This is the last full week of school for my kids, with the semester officially ending next Wednesday. A week from now I’ll share this summer’s Childcare Plans, which may or may not be at odds with this summer’s Writing Plans. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here are some recent delights, be they literary, visual, edible, sartorial, or interpersonal—

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For today’s Friday edition for paying subscribers, I thought I’d share some of the books that my teenage son has enjoyed these past few years…

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Then, as now, I exclaimed over the collage-style illustrations, Peter’s cap a pop of red in a world of white snow. I marveled at Peter’s pink bathtub as I read, “And he thought and thought and thought about them,” the repetition a song, a pleasure.

My child could not see beyond a few inches in front of him, let alone follow a picture book. His face was still swollen from a tough birth, and I was still bleeding as my uterus contracted back to its original size. Had my milk even come in yet?

No matter. A story was a story and I was reading my child the first of many.

Looking back on it now, I think, Of course I did that. I was sleep deprived and wrecked after a 42-hour labor that ended in a C-section, a birth outcome I’d refused to mentally prepare for. And now I had this human to keep alive? Excuse me?

Reading was how I’d always relaxed and self-regulated. Reading, I felt like myself. That I could share this experience with my baby was the first clue that I’d be able to mother him.

I had two more children, and I read to them as soon as I could. Reading to and with my kids transformed time: ten or twenty or thirty minutes of parenthood became an immeasurable unit of peace and togetherness. The soothing prose rhythm of Margaret Wise Brown’s Big Red Barn is only made more profound with a child’s weight against one’s chest.

In the beginning, it seemed I’d transferred my love of reading to them, that this was a passion my children and I shared. We bonded over favorite books. We laughed over them, we appreciated illustrations, we quoted lines, we asked questions we couldn’t answer. With reading, we punctuated the day.

They got it.

I was eager to teach my kids to read by themselves. How could I not want to pass on this magical power? Also: If they read, they would be more independent. They might leave me alone to dive into a novel. Bliss!

So, one by one, I taught each of them their letters. Then we practiced reading with BOB books. I cheered when they read aloud their first picture books.

Now my kids are fourteen, ten, and six. We visit the library and our local bookstores on a regular basis, and our house is covered in books. As far as children’s literature goes, we have all the classics and modern greats, plus the hipster titles, the award winners. We also own every shitty Pinkalicious paperback and handfuls upon handfuls of TV tie-ins. All the popular graphic novels too. If you want to read it, I’ll find a way to get it in your hands. Just read!

The truth is, there are very (very) few things about parenting that make me think, Yep, nailed it.

For a time, reading was one them.

Until it wasn’t.

Somewhere along the line our house of voracious readers shifted to a house where the parents read…and (most of) the children do because…their parents require it.

Maybe that’s not totally accurate. My kids do read, and not always because we make them.

Mickey has re-read the Dog Man and Dory Fantasmagory series at least 600 times, and he’s currently smitten with Bird and Squirrel, a graphic novel/comic book series that his older brother also loved in first grade. We recently went through a pile of Berenstain Bears picture books together. Now he’s onto a graphic novel series called Mayor Good Boy, which is like Dogman without the copaganda.

Ginger will read any Babysitters Club-related content, especially if it’s a graphic novel. She had a three-month, on-and-off again relationship with a middle grade novel called Gracefully Grayson that she finally finished, declaring it, “My new favorite book.” Last year, she went through a serious Judy Blume phase. We’re slowly reading Anne of Green Gables aloud together.

And, back when freshman year began, Bean read Salem’s Lot obsessively. From time to time, he’ll say, randomly, “I love that book. How did he do it?”

I realize these descriptions paint a rosy picture of my family’s literacy habits. The reality, however, is less than ideal.

My kids, if they’re reading, don’t typically do it of their own volition. It’s not fun to them. It seems like they’d rather do something—anything—else.

We make Ginger and Mickey read at least thirty minutes before bed. It’s a rule, not to mention Ginger’s homework, but it’s also a ritual, a way to be a person.

If they didn’t read then, and if we didn’t make them, would they do it at all? I’m skeptical.

Ginger rarely finishes a book; she only got to the end of Gracefully Grayson because I forced her to. I usually let her abandon books as she sees fit—it’s her reading life, after all!—but there were only thirty pages left and she’d been quite taken by the novel at different points. (I felt vindicated by her final verdict!)

When we read Anne of Green Gables together, she is fidgety.

“Why is this so boring?” she’ll ask. (Meanwhile, I’m filled with the golden light of L.M. Montgomery’s descriptions.)

Mickey, though happy to get in bed to read, resists almost all new books. And if I suggest he read on a random afternoon, he’ll wrinkle his nose.

“I’m not you, Mommy,” he might say, and a hairline crack edges along my heart.

He’s correct. He isn’t me. Neither is Ginger or Bean. That’s fine—I’m not trying to make carbon copies of myself. (Or am I?!) But my kids rarely seem genuinely excited to read, and it bums me out.

It’s worse with Bean, my teenager, to whom I read The Snowy Day so many years ago.

I can’t force him to read at bedtime anymore. So he doesn’t. After Salem’s Lot, he couldn’t get into another book. He abandoned one Stephen King novel after another until giving up on the author altogether. The book of De Gaulle’s war memoirs, which he begged me to get him on a random trip to Vroman’s, also went unread.

The kid doesn’t have a smartphone, but he has other ways to degrade his attention span. There’s the endless buffet of streaming TV, there’s YouTube, there’s Nintendo.

