Hello and a happy, humid spring to everyone! Recently my daughter told me that she felt like the days were trudging along so slowly, but I feel the opposite—how are we already rounding out May? With the release date for The Seekers of Deer Creek fast approaching on August 4th, I wanted to share a couple exciting pieces of news. Firstly, a preorder gift!

If you pre-order a copy of The Seekers of Deer Creek from Storyline Bookshop, my fabulous, local bookstore (shipping available!), we’ll include an original, handmade cyanotype inspired by the novel. Each is completely unique, hand-printed on archival-quality paper. When I tell you that I spent hours and hours perfecting this process—which is still beautifully imperfect—it’s no exaggeration, but I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend my time. (More on the process later.) It’s my thank you to readers, without whom I wouldn’t be able to continue doing this work, on both the newsletter and in my books. I’ll spare you the talk on why pre-orders are SO crucial to authors (you know they are, right?), but know that I don’t take your support for granted.

PREORDER THE BOOK!

Next! If you’re local to the Columbus, Ohio, area, please come see me at the launch event for The Seekers of Deer Creek on August 4 at 6pm at Storyline. Your event ticket includes a cyanotype and a copy of the novel. I’d love to say hi, sign your book, and answer any questions! And if you haven’t been into Storyline, you’re in for a treat—it’s the most gorgeous, photo-worthy store with a warm staff and cozy alcoves of books.

Thank you so much for all your support! I hope to see some of you in a little over two months!

*All photo credits go to the wonderful Storyline team!

The turn of the century, in brief: rhinestones hanging from bellybuttons, gritty sand inside Old Navy flip-flops, baskets of fried conch, diesel fuel mixed with Hawaiian Ginger body mist, Natasha Bedingfield on the top-20 VH1 countdown, platformed Steve Maddens, scantron tests, textbooks that smell like toe jam, Italian sodas at Books-a-Million, movie theaters that charged $3 for a matinee, the hard, polished wood of a hostess stand under my palm—I could go on for, literally, hours. It’s not exactly the Belle Epoque, but my Y2K sensations of yesteryear can feel stronger and more present to me than things that happened just yesterday.

I’ve heard people ask that speculative and revealing question: What’s your real age? They’re asking about the age inside your heart, the trapped person who is still frozen in amber, the one who sometimes glances around them as if to say: How did I end up here? A part of me will always be caught in that flurry of sunscreen and salt and boredom of my sixteen-year-old self. Not because I peaked (I sure hope not!), but because that was the inimitable time of my life where everything seemed incredibly urgent and, in the same moment, endless and predictable. Excitement and safety, held inside a clutch of days that passed all too soon. I don’t think I’ve managed to capture that intoxicating contrast since.

Subscribe now

These days when I scroll, I listen to influencers referring to Y2K fashion as vintage (it is, inarguably, but the label still smarts), trotting out the baby tees and zigzag hairbands I once wore. Disposable cameras that once retailed for pocket change are now repackaged as novelty items, commanding high prices on Ebay, that black hole for nostalgia. The Practical Magic witches are coming back; a revival of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had been, all too briefly, in production. After school, my daughter and I watch Full House together and the sound of the laugh track never fails to catch some buried latch inside, opening me to a loop of memories.

Each time I encounter one of these relics from my teen years, I’m inundated by a wash of warmth quickly chased by a more complex emotion, a niggling doubt. What exactly lies behind my longing? What is it I want to escape so badly? Because, by every account that matters, my life is a very good one. Yet somewhere inside, that sixteen-year-old voice demands: Weren’t we promised more than this? More joy? More safety. But what if my portrait of joy and safety has never been an accurate one to begin with? At the end of the day, I can’t fully trust nostalgia, as good as it feels, because it will always come with its own obfuscations.

It turns out that we’re hard-wired for nostalgia, especially in times of distress or uncertainty. Nostalgic impressions can even be used in pain mediation, regulating our physical and emotional selves. At its best, nostalgia can serve as a much-needed escape or a roadmap back to the people and places that have made us happiest. At its worst, nostalgia is a maladaptive coping mechanism, a mental trap all the more treacherous because it looks so damn pretty.

