Well, not really, I don’t have the nerve. Really, I just want to feel good about my novel again. I don’t even need to feel good, per se. I just want to relate to it in a way that has nothing to do with the bad weather of my ego and the noise of external (in)validation. I thought this would be easy when writing the book; I believed I wouldn’t care what other people thought as long as I believed in what a wrote. Enter Fool. Kitten has been out everywhere for just over a week now, and though many wonderful, exciting things have happened, I find myself focusing mostly on the negative things, the things that haven’t happened—

—and then, day by day (hour by hour, really), letting those things go. What used to scare me months ago - talking about Kitten publicly, pitching it to writers I admire - doesn’t anymore. The Amazon review that sent me into a frenzy last week feels completely irrelevant now. Things get easier once you’ve experienced them and integrated them into your reality.

At the moment of writing this, at the sunny desk of my childhood friend’s bedroom in Berkeley, where I’m spending a few nights for an event in Alameda, I feel fine, and rather detached from Kitten on the whole. I’m just so happy to be in California again, breathing in the cool green air and eating a chocolate chip cookie. This morning, Kitten made the USA Today Bestseller List at #105. When scrolling down the list, I actually felt myself reaching for disappointment about not making the top 100. But then I immediately realized how ludicrous such a feeling was, and then I was OK, I was happy.

So maybe it’s true I’m maturing.

What is maturity? Is it the ability to recover on your own from outsized emotions? A cool-headedness and open-heartedness about people and situations? Rejecting the pull of self-flagellation, or escapism, or validation-seeking, or our other myriad psychological indulgences? Maybe maturity is the ability to accept the true nature of things and people without being misled by inner or external distractions, and to act responsibly with the knowledge.

When I think about it like that, the act of novel-writing seems to me a giant, prolonged effort in maturity. Writing a novel requires you to hold and realize a great deal of characters and ideas at once, without encumbering your ideas with an agenda or neutralizing your characters with judgment. You can tell when an author hates (or, worse, is uninterested in) one or more of their characters. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth - because it’s immature! Good writers are able to portray even the most morally bankrupt, pernicious characters1 with a deep yet controlled curiosity towards the inner workings of their minds, and a refusal to categorize or dehumanize. Humanizing a character isn’t just about portraying them as empathetic and redeemable. It also means showing the depth of a character’s immaturity, impropriety, or moral bankruptcy, because all these things are human, too.

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All this is a very long-winded way of saying that I think writing Kitten helped me grow up. Of course, publishing a novel will very quickly force you to grow a thicker skin. But I feel that a more significant maturing happened before then, when I had to sit with my characters every day, trying to understand them, digging deeper into their mysterious and fickle hearts and coming to know who they were outside of the purposes they served for my story. In creating these people - borne from the preoccupations I’ve had my whole life but, crucially, not me - I could confront some of my own narratives and points of obsession without the self-flagellating that usually accompanies such ruminations.

Kitten is about a woman named Katie who is desperate to escape adulthood. I’ve always felt a pull towards childhood, not necessarily the specifics of my own childhood but rather Childhood as a larger concept, a foreign land, a country I left. For much of my early twenties I nursed a strong suspicion that I was better as a kid—better to the people around me and to the world, doing no harm, leaving no trace, making my parents laugh. Everyone I loved was alive and healthy and if anything bad had happened to them, I didn’t know it yet. If anything bad had happened to me, I didn’t fully understand it yet, either.

I knew I was wrong in feeling this way, or at the very least misguided; there’s a reason Peter Pan syndrome is called a syndrome, something to be cured or dealt with, rather than, say, an affect. And I don’t really consider myself a Peter Pan type. Despite my tendency towards nostalgia, I am generally very disciplined about enacting my goals and creating for myself a life I want. But I was interested in what might happen if someone with my emotional worldview lacked the tools or for some reason felt incapable of stepping outside of such a viscous, deadening mode.

So I created Katie. And through Katie and the characters around her, I was forced to examine such ideas without my usual instinct to judge or moralize myself, because both judgment and moralization preclude understanding and therefore preclude good characterization. To write characters worth reading about, I had to be interested in and empathetic to their flaws and our differences. I could push my characters to the limits of what their worldviews could sustain, then examine, again, with both cool distance and focused curiosity, the consequences. Sylvia Plath wrote in one of her journals that “There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.”

Yes, there is—in life, but also in writing.

A few days ago, at my event in Boston, an audience member asked what I admired most about my character Katie. I really appreciated that question. It’s a question I was forced to ask myself, early on in the drafting process. Back then, I didn’t have the courage or curiosity to write Katie as her own person, so she was a caricature of my worst characteristics. And because of that, she was flat and bland and totally uncompelling. If you read that version, you would be able to tell I didn’t like her very much, because I didn’t like myself very much.

Only when I asked myself what I could learn from her did she start to become herself: completely devoted, brutally honest, and shameless to a fault. Sensitive, unable to mask or pose or lie, living life yanked by the teeth of her feelings. I could never be like that. I wish sometimes I could, even though these qualities cause her to do many questionable things.

But I’m glad she’s herself. I think she’s a far more interesting person than I am. Which is why she’s the character in a novel, not me.

If you enjoyed Kitten, I would be very grateful if you left a rating and review on Amazon, Goodreads, or the platform of your choice. This really helps discoverability, which in these early weeks creates a waterfall effect down the line. Data analytics show that the higher a book’s star rating, the more likely people are to purchase it. I really hate to lead more people into the bezosphere but I do want to keep writing books. Thank you!

Kitten has been out for just over a week now. Despite what the beginning of this post may suggest, I have been in a giddy fugue for most of it, because, yes this is going to sound cheesy but it is absolutely true, nearly every day I am either seeing the people I love most in the world, whom I live far away from and miss dearly, or else I’m meeting writers, authors, booksellers, and readers with a passion so infectious and great that it makes me FURIOUS to think about the “reading is soooo over” tirade that never ceases to capture the Internet’s attention in various recycled forms.

In addition to the general joy of celebrating, I have had a few pinch-me moments since Kitten came out a week ago:

• I was in conversation at Boston with inimitable genius Kelly Link, who was so kind and generous, and whose writing just completely seizes and enchants. Getting to share the stage with an author I’ve long admired was a bucketlist item for me. I didn’t know Kelly personally, so I was really thrilled that she agreed to do the event with me. Thank you, Kelly!!

• I wrote a viral essay for Marie Claire on what I coin the “girlbaby” versus the girlboss. I was nervous for this to publish (and I’m still quite skittish about the response) because I’ve never written anything like it - nonfiction/cultural commentary is not my usual arena.

• In addition to the USA Today Bestseller list, Kitten was a bestseller at McNally Jackson, Foyles, PT Knitwear, and other wonderful bookstores. Thank you to every bookseller for the wonderful, important work that you do, and for championing Kitten.

• Kitten was lucky enough to get a few lovely reviews from the below media:

“Kitten indulges in the agony and ecstasy of helplessness . . . This delights” —The Boston Globe

“Strange, vibrant, and genuinely idiosyncratic… Kitten is exceptionally good” —The Irish Times

“You won’t want to put [it] down… A thoughtful meditation on the fragile threshold between childhood and adulthood” —Service95

“Beguiling, biting… [Kitten] explores the political, economic, and social implications of who gets to be ‘helpless.’” —Marie Claire

“Kitten blends dark humour and emotional insight, marking Yu as one to watch in contemporary fiction.” —The i Paper

If you have read, purchased, borrowed, or shared Kitten, thank you so much.

I will try to one day stop talking about this book.

(But I can’t guarantee it.)

Love from Stacey

you can buy it here, or from your local indie

I’ll be running around bookstores in Brooklyn signing copies and trying not to freak out

(the first bookstore I’m visiting is Center for Fiction, which amazingly longlisted Kitten for its First Novel Prize, eek)

Thank you for reading and supporting and, importantly, waiting alongside me, I know I’ve been talking about it for eternities

Had my UK launch in London last week and it was the best party of my life

Can’t believe I get to do it all over again today in New York

city of my heart!

signed pre-orders at Yu & Me yesterday and saw so many names that surprised me, the first friend I made in middle school but haven’t spoken to since then, old co-workers, friends of friends and even someone from Australia!!

come see me on tour - tickets still available for Boston, Alameda, Manchester, and Bristol

hmm, what else is there to say - I went on the Barnes & Noble Poured Over podcast, adored the conversation

last night I had dinner with my family at a Georgian restaurant where we had khachapuri and saperavi (iykyk)

apparently Kitten is one of Foyles’ top 10 books this week

that’s all for now. love you all

I can’t believe I’ve forgotten to do the very basic task of letting you all know that I am going on tour to promote Kitten soon! In the US and the UK! I would love to see you there. I used to work in publicity, so there is still little that strikes more fear in my heart than the idea of an empty room.

All details and links below. If you’re around in one of these cities, I would be so honored and happy to see you.

USA

New York

🥂 Launch at McNally Jackson Seaport, in conversation with Leah Abrams - August 6

💐 Flower arranging pop-up with Yellow Peril Books at Flower Cat - August 8

🐱 Conversation with LIC Feral Feeders Cat Rescue x Astoria Bookshop - August 9 (A foster kitty will be in attendance!)

Boston

💬 In conversation with Kelly Link @ Brookline Booksmith - August 10

Bay Area

🌅 In conversation with@ Addie Woolridge @ Books Inc. - August 12

Los Angeles

🥄 Grain of Salt Reading & Snacking Series - August 14 [SOLD OUT, WAITLIST AVAILABLE!)

UK

London

🌟 Launch at Foyles Charing Cross, in conversation with Sarvat Hasin @ Foyles - July 30

Oxford

👞 In conversation with the booksellers @ Gulp Fiction - July 31

Bristol

⛵️ In conversation with Freya Bromley @ Bookhaus - September 14

Manchester

🐝 In conversation with Hannah Mcdonald @ Blackwells - September 24

More soon!!!

Kitten is out in less than two weeks. If you’re in London, apparently a few books have already stocked it (!) - Bard Books and Foyles that I know of. I’m genuinely incapable of holding a thought at the moment. Even typing this is hard, I feel like I’ve forgotten all my words. I hope I become literate again soon.

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The other day, I found my old journal, the one I kept from from 2020-2025 (I journal consistently but rather infrequently). Flicking through, I came upon the entry I wrote when I first started my novel over three years ago. “I am determined to write a novel. I am determined to be an active agent in the rest of my life.” The steeliness surprised me. What business did I have saying ‘active agent,’ ‘rest of my life’ at twenty-four? Girl, your life hasn’t even begun! You were not being held at gunpoint by your day job! But I guess my flippancy now is only possible because I was once so unflippant then. I don’t remember writing that, though I do remember feeling that way, and it surprises me that I had the gall to commit such a big desire to paper. It’s unlike me. I usually keep my dreams a secret, even to myself.

When people ask me how I wrote my first novel, I talk about the repetitive act of writing it, not the feeling. I’ve almost forgotten how I felt while writing it, though I know it was difficult. When I came upon that first entry, I couldn’t stop reading. I was pleasantly surprised to not feel much shame or embarrassment; I actually felt a bit of sympathy. Almost two years ago to the date, struggling to finish my nth draft, I wrote: “I know I’ll miss writing this book when it’s finally done.” I was right. I miss writing the book, I really do, even though it often left me confused and despairing, staring down the barrel of my limitations. But the moments of clarity, euphoria — they existed. I miss them, too.

This is how it felt.

February 11, 2023

“I am determined to write a novel. I am determined to be an active agent in the rest of my life. Because why not me? Why not try?”

July 23, 2023

“I’m finding my novel-writing to be a bit difficult. I’m discovering more themes and ideas as I write and don’t really have faith in myself to pull it all off. I want so badly to create something meaningful…”

November 20, 2023

“All I can think about is my writing – how desperate I am to do it well, to complete it. I know most – if not all – of this is in my hands which is why it’s been so difficult.”

“[Yesterday] I felt good about what I’d written. But today I feel so awful about it. I’m not even getting much out by volume, let alone ideas and content. I felt very briefly the other day a certainty that I would finish the novel – but today I’m not so sure. I hate everything I’ve written and think I’ve gotten worse –”

November 26, 2023

“I thought of a few things that need to change in my novel: restructuring the beginning of part 3, and introducing more love from Katie to Silver in the first half... she needs to see herself in Silver”

January 1, 2024

“Well, it’s the new year... I want to be a better person. I want to finish my novel - perhaps sell it - this year. I shouldn’t be afraid to want things. It’s okay if it doesn’t happen. It might take a while. I will be fine. I think. This time last year I didn’t know whether I’d be able to move to London. We had breakfast in Jacob’s big kitchen.”

January 20, 2024

“Been writing more. I feel for the first time that things are finally starting to make sense in the manuscript - I can see the light @ end of tunnel, etc. at least that’s what I’m telling myself.”

March 7, 2024

“I can’t stop thinking about my novel. I feel or fear that it’s going nowhere, I will continue to revise and rewrite until it’s totally unrecognizable, it isn’t doing or saying anything important, my ego is absurd and I have nothing to show for it. Even now, as I write this, there is a small voice in the back of my head, not even that far back, protesting…”

March 17, 2024

“I’m making good progress on my novel. The second rewrite is proving much more structured and doable than the first draft. Sometimes I feel moments of genius - fleeting, small, too small really to be called genius, maybe it’s clarity – that arise out of nowhere and find themselves a place within the text. Other times I struggle to finish a sentence.”

July 19, 2024

“It was very satisfying to feel that the themes and structure were coming together. I think I’ve written something good… it will need editing. I know I’ll miss writing this book once it’s finally done.”

July 26, 2024 - Preparing to query agents

“I feel positive against all my knowledge about the industry and how brutal and disappointing it is. I guess this is how most people feel otherwise they wouldn’t submit. But I wanted to write it down anyway, remember how I felt when it felt good.”

September 16, 2024 - Sent off my manuscript to a few agents

“I can’t stop thinking about my book. I feel really glum and anxious about it. The excitement of it being read - and the glimmer of conviction I experienced not even a few days ago that it would be published, do well, that I could do anything I wanted, has long died - I’m so nervous and convinced that I’ve wasted my shot…”

September 17, 2024

“I wonder if this whole endeavor will make me very unhappy… more so than I’ve ever been capable of before... although on Friday, after sending it to [AGENT], I did feel a sense of pride, for the first time possibly in this process, very lucky and like I had nothing to worry about. I took a walk and felt astonishingly capable and hopeful. But that’s over now.”

September 24, 2024 - Got an offer from an agent

“The joy last night was great. I laid in bed kicking my feet so as not to wake Jacob.”

October 1, 2024 - Just after signing with my agent

“On the topic of signs! I’ve just send my email to Meredith - and immediately afterwards the buzzer rings and I get a package - it’s BIBLIOPHOBIA, a book about loving and being ruined by books. And the sun came out. And my playlist - the hours-long one - has just ended. It’s quiet now. I’ve done it.”

October 23, 2024 - Starting on first round of edits with my agent

“[Felt unhopeful] that I’d ever achieve the book’s full potential, all the great things I know it can be. It feels like such delicate work beyond my ability. But I made it, so I should be able to make it better. Right? It’s just a matter of work. I can’t be afraid.”

December 10, 2024

“Editing the book upsets me. But I can see it’s getting better on a molecular level. This is what I wanted. I’m not going to catastrophize. Anyway. Sometimes I feel so old. I was 22 when I started this journal. I can feel the pages ending. My entire life has changed. Have I, enough? Too much?”

December 17, 2024

“...revisions, revisions, revisions. I’m done with the hard part, going back in. Have I already written that I’m scared? I feel myself losing trust in my writing, the pulse of the story, why any of it should stay. I’m always biased to newer passages. Then I read them over and over until they’re terrible. Mostly I worry about book 2.”

December 31, 2024

“I woke earlier to revise my novel. It’s going well, I think, I’m not inserting new material but rather modifying existing content to be sharper, ‘more magic’…”

January 25, 2025

“Turned in my final draft. Feeling a bit crazed. Can’t stop ruminating about all the dead sentences and wooden dialogue and mechanical descriptions. What have I done!! Apparently we go on submission next week, or the week after. I hope I fall back in love with this book eventually.”

“I feel incapable of pride towards the project or myself. I feel certain that I’ve tricked everyone who thinks it’s good and that I will be disappointed with what comes from the submission process. I am such an unbearable pessimist!”

January 29, 2025 - My book goes on submission to editors

“My book goes out today. I feel nervous, but fine, the nervousness is muted by the task of work...

Just this morning I had the strange brief feeling of revulsion, fear at the idea of somebody else reading it, and then others, it being a real thing, which is what I’d always wanted it to be. And I will be disappointed if it isn’t, but I have a feeling I’ll be disappointed if it is. The things you want are never what you think they are. You can never be sure, can you? Just take it one day at a time.”

February 13, 2025 - The day before my book goes to auction

“Feeling good about things. Thought I should write that down. It’s the day before the auction, and my birthday. I want to make it last forever, I want to remember it clearly or for it to feel special, but it doesn’t, not particularly.”

February 14, 2025 - Just before my book goes to auction, at 11:59 am…

“Danced a bit when I got home. Now, writing this, trying to make the moment last, before things change for my book. Took a quick peek up - an offer has just come in. Look - the moment’s already over.”