People tell me he’ll get back to the reading habit. That he’s a teenager. And I get that. But when people say that they also didn’t read when they were his age, I’m less comforted. The world our kids are growing up in is different than the one we grew up in. There’s now a mind-boggling array of on-demand entertainment. There is less friction, less boredom, and unlike other pastimes, reading requires an ability to move through those feelings until the mind fully immerses into the text and lights up.

Patience, attention, tenacity—in 2026, you can get through most days without them. Yet those same skills made me a lifelong reader.

What I want is to raise lifelong readers.

But why —and how? Maybe it’s a folly to try.

I’ve written before about family rules v. family values. In a household where reading is a value, what do you do when that value isn’t shared?

When reading is enforced, a site of connection becomes a site of conflict. Believe me, there are more than enough of those in my house.

In the middle of the night, my rational brain floating somewhere in the dark, I worry that my children’s halfhearted reading reflects a widespread, societal deterioration. That their lack of passion for books signals how they’ll live going forward, adapting to an AI-slopped, fragmented world where sustained attention inside another human’s consciousness is considered out of touch, inessential. That reading will only be good-for-you, and reserved for a select few. That it won’t be valued. It won’t even be entertained as entertainment.

Sometimes, way past midnight, I think about all the bored kids who scroll or play mindless games on phones instead of reading—or making art or music or some dumb doodle as their mind wanders. How many artists and thinkers will be unmade before they’re made?

Reading can’t prevent the world’s ills. I know that.

And yet, it’s saved me over and over again.

Reading—and the way my kids do or don’t do it—has become an avatar for everything I’m afraid of. The world they’re inheriting. What they’ll reach for when life gets challenging. The options they will or won’t have. The space they’ll be given: to reflect, imagine, mature, dream.

It’s control I want. I want a failsafe method to keep them safe. And there isn’t one.

Reading to my kids was how I meshed my identities: the person I was before I had children, and the person I became after. They weren’t so different after all.

But raising bigger kids also means accepting them for who they are. Figuring out that dance of identities. Learning to let go, without neglect. Allowing them to differentiate from you. Watching them find their own way, in their world.

It tracks that the children of readers might reject the practice—or at least come to it on their own terms.

The most I can do with my teenager, in particular, is to continue to offer different stuff to read, and to accept his methods. As with everything else, if I push, he resists.

I have to encourage, never demand.

And so—

I check out from the library that dry history book on slavery he asked for, and say nothing as it remains unread on his nightstand.

I buy him a cool-looking graphic novel from a local comic shop, and display zero enthusiasm when he takes it into the bath one evening.

I remain placid when he brings back a sci-fi book from a little free library, and a month later, and I keep my face neutral when he mentions finishing it at school.

I pay attention to his interests so that when he starts talking about being “a simple country lawyer” in an egregious Southern accent (don’t ask), and mentions creating a Civil War-themed amusement park, I can say, “I have just the thing for you.”

All I can do is create opportunities for my kids to read, and model a life that includes books.

To try not to control the outcome—because I can’t, I have no control, I never did.

(Here we are again, learning yet another Motherhood Lesson.)

This is their life to cultivate as they see fit.

The other day, on a Sunday, Mickey wanted to re-read Bird and Squirrel. The sun was hours from setting. It felt like a minor miracle. He wanted to read!

Play it cool.

I asked if I could read my book next to him. He was delighted by the prospect.

It took us a while to get comfortable, and we chatted about how settling in to read can be hard, but once we got going, we were reading for a good forty-five minutes.

He finished his book, for the eleventh time.

Two days later, Bean said offhandedly, “I’m reading that story. The CivilWarLand one.”

I held back from screaming with glee.

“Is it making you laugh?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Yeah,” he said.

He offered nothing more. I didn’t press.

The other morning, I read about the fund and then, a few minutes later, discovered Ginger barefoot in her room, drawing with a highlighter in her journal like it wasn’t 7:41 am and time to leave for school. I lost my mind. There is only so much bullshit I can handle!

Since I’m riding a wave of anger, here are three other parenting annoyances I want to stew about…

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Attention! I have an announcement!

For the past couple of years, I’ve taken the summer off from writing to become a full time parent. This summer, although I’ll have only three weeks of childcare for the nine weeks that schools are closed, I’d like to stay connected to my work.

I won’t be able to do that without my Fuckeroos. I need accountability!

Introducing the Fuck You, Write Your Pages: Quick ‘n Dirty Summer Session.

The session will go from June 22, 2026 to August 3, 2026 (7 weeks).

It will be a compressed version of the fall and spring accountability groups. Members will post their weekly writing goals to a private newsletter, which, unlike the regular sessions, will not include guest contributors. However, there will be three optional Study Halls to write together on Zoom, scheduled for Saturday June 27, Wednesday, July 8th, and Sunday, August 2nd, from 9 am to 11 am, Pacific time.

Cost: $55; $50 for paid subscribers of Italics Mine (this newsletter!)

I have 3 spots left. Please email me at edan.lepucki@gmail.com if you’d like to sign up.

***

I’m in the midst of revising a new novel, which feels unlike any other book I’ve written. This one is a sleek (yet smelly) horse that wants to gallop wild and free. Imagine me on its back, no saddle, hanging onto its matted mane for dear life. It’s exhilarating. And exhausting.

Maybe this metaphor doesn’t make sense to anyone but me. What I’m trying to say is, all my writing energy is going toward the novel. Until the horse and I finish our ride, I can’t come up with any essays, or even “essays”—as this medium encourages.

What I have, instead, is a list of delights. Who doesn’t want to be delighted?

Here they are, in no particular order, starting with the best postcard ever invented…!

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One of these shirts is only $10.00! The other costs more, but it’s made in the USA and when I wear it I feel like a sultry and powerful Ed Harris—except with breasts and not bald.

