I was struck by a bookcase on the wall with “books about mothers,” according to the placard.

In fact, there were books about pregnancy, pregnancy loss, childbirth, and, significantly, not having children— Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Without Children by Peggy O’Donnell Heffington. I both appreciate discussion around the choice to be a mother and often am overwhelmed by the vehemence of both sides of the conversation. It is a personal decision, of course, but is also split simplistically into a binary issue in the public eye.

On one hand, choice around motherhood— that is, the idea that in this day and age, women can choose if, when, and where to have a child— does not seem particularly revolutionary. But given the history of women’s rights, and the current degradation of a woman’s right to an abortion, it really is. The idea that having children isn’t automatic is one that has liberated women. Women who know they don’t want children are now empowered to enact that choice; women who don’t know whether or not they want to have children now have more room to consider that choice, even though I fear they are mostly just being assaulted by a public discourse that could be empathetic but is increasingly inflammatory.

My grandmother died this last year. Smart, thoughtful, and artistically-minded, she was in many ways a wonderful person; my uncle did a really good job encapsulating some of her contradictions in her obituary. She could be amazingly forward-thinking, and I think as such she sometimes chafed against the constraints of being a wife and mother in the 1950s. Of course, I’m very grateful to be alive— but I often wonder if she felt she had any choice in the question of having children.

Seeing this bookcase and the fact that the one novel on it was about a woman who (spoiler) decides not to have children contributed to an idea I’ve been thinking about for years.

Why are there no good fiction books about women who happen to be mothers?

That is, not books about motherhood or books about the decision to have children or not, or the logistics, like most of the ones that were gathered above in the Designing Motherhood exhibit, but pieces of fiction where the main character is a woman who happens to be a mother?

The reason why not— I believe strongly, is a narrative problem that exists in society and in literature side-by-side. It is worth paying attention to because of what it is telling us about how we perceive mothers and why some women are struggling with the decision of whether or not to have children.

Let me backtrack a little and survey recent books about mothers. I had a fascinating conversation with a bookseller at one of my favorite bookstores, Lost City Books, about this question. In terms of narratives about mothers, the bookseller pointed out the novel about mothers that came to mind for her first and foremost: the immensely successful Nightbitch (2021), a book in which a new mother gives up her career as an artist and becomes a stay-at-home parent and eventually turns into a dog. This book and some others, like Soldier, Sailor (2023) and Motherthing (2022), about maternal rage and incredibly unhelpful if not actively harmful husbands or families have enjoyed huge popularity, and this is telling! Night Waking (2021) and Chouette (2011) come to mind as well. Women want to hear about how difficult and bodily and grotesque and surreal motherhood can be, and I’m glad there is space for this.

There are also excellent books about mothers where if not about being a mother directly, being a mother is inherent to the plot, including books like Margo’s Got Money Troubles (2024) by Rufi Thorpe and The School for Good Mothers (2022) by Jessamine Chan, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. The Mothers by Brit Bennett uses the framing of a Greek chorus of mothers. Salvage the Bones (2011) by Jesmyn Ward and Red to the Bone (2019) by Jacqueline Woodson are moving novels about the anticipation of motherhood. There are many more in these veins too.

And then there are books about mothers where the bulk of the mothering happened long ago— these women are mothers but now have time to focus on other things, like Elizabeth Strout’s series about Lucy Barton, or Catherine Newman’s Sandwich (2024).

There certainly can be books in which the mother does not act like a mother, and this is a genre in and of itself— as in a classic like Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) by Lionel Shriver. But primarily the Bad Mother is a side character, rather than a main character.

But what about books about women who happen to be mothers, especially mothers of children who are not fully grown— but books that are not ABOUT motherhood or its contingencies?

There seems to be this universal agreement that being a mother precludes plot for the following reasons:

1. Mothers cannot be people with identities outside their motherhood, or people who do not associate motherhood as their primary identity. Meanwhile men, of course, are always people first, parents second.

2. Mothers are BORING. Raising children is BORING. (And yet the right is simultaneously trying to sell women on the idea that raising children is the most important and meaningful thing a woman can be doing— nay, that it is her sole purpose on this earth? No wonder this messaging is causing cognitive dissonance.)

3. Motherhood being what it is, mothers have no time to be anything but mothers. To be a mother is to give up your own self, your own plotline, your own life, in order to be a mother. This fascinating New Yorker piece1 goes into this perception:

Woof. There is so much to unpack here. In essence, this is the idea that mothers simply do not have time to be anything other than mothers— either because of the very real lack of childcare in this country or because of, as this article fascinatingly mentions, the perception that in order to be a good mother you must invest “enormous amounts of personal attention.”2

Regarding the boring allegations— I do not believe that having and raising children is boring. But society often seems to see it that way, and that is a shame. The second part of this is that women who have given birth are subsequently viewed as uninteresting, perhaps because they’re theoretically not sexually available anymore (the “fuckability” factor is real!), and perhaps again, because of this “enormous amounts of personal attention” problem— a woman can only have space to talk about motherhood because mother is all she is and does now. Being one-note is boring.

Under the yoke of this logic, can there be a book that features as a heroine a mother?

• No, because being a good mother entails spending all your time as a mother. Motherhood is your A-plot as it never is with men. Fatherhood does not preclude plot. Men can be many things. We never ever question whether a man is less of a person because he is a parent.

• Because you must only focus on your child or children, there is no room for anything else.

• Additionally, if you do other things other than focus on your child you are in fact not qualified to be a heroine but you could be a Bad Mother.

Motherhood, for women, is always the A-plot. To imply otherwise would be disastrous! Women having and raising especially young children is an intense and magical time, and to go so far as to imply that they might be doing other things that they similarly hold near and dear seems unacceptable to people. Our moral judgment about women who have children but do other things is absolute. If motherhood is not the A-plot, then this mother is surely a Bad Mother. And the Bad Mother is a character we are admittedly fascinated with, a woman whose actions are debated again and again on the internet, in celebrity rags, and out in the world— sometimes most harshly by other women.

This dearth of books about women who are incidentally mothers seems to point to this: that to be a mother is the only plot a woman who happens to be a mother can have. To suggest that a woman who is a mother might not consider that her only or even most important plot is actually wildly divisive. Being a mother IS incredibly important and essential and wonderful, there’s no doubt. And yet, why can’t a woman hold other things as just as or more important?

I recently read Yesteryear (2026) by Caro Claire Burke, which is a sensation and the subject of no small amount of online ire. Certainly it is very timely. I think it hits a lot of accurate notes in how motherhood is being typified by the right and the left. For the right, motherhood is a woman’s innate place in the world. But for the left, motherhood can be at odds with liberation.

This dichotomy is interesting to me for its simplicity, especially as conservatives in this country freak out about the potential of the birth rate falling (among white women, let’s be clear). The right is trying to feed us the idea that women should be mothers because it is the highest calling, the most meaningful thing they can possibly do with their lives. And yet, their attitudes and policies on motherhood are abysmal. Our country is not a welcoming place for mothers. We don’t have paid leave, we have the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, and our society is very focused on judging mothers. Being a mother is not made fun. More and more, I see how children and babies are not welcome in public spaces, and thus mothers are excluded and isolated. Despite their anxiety about the birth rate, I don’t see Republicans addressing any of this.

It’s notable that none of the women in the Trump Administration preaching this agenda of women getting married, giving up any careers, and dedicating their lives only to having children and maintaining their husbands follow their own advice— a contradiction that has been pointed out many times.

It’s easy to understand why for liberal and conservative women alike who are considering having kids, motherhood is sometimes not seen as an attractive concept.

When I talk to women my age or younger about having or putting off having children, they cite things like their lifestyle, or their love of travel, or their economic instability. (Childcare should not be a luxury item, obviously, and the cost is unconscionable.)

But having a child does not intrinsically end your personhood. Isolation, lack of childcare, lack of empathy—these things all work to separate women from their personhood. For women with unsupportive partners, a lack of community, medical issues, no access to childcare, motherhood can be all-consuming. Our widening income gap is making this even more so, and so is the idea that parenting is individual, rather than communal.

Until we see mothers, especially mothers of young children, as people too and perhaps people first— how can they be heroines in stories?

I would like to see more books that reconcile the idea of a woman who is both a mother and everything else that women who are mothers can be, which is to say absolutely anything. What I would like to see is a book about a women who happens to be a mother, but is other things first— the same treatment that male characters have received since the written word began. I am heartened by recent books like All Fours by Miranda July and Heart the Lover by Lily King, even if I despair that this idea is boundaried by things that should not be privilege— the privilege of financial stability, the privilege of the right to control one’s body, and the privilege of support from family and community.3

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Among the Thugs by Bill Buford (1990)

Among the Thugs is an account of British football hooliganism in the 1980s. This kind of sports-based rioting is pretty much anathema to Americans; even the word “hooligan” does not have the same associations here. The United Kingdom is small enough that traveling to games is realistic and there is an incredibly strong drinking culture associated with football. In America, games are viewed mostly on television; fans don’t travel to each game. The fans who get drunk while tailgating or at the bar largely don’t end up committing violence. Disgruntled American football fans will sometimes wander a city in their oversize jerseys after a game in search of a bar, but with the exception of sometimes Eagles fans they are not rioting. In England, it is very different. Spectator violence has always been a part of football culture, and this behavior has deep roots.

Buford, a journalist who went on to become the fiction editor of the New Yorker, is graphic in his detailing of both the violence and its participants.

I found myself neither in conversation nor not in conversation but looking into a particularly ugly mouth. I can’t recall how I arrived before this mouth—zigzagging across the square—but once in its presence I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

In it, there were many gaps, the raw rim of the gums showing where once there must have been teeth. Of the teeth still intact, many were chipped or split; none was straight: they appeared to have grown up at odd, unconventional angles or (more likely) been redirected by a powerful physical influence at some point in their career. All of them were highly colored—deep brown or caked with yellow or, like a pea soup, mushy green and vegetable soft with decay. This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury’s milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.

This passage for me was an excellent metaphor for Buford’s investigation into why seemingly “normal” sports fans commit incredibly dark acts of violence against opposing fans and also just random, especially nonwhite, people. A thread throughout the book is Buford’s bafflement at finding that investigating the very center of this violence, where the heart of the matter should lie, in fact, there is only a cipher, a nothingness— a disgusting, empty mouth.

Why this kind of antisocial conduct? I couldn’t separate the end—this exhilaration—from the means that got people to it; I couldn’t treat it as this generation’s thing, its rock and roll. There are endless precedents for extreme forms of behavior—especially violence—but not for organized violence, not for violence pitched at achieving this kind of frenzied high: the crowd high. this was unusual. And, amid all the different factors that contribute to why an assembly of people becomes a crowd and then, ultimately, a violent one, there is almost invariably a political or economic cause of some kind, even if the cause is cosmetic or rhetorical—a grievance or an injustice or at least a hardened feeling of social frustration—and I couldn’t get away from the starkness of the conclusion I kept reaching: that there was no cause for the violence; no “reason” for it at all. If anything, there were “unreasons”: rather than economic hardship or political frustration, there was economic plenty and an untroubled, even complacent faith in a free market and nationalistic politics that was proud of both its comforts and its selfishness.

I couldn’t believe that what I saw was all there was.

Buford is incredulous that men who hold down jobs, who have small businesses and own houses, have families, wives, and children, can commit atrocious acts of violence and torture. But inherently— this is not contradictory, however much we would like it to be to ease the cognitive dissonance.

Buford delves into hooliganism’s relationship with nationalist and far right groups in Britain, and reveals how pro-Nazi groups try to recruit membership from football fans. The relationship between the far right and hooliganism is a shared sense of not actual but perceived disenfranchisement. The nationalism too is a shared value, on display for football fans for example when England teams play other countries. And then there is of course a common interest in violence, often against marginalized groups; and yet, hooliganism taps into something chthonic that is more than just organized crowd violence—a trance-state which reason cannot explain.

If you are different in an acceptable way, i.e. a white man from America like Buford, you are given a privileged seat as an outsider and explained things, as Buford is. He profiles a variety of fans inside the football “firms”— “firms” being gangs of hardcore fans who organize premeditated rioting, violence, and intimidation of the other team’s fans. (These “firms” also handle logistics of getting large groups to the games, quite difficult if you are banned from doing so, and occasionally engage in unrelated criminal activities.) Clearly Buford was very good at getting his subjects to trust him, which he admits causes him some consternation. Several of his accountings of the crowd violence veer into uncomfortable territory, because one wonders if to be present is to partake. At one point, mistaken for a group leader in a riot, Buford is beaten badly by police, who attack him with the same zealousness that he has seen football hooligans beating someone who got in their way.

As an outsider, Buford is well-positioned to ask why it is that football hooliganism has historically been so violent, and if it is simply an outlet for white fans who feel a deep sense of economic, cultural, or racial disenfranchisement. What he finds is much more macabre— that those are excuses but not the reasons.

The Keith Richards look-alike was disconcertingly self-aware. He knew what a journalist was hoping to find in him and that he provided it. He worked in a factory, making soap powder. “The perfect profile of a hooligan, isn’t it?” he said. “He works all week at a boring job and can’t wait to get out on a Saturday afternoon.”