February 14, 2025 - Probably around 12:15pm. Opened the first email, and my whole life changed

“Opened her email, scrolled down, saw, screamed. The moment was very still and fast. Jacob ran in from the kitchen. Then I went completely nuts. Jumped on the bed screaming. Crying actually. Laughing. I can’t believe I did it, I kept repeating, I did it, holy fucking shit… in my heart I felt like a crazy little kid but no kid could feel the way I felt then. I can’t believe it still. I made this. I did this.”

“The sun was shining everywhere.”

I signed with Random House that weekend1. I didn’t journal for about a month afterwards, though my entries since have very much been the same as I edited the book for another year and a half, and prepared for it to come out.

Kitten comes out in less than two weeks - July 30 in the UK, and August 4 in the US. You can order it wherever books are sold.

Thank you for reading, for subscribing, for being here. I know I haven’t written much this year. It means a lot lot lot.

x Stacey

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My editor Miriam and I spent two days moseying through Brooklyn and Manhattan with a bag full of proofs and kitten-shaped candies I imported from the UK. Hats off to my UK publicist Bella for this idea - everybody appreciates a sweet treat, and leave it to the British to have an animal-shaped snack for every situation. I decided to take advantage of this idyllic tour to ask each bookseller their ultimate book recommendation. I realized not long into this effort how difficult a question this is for people who sell books for a living, but everyone was a champion about it (even if it was hard to limit the answer to just one). The result is a diverse and fascinating list of titles that I’ll be returning to time and time again.

For reader convenience, I’ve loosely categorized the recommendations.

For lovers of the strange, sad, and/or surreal…

Yeshim from Books Are Magic recommends The Body Builders by Albertine Clarke, a debut novel about the frayed borders between our bodies and minds. I have heard many good things about this book and will be picking it up!

Theresa from Center for Fiction recommends Fishbone Cinderella by Elizabeth Lim, a forthcoming novel about a mother and daughter breaking their family’s curse. This one sounds great for lovers of magical realism and intergenerational stories.

Eve from Books are Magic recommends White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link, a story collection of seven modern fairytales. This feels like it would also appeal to lovers of magical realism.

CJ from Yu and Me Books recommends Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki, a short story collection by a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon. I read some of Suzuki’s stories in Hit Parade of Tears, and her style is unsettling and beguiling.

For those who are drawn to complex relationship dynamics…

Sydney from McNally Jackson Soho recommends Masks by Fumiko Enchi, about two men who love a woman - and the mother-in-law that is manipulating all three of them. I am thoroughly hooked by this premise. Sydney had finished it a few weeks ago, but reported that “it keeps haunting me.”

Miriam from Three Lives recommends Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette, about four sisters who find their devotion tested as they leave the familiarity of their little house for a new life in a former mill town. As a fan of books about cloistered lives and intense female bonds, I am intrigued by this one!

Books that defy simple categorization…

Phillip from Community Bookstore recommends U and I by Nicholson Baker, about the author’s relationship with his hero John Updike. I am always intrigued by books whose subject of obsessive study allows the author to explore more than they might’ve initially set out to.

Elish from Books Are Magic, Smith St recommends Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, a literary political thriller follows members of guerilla gardening collective Birnam Wood as, with the help of a charismatic tech billionaire, they undertake a new project on abandoned farmland. I haven’t read anything by Catton yet and might start here!

For those seeking a deep cut…

Patrick from Community Bookstore recommends The All of It by Jeannette Halen, a seemingly simple tale of a parishioner confiding in her priest. Patrick spoke so highly of this novel that Miriam bought a copy and I wish I did, too (but I try not to buy books when I’m traveling)! Apparently it had been out of print for a while until Ann Patchett stumbled upon it in a used bookstore, fell in love, and brought it back into public attention.

Julianne from McNally Jackson Soho recommends The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson, an adventure novel set in the late 10th century that follows the adventures of the Viking Röde Orm. She reported that there’s “a lot more humor than you’d expect from a Viking book.” The way she spoke about this book made me want to immediately pick it up… I’ve never read anything like it!

Claire from McNally Jackson Soho recommends Angels by Denis Johnson, his 1983 debut that tells the story of “three losers” and takes the reader through the dark underbelly of America.

Theresa from Yu and Me Books recommends The Postman by Bi Yu, translated from the Mandarin, about ​​a man who tries to discover the truth about his late father’s brutal death in the wake of the Sino-Japanese war. It sounds fascinating, and Theresa pointed out that it’s “less about the war and more about the people who get embroiled in the violence.”

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For lovers of beautiful prose…

Enzo from McNally Jackson Seaport recommends Light Years by James Salter, about a married couple whose idyllic life is starting to crack. Enzo spoke so passionately about the “perfect, beautiful” sentences of this novel. His description reminded me a bit of how I felt about The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, a book of such delectable prose you’re tempted to re-read every line.

For fans of science fiction…

Charles from Unnameable Books recommends Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delaney, a layered, deftly written science fiction novel about a lone survivor transported to an entirely new planet. Charles spoke about how the book interrogates the complexity of language and communication, themes I love.

Jacob from Greenlight Books recommends Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer, where under the watchful eye of The Company, three characters ― Grayson, Morse and Chen ― shapeshifters, amorphous, part human, part extensions of the landscape, make their way through forces that would consume them.

JoAnn from Books Are Magic, Smith St recommends Chaos Walking by Patrick Ness, a YA science fiction series set in a dystopian world where all living creatures can hear each other’s thoughts in a stream of images, words, and sounds called Noise. She noted that it is especially “timely” for today.

For fans of non-fiction…

Jacob from Greenlight Books recommends Love in a Fucked-Up World by Dean Spade, a manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands. Jacob recommended it for the way it brings the language of activism into interpersonal relationships. I was reminded of Love in Exile by Shon Faye. The first chapter in that collection is an excellent meditation on the ways our relationships with gender intersect and clash with our expectations from modern dating and finding love.

Enzo from McNally Jackson Seaport recommends Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood, the author’s dazzling comic memoir.

For fantasy readers…

Izzie from Books are Magic recommends Blood over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang, about a woman who unravels a secret conspiracy that could change the practice of magic forever.

I am most intrigued by Masks, The All of It, Birnam Wood, and Light Years. Currently, I’m juggling three different reads: Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg, and the eternal Middlemarch, which feels more like a safe harbor I return to after weeks or months away than a book.

What are you reading? What are you loving? Let me know, and sorry it’s been so long! Time and much of life has not felt totally real in these months leading up to Kitten’s launch in August. I found it so difficult to read in January and February, but these days all I want to do is live in somebody else’s sentences. I’ve been especially loving the cool, mordant prose of Gwendoline Riley. I bawled my eyes out reading Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba. And reading the ultimate Notting Hill novel, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, in various rooms and cafes and parks in Notting Hill during the slow and precious onset of Spring has been a special experience. I could stay in Hollinghurst’s private twilit gardens forever.

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Before diving in, I want to share some funds that you might consider donating to to support Minneapolis, detained immigrants, and frontline organizers.

Support the Immigration Bond Freedom Fund | Support frontline organizers | Directory of GoFundMe’s and other campaigns

How does a book get its clothes?

I’ve always maintained that I have too much respect for the design profession to not judge a book by its cover. I don’t envy the job of a cover designer, though I do envy their desks. Visually capturing the spirit of an entire book, while also making sure it can hold its weight in a bookstore or phone screen, is no small task.

Because my novel comes out in the US and the UK, and the markets have quite different aesthetic preferences, I’m lucky to have two covers. I just adore them. The blue on the left is the US cover, designed by Cassie, and the yellow on the right is the UK one, designed by Saffron Stocker.

I was already a follower of Cassie’s work and was delighted to learn, when my cover was near completion, that she had designed it! Energized by the speed with which we landed the cover (3.5 days), the general frenzy and bonhomie of the holiday season, and my being a previous fan, I slid into her DMs to gush. Pretty soon, I knew I wanted to interview her to learn more about and share the mysterious and layered and very diplomatic process of how a book gets its clothes.

So without further ado: here’s Cassie!

Enter Cassie: Prior gymnast, avid reader, and cover designer extraordinaire

Can you tell me a little about yourself?

I’ve been working as a cover designer for 10 years, and I mostly work on fiction. I have a particular love for 700+ page novels and realistic romcoms. Outside of book design I’ve had a photography business since I was a teenager. I love to draw, paint, embroider, cook and bake, and recently I’ve gotten into floral arranging. I was a gymnast growing up, and now I like to run half marathons very slowly. The cool thing about book design and working on so many different projects is that I know that eventually, all of these interests will show up in my work in some way or another!

What about book design appealed to you?

Reading has always been a huge part of my life. Even in high school and college I was reading 60 to 80 books a year. You don’t have to be a huge reader to be a book designer, but it certainly helps! I think my editors value the fact that I connect with the books, and that I’m the target audience for a lot of the books I design.

An art, not a science: The making of a book cover

Even as an author, the design process feels mostly like a mystery. Can you describe it from beginning to end, starting with: how does the process kick off?

In my department, we get to request what titles we work on. We have 3 seasons per year - Fall, Spring, and Summer (who knows why there is no winter season). So three times a year, I’ll make a list of about 10 books, ranked in order of preference, and I usually get assigned about half that I request and half that I don’t. I typically have 7 to 10 frontlist1 hardcover titles per season. We also have paperback repackages, reprints, special editions or special projects (like my Bantam Classics series) that add to the workload, but the frontlist is the bulk of it.

The process can be different for each book, but personally, I start each project by reading the manuscript and doing image research. The editors will give us a brief with thoughts about the target audience, the author’s notes, the settings or characters if necessary, and comp titles - books that are similar in tone and genre - which is probably the most important part! My personal favorite projects are when the editor will provide all of that information, and then say something like “but we trust your judgement, and feel free to bring any ideas to the table.” That’s what happened with Kitten, and obviously it proved very successful! :)

What happens after the initial exploration?

Once I’ve done about 10 to 15 options for a cover, they go to our weekly cover meeting. If you’re an art school girlie like me, a cover meeting is essentially the corporate version of a crit, or a critique. You show your work, and then everyone stands around discussing it for 5 to 45 minutes while they try and figure out if you are a genius or if you are a stupid idiot (they don’t actually say that, but sometimes it feels that way).

And then rinse and repeat. I would say we usually go between 3 to 5 rounds of revisions, with varying degrees of starting over and scrapping all the work you’ve done so far. It’s typical to have 20-50 different cover options that never see the light of day. Kitten was unusual in that I nailed the concept in the first round, but we did have approximately seventeen cat variations (and ended up using the original cat anyway). A majority of the time, we do at least one or two rounds at our cover meeting before even showing the author!

[Note from Stacey: Below is a sample of the different cats we deliberated over… at the very end, you can see how we tweaked the cat’s eyes to be rounder and wider, and less menacing. I kept saying: but can we make it cuter? Cuter?!]

And then?

Sometimes people think our job is done once the cover is finalized. I freaking WISHHHH! After we get the jacket file, otherwise known as the mechanical, all set up, we have to proof the cover. This happens in house on our Epson printers that replicate what the actual printer will do. I could get really in the weeds here explaining, but basically, book cover printing is nothing like a regular laser color printer. It’s more akin to screenprinting, where the colors are laid down individually on a large press. Sometimes we get to proof on the actual cover printers (this requires both time and money, which we don’t always have). If we are considering multiple effects and paper finishes, we’ll proof the jacket multiple different ways. Even after a jacket is finalized, printed, and published, there can be reprint adjustments, award seals, book club picks, New York Times Bestseller line additions (if we are lucky), etc.

So we do all that work and sometimes a cover STILL doesn’t print the exact way you want it to. It’s an art, not a science.

To you, what elements make a book cover successful?

I think there are only 2 things really. 1) Does the cover make you want to pick up the book, and 2) does the cover make sense to you when you finish reading it. Pretty much any good designer can accomplish number 1, it’s number 2 that has to click!

Beyond its representation of the book, what else do you consider when designing a cover? How do trends factor?

Much to my chagrin, we live in a digital world now, and a majority of people buy books online. Covers absolutely have to look good at thumbnail size, so these days you see a lot of big type and bright colors.

We also tend to work a lot within genre. Take romcoms, for example. The current trend is the Emily Henry look, flat colors with less detailed figures (popularized by the AMAZING Sanny Chiu, who is a true gem). But now the pendulum is swinging in the other direction, due to reader fatigue. How can we make a more detailed illustration fit on the shelf with the rest of the covers in the genre? That line of thinking gets us towards the covers that I did for Kate Goldbeck, for example.

You read all the books you design. Can you describe how that affects the way you read a manuscript—are there certain things you look out for?

I am very lucky to be a super fast reader (about 2-3x faster than average), so sometimes I actually will read a manuscript twice. Once for enjoyment and ~vibes~, and then again for details I can pull out to represent on the cover. I do a lot of highlighting, either on my kindle or a printed manuscript, and I’ll go back and reflect on the passages and see if there are repeating motifs that stood out to me. If I’m in the right headspace I can accomplish both things at the same time, but it really just depends!

A negotiation and a collaboration: Bringing people in

From my day job in branding (I am not a designer, but I work with them!), I know that getting a design on paper is only the first step. You then have to contend with a whole cast of decision-makers. How collaborative is the process, and how does that affect your work?

I think the amount of people who have their hand in what a cover looks like would shock the average reader. Before the author even sees cover options, they are looked at by the editor, the editorial assistant, the publisher, the deputy publisher, my art director, creative director, and sometimes the sales team and marketing team. The author’s opinion will always be weighted the heaviest, but all of those other people weigh in too. So a lot of the time I’m thinking in the background “does this particular editor like this style of work? Has the publisher seen something like this before?” Every single decision is made with intention, whether it’s my intention or someone else’s!

Why is the process so removed from the author? For reader knowledge: authors have absolutely zero interaction with the designer; everything, including feedback, is liased through the editor.

I don’t know the true reason, but my best guess is just efficiency for the process. An author’s book is their baby, but I’m juggling 7 to 10 different babies at any given time. Assume a minimum one-hour conversation with each author and that’s already 10 hours out of my 40 hour work week! I just don’t think it would be possible to do.

We can usually get just as good of a result if the author simply says “here are 5 book covers that I like, can you do something like that?” At the end of the day, a book cover is an interpretation, and I can interpret just as well from a set of notes vs speaking to someone directly!

Way before the cover process even started, I made a PowerPoint of covers and design elements I liked. I know sometimes authors bring in Pinterest boards. How do author preferences and input affect your design process? Generally, how much sway do you think authors have over their own cover? You can be honest!

They have TONS of sway!!! I don’t know where the myth originated that authors have no say in their covers, but at least at Random House, and everywhere else I’ve worked (4 out of the big 5), the authors have the number one input. Of course, it’s filtered through the editor, and about 1 million other people also get to weigh in, but if an author puts their foot down, I can honestly say I’ve seen it respected 100% of the time, regardless of if they are a debut author or a bestseller one million times over. With genuine regularity, we scrap cover versions just because the author isn’t feeling it. Of course, no one is getting exactly what they want 100% of the time (least of all me), but if an author doesn’t love their cover, I’m not doing my job correctly! Cover design, like everything in publishing, is a negotiation and a collaboration, but the author rules all.

The nitty gritty

Where do you find inspiration for covers?

Oh, anywhere and everywhere! I love going to the bookstore, museums, looking at movie posters, interior design, seeing what the posters on the subway look like this month. What other job can you say that pinning on Pinterest and scrolling on Instagram are valid uses of your time!

How do designers go about finding, and licensing, interesting artwork or photography?

This part is pretty banal, truth be told. Usually, we just go to Getty or Shutterstock. I like Stocksy too for more editorial looking images. A common misconception is that we don’t have to pay for usage of old paintings. We absolutely do—licensed from Bridgeman images, different museums, or whatever estate holds the license.

Sometimes, if we are stuck or short on time, we’ll hire an image researcher. That’s usually done when we are looking for specific photographs, and a professional image researcher will know a lot of people I don’t. I have a large library of saved artists and illustration agencies, as well as connections with great people I’ve met over the years. We also all chat with each other in my department—“Hey, does anyone know a Rwandan illustrator who does interesting figural paintings?” (a real request from my cover for Jacaranda, we went with Mugire Peace David). And if an artist is always late, a diva, or otherwise bad to work with, word gets around!

[Note from Stacey: For the UK cover, the photograph was actually sourced on Pinterest (a very serious research archive). For that, we had to find the photographer and clear permissions. Which, happily, we did!]

Do you ever get stumped? What do you do then?

Honestly, when I’m truly stuck, I’ll just hire someone smarter than me. So many talented book designers out there, why peddle around fruitlessly! Usually that happens either right from the jump if I know I’m out of my wheelhouse, or if we’re on round 7, not getting anywhere, and I’m simply tired.

A lightning strike of an idea: Designing Kitten

Can you describe the story and intentions behind the cover—from image to font to color?

Usually, we arrive at a final cover through a process of iterating—that is, I start designing within a loose framework of ideas, or color patterns, or genre, or setting, or fonts, and the idea comes to me through the process of making. With Kitten, I can describe it as nothing more than a lightning strike of an idea.

