I am constantly recommending, gifting and talking about books. There is no one-type of book that I love more than another, as rather, books are a very specific thing that meet you where you are in life. Often, I liken this experience to Harry Potter: the wizard doesn’t choose the wand, the wand chooses the wizard. Books feel much the same way. Their emotional register depends on how open you are to receiving them, which can make the experience of reading feel strangely charged, almost fated. Even if a story is fiction, commonly thought to just be entertainment, books offer a sort of confrontation that is intimate, and almost uncomfortably real.

Women unraveling in beautiful apartments. Intellectuals making terrible romantic decisions. Socialites chain-smoking through psychic distress. Narrators dissociating elegantly.

Last week, I took a post-work stroll through the bookstore and immediately was gravitated towards a slew of books. Whether I’d already read them or simply liked the cover made no difference — it simply felt necessary to hold them, and all of the potential worlds they offered, in my hands.

Below are books I think about constantly: books I recommend with frequency, books I devoured in a single weekend, books that altered my perspective or forced me to confront parts of myself and the world at large afterward (which, in my opinion, is the best indication of a worthwhile read). Some I haven’t even read (yet)!

Not every book will change your life. But the best ones push you toward opening a door you may not have otherwise dared to pry open alone.

Without further ado.

If you want loneliness so palpable it becomes atmospheric:

Strangers — Bell Burden

This book would not leave me alone — I saw it everywhere from online, to irl subway commutes. Then I was lent a copy (Gill if you’re reading this, I still need to run this back to you!) This was one of those quiet novels that leaves a crater. In 2023, Burden went viral with an essay for The New York Times, “Was I Married to a Stranger?” In this memoir, she explores the shock of that unraveling, capturing the strange emotional distance in a tender and deeply observant way.

If you want essays that feel like riding into the sunset with a lover you know will break your heart:

Tonight I’m Someone Else — Chelsea Hodson

Chelsea Hodson writes about identity, performance, desire, work, beauty, and emotional detachment with the exact tone of someone staring at herself in a bathroom mirror at 2 a.m: bloodshot, smudged eyeliner; utterly in control of the crucification and subsequent resurrection. Strangely hypnotic — this was the first book of essays that showed me what language could be if one has the courage to say what is true for them.

If you want advice that somehow still feels devastatingly true a century later:

Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke

Not self-help, not philosophy — more like being gently emotionally dismantled by someone vastly wiser than you. Rilke writes about art, solitude, love, uncertainty, and becoming with such sincerity that certain passages feel permanently lodged in human consciousness. For instance: “Do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better…But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did.” 🤯

If you want consciousness itself as narrative:

The Waves — Virginia Woolf

Not really a novel so much as a sustained act of perception. Six voices drift through childhood, friendship, aging, longing, identity — all written with language so luminous it barely feels earthly. A Durga Chew-Bose rec is always an immediate add to the never-ending To Be Read list.

If you want a roaring Sex and the City novel written by someone much sadder:

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“My springtime, a sobbing hunger,
my summer, a hot struggle—
what
will my autumn be?

A tardy golden sheaf?

a lake of mist?”

— Arno Holz, Phantasus

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I decide everything in the moment I decide it as I eat an apple in…

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Just…

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I’ve always said that the real new year doesn’t start until February because January always has a little too much of the past year carried over. So in lieu of prematurely claiming knowledge and judging 2026 based on the previous 31 days — …

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Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?

Some days I fall asleep, or land in that
even better place — half-asleep — where the world,
spring, summer, autumn, winter —
flies through my mind in its
hardy ascent and its …

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Today, helped no doubt by the hard, bright freshness of a cool, sunny January morning, I have a feeling of contentment. The world makes sense this Sunday morning. Even the weather seems to be resting, peaceful and mellowed after the angry wind squalls of the last few days.

There’s a smell of cloves and dinner in the oven and from where I w…

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“We’re all just walking each other home.”