I nodded and grinned rather stupidly. He was right: the disenfranchised and all that.

He sneered. It was a wonderful sneer—arrogant, composed, full of venom. “So what do you think makes us tick?” he asked. “If we,” he said, not waiting for my answer, “did not do it here at football matches then we’d simply end up doing it somewhere else. We’d end up doing it on Saturday night at the pub. It’s what’s in us, innit?” He had an intense, but rather practiced, look of contempt.

What’s that? I asked. What is it that’s in us?

“The violence,” he said. “We’ve all got it in us. It just needs a cause. It needs an acceptable way of coming out. And it doesn’t matter what it is. But something. It’s almost an excuse. But it’s got to come out. Everyone’s got it in them.”

I remember being on a crowded train up to Sheffield a couple years ago on an afternoon and being surrounded by men in groups, each one carting his own 6-pack of beer. There was a Sheffield United game that night, and the train was absolutely packed. (Sheffield, it should be noted, was the site of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989: a fatal crowd crush at a match in which 97 people died.) My takeaways at the time were in retrospect quite naive. I thought it was nice to see these groups of male friends traveling to the match together. I thought it was quaint that drinking freely on trains is allowed in England.

I had to stand. I was across from an Indian grandmother in a sari, her daughter, and her daughter’s two young kids. All three generations were also standing while the football fans had crowded into all the seats with their bags of booze. The grandmother did not take her eyes off the men sitting and drinking the entire train ride. At the time I thought it was a bit strange how fixated she seemed on them, but now I wonder if she was simply privy to an understanding of what these men were capable of that I was ignorant of then. After all, hooliganism is frequently racialized: whether it be the appalling abuse of Black players by fans or violence against nonwhite fans or nonwhite bystanders.

When we disembarked at Sheffield, the train car was awash with empty bottles. Not a single beer had been left undrunk, and each man, most of whom had drunk approximately 6 beers on the two-and-a-half train journey from London and some of whom had been drinking surreptitiously straight from handles of liquor, then proceeded to the pub before they went to the stadium that night.

• America is breaking your heart right now;

• You can’t stop thinking about death;

• You’re tired of looking at your small device constantly and want to read more but want it not to be stressful;

• You want to read something that, unlike in life, will assuredly end happily;

• The changing of the seasons causes you ennui.

I too have been seeking some gentler reading for some of these reasons. I came across this excellent recommendation list a while ago and finally got around to reading some of them, namely An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym and Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple.1

My many-times-aforementioned anglophilic tendencies propelled me forward, and before long I was reading my third Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence. Pym’s books are undoubtedly “cozy,” a genre which to my eyes contains the following tropes:

• Small-town setting. The “cozy” novel is never set in a city, as the aesthetic rules of “cozy” cannot be accessed in a city, like the limited cast of characters and narrow geographic setting;

• Lack of gritty details like financial stress,2 violence, trauma. For example, if the “cozy” book is a mystery novel, the murder happens off-screen;

• General good-temperament or good intentions underlying the main characters;

• Cast of characters often featuring a member of the clergy;

• Happy or at least neat ending;

• Something stagnant about the setting, a lingering sense that nothing that could happen in the book could fundamentally change the world in which it’s set;

• A lack of historicity, an out-of-time quality.

A wonderful perversion of the “cozy” genre is the book The Girls by John Bowen, which I wrote about here. That book holds up. Every line is hilarious. Run, don’t walk, etc.

I didn’t particularly enjoy An Unsuitable Arrangement, Pym’s final book which was rejected by publishers after she was established as a novelist and then later published posthumously. Some Tame Gazelle I did enjoy, and I’m wondering if the difference is that in the end of An Unsuitable Arrangement the main character ends up marrying a totally lacking man, and in Some Tame Gazelle the main characters are two self-described spinsters who reject a pile of totally lacking men and remain spinsters. I am currently on Jane and Prudence. Send thoughts if you have read Barbara Pym.

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash (2026)

Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is an updated, wonderfully humorous Virgin Suicides. The book follows three vibrant teenage daughters of a confused couple in a perhaps (not really) futuristic town controlled by a ruthless oligarch. Catherine and Gus are limping along after opening their marriage at Catherine’s demand. Oldest daughter Abigail is wiley and beautiful, dating an older man nicknamed “War Crimes Wes” for his vaguely suspicious military background. Middle daughter Louise is interested in blowing up a pageant that, despite her unique special skill (she can hold her breath for more than four minutes), she can’t qualify for. Youngest daughter Harper is the smartest of the three, and the most ornery, getting sent to a wilderness camp for troubled teens after her parents decide they can’t handle her. All the characters border on the edge of ridiculous, but their pathos redeems them.

It’s quite hard to write good contemporary fiction for many reasons, of course, but one of the largest problems is the overwhelming interference of our cellphones. Exceedingly tedious and convenient devices; our cellphones have ended the kind of miscommunications that drove centuries of novels and simultaneously introduced a maddening, meaningless Charybdis of entertainment and distraction on which we spend far too much of our precious time. Lost Lambs handles technology (the insistent presence of our cellphones, the role of the internet in investigating and bringing down an oligarch, etc…) well.

The other reason Cash’s Lost Lamb sticks out in my mind among many other recent novels is its pitch-perfect dark humor— it’s not at all try-hard, but insistent nonetheless. Life is absurd, Cash reminds us. Humiliating! Hilarious.

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However, I backtracked on this intention the minute I was having a health scare and needed some comfort. The worst part about my mostly minor health issues has been waiting for results, during which time I was thinking obsessively about death, even while avowing publicly and privately that things WILL BE FINE no matter what happens.1

Thoughts of his own death,
like the distant roll
of thunder at a picnic.

(An apt haiku by Auden, naturally.) So of course during all of this I went to Loganberry Books, an amazing bookstore in Cleveland, and bought myself some tomes.

One of the books that I made a beeline to was Mieko Kawakami’s new novel, Sisters in Yellow. Kawakami’s book Breasts and Eggs was my top book of the year in 2020, when it was published in English.

Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Laurel Taylor and and Hitomi Yoshio (2026)

Kawakami’s new book takes place in Tokyo’s nightlife industry, and follows several people existing on the fringes of society who work in that industry. In Sisters in Yellow, these people— bar owners, hostesses, shot girls, escorts, bookies, gangsters— all live precariously. The book’s main character, Hana, has no ID, no resources, only a doggedness that is her saving grace but also precludes dreams of anything but survival. Raised by an unreliable and flighty mother who herself works as a bar hostess, Hana is driven by a burning urge to make money and find stability. She begins working with a mysterious friend of her mother, Kimiko, and together they set up a bar, which flourishes at the outset. But it doesn’t last, and Hana has nothing to fall back on.

Kawakami said that she herself was a “graduate of hostess university.” She worked for years in the nightlife industry, and the details of Sisters in Yellow show it. She was also raised by a single mother who worked at a grocery store; Kawakami started working at 14 at a local Panasonic factory. “I was raised in the streets,” she said in an interview, “so I know that there are some people who can only survive in the streets.”

Hana’s guiding light is money and a superstitious belief in the color yellow. Her bar with Kimiko was called Yellow, and for good luck Hana gathers yellow tchotchkes, which she arranges in a corner of the house.

Once Yellow burns down, Hana finds herself the sole provider for Kimiko and two other young women who she befriended at the bar. They all live together. But the only way to make ends meet is resorting to crime, and she begins to run credit card frauds for a gangster.

August was almost over. Every day was blistering, and no matter where you looked, summer was in the air, but that year, summer didn’t feel like it had always felt. Huge white clouds filled perfect blue skies, cicada song screamed over every surface, and from time to time, wind gusted through, ripe with the sun’s heat. And I sweated my way across the city. But a deep dark canal had carved its way between my sense of self and my sense of summer, and though it was silent, I could sense something flowing violently through it. But I had no way to look down and see what exactly that something was.

Working even further in the underground, Hana gets darker and darker. When things go wrong, there is no real path for restitution. And she begins to realize as she matures into an adult that there’s something off about Kimiko, the woman who brought her under her wing. Something childlike— an old deep trauma from youth that persists. When an old friend of Kimiko’s who frequented their bar is murdered by her boyfriend because of a tangled web of things that Hana knew, Kimiko has to spell it out for her: “There are no cops for me, no cops for Kotomi.” There is a simplicity to their life that even Kimiko understands: no cops, no help, no safety, no peace.

Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the book for him never came alive and compared it to the Hardy Boys. I don’t understand the comparison, but perhaps because I never enjoyed the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew books. Garner writes that “Kawakami’s talent is wider than it is deep,” and I totally disagree. For me it’s clear that the point is that Hana cannot progress. Hana saves money like crazy, but has no dreams— she doesn’t have the bandwidth for anything but survival. She is stuck, almost like a younger version of Kimiko, a person with the mind of a child, hustling as hard as she can in an adult world. Hana has no access to herself. Garner seems to conflate Kawakami and Hana, as the first person narrator—a tired fallacy. (Why is it that women are often conflated with the speakers of their novels?) True, Hana is no intellectual; she cannot escape her life’s drudgery. But she has so much feeling inside her, even if she can’t parse it. And Kawakami’s writing, expressing that dichotomy, is full of soulfulness; she has much to say about Hana even if Hana herself does not.

When I walked around Sancha, in the residential and the shopping areas, I always saw people enjoying each other’s company— friends, families, lovers. There were plenty of girls around the same age as me. They wore carefree smiles on their faces, and they looked happy. I was sure that this happiness sprang from the fact that they had someone looking out for them—parents, families, boyfriends, I didn’t know—someone stronger than them that gave them relief and comfort. Every time I saw those girls, I felt a dark vortex whirling in my chest.

Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (2026)

My second recommendation is Asako Yuzuki’s new book Hooked: A Tale of Obsession. Yuzuki’s 2024 Butter was a huge bestseller about a journalist who becomes fixated on a female serial killer; it was bizarre and quite fun.

Hooked is the story of Eriko, a corporate high-flyer who has always struggled with making female friends and becomes fixated on her favorite lifestyle blogger, hilariously called Hallie B, the World’s Worst Wife. (I enjoyed that Yuzuki sidestepped the tedium of the current conversations about the tradwife blogosphere.) Hallie B, whose real name is Shoko, is a self-described lazy housewife who writes about local cafes and easy meals.

Like Hana, viewing the friendships between normal women from afar is painful to Eriko, if for different reasons. While Hana sees that she is outside of the standard normative middle-class life with its comforts of family and friends, Eriko has the means to participate in that which she observes, but she is unable to.

Although the translation feels awkward at times, that’s perhaps because both Eriko and Shoko are quite strange people. Eriko, with her difficulty with people, is baffled by the simplest interaction between women but then can convey complicated situations quite shrewdly, like the state of feminism in Japan.

Shoko has her own issues, namely breaking free of an emotionally abusive, aging barnacle of a father who assumes that every woman around him will take over his care. Her scenes visiting home are dark and visceral, including one where he’s had a stroke, and coming upon him she assumes that he is dead:

Her first sensation was that of the fog stretching before her clearing, a bright, wide plain opening out in front of her—a feeling of liberation so intense it made her want to cry out. This was what everyone had wanted, she thought — everyone around him, and her father himself. He had died without causing anyone any bother, here at home.

‘Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead.’ Hadn’t she heard somewhere that that song had been number one in the UK charts after Margaret Thatcher had died? Shōko felt in that moment that she understood the British music fans. Just the fact that Thatcher was still alive gave them a sick feeling in their chests. Her father had died. The Wizard was dead!

Shōko was finally free. She spread her hands wide to see that the skin on her fingertips that had touched her father just now had broken out in a rash.

The Guardian described Yuzuki’s writing as a “mix of the banal and the profound,” which feels apt. Eriko embodies this as a literalist, unable to understand the unspoken rules of being a friend and woman in the world. Often she cannot differentiate between what is important and what is irrelevant, an uncommon character trait for a person in a novel but a common and ticklingly human one for all of us living outside the novel.

Yuzuki tackles the ridiculousness (and eeriness) of the parasocial relationship satisfyingly. During the course of the book, Eriko falls into the same trap again and again— believing that she truly knows Shoko because she is obsessed with her blog. Shoko is perturbed, but herself ends up falling into a parasocial relationship with a more popular blogger, who she barrages with messages after meeting her once at an event. Nobody comes out unscathed.

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I’ve been going out in just a light jacket recently (immediate regret!) as a sign of optimism and also defiance of the reality of current weather. (It’s snowing here, nigh on blizzarding.) It’s early (early…) spring and the seasons are boomeranging unhappily.

I’ve been having trouble reading, partly because of the demonic pull of my small device and partly because of life’s machinations (busy-ness, health issues, small child, etc). In these moments, I pick up a book (you might know that I have an entire to-read bookcase), put it down, pick up another one, put it down, and so on… a process I repeat until I wonder if I even like to read at all.

You can find a million things to do before read. You can try to remember the history of Haliburton, check up on what some odious person from middle school is up to, you can sit scrolling forever. You can scroll your life away and I and probably many of us have been. Being present is more difficult and oftentimes more boring than scrolling.