Nostalgia’s danger (see: MAGA movement; see: Tradwife content) rests in its false promises. Nostalgia brushes the past with illusion, filtering the unpalatable impressions away, so all we get is a watery, incomplete picture. Things were hard in every era, even those halcyon Y2K years. No, we didn’t have social media, but we had some intense hallway bullying. Yes, things were more affordable as a whole, but it was more difficult for people who looked like me to buy a house or hold leadership positions. For every moment of excitement and promise in my teenage years, I suffered one of embarrassment and anxiety. Because that’s youth; that’s being a human.

But the desperate wanting for something that never existed—well, nothing’s more human than that.

Our world being what it is, we grapple with the multiplicity of our desires by turning to accessible yet ultimately reductive life hacks that promise to shuffle us back in time. Analog bags in which every item is purchased from an online shop, apps to keep us from looking at apps, laborious hobbies like sourdough that require hours of TikTok tutorials. We’re fighting ourselves every turn of the way. So how to make peace with nostalgia? How to allow it to touch our lives, then recede back to where it belongs? I think of a quote from The Office, uttered by Cornell graduate Andy Barnard: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” Maybe it’s simpler just to say that it’s all “the good old days.” The traffic, the bills, the sweaty walks, the movie nights, the fear, the anxiety, the love, the all-ness of existence. One day, this very moment will, too, be clouded by nostalgia.

Later this afternoon, when my girl and I watch Danny Tanner wrestling with his imminently manageable problems in his huge San Francisco row house, I will be living blissfully in the laugh track of the sitcom, but I will also know that the laugh track is the most clever sort of fiction, the sort that gets added after the fact, a gloss on all we actually lived through.

A couple years ago, I wrote a post on writer essentials, but I neglected to add the most important desk accessory of all—a cat. Of course, at the time, I hadn’t yet adopted Duchess Marshmallow Bandit Thai, so I had no idea what I was missing out on. (Sleep; that’s what I was missing out on.)

Now no writing day feels complete without a swish of a tail on my keyboard, a plaintive yowl from some shelf behind my head. MB isn’t much of a cuddler, much to my dismay, but she enjoys lounging next to my monitor, surveying my drafts with painfully obvious judgment. If I’m stuck, I run my ideas past her. (“Add a cat!” is her resounding advice each time.) If I’ve chosen an untrue word, I practically feel her disapproval emanating from whatever perch she’s co-opted. The sound of her snores is my favorite soundtrack, her nibbles on my heel the cue for me to get up and stretch. It turns out that a cat is better than one of those Pomodoro timers.

What is it about cats that make them such wonderful creative companions? I think it’s that they contain some inherent mystery, punctuated with a solid dash of crude humor. MB sashays with breathtaking elegance in one moment, then turns around and licks her own butt in the next. Cats are both inexplicable and terribly simple. In them, we glimpse the conundrums and mundanity of the known world.

Subscribe now

Whatever the nature of that beautiful alchemy between cats and creatives, I’m not alone in my reliance on a feline companion. Hemingway, of course, is the most well-known example of a writer with a coterie of kitty muses. Mark Twain rented cats when he went on vacation, so repellent was he to the idea of a cat-less day. Samuel Johnson’s cat, Hodge, immortalized in a bronze statue outside his home, dined on oysters that he fetched himself, lest the servants began to resent Hodge. I, too, have been known to sear a tiny steak for MB, who turns from it with nary a sniff after she sees it’s only chuck.

Can we begrudge these writers—myself included—for our oversized worship? To love a cat is to endure a peculiar, unrequited longing, a protracted and often one-sided love story. They might echo our warm feelings, but we must earn their affection day in and day out. Maybe it’s not surprising that writers often choose cats as companions, then; we do engage in that most masochistic of acts for a living.

Below, a selection of cats and their writers to inspire your workweek. And please, for the love of all that’s good and delightful, post pictures of your own cats in the comments. I need a strong argument to hire a second feline editor.

