charred scallion and feta dip

active time: 15 minutes

total time: 15 minutes

makes roughly 2 cups of dip

This is the ultimate summer dip, even though it doesn’t actually involve any peak-summer produce. Scallions? You can get those anytime! Even so, I can’t imagine eating this salty, onion-y dip in the dead of winter, or even in the fall. Make it while you’re still putting your beer cans in koozies and opening crisp roses. Bonus: It’s really, really easy to make, so even if you’re short on time amid late-summer plans and back-to-school planning, you’ve got time to make this.

I whipped some up on the Fourth of July, while a bunch of family was over at my house for a barbecue. Most of it went fast. A few hours after most people had left, my brother, never one to issue a hollow compliment, walked out onto the screened-in porch holding the bowl, scraping away at it with potato chips. “You need to tell me how to make this stuff,” he said, mouth full. So, hey, John, this is me telling you.

Ingredients:

• 4 tablespoons olive oil, divided

• 2 bunches scallions (10-12 total), trimmed of roots and any spots where your dark-green ends have gone sad

• 3 cloves garlic

• 1 cup Greek yogurt

• 6 ounces feta

• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

• potato chips

Equipment:1

• cutting board

• petty knife

• spatula

• food processor

• measuring cups/spoons

Instructions:

1. Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a pan over medium-high heat; anything will do! A nonstick, a cast-iron, a grill pan — they’re all fine. Charring scallions is not precise work. Alternately, you can take those 2 tablespoons of oil and brush them on a hot grill and grill the scallions. I don’t usually do this, in large part because I don’t feel like walking outside to my grill.

2. Okay, anyways! Once you’ve picked your hot surface of choice and your oil is sizzling, add the scallions. (If they’re too long for your pot, slice ’em in half!) Cook them, stirring occasionally but letting them sit still long enough to blacken in spots, for 8-10 minutes. You want them to get a nice crust but still have some green and white remaining on the exterior.

3. While the scallions cook, peel 3 garlic cloves. When the scallions have been on the heat for 4 or 5 minutes, add the cloves and let them soften and caramelize.

4. In the meantime, add the Greek yogurt, feta and black pepper to the bowl of a food processor. When the scallions and garlic are ready, add them to the yogurt-feta mixture and blitz the whole thing like crazy. I won’t tell you which buttons to push or for how long, because every food processor is different, but the goal is a relatively smooth dip. You want the feta and yogurt truly combined and the scallions diced into oblivion. Once you’ve achieved that consistency, add 2 additional tablespoons of olive oil and run the food processor again to incorporate it. The oil should loosen the texture of the dip slightly; if it seems too think, like a chip could not stand up to it, add more oil, a tablespoon at a time.

5. Serve the dip at room temperature with good, thick potato chips. It will keep in the fridge for several days; stir it and let it sit at room temperature for 15 minutes before consuming. If the refrigerated dip feels too thick, add more oil and stir to combine.

some odds and ends and recommendations

… for paid subscribers only, because I’ve got to give you people something in exchange for your support

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Did I mention the five-month-old who’s only interested in napping in the crook of my left arm? Yeah, we’re working on that. Sometimes, I let my mind wander to all the things I could’ve done by now if she were a great crib napper. The garden beds weeded! The newsletters written! The basement shelves organized! But when I take a breath, I realize the alternative isn’t so bad. There’s more Curtis Sittenfeld in my life because of this napping predicament. Also, in case it sounds like I’m disparaging the five-month-old, let me be clear: She is a marvel. And fortunately, she’s not awake to see my digital page-turning; it would probably confuse her, given that she’s an infant Einstein who’s already figured out how to turn the pages of her board books.

(almost) all the fiction I read in May and June

I purposefully never engage much with the synopsis of an Ann Patchett book. I become aware she has something new coming, I clock the name, I put in a pre-order. I’m painfully aware of the release date. The book arrives; I read immediately. There’s no author I trust more to deliver something that will engross me, that’ll grab me behind the navel and yank me away to a world that looks a lot like reality, but where everyone is slightly kinder and more thoughtful — even the bad guys! — than they are in reality, where the conflicts and resolution are exactly as dramatic as they should be. These are novels without cheap tricks. Their tricks are lavish.

So, Whistler. Whistler. Whistler! There’s a horse on the cover, so I figured someone might ride a horse, or a little girl might dream of owning a horse. Maybe there’d be a farm? Dear reader, there was no farm, no little horse-crazed girl, no horse (not alive, at least, and that’s really not a spoiler at all). I’ve been finished with this book for about a month, and I mean it when I say I actually miss the characters. That’s all I’ll say. Read this book.

Two more books you should read (after you read “Whistler,” and I’m not insulting either of them when I say that you should also never compare them to Whistler, or to anything Queen Ann of Nashville has ever written): Clutch, by Emily Nemens, and You Think It, I’ll Say It, by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Let’s start with “Clutch.” And let’s establish a crucial premise: I am a sucker for a semi-literary novel about a group of millennial female friends, and that is exactly what this is, and thus I loved it. I also happen to use Goodreads to track my reading, and when I finished “Clutch,” I metaphorically skipped onto the outmoded app to bestow my five starts … only to discover a minefield. People hated this book. You may hate this book. If you are like the people of Goodreads, you will find the women unlikeable and the plot lacking. If that’s the case, sorry. If it’s not, join me as a hater of everyone else on the Goodreads app.

Next, Sittenfeld. I thought I’d read all of her books, only to discover “You Think It, I’ll Say It” on Libby. It’s a story collection, and it’s very much in the vein of what she does best: exploring the lives of women, many of them in the Midwest, along with class, gender and misplaced assumptions. What’s not to like?

I’d have included this next book under the “two more you should read” umbrella if only I knew who you, exactly, were … because a lot of the collective you might find it utterly deranged. Julia Langbein’s Dear Monica Lewinsky is the story of Jean, a woman who had a relationship with her professor while on a study abroad summer trip in 1998 and who, two decades later, unravels. In the process of that unraveling, she revisits that pivotal summer, guided by Lewinsky — except she’s a Catholic saint, appearing in a vision, offering her wisdom. This book made me cackle. If you read it and like it, send me an email. We should probably become friends if we aren’t already.

Let’s end with the so-so stuff. I’ll preface this by saying I love Emma Straub. Her books are lovely. (This Time Tomorrow made me feel every single feeling there is.) But her latest, American Fantasy, just didn’t quite do it for me. It’s about a woman on a boy band cruise, and I just wanted … more. More character development, more plot, more of a message. I’m not sad I read it, but I also think there are better books to get lost in.

And then, well, we’ve got to descend about 1,000 miles deeper toward literary hell, to a book so bad, I feel bad naming it publicly. (Like, what if that kills my future author karma? What if I finish my book, and someone like me thinks it’s that bad, and they debate writing that online? Nope, I can’t do it.) This book killed my reading rhythm this spring. When I finally finished it, I set it on the radiator where my husband and I pile books bound for Little Free Libraries. But a few minutes later, I picked it back up. I wouldn’t wish this book on anyone else, I decided, and so I threw it in the trash.

From Ann Patchett to … that. Did you think we’d end up in a garbage can? Neither did I.

all the nonfiction I read in May and June

I’ve had a nonfiction itch lately, which began in April and has persisted into the dog days of summer. Maybe I want to write some actual journalism again? (Maybe not!) Maybe working only 10-ish hours a week has made me feel like my brain needs a bit of an extra workout in its off hours. (This actually feels like a reasonable explanation.) Regardless, I’m on a bit of a tear, and I think some of the nonfiction I read this spring — narrative, not particularly hard to synthesize — helped lay the groundwork for some actual, honest-to-goodness education via books as the calendar turned to June.

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in defense (and repulsion) of baby talk

In the lead-up to giving birth, the biggest issue I had with my impending identity change was a matter of vocabulary. Mine was an easy pregnancy, so I had only cursory knowledge of the medical terms that gnaw at some expectant mothers: NSTs and preeclampsia, gestational diabetes and GBS. I was lucky enough to focus most of my energy on preparation: opening gifts, sorting, laundering, putting away, shopping. I was snowed under with stuff, and so stuff was what I talked about.

This was stuff I’d had no idea existed, designed to perform functions I’d only recently learned would need doing. My neighbor, a baby-gear enthusiast, began giving me helpful advice, about which items she’d sprung for and regretted, which she’d passed up and longed for. I’ve always had a subconscious urge to optimize most aspects of my life, so this was catnip; it drove me wild, it soothed me. That is, until I started jotting lists of what I hoped to buy.

Call me naive for expecting these novelty items might be named for their practical function, their utility: the Transformer Stroller, the Stroller for Walks, the Machine That Makes Formula, the Cup That Catches Breast Milk, the Pump You Can Wear While Doing Chores. But no, no; we’re far too capitalist for any of that. Far too many people earn a living in the act of marketing, and pregnancy is nothing if not an opportunity to sell.

Have a Doona, an Uppa, a Brezza, a Haakaa, a Eufy! One of each, please, for the lady. But even as I marveled in my luck, in the generosity of my friends and family who sent gift after gift — even as I recognized that each of these inventions would make my life easier — all I could think about was the fact that I’d have to say those syllables aloud. These were not words; they were gobbledygook. These were not sounds my mouth was prepared to make without smirking. So I resisted: I got this infant carseat that pops up into a stroller. There’s this machine that mixes and warms formula for you! I’m curious about a wearable breast pump.

It felt, to me, like a slippery slope. Say “Doona” too often, and I’d be fluent in baby-talk. Repeat “Uppa” enough times, and I’d sound like one of those women on Instagram whose dialect made me averse to the idea of being a mother. I would not become saccharine, I swore. My voice would not raise an octave. I would not say such things, make such sounds, as pee-pee and poo and boo-boo. This baby might take my body, my brain, my free time — but she would not take my vocabulary.

And then my daughter was born in a flurry of extra monitors and hospital transfers, surgical instruments lined up to carve what was left of my abs. In the early stages of labor, she’d presented with an arrhythmia. Quickly, I was signed up for a surprise C-section, and once Eva was yanked out — screaming! pink! — she was put through an extra-thorough examination. Things seemed fine, phew, exhale. But babies are fragile beasts, roaring little origami figures, too easy to crumple if you’re not paying attention. So in the most joyfully muddy hours of my life, as my brain and lower body thawed from the hormonal and medicinal freeze of delivery, I was doused with a firehose of words. Some, I knew: heart rate, Apgar, EKG. Others, I couldn’t keep straight, and then they were Latin, abbreviated, shorthand. (Apgar, it turned out, had been the first acronym of many, albeit one hiding behind lowercase letters, pretending to be a word.)

The baby, I was told, would go for more testing, which might reveal a PFO. There could be an ASD, or a VSD, and “D” stood for defect, but I couldn’t keep straight the “A” or the “S,” much less the “P-F-O.” Offhand, someone mentioned a PDA, but not the kind I’d heard of. My parents and my best friend, all medical professionals, would ask me for reports, and I would spit these letters back at them, scrambled. VDS? No, not quite. PFA? Wrong vowel, dummy. I had nightmares about all the things that could be wrong inside my baby, all the wires that might’ve gotten crossed without me knowing. But then she’d bad her blue eyes at me and squeeze my index finger and screw up her little face with confusion, and all I could think was, me, too, baby. So without anything better to tell her, I began to coo.