Whenever I’m not enjoying reading I think to myself fatalistically— this is it. It’s over. My love of reading is over. From now on I will only watch TV.

Our often necessary and sometimes admirable ability to divide our attentions is the thing that robs the magic out of reading.

But love is attention. It’s concentrating on someone or something and not looking at your phone, not doing something else, not thinking about something else even.

I have always found that the magic will come back, but that there’s no easy answer for a reading rut except to read through it. There’s no gimmick, no fancy thing to buy to help.

I don’t claim to be some kind of paragon of virtue— knowing that concentrating and devoting real time will help me love reading again doesn’t necessarily make me do so. However, thankfully I’ve realized that sometimes even if you can’t bring yourself to change this pattern, a book will blessedly come into your life and change it for you— grabbing you so viscerally that it demands you pay attention to it.

The Flight of the Maidens (2000) by Jane Gardam is an extraordinary, quiet novel about three friends in the period immediately following WWII. All three of them have won scholarships to go to college and the book opens on their last summer before leaving their small Yorkshire town.

Everyone is surprised when Hetty, not your typical intellectual powerhouse but a young person with a deep wellspring of feeling nonetheless, has won a scholarship to read English in London. She believes this is just because she has been tutored in English by her on-again-off-again boyfriend who seems more interested in her mother than her. Hetty’s mother is a loving but interfering, pious woman who has an overly close relationship with the town vicar; her father, who served on the Somme in WWI, is now a gravedigger. The family scrapes by. (As the Rolling Stones put it in Factory Girl, “she's no money anywhere.”) Hetty decides to escape her parents, who are well-meaning but varying levels of batty, to go to a rustic hostel in the Lake District and read the books that she believes everybody else on her course will have already read.

Una and Lieselotte have scholarships to Cambridge. Lieselotte was a member of the Kindertransport, a program that transported Jewish children to Britain at the start of the war; in many cases, like Lieselotte’s, by the end of the war these children were orphans. Fostered by a Quaker couple, Lieselotte seeks out several bizarre and surreal potential relatives, to very strange ends. Una, a bike-lover, starts a love-affair with a longtime friend, a local delivery boy and aspiring left-wing agitant. For her, leaving for college means saying goodbye to her mother, who she’s not even sure will notice: Una’s mother is a wise but odd cat-hoarding hair-dresser whose husband, the town doctor, committed suicide after coming home from the Somme.

All three young women have an intensity of feeling about the outdoors. Hetty goes on a journey to the Lake District with a stack of books, trying to channel Wordsworth, Una goes on several bike trips, and Lieselotte makes it all the way to a bombed-out London and further afield even to the Bay Area in search of a potential relative. Through their eyes is visible: the beauty of the countryside, the quality of summer sunshine, the devastation of London after the war. An idea hovering: that life is precious, but not light.

“She’s not all right,” said the grave-digger. “She is clearly not all right. But then I don’t know who is. Our Het’s not. They never had any fun, any of these girls. Never, since the war, and they were only kids before it started. They don’t know where they are.”

The summer is a glimmer of hope. Maybe this can change.

The relationship between Hetty and her mother was striking— it reminded me so viscerally of the movie Ladybird, especially the scene of Ladybird’s mother dropping her off at the airport for college and refusing to park the car because, she tells Ladybird, the airport parking rates are too high. Laurie Metcalf —truly my queen since her Roseanne days— here just embodies so perfectly the immediate hit of impulsive behavior or desire to wound and then the immediate pangs of all-consuming regret. In The Flight of the Maidens, this is Hetty to her mother, again and again.

This book captures beautifully the latitude that we have with our loved ones to act in ways other than our best selves and still receive their love, and sometimes their kindness.

The Flight of the Maidens is a book of a particular time and place. The uneasy postwar period it depicts so incisively and the modernist era more broadly speaks to me right now, especially as we regard a new, horrific war with Iran. The conditions of that period feel much the same: modernization, industrialization, a tectonic shift in gender roles, greater access to communication and more avenues to isolation too, and real exposure to the realities of war.

One gripe I’ve been having recently with books, with TV, with other mediums, is the lack of personality in characters as an apparent overcorrection for a desire for characters to inhabit a kind of “wokeness.” And what I mean by this is characters who have no failings, are never ever offensive, very rarely are their worst selves, have only several strict personality traits and stick to them, and never contradict themselves. This is so tedious and further creates a model for relationships between characters that are quite boring as well.

Gardam accounts for the fits and foibles of her characters well— as if they were just as fickle and unpredictable as real-life humans really are. And she translate that acuity to the relationships she depicts as well. The Flight of the Maidens is random and wonderful, strange at times, filled with meaning and also meaninglessness— both are poignant.

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Heartburn by Nora Ephron (1983)

Ephron’s classic autobiographical novel about the breakdown in her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein. (Bernstein tried to stop both the release of the book and subsequently the movie; he called Heartburn a violation of privacy and slanderous. Which is all just to say that it hews deliciously close to the truth.) Ephron’s “Rachel” is seven months pregnant with her second child when she learns that her husband (“Mark”) is an inveterate cheater. What to do, what to do! Run off to New York, delve into your parents’ foibles, return to group therapy, get robbed, and of course muse on the decision of whether or not to leave your philandering husband.

It’s a classic for a reason. Ephron is witty. If you are looking for one of those elusive books that is light but doesn’t make you want to commit hara-kiri with how badly it’s written, this is for you.

(I believe this book was the progenitor of fiction books which include recipes, an unfortunate genre, justified in Heartburn as Rachel is a cookbook writer. The recipes are extremely brief, thankfully.)

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer (1962)

Another work of biographical fiction, this one much sharper than the Ephron. Penelope Mortimer wrote autofiction about women with terrible husbands, hordes of children, having various near or full-on nervous breakdowns.

Mortimer’s Mrs. Armitage is a feisty mother-wife (mostly wife) who is forced into analysis at the book’s open. The psychoanalyst, who her third and current husband has sent her to, posits that she might have an addiction to having children and prescribes her pills to quash “those little weeps.” (The precipitating event for the analysis was an apparently worrying crying jag in a department store, which seems standard issue but I digress.)

The Pumpkin Eater (i.e. “Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,/ Had a wife but couldn’t keep her;/ He put her in a pumpkin shell. /And there he kept her very well”) depicts the violent collapse of a marriage and a husband grasping to exert control over his wife. The book declines to explicitly say how many Mrs. Armitage has by several different fathers, but it is enough (six or seven?) to be a threat to society’s norms, certainly. Shortly after marrying Mr. Armitage, she sends her older children (the “melancholy Conservatives”) away to boarding school for his benefit. Despite an increasingly adversarial relationship with her husband, Mrs. Armitage thinks have another child might solve the problem. Mr. Armitage, a moviemaking executive having an affair with a young actress working with him, does not want this child. So, in order to placate him, she gets an abortion, and in order to placate her doctor, she allows herself to be sterilized. While recovering, she finds out about the affair and despairs.

This all was from life, and the rawness of the writing reflects that. Not only is there Plot in abundance, but The Pumpkin Eater is a philosophical text too. Mortimer muses on the retreat into self that comes with partnership and children— and what happens when those things end.

Now I realized how completely I had been absorbed by Jake. I needed the outside world, but had no idea where to find it. For the first time, I needed friends; there were none. Over-indulgence in sexual and family life had left us, as far as other relationships were concerned, virginal; we said we had friends much as schoolchildren, busy with notes and hearts and keepsakes, say they have lovers. In a packed address book there was not one person to whom I could speak or write.

Mrs. Armitage has leaped from relationship to relationship— laying bare, as this last one is being scrapped, that the dissolution of a relationship in a model where the partner is one’s entire world, means total devastation.

I only knew how to do one thing, to give myself away. Now there was nothing left to give. It is a moral tale, proving that it is better to take life in neat steps and small sips than it is to believe, as I did, that there is a wealth which is perpetually renewed.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (2024)

Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, which landed on the Booker Shortlist,1 is about two couples in a small English countryside town during the “Big Freeze” of 1962-3. An excellent read for a winter that has been brutal across the board here in the States. There is Eric Parry, the village doctor, and his wife Irene, and living nearby there is gentleman farmer Bill Simmons and his wife Rita. Both couples are relatively recent transplants to the isolation of the rural Southwest, and both wives find much to miss in their former lives in London and Bristol. Irene and Rita are both pregnant, and find kinship as women tend to do, despite their differences. Over the course of the winter, the two couples are tested by the pressures of an affair, anger issues, mental illness,2 money troubles, class issues, a classic gamut— combined with the oppressive claustrophobia that comes with incredible weather events. It’s all very English— a winter landscape that might look still, might look quiet, but contains multitudes under the surface.

Miller, whose books I have found all to be excellent, is a tender observer. And yet he’s not a sentimentalist, exactly— this is kept at bay by his exquisite pithiness. It’s this combination that makes everything he writes gold, in my eyes.

Originally published in 1932 by Stella Gibbons, the book follows one Flora Poste. Flora’s parents have recently died and, despite being a Modern Young Woman, Flora is exceedingly practical about her future. Because she has no way of earning her own living, she decides to find some relatives to bunk with. The book opens:

The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

These relatives: a rural family called the Starkadders in Howling, Essex, whose matriarch, owed Flora’s father some biblical debt that she hopes to repay by taking Flora in. She responds immediately to Flora’s inquiry about living with them:

“So you are after your rights at last. Well, I have expected to hear from Robert Poste’s child these last twenty years.

Child, my man once did your father a great wrong. If you will come to us I will do my best to atone, but you must never ask me what for. My lips are sealed.

We are not like other folk, maybe, but there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort, and we will do our best to welcome Robert Poste’s child.”

Flora is less interested in this great wrong and more annoyed that the letter doesn’t cover what her sleeping arrangements will be. Nevertheless, she departs promptly to the countryside and finds that the Starkadders and their associates are, in short, all nuts. I would break down the characters, but the Roz Chast cover simply does it better than I could.

Cold Comfort Farm is a satire of the “loam and lovechild” genre, aka a kind of overwrought 20th century rural British literature that featured a lot of MELODRAMA and EARTHY TYPES. Flora sweeps in with her modern ideas, including birth control, putting a stop to bad poetry, and organizing all the desperate lives around her, including the “highly-sexed” young men of the farm, her cousin Elfine who won’t stop running around the forest pretending to be a wood nymph, and her Great Aunt Ada Doom, who saw “something nasty in the woodshed” and was never the same again.

To me, a comfort read isn’t defined by predictability or everything coming out all right at the end. It instead embodies the idea (true fantasy!) that whatever circumstances we come upon in life, be it a death or harrowing change, we could choose to meet them with wit — and greet the absurdity of life, this whole short scramble of existence, with grace and poise and humor, as Flora Poste does. This is comfort reading to me.

Gibbons worked as a reporter and editorial assistant for various newspapers and magazines, becoming her family’s breadwinner after her parents’ early deaths. She began writing Cold Comfort Farm, her first book, while working for the women’s magazine The Lady. A colleague reported that Gibbons “neglected her duties disgracefully” in order to write. I enjoyed this detail, given that I’ve never understood just when people who have full-time jobs, or children, or full-time jobs and children, write novels. Time is the ultimate zero-sum game. I remember reading about Hanya Yanagihara, the editor-in-chief of T magazine who writes at night after working all day, and thinking, I am fucked.

I tried to relive the joy of this book by reading Gibbons’ other works (she wrote many novels, and poetry as well), but none of them I encountered holds a candle to Cold Comfort Farm’s brilliance.

DISTRACTION CORNER

Some pieces I’ve read on Substack recently that I wanted to recommend:

• “Well, I Self-Deported”: a beautiful, hilarious, and terribly sad essay about the author’s decision to leave the US.

• “I’ve Been Laid Off. I’m Not Done.”: a note of defiance from the Washington Post’s longtime book editor.

• Jessica Valenti’s newsletter Abortion, Every Day: a grim and necessary read given the mainstream media’s incapability of covering abortion. She covers legislation and individual cases.

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Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988)

Nervous Conditions is a brilliant novel set in the period of white rule in then-Rhodesia, now-Zimbabwe, in the late 1960s. The book follows a young girl from a poor family who takes her brother’s place at a mission school in the wake of his unexpected death. In 1965, the white minority settler population declared independence from Britain (which had colonized Rhodesia around 1900, led by the supervillain Cecil Rhodes). A long civil war ensued, ending in 1980 when the settler regime was forced to give up power to the Black majority. Zimbabwe was one of the last African colonies to get self-governance. (If you’re interested in other Zimbabwean writers, I recommend NoViolet Bulawayo, who wrote a satire about the end of Mugabe’s 37-year “term” in office; her earlier We Need New Names scalded me.)