On a given Sunday afternoon, you’ll find me doing a puzzle while rotating through my weekly queue of podcasts. My husband paints in the next room with a record spinning. Upstairs, our daughter blares her audiobook as she sketches. Our cat, bereft of her own aural crutches, wanders from room to room until she finds a rare, quiet spot to nap. Outside, I can hear our neighbors’ television tuned into a baseball game, the urgent buzz of lawn edgers, kids on their electric bikes, a woodpecker knocking away, a pair of dogs barking discontent from their yards, a train stuttering across the tracks a few blocks over. These are the sounds of life, beautiful and essential, but they come at a cost. Silence is not only anomalous these days; it’s nearly gone extinct.

A recent WaPo article dissects the ways that audio stimulation has overtaken our modern lives, citing a 2025 Edison report that found Americans listen to an average of four hours of dedicated audio that does not include audiobooks or social media. Anecdotally, I’ve found that wherever I go—coffee shops, evening walks—those around me, myself included, are connected to earbuds. (Or, worse yet, they’re listening without headphones, a modern discourtesy that drives me particularly bonkers.) We don’t even speak on the phone much anymore; these days, we’re just letting others talk at us in imminently portable ways. It would be entirely possible to live a life completely bereft of silence, if we chose.

Subscribe now

Though I’m generally suspicious of diagnostic think pieces like this one, I found that it resonated all the same. Unsurprisingly, the article argued that audio stimulation can be as habit-forming as screentime. We become inured to the temporary shot of dopamine that audio stimulation provides, so we seek more and more, tying ourselves further to the “feel good” thing. Parents often talk amongst themselves about how they once had permission to be bored, free of stimulation. Maybe we used to have permission to be silent as well.

In the WaPo piece, psychologist and attention researcher Gloria Mark says, “When we’re not involved in some kind of cognitive task, the part of the brain called the default mode network takes over, [which] helps us regulate our emotions, helps us make sense. It’s how we form internal narratives about ourselves.” That quote struck me deeply, as someone who has struggled to feel connected to her life in recent months. Maybe I’ve been so busy listening to the ideas of others that I have not, really, taken the time to cogitate on my own presence in the world. My internal narrative is unformed clay, drying by the hour.

Everyone’s mind works differently, so it’s too simple to say that audio = bad, just as it’s too simple to say that screentime = bad. And many of us are tied to audio for work, making it a privilege to entirely disconnect. But it’s interesting to witness the rapid decline of quiet in my own life, accompanied by my growing yearning for it. That yearning tells me something about loss. You rarely understand a good thing until it’s (nearly) gone.

In college and grad school, I found it easy to focus wherever I was. I could have been in a crowded coffee shop, a bar with live music, a lecture hall clamoring with conversation, and I would have still been able to write or, at least, think without interruption. The noise became atmosphere, drowning itself out until it was nothing more than a hum in the background. But these days I can’t write unless I have complete silence. Focus is a tool I must hunt for. Ironically, at a time when I most need silence, it’s more difficult than ever to reach for it.

What might it feel like to cook dinner without an audiobook? To go to bed without the latest TikTok-approved sound bite in my ear? To wait in line without some talking head keeping me distracted? I think it’d feel uncomfortable. I’d have to retrain my thoughts to gather in a linear manner, rather than the way they do now, as a constant leapfrog game. But maybe the ideas—my once-profuse internal narratives—would finally have the space to form again. Maybe I would find what I’ve been lacking for so long: a true groundedness in my everyday life.

I’m not going to be retiring my headphones any time soon. (I still have a 15-hour audiobook to finish!) But I am curious what it would look like to bathe in the discomfort of silence and witness what might emerge in that soundless space. What a joy, a luxury, it would be to be quiet together.

Daylight Savings always catches me by surprise, just like the first balmy days of spring. It’s like turning a corner and spying a friend you’ve nearly forgotten about. But I’m always thinking about time and I’m always thinking about light, in some form or another. The light between people. The light that glazes across the hours of our lives.

There’s a riddle within the first few pages of The Seekers of Deer Creek that references “the place where time peels from light,” a motif that is all too suited for a book about legacy and art. So in honor of Daylight Savings and in honor of my hard-won sophomore novel, here’s a list of a few of my favorite books about time travel. Because that’s what memory is; traveling backward until we find the luminescent core of ourselves.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: One of my most entertaining reads from the previous year. Part thriller, part sci-fi romp, this novel centers a civil servant tasked with rescuing historical figures from time. But things go awry when she extracts someone who stirs her more than she ever imagined. (Adaptation forthcoming!)