I had seen the moodboard from Stacey at our concepting meeting, and I tend to enjoy books from Stacey’s editor, Miriam Khanukaev, so I requested to work on it and read the manuscript. Miriam and I were schmoozing at bookclub one night after work, and she said something to the effect of “Stacey has all of these ideas and themes, but I think you’re the designer who will understand the vibe that she’s going for”. And right then I had the thought: I think it should be a cursive script, on a blue background, and it’s a lover’s eye, but inside the eye is a cat’s face. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a picture in my mind so clearly!

If I had to parse back my thinking at that moment, I think that blue fits because of the water, and the luxurious setting. But truthfully I also just like the color blue. Picture the cover in red, or pink… it just wouldn’t feel the same! Sometimes I just feel very strongly that a cover needs to be a certain color.

We did have a couple of alternate cover options that were well liked in cover meeting… but everyone knew right away that the lover’s eye was the right call.

I am a true appreciator and collector of vintage jewelry, and I had just attended the winter NYC Jewelry and Objects show and had been handling all kinds of vintage Victorian pieces (see again, how inspiration can come from anywhere!). I had also just created a cover that was ultimately scrapped for an edition of Little Women that featured an open locket with different flowers inside representing the sisters. So I think the idea of something small and precious representing intimacy, love, and sisterhood, was clanging around in my head.

The brooch on Kitten is called a lover’s eye. What is the significance of that?

The lover’s eye was a jewelry trend popularized in the late 1700s, during the Georgian period. They were small, intimate paintings, commissioned for sentimental reasons, to a hold a piece of your beloved close to your heart. The tiny paintings were meant to be treasured, adored, and kept secret, similar to the trend in the same era of clipping a piece of hair into a locket.

For much of the story, Katie’s obsession with Silver is kept secret from her boyfriend, so I thought the lover’s eye was a perfect visual metaphor for her fixation on the preciousness of the cat. If you know what a lover’s eye is, the connection is instantly recognizable. If you don’t, hopefully the imagery is intriguing enough that you will pick up the book anyway!

I’m personally so excited to see you work your magic on the back cover. When does that process start for you? When you’re designing a front cover, do you also take into consideration what can be done on the spine, back, jacket flaps, etc.?

It happens much later than the cover design process! It can be difficult to design in the abstract without the jacket copy, which usually takes up a significant amount of real estate and limits what we can do imagery wise. We don’t get that copy until a few weeks before the jacket needs to route for approvals, which is a couple of months before the files are due to the printer. Most of the time we don’t even know the final spine size until shortly before the jacket goes to print! I can definitely have some ideas percolating in my head, but nothing starts on the jacket for at least a few months after the cover is designed.

Closing hour

Is there anything that would surprise people about the book design process?

You usually have to pay to use an award seal on a cover (like the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, etc), even though the book won the award! Not the Nobel Prize though, shoutout Nobel!! They don’t have a standard seal, so I got to design the Nobel Seal when Han Kang won in 2024.

One part that really amuses me is that we handle the licensing contracts. Like, why??? I’m not a legal expert! Sometimes agents will get into the weeds about changing certain details, and then it requires a lot of back and forth with either our department manager or the legal team.

Speaking of contracts, contrary to popular belief, AI is not being used on book covers for any big 5 publishers, because it’s currently illegal to do so. If you see AI being used, it means someone is in breach of contract. And on top of that, any of my coworkers will tell you I’m the #1 AI hater at Random House. You’re telling me a robot is going to think of putting the face of a cat in an antique brooch? I don’t think so.

What are three of your favorite covers you’ve designed, and three others have designed?

My covers:

Kitten (duh), Liars by Sarah Manguso, and Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Others’ covers:

A childhood favorite: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (designed by Henry Yee), a recent icon: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (designed by Grace Han) and a cover so good I wish I had designed it myself: A Place Between Dreams by Jess Munday (designed by Luísa Dias).

Anything else you’d like to add?

Preorder Kitten!!!

You can follow Cassie on Instagram and TikTok. This is her website.

A reminder that I’m running a pre-order raffle for Kitten, where if you email me confirmation of your pre-order, you will be entered to potentially win an advanced copy of the book, an exclusive print of the pictured oil painting by Bean M, and a bunch of other goodies that have some connection to the world of Kitten but are mostly just nice to have and pretty to look at: Le Labo Rose hand cream, a cat stamp and red sealing wax, a hyperrealistic oyster key chain, and a starched lace ornament.

If you are a Blue Hour subscriber, your entry will be doubled!

Subscribe now

Pre-order US

Pre-order UK

More details about the raffle below.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading, and for your love and support for the book so far. I appreciate it all so so so much.

Until the next hour. xxx

2026 is the year my debut novel Kitten comes out. Kitten is about an adrift young woman whose growing fascination with her boyfriend’s cat ushers her into the possibilities of her own life—but not without first threatening to unravel it. I keep (un)ironically trying to say it the way Timothée Chalamet neologised ‘MARTY SUPREME CHRISTMAS DAY.’ KITTEN AUGUST 4. KITTEN AUGUST 4. KITTEN AUGUST 4. We’re missing a syllable. KITTEN OUT AUGUST 4?

Forgive me for starting in such a self-promoting fashion, but sometimes you have to let the soft Timothée Chalamet of your body love what it loves. And I’m in a particularly lovey mood: just before Christmas, in only three days, we landed the US cover. For my British kittens, we have a different one—I’m equally obsessed and can’t wait to show you soon. Double fun.

With this cover, it was love at first sight. Which is fitting because what my narrator, Katie, feels for Silver, the cat who she becomes a little bit obsessed with.

A lot of the book is about love, really: whether it’s the same thing as care; how it so often sits shrouded behind silence or resentment. The unwieldy actions it manifests: hiding, obsessing, doting, fleeing. But also the thrill of loving someone, or something, with dizzy abandon, losing yourself in it a bit. Might that be safety? Or freedom?

US cover reveal incoming

We’re revealing the cover everywhere else tomorrow, but I wanted you, my Blue Hour readers, to get the first look.

I always thought that the cover of Kitten should not feature a cat. Surely too on-the-nose? It is a testament to the brilliance of my designer, Cassie Vu, that the cover we landed on very much centers a cat, but in a way that feels specific and new. Cassie is amazing, and I’m going to interview her about the book cover design process in a future post, so keep your eyes peeled.

Cassie was inspired by lover’s eye jewelry, a beguiling, strange, and short-lived phenomenon in the 18th century, where lovestruck people gifted the object of their affection a delicate brooch encasing a miniature of their eye. These miniatures conveyed more than what met the eye (lol): details such as the direction of the eye’s gaze, the shape of the brow, or the heaviness of a lid were all thought to signify different things, from excitement to secrecy to longing.

How very strange, playful, and intimate—the exact mood I wanted Kitten to convey. I often wondered how the nature of Katie and Silver’s relationship could be captured visually, and whether that was even possible. I think the cover does the job, and more. From the moment I saw it staring back at me, I loved it. I hope you do, too.

✧˖° My Very Darling Kitten Raffle ⋆˙⟡

Now for a little fun… if you pre-order the book before February 14, you will be entered into a special raffle. This is open to both the US and UK!

Pre-orders are very important for debut authors. They have the biggest impact on first-week bestseller lists, and signal to the publisher that this book is worth paying attention to. In such a crowded marketplace, measurable reader attention means everything. If you think you want to read Kitten one day, would you do me a favor and consider pre-ordering? <3

A winner will receive an advanced copy of Kitten, a collection of assorted treasures (which bear loose relation to the universe of Kitten), and an exclusive print of the below oil painting by Bean McLean, which I commissioned after I sold my novel. I’m opening this raffle across my socials later on, but as a dear subscriber to Blue Hour, your purchase will automatically count as two entries!

Prize details

• Advanced reader’s copy of Kitten

• Giclée print of Girl and Cat before Milk Bowl oil painting (my most treasured artwork!)

• Le Labo Rose hand lotion (to keep your hands soft forever)

• Wax seal of a cat + red sealing wax (for your love letters)

• Starched lace lily of the valley ornament (in honor of more innocent times)

• Hand-crafted oyster keyring (better to look at than to eat)

• Japanese silkscreen print of cat in wine glass (just bc it is so cute)

How to enter

Simply pre-order Kitten and email me at staceyyu@gmail.com with your receipt (subject: “Kitten pre-order raffle entry”).

Pre-order US 🇺🇸

Pre-order UK 🇬🇧

Regardless of raffle results, a finished copy of Kitten will arrive promptly at your front door August 4. You will probably have forgotten you’ve pre-ordered it. Such is the magic of purchasing something that’s not yet out!

If you have already pre-ordered Kitten, thank you from the very bottom of my heart - you can email me with the receipt and you will automatically be eligible for the raffle, too 🙂

Winner picked February 15.

As I mentioned, this is the US cover. We will be revealing the UK cover soon! It’s fascinating to see different trends and marketplaces play out visually. I’m excited to show you.

Thank you for being here. I hope you had a happy new year, wherever you are, and that your January goes gently.

All my love,

Stacey

But then I think of the squirrels.

I go to the park every other weekend to see them. They’re everywhere. Cute enough to win food from humans, unculled by wildlife enemies. I know that these squirrels, American greys, are an invasive species that have obliterated the British red squirrel population like any successful colonizer through starvation and disease, but still, I love them so much. Their sheer and puffy tails. Their intelligent eyes. The way they come right up to you and stare, each time with a look of curious recognition. Dogs don’t look at you for that long, they get bored. Cats don’t look at you at all. When I look at a squirrel I feel like time stops. I wish I could tell them apart—someone who really loved them probably could—but I can’t. Every squirrel I see is my favorite squirrel.

Sometimes I wonder if I need to make more plans.

But I’ve been bad company recently. I can’t stop thinking about the production timeline of my novel, or the characters in the new novel I’m trying to write, or the fact that I’m not writing, or my usually tame but newly vicious desire to dye and cut off my hair, or my once non-existent but viciously new curiosity about Botox, which is to say I can’t stop thinking about myself. You can’t create anything meaningful, not even a conversation, with a mindset like that. I think to myself, you’re thinking about yourself too much, Jemima Kirke’s frosty expression glowing in my brain. Heard, Jemima. But how do I stop?

At work the women gather and we talk about hair products and skin routines and how young the interns are, scripted middle ground. Online I read articles about the necessity of self-marketing and recent despotic violences, the rise of the surveillance state and the stakes of the debut novel. I watch the new Yorgos Lanthimos and feel electrocuted, then go home and scroll on my phone. I know my phone makes me unhappy, but it could also make all my dreams come true. I read and wish I were at a party. I go to a party and everybody talks about themselves and I try to understand how they make themselves sound so interesting. I draft this piece and wonder if the self-conscious confessional is a particularly female mode of storytelling, and whether it’s possible to transcend it when being a woman is to be self-conscious and being a writer is to confess. I then doubt if that’s true, that to be a woman is to be self-conscious; maybe it’s a quality of the atomized and online American, or just of being young. I wonder also if I believe that being a writer is to confess, if it isn’t, rather, to lie. Well, I’m not lying when I say that sometimes the only thing that makes me feel good these days is going to the park and seeing squirrels.

I witnessed something exciting last week. Walking into the park that day, I found there were fewer squirrels than normal, probably because of the approaching winter. When I got closer to the pond, which was populated with koi, ducks, and these beautiful scarlet-beaked birds whose name I do not know, I finally began to see more squirrels. Two of them darted around in circles and up a tree. I imagined they were friends (I don’t know if friendship matters to squirrels, I’m probably projecting). Another one was particularly social, approaching people on the pathway. A man whipped out his iPhone, bent low, and got close to the squirrel. I thought the squirrel would run away, but it stood on its hind legs and sniffed the man’s hand. I felt jealous of that man.

I walked further down the path and came upon a lone squirrel darting across the grass. He stopped, picked up a nut, gave it a nibble, and then, as if confirming it was worth keeping, stuffed the nut into his mouth. With full cheeks, he ran to a patch of grass a few feet away (which did not seem more special than where he previously was, but what do I know), then proceeded to dig a hole and bury the nut!!! He finished by giving the earth a few pats, standing on his hind legs and driving both paws firmly into the ground. None of this was anything I’d seen before. I felt rapturously giddy to have witnessed it. I suppose I have always known that squirrels eat acorns and bury their food for winter, but seeing it in real time was unexpected and heartening, a reminder that some things in this world will always be the same. Winter is coming. Somewhere out there, a squirrel is looking for acorns. A few months later, he will find them again, he will not go hungry.

For days afterward, the image of the squirrel burying his nut flashed in my mind, giving me happiness. Why am I so moved by a squirrel behaving like a squirrel? Is it because it’s comforting to see reality being real? It’s not that I didn’t believe that squirrels buried nuts, but there was something comforting about confirming a long-assumed fact with my own two eyes.

I am caught between a generation that played outside and a generation numbed to sleep by the glow of a screen. I remember collecting rocks and catching bugs in the garden, but I also remember staying up past midnight talking strangers off the ledge on Tumblr. I wonder if the Internet has nurtured within my generation (and the next) a detachment from the reality of, well, everything. Most everything on the Internet is artificial, but the artifice has a real impact on our behaviors, feelings, relationships, and culture, which then inform the stories we tell, the companies we build, the things we buy, the politicians we elect. Eventually, the logic of don’t believe everything you see online naturally becomes don’t believe anything and then what you believe in doesn’t matter, the artifice becomes reality becomes artifice—we’re so accustomed to navigating the hyperreal that the purely real comes as a surprise. And we’re so unaccustomed to witnessing something new, unmediated through a screen, that doing so feels like a rare and special treat.

Or maybe I just really love squirrels.

Okay, no more Internet talk. I do dream of going to Cumbria and seeing British red squirrels, which I am obsessed with. I think I have to save that trip for a particularly low time in my life, when I really need an upper. I know that the grey squirrels I love to visit have a direct and catastrophic impact on the red squirrels I long to see, but honestly, I’m going to have to accept the cognitive dissonance on this one.

Maybe it is the predictable destiny of someone in their late twenties to go nature-pilled, but I can’t deny the remedying effect that even being in a manmade park has on me. Increasingly, I’ve been captivated by novels featuring rich natural environments or remote settings: Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, A.S. Byatt’s Possession.

Sometimes I wish I enjoyed spending time in nature more. My parents are nature-loving people, and I grew up camping in national parks each winter to ring in the new year (where my love for squirrels began). But I always got tired of the woods after a few days. I would rather read about trees, I think, than live among them. Which is to say the idea of escape, the fiction of distant places, is more attractive than actually escaping. If I tried to live in the green world, I would definitely pull a Thoureau and secretly import my sandwiches from town. I would get used to squirrels. And I don’t want to get used to squirrels.

Thanks for reading, as always. And let me know, do you also love squirrels or other wildlife? Have you ever seen a red squirrel and was it amazing? What do you do when you don’t want to do anything? How do you stop yourself from ruminating about things you have no control over? What have you been reading? (I’m currently reading and enjoying Wanting by Claire Jia.)

If you enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing or sharing. And see you next time!! xx

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My friend Zoe messaged me last week to ask if I could read her poem. I shared my enthusiastic thoughts, particularly over a line I loved and felt was the line of the poem, and ways other parts of the poem might shift or evolve to service that line. Then I read over my texts and felt a little guilty because maybe that wasn’t the line of the poem, just my personal favorite, and in fact there were other lines that could, depending on what she chose, be the line of the poem. A poem in its first draft can be so many things.

I quickly followed up with a message asking what her vision for the poem was, or what she really wanted it to be about. She wrote: “Great question, I think I need to practice being able to describe what I’m trying to communicate with each of my poems… that’s the thing I struggle with the most. Did you have a hard time talking about your own work and why you’re writing it or what you’re trying to say with it?”

Yes!! I did!!!!! People say that “writing is hard, but not writing is harder.” I’d like to make an addendum: talking about your writing is the hardest.

I find it basically humiliating on many fronts. The simpler humiliation is that of having to verbalize why you spent multiple years of your life writing about people you made up in your head. These people are very precious and important to you but not so much for anybody else, particularly if they haven’t read the book yet. I can get over this. The bigger humiliation is the feeling that maybe, despite all the words you’ve put to describing the characters, the plot, your intentions, not to mention the seventy-thousand you actually wrote, you can’t quite describe what the work is really about, not just the plot or the premise but the idea that gives the plot a reason to exist (e.g. like how The Great Gatsby is about a very wealthy man who tries to win back a past lover, but it’s really about the emptiness of the American dream).

When writing my debut novel Kitten, I spent a lot of time trying to pin down what my novel was about, all the while hoping that eventually someone smarter and more well-read and with better, professional taste would just tell me: what was my novel really about? I wished a person would reveal to me something that I’d missed, that my novel wasn’t merely about the politics of helplessness or the loss of childhood, the topics that led me to write the book, but about something more specific and true than I could put into words, because as the person closest to the text I sometimes feel the most blind to its intentions.