— Ram Dass

When tornados would rip through my slice of middle America, and my brother and sister and I would hide in the basement for hours, I remember thinking we’d emerge to a world that had ended. Then when the sirens stopped and we were safe, it turned out that the yard was just as flat as it was before and the roof was still over our house. The air didn’t feel the same though. I’d check on my magnolia tree first, maybe it was down a few branches and petals, but intact regardless. It didn’t sit right with me that life resumed its normality afterwards — that we would go on pining for an ice cream cone with sprinkles or a later bed time — as though we were not just huddled close, bracing for impact, mere moments ago.

On occasion I still think like this, convincing myself that change should arrive immediately, preferring life-alternating seismic events instead of small movements seemingly imperceptible to the naked eye. Sometimes the storm’s lingering cloud coverage complicates the crossing over from before and after. Life slouches towards meaning incrementally, and that was never more apparent than in this year’s cadence. I can easily divide it into thirds, and the symmetry pleases me:

I. Late winter into spring full of training dreams and intimate quarters (for better or worse).

II. The hallucinatory and hormonal heat of summer when words sounded like a curse.

III. A blissful detachment as to make room for new company and books.

Through it all, I lived privately and wandered off mostly. There is a lot of writing I’d like to finish before new realities come blooming and thrashing all around me, and I’m only just getting color back into my face. It is in my earthly experience that emotion hums at an inconsistent frequency, irreverent of my most sought after intentions for contentment. I know all too well the far edges of what the human mind is capable of. Miraculously this skin is still not done with me, and so I figure my life must be worthwhile.

For all of the stories I thought I would never be able to tell, the specificity of life at this time has changed that.

While I have no interest in peacocking outside of my line of work, if you asked me about the integrity of je suis comme, je suis suivi I’d say, yeah, I understand. I don’t really think about it all that much, until I do. How do you peg meaning in a landscape that isn’t real? There’s an answer that sounds satisfying in my head, but actually says nothing. What I’m saying is I’m not invested in my own superficial performance, but I find myself required to believe in it nonetheless. In a world that is strictly make-believe, you can chase a very beautiful frictionless existence and fool everyone on the ascent, yourself included.

Somewhere along the way things got unstable, a bit mean, and one learns that asking for forgiveness is better than asking for permission. Perhaps I was encoded this way, for I hardly remember when the conscious decision to be a good person that sometimes had to do bad things in order to survive came about. This isn’t a new thing, but for five years I haven’t had a home and the one that raised me isn’t one I can visit anymore. I don’t mind living out of two suitcases, moving past the threshold of 40 times in a year, or the inability to buy as many physical books as I’d like, because it’s not like I’m not making a bed on concrete or trapped under the wrong roof. Still, I have struggled to explain this instability and its effects on my psyche to anyone who knows where the light switches are having had the luxury to return to a known place.

On an unseasonably warm February day, I took a walk through Central Park with an artist. I wasn’t surprised at the words coming out of my mouth, or that being there with her felt as though it was always going to happen. There on a Monday, with my loafers rubbing my heels into blisters, I sensed a greater infinity begin to unfold. Over the course of the following months, this happenstance quintet ran amuck with New York City as our playground. Always to and fro, we often danced and played and forgot to preheat the oven because light was pouring in through the window and how marvelous it felt on our faces! By each other’s grace, we were allowed to be human for the first time too. What a beautiful day! We’ve never seen this one before! Again and again, we reminded each other of this.

“Do you feel seen?” He asked me after a close pass in the kitchen. The term ‘seen’ had only ever been an end in itself. All I’ve ever known is how to make myself agreeable to everyone. The idea of a wholly lovable, justified self walking safely in the world had slipped further away in May. “I can tell where you’ve just come from.” My chest braided tighter, the scene replayed: there I was, splayed out on a stranger’s tiled bathroom floor, voice cracking over the phone, asking for the validation that I was still salvageable, playing to an audience of one. Despite myself, I had once again fallen for the artifice that on the other side of my overly devoted attempts at being perceived as good, there might be a glimmer of redemption for my axe use.