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Hey there! I’m Edan Lepucki, bestselling novelist and mother of three living in my hometown of Los Angeles. I send an email every Friday to paying subscribers; these missives cover everything from parenting to writing to reading to eating to dressing to…oh you get the picture. Subscribe for a weekly delight. Thanks so much for supporting my work.

Before I get to a report on my writing retreat, I wanted to share two pieces that were published while I was away:

For Alta, I interviewed Rachel Khong about her marvelous new story collection, My Dear You. We discuss her roots as a short story writer, her newsletter devoted to reading the form, her work’s goofy yet sincere tone, and magic:

“I find a lot of things magical. The fact that you can grow a tree from a seed: That’s magical. There’s the magic of our everyday lives. We take it for granted.”

Go here for more!

Although I was out of town for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I did contribute to the paper’s special section on book clubs, recommending Sula, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, and Middlemarch. About George Eliot’s novel, I wrote:

In these outraged, internet-addled times, there’s perhaps nothing more noble and community affirming than discussing a thick 19th century novel about rural England with a group of fellow readers. Originally published serially as eight volumes over the course of one year, “Middlemarch” would be the perfect pick for a slow-reading book club. For one, it’s long (my Penguin Classic clocks in at 800 pages), and you’ll want to take your time dissecting its fascinating cast of characters: the sincere and the bitter, the blowhards and the tenderhearted. By the sage grace of her omniscient narrator, Eliot depicts the full complexity of these lives — and, by the magic of fiction, our own. Trust me: There’s a wisdom bomb on nearly every page.

There are many other excellent books recommended—check it out!

I returned from my two-week writing residency on Monday and my re-entry has been…rough. The kids, resentful over my absence and uncertain what to do with their big feelings, have been the opposite of easy. Beyond that, the noise of everyday life, compared to the hours I had of solitude and birdsong, feels like being inside a truck motor.

That I ever wrote any of my novel during my regular life is a goddamn miracle.

Here’s a photo of me three days into my retreat. Has anyone ever looked more relaxed and happy?

I go away twice—sometimes thrice!—a year, but I don’t usually leave for two entire weeks. That asked a lot of Patrick, who handled everything while also working his demanding full time job. During my absence, he not only did all the normal stuff, like school drop-off and pick up, homework help, meals, and bedtime, he also dealt with a sick dog, a thousand meltdowns, overseeing the last part of a big fourth grade language arts project, getting a teenager to pack his PE sweats and log onto Spanish tutoring, taking said teen to the orthodontist (an appointment he made, by the way, because, no, not all moms make all the appointments, stop saying that), and putting out a million small domestic fires. I came home to a clean house, a stocked fridge, and news that the plumber had fixed our leak. Patrick was drained of his very life force, but at least he’d kept the household together. I have never been more grateful to have married someone so capable and loving.

To go away to write, as a parent, requires a mammoth level of support.

It also requires nerves of steel. I received many weepy phone calls from Ginger, and one where Mickey asked in a little voice, “Can you drive home right now to see me?” I missed them in that elemental way when distance has lathed away the frustration and fatigue and all you want is the sacred duty that is caretaking. I longed to see them, hold them, smell them. Everything was happening to them, and I wasn’t there to see it.

While I was gone, Mickey lost two teeth, and the photo Patrick took me of his new smile made me tear up:

My youngest was stepping into the next stage of childhood, and I wasn’t there to see it, wasn’t there to slide that cash under his pillow in exchange for a little piece of him, wasn’t there to hear the air whistling through that hole in his mouth, hear his new and temporary lisp, because—because why? Because I was writing a novel?

To go away to work is to prioritize your writing over everything and everyone else, including your children.

Nothing to do but hold the guilt and grief alongside the delight and pleasure of being away. I wrote a lot so that the sacrifice wouldn’t be for nothing.

Here’s a further peek into my experience there:

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I’ve decided to (temporarily?) remove the paywall from this recent Friday post. If you enjoy reading it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for more weekly posts. I keep hearing how newsletters should be about one thing, but, no thank you: I can’t contain myself! For this newsletter, I write about parenting, writing, reading, food, fashion, film, and beyond. Thanks for supporting my work!

In January, during our third week of winter break—a break that included endless rain, various flus, major holidays, zero travel, and days of boredom and fighting—Patrick said, “We have to go somewhere over spring break.”

If you have three (or more!) kids, then you know the financial pain of travel: five (or more!) is a troubling number of people to fit into a hotel room or a rental car. Airbnbs are better for a larger party…but I’m down on vacation rentals. The ones in our price range are always a little depressing. I don’t want to pay over a thousand dollars to swim desultorily in an okay pool in an okay house with serial killer vibes!

When Patrick was a kid, his family (two adults and four kids) would take road trips down to his grandparents’ house, and, on the way, stuff into a single motel room. He said he slept on the floor. I’m sorry, but I would rather stay home. I know it’s deeply uncool to admit this: but I don’t love to travel! I get anxious away from home, without my bed and my routines. I’d rather travel less so that I can spend more to have a comfortable (even luxurious) experience.

(Remember: frugality is not one of my core principles.)

A few years ago, we went to Santa Barbara with the idea that we’d do some stuff for the kids (swimming, ostrich feeding), and some stuff for the adults (winery visits, nice meals). In the end, this tactic meant someone was always unhappy: the parents swimming on what turned out to be a not-warm day, without even poolside service to soften the blow because we didn’t have the money for a nice hotel; the children who had to suffer through an (amazing!) lunch at Bell’s. We returned home resentful—and with a big credit card bill.

I didn’t want to repeat that sort of spring break. Why not just let the kids have all the fun, and we’d lap up the delights where we could?