I needed no lessons in gobbledygook. I was fluent in an instant. I congratulated Eva on her poos and babbled as I tickled her. I called her boo-boo and princess and shrieked about her toots. You could say I gave in, as I called for my husband to load the Doona in the car or to refill the water in the Brezza. But I prefer to see it differently: I dropped my tough act. I acknowledged that parenthood is terrifying. It’s like fumbling around in a pitch-dark room, worried you’re going to trip, terrified you’ve gone deaf and are thus missing cries, tears, wails, laughs. And so of course you talk nonsense. Nonsense is soothing, and it’s a relief to sound like a goon sometimes, to be a mere puppet in the hands of the marketers.

My daughter’s heart, it turns out, is fine. When she was a month old, a tech stuck a bunch of nodules to her chest and smeared her with gel and took a million pictures of her heart. Then she wore a holter monitor nearly as big as she was for 48 hours, and last week, we repeated the nodules-gel-photos routine. She passed with flying colors, and so now I tickle her chest and tell her she’s got the world’s best ticker. Yes, boo-boo, you do, the best there is, the best this side of the Mississippi.

But the lead-up left its mark. Now, I Google every splotch, every mark, like the tiny purple veins on her eyelids, which started out condensed and are spreading as she grows. And then there’s the little shock of blue across the bridge of her nose. Both, it turns out, are utterly normal. And both have names, bestowed over generations, I presume, to ease the fears of women like me.

Look, Eva, at your stork bites, I tell her, tracing around her eyes. I pinch her nose and smile, and she smiles back, and that blue vein ripples. That’s your sugar bug, I remind her. I never bothered to learn the acronyms, but I keep on collecting the nonsense.

April books, or: My baby is a good sleeper, for now at least

Everything happens all at once. In the 11 months since I found out I was pregnant and the 13 weeks since I became a mother, this has been the guiding principle of life; there are no longer gradations, gradual evolutions, subtle shifts. Things are one way, and then they are the opposite.

I felt normal, and then one morning in a coffee shop in Asheville, N.C., I became violently nauseated, and I stayed that way for 10 weeks.

I was fit, in shape, barely showing, working out as usual, and then at the start of a Pilates class I could barely get up off the reformer, and when I caught my image in profile in the mirror, I was a stomach with stick-figure limbs.

I had no obligations, and then I had a hundred million, all to this very soft 7-pound creature with downy hair and bright-blue eyes.

That creature was wound up tight like a human spring, little legs bent into her round belly, skinny arms tucked toward her chest, impossible to unfurl — and then one morning her onesie came off effortlessly, and her legs stretched long and her gaze followed my face, and she was human.

There’s never any warning, just whiplash. The baby grew eyelashes overnight. My pants seemed an eon from buttoning, and then they did. Being a parent was impossible to imagine, and then I started doing it without a thought. And so I know, in the whisper of a tiny devil on my shoulder, that on any given morning — at any given 2 a.m. — my baby could wake up and become difficult. (She is, after all, a newborn: inherently, earth-shatteringly dependent. The easiest newborn is the equivalent of the nimblest elephant, the cuddliest spider.)

For now, though, for today and yesterday and the 12 or so weeks before that, my baby is a charmed little beast, a goofy roommate, a wide-eyed little pal who tags along to pizza joints and wine bar patios, who sleeps practically through the night and snuggles up to me on the couch in the middle of most mornings, allowing me the freedom to clean my kitchen and bake cookies and sometimes write this newsletter and quite often read.

I swear I understand how lucky I am. And hear me when I say I’m aware this could all end in 10 minutes. It could be different by the time you read this. But for now, let me tell you about the glorious month of reading I had in April, the books upon books I read by phone flashlight under the covers and spring sunshine on my patio. I loved most of them, and not just because I was amazed I had the time to read them.

It’s impossible to pick a favorite or to even rank these books, so I’m going to try something new this month: superlatives. Several of these books were, in fact, superlative. So here goes:

FUNNIEST: To be clear, Lost Lambs isn’t just the funniest book I read in April; it’s the funniest book I’ve read in years. As with most humor, it won’t appeal to everyone, and I’m well aware I was snared by the potent equation of weird Catholicism + sisters + wordplay + dark laughs + debut novel. Here’s what I’ll say about “Lost Lambs”: early on, there’s a gnat infestation in the family’s church, and the author, Madeline Cash, then goes on to spell any word containing the letters “nat” with an added “g.” For instance: donation becomes dognation, natural becomes gnatural, etc. etc. etc. This construction does end, for a reason that makes some sense, and if you’re the kind of person who finds this amusing (even considering the fact that the gnats have no real significance to the plot), this is the book for you.

The story is weird and rambling and covers everything from secret societies to terrorism. The moment when I decided it was a masterpiece came relatively late in the plot, when the story arc pivoted to the middle sister, Louise. Until then, she’d been a bit of an afterthought — but she’d been up to something ridiculous, something Cash had explained several times. Among all the other absurdist hijinks, I’d completely forgotten about Louise’s descent into madness, and when Cash circled back, when it all came together, I laughed so hard I cried.

MOST ENGROSSING: This is the summer of the story collection, and I can’t imagine any of them will top Lauren Groff’s Brawler, which I read over a span of just two or three sittings. I’ll just read one story, I’d think, and then I’d look up and have chewed through three. Groff has the uncanny ability in her writing to drop readers somewhere utterly confusing, leave them to piece the details together as they go and then ultimately deliver something fully explicated and fleshed-out and clear. I don’t always love that kind of blind fumbling in prose, but Groff does it so perfectly.

BEST PLOT: Kin, by Tayari Jones, was the kind of book that practically turns its own pages. Somehow, I’d never read Jones before, having somehow forgotten to get to An American Marriage back in 2019, so I had no idea how propulsive the story would be. I’m a sucker for any book about childhood friends set on diverging paths — that’s what I’m trying to do in my own novel-in-progress — and this one lived up to the high expectations I always have for these stories. In addition to painting full pictures of each women’s interior life, “Kin” was chock full of plot, adventures and asides that all led to a gutting resolution.

MOST RECOMMENDABLE: (Is that a word? Who cares!) This superlative goes to So Old, So Young, by Grant Ginder. For someone who writes a newsletter that kinda, sorta recommends books, I have a very hard time telling real people in my actual life what I think they should read. I worry my tastes are too specific, that I’m suggesting something too highbrow, too lowbrow, too much in one genre or another. And this book, to me, exists at the center of a massive Venn diagram. It’s neither high- nor lowbrow, it’s general, it’s an easy read, it makes you think … it could appeal to anyone! That might sound like a slight, but I promise, it’s not. I didn’t love-love-love this book, but I really liked it, and I enjoyed it more the further along I got into the plot. It tells the story of a group of college friends over the course of two decades, across breakups and marriages and heartbreaks of other kinds, through a unique framing: The plot checks in with them at several parties over that wide time span, dropping in on their lives and then zooming back out. As devices go, I loved it, and I found myself sobbing at the end of this one — not because I was overwhelmingly sad, and not solely due to postpartum hormones, but just from all the FEELINGS.

BEST NONFICTION: It’s a tie, between Family of Spies and London Falling. We can have ties, because I set the rules, and both of these books were exactly what I want from nonfiction. “Family of Spies” is part memoir, part historical exploration; in it, the author, journalist Christine Kuehn, dives into her family’s secret history as Nazi spies. It’s as dramatic as it sounds, and as she uncovers the true arc of her father’s life, one he never fully shared with her while he was alive, the story becomes downright gutting.

“London Falling” is Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest, and that would’ve been all I needed to know in order to pick it up. However, I read the New Yorker piece that inspired it when it came out in 2024, which meant I was even more desperate to get my hands on this book, buying it rather than waiting in the library hold queue. It lived up to the anticipation, somehow going even deeper than the magazine piece had and making me forget, at times, that I was sitting in St. Louis, Missouri, rather than wandering around London trying to solve a crime.

I read two other books in April: Lonely Crowds, by Stephanie Wambugu, and The Reservation, by Rebecca Kauffman. I enjoyed both of them, too, but I’d have felt a bit silly shoving them into superlative boxes when neither of them was the most anything. “Lonely Crowds” fits into the same genre as “Kin” — childhood friends, diverging destinies — but I didn’t like it quite as much, and I found the characters much harder to empathize with. And “The Reservation” was, like Kauffman’s previous novel, I’ll Come to You, an easy, engaging read. It’s set over the course of one day in a restaurant where a bunch of expensive steaks have gone missing, alternating perspectives between different employees. The small scope and wide range of narrators provided an interesting push-pull between constraint and digression, which I loved. Plus, a book about missing steaks? Find me a better conceit.

everything I read in March

Before leaving for the hospital to be induced, I packed for a long labor. My doctor warned me things could move slowly, that it would be at least a day, and maybe two or three, before we met our daughter. So I packed a book, of course. When I think back to that strange, impatient evening, I remember staring at the bookshelf in my bedroom, considering some of my most beloved authors. I have an Alice McDermott paperback or two that I haven’t yet read, and I’d picked up Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder — another “I should read this someday” title — in a Little Free Library. But I wasn’t quite thinking straight as I sorted through everything I needed to pack while the clock crawled toward my midnight check-in. How many pairs of pajamas? Would I want shower shoes? Was I silly to have purchased my own pack of one-time-use underwear, rather that just using whatever the hospital would offer?

Here’s what happened, then: I grabbed my most recent library check-out, Venetian Vespers, by John Banville. I’d read about it somewhere, who knows where, and seen such buzzwords as “literary” and “historical fiction,” the kind of reading-related catnip that tends to make me look past crucial details like scope and plot and setting. Can you guess where this is going? “Venetian Vespers” was not a very good book.

And here’s the silliest part of the story I’m telling you, about the quick moments of reading I stole during my daughter’s first weeks of life: I didn’t even read “Venetian Vespers” in the hospital. Turns out, I was in early labor when I arrived, and then my daughter’s heart did what one kind nurse described as a “cha-cha.” A taciturn on-call doctor described it less colorfully: It was an arrhythmia. When my (much less taciturn) doctor arrived, she decided it would be better to get the baby out quickly. In a few hours, after sunup. And then no, never mind, immediately. There was a spinal block, a c-section, and barely six hours after I’d stared at my bookshelf and made the wrong choice, there was a baby. A perfectly healthy baby with a great heart, it turns out.

But there were no pages read in the hospital. So why didn’t I make a better choice when I got home? Let’s blame the hormones.

“Venetian Vespers,” if you’re still curious, features the most detestable narrator I’ve encountered in years. It’s a bit of a who-done-it — or, more precisely, a where’d-she-go — set in Venice in 1899. Here’s what it’s like to read it: The detestable main character bumbles around, and you know from the start he’s too self-absorbed to realize he’s being preyed upon, but you aren’t even sad he’s being preyed upon, because yuck. You are, at least, confused, which is a thing you should feel when you’re reading a mystery. But then, with about 30 pages to go, all your questions are answered when a random character arrives unannounced and explains the situation to the idiot narrator. And that is that. The end. I can’t believe I gave up three or so hours of staring at my daughter to ingest this story.