My magical thinking would still like to insist that it is a necessary endeavor to keep myself brilliantly free, full of holes and absences, never one place too long, aware of my exit portal to anywhere I fancy as soon as the lovin’ runs dry. This nervous system of mine hasn’t found use for gravity in a long time and so I built a life upon leaving and got very good at it. Hey now, I’d coax myself, parading as a sheath of vapor is a strategy, but legitimate form requires capacity. How do you make a person real? You stay with them long enough.

For all of the turbulence and weeds that bore a hole within me, I found that a body that stays is a body that is counted on, expected for, and able to be the recipient of family dinners, porch lights left on and doors unlocked. What a relief it was to see hues of amber and butterscotch spill from the entryway as I rounded the corner onto 6th Ave. How lucky I am to be invited into homes and shown how new love finds me whole enough as is, even while I figure a few things out. What a good thing I get to return to after long nights. Perhaps it is the purpose of all of this.

My tolerance for the unknown can read as recklessness and of course many people have continued to dissuade me against further pursuit, but what do they know? I could be on the verge of one of the greatest stories ever to be compellingly told! I intend to stick the landing. What I’ve found is that the work is difficult, but I didn’t come here to be encouraged, I came here to figure out how the world enters me and why. With this in mind, I began to write, and write like I really meant it.

I can only be honest and create with what has happened to me. The undertow of most of what I wish to say to you is in the book. It was the most neurotic and intense summer of my life, one that I don’t want to repeat. I put everything I wished I didn’t know was true about myself on the page and left. Writing allows me to live through things that I cannot survive, therein allowing me to survive in ways that begets more truthful living. My job is to push past the place of comfort and return with, not answers necessarily, but guidance. Richard Siken says it best: “We say, I was in this room once. It is a difficult room. I left this on the table for you. I hope it helps. Whoever you are, reading this.”

People keep making bold statements about my choices that are most times unsolicited. Indirectly they ask, How can you persist being this exposed? Aren’t you scared? I just think, No, I’m good, but you seem pretty worried. They call me crazy, they call me unsafe. Sure, if those are words you need to put on it for your understanding, go ahead then, but I’m not listening. The I you read is not always the snake in my line of vision. How else can I tell you I’m not there? I am breathless, I am hot air, I am forward, I am motion. I am already so far away from the black ink scrawled on the page. If you want to come with me, you’ll have to run faster.

Do not be fooled, writing does not solve everything. I still have my grief and my rage, they sit beside me with peace and my morning tea. This is an increasingly difficult and contradictory wish: to share, but yet remain concealed. There are damages I’d like to not be reminded of so I can get through the day. There are people’s privacy I respect too much to give access to (they didn’t ask to be in relation to a writer, but here we are).

I wanted a less emotionally frantic approach to living and I got it. Now I’m probably really boring at parties because I put everything into language, and that’s okay. I have yet to finish writing my book, I blew my deadline, and that’s okay too. I’ve come to understand that art is a tangible way to access the freedom I so desire. It is rebellion from everything that raised me: compliance, bucolic wonder, order, curfew…and though this ostracizing of myself from what they first made me was costly, it has also rendered me very very alive. Incontestably, I know that this is what I am made for.

I’ll survive in a day that goes beyond limits, in a dream that is longer than the night, in a silence that is of interest only to myself because understanding my neighbor is necessary work. When I stop to look at someone else and think, how the hell do you live with yourself? The answer is quite obvious — they live with themselves exactly the same way you and I do too.

The way life formidably solidified around me by the later points of the year was unexpected in every way. I wasn’t looking for much and then it all happened. Much quicker than anticipated too.