“But what is it about? you might ask, and then the novel recoils.” —Alexander Chee

It was a shock to discover that after I’d written my novel, I had to learn it all over again. I think writing and knowing are two entirely separate acts. People have said they write to understand, or to find out something. I mean, I guess. Sometimes I think this could be true. But mostly I feel that I write because there’s something inside me and I don’t want to know it. I already understand it, I think, on a subconscious level. I would rather not look it straight in the eye, which is what revising is for.

What is a ‘you’ novel?

The tricky thing about writing is that you often start with an idea of what you want the work to be (the line of the poem), and then it turns into something different (a secret other line that emerges, mysteriously, better and more fully-formed than the one you set out to write), and now you have to contend with the two. This is why I find writing much easier than revising.

It might be valuable, then, to narrow your focus and set parameters on what you intend to say before you try to write it. This is what I said to Zoe, because a commiserative “I don’t know I fear it will be a lifelong struggle” isn’t great advice. Your intentions and inputs for the work often hold the answers to your work’s ‘aboutness,’ to borrow a word from my agent. I didn’t do this when I impulsively started my draft two and a half years ago, letting whatever paragraphs fall out of me in whatever order. The result was a draft that I definitely needed to get out but felt dishonest, somehow. Not me. I often have the urge to delete these early drafts because they are so disconcerting to consider as my own, but that would be on par with throwing away my teenage journals—maybe organizationally sensible, but spiritually reprehensible.

Probably the most important turning point in the lifespan of Kitten is when I gave my boyfriend Jacob a few chapters to read and he said, with a devastating lack of hesitation, I don’t think this is the novel you want to write. After I completed my requisite breakdown, I accepted it was true. Kitten is about a 22-year-old woman who becomes enamored with her older, wealthier boyfriend’s cat—a startling affection that opens her to the possibilities of her own life. It’s a book that attempts to balance the mordant and hopeless with the curious and redemptive. But in its first iteration, it was flatly dark; the protagonist was a little too dangerously obsessed; characters suffered, there was no real relief. Those who know me in real life know that although a healthy esteem for suffering certainly exists within my emotional arsenal, especially in the drearier months, it is not my primary characteristic. I cannot pull off purely Moshfeghian writing when I love the movie Ratatouille so much.

So we sat down and made a map of what makes a novel mine. I’m a bit embarrassed to share my little “What is a Stacey novel?” chart from two years ago, partly because it represents an old version of me (I was newly twenty-five). But when I look at all these things, I do see that they still exist in the book, the one I just turned in last week.

This exercise pointed me towards a) what my prose could do best, and b) which facets of existence capture my attention most. I then went forth and wrote a whole new draft with these in mind. It was so helpful and re-orientating that I constantly recommend it to people, even non-writers. It’s always been important to know what makes your work yours, be it a painting, an essay, a song, or a newsletter. This is often boiled down to questions of voice (Elif Batuman’s piece “HOW I FOUND MY GODDAMN VOICE” is great – it’s behind a paywall but I have five free one-month subscriptions available to gift, if you want one, let me know in a comment!) but I think the chart exercise goes beyond that, into the little pre-occupations, obsessions, interests, and emotional qualities that not only make your writing yours, but your brain yours, too.

The Elif Life

HOW I FOUND MY GODDAMN VOICE

Munificent readers! As a token of my thanks to everyone who upgraded their subscription after my last post (about writing every day), this is a follow-up about some ways I find it helpful to think about voice. It’s largely inspired by a book event I went to last January in Tokyo, for…

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a year ago · 129 likes · 14 comments · Elif Batuman

Anyway, like I said, after making the chart I immediately filed away my half-formed first draft and started a second one. A different novel emerged, bit by bit, occasionally revealing new facets of itself that immediately energized me (so this is the heart of the novel!!!) before turning into something else (I was a fool to have been so certain, I shall never again). And since completing that draft, I’ve done many more re-writes. But throughout, there remained little bits of the chart, plus a handful of other elements that I will add to a newer version of it.

When I turned in my final draft of my novel last week, I felt not so much a sense of satisfaction that the project was nearing its end, but the slightly disorienting yet gratifying thought: so this is what it was all about. I would describe it to you, but I think that would spoil the novel.

Picking your multitudes

I really don’t think I’m qualified to give anybody more than a few lines of writing advice, but if you’re still here, I will just say that I recommend not spending too much time on the chart but rather noting the first few things that pop up for you. I think it took me like 10 minutes. First thought, best thought, and all that. Of course, you contain Multitudes. Your chart can only be a snapshot of what makes your writing yours, and it will evolve with time. I’ve started working on my second novel (now clap!) and it has little to do with the stuff I wrote down back in 2023, though that stuff still lives in me. But because I’ve channeled some of these qualities and pre-occupations (namely “animals” and “penchant for the cute”) into my first project, I feel I’ve answered to these particular then-relevant aspects of me, and now I can turn to the other ones. This is another reason why, while the chart might include qualities of voice (for me, the words “playful,” “observational,” and “knowing” feel ever-relevant), it is not limited to it.

I’m not a good enough writer yet to fit everything I care and think about and am in one work. In this interview between agent Alia Hanna Habib and editor Yahdon Israel, Israel touches upon the fact that many debut authors “have all tried to write every kind of book that they could imagine writing in the first book that they’re about to get published.” To that impulse, he says, “Listen, this is your first book. All you have to do is do one thing well for your first book, and you’ll get to do another thing well with your next book.”

Delivery & Acceptance

Merchants of Culture: A Conversation With S&S Editor Yahdon Israel

I wanted to chat with Simon and Schuster editor Yahdon Israel after reading his refreshingly frank interview with Merve Emre for her excellent (and I’m not just saying that because she’s a client) series “The Art of Editing.” I particularly loved how Yahdon reframes how we should think about …

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a year ago · 161 likes · 34 comments · Alia Hanna Habib

This is relieving to hear because I have taken a similar approach with my debut. It is a pretty interior coming-of-age story. I really hope I’m able to publish more novels in the future, because I have many more things to say and ways to say it beyond what I’ve said in this book. I have more things to add to my chart. But you can’t use all your lines in one poem. Or maybe you can. But know that somebody will ask you: What is it really about?

Thanks for reading this slightly different edition of “Blue Hour.” I am deep in novel-land, and it shows. I know I write about many things in this newsletter, and would love to hear from you what resonates most.

See you next time! xxx

Stacey

The beginning of August, or Women in Translation month, might’ve been a more fitting time to share these recommendations, but I’ve always gravitated towards endings. So let this be your reminder to continue to read translated literature, and translated literature written by women, in the many months and years to come.

Note: This post is too long for email, so open in desktop for the full list!

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, translated from the Japanese by Megan Backus (1988)

In Yoshimoto’s worlds, colors shine brighter, time moves more slowly, and people are sensitive and honest and vulnerable and brave the way children are, the way we wish we could be. Though I wouldn’t classify Yoshimoto’s works as magical realism, there is a magical quality to her pages. A finely-tuned otherworldliness. Her characters’ experiences are so precisely rendered, down to the way they see a certain shade of blue. Your time with them is short, but the lessons they leave with you linger.

Kitchen follows a young woman who has just lost her last living relative and is plunged into a loneliness from which there seems to be no true relief, until she’s taken in by an eccentric and earnest mother-son duo. In their home and across different kitchens, she navigates grief, despair, joy, and love. I adore this book for the way it honors sadness while also declaring that “in this world there is no place for sadness. No place; not one.”

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (2011-2014)

These are some of my favorite books of all time, so it is very hard for me to talk about them. I don’t think I really have to, given their only ever increasing renown. What I will say is that these books are about so much more than a complex female friendship. They are ultimately, to me, books concerned with the making of the self: whether or not the self can be unyoked from country (and from the town you left or never did, from the neighborhood where everybody or nobody knows you, from the room your sister grew up in, and so on), and how the making of that self engages with or is thwarted by the external world—in this case, an impoverished neighborhood in Naples and a post-war Italy undergoing massive social, economic, and cultural change. They are about the awakening, and curtailing, of sociopolitical consciousness and the ever relevant gap between the theorized and the experienced. They are about violence: domestic, psychological, political. They are also about the fierce and indelible connections we form throughout life with the people who make us.

Though the book centers Elena and Lila, every single character (and there are many!) has an arc which contributes to and reinforces the series’ overarching ideology about self-actualization and place, particularly examined in the lens of gender, the family unit, and class.

There is also a small but potent dash of the fable-esque. One of my favorite elements of Ferrante’s writing is the way she utilizes tropes from fairy tales, such as the big bad ogre, or vanishings, or portents, into a decidedly realist setting. I love a tragedy. I love the idea of fate and destiny and predetermined scripts, and I love being tricked into thinking anything could be different. Oh Ferrante. I’ll read you forever.

I’ll stop myself. If you liked the Neapolitan Novels, I highly recommend her book of essays In the Margins. And here are some of my favorite Ferrante-related articles and interviews:

The Hypnotic Genius of Elena Ferrante

Interview with the Paris Review

Interview with Sheila Heti

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (2022)

Finishing this book made me feel kind of sick. It’s not uncommon to feel a sense of loss upon finishing a good book, but it’s rare for me to feel so bought into a character’s narration that I experience a personal obligation to stay in the novel with them – to keep them safe, accompanied, alive.

This literary suspense is narrated by a live-in maid for a wealthy family in Chile named Estella. She is telling the story of the freak death of the family’s 7-year-old daughter. We know that Estella is alone in a cell. We know that as she tells us this story, she sometimes feels that nobody is listening. We are therefore thrust into the role of the passive listener, whose presence is necessary for the story to unfold but useless in every other way; we cannot help or comfort her, even as she discloses increasingly distressing details; in fact we are often abandoning her. This novel is as much a suspense story as it is a meditation on domestic labor, power, and violence, and the psychological unrest caused by a country undergoing increasing social upheaval.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside (1963)

People in my life are sick of hearing me talk about this book. I’m sick of hearing myself talk about this book. I reviewed it here. And here. It captured me completely. It made me weep. It also brought me a great deal of comfort, which is an unexpected thing for a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel to do.

A woman is on vacation in the countryside when one day she wakes up and discovers that everybody is dead. The closest thing to an explanation she gets for this terrifying phenomenon is the existence of a transparent wall by the river, which separates her from the dead. And so begins the lonely journey of the rest of her life on the other side of the wall, accompanied only by a few animals. This book contains some of the most beautiful and cutting passages on the nature of humanity, the condition of woman, and the wonder of animals I’ve ever read. You could choose to interpret this novel in numerous ways: a critique on modern capitalist civilization and the allure of escape to a “green world,” a feminist exploration of what true agency and freedom for women might look like, a moral analysis of the human condition, especially in the aftermath of war.

A few people have told me that the ending was disappointing or ruined the book for them. For me, the ending made the book. But you can decide for yourself.

Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman (1967-1971)

I read this book years ago, but I can still recall particular images and lines as clearly as if I read it yesterday. The busy streets of Ditlevsen’s childhood neighborhood, the comparison to childhood as a coffin, the line “there lives a young girl in me who will not die” (granted, that is the title of a separate collection of Ditlevsen’s poetry, but she discusses the titular poem written in this book).

Ditlevsen charts the core events and writings of her life, from her childhood in a poor town in Copenhagen to achieving literary renown in young adulthood to descending into addiction. It is a gift to be so intimately acquainted with such a brilliant writer’s mind and emotions, and astonishing at times to recognize an emotion as she writes it. I don’t by any means think we should judge books for their relatability (in fact, I think that’s stupid!!), but the fleeting pang of recognition, of meeting a tender inner part of yourself on the page, rendered by someone else, is undeniably one of reading’s most profound offerings. I’m drawn to a ferocity of emotion more than I am to a withholding of it, and I was so enraptured by the emotional honesty with which Ditlevsen writes.

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (2019)

This book changed the way I see motherhood and childbirth in a way that I probably will be grateful for forever. I read it in my early twenties, when the idea of having children was something that was so astronomically none of my business. My response to whether I’d have children was always a knee-jerk and self-assured NO! Yet even then, this book broke through to me. It both gave me fodder for the NO! and planted a tiny curiosity. It attuned me to what our opinions on traditional and non-traditional routes to pregnancy implicate about our opinions of family, identity, purpose, and existence in general.

The novel is split into two parts, with the first mostly revolving around a woman named Makiko who has travelled to Tokyo to get a boob job, and the second part around her sister, Natsuko, who seeks to be a mother and, in her contemplation of IVF, meets and speaks with various children who were conceived through IVF. I will admit that I have essentially forgotten Makiko’s part; only Natsuko’s story has stuck with me. I was very interested in its exploration of reproductive rights, biopolitics, and antinatalism, but equally in Natsuko’s relationship with aging, aloneness, her body, and motherhood, though she is not yet a mother. I was intrigued by how much she wanted a baby, a completely unfamiliar desire to me, and not something she could really coherently articulate or justify. But the strength with which she wanted was the point. It moved me greatly.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jacquette (2017)

This is a difficult book to write about, because it is such a difficult read. Yet it is necessary and unforgettable. This book unfolds in two parts: the first takes place just a year after the Nakba and follows an Israeli soldier whose army captures and murders a Bedouin girl. The second takes place decades later, and follows a Palestinian journalist who becomes obsessed with this story, reported as but a “minor detail.”

Shibli’s writing is spare and hypnotic, giving the novel a propulsive tempo that keeps the pages turning despite the harrowing nature of the subject matter. With the two vastly different perspectives, Shibli forces you to look the violence in the eye, experience it unfold, and witness its ramifications years down the line. The slow, sickly psychological dread that characterizes the novel’s first half transforms at once into unrelenting suspense in the second, in which the smallest bureaucratic details hold major existential weight. This is the reality faced by Palestinians, and Shibli has masterfully captured it across different angles.

Shame by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Tanya Leslie (1998)

I remember coming across the first line of this book somewhere online, and then immediately ordering it. “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.”

Shame is Ernaux’s attempt at writing about the above event since it happened when she was twelve, an event that births in her the feeling of shame. In examining her shame, she reconstructs the broader memory of her childhood in a working class town in France, organized neatly by religion, tradition, and the separation between public and private life. I only felt how truly masterful this memoir was in its last few pages, which gave everything recounted before more meaning and depth, like the feeling of shame often does for memories of times preceding it. Ernaux’s writing is clean without being colorless, controlled without dulling the vibrancy and detail of life.

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, translated from the German by Lucy Jones (1963)

I won’t lie, I bought this book mostly because I liked the cover. Also, Julia Armfield blurbed it, and she’s one of my favorite contemporary writers. The title also spoke to me, because I was interested in reading something about siblings. I never said my method for choosing my next read was particularly refined.

Due to all the above I didn’t have many expectations going into this book, and maybe that’s why I ended up enjoying it so much. It’s set in the GDR and follows a painter named Elizabeth whose devotion to her politics and East Germany’s socialist future is rivaled only by her love for her older brother Uli, who has a big secret: he wants to defect to the west. I thought this novel brilliantly portrayed the gap between devotion and disillusionment and how quickly it grows, between both party lines and family relationships.

I love reading about intensity of feeling, particularly regarding the allure, and trap, of political and moral purity. There’s a real existential threat hanging over the post-war youth as they grapple with a split Germany and the possibilities of their futures, and they respond differently to the ways that their identity is subsumed into their country and party.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (1995)

I wrote about this novel here as soon as I finished it because I had so many thoughts. You can read that original post below.

This book was engrossing in every sense thanks to its eerie dystopian premise, which kept the pages turning, the strength of the images, which were often harrowing and strange but at times strikingly beautiful, and, most of all, the interiority of the narrator, rich with curiosity and observation. This book is about a group of 40 women trapped in underground bunkers manned by unspeaking male guards. They have little memory of their past lives and no idea why they’re there. Among them is our narrator, a young girl. Because she has no memory of a past life, she feels uniquely alone. But she is the key to their escape and their survival.

This book asks what lies at the bottom of our humanity when we are removed from everything that makes a life worth living. The answer I took from that is the experience of curiosity, and the life of the mind. It is the most human gift.

What are your favorite translated books by women? Have you read anything good this month? Let me know!! xxx

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I go to New York often because my sister and most of the people I know and love live there. Usually I look forward to the trip, but when I land, a small flap somewhere in my heart closes. It annoys me that I am more penetrable to the city than it is to me. I feel smug when something gross happens (luckily for me this happens frequently), like that time a pipe burst and doused the streets of Union Square with an opaque brown liquid that could have been anything but, to me, was most definitely poo. I think: Yes, you really are disgusting, and it’s not acceptable. It makes me feel better for being frightened, like noticing someone has food in their teeth when they’re yelling at you. And the feeling doesn’t quite go away until the plane sails out of the tarmac and an appropriately melancholic song comes on and I think, with real sadness, Oh, I’ll really miss you.

To be clear: I love New York. I lived there once. I had to go because of Covid. I packed up my life in forty-eight hours and then graduated on a Powerpoint presentation.

To be clearer: this is not a piece about Covid. But I can’t deny its significance as the inciting incident in the ensuing internal drama I have with the city, a place I hesitate to write about because a) it’s one of the most written about places ever, b) as I’ve made clear, I’m scared, and c), writing about it would confirm its importance to me, which I’m not sure I want to do.