Our heroine, Tambudzai, begins attending her brother’s mission school and goes to live with her successful uncle and her cousins, Nyasha and Chido. In her new mission school, Tambu is immediately placed under high pressure but rises to the occasion, flourishing academically. At the end of the term, she has performed so well she is offered a place at a boarding school run by nuns; there are only a few African students there, who are treated differently than the white students. By the end of the book, when Nyasha develops a serious eating disorder and Chido becomes involved with a missionary’s daughter, Tambu’s mother says bitingly, “It’s the Englishness. It’ll kill them all if they aren’t careful.” It’s true for her daughter too, but Tambu is only just starting to understand the crushing effect of that Englishness as she sacrifices more and more to further a colonial education.

Dangarembga places an epigraph before the first chapter that lends the book its title:

“The condition of native is a nervous condition.”

From an introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

I was interested in the context of this quote and looked it up. The introduction in question is by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and the book’s version of the quotation is both truncated and amended (removing the quotation marks around “native”):

“Our enemy betrays his brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do the same thing. The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.”

I was struck by this apparent discrepancy, which I don’t see that Dangarembga has addressed. I kept getting tripped up on the phrase “with their consent,” which seems to lay some measure of blame at the feet of the “native.” And yet, Sartre and Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth was a seminal book on the psychological effects of colonization) were fervent anti-colonialists. For Fanon and for Sartre, violence was an unfortunate but necessary tool for liberation— decolonization is inherently a violent process because only violence can break through the oppression of colonization. For Sartre, the placement of “native” in quotations seems to draw it into question, as if using the word involves caving to a classification that eases the colonizer’s view. I’m not sure whether Dangarembga’s removal of the scare quotes and “consent” language represents the kind of giving in Sartre seemed to be getting at, a rejection of his view, or simply a writer’s search for pithiness.

University of Michigan Professor David William Cohen has a great article about Nervous Conditions that also discusses the epigraph, and he suggests that Dangarembga’s erasure of the quotation marks further reflect her interest in the complexities of the supposed “native,” rather than the idea of Zimbabweans as a monolith defined by their race.

Abigail by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix (1970)

Magda Szabó’s book about Hungary in 1943-44 is beloved in her home country for good reason. The book follows Gina Vitay, an intelligent but rather coddled 14-year-old whose father has decided, in her eyes totally unexpectedly, to send her off to a strict boarding school. There she becomes fixated on a statue named Abigail that is rumored to have supernatural powers.

After entering the World War II in 1941 as an Axis ally, Hungary essentially tried to flip sides. Gina’s father, General Vitay, a high-ranking Hungarian officer, is secretly involved in the Hungarian Resistance. To protect his daughter and keep his activities hidden, he sends her away to the strict Calvinist boarding school in Debrecen and cuts off their previously affectionate relationship. This is strategic on his part, as he tries to both protect her from the war and distance her from his activities. The book is from her perspective, though, and his decision is baffling and heartbreaking to her. Over the course of the book, as Gina matures and begins to understand more and more about the situation, so does the reader.

Old School by Tobias Wolff (2003)

Old School is a classic, semi-autobiographical (cf. with Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life) story of an unnamed Jewish scholarship boy at an elite New England boarding school. The main character, after essentially being abandoned by his family, throws himself into the pursuit of literary stardom—a measure of success the boarding school boys regard above all else. The school hosts a number of distinguished writers, and the students can receive a private audience with a famous writer by composing a winning poem or story. After failing to win an audience with either Robert Frost or Ayn Rand, our narrator is determined to be chosen by Ernest Hemingway.

The main character is ambitious and insecure, and sees writing as his lifeline to a more elevated life. He believes that understanding literature and poetry will lead to an understanding of the soul, and also, more importantly, to glorious reward. But through his fixation on winning an audience with a famous writer, he comes to find that there’s a difference between the performance of literary talent and developing a genuine voice. And to do the latter, he might have to come to terms with his otherness— as a Jew in WASP territory, a scholarship boy in a sea of privilege and without a supportive family.

“By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects of manner and speech without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!”

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Other Excellent Books Set in Boarding Schools

• A Separate Peace by John Knowles (1959)

  • The classic boarding school novel: one boy revisits his New Hampshire boarding school days after fifteen years. Tragic memories ensue.

• Mrs. S by K. Patrick (2023)

  • A butch Australian woman gets a job at an all-girls English boarding school and has a passionate affair with the headmaster’s wife.

• Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (2010)

  • Skippy, a student at a Catholic boarding school in Dublin, dies suddenly in a donut shop. But how?

• Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld (2005)

  • A scholarship student from Indiana navigates four years of hell at an elite Massachusetts boarding school.

If you have any others you would recommend, let me know!

Distraction Corner

• In awe of: Ilhan Omar’s courage while being assaulted by a man attending her event.

• Taking note: A University of Alaska Fairbanks student protested an AI art exhibit of polaroids by eating them. I think he made his point quite eloquently.

• Reading: Journalist Laura Jedeed wrote about how easy it is to get hired by ICE. (You can also listen to Jedeed tell the story in various places including on What a Day.) She herself, despite being a journalist and a vocal critic of ICE who had just smoked pot and thus wouldn’t pass the drug test, was offered the job despite not really trying at all. This all to confirm what we already know— it’s not the best and the brightest out here. Moreover, she seemed to be given a start date before even passing a background clearance.

• Recollecting: In late January 2025, I took these pictures at USAID, where I was working at the time. (Empty photo frames in the hallways, TVs tuned to Fox News, where a version of RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing was playing.) Trump had just been inaugurated, but we didn’t know that USAID would be his first target. Shortly thereafter, I and many of my coworkers would be laid off and USAID would cease functioning.
  

The Group by Mary McCarthy

The Group follows eight Vassar women of the class of 1933 going out into the world with one goal in common: not to become their parents. They are college graduates coming of age in a country shaken by the financial crash of 1929.

In the 1930s, more and more women were getting an education. And yet they were still overwhelmingly expected to return to a traditional family role afterwards. Women got a taste of self-determination, and as in The Group, they didn’t necessarily want to return to the mores of the past. The entry of an educated but middle-class generation of women into society complicated class structures too.

These tensions are among those The Group explores. The book begins with the wedding of Kay and Harald several weeks after graduation, and ends with Kay’s funeral a couple years later in the very same church. In between, Kay is involuntarily committed to a mental institution by her abusive, philandering husband. (Her storyline also reminded me of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, published two years earlier but about a suburban couple in the 1950s.) Like Yates, McCarthy presents all these problems, and no real answers, leaving us buffeted between these women’s engaging minds as they take on their lives and a deep, unsettling pessimism about their futures.

For us here in 2026, McCarthy is an anthropologist too. The logistics (bulky) and concerns (myriad) of being a woman in the 1930s are revealed to us through the characters navigating birth control…the impossibility of casual sex…being a modern woman…the impossibility of being a modern woman…and on and on. The one option McCarthy seems to really endorse is being a lesbian and leaving for Europe. Take that as you will.

With the new year comes a renewal in my love of reading, a great surge of optimism about my capacity, and a renewed desire to read more books in translation.

Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi

I had almost finished writing about The Group, which I finished right after the new year, when I came across the book Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi. The two books have nothing in common, but they both ignited something in me.

Translated masterfully by Sara Khalili, Tali Girls is a tale of rural Afghanistan that begins in the early 2000s. Written in 2018 in Persian, it was published in 2023 by Archipelago.

“This is the twenty-first century!” he shouts out to the crowd. “The year 2006! Villages and towns in this province still have no electricity, no plumbing for water, no paved roads. We have no doctors, no medicine! At least let our children go to school and grow up literate and educated.”

“No!” Mullah Sikhdad cries flushed with anger. “Our children will be corrupted. They will grow up faithless sinners!”

This exchange exemplifies the book’s central conflict between the villagers’ desire for education and the conservative religious leaders’ desire for power. Just as in the U.S., morality is an excuse to control women.

Even the parents of the book’s main character Kowsar, who are supportive of their daughter and eventually receptive to her receiving an education, casually call her a wretch. This is what they call all the girls. Her mother says matter-of-factly: “A wretch has no voice of her own. No one will ask for her consent. She marries when the man of the house says so. And then she breeds and cooks and cleans. It is life, my dear.” But we see that Kowsar, a keenly intelligent student who is encouraged by her teacher and a village elder, changes her mother’s view— simply by proximity of her education.

In 2001, the U.S. entered the country and ostensibly overthrew the Taliban, establishing a new Afghan government under “Operation Enduring Freedom” (originally “Operation Infinite Justice”)—a name that signaled that the Bush Administration, however misguided, understood that the fight against terrorism was a long term investment. The book’s action starts a year later when the Taliban are starting to encroach on small villages like Tali.

I was working for the Democratic party apparatus in 2020 when the Trump Administration was agitating to withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan after almost 20 years in the country. This certainly appealed to a public frustrated with our long, unsuccessful engagement in the country and our inability to actually get rid of the Taliban— also a public concerned with the budget and interested in the America First agenda. I remember vividly working on a project tracking how the first Trump Administration, and Mike Pompeo’s State Department more specifically, abandoned the notion of advocating for women of Afghanistan during the process of the so-called Doha Accords. Again and again, Pompeo claimed facetiously that any talk of women’s rights was an intra-Afghan issue.

Pompeo’s insistent glibness and total abdication of responsibility stands out in my memory: “I hope the women of Afghanistan will demand [equality] of their leaders,” he said when asked about how the peace deal wasn’t contingent on any action on women’s rights. He added smugly, “We’ve always done our part there.”

It doesn’t matter. Any lip service to women’s rights in this deal was besides the point as this negotiation was entirely fake. It was real in that it existed; it was fake in that nothing could have stopped the Trump Administration from withdrawing from Afghanistan. The final deal was not contingent on any promises made about women’s rights. But again, that doesn’t even matter because there can be no negotiations with a group like the Taliban, which has a long, long history of reneging on its promises. After 9/11, the reason Bush invaded Afghanistan was that the Taliban could not be trusted to turn over Al-Qaeda terrorists.1 The Taliban’s cruelty, especially towards women, was also always used as justification for American presence in the country. But the Trump Administration had no problem with these contradictions when setting up negotiations with the Taliban, because it wanted the easy glory of a fake peace deal. Not our problem anymore! The Trump Administration’s logic here defies Republic orthodoxy in rendering the deaths of thousands of servicemembers in the line of duty in this conflict seemingly pointless.

In 2021, the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan completely under the terms of the Trump Administration’s deal. The Taliban took over the government, and has since barred women from secondary education, entering the workforce, and being in public spaces. The Taliban has nevertheless been taking part in U.N. and other international meetings in Qatar in the last couple years. In 2025, the group dismissed women’s rights as an internal issue that would be dealt with based on Sharia law. Although the Taliban is not recognized as a legitimate government by any country except Russia, recently, the group is somehow allowed to participate. This is the legitimacy that the Trump Administration’s deal gave them.

I could go on, but I won’t. The Taliban’s arbitrary and vicious violence against women and anybody who dares to stand against them is well-documented. This book is its own record of Taliban conduct and there were several times where I had to put it aside. One such point was when a nine-year-old girl is married to evil Mawlawi Khodadad, an education official and an ally of the Taliban, who brutally dismembers her. Khodadad goes on to kill other women, all with the power of his status as a religious leader and the support of the Taliban behind him. (A former schoolmate reveals that Khodadad had no aptitude for religion, was a thief and criminal, and came to his role corruptly.)

The women of the book are heroic, and even the ones with no education understand that the Taliban are poison to Afghanistan’s progress. Women are relegated to currency, property, and free labor. As Kowsar says as she tries to help a friend who runs off after being promised to a Taliban leader:

That’s how it is in this country. They stopped burying women alive when they realized they can buy and sell us as brides, claim us as blood money, take us as slaves, offer us as gifts. They reckoned, why bury all this wealth?

Tali’s positioning in a valley shows the difficulty of Afghanistan’s rugged landscape: its terrain is extremely mountainous, difficult to navigate, and villages are often very isolated. These are areas where the Taliban easily take control. In this case of Tali, the Taliban close the school and set up poppy fields instead, which have the double benefit of providing funding for the group and snaring the infidel in drug use.

And yet it is clear from this book what is clear from the dwindling news reports about Afghanistan: the girls and women there have a fierce desire to have the right to educate themselves. As we hold the young people of Iran in our minds, I think too of the Afghan women and men that we have abandoned.

Perhaps because where I live has been bitterly cold, but W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” has been on my mind— a beautiful poem commemorating the death of Yeats in winter:

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

The quote “poetry makes nothing happen” has been used a million times and out of context; I have forcibly separated these lines from the rest of the stanza— but I think much more of those last lines: “it survives,/ A way of happening, a mouth.” Art survives! It is a mouth. I hope to see more of Herawi’s works translated into English.

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DISTRACTION CORNER

• Watching: Department Q on Netflix, an excellent dark detective show set in Edinburgh.

• Listening: Somi, a jazz singer whose mellow stylings are giving me strength.

• Thinking: One of my goals for this year was to disregard the false sense of urgency to consume new material, whether that be buzzy debut novels, bingeing all the award nominees of whatever medium, watching the new reality show, whatever. I’m trying to ward off the false urgency of consumption and consume what I want when I am moved to. I’m not particularly timely (as you can see from my recommendations of books from 1963 and 2023) but I’m right on time.

Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac (1981)

(A perfect fit for a reader who hates Jack Kerouac but loves a road trip.)

Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver, first published as Baby Driver: A Story About Myself, is auto-fiction modeled on her own wild life. The main character has her name, and many details are the same, including the fact that she only met her famous father twice. Both Jans grew up in poverty, left home incredibly young, took drugs and engaged in sex work, were plagued by a parade of insane men, and had free-spirited mothers. It’s unclear where exactly the fiction part comes in.

Jan wrote unflinchingly about her early-onset adulthood. (At age 12 she takes LSD for the first time; at age 15 she is living with her boyfriend in Mexico, where she has a stillbirth.) The book jumps back to her wanderings through Washington, New Mexico, Arizona, South America, and New York. Jan is deadpan and succinct— it’s no pity party. Comparisons with her father are natural, and both of them are poetic, but Jan’s adventures are no dreamy road trip: she is incisive and brutal.

Near the end of the book, she describes “Jan” traveling to meet her father Jack in Lowell— he is watching Beverly Hillbillies with a bottle of whisky, cradling “his giant baby bottle, rocking himself as if in a cradle,” with his wife and mother both nearby. It’s not a flattering portrait. She tells him she’s about to run off to Mexico to avoid being sent to a home for unwed mothers.

John told him we were on our way to Mexico, and I added that we had wanted to see him before we left, because we might be gone for a while. To which he replied, surprisingly, “Yeah, you go to Mexico an’ write a book. You can use my name.”

This, his blue eyes and dark hair, and the minimum child support payments are pretty much the only Jan gets from him. (Both book and author Jan met him for the first time as a nine-year-old, when her mother sought him out for child support; after a court-ordered blood test proved his paternity, he started sending checks but disavowed her, apparently on his mother’s urging.) In Baby Driver, after Jan hears about his death on the radio, she reflects that both he and her stillborn baby “had been half-formed, then lost.” In Eric Vanderwall’s On the Seawall review of the book, which was reissued by NYRB Classics in 2025, he notes that she is both incredibly sensitive (near the beginning of the book, she sweetly describes the a tap-dancing spider who frequents her house) and at the same time oddly removed from the hardships she lives through:

Jan, as a character in Baby Driver, thus comes across as acutely sensitive, which brings into even starker relief the almost casual accounts of harrowing experiences, what Fortini in the introduction describes as a “shrewd, clinical detachment.”

From the beginning, Jan (“Jan”?) endures a lot. The sheer lot of her tribulations make the book painful to take in at times, especially given this detachment that both Vanderwall and Fortini mention. Childhood abuse at the hands of a daycare, for example, is described in a terse sentence: “Terrible things went on there that for some reason I thought I couldn’t tell my mother.” Abuse from men and strangers is addressed similarly. The tradeoff for her carefree, careless, peripatetic life is apparent self-removal. She quickly dismisses trials like her father’s rejection of her, her stillbirth, etc, but we see her careening away from them and how impossible that self-removal is.

Jan (author Jan) wrote two other autobiographical novels and died at 44.

The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy (1964)

(Pairs well with a cocktail and a hatred of the English.)

A young, broke American woman runs off to London, a tale as old as time in ages past…with more favorable exchange rates... Under the fake name of Honey Flood, the anti-heroine of The Old Man and Me seems to be pursuing a good time despite an England antagonistic to the Young American and despite the fact that she hates England quite a lot. A secret agenda? Yes, thank god, because the first 100 pages are kind of slow and baffling, but the pay-off is immense. Specifically, “Honey” is pursuing an old man named C.D. (or Seedy, as she starts to call his alter-ego). She wants him, despite his age and their incompatibility. But why?

Compared with the slim, hard-bodied young men his figure was a joke—round, tubby, pillow-paunchy, it had the consistency of foam rubber; rolling around with him was like rolling around with some big beach toy. But he flung himself into it with a devotion that was disarming. A tyrant on his feet, he turned out to be a real woman-worshipper in the sack. And subtle too. And full of tricks. He knew a trick or two, that one. And then it turned out I knew a trick or two I didn’t even know I knew. He could play a whole jazz concert on me. When we were finished we were covered, absolutely covered with each other. And yet I was never surprised at finding myself, six or seven hours later and in my own bed, in real trouble, seized with a shuddery revulsion of shame and disgust. How could I have? All those things. And with that fat old monster? And on top of everything—who was using whom? The original idea had been to enslave him for ever with my womanly wiles but rather the opposite seemed to be happening. For in spite of those sixth- and seventh-hour shudderings at the ghastly unnaturalness of the liaison, in spite of the painfully sharp recollections of my slender, delicate, gloriously young body stretched out alongside his vast old bulk—I am still at a loss to explain it—but in spite of all this—not once was I able to resist him in the flesh.

Ah, an unsuitable love affair. Excellent perversity.

The Runaway Bunny (1942)

At first, I found this book tedious. I’ve read it about two hundred times or more, so I can safely say my thoughts on it have evolved. My son would demand it ad infinitum, but after about 10 readings or so I would hide it in the couch cushions and pretend I’d lost it. (He doesn’t buy it, because he is Too Smart for His Own Good.)

Initially, I thought, what an annoying and somewhat psychotic book. (For those who need to be brushed up on plot: the Runaway Bunny informs his mama that he is going to run away; but everywhere he says he’s going to go, she says she will be too, i.e. if Bunny joins the circus to fly away on a flying trapeze, his mama will be a tightrope walker.) “Attachment issues, hello!!” is what I thought. But after the fiftieth reading or so, I began to thaw. Slowly, I became moved by it. I began to tear up reading it, and now my son actually hides it from me to prevent my inevitable meltdown when I read it.

Maybe it was the proximity of the Rob Reiner news. And then the murders of devoted parents by ICE that have been on my mind: Renee Good in Minneapolis just last week and Silverio Villegas González in Chicago in 2025. I now ache for the Runaway Bunny’s mama. And for Runaway Bunny for wanting to be free.

“‘1973,’ he said reflectively. ‘I find the years are sounding more and more odd. 1973 sounds like a thing out of those comics, with death-rays and robots and monsters from outer space. Whereas the year I was born sounds like stage-coaches and highwaymen and crinolines and fans and duelling-pistols and warming-pans and snuff-boxes and ruffles and shoe-buckles and—’”1

Some people “sail into an extraordinary mildness”2 in their old age and some, like Kingsley Amis’ characters, into extraordinary rancor. The satirist Craig Brown writes in the introduction (also available here) that in his notes for the book, Amis wrote out 45 ways of being annoying and distributed them among his characters. Ending Up (1974) follows the last couple weeks before the close of the year for five disagreeable oldsters: Adela, Marigold, Bernard, Shorty, and George. It is not their age that makes them tedious, but their age has magnified their shortcomings…

An excerpt from the list of 45 ways of being annoying, which Amis matches to each character; A for “Perverse shag” (Adela), B for “Egotist” (Marigold), X for “Shit” (Bernard), Y for “Fool” (Shorty) and Z for “Bore” (George):

X Being deaf – the which? – contemptuous when told
Z Talking quietly, then v loudly
Y Repeating the wrong bit
A Telling people to do what they’ll do anyway & what they know
A Wrong end of stick through eye of needle
X Anger at simple questions
B Whining – I’m old, on scrap-heap
Y Punning – dud spoonerisms
Y Polysyllabic facetiousness
B Lying about what’s happened, whose side was on in argt.

Apparently Amis himself was quite an irritable man, which tracks as this novel is vicious. His first wife, Hilly Bardwell, recounted his intensity about small irritations and “endless complaints about what seemed to me harmless things.” (They got divorced.)3 In turn, his characters are fixated on irritation, more than anything else. “If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing,” was his mantra, which I can’t help but appreciate. Of course Ending Up is an extreme example, but I cannot stand a character with no flaws (see my post about romance novels). In Ending Up, flaws are the point.

The five characters host two of Marigold’s grandchildren (somehow Marigold’s children have passed responsibility for visiting their mother entirely onto their own children) for Christmas, a sad affair. Bernard, our spirit guide of sorts, has some kind of vague terminal illness, a limited time left to live, and still cannot make himself act with any kind of grace; in fact, he spends his remaining time on earth torturing his roommates and trying to trick them into thinking they are even more senile than they are.

I quite liked Rachel, Marigold’s granddaughter, the mother of two young children, who is mostly asleep during the visit.

“(Rachel was in Marigold’s room, officially to keep the children quiet, though they needed no such attention, being sound asleep, and she was herself sound asleep, her favourite state since Finn’s birth.)”

A couple pages later, Rachel is asleep again, this time while the children make a game of spitting into each other’s mouths. Inspirational.

“(In the next room, Marigold’s room, Rachel was minding the children. This meant in practice that she slept in a rather knobbly easy-chair with an abandon almost approaching that of Shorty’s drunken-gaoler performance, while each of them, in strict rotation, and in something near total silence, climbed on to the bed and aimed one gob of spittle at the open mouth of the other, stretched out on the floor immediately beneath. As with their elders’ game, there was a scoring system here, but it was observed with less rigour: a direct hit, at any rate a total direct hit, was less easy to establish.)”

It’s a comic novel, sure, and it’s also a warning about letting pettiness take over. Amis’ list quoted above shook me to my core (…“talking quietly, then v loudly”?? guilty!!), but I suppose it’s a good lesson for the end of 2025.

Happy new year.

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Two recommendations today, the latter which I’ve only just finished reading, which have me reflecting on Irish authors who are also driven to be activists. Recently, Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan, and others have been taking a stand against the genocide of Palestinians. Given Ireland’s history, it makes sense to me why Irish authors would be sensitive to systemic injustice in other parts of the world— and makes sense to me too why their writing about injustice is so keenly-felt.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023)

This one is perhaps an obvious choice, but Prophet Song, which won the Booker Prize in 2023, is a searing look at one’s family’s disintegration in the face of a fascist regime. For the main character of Prophet Song, it starts with disappearances. Eilish is a scientist and mother-of-four, the latter which identity begins to take over as the situation in a semi-futuristic Dublin deteriorates. Her husband Larry, a trade unionist, goes missing. What begins as a political issue that seems far removed from her becomes very personal quickly. (Larry’s disappearance reminded me of the 2024 Brazilian movie, I’m Still Here, about a disappearance of a patriarch during the military dictatorship of the 1970s, although of course there are many, many such instances.) Eilish becomes the only provider for her children and for her elderly father.

Interestingly Lynch’s fascism is not, despite Ireland’s history, based in religion or a return to British colonial rule. In that way, the setting is immaterial and vague, and all the more frightening for it. So is too the fact that he offers no easy answers. The anguish of fascism’s realities is not going to be combatted by a protest, or by individual denial. Eilish and her family are literally helpless, even as she does her best to keep her children, who range from teenagers to a young baby, safe. Prophet Song details the mechanics of fascism, on speed. Quickly, quickly, the situation moves from disappearances, the inability to travel freely, the torture of innocents, to the violent unraveling of the family unit. And no matter how heroically Eilish acts, the impossibility of keeping her family together and alive is the horror that becomes all too clear over the course of the book.

Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan (1958)

An absolutely rowdy call to arms that at times electrified me. Borstal Boy is Brendan Behan’s account of his time in juvenile prison for his decision to, as a 16 year old Irish boy and IRA member, make an unauthorized mission to try to bomb the Liverpool shipyards.

The prison memoir is a difficult one, because of the absolute tedium and repetition of being incarcerated. But Behan is pithy, and humor imbues everything, even the accounts of him fighting with other prisoners. Some of the writing is quite beautiful.

“Lying in bed, I could hear the trams far away in the distance. Turning the corners heavily, and gathering speed for the hills.

I used to hear them back in Dublin on the Northside when I was small, lying in bed, avoiding the eye of the Sacred Heart in the picture on the far wall. The house we lived in was a great lord’s town house before it was a tenement, and there was a big black Kilkenny marble fireplace before my bed. If the souls in Purgatory really came back, it was out of there they would come. A Hail Mary was all right, but there was more comfort in the sound of the trams.”

Prison gave Behan the opportunity to read a huge amount. His accounting of savoring each page and rationing his books is moving, especially to those of us for whom reading is a lifeline. In prison, and in the “borstal,” which is what juvenile detention centers were called, Behan is surrounded by the English, his ostensible enemies. Some of them become his closest friends. The Irish he meets (and the nuances of second-generation Irish people born in England— Liverpool-Irish, etc) are not always friendly. In jail and then in the borstal, Behan works through complications in his deeply-held, inherited nationalism and Catholicism, which maintaining his understanding of England’s yoke on his country.

Downside is it is quite dense, so if you’re looking for a quick read— this is not it. It’s English, theoretically, but an idiomatic dialect that is a whole new language unto itself. I learned quite a few new expletives, some of my favorites being “fughpig” and “white-livered whore’s melt.”

Behan, who was clearly quite brilliant, drank himself into an early grave at the age of 41. But Borstal Boy has a place now with some of my other favorite prison memoirs— namely Solitary by Albert Woodfox and The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X.