Early December, though the weather in Paris felt like fresh autumn, I did not expect that I might tell my friend the entirety of what is happening to me, but as the conversation went on in between rain showers and sips of coffee, that is exactly what happened. She oohed and aahed, leaned in at inflections and sighed with effect. She nodded along like it made all the sense in the world, though we’d only just met. Her presence was fortifying and simultaneously devastating — I was abruptly aware of how painful the absence jutting into my side for the last five years has been. Life could have always been a beautiful existence like this, but in spite of my persistent hopeful efforts, I couldn’t quite fill it out on my own.

After repeat offenses, certain relationships didn’t work anymore and I gave in to giving up. People I love/d hurt me, and a few disappointments cut deep. I accelerated through the trying process of apologizing, hand-wringing, compromise and empathy in various forms. I fought to keep the status quo and shared histories alive until one day, I just didn’t. If I were to have any relief, my choices were going to have to be in the direction of the no-going-back abyss. More uncertainty lies ahead yes, but I won’t ever get to heaven if I save a kind word for everyone except myself. I am sure of this.

Why do we tell ourselves stories in order to live? Especially ones that have such arbitrary resemblance to our actual living? Why why why do we arrive to our arrivals just for the sake of arriving and therein miss the point entirely? My time in Paris has asked this of me again and again. It slapped my little rectangle oblong figure of flesh into focus. When I decided to come here, I thought that by all means it was a great idea because no one, not even I, expected me, which meant that everything, including I, awaited me. It took all of two weeks for me to realize that I was never going home again. Naturally at first, the tug of new life bartered with the preoccupation of that old one left on the shelf, but the motives and desires that got me here are distant. I’m here now, is all I think. I’m here now, anew now. Of everything I’ve brought along, the heaviest baggage was all in my head. It’s really quite useless here. This is all there is now. This is home now. I won’t be late arriving to my desires. Only what is beautiful and necessary remains now. For a split second I question everything, but those moments are becoming fewer and farther between. At this point I’m no longer interested in curating a performance for agreeable perception or trying to sound smarter than I am. I just want to have a voice and an honest one at that.

Repeatedly, I found myself in new company, the good kind, and a pattern started to emerge.

The human experience is so unreal! How clear it is that mutuality extends itself as a bridge between us and the connections we desire! It turns out that there are so many people waiting for your offer. It’s all so incredibly sublime! It’s a story you can’t tell, the bends are there, but the arc hasn’t formed yet. It’s by definition a story you can only know in real time. Like sitting half-drunk alone or with a few friends under a moon-coated night. How rice on the ground looks like snow. Wanna hang out, like everyday? Yeah! The dinners served family style. To take a midnight detour because your friend wants to show you a secret pavilion in the heart of the city. Long legs that stick out of the bed. It’s unexplainable: my beauty, his beauty, hers, theirs, ours. Impulsive heart pulses. A few good years with this skyline in view. How it can all be so light, pull you in and then kick you in the face. We were meant to be serious and foolish together, louder and more direct in our outright need for one another. I say this with my chest. Knowing why we bother to survive is an overlooked practicality of the human condition. “I’m exhausted, but I’m okay because I’m with you.” To me, no words ever sounded more like love.

This is a mighty fine existence, much more real than the one I had believed myself to be in just a year ago. The candor is somewhat unmentionable, likely because true relational feelings lack articulation, but more precisely because it did not occur to me that others would also be openly receptive to the sustained effort of sharing in life together. The evidence that this is love is simultaneously too obvious and significant to be named. Whether it be friendship, familial, romantic or self — the gentle steadfast work of love is the work of keeping each other’s light on. To beam this ray back into another who, in a moment of shame or grief cannot see it for themselves, is life saving work. I believe that in our best moments, we are the mirror that magnifies this in another person.