Last Sunday, I made it back to London after two weeks in New York. I was less wary of it this time around, probably precisely because I’m happy in London. My contentment with my life here has afforded me a more neutral outlook on New York: I didn’t have to dodge all the ways it was great and I was missing out, or prove that I knew it the way I once thought I did. But still, as always, I was a little apprehensive. While trying to catch a train downtown, I humbly watched the doors close right in front of me because I did not have the chutzpah to bolt. This was a respect I would’ve never shown to the Tube. In my defense, it was a green line, and I don’t know the green lines very well, because when I was a student I lived uptown and only used the 1, 2, 3, and occasionally the yellows and oranges. I’m happy on the green lines, they are novel and fast and I like that one of them is shaped like a diamond with bejeweled sides. But on an orange line (the B or D), I lose it a little bit.

The B and D became my local lines in the summer of 2019, the first and only summer I lived in New York. Graduation was less than a year away. I spent three days a week commuting midtown to my internship at W. W. Norton, where I read non-fiction book proposals (dull) and lots of Jean Rhys (depressing, excellent), and the rest of my time doing I don’t even know what, probably obsessing over my body or watching Love Island for something to discuss with the British guy I liked or re-inflating my air mattress—we squeezed three people in a 1.5 bed apartment—or plotting the weekend with other semi-employed people in the city. I had never frequently used the B or D before, and I have never frequently used them since, so they carry a specific visceral association, an actual odor of that summer which meant so much to me because it was the summer I felt everything. July, New York. I’d never known weather like it. I was always running from a sudden onslaught of rain, the shock of it like the first time, every time. Next summer we would no longer be students. I was frantic over who I would become (I loved books, so I should probably work with books, but also maybe I should be a management consultant?), and money (it was a part-time internship in publishing), and status (the person I was hooking up told me not to tell anyone), and the city, which I was free for the first time to explore without the obligation of texts to annotate and exams to study for. One thing I knew with certainty: I would live here forever. I felt this scurrying across Bryant Park with a box of freshly bound manuscripts from Staples in my arms, I felt this standing foolish and regretful at the lips of apartment buildings that were not mine, I felt this waking up on the floor to new messages from friends: bewildering screenshots, plans for dancing. We would always be together. Here. There was no other way. Each time I go on the B or the D there is a risk I remember all that again. Sometimes I feel my old self sitting inside me, anxious about being late and listening to “Black Beauty” by Lana Del Rey, my most played song of that summer because I agreed so much with the sentiment that life was beautiful and I didn’t have a clue, and it feels like I could slip into that old self again with a jolt of the cart. I think of the past a lot, but I don’t usually animate past versions of me; it feels so cheesy. But on those orange lines, I do. And I think: oh my God, you actually didn’t have a clue.

Since our make-up graduation in 2022, three of my friends and I meet each summer for a group trip. This year, we reunited in New York, for a few days upstate in the Adirondacks.

The first thing I noticed about being upstate was the amount of American flags. I had that weird feeling, a mix of detachment and guilt and recognition, that you occasionally get when you’re an American who lives abroad. On the way back from the grocery store we drove past a banner of Trump. Then we drove past a sign that said, delightfully, Caution: Chickens at play. Trees flanked us on both sides. When we turned up the hill that led to our secluded Airbnb cabin, it started to rain, though it was still light out, so the water that passed through the leaves was fine and bright and backlit by the sun. We all cried out at the beauty.

Reunion is a loaded thing. The fact of having chosen to do it is already a signal to each other, and to time, that our togetherness means something. There are expectations, narratives. There are backlogs of things to discuss. Some of us were already familiar with the recent stuff of each other’s lives, but we hadn’t yet discussed the stuff together, which was crucial. On the agenda, day after day: swimming, roasting marshmallows, but most importantly, and through it all, talking. We talked and talked and talked. Job qualms. Break-ups. Relatives passing. The normal beats of an adult life, pulling from each of us different perspectives and emotions, so that in the end we arrived at a new sense of what was and had been happening to ourselves; we arrived at a better sense of each other. I was open about things I kept close to my chest years ago. Even though we’ve been friends for nearly ten years, every time we see each other, we learn to talk to each other better.

I’m reminded of a line in the dystopian novel I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, about the self-sustaining community the stranded women are able to form when they start to share their thoughts with each other: “Talking is existing.” Sharing who we are, what we think, over and over again: we exist. And though we exist on separate sides of the Atlantic, we still make the choice to exist together.

One of the things we discussed was the idea of missing a version of your life that you could’ve had but didn’t choose. It became clear to me this was what my fear was all about. Emilia and I were chatting outside on the deck. There were a lot of flies, so we doused the chairs in bug spray, coughing through the fumes. But once we settled, it was beautiful, the thicket of trees hanging over us dark against the sky and occasionally glimmering with fireflies. After graduation, both of us ended up leaving the city for good (at least, for now), while Ari and Daniela made their ways back. “It’s weird,” she said. “For the first time, I have this sense of loss about New York.” It didn’t even have anything to do with Covid, she said, those years of our twenties gone. The loss was over something less concrete, just an idea, really, of what could’ve happened had she not chosen to go to grad school in Oxford.

I understood what she was saying. Up until recently I hadn’t made my life change in any significant way. Covid forced me out of New York, and then my job required me to move to San Francisco. These moves felt pre-determined, like they had to happen. But when I chose, two and a half years ago, to close the gap of my long-distance relationship and move to London, I wasn’t following a pre-determined direction, I made my own. My life forked. I could always go back to America, but that wouldn’t undo the fork, it would just make a new one. This fork was the reason that instead of finding New York nostalgic and familiar when I visited, I found it hostile and intimidating. I had taken it away from myself. Would it, and all the versions of me determined to make it my home, ever let me forget that?

I thought back to the start of quarantine, when Emilia was still deciding whether or not to accept her Oxford offer. I thought further back to that summer in 2019, where none of us had a single real decision to make. There wasn’t a question we would’ve asked then that we could not answer now. We were old enough now to have experienced our own decisions.

Ari and Daniela came to fetch us because we’d been out there for ages. We told them our revelation. They just looked at us, like, it took you this long to realize? They were always better at coming to terms with things.

New York frightens me because it forces me to meet myself. The distance between the girl I was when I first arrived and the person I am now feels dangerously compressed, and it’s painful to recall the crippling insecurity and instinct for self-punishment I used to carry. But it reminds me of the good feelings, too. Some of these feelings are unavailable to me now. Last year, I took my parents to the Columbia campus. It was my dad’s first time seeing it, but I had the urge to be brisk about the tour; I didn’t want to give myself time to miss anything. My feelings about my time at college are mixed, but I am not immune to the romance of campus. We walked up the steps of Low. It was a bright and cold day in March, the end of winter. From the corner of my eye, I saw students with their heads bowed in a sun-lit room in Mathematics. Someone raised their hand. My chest ached. All those hours bent over wooden tables. The notes I took, the ideas I had, where did they go? Would I ever know so much about the world as I believed I did back then? I turned around.

I want to raise my hand again. But I also want to publish my novel. I want to knock on my friends’ doors at odd hours of the night. But I also want to decorate my apartment with my partner. I want to go back to New York. But I also want to live in London. I guess not all of these things are mutually exclusive. But it wouldn’t be the same if I could have them all at once.

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It was cold and gloomy when I landed back at Heathrow. I was irritated until I realized that I didn’t mind. Jacob came to pick me up but went to the wrong terminal, so while I waited for him I bought myself a coffee from the airport Pret.

A teenage boy dropped his phone. His arms were full of Pret goodies, so I picked it up for him. He gave me a terrified look and said “Thanks.” It was a simple interaction, but seemed to me unnerving and momentous. I knew from his accent where in England he was from, which felt like an odd thing for me, an American who just got off an airplane, to know about him, and I wondered if he was visiting or if he lived here or if he was on a connecting flight about to go somewhere else. I thought about him so much that I felt kind of weird. Then I found Jacob, and we talked and talked all the way home. I waited for a revelation to hit me: a wash of comfort, or else the urge to move back to America. But nothing happened, what a relief.

Back at our apartment, I took off my airplane clothes. I hugged my stuffed animals, they smelled like me. I stared at the books on my shelf, which seemed to have multiplied in the time that I was gone. I forget sometimes, but it was hard to make London my home. Almost as hard as it was to accept that New York no longer felt like home. But doing so has made the city feel smaller, less hostile. Towards the end of my trip, I even started romanticizing the smell again, the way I did as a wide-eyed freshman who believed the propaganda of “gritty.” Yes, I could still love this place. I could go back, eventually. Or not. I choose.

Thank you for reading. Is there a place you feel this way about? Let me know.

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Here are my stats. There’s some crossover between categories. My full list of reads is at the end of this post.

• 19 contemporary

• 8 non-contemporary

• 5 non-fiction

• 5 translated

I won’t review every book I’ve read, but I’m going to share my favorite 6 books from the past 6 months. Even though the majority of the books I read this year were contemporary, most of my favorite reads were not. I think I’m going to seek out more non-contemporary novels for the second half of this year!

The Wall by Marlen Haushafer (1963), translated from the German

The book of my heart. I missed it when I wasn’t reading it. I’ll never forget it.

The book begins with a woman joining her cousin on a hunting trip to the countryside. One day, she wakes up alone and discovers a transparent wall by the stream. Beyond the wall, every human and animal is dead. The lone survivor on the other side of the wall, the woman must begin the daily and endless task of staying alive. She is kept company only by a few animals: her cousin’s hunting dog, a lone lost cow, and an old cat.

I was completely enraptured by this book. I recently read I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, which has a similar dystopian set-up, and was wary of growing bored. How silly of me! Despite the repetitive nature of our narrator’s days, there is nothing repetitive about this novel. On the surface level, it’s a diaristic account of tasks of survival. But at its core, it is a dissection of what it means to be human—what it means to be a woman trapped in a hopeless situation yet free, at last, from the constraints of society. It is masterfully constructed, totally alive.

Nearly every page presents an observation that cuts to the bone. But my favorite part of this novel is the way it loves and understands the animal. What can a living but non-human thing teach us about survival, compassion, care, need, cruelty, and mercy? Haushofer conjures a world where they can be explored fully and purely. The narrator’s relationship with her animals is as complex and multi-dimensional as any relationship between humans. It brought me to tears many times. I’ll cry again just thinking about it!!!

For a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, The Wall presented one of the most pleasurable reading experiences I can remember.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

I eagerly await the day I reread this playful, generous, and mind-expanding book.

Like its titular character, Orlando, the book (inspired by Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West) defies classification, transcending genre and expectations. It takes the form of a (fictional) biography of a young nobleman at the start of the sixteenth century. Orlando’s life spans three centuries, across countries and cities, through the Elizabethan to the Victorian. By the end of it, Orlando is a thirty-six year old woman.

Orlando is spirited and shrewd in its exploration of gender. As Orlando falls in love with both man and woman, eventually transforming from man to woman him/herself, all expectations and pre-conceived notions of sexuality give way to discovery and play. And beyond its examination of gender and sexuality, Orlando is also a devoted study of the love of literature. Through the three centuries of his life, Orlando pursues an intense and “doomed” love for letters, toiling away on the poem he started in adolescence, which is never quite good enough.

Woolf’s sentences are like chests of jewels. There’s so much to look at and hold, you want to admire all of it. Flighty, expansive free and indirect discourse meets a realist’s attention to detail and a romantic’s love for nature. The result is a simultaneously challenging yet deeply hypnotic reading experience you can’t get from anyone else.

Possession by A.S. Byatt (1990)

Do you ever read a book and marvel that it even exists? This is how it felt to read Possession. Not only is it a contemporary literary detective novel, it’s also a romance between two Victorian poets, whose poems and letters make up hundreds of pages of the book. The myriad of voices, perspectives, and literary styles come together in a chamber of never-ending delights for the reader.

We follow two literary scholars as they discover the paper trail and previously unknown romance between two poets, one of them a famous foundational male poet and the other a barely known social recluse, studied only by feminist academics.

The thrill of this book! The romance of reading a romance between two Victorian writers! The richness of the letters and the poetry and the prose! I, like the main characters, became absorbed in combing through old texts for meaning, parsing forgotten diary entries for clues, turning back to an old poem and reading it anew. I itched to discover something new about these two long-dead writers. Hair-twirling and feet-kicking ensued. But also dread, disbelief, disappointment. The highs and lows of true romance…

This novel asks, how far can our love for a book or a writer take us? How do you put together the mystery of two people who are no longer alive? What right does a reader—even the most devoted kind—have to the details of a writer’s life?

The writing is lush and descriptive, a beautiful thing to sink into. It’s also very funny! Byatt throws crisp stabs at Englishness, academia, and class. If you have ever been possessed by a book, or a writer, or a text, you will understand the heart of what this book is all about.

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Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)

Baldwin’s sentences are perfectly crafted emotional traps. They punch you in the stomach while looking you in the face.

David is a young white American in the 1950s. Plagued by a sense of misbelonging in America and frightened of his homosexuality, he moves to Paris, where he meets and falls in love with an Italian waiter named Giovanni. Their affair is short-lived (David is already engaged to a woman named Hella) and ends in tragedy.

Both David and Giovanni are running from something, but the difference between them is that David is ashamed and Giovanni is not. This makes for one of the most painfully doomed relationships I’ve ever read. I wondered, upon finishing, if shame makes honesty impossible. They’re certainly intertwined; shame is often an aversion to or denial of the truth. But, in recounting his past, David is honest yet still ashamed. What I’ve learned, then, is that while shame can accompany truth, it renders the truth unbearable.

The book is not so much a doomed love story between David and Giovanni as it is a reckoning of David’s distance from his own self, the shame that stands between the life he wants and the life he has, and the tragedy of looking for something you don’t want to find.

I wrote an essay on the book (from which I paraphrased for the above) in January. You can read it here if you want:

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li (2022)

This novel is like if the electrifying friendship of the Neapolitan Novels met the disquieting finishing school of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, laced with the angry psychological pulse of The Catcher in the Rye.

It starts with the death of Fabienne, the childhood best friend of our narrator, Agnes. Fabienne’s death pushes her to finally tell their story, which begins in a poor backwater farming village in France. Fabienne is enigmatic, shrewd, and wickedly imaginative, and Agnes is just happy to play along with Fabienne’s experiments. Fabienne hatches up a plan for the both of them to write a book, and what follows sends Agnes on a trajectory of sudden fame and fortune.

Agnes is a rare kind of first-person narrator: full of secret motivations and emotions, yes, but painfully, nearly pathologically passive. Because the book is partly about Agnes’s book, there’s a meta quality to the reading experience: we’re told early on to discount her narratorial voice as underdeveloped and devastatingly ordinary, but her story becomes increasingly impossible to turn away from.

Ultimately, this is a story about the vivid life of childhood, the impossibility of holding onto that world, and the disappointments and compromises of growing up. It’s about two girls who would do anything to stay in their own shared world forever.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018)

I highly recommend this novel if you like books about writers and writing. You’ll also enjoy this if you liked Bluets by Maggie Nelson. The Friend features a similar controlled stream-of-consciousness prose style, bite-sized contemplations on art, philosophy, and morality, and sensitivity to feeling.

The novel follows a woman who unexpectedly loses her friend to suicide. She is entrusted with the care of his Great Dane, whom she becomes gradually devoted to. Soon this dog is her only tether to reality, and to her precious friend.

This novel probes the mysteries and sensitivities of the animal heart. And while it is a novel about a dog, grief, and loss, it is also a novel about novels. The narrator is a writer, so was her friend. Older and originally her professor, he still commands some authority over her writing, even in his death. Through writing, the narrator attempts to tell the story of his death, which had more to do with writing than it did anything else. It’s a beautiful and curious novel, with an ending that moved me greatly.

(Note: The Book of Goose and The Friend were featured in my March reading round-up, from which I paraphrased here!)

Have you read any of these books?

I’d love to know! I’d also love to know your favorite reads of the year. Substack is my new favorite place to get book recommendations…

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Every book I’ve read this year

• The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Contemporary)

• Wild Houses by Colin Barrett (Contemporary)

• Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (Translated from the Japanese, Non-contemporary)

• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (Non-contemporary)

• All that Glitters by Orlando Whitfield (Memoir, Contemporary)

• Good Material by Dolly Alderton (Contemporary)

• Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Contemporary)

• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (Contemporary)

• The Turn of the Screw/The Aspern Papers by Henry James (Non-contemporary)

• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Hartman (Translated from the French, Non-contemporary)

• The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li (Contemporary)

• The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Contemporary)

• Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (Translated from the German, Non-Contemporary)

• The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya (Contemporary)

• Audition by Katie Kitamura (Contemporary)

• Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya (Memoir, Contemporary)

• Orlando by Virginia Woolf (Non-contemporary)

• James by Percival Everett (Contemporary)

• Good Girl by Aria Aber (Contemporary)

• Love in Exile by Shon Faye (Memoir, Contemporary)

• Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert (Non-fiction, Contemporary)

• Greek Lessons by Han Kang (Translated from the Korean, Contemporary)

• The Wall by Marlene Haushafer (Translated from the German, Non-contemporary)

• What A Time to be Alive by Jenny Mustard (Contemporary)

• Possession by A. S. Byatt (Non-contemporary)

• The True Happiness Company by Veena Dinavahi (Memoir, Contemporary)

• Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Contemporary)

In April, I readied for my life to change. Instead, the sun came out. Work got busy. I didn’t see my friends much, didn’t read many books.