When talking about kids and television time, the economist and author Emily Oster often references the opportunity cost of clicking the power button on the remote. I was once an econ major, so it no surprise that this framing makes so much sense to me. In short: If it’s raining outside, or if your kid is sick and stuck on the couch, the opportunity cost of “Bluey” is pretty low — but if it’s a perfect 70 degree spring day, the cost is off the charts.

My baby isn’t old enough to ask to watch TV — though she has nonconsensually been in the room for a whole lot of college basketball — but even so, the opportunity cost lens of parenting is fully lodged in my craw. I thought of it immediately when I closed “Venetian Vespers” — GARGANTUAN opportunity cost, guys — and ever since, I’ve been pricing out the choices I make with my time. If I’m going to work out, I should focus and activate my core and get the most out of those 50 minutes that I can. If I’m going to scroll my phone, I’d better be aware of the value of those minutes I’m putting through the mental shredder.

If I’m going to read, I need to check out better books — or I need to learn something. I was better at the latter than the former in March.

For instance, I hated this extremely confusing manual for how to build a space-age outdoor TV stand. Hated it almost as much as I hated “Venetian Vespers.” It turned me into an unlikeable protagonist … but I did learn how to build a wind-resistant TV mount, which was pretty ideal given that our patio TV blew over and shattered during the baby’s second week of life. Opportunity cost: low. I can’t keep spending $200 a week on televisions.

Some more high-reward, if eccentric, reading: the fabric content of H&M’s baby clothing, opinions about what you should do when you have two glasses of wine and need to pump, approximately 27 Reddit posts about how often five-week-old babies should poop and several reviews of the Frida Baby Windi. We talk a lot about bodily functions these days. My emotional state is directly correlated to the time elapsed since my daughter’s last bowel movement. “Toot” is my most-used word, and in March I felt I needed to know everything about tooting and baby digestion: the smells and the frequency and the way her face goes from its usual pale to something like crimson in a matter of milliseconds.

Sometimes, though, the baby’s insides are peristalsis-ing along just fine, and she isn’t in the midst of eating or sleeping, and when that lines up, we read. Reading to a one-month-old is aspirational, insane and an exercise in practicing a wide range of odd voices. It’s so fun, even if she does spend more time staring at me than looking at the pictures. (I’m flattered.) In the last week of March, we spent a lot of time with a little finger-puppet board book called Mommy and Me, which leaves something to be desired when it comes to plot and character development, but which makes my daughter’s eyes go wide whenever I wiggle the little plush elephant face with my index finger.

If her darting eyes — which can see a whopping 12 inches into the foreground — were any indication, the baby did love The Jumblies, a wacky nonsense poem of a book that my best friend loved when she was a kid and then delivered to us in the hospital room. We didn’t get around to opening it for a few weeks, and for that I’m deeply sad, given that it’s an instant mood-lifter. It seems like the kind of book we’ll read at least weekly.

And last but certainly not least, there’s Nora’s Roses, by Satomi Ichikawa. The Nora books are an illustrated series published in the 1980s and ’90s, and I adored them when I was a little girl. They’re beautifully illustrated — so beautiful, I ripped up a copy of “Nora’s Stars” and framed some of the pages as artwork in the nursery — and heartwarming. “Nora’s Roses” just happened to be the one Nora book I could reach while sitting in the glider, rocking the baby, and so it was the first one we read. In the story, Nora is sick, and she watches friends and acquaintances pick roses off the bush in her window … until the roses come to her and take her and her stuffed animals off to a party. Every book in the series hits that perfect note of little-kid fantasy, and until I re-read it, I’d forgotten how I used to daydream about flowers come to life and tea parties with my favorite stuffed rabbit. I wonder how many hours of my childhood were given over to those daydreams. I can’t wait for my daughter to lose herself in those stories someday, so why not plant the seed early? Why not make her wonder, when first learns what a rose is in nature, if it might dance its way to life?

And the opportunity cost? Zero. I’d read to her all day if I could.

an unsolicited recommendation

Up above, I mentioned framing book pages in the baby’s nursery, and I cannot recommend this enough. Art is expensive! But a used copy of “Nora’s Stars” and a used copy of “Madeline” set me back about $9 total, and then all I had to do was destroy the binding and ship my favorite pages off to Framebridge. The finished product is prettier than anything I’d have bought on Etsy.

everything I read in February

The other day, my husband and I stopped at the library. We both had books to pick up. I waited outside with the baby while he went in to grab what was waiting for us. When he came out, he laughed. “I thought there was a mistake,” he told me. “You never read books by male authors.”

The book in question was Ashland, by Dan Simon, which I’d read a review of … somewhere. I haven’t opened it yet, and I’m not going to do a full accounting of my recent reads to see if the numbers bore out Jesse’s claim — but the spirit behind it is certainly correct. I do feel like I read more authors who are women, in part because, painting broadly, I find that women more often write about the subjects that interest me: family, friendships, generational sagas. Or maybe they create characters who compel me. Or maybe they just tend to write more often about women, and I like reading about women, and it’s as simple as that.

In February, I read one book by a man: Women’s Hotel, by Daniel Lavery. This is, quite obviously, a book about women — specifically, women living in one of New York’s residential hotels in the 1960s, at a time when that way of life was tapering off. This book had been sitting on my shelf for over a year, and why I grabbed it in my 38th week of pregnancy, I cannot say; maybe I subconsciously knew it would provide the laugh I needed during a time of deep discomfort. (I actually finished this book as I waited to leave for the hospital to be induced!)

“Women’s Hotel” is very funny. Lavery’s narration is tongue-in-cheek, absurdly descriptive and keenly observed. He has an eye for his characters’ quirks — but at times, he reduces these women to nothing more than their quirks. The story is set over a short period of time in which nothing really happens, but we learn all about the strange and scheming women who take rooms at the Biedermeier Hotel, their bad haircuts and marriage plots and beloved stray cats. I laughed out loud over and over again. I enjoyed the book immensely. And since I finished, I keep thinking: I’d love to read the version of this story written by a woman.

Lucky for me, the other two books I read last month fit my usual pattern. After a long wait, I finally got my hands on The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai, which was on practically every year-end list for 2025 and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s a doorstopper of a book; I guarantee it weighed more than my 50th-percentile baby did when she was born. And for me, at least, it wasn’t the quickest read; I struggled to get into the story, and then the book’s due date loomed, so I ended up buying it. It just didn’t feel like a story I should abandon, but in hindsight, I’m not sure it was worth the price tag. Even once I was immersed in my own copy and halfway through the long arc of the story, I struggled to connect with the characters’ motivations; the way they dragged their feet at almost every task they undertook and goal they set drove me batty. Maybe I’m being too hard on them. Maybe I just didn’t have the stamina for 700 pages. Either way, my copy of this book was dropped at a little free library soon after I finished.

In a bit of a pivot, I followed up “Sonia and Sunny” with Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, by Sophie Gilbert. This, like “Women’s Hotel,” is a book I’d been meaning to read for months — and it was by far the best thing I read in February. It’s a nostalgia tour of ’90s and aughts pop culture, told through the lens of the misogyny and hyper-sexualization that pervaded entertainment and media. My favorite detail: The May 2008 cover of Esquire featured a close-up photo of a topless Jessica Simpson, with text that read: “We shot this image to catch your eye so you will pick up this issue … and immerse yourself in the most gripping story you will read this year.”

The story in question? “The Things That Carried Him,” by Chris Jones, which was, when I was in journalism school from 2009 to ’11, one of the stories that nearly every professor referenced at least once (or 10 times) when teaching about narrative writing and reporting. It’s one of the best stories ever to be published in Esquire, a magazine that was for years known for publishing the best longform stories there were to tell — and for some reason the people men in charge believed we needed the top of Jessica Simpson’s boobs to entice us all to read it.

That’s all to say: “Girl on Girl” was very much my jam, as far as cultural criticism goes.

the scourge of the $80 king cake

A few weeks ago, my mom told me she wasn’t going to order a king cake from New Orleans this Mardi Gras, for the first time I can remember.

This was, growing up, one of our greatest extravagances. My parents are not people who want things, at least not with any specificity. But each year, my dad, who went to college and medical school in New Orleans, wanted a king cake.

There was a time, I think, when my mom attempted to find one in St. Louis — but good luck getting a plastic baby or the right texture of pastry this far north. So at some point in the ’90s, we started calling Haydel’s, our bakery of choice, and having one shipped. Then my brother moved down for college at Tulane, so he could drive over to the little storefront on Jefferson Highway and fill out the slip to have one expressed up to my parents’ house. The cakes themselves were $20, maybe, and shipping was another $20 on top of that — so even if it didn’t taste quite as fresh as it would’ve in New Orleans, it was still worth the once-a-year expense.

Plus, this made us interesting. Friends and family who stopped by in the two or three days before the cake was devoured always angled for a sliver, impressed by something so multicolored and exotic. I felt cultured; here was a bite of Mardi Gras in the suburban Midwest. Here were my boring parents, but wait — did this make them cooler than I might’ve guessed?

As an adult, I’ve always gone out of my way to have at least one king cake in my life each winter. Lucky for me, trips to cover the Sugar Bowl sometimes extended past Epiphany on January 6, the first day of king cake sales. So I’d stop at Haydel’s en route to the airport and fly one back in my carry-on, only a little bit worse for the wear.

Two years ago, I wrote a story for the Washington Post about Dong Phuong, the Vietnamese bakery in New Orleans East that’s been supplying some of the best bread in the South to the city’s sandwich shops for decades. I’ll spare you the full history, but the gist is this: 20 or so years ago, Dong Phuong branched out into king cakes. Decadent, croissant-inspired king cakes, with a variety of fillings and a thick slathering of cream cheese icing. Ten, 15 years ago, these things were like collector’s items in New Orleans proper; the bakery is a 30-minute drive across canals and swamp and potholed road, and enterprising businesses started partnering with Dong Phuong to carry the cakes closer to the crowds. They exploded in popularity.

Sometimes, when I was in town visiting my brother during carnival season, I’d borrow his car and make the trip. Then, I discovered Dong Phuong offered online ordering through its website, so I’d have the cakes sent to Chicago and eventually D.C. That ran me $25 plus shipping. But by 2024, when I wrote about the bakery, that system had changed. The business was just too overloaded with out-of-town orders, so it had partnered with Goldbelly, a company that harnesses the power of dry ice and FedEx to send regional cuisines national. The site’s fees practically quadrupled the price of the cakes, but that was hardly a deterrent for anyone who’d ever tried them — or anyone who’d ever seen a hungry influencer unbox one online. Now, if you don’t order a Dong Phuong cake by Christmastime, you’re toast. Sold out.

And of course this plague is catching. Now, practically every bakery in New Orleans is linked up with Goldbelly, and it’s impossible to order from them directly. Now, a run-of-the-mill king cake will run you $60, $80, and that’s if you can manage to get your order in before your shop of choice hits capacity. Next year, it’ll probably be $90, $100, and the joke’s on us, because these prices aren’t just elastic; they’re slime, mozzarella, hot glue. You saw a king cake on the internet and now you must have one in your house a thousand miles from the mouth of the Mississippi, slightly stale because a snowstorm delayed the truck.