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenger: A classic in the genre about two people who find each other through the years, often through periods of great loss. I remember loving it when I first read it partly because it paid such wonderful homage to one of my home cities, Chicago (where Seekers is set, too!). Bonus: we’re getting our long-awaited sequel this year!

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: Another love story. One day we can talk about how time travel stories are always, at heart, love stories of some form. In this slim, epistolary volume, two competing warriors of a time war leave taunting messages that eventually turn into something deeper, transcending their missions and the many obstacles in their way.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel: Another gorgeous work of speculative fiction by Mandel, exploring anomalies of linear time through an expansive cast of characters set across centuries. Written with Mandel’s signature lyricism and brevity, Sea of Tranquility feels like a fever-pitch dream, taut with philosophical quandary and the dread of knowing what lies ahead, without knowing if one can change the future.

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub: No one does nostalgia so beautifully as Straub. Forty-year-old Alice goes to sleep just before her birthday and wakes up magically sixteen again, with her father healthy, her old friends surrounding her. This literary novel is a love letter to so many things—teenagehood, New York, the glorious ‘90s, fathers and daughters—and it packs a stunning emotional wallop.

Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness: For a classic witch-vampire romance with a satisfying twist of dark academia twist, the second book in the Discovery of Witches series sends our heroes backward in time to Elizabethan England, where we encounter Kit Marlowe, Mary Sidney, and the Virgin Queen herself. It’s a deeply researched book with a throughline of supernatural tension, casting a well-trod period of history in a fascinating new light. (Note: you do have to read the first book!)

Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister: This fast-paced thriller asks what lengths a mother might go through to prevent her child from committing a horrible crime. In the aftermath of her son’s arrest, a mother wakes up again and again in the past, a bit further back each time, until she finds the seed from which disaster grows. Full of twists and a heartrending thread of maternal desperation, this is a quick read with some thought-provoking moments.

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle: For those yearning for a love story with a twist, Serle’s popular novel sends a type-A lawyer on the journey of her life when she’s momentarily transported five years into the future. She doesn’t recognize her future life—and she especially doesn’t understand why she’s in bed with the man she least expected to see. Though she only spends an hour in this reality, she can’t shake what she’s seen, and comes back to the present with revelations that wrack her.

A few weeks ago, amid my usual doomscrolling, I stopped short when I saw a post from talented author and podcaster Olivia Muenter wearing an embroidered hat that read “Unlikable Female Character.” The moment I saw the hat, I felt something ding inside of me, a resonance that I wanted to sit and explore. The phrase swept me in, as if I were being welcomed into a community I’d been searching for. It didn’t take long for me to reach out to Olivia to ask if she’d sit down and dissect our shared experience with Unlikable Female Characters (UFCs) together.

Olivia is the bestselling author of Such A Bad Influence and the forthcoming, much-anticipated Little One, which has already earned glowing praise from Liz Moore, Amity Gaige, Ashley Audrain, and many other literary luminaries. Her work offers incisive cultural examinations of things such as the wellness industry and influencer culture. And she runs not one, but two, fantastic podcasts: Bad on Paper (with cohost Becca Freeman) and Little Pod, which will be releasing shortly.

Before we dive into our questions, for the sake of clarity, I’d like to reiterate that we’re using the term “likability” with implicit quotes throughout this interview. We don’t personally find the characters or women we describe unlikable. We’re not celebrating unkindness or bad behavior, but we are interrogating the cost of authentic representation. The term “unlikable” is used here as a framework for societal critiques for such women—women of nuance, of brio, women who say things that others prefer to leave unsaid. In other words: fully realized, flawed humans who inspire any manner of reaction from the public.

THAO: First off, I need to know where the idea for this amazing hat came from! What was it about the idea of the unlikeable female character that struck you (and your audience) so deeply?