When I reflect on the month to try and make narrative sense of it (because I must have Narrative), I struggle. I feel strongly that if April with all its events and non-events did not, my present would still be the same. This is objectively untrue, a few important things occurred. It was my parents’ first time visiting me in London, their first ever trip to Europe. I turned in a revision of my novel, now officially a step closer to its final form. I had a “good” month, but it feels like a “bad” month, and I’m trying to understand why.

I think of a lyric by The 1975: “I bet you thought your life would change, but you’re sat on a train again.” You work towards or look forward to something, it happens, you’re sat on the train again. Sometimes I think my real life is still waiting to happen.

I know there’s a causal relationship between my fixation on narrative and my ambivalence, even disappointment, towards reality. What I mean by narrative: I want events in my life to be meaningful, to be worthy maybe not on their own but against a broader unfurling story, to interact with each other in clear and logical ways that build into something bigger, big enough to become small again, just one sentence, a chapter title that confirms the importance of time past. The idea—the reality—that time could pass and nothing could come of it, that sometimes days end without offering anything remarkable, no rare bird or strange revealing conversation or burst of great feeling, makes me uncomfortable. Things are boring and forgettable and don’t often make sense. Life can’t be exciting all the time, I know. But also, why can’t it be?

I am sorry to say that on the Warhol/Didion spectrum pictured above, I fall entirely on both sides. When I first came upon this hilarious “exchange” I felt a stronger affinity towards Didion’s answer, her cool and baffled seriousness against the inanity of Warhol’s question. I relate to this attitude of temperance and realism; a big part of me believes that life is a challenge in discipline, and if you don’t stay focused, you fall off track. Behind every act of magic is the trick, and I’d sooner habituate myself with trick-making than magic-chasing.

AND YET. And yet. I am known to lose myself slightly at the sight of a squirrel. I will read a paragraph that surprises me and feel completely and giddily awake, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt skipping through the park after sleeping with Zoe Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer awake. A very good conversation over dinner will momentarily transform the way I feel about myself, my life, its potential for ecstasy and connection, and I will feel sorry for those who don’t believe it can be magic all the time, I will believe that magic is real, and everywhere, and maybe there is no trick, maybe life can be this delicious if I every day I come upon a squirrel or read a good book (maybe that’s why April was a nothing month, I only read two books, and one of them I didn’t like) or sit at a table with two to four friends where the glasses are sweating but not yet empty and there’s no way the evening will ever, ever end, there’s no way I’ll lie awake in a dark room staring at the ceiling thinking about the kind of weird things I said and the fact that one day I’ll die with so much still left to do.

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The problem with April is that I wanted it to be magic all the time and instead it was What. The events had so much narrative potential. My parents came. We haven’t properly traveled together since I was a teenager. I secretly believed it would transform everything: our relationship, how they saw me, how I saw them, the way we spoke with each other, opening a new chapter of relating and seeing. The reality was that even if such a definitive change was possible in such a short amount of time, it would transpire through the feeling and language of the typical. We had good days, we had okay days. We discussed the cat, made new jokes, went on long walks, and struggled to understand each other. Sometimes I was sensitive and irritable, which I swore to myself to not be, other times I felt misunderstood, and sad. Two weeks passed, I got the stomach flu, they left.

Another thing: I turned in my first round of revisions of my novel (at least the tenth in its life cycle) to my editor. I had expectations of the process: it should offer thrilling breakthroughs; it should possess my thoughts and day job the way writing and editing the book did; it should be challenging, but ultimately unthreatening.

How it actually felt: laggy, nearly mathematical, enlivened occasionally by a rush of inspiration but mostly failing to consume my attention unless I made a great effort to Lock In. How could I have felt apathetic about my own novel? What does that mean, like, maybe I actually hate writing, and I’ll never write another book? I felt like I’d been thwarted, done some great narrative injustice—why can’t it be magic all the time!!!—instead of having a simple case of writer’s block.

In the end, I made it through, I turned in a draft that I’m actually somehow satisfied with. Yet hitting Send gave me no satisfaction at all. For me, in order for something to feel like an accomplishment, it must carry narrative significance, it should tell a good story. Otherwise, it’s just a task. Completing a revision through the same sense of duty that obliges me to fulfill my job’s 3-day in-office requirement is not a good story. I think of those consecutive weeks of rote studying I used to do at university for midterms and finals, whole months slipped away. That’s the same feeling I get when I look back on the revising process. I know it happened, but I can’t remember doing it. In the words of Lorde: what was that?

I don’t think my perspective is unique. I think a lot of people live their lives, whether consciously or not, in pursuit of narrative, and are then either gratified or dissatisfied by the result. Do it for the plot, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, you know what I mean. I guess what’s interesting or sometimes intimidating is that our idea of a good story can depend so much on broader, internalized narratives of worthiness: what an interesting life looks like, the right way to spend a day, how an adult relationship with your parents should be, which experiences are meaningful and which are simply filler. My feeling that April was a bad month is a result of it falling short of my expectations, the story version where I emerged a more ideal daughter and more actualized writer—a more actualized person in general.

I don’t want to live for the story, but how can I not, when writing and reading stories is the most basic instinct I have? How can I separate my expectations and narratives surrounding how an experience should unfold with the reality of it, when the unfolding only happens once, but can be narrativized in different ways forever? How do I accept hat actually, yes, my life can change in myriad and often extraordinary ways, but I’ll still be sat on the train again, debating whether or not the vaguely old person in front of me would be offended if I offered them my seat, then kicking myself for failing to act when they take the next available one?

That’s the thing. At the end of the day, I’m me, and the experience of being me offers the same thrills and bores and disappointments as ever.1 My life will change, but it will still be the same, despite the narratives I spin around it.

Whatever, April was just a filler month. May is when my life will finally begin.

Thanks for reading, as always. And, as always, let me know how you feel.

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I realized after writing this piece that it is essentially SNL’s “Romano Tours” skit, which is humbling.

Bibliophobia is a story of a mental breakdown triggered by and survived through books. While books have not pushed me to the same depth of despair as they have for Chihaya, I understand, as anybody who loves books certainly will, the singular impact of a Life Ruiner. I know the way a book can sit in you forever.

I say I love books, I like reading, but such words connote an affection or goodwill that have nothing to do with how I feel about the books I love most. It’s why, when I really feel an affinity with a book, I resort to the phrase: this book captured my heart. It sounds cheesy, but it’s more accurate. I enjoy plenty of books, but few of them capture my heart.

Capturing my heart usually has little to do with pleasure and, more often than not, actively pushes against it. I think of the chasm of dread opened by the ending image of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which to me feels like all the eyes of the world dropping to the floor, unable to look back up—but also, awe, tinged with anger, at the steeliness of the novel’s logic, its unwillingness to spare its characters. That sprout of pity and sadness wiggling throughout the course of John Williams’s Stoner, the ache of recognition of the temporality of life’s best pleasures (warm-cold autumn, a lecture where it feels like the professor is talking only to you, a good flirt), grief for the small distance of life. The surprise of seeing myself in a stranger’s memoir about her cat, and the weeping that came on sudden and strong three full days after I finished it. The electrifying horror of watching Sula watch her mother burn.

That’s not to say there isn’t immense pleasure, too. Of course there is. Lily Briscoe laying down her brush. Catherine and Hareton’s faces held close and glowing against the firelight. Queen Anne’s lace dusting the surface of the meadows like foam on a painted sea.

I didn’t have to think hard for these passages, their feelings, to come to me, nearly as powerful as when I first encountered them. This is what Chihaya writes about: the difference between a book you consume and a book that consumes you. Between a book you lend to your friends and a book you keep close to your chest.

I admit I get possessive over my favorite books. Occasionally I have to shake off a flurry of emotions—a range of annoyance to full-body thrill to hammering anxiety—at the mention of such a book in passing, as if it’s not an immediate conversation-stopper. The closest feeling I know is being thirteen and overhearing somebody talk about One Direction across the middle school quad when you actually “discovered” them like six months ago, on Tumblr, when they were fresh off the X Factor, so you’re a real fan, and do they even know that Louis Tomlinson likes carrots?

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I force myself to behave normally in such situations, which is to say I deflect. Yes, it’s one of my favorites, anyway, what are you having for lunch? Oh, you thought it was overrated? Ugh, yeah, the weather’s been terrible recently. Meanwhile, in my head, I’m already rereading it, I’m furiously writing this newsletter. Actually, maybe this is abnormal behavior. But I’m emotionally avoidant, and Life Ruiners make you feel abnormal things.

I started this piece with the intention of writing about my original Life Ruiner, the book that made me a reader (and, I think, a writer). I got sidetracked by the other books that have “ruined” me since, but let’s return to the original point. You actually read a line from it earlier. It’s Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt.

Tuck Everlasting is a children’s novel that tells the story of a lonely 10-year-old girl named Winnie who stumbles upon an immortal family, the Tucks. The Tucks have been keeping their immortality a secret for decades. But they are discovered not only by Winnie, who is beguiled by their seemingly idyllic life, but also by a mysterious stranger who wants to harness their immortality for profit…

It’s an excellently plotted book, but the prose is what captured my heart. Do you remember the first time you were taken by the language of a story? Tuck Everlasting gave me that gift. For the first time, I invested not only in the events of the story, but the string of words that revealed them to me. The entire opening paragraph, which casts a sweltering image of August as a ferris wheel, gripped me, but the line that remains seared in my brain, after over fifteen years, is a simple one, and not even the full sentence: “...Queen Anne’s lace lay dusty on the surface of the meadows like foam on a painted sea.”

The textures and colors of that image! The rhythm and sound of that sentence! To this day, when I see Queen Anne’s lace, I think of foam, I think of the sea. We’d been learning about similes and metaphors in class at the time, and Tuck Everlasting is full of them, but this particular one was the first to wiggle into the part of my 10-year-old brain that wanted to play with words.

Beyond its language, the book tackled a subject that had begun to seriously preoccupy me at the time: death. Back then, I’d never experienced a passing, except for my pet fish Getty. But my parents replaced Getty each time she went belly-up, so it didn’t really count. Death felt far away, as fantastical as the eighth grade, but I always knew I’d have to contend with it eventually, and I worried I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I really, really wanted to live forever. I was intrigued by the spring of immortality in the book, and half-believed it existed.

But I soon changed my mind. The Tucks warn Winnie of their phantom-like existence. They are cursed to live separately from society, free from its rules but also denied of its joys. (Could I do a Marxist reading of the book’s critique of land ownership and use of immortality as a metaphor for hyper-individualism? Yes, but I’ll spare us!). “Living’s heavy work, but off to one side, the way we are, it’s useless, too,” Angus Tuck, the patriarch of the family, says. “It doesn’t make sense.” I was so convinced that I told my dad, unprovoked, that if given the choice, I wanted to die rather than live forever. He was rightly alarmed.

After my class finished the book, we watched the 2003 movie starring Alexis Bledel. I hated it. From what I can remember (and Google backs this up), they turned the book into a romance. Instead of being a child, Winnie is a teenager. She and Jesse, one of the Tuck brothers, fall in love. She must choose whether to live forever with him or carry on with her life1. This love affair completely took away from the very profound (to me) question of asking a child, the same age I was, to commit to eventually dying. After the credits rolled, I saw that some of my classmates had fallen asleep. Quietly, I seethed. But I was also affirmed: Tuck Everlasting was mine. I cared about it more than other people did, and the intensity of my displeasure was proof.

Tuck Everlasting did more than introduce me to the power of good prose. It gave me opinions. It introduced me to the new and righteous anger of watching a bad film adaptation. It provoked my fears and planted new desires. It dangled possibilities, twisted and challenged them, then took them away. It left me with a new understanding of myself and the world. Put simply, it changed me.

A Life Ruiner, Chihaya writes, is “the book that sets you on the path to a life built by and around reading.” Right book, right time. If I’d read Tuck Everlasting for the first time now, maybe I’d have forgotten about it a month later. There’s an alchemy. There’s luck. There are the books you read over and over again and the books you’ll only read once. There are the books you love, and the books for which love does not nearly mean enough.

Do you have a Life Ruiner? Or multiple? Leave a comment and let me know!

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All the books mentioned in this post:

• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (really the entire series, especially The Story of the Lost Child)

• Stoner by John Williams

• Lost Cat by Mary Gaistkill

• Sula by Toni Morrison

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

• Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

  

I went off course in February and didn’t manage to get to my non-fiction pick, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. As much as I appreciate having a pre-planned reading list, I’m also a big mood reader, and Didion just wasn’t calling to me (maybe it was all the noise around the forthcoming publication of her journals). Instead, I picked up The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, which I finished in a flash.

Anyway, here are my thoughts on the five books I read in February.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez / Contemporary. Let’s start here, since I just brought it up. I highly recommend this novel if you like books about writers and writing. You’ll also enjoy this if you liked Bluets by Maggie Nelson, whose organized stream-of-consciousness, bite-sized contemplations on art, philosophy, and morality, and striking sensitivity show up copiously in these pages.

The novel follows a woman who unexpectedly loses her friend to suicide. She is entrusted with the care of his gigantic dog, whom she becomes gradually devoted to. The dog is an obvious stand-in for her friend, but soon it grows to mean much more than that.

This book wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. I thought it was going to be primarily about her relationship with this dog, and in many ways it is, but it’s also largely interested in the question of the changing relationship culture has with the figure of the writer and literature. The narrator and her friend are/were both writers; in fact, he was her professor. Through writing, the narrator attempts to tell the story of his death, which had more to do with writing than it did anything else. It’s a beautiful and curious novel.

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte / New release. What everyone else is saying is true: it’s batshit. Gross. Shameless (which is good, because it’s a book about shame). Funny. Cringe. Simultaneously on the nose and spot on. The word bathos came to me while reading. Even though the stories only ever deal with the pathetic, the stylish hardcover packaging, plus the marketing weight of its major publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, contributes to a pleasurable dissonance between what we expect from a book like this (a decent story that nods at its buzzy blurbs —“profound”, “incandescent,” “genius”1) and what we get (10+ pages of a very disturbed man’s very disturbed sexual fantasies, transcripts of the most annoying group chat you’ve ever read, reddit copypastas, memes seven degrees removed from its original format, manifestos of the sickeningly online).

Tulathimutte’s achievement is that he does indeed nudge the profound out from the totally absurd and radically disgusting. Unlike many novels concerned with the form and content of the Internet, here, being unmannered and extremely online is not the point, but the vehicle through which he makes his larger point, which seems to be that everything that underpins a functioning society (or at least gave the impression of one)—that is to say language, morals, communication, means of labor, and modes of justice—is being perverted and thwarted beyond our control, and the consequences this has on the individual psyche and, as follows, on romantic and sexual and platonic relationships, can be immensely and irreparably harmful.

Anyway, do I recommend? What the hell, sure.

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The Turn of the Screw & The Aspern Papers by Henry James / Classic. These are two roaming, obsessive stories that I took my time with. It’s easy to get lost in James’s prose. You can do it in a single sentence, and then again in the following one, over and over.

I adored the premise of The Aspern Papers. We follow the narrator, a devoted scholar of the late poet Jeffrey Aspern, as he grifts his way into the mansion of one of Aspern’s past lovers and muses. She’s rumored to have a load of never-before-seen correspondences from him, and he’ll stop at nothing to get them. I appreciated this peculiar angle of obsession: that you could be so desperately devoted to the subject of your work, who is also a real person, and justify your transgressions in the name of art. It’s great. Very suspenseful and calculated and thrilling, with a scene that made me gasp out loud.

The Turn of the Screw is one of James’s more famous works. It’s about a governess who becomes convinced that the house is haunted, full of evil spirits intent on possessing and destroying the children. She worships these children, it’s weird. Tension builds. Phantoms appear that only she can see. Or can others see them, too?? The Turn of the Screw is a more traditional suspense, full of perfectly crafted scenes that balance tension and catharsis masterfully, but I preferred The Aspern Papers.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Hartman, translated by Ros Schwartz / Translation. I did a long-form review on this. If I had expectations going into this book, I let them all go by the second page. I knew that the story would take me places I could never predict, questions I had might never be answered, and I was glad for it. It’s the worst to read with expectations. A great book strips you of that early on.

The book is about a group of 40 women trapped in underground bunkers manned by unspeaking male guards. They have no idea why they’re there, they’ve all basically forgotten their past lives. One of them is a young girl, who is there by mistake. Because she has no memory of a normal life, she feels uniquely alone. But she is the key to their escape, and their survival, in a strange new world.

This novel takes its thought experiment to the nth degree, asking what lies at the bottom of our humanity when we are removed from everything we believe makes a life worth living: love, culture, knowledge. It is not, to me, a particularly probing novel, it’s almost passive in the face of enigma. But that’s what makes it so good. You discover the answers—if there are any—yourself. I have so much to say about it, and I have in my long-form review.