My family’s extravagance, it turns out, has limits. We drive old Hondas, after all. And this year, it was just too much — if not for our wallets, then for our consciences.

So instead, I baked a king cake on a chilly Sunday morning, and it was nearly as good as whatever we might’ve ordered, if we’d ordered in time, if we hadn’t paused to consider whether $80 for flour and sugar, cream cheese and carbon emissions, was worth it. Could something so rich be an exercise in restraint? Maybe. Today, I’m dreaming about next year’s king cake on the sidewalk side of St. Charles Avenue, on a 70-degree day, washed down by an Abita. There’s no blister on my heel, no hangover nibbling at the back of my brain.

When you want something you can’t have, it is perfect. And there’s no way to get that day in a neat box from FedEx, no matter how much money you offer, how long you’re willing to wait.

everything I read in January

How did it take me until my 38th year of life to read anything by Marilynne Robinson? It feels like a reading sin. Housekeeping, her 1980 debut, was on some list I consumed somewhere toward the end of last year, and I thought, why not?

It’s the story of two sisters growing up in the fictional town of Fingerbone — Fingerbone! — in the far-flung American West. The setting is vague, probably the 1950s, certainly rural, and the whole story reads as being suffused with a certain frozen mist. Trains fall into lakes, and so do cars, and people die and disappear and sometimes execute the unthinkable balancing act it takes to survive and escape. The imagery in this book is gorgeous. The narrative voice is omniscient but still narrow. As I read, I had the vague sense that nothing was really happening, until I finished the final page and realized how far the story had come.

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stories over soundbites

There’s a specific spot on my stomach, just below the end of my stretching-as-we-speak ribcage, where I’ve come to rest my book while I read. This is in part because it gives me the perfect angle and in part because the slight pressure of, say, Zadie Smith’s new essay collection, “Dead and Alive” — hardcover, 352 pages — is just enough to make the baby say hello. From what I can tell, she bends her knees and wiggles her butt, and I imagine this is fun for her. It’s fun for me — essential, maybe, to my imagination of what this soon-to-be little girl will adore, how she’ll pass her time.

See, I think, she already loves books.

She shimmied last week as I read “Some Notes on Mediated Time,” my favorite essay in Smith’s collection, a wide-ranging arc that’s mostly about the Internet and the insidious way it’s wormed its way into everything we do and shaped the way children dole out their attention. I took it — Smith’s words, the baby’s bump-thwack-poke as I processed them — as affirmation of the kind of parent I hope to be.

The closer I get to my due date, the more I allow my brain to skip to the future. The particular worries of early pregnancy have subsided, and the reality of what I’m about to become, the way my life is about to get stripped to the studs and rebuilt, has arrived. I think incessantly about how I’m going to put it all back together, the kind of mother I want to be at a time when I sometimes wonder why anyone would want to be a mother. I consider the values I want to instill — and the self-improvement it’ll take to get there.

That applies to attitude, patience, open-mindedness, optimism. But I keep coming back to one concrete goal: I aspire to be something like a Luddite. No need to smash the machines, I guess, but I’d like at least to ignore them.

In an ideal world, my daughter would do all her future communication through a tin can on a string, and I imagine a scenario in which she looks at me with confusion when I explain social media to her in 15 years, on the heels of its violent extinction. I want her brain and her computer to have fewer tabs open than mine do. I want her to think that screens are static, televisions mounted to walls and resting on bookshelves, not the handheld attention leeches we willingly stuff in our pockets each day.

I want her to read books.

I know I’m not alone in this, among millennial parents scarred by the way the Internet and social media — let’s call it what it is: Silicon Valley — have infiltrated our unsuspecting neurons. And I know I sound preachy, especially as the current parent of zero children, as a woman who’s never experienced the need for 10 minutes of blissful silence, a half-hour of distraction to do dishes or change the cat’s litter or shave my legs. I will be that woman soon enough, and maybe I’ll look back at this essay and roll my eyes. I hope not. I think I would grow the shaggy limbs of a wooly mammoth — permanently, without complaint — in exchange for a promise from the universe that my daughter will someday pick an afternoon lost inside fiction over one spent getting whiplash from the TikTok algorithm, beamed out through a handheld screen.

Back in the present tense, four-ish weeks out from giving birth, I own not a single wipe and just one pack of newborn diapers, but I’ve spent hours scouring the Internet for affordable copies of the now out-of-print picture books that stole my imagination three decades ago: “Nora’s Stars,” the Mousekin series — these are collectors items now, it seems, and in a sick twist, I can only find them because of the Internet that already siphons off so much of my precious time and attention. But collect them I have, and they’re waiting on this baby’s bookshelf. On a shelf in another room, all seven Harry Potters wait, plus all of Narnia and “Island of the Blue Dolphins” and “Number the Stars” and “The Phantom Tollbooth” and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” Long before I was pregnant, at the moment of wanting when another women might buy minuscule shoes or tiny hats, I was collecting paperbacks.

In “Some Notes on Mediated Time,” Smith focuses not much at all on books — and maybe that’s realistic, given that readers these days are, according to the Atlantic, an “endangered species.” But the essay on resisting the onslaught of digital tech is in a book, so I couldn’t help but think of the written word as the centerpiece of my own resistance to the hell these tech bros hath wrought.

“[C]hildren,” she writes, “could always be counted on to be present. They looked up and around at you, got bored, threw tantrums, made outrageous comments, made the adults around them sigh or laugh or groan. Now they are silent.”

She’s not talking about the silence of a kid turning the page of a novel or even caught up in the story arc of “The Lion King.” She’s talking about the glassy stares, the bodies frozen save for thumb joints swishing up, up, up, up. Smith, who grew up semi-addicted to television, makes her stance clear: This is so much worse than whatever our vices once were.

“Over the past fifteen years, I’ve adapted that old PSA from American television in my mind, silently mouthing it to myself on an almost daily basis: This is your brain on algorithms,” she writes. “I find as long as you keep whispering that to yourself, you can keep both the responsibility and the blame in the correct place, which is not really with the manipulated and the modified, but with the (by now) obscenely rich people who did all the modifying. For example: whoever it was who worked out a way to keep the eyes of an eleven-year-old girl on a small scrolling screen for nine hours a day without that child finding that any time has passed at all? With access to all the information in the world and yet somehow less informed than she might have been listening to the news on the radio twice a day twenty years ago? I’d like to see those people up in court someday.”

Smith says she’s largely given up proselytizing on the subject, and I’ve been trying for months to avoid talking too much about my own hopes and dreams for analog parenting. For one, I know I’m putting a lot of eggs in this basket. Too many. (There are reasons that could keep this baby from loving books the way I do, and I will have to be okay with them, as long as the reasons are not screens.) And beyond that, this line of thinking can come across like a judgment, like I think I’m strong enough to withstand a more arduous level of baby-rearing — but that’s missing the point entirely.

My daydreams rest entirely on the shaky assumption of personal betterment. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with my friends who have kids about how they handle screens, what they think is best. I’ve jotted down notes, concrete plans of action. But it’s been even more valuable to watch what some of these parents model: By and large, they are so much better at unplugging than I am. Their phones are tucked away in pockets. They respond to texts in flurries and then not at all. They’re off Instagram, they never tweeted, and Facebook is just a place for buy-nothing groups and mom forums. If I want my baby to turn pages instead of swipe, I have to get better at modeling just one of those behaviors, not both.

There are tricks, of course, ways to fool your brain into reestablishing the neural pathways it abandoned on the day you got your first iPhone. Smith writes that she somehow wound up downloading WhatsApp on her MacBook — she’s not sure how — and uses it only there, which she says is like “trying to play Mario Kart on a loom.” That trick is part the way she approaches technology use. “Why not keep your computer on your desk instead of in your pocket?” she asks, raising a question to which I have no good retort.

When I think back on my childhood, the information seemed finite, the stories tidy, with beginnings, middles and ends. Credits rolled. I raced to finish library books before the due date stamped on the enclosed card. I imagined nonexistent sequels to what I read, or sometimes I just picked a book up again a year after I’d finished, thirsty for more. I rented the same movies at Blockbuster, over and over again. Sometimes the repetition was enough.

As I moved past picture books to chapters, I started reading a decent amount of fantasy, and maybe that’s what sparked this particular routine: When I felt desperate, when no one would drive me to the library or wield a credit card on my behalf at the bookstore, I’d wind up in the basement guest room, which smelled like mothballs and my great-grandma’s soap. There was an old bookshelf against one wall, where my mom stored dog-eared paperbacks, most of them mystery series she’d bought at the grocery store. But once, she’d found an old book from her childhood there, an out-of-print story about a 14th-century Lancastrian duchess, which I’d read long before I had any business knowing anything about the Wars of the Roses. And so the bookshelf became a place of buried treasures, where an unknown, unexpected story might pop up, rescued from a box in the storage room, loaned from a friend, pulled forward after spending a few years with its spine in shadow.

Mostly, though, there were just those squat murder-mystery paperbacks. Eventually, I read one or two. What else was there to do? We had dial-up Internet and my dad was a doctor, which meant we were never allowed to stay online more than five minutes at a time, in case the hospital called and got a busy signal. I can’t say what might’ve happened without those constraints, what kind of kid the online world might’ve made me. I know only that as an adult, it’s left me vainer than I’d like, materialistic, pithy, dead-eyed. It’s sharpened my sense of humor (see, not all bad!) and deepened my outrage (very bad!) and led me to ask fewer questions (even worse!).

Here, then, is what books did to the little-girl version of me: They built bridges to strange worlds. They delivered me friends who didn’t look like me, didn’t speak like I did, didn’t face any of the same obstacles of a lucky little girl in suburban America. The algorithm could never have delivered me these people, these places, these pains and joys and adventures. I ran my pointer finger down a shelf and stopped when I reached a title that grabbed me, a pretty color, a suggestion of drama — be it dragons or war, long maritime journeys or adolescent friendship.

“I found,” Smith writes in her essay, which I’m doing my best not to simply transcribe here on my screen, “I would rather the kids knew stories than soundbites. I wanted them to have to think about death sometimes. To have a sense of place. I didn’t want it to be always ‘now’ in a place called ‘here.’”

Social media can tell me about a resort in Costa Rica. It can give me a discount on a swimsuit and dole out tips on when to book flights. It can remind me to work out in advance and make me jealous of other women’s tans and then sell me some special potion to turn my bluish skin bronze. But a book can send me back centuries or drop me halfway across the world, all for free, all without envy or comparison. And just as quickly, I can move on, without an amorphous digitized quant logging how long I watched, how likely I might be to bite if they delivered me Jamaica instead, or Turkey, or Belize.

I want the same thing for this baby. I want her to point at her bookshelf and pick a new, bright-colored cover whenever we finish a story. I want her to run out of new words and revisit old ones. I want her to have to choose where her imagination takes her next, rather than be spirited along without any real consent.