OLIVIA: I realized a long time ago that I loved reading books with ‘unlikable’ female characters. When I started writing novels, I pretty quickly learned that I had no interest in writing strictly likable female characters, either. I like gray areas, questionable choices, and complicated emotions. I like bad habits, baggage, and spikiness. To me, so many “unlikable” characteristics are more relatable than the more digestible ones. I want characters that echo the worst thoughts I’ve had, not the most palatable ones.

I hosted a reading and writing retreat in the fall, and one of the gifts I gave to attendees was an embroidered hat with fun bookish phrases, and “unlikable female character” was one of the phrases they could choose from. Afterward, I wore one myself, posted a photo in it on Instagram, and people seemed to like it! I made sure the phrase wasn’t trademarked, then figured out how to offer them as merch. To be honest, I had no idea who would buy them, but I just passed my 100th sale!

I am a lifelong people pleaser. I never want to be seen as difficult. I have trouble being direct and setting boundaries. I try to remember now that I always want to be kind to myself and to others, but that has less to do with being liked than I think. The hat helps!

THAO: I love my own UFC hat and wear it with such pride! Just this morning, I came across a great flash piece by Deb Olin Unferth called “Likable.” In it, she has this gutting line I can’t stop thinking about—

Or had she become less likable simply by growing older—so that she might be doing the same thing she always did, but because she was now forty-one, not twenty, it had become unlikable because any woman doing something at forty-one is more unlikable than a woman doing it at twenty?

I do wonder how much age and evolution has to do with my own leaning into the unlikable. Because I care less about fitting into certain modes of femininity and apologize far less than I once did, some might be less tolerant of the way I (and women like us!) exist in the world. I find that for women, a lack of compliance often results in some societal consequence, usually a withholding of approbation from the community. You can’t talk about unlikable female characters without talking about the patriarchy!

However, I was speaking with a friend of mine, a college professor, and she mentioned that among her female Gen Z students, she senses less of an imposition of performative likability that some of us Millennials might have had instilled upon us. That feels gallivanting. Maybe there will be a revolution of unlikable characters in the near future, both in real life and on the page.

But speaking of real life; let’s pivot to our personas as authors in this age of hyper-visibility. Do you feel a pressure toward traditional likability?

OLIVIA: Oh, yeah. I always want people to like me, especially readers. I think the fact that I know some people won’t like my books (that’s the name of the game!) makes me feel even more pressure for them to like me.

THAO: I remember one of my first public appearances as an author. I was incredibly nervous, even though everyone was so lovely and welcoming. Then during the Q&A, a man asked a culturally insensitive question that made the tenor of the room shift—we all paused, not quite believing what we heard. I stumbled, then issued a generic and placating response, mostly sidestepping the question. In retrospect, I wish I’d responded more directly; with courtesy and empathy, obviously, because I have respect for all readers and attendees. But I realized that my response was couched in a fear of how I’d be perceived. I didn’t want to be seen as difficult or ungrateful, even though I certainly wasn’t ungrateful.

It’s a tough balance as an author. We love our readers and we are so appreciative of everyone’s time. Yet, it’s vulnerable to be public-facing and, as I said, rather unprecedented in the long arc of literary history in which writers once largely did their work without having to step outside too often. Access comes with so much opportunity—and challenges! And as a Woman of Color, I think a lot about what it means to exist in predominantly white spaces. The code-switching, the multiple consciousnesses, the imagined reflection one sample casts on the whole. I want to be liked because, at some points of my life, it was dangerous not to be liked. But we have so many templates for existing now and I’m incredibly grateful for that!

Do you remember the first UFC you encountered in literature or media? How did that character shape your understanding of what was considered acceptable “likable” behavior in society?

OLIVIA: Books-wise, it’s possible it was Amy Dunne of Gone Girl. Obviously, there are a lot of reasons she would be disliked by a reader, ha. But she’s also smart, and even amidst her most horrific impulses, she has a point. By the end of the book, you understand her even if you don’t condone her choices. That, to me, is so much more interesting than someone who acts in all the ways women “should” behave.

