoree LAWLESS SPACES

For the teen in your life who still likes fairy tales and curses and Into the Woods and, yep, fighting the patriarchy: EVER CURSED

For your kid/tween reader who likes baking, The Giver, roses, sister stories: Edgar Nominee EVENTOWN

For the kid/tween reader who is Greek mythology obsessed, who has listened to all of Greeking Out, and who maybe has some friend drama: THE WIDELY UNKNOWN MYTH OF APPLE AND DOROTHY

For the new reader who likes magic, secondhand shops, big bustling families: my HAND ME DOWN MAGIC series.

…and for the little one who is working through their tantrums, who is told they’re a little too much, and for their parent who likes beautiful illustrations and books that remind them that their feelings are okay, too: my picture book A PLACE FOR FEELINGS

And if you’re wondering what I’d like for the holidays, it’s a pre-order of my upcoming early reader/chapter book series, ZOOMI AND ZOE! This is sillier, zanier than my usual fare, because I have seen first hand how well a big dose of silliness (and even an occasional fart joke) goes over with the 4-8 year olds. But it still underneath it all is also about the way we handle the hard things life gives us— By befriending a purple glittery rhino-monster from the land of GlumbleGlibble of course!

Pitched as Monsters Inc meets Princess in Black, it’s illustrated by the wonderful Anne Appert, who really captured every bit of whimsy and fun I was going for— and even a little extra. :)

Recomendations:

Have a podcast loving kid? Or just like your history lessons delivered with sytyle and music and a sense of fun? On our trip to and from the Chess Nationals we devoured HISTORICAL RECORDS — from the Story Pirates crew, a fun deep dive into less familiar pockets of history. I especially loved the first episode about Ida Tardell and the episode about Keith Haring.

This documentary series about a Grey’s Anatomy writer who…. you sort of have to watch the documentary to understand. No need to watch Grey’s Anatomy to get swept up in this unbelievable, disturbing story.

This strange little book written from the perspective of twin babies. It is the slimmest, most interesting thing I’ve read in ages, and I wish we all had the freedom to write so far outside of the assumed constraints of our genres.

These chicken burgers which absolutely floor me every time, my favorite weekend dinner.

11/17/24

The two year old
keeps saying the name
Kamala Harris
like a chant of things that cannot be

maybe I shouldn’t have taught her
those words, that name.

There are so many things she doesn’t
know
yet—
the difference 
for instance
between yellow and orange
or 
the sound a hippopatomous
makes

or
of course
a world better than this one.

This is not a poem about giving up
this is a poem
about grief
and how it can’t be rushed.

Someday
too soon
she’ll learn other words like
ophthalmologist
kaleidascope
obfuscate
celebrate—
she’ll learn
even
that the letter Q is nearly always followed by a U;
that mauve is a lot like
purple
that kindness is work, that democracy is not a given,
that even a platypus
probably
makes a sound if you just
listen
 and in that way
she’ll teach me
too
to find the things I haven’t yet
understood
to find a way forward 
I hadn’t yet
considered.

11/9/24

I always wanted

daughters 

finding out about each
a jolt of hope
a lesson in the work of joy
the sturdiness of it too.

daughters

which can look like anything
really
playing chess in a tiara or
smearing peanut butter on the walls.
Reading books about Spot
hippos
Ramona
Nancy Drew
Elsa
trucks
goggies
which is what the littlest calls
doggies
because life really is that
precious
that
perfect.

It can look like explosions over the fact
that
no
you cannot go
inside
that tree, and I can’t really explain
why not because some things just
aren’t possible,
even
even
for you two—

with your French braids or knotted hair, with your
crooked letters and
scribbles that you are sure are drawings of
cows
with your
pointy-toed cartwheels and
strong 
tiny
legs that push
hard
against the earth—

some things 
aren’t possible
and going inside the trunk
of that one tree
		
			I am so, so sorry to say

is just the beginning.

but then there’s your
way of walking into a room like it’s
yours
your way of calling an unfair thing
unfair
and the fact of you here
at all.

daughters. two of them. and me, their mother

and I think—

maybe you can get into that tree
after all
I 
write poems and make
 soup 
plans
friends
mistakes

what do I know
anyway
about trees
about impossible things that become
in the right hands




possible

I’d love to know where you’re donating, where you’re hoping to spend time fighting, any glimmers of plans to move forward that you have,

xo

11/7/24

The small things stay the same:
the curl coming in to your hair, my ability to make a perfect piece of cinnamon sugar 	toast.
There is still the sliver of moon in the sky and
the things coffee does in the mornings
when you need it most. 