She’s still now, while I type, as my cursor has wandered over to the tab that delivers me to Twitter, to the Reddit pregnancy forum that’s become my guiltiest pleasure, to my inbox. I don’t even know I’m doing it. I’ve put her to sleep. It’d put anyone to sleep, anyone who hasn’t yet developed this addiction to infinity. Time to finish writing. Time to read a book.

There was a time in my life, five or six years ago, when I felt like every contemporary novel I read grabbed me by the hand and yanked me into its world. These books weren’t uniformly great, but they were immersive. I felt like I was part of the friend groups and families whose dynamics they plumbed. Maybe the pandemic and the post-pandemic literary landscape was just flush with gems. Or maybe I was picking books better than I have for the intervening years. Either way: By the time I hit page 10 of The Ten Year Affair, by Erin Somers, I was experiencing that most perfect reading sensation.

Was this book perfect? No way. But I loved it, and I loved the conceit the author used, sliding fluidly between reality and fantasy as the main character does and does not consummate an affair with a man she meets at a playgroup for her child.

Shred Sisters, by Betsy Lerner, had not quite as firm of a grip, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a page-turner. The story was somewhat predictable, and I felt the narrator kept me at an arm’s length, which worked at times but sometimes sputtered. Even so, I love nothing more than a book that’s at least partially about childhood, told through the eyes of an imperfect adult.

Also on the theme of sisters, the aptly titled The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, which I actually read right before I picked up “Shred Sisters.” (Nothing like staying on a theme.) This is a Book That Is on Lists. I have increasingly become a Person Who Doesn’t Put a Ton of Stock in Lists. Let me tell you, then: The lists are correct! This is a banger of a book, but please don’t bang anything with this book, because it’s also a behemoth.

I’d try to write something incisive about this book to give you a sense for why you should read it, but I’d never be able to say it better than Maris Kreitzman did in her wonderful weekly newsletter, the Maris Review:

What if The Virgin Suicides was narrated by only one neighborhood boy, and it was more about the boy than the Lisbon sisters, and the neighborhood boy's name was Jeffrey Eugenides?

If you knew me and my media habits when I was 15, then you understand why I adored this book.

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click-delete-click-delete-click-delete

Not long after I learned to write, I got a diary as a gift. It was hot pink and made of puffy plastic — a description you’ll be able to gin up into something concrete if you, too, were a little girl in the mid-’90s, the heyday of Lisa Frank and synthetic mass production. For a year or so, I scribbled consistently, sharing the concerns and slights and joys that propelled me through first and second grade.

The diary had a tiny padlock, and I stored the key in my bedside table. But eventually, the habit of journaling passed. The minuscule key fell through a crack, physical or metaphorical, and the little book lay for years in my desk, impenetrable. I remember expressing some weak, wispy desire to open it again, to write something else, or maybe to read what was etched in metallic gel pen. But I never acted on it, never ripped off the lock or sliced at the cover with a pair of sturdy kitchen scissors, and eventually, the diary disappeared into the same childhood wormhole as the key.

Some records, I figured, were best locked and lost. No longer was there a need to blush or squirm at the memory of a wide-eyed past self.

A year ago, I was faced with the prospect of rifling through another time capsule, this one infinitely more public. I’d come across a headline, something to the effect of “Elon Musk will now use X posts to train LLMs.” This was back when I barely knew what an LLM was — but I did know I’d been the author of thousands of what were by then called “X posts,” back when we called them tweets, back when I was a sports writer who was told cultivating that kind of online forum would be beneficial (no, essential) to her career. So for a decade I’d cracked bad jokes and shared links and fought with fans. I’d received the digital equivalent of a thousand pats on the back and handed out just as many … and then I got laid off, and my career began to wind and sputter, and I quietly slipped offline. By last winter, Twitter/X occupied none of my brain space — with one caveat: I didn’t want Musk to have any claim over the nonsense I’d typed when I was 25.

I researched what I should do and quickly ruled out the easiest solution: deleting my account. If I did, someone might snap up my handle, re-upload my photo and start typing into the void, pretending to be me. (The internet is never as simple as it seems, is it?) Instead, Google told me, I should set my account to private and start scrubbing. Thousands of tweets, millions of words, they’d all have to come down until there was a round zero next to my name.

At the outset, this seemed easy, painless. I would hold the decade-long record of my past professional musings at arm’s length. The problem presented itself as soon as I realized none of the mass-deletion services advertised online actually worked, which meant I would have to delete thousands of tweets one by one. I worked in batches, hacking away for half an hour, forgetting about the project for a month. Sometimes, a technical glitch would keep the site from delivering me any more fodder. I’d wait a week, three, six. More missives from the past — more potential embarrassment — would appear.

The process dragged on so long I missed whatever deadline existed to keep my musings out of the machine. And at some point, I forgot the original goal. You see, I’d started to read the tweets.

It was unavoidable. At first, I crossed my eyes and blurred the screen and click-click-clicked at manic speed, blowing through half a college football season in one sitting. But then I caught snippets: exchanges with people I no longer know, overfamiliarity, trite takes dashed off in service of fitting in. Guys, I’d typed, over and over again, in some ill-fated quest to join their ranks. I replied to the people everyone else replied to and clicked the heart underneath the jokes everyone else laughed at. I broke news and reacted and marched along like a lemming, but the edge of the cliff never came.

And so I kept at it, this act of becoming an avatar of myself. I yo-yoed between flippancy and indignation. I got preachy sometimes, too. I was a cool girl, I was an angry woman, I was a grinder, I feigned experience I thought I had but didn’t. You guys, you guys, you guys, you guys you guys youguysyouguysyouguys …

Who was this person, I wondered as I deleted. Was this really me?

I was embarrassed, but — counterintuitively — I slowed down. Against my will, I’d started to enjoy the trip back in time. The nostalgia snuck up on me, and some of my past selves have surprised me. I read such interesting books! I was so busy! And all those movies — how did I watch so many movies? One day, I paused long enough to re-read my 200-character review of “Marriage Story” from 2019; it was hardly original, but it sparked a direct message from a younger writer I’d met a few times, whom I’d happen to see a few weeks later, whom I’d happen to marry a few years after that.

Click-delete-click-delete-click-delete times a thousand, and I was back in 2016, 2014, the peak of my Twitter usage. As the volume increased, I began to catch glimpses of a girl I recognize. Amid the attempts to comment on whatever everyone else was commenting on — to be quicker, funnier, breezier, angrier, whatever the moment called for — there she was. And she was earnest. So earnest. I’d forgotten I had the capacity.

Right after my 24th birthday, I’d moved to a new city to cover a team I’d never watched and adopted players’ nicknames within weeks. Oh, who am I kidding — within days. I read hundreds of pages of CBA documents and made flashcards with athletes’ basic info and watched YouTube clips of past seasons all in the effort to appear nonchalantly informed, trustworthy, like a person whose face and voice you’d want to pull out of your pocket to learn about a trade, a touchdown, a triple-double.

I cared a whole lot about who I was as a professional — not for the sake of advancement, but for my own satisfaction. In my slow effort to extricate myself from sports journalism — in the mostly unfulfilling years since I was laid off from Sports Illustrated in 2019 — I’ve forgotten a simple fact about who I am, who I was. I was, for a while, very good at my job. And even if I don’t want that job anymore, that’s motivation. So is the reminder of all the fun I had, the moments I got to write about, the people I met, the places I went. I bolted out of my seat when Malcolm Butler, a Patriot no one had heard of, caught an interception in the end zone to cap the Super Bowl, raced to the locker room and figured out something to write, fast, for an issue of the best sports magazine ever published. I was on the field as LSU’s players hoisted Les Miles on their shoulders after an upset of Texas A&M, which meant their coach wouldn’t be fired after all, not for a few more months. I rode Marcus Dupree’s pregnant horse. I met a Somali refugee at the airport in St. Louis, a former pro soccer player who barely spoke a word of English, and went with him to his new apartment in a city where he was charged with building a new life from nothing.

I cared so much about those people, those stories, those facts. I wish I’d admitted it more often, but here I am now, doing my penance. Saying goodbye. I’m deleting the not-that-cool girl, the quick wit, the pithy takes — but I hope the earnestness will remain, now that I’ve jogged my own memory. Now that I’ve realized the past isn’t always as blinding as I might imagine it to be.

I wonder where the pink diary wound up. I wonder if its cover still makes that satisfying squelch, if the pencil inside is smudged, if the little girl had any idea how many more words she had in her to write, how far her words would take her. If I could find it, I’d tear the lock from its hinges and read.

Lately: Thanksgiving! Over and done with! I can’t believe it. I baked five pies: Ina Garten’s Kentucky Derby Pie, Melissa Clark’s maple-honey pecan, a truly psychotic butterscotch banana cream, a brandied pumpkin and Bronwen Wyatt’s pumpkin cream. I think it’s safe to say the pumpkin cream was the biggest hit, though I didn’t actually move fast enough to try any. By the time I got around to dessert, it was gone. At the start of the proceedings, my cousin’s five-year-old had told me he wanted pumpkin pie, and I told him there were two; one had a normal pie crust, and the other, I explained, had a crust like a cookie. “Cookie!” he told me, and I heard a rumor he went back for thirds. This pie is going in the yearly rotation. … A mere 36 hours after the feasting let up, the St. Louis sky had the audacity to SNOW. In November. On my birthday. Breakfast plans were scuttled, but I did berate my family enough that they agreed to venture out to Sidney Street Cafe for dinner. I hadn’t been since my 21st birthday (which certainly wasn’t 17 years go, no, don’t do that math, please, ever), and it was even better than I remembered. … Here’s another St. Louis hack: Get your Christmas tree at Ted Drewes. We went first thing Friday, snagged a tree that met my husband’s exacting standards and also grabbed a few frozen custards for the road. Instead of standing around at 10 a.m. in 35-degree weather, shivering and eating, we took ours to go, and we got massive sizes, which meant we were able to eat them all weekend. … Ok, finally, it’s time for books. Two months of books! I didn’t have my act together last month, so this is a doozy.

everything I read in October and November

Right before Thanksgiving, Susan Orlean was in town on tour to promote her new memoir, Joyride, which is high up on my to-read list. My husband and I went to see her speak in a fluorescent-bright, windowless room at the public library, where only about half the chairs were full. This was the kind of event that would sell out in D.C., and at first I was discouraged at the crowd for one of the best working writers of narrative nonfiction.

Then I realized the upside: I’d actually be able to ask her a question. And I did. Toward the end of her talk, she mentioned the New Yorker’s comparatively great record of hiring women as staffers; when she started writing for the magazine in the late ’80s, there were plenty of female bylines, women whose careers she could look to as a model. But, she said, she has one regret: She never asked any of them how they did it with kids.

I decided not to miss my opportunity (not that my career compares in any way to Orlean’s, other than that we both tap away at keyboards). So, I asked as soon as I got the mic, how did you do it with a kid?

She told me exactly what I’d feared: that working from home with a baby has its upsides and its extreme downsides, that all the very real flexibility inherent in not working a 9-to-5 can bend you into a position where you end up not writing at all. Immediately, I began thinking about schedules and childcare, locked doors and trips to the library. I started to feel as if I needed to wring every decent word in my brain onto the page between now and Feb. 25.