“Let’s go to Disneyland,” I told Patrick. There was a 3-day park hopper ticket for Southern Californian residents, which meant we could do both Disneyland and California Adventure over multiple days.

We’d gone as a family to Disneyland in 2021; Bean had just turned ten, Ginger was five. Mickey, who wasn’t two years old yet, loved it…and yet he has no memory of the experience.

Time for another go!

That’s how we ended up staying at a Homewood Suites in Anaheim, California from Monday to Thursday of last week.

Let me first say, this was a great hotel for the price. (Specifics: The first night was something like $145, the second night was $200, and last, and most expensive, was about $320.)

For that cost, we got a large one-bedroom suite with a kitchen, plus free breakfast. This set-up, with Bean on the pull-out couch in the living room and the rest of us in two queen-sized beds in the bedroom, is still bone chilling for someone with travel-induced sleep anxiety (i.e., me), but it was our best option in our price range. We could walk to the free park shuttle, swim in the pool, and Mommy could take her emergency Xanax on night two when it was midnight and she was having a panic attack about being trapped in a room with three sleeping people and nowhere to go.

Here were all the bad things about our trip:

1. That stupid panic attack. Don’t recommend.

2. Two days in a row of amusement park madness. If we’d had more money, I would have rather put a day of rest between these Disney visits—we could have slept in, watched television, swam at the hotel or gone to the movies. Instead, on day two, we marched back to the happiest place on Earth without enough sleep. I was likely dehydrated and so tired I felt nauseated and dizzy. Everyone was crabby. The first day had been overcast, but the second day was hot and sunny. I felt like I was being fried on Main Street. Then I rolled my (still healing!) ankle and, I hate to tell you this, but I cried. I believe I said to my family, “Don’t touch me! I want to be alone!” Not my finest hour. However, the tears must have released some adrenalin or endorphins or whatever because things turned around after that. We went on Big Thunder Mountain for the second time, and then ate some Dole Whip while watching the animatronic birds sing at the Enchanted Tiki Room, and I felt my heart open once more.

3. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Ginger’s anxiety is really bad when we travel, and on this trip her OCD spiked too. Lots of compulsive behaviors, rigid thinking, worries about anything and everything, many meltdowns. She subjected us all to an absolute obsession with Minnie Mouse ears, a ubiquitous trend among girls and women at Disneyland ages five to a hundred. She finally decided on the pair she wanted…and still every conversation returned to the various Minnie Mouse ears available. Just kill me. Please. Take me behind the Dumbo ride and shoot me!

4. The arguing. My god. You think, The kids will be so happy at Disneyland! But you forget that you have to do a lot waiting-in-lines together, a lot of dining together, a lot of hustling from one ride to the next together: in short, there are many opportunities to argue and pester one another about every god damn thing. I can’t count the number of times I said, “Just stop.”
   

   

5. Two years ago, I made the mistake of showing the kids this video about a guy who got naked on It’s a Small World because he was on drugs. To this day, I field questions about this newsworthy event. No surprise, these questions reached a crescendo when we were at Disneyland, and, in particular, in line for It’s a Small World, and on the ride itself. Why did he do that? What drugs was he on? How did he get off the boat? At what point in the ride did he take off his clothes? What happened next? Why did people film it? Did they give him new clothes when they caught him? What kind of blanket would they put on him? Is he is in jail for that? What’s the difference between jail and prison? How long would you go to prison for that? What is the crime he was charged with? What is psilocybin like? How is LSD different from mushrooms? What was he hallucinating? What part of the ride set him off? Is being on mushrooms like being in a dream? What did his family think? Were people scared? Why can he never come back to Disneyland? Why is Disneyland so strict? What if I see a naked man on this ride? Mom? Mommy? Mom?

6. On day two, we had time to kill before another ride reservation (we got the lightning lane pass) so we jumped into the 50-minute line for Goofy’s Sky School roller coaster at California Adventure. Well, folks, that shit took ninety minutes, in the blazing sun, and the kids were being insane. The ride itself was not special and we all felt cheated. At least we bonded over our hatred of this ride. We absolutely roasted Goofy for the rest of our trip.

7. The pain of walking twenty miles in two days, especially so soon after a sprained ankle. Everything hurt by the end!

Wow, that felt cathartic! Thanks for letting me rant!

I am happy to say that the good was so good. Here are some highlights:

1. We got to the hotel the day before our Disney adventures began, which let us settle in and hang out. For dinner that evening, we drove to Pho 101 for some excellent Vietnamese food. When Baudrillard wrote about the unreality of the region surrounding Disneyland, I don’t think he’d been to the city of Westminster! (Also, Bean kept cracking me up all week by saying, “Welcome to the desert of the real.”)

2. The new(ish) Star Wars ride, Rise of the Resistance, is a triumph. It’s a story-as-a-ride, with a goddamn narrative arc, and it’s thrillingly immersive—even for world weary adults. Mickey almost lost his mind with pleasure, and so did I. And I don’t care about Star Wars at all! (EXCEPT NOW I DO?!)

   

3. Mickey got absolutely soaked on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure née Splash Mountain: it looked like he’d fallen into a swimming pool…at 9 am on a chilly morning. He was so wet, I had to buy him some shorts to wear instead. The thing is, it was really, really funny and he was so good natured about his drenched circumstances. We all kept laughing about it for the rest of our trip.

4. We left the parks every night for dinner in downtown Disney. After walking so many miles among the masses, my bougie-ass wants a leather booth, a cocktail, and an overpriced entree on a porcelain plate. No regrets.