How then
is everything else 




everything else?

My tiny artist loves drawing
but only things that already exist:
our family, my bangs, her sister’s perfect pigtails, her father’s beard. 
She copies pictures
from storybooks
follows steps to draw a
cat
an otter
a house. 

It is too much to ask—
she is so
young
so 
fresh in her making sense of the world
— but I need her 
soon
to learn to draw things that aren’t already 
here

things
we can’t imagine
futures we don’t yet know how to build
countries that don’t already
exist. 

Yes, sure, draw the tiny beauties we have here already:
Degas’ ballerinas and 
Halloween decorations 
that sliver of moon
that desperate mug of morning coffee

But 
after you have copied the great works of art 
into your little notebook,
after you have drawn and redrawn our family— our legs too long, our lips so pouty our 
lashes
exuberant
then please 
draw 
what comes next

draw it in
crayons
in stubby pencils 
in the same markers
your sister keeps drawing on our walls with. 

draw it
if you must
with the VOTE pen
we got at the booth
that I can no longer
look at. 

I need to see something
that isn’t already here,
something I don’t yet 
know
something I haven’t
already
imagined. 

10/29/24

The thing about our anniversary is
it is also the anniversary of the week before
our hearts broke
watching results come in
on our honeymoon in Spain—

I will never again buy
cava and fancy ham sandwiches 
								for later, to celebrate
with such
confidence
such clear-eyed
joy.
I will never again
stay up late waiting for the good thing to happen
not understanding
that it
wasn’t

happening.

The thing about our anniversary is
my maid of honor said I was like
an ant
tiny and so 
unexpectedly 
strong
and then she 
told everyone to vote
and you had a heavy beard
and my dress didn’t fit properly
maybe because women’s bodies are never adequately understood
or maybe because the tailor was
rushed
tired
unwilling to admit defeat from the shape of me

The thing about our anniversary is
my father sang a song from The Fantasticks
and I held one of my bridesmaids’ hands, hard, before I walked down the aisle
and I didn’t know I would need
her
that
then.

The thing about our anniversary is
we danced to Dire Straits and everyone said it would go fast and it did and my maid of 	honor wore tulle and I had a flower crown and the sound system sounded like 
shit
and a week later I’d be 
sobbing in a Hillary Clinton t-shirt 
in a hotel in Seville
because it is hard to hold so much hope and
so little
at once. 

The thing about our anniversary is 
I texted girlfriends in the bathroom the morning after that
awful night
before you even woke up
and then we got 
stuck
on cramped Spanish roads
for hours
but we were
married
we had that
wedding
with the hanging lights the peach flowers the ethereal dress the lobster rolls the DJ 	playing Oldies and salsa the minister who’d known me since I was a toddler my oldest friend my uncomfortable shoes a city I’ll never live in champagne I never got a chance to drink a slight hangover from the rehearsal dinner a bad review on my latest book read that morning makeup that makes my eyes look like someone else’s eyes impossibly young nieces and nephews getting tired getting cold getting overstimulated by the whole of it, the 
party we throw to celebrate a new life together

the hope
the hope
the hope

even if
so quickly


we weren’t quite sure
what hope even
meant.


The thing about our anniversary is
it has been eight years and to celebrate we
say Happy Anniversary and I put on a blue sweater
I bought for too cheap for it to be
ethical
but it’s that perfect shade of royal blue
and I’m bringing
two
magnificent
daughters
to vote
for a woman and I think I’m not supposed to care anymore
that it’s a woman
because it’s a jinx or
I don’t know
if we say it too loudly the men will notice and
remember we can’t be in charge
but I can’t help it
I say it anyway

it’s our anniversary
can’t I early vote and say the truth
to little girls who pronounce her name better than most
adults
who like princess dresses and 
t-shirts with the Goldfish logos on them,
respectively,
who
will probably talk so much I will have trouble figuring out
where and how to fill in the right bubbles—

but I have to take them with me anyway
because it is our anniversary and

really

there is nothing more romantic
nothing in the world
than 
hope.