Orlean, however, has written many decent words since having a child a quarter-century ago. So I’ll bear that in mind as I slog through the next few months — even if I find myself Googling whether every woman writer I’m reading has children, and if so, when she had them, and how much she’d written by then.

Zero children — that’s how many Orlean had when she wrote The Orchid Thief, which I finally got around to reading in October after a re-read of “Orchid Fever,” the story that sparked the book, during the New Yorker 100 promotional push.

Even though “The Orchid Thief” is Orlean’s most famous book — the movie, Meryl Streep, etc., etc. — it’s not my favorite thing she’s written. It’s very, very, very good … I just happen to prefer “The Library Book.” Even so, if you were to ask me if I should read it, I would say yes without blinking. The characters she meets, the obsessions they harbor — this is a book about plants, I guess, and a swamp, but it’s really about passion and quirk and the state of Florida.

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I published this newsletter two years ago in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, and I thought it deserved a little recirculation, especially for those who are still noodling over what stuffing you’d like to make. And for anyone with plans to make a pumpkin pie, this muffin recipe will help you make sure none of your leftover filling goes to waste. I’ll be making at least one batch. Happy turkey day!

from 2023: Dutch oven stuffing + pumpkin pie muffins

A few months ago, I was deep down an internet rabbit hole when I stumbled upon this story in about Lena Richard, a Black Creole chef and cookbook author from New Orleans who had a show on television more than a decade before Julia Child did. I couldn’t read the story fast enough, and it left me both curious and embarrassed. I’ve spent months and months of my life in New Orleans, and I think I know a few things about the food there and its history — and I’d never heard the name Lena Richard.

Since then, I’ve done a fair amount of reading about Richard, with plans to do more, and I ordered her book, “New Orleans Cookbook,” and read it cover to cover. Published in 1940, it’s an extensive compendium of Creole cooking, with base recipes, variations, sauces, dressings and more. Like most cookbooks of that era, the language reminds me of the recipes my family has passed down for a few generations; it assumes a knowledge of basic cooking that’s in some ways lost. The instructions are vague at times and always brief; it’s a book with small dimensions, and there are sometimes three recipes on the same page.

I’m planning to cook my way through parts of Richard’s book in the coming months, and the first recipes I was drawn to were the ones that reminded me of holidays: creamed spinach and pie crust, popovers and stuffing. I was especially inspired by Richard’s recipe for a “plain” bread stuffing, and I’ve spent the past few weeks using it as inspiration for a Thanksgiving dish.

Dutch oven stuffing

adapted from Lena Richard’s bread stuffing

active time: 40 minutes

total time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

servings: 8-10

Lena Richard’s recipe for “plain” bread stuffing has a lot of things I enjoy — onion, green pepper, garlic — and I was intrigued by the fact that it had a little bit of a kick. Richard’s recipe called for actually stuffing something with the stuffing — a novel idea! — whereas I like to make stuffing on its own, as more of a savory bread pudding. I scaled the recipe up, tweaked some spices, downplayed the celery and landed on just the right level of moisture to make this cross the threshold from crouton to actual stuffing. Oh, and I decided to make it a one-pot production, which may be the thing I’m proudest of.

This stuffing is classic and savory, a teensy bit spicy and really simple to make. Don’t skimp on the duck fat; it adds a level of flavor dimension that you won’t want to miss.

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F, and make sure your racks are spaced so there’s room for a large Dutch oven with its lid on.

2. Pour 1 cup of dry white wine and 1 cup of vegetable stock into a liquid measure and stir briefly to combine.

3. Crack 2 large eggs into a blender.

4. Chop ½ of a large yellow onion, ½ of a green pepper and 2 stalks of celery into a very fine dice. (If you’re a perfectionist, aim for 110 grams of onion, 80 grams of green pepper and 50 grams of celery.) Combine the vegetable mixture in a medium bowl and grate 2 cloves of garlic on top. Season the vegetables with ½ of a teaspoon of freshly cracked black pepper, ½ of a teaspoon of red pepper flakes and 2 teaspoons of kosher salt (preferably Diamond Crystal).

   

5. In a large Dutch oven (preferably 9 quarts, or something that’s 12ish inches in diameter), heat 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter and 3 tablespoons of duck fat over medium heat. Once the fat is melted, lower the heat to medium-low and add the bowl of vegetables, garlic and spices. Stir to fully incorporate the garlic and spices into the veggies. Cook the mixture for 10 minutes, until the onions are translucent. If you notice any of your vegetables browning, lower the heat; your goal here is to soften everything, not crisp it.

6. While the vegetable mixture cooks, take a 1¼-pound loaf of white bread, preferably pre-sliced, and cut it into cubes. Think of aiming for your pieces to be between the size of a sugar cube and a die. Use the crust, too! Different textures are fun.

7. Once the vegetables have softened, carefully add the bread cubes to the Dutch oven and stir slowly to incorporate. Keep stirring, really letting the vegetables, spices and fats meld with the bread and allowing the bread to fry a bit in the fat. Cook the bread, stirring occasionally, for four minutes, until you notice some of the pieces browning.

8. Pour 1 cup of the wine-stock mixture over the bread, and stir to combine. Let the bread cook for 1-2 minutes, and then turn off the heat.

9. Pour the remaining wine-stock mixture into the blender with the eggs, and pulse the blender briefly to combine. It will only take a second, and you’ll be left with a frothy white mixture. Pour the wine-stock-egg mixture over the bread in the Dutch oven, stirring to incorporate fully.

10. Make sure the bread is in a uniform layer in the Dutch oven. Cover the Dutch oven, and place it in the actual oven. Bake the stuffing for 25 minutes. After 25 minutes, remove the lid and continue baking for 35 minutes, until the top of the stuffing is beginning to brown and crisp just slightly — but before it dries out.

11. Allow the stuffing to cool for 10 minutes and then serve.

leftover pumpkin pie filling chocolate chip muffins

active time: 10 minutes

total time: 30-35 minutes

makes 9-12 muffins, depending on your preference for muffin size

I have never in my life made a pumpkin pie — or any pie, actually — and found that I’ve had the exact right amount of filling for my crust. That’s especially the case around Thanksgiving, when I find myself making more pies than I have pie plates — and making pies to give away — so I resort to using those little disposable aluminum dishes. They hold less than any pie plate I own, which means more leftover filling, which means waste. But behold, a solution: muffins!

On Saturday, I made this pumpkin pie with pepitas (yum), and I wound up with almost exactly 1 cup of leftover filling. Using some common baking ratios, I came up with a muffin recipe in a pinch, and it should work with most pumpkin pie filling recipes, assuming they contain a sweetener of some sort (sugar, maple syrup, agave), some milk or cream, a couple eggs and the requisite blend of spices. You’ll notice I’m not using precise language here, and that’s because no two filling recipes are the same, and also because these are not precise muffins. These are good muffins — very good muffins, even. But they’re not going to win any awards for beauty or innovative taste. They’re just a means of turning food waste into a tasty breakfast.

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F, and make sure you have a rack in the center of the oven.

2. Melt 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter and allow it to cool slightly.

3. Pour 1 cup of leftover pumpkin pie filling into a large bowl.

4. Whisk in 1 egg, the butter and 140 grams of sugar, incorporating until the mixture is smooth and uniform.

5. Add 190 grams of flour, ¾ of a teaspoon baking powder, ½ of a teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon of kosher salt (preferably Diamond Crystal). Using a wooden spoon, mix until the flour is just incorporated, though the mixture will still be a bit lumpy.

6. Add 100 grams of bittersweet chocolate chips and stir until they’re just incorporated.

7. Place baking cups in a muffin tin; this recipe will make 12 smallish muffins or 9 slightly larger muffins. (Filling the cups about ⅔ of the way will yield 12 muffins.) For 12 muffins, bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. For 9 muffins, bake for closer to 25 minutes.

Lately: I had my baby shower over the weekend, and several family members came in town for it, so I decided to host a dinner the night before. If you’re cooking for a crowd, I cannot possibly recommend this recipe for baked shells from Alison Roman more highly. It’s also in her new cookbook, “Something from Nothing,” which I bought the second it came out last week and promptly read cover-to-cover. I also made Roman’s apple, walnut and bitter greens salad on Friday night, and it was a hit. We finished things off with Molly Baz’s pistachio and ricotta cake, which I’m fairly certain I’m going to make again this evening, for no particular occasion. It’s the platonic ideal of a sweet: kind of sort of a pound cake, nutty, not too sweet and a welcome receptacle for ice cream. … Okay, I think that’s all the filibustering I have in me. On to the main event. The essay I’m publishing today took me three weeks to get right, and it’s essentially a semi-organized brain dump of all the emotions I’ve been feeling over the past five months. Yikes.

a lack of imagination

It should’ve been a yes-or-no question, but my answer always meandered toward 10 words, 20. It should’ve been straightforward: Do you want kids?

Well, maybe, yes, no, under those circumstances, someday, right, you think?

I hemmed and hawed in my 20s, when no one I knew was procreating, and still as I turned 30 and neared 35 — long after growing and birthing and raising a child had become a concrete task many people in my life were undertaking. I, then, was still shrugging, mumbling, smiling as I swore I enjoyed the optionality that came with ambivalence.

And I think I did; at the very least, I was used to it. As a kid — a highly motivated, focused, type-A kid — I never had a grand plan for my life, never worried much about what career I’d choose or where I’d live. I didn’t imagine my wedding or clip pictures of white dresses from the early-aughts copies of Vogue that piled up on my nightstand during my teenage years. Instead, I tore out collages of black boots and statement coats and struggled to see past the next obvious step: college, grad school, first job, new boyfriend.

You reach a certain age, and people start asking questions about where you’re headed. Sometimes it’s a pushy aunt, and other times it’s your best friends as you sit huddled on barstools past midnight, nursing warmish IPAs. Do you want to get married someday? To that question, there was an easy answer: I absolutely wanted a loving, supportive partner. When prompted, I could picture that life, however out-of-focus it appeared on my brain’s projector screen.

But my future maybe-children? Asked about them, I was at a loss. They were impossible to conjure — half-constituted entities, pinprick-sized eggs going through their monthly cycle of attrition. Whose DNA would make up the missing bits? Would that future partner feel certain about kids, about wanting them or not, or would he be as ambivalent as I was? Would I reach a point in my career when I felt like there was space for a miniature dependent? Where would I live? What would I be willing to give up?

So many people I knew seemed so certain of what they wanted, long before they could answer any of those questions. Or maybe they were just comfortable with their inability to fill in the blanks. I, however, was stuck, my shoulder wedged up against all those unmoving unknowns. For years, I watched as friends and acquaintances with more defined goals and technicolor dreams made the choices that got them rings and white dresses and two pink lines on flimsy paper tests. Some of them got there with relative ease (or at least that’s how it looked), and others made sacrifices, swiping and settling and making things work when they could’ve walked away.

From their joys and mistakes, from the years that continued to stack up, I never gained much more clarity. Sometimes I wondered if these friends and acquaintances were happy with their choices — and at the same time, I wondered if I was somehow lesser for not making any choices at all, for being able to say only that I wanted a partner someday, to be part of a family of my own making that might involve just the two of us, or maybe not. I let life happen to me, cringing on dates when men tried to talk seriously about the future, rolling my eyes when my parents asked me if anyone I knew had ever frozen her eggs. Ill-defined dreams meant pliable deadlines, or none at all.