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li / Contemporary. This novel is like if the dark and electrifying friendship of the Neapolitan Novels met the eerie finishing school of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, plus a streak of the smarting psychological angst of The Catcher in the Rye. We follow two best friends, Agnes and Fabienne, children in a poor backwater farming village in France. Fabienne is enigmatic, shrewd, and wickedly imaginative, and Agnes is just happy to play along with Fabienne’s experiments. Fabienne hatches a plan for the both of them to write a novel, and what follows sends Agnes on a trajectory of sudden fame and fortune.

Despite all the comparisons I made earlier, I found this book to be entirely unique. The narration is intriguing—Agnes is that rare protagonist who seems to be without motivation, desire, or ambition. But is it that she doesn’t have any, or that she’s just unaware of them? Or, is she aware, but keeping them to herself? This is a book about the vivid life of childhood, the impossibility of holding onto that world, and the disappointments and compromises of growing up. It’s about two girls who would do anything to stay in their own shared world forever.

On the syllabus for March:

• James by Percival Everett (Contemporary)—I’ve actually just finished this! The pages fly by. I enjoyed the beginning, but really only felt sucked-in towards the end. More thoughts to come.

• Orlando by Virginia Woolf (Classic)—My dear friends Tessa and Michael gifted this to me for my birthday. It’s one of Tess’s favorite books, and I’m so excited to read. To the Lighthouse is one of my favorite classics, and I’m looking forward to reading Woolf’s writing before she embraced the free indirect discourse of her later works.

• The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden (Translation)—My friend Níamh recommended this, and it was just longlisted for the Women’s Prize!

• American Bulk: Essays on Excess by Emily Mester (Non-fiction)—Overconsumption has become a central concern for most people talking and writing and interacting with the world today, particularly Americans, who consume the most. I’m interested in reading this book’s take on consumption, which reportedly takes an “empathetic, curious approach.”

• Good Girl by Aria Aber (Contemporary)—I’ve heard great things.

• Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar (Contemporary)—I really must read this now, it’s getting embarrassing.

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Thank you for reading!

If you read, loved, or hated any of the above, please let me know. I love hearing your thoughts.

Okay, I lied, I have a lot more to say. The book is called KITTEN. It’s about a woman (fresh from college, far from home) who becomes obsessed with her boyfriend’s cat. Her attraction escalates when she goes on vacation with said boyfriend (older, wealthy) to his family house by the sea. The ensuing class dysphoria + an abrupt move-out from her roommate back in New York + the one-year anniversary of her fall-out with her unwell mother, who resents her for leaving home = a mind that is very susceptible to the antics of a manic little animal. And while her fixation starts off as harmlessly amusing, it soon gives way to startling consequences.

Here’s a moodboard-in-progress:

I wanted the novel to command the humor of the devastatingly naive yet self-assured girl-in-discovery of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, the charged class dynamics and “what will she do next” of Emma Cline’s The Guest, the delicate and earnest exploration of sadness and beauty of Banana Yoshimoto, and the off-kilter playfulness of Melissa Broder and Ottessa Moshfegh (one wonderful editor described this book as “My Year of Rest and Relaxation with more heart, Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend with more edge.” I am reading The Friend right now and believe this was far too generous a comparison to make.).

This book is rooted in my life-long fascination with the non-human and the cute, and their penchant for grossness. I think often about what our attitude towards the seemingly helpless, be it a baby or a parent, signifies about our self-perception and broader anxieties, particularly as they intersect with class, family, and race. I’m intrigued by the interpersonal politics of helplessness: who gets to be an agent in their own life? How does that affect how we love and care for other people? How do we sit within our own helplessness—for we are all helpless to something—without becoming thwarted by it?

It goes without saying that writing this book has taught me so much about what I can do for my own life. But selling it has shown me the serendipitous and generous impact that other people make on my life. Like the fact that you’re here, reading my writing (if you’ve ever left a kind comment, or shared my work, know that my heart warms every. single. time.). My community on my literary TikTok channel, where I met most of my writing group, who have supported this book from the very first chapter. My first ever publishing job, which I only held for a year, where I met an editor who would, much later, give me indispensable advice during the querying process. The friend who, in my senior year, encouraged me to apply last-minute to an internship at a literary agency, which led me to said publishing job.

I could go on and on and back and back. The point is, I’m consistently surprised by and grateful for the way nothing happens in a vacuum. Life seems to change all the time, in meaningful, imperceptible ways, until one day you see it—you realize everything you did mattered and took you to the place you are now. More than that: the people you met, those paths that crossed, they brought you here, too, proof of something greater and realer and more possible than your self.

Now I’m laughing because not only am I being so incredibly cheesy, I’m also thinking about that meme where it’s like, me sowing: fuck yeah!! me reaping: fuck this. But contrary to the logic of the meme, this time I sowed something good.

Thank you so much for reading. I mean it. I can’t wait to share KITTEN with you soon*. <3

*In 18-24 months time. Publishing!

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My very first sign of many delusional signs throughout this process was when the actress who played Frances from Conversations with Friends sat opposite me on the train the day I sent out my first query, which OBVIOUSLY meant something, because Frances’s whole arc is becoming a writer and suffering a lot, two modes perfectly encapsulated by the act of cold emailing a bunch of agents and begging them to read your book. Also, even though I DNF’ed it the first time, Conversations with Friends was my comfort book through the writing of my novel, to the point where if I was feeling blocked I’d just flip it open to a random page and inspiration would strike magically, somehow. It’s now my favorite Rooney.

I didn’t expect to fall in love so early in my twenties. Despite my love of love, I seriously believed that romantic love wasn’t for me. This was a simple probability assessment. Everybody who’s in love talks about luck, the unplanned magic of right person, right time. The universe is big. Why should I, I thought, be the lucky one? Also, my feelings for my high school exes were never serious. I believed myself emotionally reticent and shy, too selfish to commit wholeheartedly. Devout as I was to the ideology of romance, I was non-practicing.

But then I met Jacob. He was the friend of a friend in Paris. I told him “I love you” the second time we met. Are you cringing? Don’t worry, I was very drunk, and I forgot I did it until he brought it up a few weeks later. He was at once the stranger in beat-up shoes and my fourth-grade carpool buddy and none of my exes and all the people in the world. He was the best conversation I ever had.

I flew back to America the next day, he to London a few weeks later. I will spare you the details of the truly crazed feelings that possessed me afterwards except to say that I was certain I’d met somebody who would be special to me, and I didn’t know how to make the universe see it, how to get us to be together. I cried a lot. I went upstate. I wrote bad poetry.

It’s been nearly six years since then, five since we started dating, one and a half since I moved to London to close our long-distance gap. Still, I look back on that fervent and wine-laced coup de foudre and see it, above everything, as an experience of truth. The certainty of feeling, the clarity of confession, all of it was true to me, I knew it, I just had to get the other person to see it, to get him to show his hand. I had faith that everything else would easily and logically follow, to little consequence, whether that was a breakup (impossible to fathom, even before we started dating) or a shared life.

I was naive—visas are complicated, moving countries is difficult, and everything has consequences. But I wasn’t wrong.

“I love you,” I’d said, and at the moment I really felt it, but it was objectively a strange thing to say. Maybe the mythology of romantic love we’re fed from an early age inclines us to expose our truths more readily than we do with our platonic or familial relationships. We might all be better off if we were more truth-ready to everybody in our lives. There are a dozen things I could say to anybody right now. But truths are dangerous, vulnerability is terrifying, and it’s no wonder we can only stomach baring our hearts to a very select few—rarely at best, never at worst.

I bring up the intensity of the beginning of my relationship because that was my first experience of romantic love and, for a long time, I thought that was what love had to be. The high stakes of confession. All flush, full feeling, the absence of logic and relief. Up all night, no sleep. I missed it when it faded. The quieting happened both gradually and suddenly. I felt sad when I realized that we could go hours without speaking. My heart no longer jumped every time my phone buzzed with a text. I wondered if something had gone wrong, I wanted the crazy feeling back. It convinced me we were special.

But I read somewhere that people get sleepy when they feel safe. To be as thoughtless and relaxed as a baby—that’s a love we all grow out of. Maybe we spend the rest of our lives trying to get it back.

I was getting ready the other day when a song, a brave and honest little love song, came on. It’s called “As Good As It Gets” by Katie Gavin, featuring Mitski. I would’ve been embarrassed to write something like it, and that’s why I’m so very grateful it exists.

“Do I disappoint you?” The song begins. “Am I not what I seemed? I get disappointed, too, when love is not what I dreamed.”

Disappointment—that limp and inevitable other side of love. Beneath the heights of expectation: all that distance to fall. The first no when before there was only yes and yes and yes. A thing said, later regretted. That a relationship might start on luck, but sustains through work. And I regret the work I make him do. “I’m sorry if I’m not who you thought I was when we first met,” I often say to Jacob. To which Jacob replies: “But I’ve always known who you are.”

That can’t be true, I think, because there are parts of me that I’ve only fully revealed one or two or even three years in, parts I don’t like and which I carefully hide or temper from everybody else. I’m sure more parts—emotional hiccups, ungenerous impulses, dormant anxieties—will reveal themselves in the years to come, only when they do, I will not be their only witness. I can’t help but feel like I’ve cheated. I kissed somebody in a drunken turn of the night when I was twenty-one, and now they have to love all the parts of me, every single day.

But it’s not like I haven’t been disappointed, either. I get disappointed by the way love looks sometimes. How it mimics fulfillment but doesn’t promise it, or if it does, reneges on the promise later. At twenty-one, I was eager and too willing to believe that romantic love, with all its new and wonderfully obliterating feeling, was the only emotion I would ever need. It’s disappointing to realize that’s not the case. Life is not so easy. Life is not so difficult.

My favorite line from the song comes just after the chorus, in the second verse. “I want you to disappoint me / On and on until we’re old.” This is the line that made me put down what I was doing. It’s where the fear introduced at the beginning of the song finds its soft landing. What an odd and special idea—that you get to be disappointed, not that you are.

I think again of the safety of being loved as a child, the mindlessness of falling asleep in the backseat of the car, knowing your parents will carry you into bed. I’ve disappointed my parents more times than I’ve probably disappointed anybody. Many of them are small disappointments, like doing poorly on a test or getting caught in a lie. I’m sure there are bigger ones. But it doesn’t matter, no matter the size of the disappointment, they remain loving me.

We’re often worse to the ones who love us unconditionally because we know we can get away with it. I am not saying we should behave this way. I am saying that it is a rare and precious kind of love where you’re safe to be disappointing. Where you, too, are willing to listen, understand, change, or forgive, over and over again. Whether that’s with your family, your friends, or a partner, it’s special. We shouldn’t take it for granted, the privilege to disappoint.

I hope everybody I love lives long enough for us to disappoint each other at least once. I hope I’m brave and willing enough.

And, I’m wrong about the beginning being more full of feeling than now. While flipping through my journal the other day, I came across this recent entry. We were back in Southwold, the place we first met up after months of not seeing each other during Covid. “It’s hard to believe that three years ago I was sitting at this same dining table… our lives have changed so much,” I wrote. “We play and we laugh more than the beginning, more than ever.”

Love is both more and less than everything I dreamed. I was wrong about my odds. I got lucky, after all.

Thank you for reading this soppy belated Valentine’s/birthday post. Wherever you are, I hope it’s warm, I hope there’s soup and a heavy blanket. <3

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Knowledge is power, the adage goes. But what if you are born into a world without knowledge, without culture, without history? What if there is nothing for you to learn?

This is the case for the narrator in Jacqueline Harpman’s 1990 novel I Who Have Never Known Men, translated from the French. It follows a young girl who, along with 39 other women, lives in an underground cage manned by unspeaking male guards. The women do not know how they got there, nor the reason for their entrapment, though they have vague memories of a previous life. The girl, however, knows only the cage. Unlike the women, who are resigned to their situation, the girl is curious about what lies beyond it. This makes her a pariah, but it also makes her the key to their escape.

The novel is an astounding piece of fiction that asks what lies at the bottom of our humanity when we are removed from everything that makes a life worth living: love, culture, hope, knowledge. It is not, to me, a particularly probing novel; it keeps its head bowed in the face of enigma. The prose is clean. The images veer from visceral and distressing to removed and beautiful. The book’s refusal to give answers or explanations is what makes it so compelling. Like the girl, you are curious. This is what I think all great fiction does: spark curiosity, which is one of the greatest pleasures of having a mind.

When I say curious, I don’t mean just about the reason for the women’s imprisonment. That’s where the curiosity begins, but any book can summon that with a strong enough hook. And in a book where knowledge itself is a precious rarity, you’d be a fool to hold out for a neat explanation.

No, your curiosity quickly drifts from the novel’s big unknown towards the astonishing and idiosyncratic smaller ones: the unfamiliarity of fantasy in the mind of a girl who has never known affection. What a stranger might feel if you refused to break eye contact with them. How to tell time when there are no clocks. All of these are acts of extreme imagination for the girl, but by thinking them through, she achieves a sense of satisfaction, she discovers her humanity.

One of the first instances of imagination the girl exercises is in trying to imagine the appeal of sex, which the women discuss occasionally. She begs the women to tell her more, but they see no use in it.

“After a few sighs, she came out with the usual reply:

‘What point is there in your knowing, since it can’t happen to you?’

‘Because I want to know!’ I raged, suddenly grasping why it was so important to me.”

This want, this curiosity, is annoying for the women, but unbearable to the girl. Without an answer, she retreats into her brain, engineering imaginary scenarios with a male guard. Her imaginations are based on acts of interrogation, which the women have described the guards engaging in. It’s sexless but exciting and leads her to her first orgasm (though she doesn’t know that’s what it is). “After that,” she writes, “my mood changed. I no longer tried to persuade the women to tell me their secrets; I had my own.”

Through the act of imagination, the girl turns automated days into opportunities for meaning-making. She storytells different scenarios about the guard, she counts her heartbeat to measure time. In other words, she turns existence into experience. It is thrilling to encounter on the page—the basic but brilliant act of the mind at work, creating something out of nothing.

What makes a person curious? Is curiosity innate? Is it taught? Why is it that some people “prefer not to know” while other people cannot bear being in the dark? Most children are curious because they know nothing, but I’d argue that most adults know next to nothing still, so why aren’t we more curious? When we discover answers to our questions, does that make us feel a little better about having asked the question in the first place, a little safer in our own mind? Is curiosity dangerous? I mean, it did kill the cat, but didn’t satisfaction bring it back?

I fear the deterioration of my own curiosity. In the same way that friendship groups winnow and our taste in music stagnates as we grow older, I worry about being placated by my own tastes. In the past year I wondered if I could call myself a curious person. I do make efforts to stretch my intellectual curiosity. But I feel less confident in my social curiosity, which I am also more reluctant to challenge. I gravitate towards people who are similar to me, whether in interests or emotional intensity or communication style. When I sense friction in a friendship, my instinct is to concede or back down until it passes, for better or worse.

Put generally, I orient towards emotional harmony and safety in my friendships. Other people may orient towards curiosity (this person is interesting, what can I learn?) or passion ( this person makes life more fun and exciting) or utility (what can this person do for me, what can I do for them?) or something else. Of course these factors can show up in every friendship, and I have very cherished friends of different kinds, but I’m far more inclined to pursue a friendship with someone I feel a thrilling familiarity with—it feels like we’ve known each other our whole lives!— than someone who I find fascinating but distant. (Maybe this is how most people feel, but someone did tell me recently that they are attracted to people who are very different from them, and I have been thinking about that since.)

The ability to discover new perspectives or ask probing questions can be a privilege. Your experiences in the world inform how willing you are to open up to or trust the unfamiliar. This is certainly true for the women in the cage, who have long forgotten their past lives and are unwilling to dredge up memories of their families. It’s far too painful, even the girl can see that. And most of them worked household or service jobs, accustomed already to a life of curtailed agency. The specific combination of life experiences and trauma have numbed these women’s ability and appetite to question their situation.

Because the girl lacks these life experiences, the trauma of capture fails to obliterate her autonomy. Her privilege is that she is young. Unlike the women for whom their selfhoods have been snatched away, hers is yet to form. That’s an opportunity.

Curiosity has no price for her, it does not dredge up painful memories or force her to confront the limits of her intellect. No, curiosity is her tool for survival, and it soon becomes its own reward.

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In most dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction, scarcity plays an animating role. The lack of food or shelter pressures the characters to act or perish, driving the paranoia and unrest that erupts into violence (à la Lord of the Flies). Hunger and danger: without the two, there’s hardly a challenge, is there?

The lack of danger in I Who Have Never Known Men is, ironically, one of its most unsettling forces. The women have all the food and shelter they need, but they are entirely alone. This book trades the daunting question of survival for a far more horrific mental task. What do you do when surviving is easy, but living is unbearable? What meaning do we make for ourselves when there is none to be found?

Some of the women become couples or threesomes. They work together to build houses and recuperate food from a seemingly endless stash. They communicate openly and freely, always giving thanks and appreciation. Despite being removed from culture, it’s clear they begin to create their own. But for the girl, any hope of true meaning or satisfaction lies, as ever, in the recesses of her own brain.