This year has been a continuation of feeling close to the end, thinking each moment was the end, and then miraculously a new tomorrow would begin. I am fascinated by the fecund times, the soft booms followed by obvious buds. I find myself alone, but in this sentence with you, dear stranger I may never meet. In certain ways, I’m still curled up under the layers of brick and cement, pushed past a place of comfort, thinking that at any moment it could all end. So the year made me realize that there really are points of no return, and though I know it’s for the better, it doesn’t always feel like that. After the sirens cease and, by all measures of science, you are considered safe again, a part of you will want for the time before that was pure and innocent, undiluted by pain. Life, with all of its beauty and terror, is inevitably going to happen to you — try to keep your eyes open and skin permeable.

If our collective and personal storms hadn’t intervened, who knows what would’ve happened? I often wonder where the tornado goes after it is done decimating the land past recognition. Does it live in a cathedral in the sky? Does it retreat because it seeks redemption and praise for its destructive adrenaline? Maybe it just wants to be called good too. It’s probably indifferent, just doing its job twisting through the bends, rearranging the world for necessary order, luckily showing mercy to my magnolia tree. We aren’t supposed to always understand why. Though time happens differently for all of us, it also runs on the same for all of us too. Your retrospective glance and hopeful intentions are just like mine. It is unmistakeable that the storm was here, believe in that. Now comes the pleasingly tedious task of choosing the ways in which we are altered in turn. I won’t speak for you, but I am as eager to be changed as sugar is to be in the bloodstream. The wind ripples back and forth with possibilities, and all of them are true.

It goes on like this: life ruptures, we retreat into the arms of safety. The sirens stop, the yard remains. It is only right to emerge again with a resolve to love better what you still find lovable. From my vantage point, I can feel that something in the distance is coming to grab my pretty little neck. I am the deer, I am the headlights, I am the road where they collide. I consented to this path knowing it would not spare me. Yes, the crash is inevitable. This I accept. Equally so, I refuse to give away to anyone else the responsibility for my life and my choices. It is mine. I will do what I want with it. You may call me brave, but what speaks to me more is something less overly valorous. When the clouds brew black and we can’t cross back to where we would’ve been — I will return this skin without bitterness to the wild and rapturous skies, ideally under the impression that I’m going somewhere familiar, somewhere that feels like home.

Xx,

M

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“A nice healthy amount of humiliation is really humbling, you know what I mean? It also makes you realize too that the first scratch…who cares? After that first scratch you just go like ‘Okay, so crash the car. We can fix it.’” — Kristen Stewart

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“I’m aware that I and the people I love may perish in the morning. I know that. But there’s light on our faces now.”

—James Baldwin, 1970.

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You finally left the table
And what a simple thought
You’re starving ‘til you’re not

—Opalite, Taylor Swift.

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Circumlocution

(n) The use of many words where fewer would do, especially in a deliberate attempt to be vague or evasive.

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“I was ashamed of myself, when I realized life was a costume party, and I attended with my real face.”

— Franz Kafka

You walk into the room and you know the night will surprise, and possibly, fail you. There are too many people, obscured faces, exposed bodies, fair weather friends, mahogany walls, drinks you won’t drink, smoke shrouding the rooms like the veil of a bride. It’s just another graceless, imperfect night under strobing red lights.

You are here.

To your amusement there is no danger upfront. Only creatures in costumes, humanity shut down, packed away, stifled. The usual really, but for tonight everyone gets a pass. It is Halloween and no one has to be who they really are, because let’s be honest who wants to face who they actually are? The music is horrible. It’s already the next day but the night has only just started. Ro embraces you by the bar and leads you through the party. Everyone’s head is on swivel. This is the blithesome pleasure of disguise, you never know who anyone is other than their characterized, ballooned and cartooned self. You enjoy them for what they are and ask for nothing beneath the surface. For one night and one night only, the trappings of awareness dissolve into the air. Time is unperfumed, as though intentionally lacking in the necessary makings of memory. The truths of the night are built on lies, there will be no place for them come sunrise. Enjoy yourself while you can.