Do you want kids, do you think you might want kids, is there a world in which you can picture having kids, is there anything you should do to extend your window for having kids, just in case? I answered some version of one of those questions definitively for the first time two years ago, on a velvet stool at a dimly lit pizza place in Northeast D.C. My husband sat next to me, and we agreed: We wanted to be parents.

Finally, the answer was easy. The blanks were filled in, the blurry lines sharp. Kids or no kids was the obvious next choice, and we made it, and at first, I was relieved. We made a loose plan for how we’d get where we wanted to go; we were lucky — healthy, with enough resources to counteract the fact that I was about to turn 36, already tumbling off the proverbial fertility cliff. Eventually, there was a test with a second pink line that filled in much darker than I’d ever have expected — no guesswork, there she was. There were ultrasounds and bloodwork and plenty of concrete evidence: numbers on lab reports, that wiggling little tadpole on the screen, the audible, watery whoosh of a heartbeat.

I was nauseated, gassy, bloated, bone-tired. I was someone other than myself. So you might imagine that by then I could picture it all. The nursery was painted yellow, with an antique pinkish rug on the floor. It shouldn’t have been so hard to superimpose a crib and glider and a baby, but for me, it was impossible. I was pregnant, but that fact felt separate from I will have a baby in nine months, eight, seven, six.

There was, I began to think, an easy explanation for that state of disconnect: my not-so-long-gone ambivalence. If I’d never dreamed of a baby, if I’d been so uncertain for so long, then maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. Maybe what you can’t imagine, you shouldn’t have — and I couldn’t fathom that the cluster of cells in my abdomen would soon become a little person strapped to my chest. It wasn’t that I was convinced something would go wrong; I just could not for the life of me extrapolate the next step, the rounding of the pale, flat swath of skin between my hip bones, the stretching and loosening, the birth itself. Life continued on, gifts arrived on the porch, my waistband groaned, I hallucinated a world in which I could eat raw salmon, and yet all I could fathom was the status quo, for now, forever. My husband used the name we’d picked out for her, and I cringed. All I could manage was “the baby,” and even that felt fantastical.

And then one morning, in the hallway to the kitchen in the dim morning light, you kicked. Your little foot, with its little light-up bones I’d seen on an ultrasound a few days earlier, connected with whatever ab muscles I had left, and I felt like the feeling should’ve echoed, should’ve shook the neighborhood, should’ve smacked my husband awake and down the stairs. Something so small, how could it be so seismic?

When the universe stopped shaking, there we were, you and me, and I glued my hand to my lower belly and realized there was a hint of a swell. I sat and waited for you to tell me something else, and you did. For more than a month now, you’ve been sharing yourself with me. Foot, shoulder, itsy-bitsy hand, elbow — I like to guess what’s nudging me, why you’re rolling side to side. You like orange juice and when I half-recline on the little couch on the screened-in porch. You never keep me up at night, but you’re there when I wake up, poking me good morning.

And here’s the miracle: I can imagine you now, finally. In the hospital, at home, on a walk, wearing the striped cardigan I just bought you. I never dreamed about you. I love you because you’re real.

Lately: Let’s talk about what it’s like to have a dishwasher for the first time in two months. In short: It’s induced a state of hours-long giddiness. I’ve never been more excited to do load after load of dishes, to order more detergent pellets, to put plates and bowls in cabinets. For two months, we’ve been washing the few dishes we’ve used in our nasty basement laundry sink, which looks like it was installed at some point around the onset of the Great Depression and which now needs a gallon of Draino if it’s ever going to function again. And the dishes we didn’t use during this kitchen renovation? They’ve all been stacked in our unfinished basement, which is an amazing spot for storage of spare items and also dust. So it’s all going through the brand-new dishwasher, and I am a new woman.

Also, a quick note: I realized I’ve done very little for paid subscribers lately, so I’m putting this post behind the paywall, since several dozens of you are kind enough to shell out a few dollars each month to encourage me to write this newsletter. Thanks as always for reading.

everything I read in September

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Lately: I sort of have a kitchen. What that means is I have a range and an oven and a fridge, but no sink, dishwasher or microwave. What that also means is I am trying to cook one-pot meals, stuff that makes for fewer dirty dishes carted down to the laundry sink in the basement. Sunday, I tried this salmon with rice, which was very good. You can never go wrong when miso is involved. Tonight, I’m making this mushroom-leek pasta and praying for dishwasher installation tomorrow. Send all your good vibes. … Over the weekend, we were in New Orleans for a family wedding, and before the festivities started, we had a free night, which we used as an excuse to go back to N7. It’s consistently one of my favorite restaurants on the planet. There was a crab au gratin appetizer special that I’ll be dreaming about for months. … Remember I told you I’m pregnant? Well, the baby’s kicking. It’s as insane as advertised.

typing into oblivion

For a decade now, I’ve been saying I want to write a book. I’ve been working on writing a book. Well, technically — books. I started out with one idea, a work of nonfiction with elements of memoir, about my great-grandmother and the forgotten slice of southeastern Missouri where she lived all but a few of her 95 years. Then I thought the story might be better told as fiction, in the way Jeannette Walls wrote “Half Broke Horses” about her grandmother and called it a “true-life novel.”

But after a while, I put that idea on pause, too, and started working on a novel that I hope will eventually live in the genre of contemporary literary fiction. I’m still working on it, writing and deleting (and often deleting more than I write). When I tell people this, they seem excited, and that makes me frantic. It makes me want to talk about anything, everything else. I want to yell, “I don’t even know if I can do it!”

And I don’t. That’s part of the reason why I fill my workdays with other tasks and jobs that aren’t getting me any closer to becoming a novelist. (The other part of the reason is that those jobs pay me every two weeks.) If I don’t have time to fully try, then I’ll never know if I’m not cut out for it.

Recently, I gave myself a deadline: Have a first draft completed by the time I give birth, which should be in late February. That’s actually a reasonable goal, and some mornings I wake up and think, absolutely. Other days, I feel like an impostor, a woman who’s delusional enough to think she’s going to type the last few words of a draft — a project on a scale she’s never come close to achieving before — while nine months pregnant. And so I throw myself into the jobs that pay me. I read. I buy furniture and chart the baby’s growth — chicken breast! pomegranate! large onion! — and do everything except what I need to do to meet that goal.

I type this newsletter, and in the process, I’ve realized: I’m scared of something else beyond failure. I’m scared of the flip side: success and the reality that comes with it, that other people would have to read my work.

These days, most of my professional hours are spent editing. There’s less ownership in that than in writing. Sometimes it can feel as if there’s no ownership at all. I don’t even put all my jobs on my LinkedIn page, so who’s to know I’m the woman tinkering with the words? There’s something freeing about it, and I enjoy the work of making stories better … but not as much as I enjoy the anonymity.

And by not writing regularly, I’m getting worse and worse at sharing — and more and more scared of my eventual finished novel. It used to be that I’d write a story, and maybe I was proud of it (maybe I wasn’t). I’d tweet it once or twice, respond to a few Internet People and go about my day. Now, I’m most of the way off social media. I write occasionally, the story publishes, and I can believe with more conviction than ever that it’s disappeared into the ether.

And that’s how I stay scared. No — it’s how I get even more scared of building a reputation again as a writer. So in the sprit of using this newsletter as a vehicle for growth, I’m going to try to buck that trend by sharing two things I’ve written lately (and, until now, shared nowhere).

The first is this feature in Washingtonian, which I reported in the spring right before we moved away. It’s about a team of researchers at UVA’s medical school who study near-death experiences in service of answering a potentially unanswerable question.

At the eastern edge of downtown Charlottesville—past the red-brick pedestrian mall with its bookstores and fudge shops and busking guitarists, beyond the incongruously modern amphitheater, just as the road begins to slope downhill toward the train tracks and then out toward Monticello—sits an utterly nondescript condo building.

I was there looking for the site of some highly unusual research conducted within the University of Virginia’s medical school. It’s mind-bending, norm-challenging work that explores the metaphysical—which is why I’d expected something a little more mystical. A spiral staircase, an owl, a crystal ball. The divination tower at Hogwarts. Certainly not a mid-rise straight out of Anywhere, USA. Only there it was, visible through the glass front door: a placard in the lobby reading “Division of Perceptual Studies.”

The door handle turned with a wiggle. Upstairs were the researchers I’d come to see, inside an office lined with heaving bookshelves, at wide wooden desks scattered with papers and research journals. They’ve devoted their careers to one of life’s biggest questions: What happens when we die?

The second piece, Lost and Found, is the one that actually gives me nightmares. It’s my first-ever published work of fiction, a short story published in the Bellingham Review. I haven’t had the guts to read it since it went online, because I know I’ll start picking apart the comma placement and word choice. Fiction, even more than the more detailed and extensive reported stories I’ve written, seems ripe for an unending cycle of tinkering and revision. Nothing is ever perfect, but I can’t help but think one more pass will get me even closer — so for that, I suppose, I’m grateful this now lives on the internet in a static state.

But the real thing that makes me nervous is the seed of truth this story sprouted from. I seem incapable, at least in this early stage of writing fiction, of coming up with any idea that isn’t rooted in a memory or relationship I’ve experienced. I have no trouble making things up from there, but I can’t help but worry about the speck of truth buried in these fictions. Will people feel misrepresented? Will they recognize themselves? They shouldn’t, because the real-life inspirations for my stories are only that: sparks, curiosities, jumping-off points.

This story is about an older couple and a lost bracelet. My grandpa and his second wife inspired the characters, and there was a bracelet picked up off a concrete parking lot. But that’s it. That’s where the truth ends and these characters’ motivations begin.

I’m finished explaining myself. Want to read the story? Here’s the beginning, and you can keep going by clicking this link.

It’s nothing more than a quick glimmer on the asphalt, weak morning sun grazing dull metal. A minor miracle in the parking lot at Saint Ursula as an old man’s filmy gaze catches a wink of light. He stops, and for one more step, the woman next to him keeps walking. He sets a hand on the nearest car’s tail light, steadying himself before bending down. “What on earth?” his wife asks, turning on a sensible heel, her voice deep and full, a laugh with syllables.

Sam and Lily O’Dowd have grown to look alike, just like so many couples of a certain age. They are age-spotted and gray, with pink-rimmed eyes and long earlobes, rounded shoulders and swollen knuckles. Their skin is creased like paper once crumpled and bound for the trash, then smoothed into a state of not-quite flatness. Like a shattered vase, reassembled, but they are still defiantly whole, still driving, still grocery shopping, still kneeling down on the mahogany pews each day just past dawn.