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DISTRACTION CORNER

• Reading: I liked this series of obituaries in the New York Times Magazine, commemorating people who died this year. Feels right to take stock of deaths at the end of the year.

• Watching: Just saw the horror movie Black Christmas (1974) for the first time, which was actually so good. Despite its age, genuinely scary. Despite its age, genuinely relevant. And Olivia Hussey shines with her devastating middle part and her wonderful Transatlantic accent.

• Thinking: W.H. Auden’s “In Sickness and in Health” has been an important poem to me this year. These lines I always go back to, and somehow are applicable each year. December, despite its Christmas lights and jollified consumerism, is so dark.

  Now, more than ever, we distinctly hear

  The dreadful shuffle of a murderous year

  And all our senses roaring as the Black

  Dog leaps upon the individual back.

  Nevertheless, if we continue, Auden offers an antidote.

[please read in app, much better formatting experience]

Romance novels are a force to be reckoned with in this day and age. I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently.

There are many aspects of romance novels that I can get behind. For one, although it’s a genre that used to be overwhelmingly heterosexual, I think in the last couple of decades it’s welcomed a lot of diversity, including in sexuality. That seems good.

Romance novels are a socially acceptable avenue for women to consume porn—and furthermore, porn where women’s needs are prioritized. It makes sense to me that women would want that, since clearly current mainstream online pornography is focused more and more on degrading women, and sometimes children.

It’s a genre where there tends to be lightness and there’s an expectation of a happy ending. I get why people, especially now, would want that comfort. A happy ending in a book can feel like an expression of hope.

Clearly it’s a dominant genre that is still on the rise— and there’s not been enough real reporting on this, given that it’s a significant financial trend. Romance is the #1 top selling genre around the world. And women are the force behind that, as it is overwhelmingly women who read romance novels. The New York Times reported in 2024 on the fact that brick-and-mortar bookstores specializing in romance novels are opening up across the country. They have opened in big cities like Los Angeles and Brooklyn, but also places like Cleveland, Wichita, Buffalo, Anchorage, and so on. This is remarkable, in a time when for years people have been bemoaning the death of bookstores and the publishing industry more broadly.

And yet! I generally don’t like them and think a lot of them are written terribly. Okay, I said it. Here are some of the reasons I get annoyed by them.1 Let’s get into it.

• THE CHARACTERS HAVE NO FLAWS. Sure, they have fake flaws. They have the kind of bullshit flaws you bring up in a job interview when the interviewer asks, “what do you think your weaknesses are?” and you say, “I just care so much that sometimes I work too hard!” Maybe the man in the romance novel is grumpy— but wait, he’s not actually grumpy. Because that would be a flaw. He’s actually just shy! That’s okay. The woman seems abrasive. No she’s not! She just loves her career, so she’s misunderstood as being brusque! Don’t worry! I do think this is a larger trend in TV, books, and just general bad writing that I’ve noticed in a post cancel culture era: as a way to avoid being offensive, writers are scared to give characters any kind of personality. This is a shame and truly idiotic.

• THE CAST OF CHARACTERS IS TINY. This is a personal issue I have with the contemporary novel more broadly, which is that it is so damn lonely. The hero of the moment is one who grapples with alienation, and their journey is often extremely internal (and here I think of books I’ve really enjoyed from the last year or so like Martyr!, All Fours, Stone Yard Devotional, etc). I do like books like this, to be clear. But I also crave books that seem to be rarer nowadays— books with a huge cast of characters and a hero who is surrounded by connective tissue. Instead, contemporary novels seem to reflect the isolation of our current moment, and romance novels seem to suffer from this… but even more so. The two destined lovers are never part of a huge cast; they’re two shopkeepers in a small town (there’s a looooot of small towns in romance novels); they’re two people thrown together on a vacation; if there are other characters, they tend to be an archetype of a best friend who might as well be a cardboard cutout.

• LIFE BEFORE THE TWO CHARACTERS GET TOGETHER IS SAD AND LACKING. I understand that setting up that being single is empty and emotionally unsatisfying makes the payoff all the more rewarding when the two characters then get together. But this plays into this idea that single people don’t quite exist— that life is only worth living when someone is partnered up. Which I suppose creates the very stakes of a romance novel. But why must we still be propagating this malarkey? Romance novels (and the isolation mentioned above contributes to this too) then also set up the idea that the partner is someone who will satisfy ALL of one’s needs: they are a best friend, they are a romantic partner, they are your therapist, etc.

• THE WRITING ABOUT SEX IS BAD. Everybody is having simultaneous orgasms, and P in the V still reigns supreme. I won’t delve too deeply except to say that it’s so far removed from reality to be laughable.

The inevitability of two people getting together at the end as dictated by the romance novel structure simply depresses me. (As a wise friend said when I consulted her, “possibly you’re just depressed.”) Well, sure. (I just bought myself a happy lamp!) But the problem remains. The entire comforting predictability of a romance novel is exactly what I find depressing.2

End tirade and enter Jilly Cooper.

Dame Jilly Cooper is the reason I’ve been thinking about romance novels. I picked up Riders, the first book in her Rutshire Chronicles, after hearing about her death in October.

I was tickled by her obituary, interviews I read with her, and by podcast episodes about her legacy. Riders is witty and hilarious, and clearly so was Dame Jilly. I loved this exchange from a Daily Mail interview:

We re­flect on the furore that sur­rounded Rid­ers when it first came out. The horsey fra­ter­nity of Rut­shire (based on Jilly’s Glouces­ter­shire) was, it seems, in a per­ma­nent state of arousal. There was sex, mainly adul­ter­ous, at ev­ery op­por­tu­nity and in all per­mu­ta­tions: al fresco, in sta­bles, blue­bell woods, horse boxes.

From well-thumbed pages a gen­er­a­tion of pre- inter­net teenagers gained an in­sight into the me­chan­ics of an orgy; a ‘heav­ing anthill of legs and arms’, as Jilly de­scribed it.

Her chil­dren Felix, 47, and Emily, 44, were in their teens when the book was pub­lished. ‘Felix read the four-in-a-bed scene and said: “Mum! How do you know about th­ese things?” and I said briskly: “I’ve got some­thing called an imag­i­na­tion.”

‘Emily was lovely. She has read all the fic­tion I’ve writ­ten, and she came back from her board­ing school [Downe House in Berk­shire] and said: “Mum, your books have been banned.” I rang the head­mistress and said: “Miss Farr, how do you ex­pect us to pay the fees if you ban my books?”

‘I sup­pose I don’t blame her; Rid­ers is jolly strong but I think it helped the sale of torch bat­ter­ies. Lots of teenage girls were read­ing it un­der the bed cov­ers.’ There was ap­probation from un­ex­pected quar­ters and in­dig­nant out­rage from oth­ers.

Jilly says: ‘A woman charged up to me at a lit­er­ary din­ner, roar­ing: “I’ve just read ev­ery word of your dis­gust­ing book,” and I said: “Gosh, I’m sorry.”

Riders is about, as the book cover would have it, the “hard-riding, high-living, sexy men and women who chase glamour and glory in the spectacular world of international show jumping.” (If you’re an imbecile like me, you will come over the course of the book to understand that “show-jumping” is riding horses through a timed obstacle course which includes hurdles.)

All these romance novel conventions that I’ve been complaining about — Riders breaks them all. It’s about a huge cast of totally obnoxious characters. Many of them are quite awful. J’adore! Marriage (or sex) is not the end of anything. For Dame Jilly, sex is just sex—it’s not particularly transformative, although it is fun, and it doesn’t go on for pages and pages. (Not that there isn’t quite a lot of it, there is! That’s why Riders and its sequels are apparently called “bonkbusters.”) And finally, as a bonus I think the writing, particularly the writing about people’s foibles, is quite stellar.

Riders tracks the career of Rupert Campbell-Black (a total shit) and the other main English show-jumpers, including his best friend Billy, his nemesis Jake, Jake’s protege Fenella (going on the baby name list!!!), a man inexplicably nicknamed Humpty, the team manager, a bunch of other stars, their grooms, funders, wives, husbands, and hangers-on, and assorted other riders from the international teams.

The book is a product of its time of course, and has its share of misogyny, racism, and quite a lot of fatphobia. Beauty = thinness = self-control = moral goodness. We know the formula well! At the end, one of the main show-jumpers goes back to his long-suffering wife after an affair and she’s— oh yes, lost a significant amount of weight and is suddenly seen by him in new light. Woof.

Regardless, Riders is excellent, and I highly recommend despite the sheer size of the book (fat).

Cooper became a “dame” in 2024 for her “contributions to literature and charity.” When asked how receiving damehood felt, she responded, “orgasmic,” which tracks. I adore you, Dame Jilly.

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This week I’m recommending two books from the McNally Editions reprint series. I’m always caught between reading the hot new thing (the Booker winner and shortlist, the National Book award winner, which I know will be so good because Rabih Alameddine is a gem, the finalists, and on and on and on forever) and working through a backlog of truly the most random things.

Nevertheless, we resist the urge to get the newest shiny thing. These two are simply SO GOOD, both on the shorter side, and probably at your library right now for free.

The Girls by John Bowen (1986)

The Girls is the perfect salty, hilarious, and fizzy novel about two cottagecore (or cottagegore?) lesbians in the English Cotswolds. Janet and Susan are a crafty rural couple who spend their days growing vegetables and making things and running their little village gift shop. But the joys of country living are balanced by the gruesome extent two women will go to defend their peace, which Bowen, to his credit, makes feel quite understandable.

Even if you’re a committed lesbian happily living in the countryside with your partner, things happen. The seven-year itch. The urge to act out. The need to see why everybody is so obsessed with heterosexuality. But then too, there are consequences — pregnancy, for one. Then, the unknowing father passing through your serene village, since he’s also in arts and crafts marketeering (small world)… threatening the entire existence you’ve built.

The Girls is amazingly witty, and while it’s dark and messy, it’s not tragic, per se. It’s not a tortured tale of doomed love or crushing societal expectations. It’s too strange and subversive for that.

The reprint has the original fabulous cover illustrations by queer icon Edward Gorey.

Winter Love by Han Suyin (1962)

Winter Love is your more classically tragic lesbian fare— the story of a woman who falls in love with her married classmate. Set in a brutally cold London during the last bit of WWII, the book centers on Red, a droll and bitter college student who falls in love with her fellow student. Said love interest, Mara, is in an unhappy marriage with a foreign businessman named Karl, who she is sexually uninterested in but financially reliant on. (He keeps her in a fashionable, large apartment with plentiful hot water, which I believe is how you bag a Brit.) Red and her classmates are at a women’s science college in what was a fascinating, tenuous time for women: women’s liberation lurched forward during the war, with women having huge economic and educational opportunity. (After would be a different story.)

I loved Winter Love too for the snapshot of a desperate moment in England— when the war was about to come to a close, but London continued to be attacked by German rockets. Much of London was destroyed, and food rations were slim, but the everyday lives of the people not directly involved in the war effort continued on.

Han Suyin, a Belgian-Chinese writer, by all accounts seems like a fascinating and complicated woman. Winter Love doesn’t seem to be representative of her output, which was mostly comprised of novels set in China and Southeast Asia, and pro-Mao nonfiction about China’s history and culture. She died in 2012; although her bestselling novel, A Many-Splendored Thing, was a bestseller of its day and was made into a popular 1955 movie, her political views, especially amid growing anti-communist sentiment that did not allow for nuance, didn’t age well and eclipsed her writing.

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DISTRACTION CORNER

• I’m obsessed with Tina Brown, the storied magazine editor. Highly recommend her unleashed Substack if you’re not already reading. She had a good interview with Lulu Garcia Navarro last week; I liked hearing her voice in the audio version!

• Listening to The Beths a bunch right now and highly recommend their new(ish) album Straight Line was a Lie.

• A good book cover is everything, despite the tedious old adage urging otherwise... I became interested in the picture on the slipcover of Winter Love, which is of a group of women in shadow, smoking, in London, December 1946. The photographer was a man named Charles Hewitt, whose photos of Salvador Dali are probably his best known work. But Hewitt was a sergeant within the Army Film and Photographic Unit (!!) during World War II and continued to take pictures long after. I was struck by his photos of a London in recovery from the war.

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I mean, a book

So obvious and yet so correct. If you’re going to buy someone a book, definitely use your favorite bookstore’s website directly (some of my favorites: Lost City Books, Carmichael’s Bookstore) or use Bookshop.org, which helps benefit independent bookstores.

This rechargeable book light

…has actually been a game changer for me. If you have a partner with whom you argue about turning off the light at night, this is for you. Also very cozy for nighttime reading in any circumstance. I have multiple. Currently on sale for $13.

A London Review of Books subscription

Okay, yes, I’m obsessed with the LRB and it’s kind of icky in this day and age to be an Anglophile. I tell myself it’s okay because I’m an anti-monarchist, and you can too! I think the LRB is pretty great.

Speaking of the LRB, on their website they sell $10 stylish little books that each collect 11 great pieces of writing from the magazine all on a certain topic, like clothes, sex, theory (yikes), siblings, WITCHES, etc. This is a perfect little gift, imo. I have snatched up a bunch. I bought the one about 1922, the “year zero” for modernism, for myself. Shipping was $20, but because the books are so inexpensive it feels okay.