5. Space Mountain is still the best roller coaster in any galaxy. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride remains wonderfully odd, and Pirates of the Caribbean never fails to make me grin and gasp—that pirate’s dirty foot! Disneyland really is the happiest place on Earth.

6. And Ginger did look fabulous in her Minnie Mouse ears.

   

7. We went on Grizzly River Run, California Adventure’s water ride, at the end of day 2, when it was dark and cold and no one else in the park was interested. We got ponchos out of the trash (oh yes we did) and still got wet in uncomfortable places. Some of us went on this ride twice in a row. Some of us went on it three times. This episode of laughter and screaming and sustained non-arguing and non-anxiety and non-pain made the whole trip worth it. Also, Patrick’s poncho was a crop-top and looked like some high-end Fashion Jacket picked up in Tokyo.

   

8. Patrick and I are not the best planners, and I admire that about us. We did make those fancy dinner reservations and, obviously, had the park tickets and the hotel, but that’s about it: we didn’t have a game plan, we didn’t pack snacks, the first day we didn’t even have water! (I know some of you are aghast! Fuck off there are drinking fountains everywhere!) We didn’t know what the week would hold and that was part of the fun. As a group, we bicker, we are inefficient, one of us (Mommy) is probably crying, someone else is wandering off, someone needs a churro yesterday. But we also are there, fully, open to spontaneous moments of joy. We are analyzing the manufacturing of fantasy that Disney does best. We are laughing. In the end, we went on all the rides we wanted to go on, some of them a few times. Most importantly, we were in it together.

   

8. Last gift of the trip: Bean’s smile when I told him we could get McDonald’s on the ride home.

…and if you were reading carefully, you’ll recall that we bought a 3-day pass to Disneyland. So we will back for one more day in May! Lord help us!

On Sunday, I posted a craft essay about summary.

As promised, here are a couple of writing exercises on the topic. I know not all of my paid subscribers are writers, but maybe everyone should try these—for fun. If the whole world paused to do a writing exercise, we’d be better off…

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This coming Friday, I’ll be offering paid subscribers a few writing exercises to practice summary writing. There, we can continue this discussion of scene and summary, and I’ll be offering writing advice to anyone who wants it.

Thanks for supporting my work.

For a long time, I was obsessed with writing scenes. I still am.

When a narrative is expertly dramatized, the words on the page transform into a kind of 3-D play of the mind. Immersed in a scene, one imbued with senses and sensations that are simultaneously emotional and physical, the reader is swept away, cast into rooms different from the one they’re sitting in. What a gift! What pleasure!

As I wrote in my previous craft essay, a scene is a completion of an action in a specific time and place. It’s the building block of fiction and narrative nonfiction, that “vivid and continuous dream” John Gardner’s always exhorting us to create.

Back when I was a baby writer, my teacher Ethan Canin instructed, “Put in scene what you want the reader to remember,” and I listened.

(I remember the room in when he pronounced this; I remember the long table at which we sat; I remember the other people in that room, taking notes or nodding or pursing their lips…)

The power of scene is creative writing 101, and I don’t disagree. Sometimes, however, the focus on scene-writing, on dramatization, on show-don’t-tell, leads us to neglect the other side of the writing coin.

If scene is the head of the coin, summary is the tail.

When I teach writing, I always cover both because you can’t have one without the other.

In his classic text, Narrative Time: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, Madison Smartt Bell writes: “Scene and summary are methods for treating time in fiction.”

At its heart, narrative is the depiction of time’s passage. It’s the writer who controls how, exactly, the reader experiences that passage.

To say it a different way: as writers, we manipulate time itself.

[Cue evil laughter; cut to image of woman—in a regrettable purple hat—bending the universe to her whims. Bwa ha ha ha…]

First, some definitions:

Summary is action and information that is told, rather than dramatized.

If a scene typically covers a relatively short amount of time, and takes a large amount of page-space to do so, summary covers a lot of time relatively quickly on the page.

A story requires not only the dilation of time, but also its compression.

It’s understandable why writing teachers emphasize scene writing. For one, most people, trained to avoid “making a scene” for their entire civilized lives, will shrink from this duty in their fiction, eliding the most interesting parts. Drama is scary! Or, new writers might painstakingly dramatize something dull…only to skip the compelling conversation or the juicy action. What we practice, as writers, is intuiting the sticky stuff—and going toward it.

The surest way to help a new writer draft a story is to ask them to choose four to six scenes. What would be the best scenes to show these characters in this interesting situation? Or, start smaller; start with one scene. Find a setting and make something happen there that will have consequences. Don’t forget to consider where the light’s coming from.

In her insightful craft book, The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing, Margot Livesey (another of my former writing teachers) reminds us that “many of the most revelatory and heartbreaking moments in fiction occur in scene.” And she’s right. For turning points, moments of crisis, and revelation of new information, scene is best.

But she also says that very few novels can be told entirely in scene. She continues: “When people in workshops shout, “Show don’t tell,” they are clamoring for the energy that dialogue brings, but that energy and drama comes in part from the contrast between telling and showing.”

The contrast—that’s what we’re after.

Summary has so many uses in storytelling!

First, it can alter the narrative register, usually to speed us up. It’s often used to move us from one dramatic moment to the next.

In Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, Janet Burroway taxonomizes two types of summary: sequential and circumstantial.

In the former, the summary moves us forward in a sequence. When you’re writing sequential summary, it’s useful to choose an organizing principle: Is it the changing seasons? Is it the college courses the character is taking? Is it the people she sleeps with, or the meals prepared and eaten? Whatever it is, how does the summary compress time to move us forward in a sequence? Furthermore, it’s important to recognize where (and when) you, ultimately, want to end.