“After our escape, Dorothy used to say: ‘Let’s organise our life, let’s not waste our thoughts.’ The fact was, I could use my thoughts as I pleased, the idea of wasting them was absurd. My survival was guaranteed… I could allow my mind to wander as it pleased.” (150-151)

Allowing the mind to wander—what a joy! I love this frank and utilitarian perspective on daydreaming, on letting one thought branch into two or three, subconsciously picking the path you want to take, following it as it changes in a flash to something else, all of it aimless but none of it useless.

The girl rarely feels the satisfaction of company, friendship, or touch. But she feels the pull of her own mind, she excites herself with ideas of expeditions, she replays over and over again the same rhetorical questions: why are they here? What happened? Where did the guards go?

Her questions mostly do not bear answers. But even a moot question has potential to conjure a new idea. When this happens to the girl, it’s one of my favorite moments in the book. When pondering the guards that used to man the prison, she suddenly arrives at a brand new thought:

“These words kept haunting me and were beginning to annoy me, when at last an idea began to form…what if [the guards] were as much in the dark as we were? I was electrified by this theory, I could feel my footsteps dancing and I began to laugh. I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was a new one, and, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still live, that was happiness.” (151)

It takes decades for her to arrive at this idea, but the thrill of the novelty lasts her days. It makes the wondering worthwhile.

Nothing is more precious than a new idea. The book seems to offer that thinking and sense-making is humanity’s most original and gratifying instrument. You can be completely alone in the world, you can have nobody to talk to or understand you, but you can still think, you can still wonder, and that’s something.

When the book was first translated into English, it was called The Mistress of Silence, referencing a phrase towards the end of the novel. In 2018, it was reissued as I Who Have Never Known Men, a more direct translation of the French title, Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes. Needless to say, this is a far better title—immediately intriguing, personal yet distanced, strange. But I also love it because I think the tension between knowing or not knowing, of building from nothing an understanding, lies at the very core of the book. The girl’s not having known men sparks her first act of curiosity. This curiosity is a privilege and a pleasure that remains with her, and with you, the reader, animating a life of total lack, until the very end.

For years I assumed I knew what a rolodex was, because they occasionally popped up in books set in the 80’s or 90’s. Context clues led me to believe it was something like a phonebook. Subconsciously, though, I assigned it the spirit of a Rolex. If you made me sketch it out, I probably would’ve drawn some kind of paperback with the girth of a fat wrist. (If you don’t know what a rolodex is, it’s “a rotating card file device used to store a contact list.” —Wikipedia)

I was shocked to see its true shape and form. I admit the picture provided in the NBC article was weirdly zoomed in, eliminating any sense of scale, the pages stiff and moldy-looking. It was strange beyond my wildest expectation. It reminded me of a mouth with too many teeth, none of them functional. I’m not exaggerating when I say it repulsed me. I also felt humbled, confronted with the truth that time really does pass, and objects, not just animals, go extinct. You might think this is obvious, but you can go your whole life knowing something logically but not emotionally.

So I became emotional about the rolodex. How sad for something that was once so ubiquitous, so essential—hailed as “one of the more important memory systems ever created” (NBC, “The life and death of the rolodex”)—to be reduced to an idiosyncrasy. It sounds stupid, but I guess people really meant it when they said the Internet changed everything.

One big change, I think, is that it phased out ugliness. I attribute part of this to Apple, whose obsession with minimalism and sleek visual branding ushered us into our current digital age. I think of the rolodex showing up to a house party attended exclusively by iPhones and Macbooks. And then I think of jumping in front of the rolodex, saying, Anybody who has a problem with him has to go through me first!, even though just a few moments ago, I was crashing out over how dumpy he is. (A later Google search produced sleeker, simpler rolodexes, but I bet those ones would still get side-eyed at the party).

Yesterday, while watching Gilmore Girls (season 4, episode 18), I was pleased to see my indignation over the death of the rolodex reflected onscreen. Over dinner, Lorelai goes on a passionate tangent about anvils. “Where did all the anvils go?” she asks. She becomes increasingly distressed. “Everyone had them. They were featured prominently in every movie western, so where did they all go?… I mean, is there some secret anvil storage facility the government is keeping from us?”

I didn’t know what an anvil looked like, either, so I looked it up. It’s just a pointy block of metal, kind of like a brutalist interpretation of a shark. This is not so scary. I can picture it in a museum, in the tools and objects section, showing how we lived in the olden days. I can even picture it in some rich person’s home. There’s a simple purity to it, like it has always existed1.

The rolodex, on the other hand, lacks the anvil’s sense of primordiality. One look at it and you think, somebody with glasses and a high sense of personal agency—probably a Virgo—made you. I think that’s why it makes me so sad. Somebody made it, it was once useful, and now it no longer is.

I love objects. I don’t mean this in a materialistic sense, but pathologically. I attach feelings to the inanimate and conduct intimate dramas in my head about our relationships.

As a child, I refrained from touching items in stores because doing so would give them the hope of being bought, which, as a person with no money, was a hope I could not guarantee fulfilling.

I motivated myself to finish my meals by imagining that all food dreamed of going to “Tummyland” (this was also how I got around the perverseness of eating already alive-looking food, like Goldfish crackers).

When it’s raining and not too windy out, I still reach for my red duck-shaped umbrella Eloise, even though one of her ribs is broken, because I don’t want to deprive her of the joy of getting wet, which is an umbrella’s destiny.

I worry about what my stuffed animals will do for company after I die.

Sometimes I think there’s something wrong with me. I read “baby shoes, never worn” and feel sad for the shoes. I feel the need to clarify that I recognize the tragedy is that the baby died, but also, I feel sad for the shoes. Who will ever buy them? Where are they now? Where do objects go when they die???? (I know about landfills, don’t remind me.)

My tendency to over-animate seems to me a projection of helplessness—or, on the flip side, a grasp towards power. I believe I, like some frivolous and too-soft god, have the ability to change these objects’ lives. Rescue them from loneliness, or the feeling of being unwanted, or the disappointment of a boring life. Sometimes I worry that this way of thinking is just a by-product of consumerism, where the act of possessing is made to look like an act of self-actualization.

But no, I don’t think it’s that. My love for objects began before I knew about money. It extends beyond the point of ownership. I love objects that will never belong to me, like other people’s doors (are they being opened enough? Maybe they don’t care. Does being open feel good to a door? Maybe not as good as staying closed). A wooden chair with the armrests worn down. My neighbor’s bicycle, whose seat is always wrapped in a plastic bag to protect from the rain, like a shower cap. Why do I love things so much? Is this how hoarders feel?

A few years ago, a friend showed me the podcast “Everything is Alive,” an “interview show in which all the subjects are inanimate objects. In each episode, a different thing tells us its life story.” The first episode is about a can of cola, Louis, who dreams of being drunk by somebody, but is also terrified of it because he has no idea what will happen when he is empty of liquid. In other words, the episode is about a can of cola with a death drive.

I listened to two episodes. They were delightful, but I began to feel a bit weird about it. To me, giving inanimate objects the voice of a person, the name of a person, plus the ability to speak English defiled their objectness. I don’t think something has to gesture at humanness for us to love them2.

It’s becoming clear to me that this entire essay is about the fact that I don’t want to die. I know an essay about death is probably not what you signed up for, but honestly, I didn’t know this was what it was going to be about. Though, in hindsight, “The life and death of the rolodex” should’ve tipped me off.

I don’t want to die, so I don’t want anything else to die. When I love something, I wish for them to live forever. I know that chasing forever is foolish. Also, forever plays favorites. You can’t be alive forever, but you can be dead forever. That really annoys me.

Even though rationally, I know it isn’t true, emotionally, death feels like the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone/thing. And in my view of object-life, I hold onto a narrow logic, which was affirmed by the NBC eulogy: to be useful is to live. To be obsolete is to die. Thank you, late-stage capitalism.

But surely if objects are alive, they live in a way I can’t fathom. Holding them to my worldview would be like judging a hamster for eating its babies, which sometimes they do in the wild. It would be like going, that hamster is such a bad mother! Well, the human mind cannot comprehend the hamster one. The hamster is a hamster. The rolodex is a rolodex.

After closing all my rolodex tabs, I had to go to a meeting for work. I used to resent my job’s three-day in-office requirement, but now I don’t mind so much. Time passes. I work. Occasionally I experience an emotional revelation. I go home.

Around a year ago, for some unknown reason, my perception of time shifted so that I no longer saw the present as following the past, but rather as something preceding the future. This made getting through everyday annoyances easier, because I could see more clearly that the thing I did not want to do would not last forever, that there was a version of me that had already finished it.

It has also made birthdays slightly less tinged with doom. I don’t see myself as the oldest I’ve ever been, but the youngest I’ll ever be. (Ideally I’d be detached from any age-related anxiety, but let’s be realistic.) I think about the present through the lens of what is yet to happen, what we’ve yet to create or destroy. Right now is just a moment in time, waiting to be studied and then forgotten by people I will never know.

Maybe this is why the rolodex’s eulogy made me so distraught. I looked at my work-issued Macbook Pro and thought: you too may one day terrify a twenty-six-year-old.

Thank you for reading this week’s hour. If you also feel bad for inanimate objects as an adult, let me know. But I mostly assume that everyone feels this way, so if you don’t, feel free to let me know, too.

P.S. I looked this up after writing and editing this, I PROMISE—but the creator of the rolodex, Arnold Neustadter, actually IS a Virgo. I screamed out loud when I found out. I was so close to deleting that joke, because astrology jokes are honestly kind of trite/self-indulgent to me, but I guess instead I’ll be re-downloading Co-Star.

My copy of Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin hurts a bit to look at. The color is a bright itchy scarlet and, after a few seconds, fades to red, too intense a hue to hold. It’s a bit like shame, which possesses the life of our narrator and gives the novel its blood. “I would never see it,” he says, about the nature of his shame. “I would never dare to see it. It would be like looking at the naked sun.”

David is a young white American in the 1950s. Plagued by a sense of misbelonging in America and frightened of his homosexuality, he moves to Paris, where he meets and falls in love with an Italian waiter named Giovanni. Their affair is short-lived (David is already engaged to a woman named Hella) and ends in tragedy.

Both David and Giovanni are running from something, but the difference between them is that David is ashamed and Giovanni is not. This makes for one of the most painfully doomed relationships I’ve ever read. I wondered, upon finishing, if shame makes honesty impossible. They’re certainly intertwined; shame is often an aversion to or denial of the truth. But, in recounting his past, David is honest yet still ashamed. What I’ve learned, then, is that while shame can accompany truth, it renders the truth unbearable.

I read Giovanni’s Room in two days. I felt a certain danger throughout. The language was direct and the sentences clear, but tucked behind them lay terrible truths. My first encounter with such a sentence was on page 4, where David reflects on his decision to propose to Hella as a means to make his life feel more manageable—marriage, in his words, as a mooring post.

Then he goes on to say: “But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

He’s talking about Hella, and the rest of the paragraph is about her, but there’s another truth slipped in there, sly yet more painful, about parents—his parents, mine, yours, their finitude, the gap between who we want them to be and who they are. Reading this, I felt affronted—like, why’d you have to bring that up?! It hurt my feelings. This happened frequently throughout.

A few pages later, David does bring up his father. It’s clear that his specter-like relationship with him is yet another thing, tainted by shame, that David is running from when he moves to Paris. And it makes for some of the saddest sentences I’ve ever read.

“I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.”

All this, and we’re only on page 14.

This book captured my heart because I am fascinated by shame. I am less interested in investigating its sources (e.g. sexuality, race) than I am in the life it takes in the mind, the myths, compulsions, tics and delusions it spawns.

In the emotional cast of my life, shame takes a leading role (yearning plays supporting). I become easily, I-would-do-anything-for-you close to people with a similar cast, and I find it genuinely offensive when, in another person’s play, shame is merely lumped into some larger generic role without a single line of dialogue (e.g. TOWNSPEOPLE). Sorry, this metaphor got away from me. I’m not really a theater person. I guess I’m ashamed about shame so I have to invent these roundabout ways in, but next time I’ll choose something I’m more familiar with.

Anyway, even if you don’t feel shame often, probably you’ve felt it at least once. I’m sure we all have a memory we don’t let ourselves think about. Maybe it’s easier to think of a lie we told, passably white but actually borne from some deep and sticky and painfully familiar inner well. The earliest lie I remember telling (publicly! I lied to my parents a LOT) was kindergarten, when I told everyone my middle name was Charlotte, even though it is Zhuoran (this was Arkansas), and the most recent probably being not correcting my friend who said that nobody threw up at the New Year’s Party, even though I did (twice).

We are often unclear about our own sources of shame, because why would we want to find out. But since we don’t know, or are actively afraid, we say and do nothing about it. This makes understanding the very basics of shame difficult. Fiction offers a path. The roots of David’s shame (homosexuality) are so clear and obvious that you can hold his shame, feel its weight, trace it as it crawls out of his body and wraps around his lovers.

To be clear, Baldwin does not suggest that shame is inherent to homosexuality; Giovanni has no such qualms about his desires. Baldwin does, however, make an interesting case for the anti-Americanness of homosexuality, painting David’s tragedy as more than just the loss of a lover but the loss of country. The book’s interrogation of nationhood (it explores three: American, French, and Italian) is the subject of an entirely different essay, but its intersection with the placelessness of homosexuality is perhaps best laid out here, where David watches an American sailor from afar:

“I was staring at him, though I did not know it, and wishing I were he. He seemed—somehow—younger than I had ever been, and blonder and more beautiful, and he wore his masculinity as unequivocally as he wore his skin. He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” (82)

The loss of home—of safety within an acceptable American masculinity—is David’s irrevocable condition. We learn so much about how David’s shame perverts his sense of home, interferes with his interactions, informs how he relates to his father. But we rarely get a sense of the feeling of the shame itself. That itchy scarlet. This is what I mean by the sense of danger that ran through this text. With each moment of honesty or clarity given to me, I sensed that something was being held back, a deeper hurt that would later rear its head.

When David directly describes shame itself, not what it makes him do or not do, he likens it to another self.

“I wrote to Hella, telling her nothing, or I wrote to my father asking for money. And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.” (74)

Shame as paralyzed self. Cold, terrified self. Belly-self. This to me is a perfect Baldwin sentence. In the slip of a clause, between clear, unromantic sentiment, he commands disgust and fear and pity, he yanks a beating heart from stone. This is frightening, but a relief. We, like David, finally have words for how it feels. The person in your belly, doing nothing forever. Not part of the real world but a real part of you. If you looked at it more, it might scare you less. But how do you look at something that lives inside of you?

Shame is the subject of Annie Ernaux’s memoir by the same name. It has one of the most daring opening lines I’ve read: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.”

The book is borne from this memory. It is not the violence itself that haunts Ernaux, but the shame. I was interested to find that Ernaux does not actually use the word “shame” when describing the incident, nor much at all for the majority of the book. “Shame” only starts showing up towards the end, and is most explicitly called out when she revisits a completely separate memory, that of a trip she took in the summer with her father and a tour group. They are immediate outsiders. Ernaux and her father avoid each the group, or perhaps the group avoids them. They also avoid each other. Of the memory, Ernaux writes:

“After evoking the images I have of that summer, I feel inclined to write ‘then I discovered that’ or ‘then I realized that’, words implying a clear perception of the events one has lived through. But in my case, there is no understanding, only this feeling of shame that has fossilized the images and stripped them of meaning. The fact that I experienced such inertia and nothingness is something that cannot be denied. It is the ultimate truth.” (81)

It is at this point, with only a few pages left in the book, that the nature of Ernaux’s shame and its impact on her life begin to clarify. Shame interferes with perception. It strips Ernaux of the ability to extricate any meaning from the events of her life other than the fact that they were shameful. As a writer, this is fascinating. She is depleted of the capacity for narrative, she can only revisit, remember. It is passive, and it seems remarkably painful.

Shame, then, is not simply the filter through which reality is experienced, but reality itself. “Shame became a new way of living for me,” she concludes. “I don’t think I was even aware of it, it had become part of my own body.”

Again the body. Like Baldwin’s David, who lives with himself in his belly, Ernaux describes the shame as part of her. Shame and Giovanni’s Room sit in conversation with each other in my mind, though the sources of the narrators’ shame are completely different. This tells me that though different things make us feel ashamed, we all feel ashamed in the same way.

I return to my cover of Giovanni’s Room. So far I’ve only described the main color, but not the pattern. Every Penguin Clothbound has one, and I love the care that the designer Coralie Bickford-Smith puts into deciding the motifs.

This one is particularly beautiful, a pattern of outstretched hands reaching for each other through a screen of raindrops. Or is it just the same hand, David’s hand, reaching for himself, never getting close enough to touch?

That’s how I see it. The book is not so much a doomed love story between David and Giovanni as it is a reckoning of David’s distance from his own self, the shame that stands between the life he wants and the life he has, and the tragedy of looking for something you don’t want to find.

At first glance, the pattern stamped on the linen cover looks gray. Only when you look closely, or hold it to the light, can you see that it is a lovely and pale light blue. I like the evasiveness of the cover’s colors. Sometimes you can only see the truth of something when you hold it up close. But then it becomes difficult to look at, it turns into something else.

In the end, David tells us about his shame. Even if he cannot reconcile with it, he lets it be known. That’s something. The hands are close to touching. But that’s what makes their distance more terrible.