A Book of the Month subscription

I don’t use this service anymore, but I did for years and really enjoyed it. A year is $200 bucks (roughly $16 for 12 new hardbacks, plus a free book in your birthday month), but they also have 3- and 6-month offers. You can skip a month with no charge if nothing looks good that month, and they have a big back catalogue of recent fiction.

An Archipelago Books membership

The memberships, essentially a subscription service to this small press that publishes works in translation, range from $100-$280 a year. Beautiful covers, great handfeel, fascinating titles. (I recently recommended Cécé, which was published by Archipelago this year.) For great international books, I also love Europa Editions.

A bathrobe

My favorite places to read are in bed and in the bathtub, so I’m calling this gift semi-related to the act of reading. This is my gifting bathrobe of choice recently, and I like the ugly-cute new prints it comes in. I love a bathrobe. I have a bunch, which I justify because they’re all different weights. A bathrobe for every season. I gave birth in a men’s red silk bathrobe that I had bought in a charity shop in England when I was studying abroad; it pleasantly made me feel like a cross between Hawkeye Pierce and the Big Lebowski, specifically in the scene where he gets his head shoved down the toilet.

If you’re looking for something low budget, Dr. Teal’s is in my opinion the most solid bubble bath. And at less than $10, so affordable and at most drugstores and grocery stores

For babies: anything with pull tabs, bonus points if it makes noise

My son’s favorite book is a book with tabs and flaps that was quite possibly written and illustrated by AI (I will refrain from linking). We bear with it because it was a present and also he loves it. But Noisy Babies and It’s Music Time are also a hit!

A timer

Eva, you say, everything is going to hell in a handbasket and I can’t make myself read. I totally understand.

This is my trick: put away your phone— across the room, downstairs, under a pillow, on silent. Take out a timer. Set the timer for 30 minutes (or less!) and just read. Having the time and space to concentrate on reading makes such a huge difference, and I think a timer is a good gift for anyone looking to reconnect with reading. This timer is cute! But truly any timer could work for this purpose.

REMEMBER THE NEEDIEST!

I like these two charities that send books to people in prison: Freedom Reads and the Women’s Prison Book Project.

There are many charities that promote literacy domestically and internationally; like most charitable giving, it can be hard to determine how effective a program is. At this point, with the foreign aid landscape being what it is, donations to simply save lives feel like the priority. GiveWell focuses on effective and direct lifesaving interventions for children abroad, including vaccines.

Coverage of horrors across the world competes for our attention: Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, and on. The human brain is not made to take them all in, and it will not. Coverage of Haiti has faded from our front pages as other crises vie for our attention. But Cécé, a slim novel about a fiery and bright young woman in a slum in Haiti, paints a powerful picture of the chaos of a capital city controlled by violent gangs.

Cécé lives in a slum of Port-au-Prince called the Cité of Divine Power, which she described as “essentially noise.” The Cité of Divine Power is a place of havoc, where shots ring out daily and nightly and each week a new gang seems to usurp the previous one. Extortion rackets are daily life: each business, no matter how small, is subject to fees for protection. Cécé describes the neverending violence and inevitability of a neighborhood controlled by one violent gang that is much like the next.

Cécé, even before she picks up a phone and starts to record, is a piercing but detached observer. Under the moniker Cécé la Flamme, she begins to document her world on social media, drawing attention far and wide. She photographs the numerous dead bodies she sees, the poverty around her, and the gang members. This draws the ire of one gang leader, who want to make sure she’s promoting his over a rival gang. Her posts draw the attention of international actors, and of a Haitian marketing firm, which pays her to advertise products including skin lightening cream. Ads promoted alongside pictures of devastation— sounds familiar.

Susie Boyt’s review of Cécé in the New York Times Book Review puts it well:

“As the novel advances, acute noticing suggests itself as a keen alternative to numbness.”

After her grandmother dies, Cécé is determined to be independent and also take care of her shell-shocked uncle, who went to the U.S. to compete in the 1996 Olympics, disappeared there for twelve years, and finally returned to Haiti a mute and broken alcoholic. She does this first with sex work, and then with her pictures. She is a savvy businesswoman, no naïf. In an interaction with American journalists trying to buy her pictures, Cécé asks for double what they offer her; they are taken aback by her haggling, shocked that she’s not just grateful for being given something.

Emmelie Prophète is a poet and writer born in Port-au-Prince; she also served in the government of Haiti. Prophète is the first Haitian author I have read who resides there still. The Haitian authors I can think of, notably Edwidge Danticat, are immigrants, and their work reflects the Haitian diaspora. Since the book was originally published in 2020, the gang situation in Haiti has only intensified, with gangs controlling around 90% of the capital as of summer 2025.

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DISTRACTION CORNER

…but not really. This week, there is no distraction from reality. So be it.

• I am perennially behind on my New Yorkers, and saw only recently Sasha Bonét’s discussion of four books about mothers. I’m fascinated by books about mothers, and the way motherhood is avoided as a topic. Many of my favorite books are about young women coming to adulthood; but motherhood, from this vantage point, seems to be both too complicated and at once too boring to write about; it’s something that might happen way after the crux of the story, after the plot has happened. Can mothers be heroines? No, because all they think about is their children, which is BORING BORING. And yet we’re told by society that motherhood is the most rewarding and amazing thing ever. Then why aren’t there more fiction books about mothers? Probably because most writers can’t address the insane whiplash of this dichotomy in a satisfying way. Just another example of how we denigrate women at the same time as trying to brainwash them. (I will write more on this topic at some point, as clearly I have a lot to say on the topic!) I’ve read Beloved, but I look forward to diving into Bonét’s other recommendations.

• I was struck by this emotional photo essay from last week showing the anguish that many of our fellow humans facing ICE proceedings and their families are being put through.

• Relatedly, I was listening to this amazing interview with Professor Jason Stanley, a historian of fascism who reminded me that there will be no breaking point, no one moment when it is clear that we are living under fascism. Despite the fact that mothers are being quite literally ripped away from their babies and deported without due process, for many of us, there will be no difference in quality of life. As Stanley says,

  “I mean, people just don’t get that under fascism or virtually any kind of authoritarianism, you can still go to the club, there are still raves, there are restaurants, there are bars. They’re like, ‘How could it be fascism because I can go to the restaurant and complain about the government to my friends?’”

I love an adult book about a child. Being a child is often quite an adult experience. Last month I read Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, which features, as a bunch of his books do, a child who helps in the fight against evil. This boy is perceptive, emotional, and keenly intelligent; he is in short, a child, but he’s allowed to stand alongside the main adult characters and as such we can assess him without the condescension of relegation. And some of the traits inherent to being a child— the simplicity, purity, and intensity of emotion, the accessibility of courage or clarity — are able to drive the plot forward convincingly in a way that it feels the adult characters cannot.

In King’s writing, the stakes are often very literally apocalyptic. In the two books that I recommend this week, the stakes feel apocalyptic to the young main characters, but not because they misunderstand or are overly dramatic. It is because they very much do understand that the stakes are life-changing, and they have not learned yet to moderate their disappointment, behavior, or expectations. In Vera, the eponymous main character grapples with the possible dissolution of her parents’ marriage and the mystery of her birth mother. In The Member of the Wedding, Frankie is searching for her place in an unfeeling world and in turn lashes out against her two closest confidantes, who are themselves outcasts.

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (2025)

Vera, or Faith, puts the anxiety of a precocious young girl front and center. Shteyngart sets the book in a dystopian near-future (i.e. pretty much the present, but people have a bit more awareness). Vera, a high-achieving, academically gifted ten-year-old with no friends, lives in Manhattan with her step mom “Anne Mom,” her Russian immigrant father, and her younger half-brother Dylan.

As Vera attempts to stop her parents from splitting up and make one (1) friend in this world besides her AI chess companion, she is also searching for the truth about her birth mother (“Mom Mom”). “Mom Mom” is out of the picture but father and step-mother have avoided speaking about her to the extent that Vera doesn’t even know what happened to her.

Shteyngart is an amazing satirist; just when things start getting too glib he infuses the writing with real emotion and complexity. Through Vera’s eyes, we see the flaws of the people around her profiled hilariously. But they are sympathetic characters too, not just cardboard. And of course, scheming, cynical but loving Igor, the patriarch of the family whose first name Shteyngart shares, is perfect.

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (1946)

The Member of the Wedding is set in a small town in Georgia in 1944; the main character, Frankie, is a twelve-year-old tomboy. The book features a powerfully drawn triumvirate of characters: Frankie, the main character, John Henry, her younger cousin, and Berenice, her family’s housekeeper.

McCullers was an alcoholic who apparently drank steadily the entire day, starting with a beer upon waking up. There is something of that maintained intensity in her books— a fever pitch of feeling throughout.

From the start, Frankie is overwhelmed by a newfound awareness of her own lack of place in the world. She is curmudgeonly, often mean, lacking in adult supervision, and daydreams about joining her brother and his fiance, the latter of whom she is possibly in love with, on their honeymoon. Her foils: tender six-year-old John Henry, and wise Berenice, her family’s housekeeper and cook. Berenice has been married four times and Knows Things. The opening is one of the best starts to a book there is and sets the uneasy tone of the story:

“It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. In June the trees were bright dizzy green, but later the leaves darkened, and the town turned black and shrunken under the glare of the sun. At first Frankie walked around doing one thing and another. The sidewalks of the town were gray in the early morning and at night, but the noon sun put a glaze on them, so that the cement burned and glittered like glass. The sidewalks finally became too hot for Frankie’s feet, and also she got herself in trouble. She was in so much secret trouble that she thought it was better to stay at home—and at home there was only Berenice Sadie Brown and John Henry West. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, saying the same things over and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange. The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer. At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass. And then, on the last Friday of August, all this was changed: it was so sudden that Frankie puzzled the whole blank afternoon, and still she did not understand.”

(To keep reading the first couple pages, click here.) McCullers’ first work, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is one of my favorite books in this whole wide world, and also features a kid as one of the main characters. If you are in need of brevity though, as I myself am more and more, The Member of the Wedding is short, almost a novella. McCullers is a true master, and doesn’t need much space. The Member of the Wedding is brief but heartbreaking.

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DISTRACTION CORNER

• There was a great profile of Robert Pullman in this last week’s New York Times Book Review. The third book in Pullman’s The Book of Dust series, a follow-up to the now classic trilogy, His Dark Materials, came out a couple weeks ago. I liked the quote from the bestselling British children’s writer Katherine Rundell on Pullman’s appeal:

  “Pullman changed the field,” Rundell said. “He showed how much can be asked of a child reader, how eagerly they will rise to meet vast ideas. The books understand that children crave stories on the epic scale, that infinity is not too large for them.”

Heart the Lover by Lily King (2025)

With her latest book, Lily King delivers a work of true tenderness. Prepare to cry upon finishing this novel (or sob on a plane, as I did). It’s an honor to be moved by words, and an amazing feat for an author to capture the ambivalence of love.

I like to think that there must be infinite worlds out there. After a close friend of mine died in 2024, I found myself dwelling overmuch on this idea. There is a world in which my friend is still alive; that world is a pleasant one to contemplate. There is a world too where you are with your first love. A world in which the decisions of your callow youth stuck. King imagines a world where, decades after a love story has come to an uneasy close, the main character is able to grapple with what might have been.

The book is in two parts: the first is the college novel, the story of young love. The main character begins dating one intense man, but ends up falling for his roommate. She is introduced by the both of them to an intellectual life that she was unable to access before in her rote co-ed existence. They dub her Jordan (à la Jordan Baker from the Great Gatsby). She begins to imagine more for herself. She goes to France to work as an au-pair. A misunderstanding occurs; expectations are dashed. The book is set in the 80s, and the lack of the immediacy of cell phones meant that the misunderstandings that ensued had finality in a way that feels almost totally un-relatable now.

The second part of the book jumps forward in time: the heroine, unnamed until the very end, is a mother of two. Living in Maine, she is married to a man named Silas; Silas is not either one of her college loves. She is a writer, a trope I am very fond of (when writers write writers). It is into this established landscape her college love reemerges, and they are able to explore most poignantly their lost relationship. But the timing is bad; her young love is hospitalized just as her own son has been approved for a life-saving surgery. There is still never enough time, King reminds us. (I think of Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”: “O let not Time deceive you,/ You cannot conquer Time.”)

The gimmick of the main character’s namelessness I enjoyed; we are flowing inside her unnamed consciousness, we are boundless in her thoughts, and her name is immaterial. Only at the very end is her name revealed. And as the book ends, she is named, and we are ejected.

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (2025)

Brandon Taylor grew up reading romance novels. I’m guessing that he, like me, also grew up with Fabio’s turgid abdominals displayed prominently in grocery store checkout aisles. (Every time I’m at the grocery store I wish there were still these salacious romance novel covers out on display. What happened to them??) Minor Black Figures is a romance novel, in the most interesting way. It chronicles the beginning of a relationship between a painter, aptly named Wyeth, and an ex-Jesuit seminarian named Keating. The sex scenes are sweet; they are additive to the plot, but the sex is not the denouement. (This is one thing I always find so devastatingly boring in actual romance novels, along with the inevitability of the two characters getting together…. god, it’s so boring and depressing!! Minor Black Figures is a romance novel that avoids these two problems.)