Circumstantial summary, on the other hand, describes what things are like generally; in this kind of summary, time is not moving forward. The reason this part isn’t in scene is that nothing has changed—yet.

Consider the use of summary in Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s wonderful and emotionally astute new novel, Lake Effect.

The following passage is the opening of chapter nine. It comes about forty pages into a 273 page book, and the shifting third-person perspective has turned to Honey, mother of Fern. Right before this, in the previous chapter, the point of view is with Fern, who has a stutter.

Here is how this new chapter begins:

Honey wasn’t unsympathetic. She hated the days when Fern came home from school visibly downcast and discouraged. She didn’t know if the Jesus prayer would work, but wasn’t it worth a try? Honey also believed, strongly, that if Fern could lose a little weight and feel confident in her appearance, the stuttering would improve. Wouldn’t it? Fern walked around like she was trying to conceal something; that kind of posture couldn’t help her esophagus. Larynx? If Fern felt comfortable in her body, prettier, if her school uniform hung nicely, all of it would make a difference.

Notice how the narrative doesn’t adhere to a singular moment of time. Days, plural, are mentioned. The use of conditional tense (“would”) implies a possible future— “her stuttering would improve”—that isn’t fixed.

And yet we feel held. We aren’t floating in space. How does Sweeney do it?

For one, the writing pins us with its highly particular and visual imagery. The line, “Fern walked around like she was trying to conceal something,” provides a unique visual that edges on the scenic. Summary gets a bad rap for being abstract, generic, but, in good fiction, it’s concrete and vivid.

The narrative is also lodged deeply inside Honey’s flawed perspective. That “Larynx?” line captures a singular moment of consciousness: for a second we exist in a pocket time, in Honey’s mind, before the summary picks up again.

Interestingly, the next passage in the chapter continues with summary, only this time, it’s sequential, revealing Honey’s history with Weight Watchers, from her first meeting:

“After Finn’s heart attack, he begrudgingly joined Weight Watchers and so did Honey to keep him accountable.”

To her recent ones:

“Now, when Honey led her own meetings, she always started by talking about confidence.”

The summary keeps moving time forward, and it’s specific and image-driven, providing scenic moments to keep it particular rather than abstract.

This chapter opening is also a reminder of how economically summary can provide exposition, another one of its uses. We do not need full-blown, dramatized flashbacks for every dang thing! Lake Effect reminds us to tuck past moments here and there in a larger swath of compressed time. Call them scenelettes or scene blips.

From this sequential summary, the chapter glides into a scene. At this point, the chapter has moved between many different moments in time, from Honey’s meetings, to when she was invited to lead these meetings, to moments of friction with Fern about her weight. It leads to this:

“It’s all she wanted for Fern—to become the best Fern possible. As she was running over in her head what the best possible Fern might look like, the real live Fern walked into the kitchen and made a beeline for the refrigerator.”

Here, the story is ready to pause, to unfurl, to luxuriate on a specific interaction for a longer period of time. The book intuits that this is the moment a scene is needed to show the characters interacting. And, by now, the reader has a trove of knowledge to interpret the scene.

If your summary is specific and sensory-driven, if it reveals information, if it’s as vivid as scene, then the reader is more than happy to swim through it.

Lake Effect moves between scene and summary with such facility and elegance. It’s also what accommodates its profundity. A book like Lake Effect, which spans decades in under 300 pages, and explores the ripple effects of an affair on two families, relies on sensual, scenic summary to move efficiently between characters and to swing ahead in time.

It also helps us see inside these characters more clearly. If Sweeney offered us only a scene between Fern and Honey where they argue about food choices, we wouldn’t have the same access to their vulnerabilities, histories, and flawed worldviews. We wouldn’t be so moved by the story.

In my own work, I’ve been thinking about how summary serves as a respite from the unrelenting pace of scenes, and how, too, summary is where characters get to negotiate meaning, wrestle with information, and just think. Summary is where character interiority gets the opportunity to stretch out. Summary is agile, it can alight from idea to idea, moment to moment, and this nimble quality captures—it mimics—consciousness. Isn’t that what differentiates narrative from other art forms?

Summary’s ability to place us in a character’s consciousness allows the narrative to explore and reveal its deeper subjects.

When we integrate scene and summary, when the narrative shuffles between these two different narrative valences, meaning gets made.

This kind of scenic, sensory, character-driven summary, and the narrative’s seamless interaction between summary and scene, the way one moves into the other, is what makes Lake Effect feel authentic.

It’s what makes it feel like a story, what keeps it from feeling like someone turned on a camera and walked away.

I’m guessing Sweeney didn’t overthink this summary-to-scene choreography. You can tell she reads a lot, and through that reading has learned to intuit the rhythms of storytelling.

It’s like she heard the music, and danced.

I’m dissecting these two narrative registers as if there are obvious boundaries. But, in most writing, scene and summary are not these discrete methods with defined borders. In fact, they often bleed into one another, and it can be tricky to differentiate between the two.

In some cases, summary might lead to a scene; in others, summary gets woven into the scene, and you move from one to the other, a web of experience, of time, a feeling of freedom.

It’s why reading feels so good—and why writing does too.

There’s nothing sexier and more powerful than the single sentence: “Five years passed.”

I mean—you can just make that happen!? In only three words?!

THAT’S HALF A DECADE!

And then, wow, you can transport readers to a single moment, with its unique light, its scents, its sounds, those words from that person. That feeling—

I am drunk on my sorcery!

Don’t you ever take these powers for granted.

The next time you’re writing, consider how you’re balancing these two narrative registers, summary and scene.

Hear the music…and dance.

Or, if you prefer the other metaphor: Flip the coin, then flip it again, so that your reader gets both sides.