Clarity, seeing and being seen, and noticing dormant lying feelings are cerebral conditions unavailable to you. Though, that was to be expected. The powers that render you specific in most ordinary situations — anticipation of a light jacket in spring, turn left at the end of the aisle, wait for two minutes more, leave but then go back inside — are useless, and therefore you are spared for a few hours. Left untouched by the subtleties, it is a fool’s errand to dissect the eyes that fall upon you, or to believe any of the words that fall like marbles from the mouths of the drunk and drugged. It’s a good time, and really it is. You believe that this is a type of peace — this unawareness of deeper perception — that allows for most people to live in comfort.

For tonight, you are someone else. Something far more dangerous and overcoming than your sensibilities has been lit at your center and you decide to no longer be in pain, or cause hurt for arriving too late to your desires. The pulse of the room quickens, you throw your head back and let pleasure in, a discovery that renders you sort of speechless and inebriate.

You watch people at the party. Ro introduces you to his friends. Everyone knows the rules. You ask how someone is—they say good or fine—and you both pretend that’s a complete answer. You laugh at jokes that you wouldn’t otherwise, and nod at stories you’ve lost the through line to. You are having so much fun. Here, you thrust your phone at a stranger. Take our photo. Though it is not said, it is understood. This must be, this must be, this must be committed to memory. Seeing as all usual encoding protocol is unreliable. .002 seconds of the night are paused and there is no worry about how to move on. It’s a quiet agreement, to keep things pleasant, to stay roving the breadth rather than depth of each person’s surface.

Are you lost enough? Have another drink, get lost in another. Take a turn through the hazy rooms, keep up the charade, that at this point, is not too far removed from the one you always play, but now there is a mask to hide the winces and flinches of reckoning. What was that? Who cares! Your presence is no longer an unwelcome mirror. You can be agreeable to everyone. Everyone likes what they see reflected back to them. Pretty young thing, flitting away, unencumbered, free to be desire and danger, soft edges and unreal. It’s fictitious and fickle and that’s the point. If the stars that night were visible through the light pollution of Paris, you would have shot at them.

Cupid’s arrow pierced through the heart, a woman dressed as a man, many men dressed as women, a porcupine, sailors and vampires, wolves and witches, tailored suits, painted naked bodies, feathers drenched in blood. For once the fragile structure of theatrics in real-life are the very bolt holding the facade together. It begets you to work hard to hide behind performance. Everyone assumes their role with glad, having seen the vision for weeks, having wanted this specific consummation to feel more free and transcendent than anything. It is without much practice, because we gorgeous freaks of nature want nothing more than to expose ourselves publicly and still be accepted. It’s beautiful really. You can’t imagine it happening anywhere else.

The night, though the clock would very clearly demarcate it morning, could continue on or end. Dealer’s choice. Ro said stop, you said go. One can imagine how that goes. There isn’t really any fun left as the substances take over, but it doesn’t feel illicit either. How could it? Everyone is pretending and obviously falling apart, but no one is overexposed in their unraveling. The intensity is dampened and muted because there is no meaning that needs to be made sense of. This is a relief, but if you’re honest, a bit boring by the time 3am rolls around. Still, you make a note on your phone: a place without truth is safe.

You grow tired of looking at blown up pupils and, having discarded interest in sincerity, think it’s best to say thank you to the party and leave. Someone always has to leave first. This is a very old story, there is no other version of this story. I’m sorry. The night is cold, but not in a capacity that you could relate to. It is silver, like a coin. You made a withdrawal and know that you will pay in the days to come. The barter of life for experience you always accept. It was fun to live in someone else, to live like everyone else. You stayed for as long as you could. Then you went home, ran home actually, from the man who liked what he saw and wanted it to stay. You looked up at the moon, the only sure thing.

You were none of those things you made people believe. Now it is day and you’re awake again, feeling again, in a world that prefers to keep numb.

Xx,

M

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“Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.” — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life.

“So I kind of want a nose job.”

I do not, in fact, want a nose job.

I am, in fact, scared of needles.

I do, in fact, think stupid, needless things when I am not writing.

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Kurt Vonnegut, talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying…

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