Minor Black Figures is quite dense. Unlike a book like Heart the Lover, which dives over decades and distills the feelings of young love over time, Minor Black Figures is a slice of the main character’s life and inner workings in detail. Anyone who reads Brandon Taylor’s Substack might recognize the relentless inquiry of Minor Black Figures’ Wyeth in Taylor’s prolific essays and literary criticism. There are several moments when Keating prompts Wyeth to the effect of “I think you think too much.” This is perhaps the world to Brandon Taylor. But it is also a recognizable conversation between anyone who has a loud internal monologue and themselves.

I listened to a fascinating interview with Taylor on the New York Times Book Review Podcast, where he talks about the erstwhile “social novel” and how American fiction of the last few decades has closed in: sometimes it’s just about one person, and loneliness is a more pervasive theme than ever before. (I loved his thoughts about form, and I have the agree: the current popular American novel has gone deep inside the psyche; there are often few characters, the character is isolated, on a hero journey that is internal as much as anything. The hero is lonely, sometimes friendless.)

The scope of Minor Black Figures is perfection; although Wyeth exists without the intrusion of family or any childhood remnants except his memories and as such is somewhat of a lonely hero, he exists in multiple universes: at his two jobs, with a cast of supporting characters at both; at his studio, with his studio mates; and alone in his small fifth-floor walk-up studio where he watches old movies. At his restoration job, he chases down information about an elusive Black artist active in decades previous. At his gallery job, he ponders advances from a popular artists collective whose work he hates. At his own studio, he agonizes over whether a Black artist can make work that is not viewed as political and whether he can even move through his creative block to make anything at all. In his personal life, he explores his relationship with Keating.

Taylor is consciously worked towards a larger scale than he has in his earlier books, quite effectively. He has some grandiose imagery at the beginning of a couple chapters, but what is more moving to me than that kind of Dickensian verbosity is how he delves into the side characters meaningfully and how busy, literally and figuratively, Wyeth’s world is. Wyeth exists in different plots, and all of them are deeply engaging; the mystery of his work at the restoration business, his own search for meaning in his art and exploration with the commercial aspect of creating art, and of course his thoughtful relationship with Keating, who, if less busy outwardly, is easily his match in depth. Both Wyeth and Keating are in the throes of separate existential crises; Wyeth because of his art, Keating because of his faith. Throughout the book, Wyeth and all his aspects are a beautiful vehicle for a series of lofty philosophical treatises, and I don’t mind at all.

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DISTRACTION CORNER

• Podcast: Zadie Smith on the New Yorker Radio Hour. She talks about her new book of essays and the idiocy of “write what you know.”

• TV: The fifth season of Slow Horses came to an end on AppleTV last night. Faithfully adapted from Mick Herron’s series of the same name, the show is SO DELICIOUS if you’re like me and love a mystery, especially one with a cast of disgraced losers and boozers.

• Music: Friendship’s amazing 2025 album Caveman Wakes Up has been a staple for me over the last month.

When I say these books are perfect for the bathroom, this is what I mean: these books can be read in bite-sized chunks. More and more I find that my time is so fragmented and yet that many books cannot be read that way— it detracts from the reading experience so much that I start doubting whether I even like to read. I need quiet, and solitude, and to concentrate; these books are DIFFICULT, old, or abstruse. They’re long or long-winded… when I tear myself away it’s a break that needs to be re-set and often I need to go back and start again.

These three books are not like that. They are digestible. They are kind to a distracted reader trying to steal a moment.

Marian Keyes, in an essay contained in one of the books I recommend below, gives her thoughts on reading:

“This thing of ‘persevering’ with a book— why in the name of God would you persevere? Reading is meant to be a pleasure, an escape from the shittiness and the rest of it. I will only read something that I love.”

These three books are a genuine pleasure. And “readable” too; I hate that that word has become a dirty synonym for facileness. They are NOT the same, and in fact I think writing a book that’s readable while maintaining its complexity is one of the most difficult feats.

Stay tuned for further rambles on the question of “should reading be pleasurable?” I think it’s a fascinating one to mine.

Envelope Poems by Emily Dickinson, Edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner (2016)

This is a fascinating little book, containing a selection of the perfectly succinct poems jotted down on envelopes and other scraps of paper by Dickinson, and transcribed helpfully by the editors. Dickinson, who published so few poems during her lifetime, wrote a great deal. These poems are taken from her later period, full of her most radical writing.

The originals are beautiful preserved in the book, alongside diagrams with the transcriptions, where you can see Dickinson testing out different word choices.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

A not admitting of the wound 
Until it grew so wide 
That all my Life had entered it 
And there were troughs beside -

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

A closing of the simple lid that opened to the sun 
Until the tender Carpenter 
Perpetual nail it down -

Dickinson is economical and brutal. She cuts to the bone so quickly, I think it’s almost unbearable to read her at any length. She must be consumed sparingly. Thank god, her poems are short. I often think about her poem (“Tell the truth but tell it slant”), essentially advising people to be gentle when delivering truth-bombs: “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind —” Even within the formalistic confines of a poem, she herself couldn’t — she blinded.

What Writers Read: 35 Writers On Their Favourite Book, Edited by Pandora Sykes (2022)

I found this as a follower of Pandora Syke’s excellent Substack about books. Although she’s somehow not a well-known presence in the States, Sykes is a longtime broadcaster and culture journalist who has achieved notoriety in the UK for her erstwhile podcast collaboration with Dolly Alderton and other ventures. I adore Sykes’ writing.

This book profiles the favo(u)rite books of popular, mostly British, Irish, and American authors, and recommendations range from familiar beloved tomes to niche children’s books.

Mass-market authors and so-called “literary” authors detail in brief their love for some of my personal favo(u)rites: Bridget Jones, NW, Cold Comfort Farm, I Capture the Castle, Train Dreams, Pride and Prejudice, the God of Small Things, and many more… Each section ends helpfully with a brief bio on the author.

The Joy of Snacking: A Graphic Memoir about Food, Love & Family by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell (2025)

I do think this book is digestible in small pieces, and I’ve been returning to it as such, but I have to confess I swallowed it whole the first night I got it. What a treat. The graphic memoir starts out in flashback vignettes of Fitzgerald Campbell’s childhood, then young-adulthood struggling with food: whether because of fear, or an eating disorder, or simple dislike. As the book goes on, it plumbs the complexity of cycles with food that are familiar to many women: feeling out of control, never feeling good being full, self-flagellating and self-deprivation, measured enjoyment, and, most elusively, the feeling of pure gorgeous joy at eating, as Fitzgerald Campbell does at the end of the book, the most beautiful tomato toast. Food, obviously, is not just food.

Fitzgerald Campbell, a New Yorker cartoonist, bravely dissects the dynamics of a difficult relationship with her then-boyfriend, a sommelier and “food person.” These patterns too are familiar. I particularly enjoyed reading about her parents, who have a real empathy for their daughter’s agonies over food, even as they tease her.

I had the pleasure of taking a cartooning workshop with Fitzgerald Campbell last year and am a longtime subscriber to her Substack, Cartoons by Hilary, which I recommend.

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If Only by Vigdis Hjorth

(Originally published in Norwegian in 2001, translated into English by Charlotte Barslund and published in 2024)

I’ve always found the first stanza above, taken from Matthew Arnold’s long poem Tristram and Iseult, moving. I think frequently of the “gradual furnace of the world,” a phrase which feels so applicable to this moment. Grappling with the "gradual furnace of the world” is the problem of how to engage with life as we get older. It is the “gradual furnace of the world” that inures us to so much suffering, makes us hardened to people we don’t know, and cruel to those we do.

Above, the poet writes that either the “gradual furnace” or a fit of passion, “some tyrannous single thought,” can destroy in us the power to enjoy life. It is accurate to call Vigdis Hjorth’s protagonist Ida’s obsessive love affair a “diseased unrest,” the latter problem. This second stanza encapsulates the spirit of the book’s defining relationship well.

Both Ida Heier and Arnold Bush are married, but not to each other; Ida is a playwright, Arnold a Brecht scholar. After a one-night stand at a conference, Ida can’t stop thinking about him. Her obsession, which grows into a mutual obsession, is ruinous. Hjorth details the reality of toxic, compulsive obsessiveness in a very recognizable way, laying bare the kind of behavior that is often underground. Hjorth painstakingly chronicles every moment: the details, their repetition, their tortured repetition, are excruciating. And part of her point is exactly that— obsession is boring, repetitive, and overly concerned with minutiae, but this goes unrecognized by those in its thrall. The form of the book reflects all of this: there are no chapters, there is no break in the prose, it continues on unyieldingly. In the end, Arnold and Ida are “burnt up with fume and care,” and so is the reader, exhausted.

This fantastic profile of Hjorth in the London Review of Books by Toril Moi is what made me read If Only. Hjorth, who is Norwegian, has been overlooked for decades while her male peers (Fosse, Knausgård, Petterson) have been getting critical accolades. The first problem: she started out writing children’s books, and therefore was not a serious author. Once she began writing adult books, the press ran with an image of her as a hyper-sexualized party girl and conflated the eroticism and heavy drinking of the protagonists of her books with the writer herself. Only four of her novels have been translated into English, and one of them created a firestorm in Norway because its depiction of abuse that seemed to line up with many details of Hjorth’s life. She says it is not an autobiography. (Again, is this the treatment her male colleagues have been getting? Autofiction or partial autofiction written by men, like Knausgård’s six-part My Struggle, is hailed as revolutionary.) It strikes me that female writers and their characters are conflated while men have the freedom to be a character and a writer.

The Kids Run the Show by Delphine de Vigan

(Originally published in France in 2021, translated by Alison Anderson and published in English in 2023)

The Kids Run the Show is an extraordinary novel about how social media and creating content specifically breaks our brains. Delphine de Vigan faces head on this question that other contemporary novels sidestep, which is— this can’t be good for us, can it? The answer is so clearly no, and how, Vigan addresses.

I was listening to Wesley Morris’ podcast about One Battle After Another, which I rather uncritically enjoyed, and Morris and his guest, Sean Fennessey, were discussed why PTA hasn’t done much in the contemporary age. Fennessey breaks it down:

Cell phones. Smartphones. Smartphones, for most filmmakers — let’s set aside maybe Park Chan-wook — are tremendously uncinematic. And the experience of being alive right now how is being attached to a device, and often not making eye contact with those you are with because you are looking at the device.

This is true in movies and TV, and this is true in books. Because phones in media, and our sad lives being addicted to them, carrying them around, staring at them aimlessly, is so boring. It’s not good to see on screen, it’s not good to read about. It doesn’t add to the plot. (Sometimes the vehicle of the phone [receiving information, hearing from a friend] or its anonymity [think Pretty Little Liars] is essential to the plot, but phones themselves are immaterial. They are distractions that lead nowhere.) Surely this should be a tip-off for us in the real world!! I say this with agony and without judgment; obviously I too am addicted to my phone…

In this case, The Kids Run the Show is about a woman who makes content about her children. She did a brief stint on a reality TV show and got a taste of affirmation from the social media machine. If Hjorth’s book is a portrait of obsessive love, The Kids Run the Show is…also a portrait of obsessive love, but its the love of image.

Mélanie is the mother of Kimmy and Sammy, two adorable children who star in her YouTube show. Every day she films them and posts the videos online. They love it, she claims. But can they really consent? Of course, says Mélanie. This is their dream and I would never do anything to harm them.

Clara, a cop raised by two liberal political activists, is our foil to Mélanie. She is assigned to the case of Kimmy’s abduction. The book, a thriller in more ways than one, follows both Mélanie and Clara into the 2030s, where surveillance and the ease of social media has become even more intense.

The desire for likes, for online affirmation from anonymous people, erodes our genuine bonds, and gets the user into a place of addiction where we will do anything for that affirmation, even exploit our own children. It is a very dark place.

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DISTRACTION CORNER***

• Things that have been on my mind:

  • The beautiful light in the fall.

  • The necessity of baths.

  • My grandmother. She died this week at 97, and I’ve been thinking about her constantly. I’ve been going over our old letters, emails, and texts (she sometimes struggled with her iPhone but was mostly very savvy) and remembering the things we loved to connect over, including books. I read Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything a couple years ago about career women in the 50s and it helped me understand something about her and the trajectory of her life. I love you, Grandma.

  • Good horror? I’m reading Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot now, prompted by his son Joe Hill’s article about it. It’s King’s only vampire novel (spoiler, I suppose?). I’m not super into vampires, but I do remember really liking The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I am a lifelong fan of Stephen King though. ‘Salem’s Lot is sophomoric, as his son points out— it’s only his second novel. I’m wading through. What frightens me now is different than what used to frighten me.

  • The public library. I’ve been in a request, pick-up relationship with the library for years, but now I’ve returned to browsing. It’s been fun.

  ***offline edition