Remember, if you’re a paying subscriber, I’ll be sending a newsletter with summary writing exercises this Friday.

If you don’t want to commit to a paid subscription, but you enjoyed this piece, you can always send me a tip! Honey I have a cappuccino addiction that needs your support. Thanks. xoxo

In the days since, I’ve been struck by how many people, upon hearing the news, ask, “Did it happen in dance class?”.

I wish that’s how I hurt myself!

The truth is, it w…

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I’ve written before about the imperfect and messy rooms in my house. In that tradition, I offer you this photo essay I’m calling Cursed Corners.

I’ll begin with something minor:

The wires? Oh well. But…

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We’re in the last days of my birthday sale! Get 30% off until Monday, 3/1.

I’m holding a Study Hall this Sunday from 9 am to 11 am, Pacific Time, for paid subscribers only. Let’s get together and write!

The Zoom link is below the paywall…

You know what I did instead of subjecting myself to the State of the Union? I watched professional clown Courtney Pauroso do her hilarious, grotesque, provocative, goofy sex robot show, my second time seeing it. If Vanessa 5000 comes to your town, go—or you can watch it online. Trump feeds off attention so, no, he may not have mine.

I loved this interview with Ethan Hawke (that’s a gift link, btw) about his Oscar-nominated role in “Blue Moon,” directed by Richard Linklater—Rick to his pals. The conversation is all about selling out (or not), being creative, and how hard it is to make films these days. This particular exchange got me:

Being a young actor, you think, “When is the spotlight going to move on and will I survive it?” When Rick and I were first becoming friends, I’d had early fame and I was incredibly suspicious about the ways it dips you in formaldehyde and asks you to stop growing. He thought this part might speak to me because it’s something I live in absolute fear of.

When the journalist, Kyle Buchanan, asks him, “Can you tell when the spotlight moves on from you to some other guy?” Hawke answers:

Oh, the ways that other people interact with you are so obvious. There’s a buzz that happened in my life with “Dead Poets Society” [1989], then it would go quiet. Then “Reality Bites” [1994] would come out and the buzz is back. The heat of the spotlight is something a person feels, but I learned pretty early that some of the best periods of my life were when that buzz had quieted down. That’s a great teacher because then you stop acting out of fear. You have to let yourself shed skins and make mistakes and try again.

May we all make art without that buzz in our ears.

I plan to watch “Blue Moon” over the weekend. If you’ve seen it, tell us what you thought in the comments.

I was tickled by this newsletter from Stephen Piccarella, ranking every Don DeLillo novel; the list includes capsule comments on each book.

Since I haven’t read all of DeLillo’s books, and since I haven’t read his work in years, I can’t weigh in on Piccarella’s rankings.

However!

I read Underworld an absurd eight times in college because I was doing my (eventually abandoned) honors thesis on it.

Take a minute to imagine little Edan back then, in low-rise jeans and cherry red clogs, no bra, ever, underlining DeLillo passages between scurrying to her library pile of Jacques Lacan and Linda Hutcheon and Frank Kermode, trying to fashion an argument for DeLillo’s big book about the secret histories of America in the latter half of the twentieth century that uses a famed baseball and a huge art installation in the desert and garbage management to do it. Oof. I still have my notebooks from this era:

It’s been over twenty years but I still believe I’d love this book, its ambition and sprawl, its sentences.

What sentences!

“She looked famous and rare, famous even to herself, famous alone making a salad in her kitchen” (67)

and

“The truth of bridges is that they made him feel he was doing some möbius gyration, becoming one-sided, losing all purchase on name and place and food-taste and weekends with the in-laws—hanging sort of unborn in the generic space” (167).

and

“Brian thought he resembled some retired stand-up comic who will not live a minute longer than his last monopolized conversation” (168).

So good!

I want to transcribe the last breathless page but I won’t. Instead, I’ll give you this single image from the passage:

“the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray” (827).

(That phrase used to be at the bottom of my email signature…?!)

I said it already on Substack Notes and I’ll say it again here: Underworld deserves a renewed appreciation, like my other favorite, Lonesome Dove. It’s high time we had a DeLillo Renaissance (er, a DeLillossance), and it would be nice if it happened before the man died. He’ll be 90 in November!

The DeLillossance rides on women deciding to read him. So, come on, ladies, let’s do this!

(Also, I humbly request some credit for the renewed interest. You know I’m miffed that the New York Times didn’t interview me about the McMurtry trend…)

Here’s the Zoom link for Sunday’s Study Hall. If you plan to come, please comment below or reply to this email.

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Here is how it works:

Every Monday, accountability group members will receive a Substack newsletter accessible only to us, AKA the Fuckeroos. This email includes wisdom or advice from a working writer I admire: sometimes it’s a useful tip, sometimes it’s a writing prompt, sometimes it’s a stirring pep talk. Since the group is multi-genre, I ask different sorts of writers to contribute, from novelists to poets to screenwriters to essayists. Past contributors include Rufi Thorpe, Attica Locke, Matthew Zapruder, Grace Farris, and Rachel Khong, among other amazing writers.

Believe me when I say that this upcoming session’s roster of contributors will be superb.

At the end of every accountability group email, Fuckeroos must post the answer to two questions: How did writing go last week? And: What are your writing goals this week? I always include my own answers in the week’s email because I too want to be held accountable!

Some Fuckeroos aim to write a certain number of pages or words a week, while some set a time-at-the-desk goal. Some are outlining; others are revising. It’s up to each person to decide what they need to do. Hearing how it’s going for other people is inspiring and comforting. Some Fuckeroos even find a buddy for extra accountability.