Lately: Our kitchen is still under construction, and I miss cooking and baking more than I can put into words. I’ve been grumpy, and the other day I realized: It’s because my favorite hobbies have been essentially off-limits to me for more than a month. I just want to make a loaf of bread. Or a cake. Or dinner. Soon. … I was in New Orleans last weekend and wasn’t able to drink (keep reading to find out why), which was a rare form of torture. I did eat plenty; the star of the trip was a fried shrimp and barbecue pork po’boy with pepper jack cheese from Parkway.

everything I read in August

As you can see, it wasn’t much. I started “The Antidote,” by Karen Russell, on Aug. 1. It felt like it was going to be a great month of reading; I was immediately swept up into the world of the Prairie Witch, onto the dust-shrouded plains of eastern Nebraska. As happens every time I read a novel with fantastical elements, I remember how much I love a small dose of unreality. I was, after all, a kid who devoured C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the “His Dark Materials” trilogy … but I’ve never read much fantasy or science fiction as an adult. “The Antidote” made me wonder if I should, and the way it wove together its bits of imagination with real historical events was pretty much my perfect reading cocktail.

Maybe that’s why I had such a hard time settling into my next book. For several years, Hanya Yanagihara’s “To Paradise” has been haunting me from the bookshelf; my husband read it when it came out, ultimately reviewing it as “meh,” but I’d read “A Little Life,” and for whatever reason, I couldn’t shake the idea that I had to give this book a chance. Well, I went on to kill my reading momentum with a week-plus of opening “To Paradise” and closing it after reading only a few pages or paragraphs. I spent most of the rest of the month in that ugly cycle before eventually abandoning the book in a Little Free Library a few blocks away, only then escaping its clutches.

Fortunately, I was reading a bit of nonfiction on the side … nonfiction about parenting … because I am pregnant. I’m under no illusions that anyone is carefully scrutinizing my Goodreads account to the extent that they might’ve guessed this, but I’ve been churning slowly through a few pregnancy-related books in recent months, and things are getting real enough that I’ve finally advanced to the parenting portion of events, starting with “Cribsheet,” by Emily Oster.

I’ve become a huge fan of Oster, and not because she’s given me implicit permission to drink wine and eat sushi. (I’ve had neither a glass of wine nor a morsel of sushi since finding out about the baby, for whatever that’s worth.) I understand she’s not a medical doctor, and maybe I’m biased as a one-time economics major, but I think the way she synthesizes data (from actual MDs!) is wildly effective in painting a picture of the choices women and parents have to make each day.

So, yeah. Cat’s out of the bag, fetus is in the uterus, and that’s what I read last month. That’s also why I’ve struggled to write here all summer — not just because I felt sick for every waking hour of July and half of August, but also because everything I thought I might want to write about was somehow linked to this pomegranate-sized human growing inside of me. Is this a pregnancy newsletter now? Absolutely not. But I do have a lot of thoughts and feelings and essays lodged in my jumbled brain. Let’s see if I can get a few of them onto the page.

Lately: We’re in the midst of a full-scale kitchen renovation, which means I’m turning into a takeout container and am terrified of my credit card bill. It also means I’ve frequented more fast-casual restaurants in the past three weeks than I had in the three years before that, and I can’t get over how much these places are sacrificing themselves at the altar of efficiency. There are upsides, sure: the Chick-fil-a mobile drive-through line is flat-out wizardry. But mostly, it feels dystopian. I went to a Panera that relied only on touch-screen ordering, where it was impossible to find the right lids. And Steak ‘n’ Shake, whose long-ago commercials bragged that it’s a “restaurant, not a work-a-raunt,” has also given way to computer ordering. The craziest part of that experience? My dad had to scan his receipt on the soda fountain to activate it to spit out his Diet Coke. And no free refills!

the day I always think about New Orleans

My brother turned 30 on March 15, 2020. I was living temporarily in his guest room in New Orleans, laid off and avoiding Chicago winter, and we’d planned a weekend of celebrations, starting with Friday-night dinner at Clancy’s, the white-tablecloth Uptown classic.

It was Friday the 13th, a date made spookier by what had come before: a gradual sense that the world was about to shut down, that life as we knew it was about to be put on pause. We wondered if we needed to worry about the virus. And then the mayor of New Orleans decided for us: She canceled the St. Patrick’s Day parade and the Super Sunday procession of Mardi Gras Indians — essentially, our plans for the weekend. My brother joked that if all fun was canceled, he’d just remain in his 20s indefinitely.

But bars and restaurants were still open, and we still had that Friday reservation. The weather was perfect and the sky was clear and the jasmine bloomed; we decided to risk it. A group of us showed up at Clancy’s at 8:30 sharp, and as the door swung open, all manner of noise burst out into the night. Our table wasn’t ready quite yet, so could we squeeze ourselves up to the bar for a moment? Women in cocktail dresses laughed with their heads tipped back and martinis sloshed. Men sweated around the edges of their sport coats, and you couldn’t glance in any direction without spotting a cork easing out of a dusty wine bottle or a fried oyster, golden brown and sweating fat under a blanket of melted brie.

There were dapper children, up past bedtime, the boys’ hair slicked just so, and nearly every table was a large group, three conversations going at once from mouths stained red with pinot noir. When our group finally sat, we wasted no time ordering: whiskey first, wine next, how many appetizers is too many? At some point, stuffed but still not slowing down, I turned to my brother. “It feels like we’re on the Titanic,” I told him.

He shook his head. “No,” he disagreed. “It feels like we’re in that Brett Anderson story about the last night before Katrina.”

I read that story today, like I do every Aug. 29. Anderson writes about food for the New York Times now, but in August 2005, he was the food critic at the Times-Picayune. On the Saturday night before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, he scored a reservation at Clancy’s, whose dining room looked the same then as it did in 2020, as it does now. A global pandemic is a wholly different brand of catastrophe than a series of massive levee failures, but Anderson’s story evokes the same things I felt 15 years later: the joy, the fear, the stubborn, stupid unwillingness to ever let the party end.

New Orleans is the greatest gift my dad ever gave me. He lived there for college and medical school, and we visited often when I was a child. As a little girl, I learned about po’boys and jambalaya. I understood that something claiming to be a beignet should never be consumed outside the 504 area code. I marveled at the rainbow of houses in the Garden District, braced myself against potholes and skipped over toxic French Quarter puddles on the walk to Galatoire’s in shiny party shoes.

Twenty years ago today, we watched the television in horror. We checked in, over and over, with my dad’s best friend and his family, who slowly made their way through the contraflow. We pictured all the beautiful things they’d left behind in their charming house at the edge of a massive cemetery. There were so many worse tragedies than water-logged, moldy possessions, but those losses were all too gargantuan to quantify, and we couldn’t yet conceive of the scale. So we cried and we hoped and we wondered when we’d ever be able to go back.

I can’t begin to imagine what it was like to live through Katrina from New Orleans and then from its diaspora. I was just a teenager in St. Louis who loved a mysterious city at the end of the highway, at the end of the world. But New Orleans has stamped itself on me — mostly this new, post-2005 New Orleans, where I’ve spent months and months of my adult life, becoming something more than just a visitor. And so every year on Aug. 29, I read the same newspaper story, and this Aug. 29, I thought I might ask you all to do the same — and recommend my favorite books about New Orleans, too. Some of them are about storms, and others are more general, stories about that beautiful accident of a city that sprung up out of a swamp and will, I’m sure, find away to keep surviving longer than the laws of nature would ever say it should.

Here’s what to read:

• 1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose

• Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum

• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

• The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

• The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broome

• Cooking for the Culture by Toya Boudy

• Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou by Melissa M Martin

Lately: My kitchen’s being renovated, so any hopes I had of sending along a recipe or writing about cooking have been dashed until September. … Jesse and I had maybe my favorite dinner since arriving in St. Louis the other night, at Stew’s Food and Liquor in Soulard. If you live in St. Louis or find yourself here, go. And arrive early. We got there at 5 and it was packed. … Okay, that’s all. Onto the books:

everything I read in July

I suffered, for a day or two, from reading amnesia. I realized the calendar had turned to August, which meant I could write this newsletter — but my stomach churned at the thought of looking at my Goodreads page and tallying up the month’s books. I’ve spent the past week trying and failing to sink into something new — after a few aborted attempts at other titles, I think I've settled on The Antidote — and I guess all that indecision temporarily scorched my brain. I was sure I hadn’t finished anything good, not in ages.

And then I got up the nerve to check, and oh, wait, what, huh — July was an amazing reading month. I liked everything. I even loved a couple of the books I finished. The worst, by far, was Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life, which I chewed through in a matter of hours, feeling delighted throughout, in spite of the fact that I was certain I knew how the book would end. (Side note on this one: Was it raunchier than the average Emily Henry? I’ve only read a few, but it felt a bit more graphic. Or maybe I’m just turning into a sour Victorian prude.)

So then what was the best of July? I can’t quite decide, but I think The Safekeep, by Yael Van Der Wouden, is the title that will stick with me longest. It was full of gorgeous sentences and palpable suspense (and a lot more actual sex than Great Big Beautiful Life). After finishing, I realized “The Safekeep” is the second book I’ve read in the past couple of years that’s set in post-World War II Europe — the other being “The Book of Goose” — and I’ve adored both, for somewhat similar reasons.

My favorite book of the month might just have been Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes. I bought it after curating my new (antique) bedroom bookshelf; my husband and I decided it should be full of our favorite authors, the people whose books we can’t stop ourselves from buying. And once the shelf was coming together, I realized there wasn’t nearly enough of McDermott on it. I guess I’ve leaned library when reading her titles — so I immediately went out and grabbed "At Weddings and Wakes” and “The Ninth Hour.”

Not much happens in “At Weddings and Wakes.” A family of five living on Long Island in the ’60s goes about its business, through tragedy and small triumphs. The book’s perspective is what makes it sing; it’s told from the third-person omniscient, and also from knee height, which is the stunning part. Here’s what I mean: Do you have certain memories from your childhood in which you see the room from the vantage point of someone two feet tall? One sticks out in my mind: when I accidentally hugged an uncle I was scared of around the knees, thinking I was beelining toward my dad. That’s how much of this book feels: like it’s impossible to see the ceilings, like you have to crane your neck to glimpse the adults’ faces, but when you manage to — oh, it’s worth it.

Moving on. Endling, by Maria Reva. I had never heard of this book before I heard it reviewed on NPR, and I was intrigued by the broad strokes of the segment: the war in Ukraine, a nearly extinct snail, autofiction, humor, identity. I don’t want to tell you much more than that, because this book is impossible to pack down into a few neat sentences, but I’ll say this: Read it.

There’s not a single natural transition from “Endling” to Bug Hollow, by Michelle Huneven. (I’m not sure there’s a natural transition from “Endling” to any other book, to be honest.) What these two books do have in common: They’re new releases, and I adored both. “Bug Hollow” is a family saga, set off by the death of a teenaged son about to begin college. What sprawls from there jumps across decades and from perspective to perspective — occasionally so far afield I had no idea how things were going to connect. But they did, and I fell in love with these characters.

My final July book was the one work of nonfiction I finished: Everything Is Tuberculosis, by John Green. I’d been curious about this book since it was published, in large part because I grew up hearing about relative after relative who’d died of tuberculosis in rural Missouri in the early 1900s. Given the scope of the disease, I’d imagine there are millions more people like me who've heard oblique references to T.B. for their entire lives — which makes this a genius topic for a book, and Green somehow manages to make a story about a disease, its history and the politics of its continued destruction feel lively and character-driven.