If someone fails to post, they hear from me. I am very good at Being Stern. I want you working!

Throughout the week, I comment on everyone’s posts, and there’s some communication between Fuckeroos as well. It’s a supportive, energizing place to gather. We celebrate and commiserate, and we get our asses to work.

In addition to the weekly emails, I hold three optional Study Halls via Zoom throughout the session; typically, two are on Sunday mornings (PST), and one is held on a weekday morning. In these sessions, we briefly share what we’ll be writing, and then we mute ourselves and turn off our cameras to write alone-yet-together for ninety minutes. It’s amazing how much people get done in these Study Halls.

This group is open to writers of all experience and skill levels; there are very new writers participating as well as authors with multiple books published or projects developed. You can be working on a book, or a script, or a play, or a story, or a poem, or a newsletter post, or a journal practice—anything goes as long as you want to write and be held accountable.

The cost is $125, except for paying subscribers of this here newsletter, who can enroll for $100. (Subscriptions are currently 30% off until 3/1!)

Please email me at edan.lepucki@gmail.com if you’d like to enroll.

Thanks and happy writing!

Plus, my birthday sale has been extended until March 1st! Snag 30% off! That’s $35 a year. Damn—what a good deal.

Thanks for supporting my work.

The next Study Hall writing session will meet via Zoom on Sunday, March 1, from 9 to 11 am, Pacific Time.

During this session, we’ll share briefly what we plan to work on before writing alone-yet-together for about 90 minutes. These are always productive and, dare I say it, spirit-affirming meetings. Join us!

Study Hall is open to paid subscribers only, so pony up, baby. (Get that sale price before it goes away!)

I’ll post the Zoom link next Friday.

Today I have a question to ask you.

When someone brings up some event in the future—maybe they tell you their birthday is in July, or the conference is in September, or that a certain movie’s coming out in November—do you see a calendar in your mind?

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In case you subscribed in a fugue state and need a reminder: I’m a bestselling novelist and mother of three; if you’re interested in getting a taste of the material I write about here, here’s my essay about talking, here’s one about writing scenes, and one about my wrinkles, and this one about teaching my kids life skills.

Every Friday, I send a little missive (like the one below) to my paid subscribers. These cover any number of topics, from parenting to reading to writing to cooking to fashion—you name it. These Friday emails are meant to delight.

On top of that, paid subscribers receive a discount on my accountability groups. They also get to attend my semi-regular Zoom writing study halls. The next one is coming up soon; see more info below.

Plus, my birthday sale has been extended until March 1st! Snag 30% off! That’s $35 a year. Damn—what a good deal.

Thanks for supporting my work!

I have two recommendations for this Friday morning, but first, an announcement:

The next Study Hall writing session will meet via Zoom on Sunday, March 1, from 9 to 11 am, Pacific Time.

During this session, we’ll share briefly what we plan to work on before writing alone-yet-together for about 90 minutes. These are always productive and, dare I say it, spirit-affirming meetings. Join us!

Study Hall is open to paid subscribers only, so pony up, baby. (Get that sale price before it goes away!)

Recommendation 1: To Drink

Patrick was out of town for work this week so I did what I always do when he takes away his cooking and conversation skills: I avoided the news, served the children breakfast-for-dinner, and read poetry to myself by the lamplight.

What I didn’t do was drink alcohol. Like previous years, Sober January ended with me enjoying the clarity and sanctimony of teetotalism. So while I’m officially back on the sauce, I’m siloing my drinking to weekend feasts.

Also, last Saturday I took three hits on the one-cent birthday joint (!) I got from my friendly neighborhood weed shop and on Sunday I felt so slow and dumb that I decided I didn’t need to do that again for a while. (Cut to me, tomorrow night, tucking the lighter into my waistband as I creep out to the backyard. A little puff won’t hurt…)

On the last weekend of Sober January, I ordered a Phony White Negroni at a friend’s birthday dinner; almost everyone else at the table would be imbibing a gorgeous red wine. At least the one other non-drinker there was very stylish and smart. I felt chic by association.

Now, I love a real white Negroni, herby and vibrant, and less like cough syrup than its red sister.

It turns out, it’s not impossible to fake one.

I liked my phony white Negroni so much I got two from my local wine shop to enjoy at home.

Goes great with pancakes and bacon, btw.

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In case you subscribed in a fugue state and need a reminder: I’m a bestselling novelist and mother of three; if you’re interested in getting a taste of the material I write about here, here’s my essay about talking, and one about writing scenes, and one about my wrinkles, and this one about teaching my kids life skills.

Every Friday, I send a little missive (like the one below) to my paid subscribers. These cover any number of topics, from parenting to reading to writing to cooking to fashion—you name it. These Friday emails are meant to delight.

On top of that, paid subscribers receive a discount on my accountability groups. They also get to attend my semi-regular Zoom writing study halls.

Plus, my birthday sale has been extended until March 1st! Snag 30% off! That’s $35 a year. Damn—what a good deal.

Thanks for supporting my work!

Norman Rush’s novel Mating, which won the National Book Award in 1991, is about a young white woman in Botswana who, failing at her anthropology research, falls in love with a well known intellectual. For years I’d heard about this book, a cult classic among literary readers who consider it a modern masterpiece. In 2015, there was a Paris Review book club. In 2023, the New York Times published an article about its popularity, declaring it “a novel for people who particularly love novels.”

I’d long been meaning to read Mating, primarily because I’d been told it was about love. Not just any kind of love, but long term romantic love. It was a paean to a loving marriage.

Or that’s what I thought it was about.

I started Mating in December and finished it the following month. Wow, what an experience I had with this book!

I’m still trying to process it…

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