THAO: Amy Dunne is a good one! Mine was Mary Lennox from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I remember that she was described as plain, disagreeable, and spoiled—a real antidote to some of the other female children’s book characters, who were mostly precocious, warm-hearted girls with low-stakes foibles. In the end, Mary Lennox gets a good character redemption arc and you understand more about where her inner motivations come from, but it was the first time I’d seen a character presented as abjectly unlikable by the author herself. I felt a certain freedom in that. I could be a disagreeable child, I readily admit that now, and a part of me was probably tired of seeing such paragons of young behavior! I longed for a little complication, a little texture to my characters.

Why do you think it’s so important that we continue to write (and be!) unlikable female characters?

OLIVIA: I think fiction allows us to go to incredibly real, vulnerable places that are hard to explore or make sense of otherwise. To me, the whole point of writing (other than processing my own experience in the world) is that someone might read it and see some piece of themselves reflected back—whether that is the best parts or the “worst” parts is sort of beside the point, I think, because the end result is what’s important: Someone feels a little less alone than they did when they started reading.

Plus, I think reading about multifaceted, rich, vibrant characters makes it easier to give ourselves some grace. We all can probably name characters that we love who are layered, complicated, and “not for everyone.” In a way, loving characters like this helps me love myself more, too.

THAO: I love that, Olivia! Who couldn’t use more grace? And “not for everyone” is such a good way of thinking about how we can exist in the world. I joked with a good friend that my tombstone would read “A Little Too Much.”

Likability was on my mind a lot as I worked on The Seekers of Deer Creek, my forthcoming novel, because both sisters in the book are flawed in different ways. I projected future feedback onto them—would readers find Vivi too harsh? Was Calla too annoyingly erratic?—partly because there does seem to be a desire for character relatability that, for some, becomes conflated with likability. It was only when I could let go of the reins of audience that I could really see the characters moving on the page in a way that felt vivid and specific to them. They could be frustrating, but they were, at least, real to me. And it’s fine if not everyone likes the characters (or me). It’s not easy, but the world continues to turn. I try to remind myself that the best stories are never written out of fear, only freedom.

Thank you so much, Olivia, for all your wise words and the best hat I’ll wear all year. Preorder Little One (you won’t regret it!), subscribe to Olivia’s newsletter, and visit her Instagram for more updates on her many, fantastic projects!

I always say that the book cover is the first moment in the publishing process where I can truly conceive of the book as something that’ll exist outside of my brain. Of course, having sold the book, I understood that there would eventually be readers. But it’s the cover that cements this knowledge, makes it all tangible. And this cover—this cover—by brilliant Ploy Siripant! I couldn’t imagine one that better captures the interplay of art and family, of mystery and legacy in The Seekers of Deer Creek.

PREORDER THE BOOK

For my other two novels (also designed by Ploy), I had clearer ideas of what the cover might look like. I made mood boards, pulled out relevant thematic notes, even provided sample color palettes. But for The Seekers of Deer Creek, I felt only a sense of possibility. Curiosity about what could unfold.

So, with this ephemeral sense of direction, I sent a collection of existing covers I liked, along with this brief note to the team:

“I’d love for the cover to feel expansive, like the beginning of a dark fairytale or mystery, like a piece of art unto itself. It’d be so lovely to feel, when looking at the book, as if you’re on the threshold of an enigmatic space, with accompanying tension in the composition or typography. One last note that might be helpful: The painting in the novel is Surrealist, but the novel itself is not Surrealist, which feels like an important distinction to make when setting the visual tone for the cover design. Please let me know if you need any clarifications at all; I’m so much more attuned to the emotion in this book than the actual mechanics of the design!”

The selected cover was my immediate favorite for its nuance and textural detail, the vivid colors, the draw of the woodland scene. We tweaked type treatments and, of all things, the eye you see peeking through the layered background, then we were off to the publishing races. Now, I’m so excited to tell you that you can pre-order your own copy of The Seekers of Deer Creek (coming August 4, 2026) and discover this art mystery for yourself.

PREORDER THE BOOK

Here’s a publisher’s summary with more about the book! I’d love if you shared the link with anyone who might love sister stories, family secrets, and insider looks into art history.

From the national bestselling author of Banyan Moon, a captivating, evocative story of two estranged sisters on a quest to find a painting by a forgotten Vietnamese artist that holds the truth of their family’s fractured past.

Aside from the fact they are sisters, Vivi and Calla Nguyễn have little in common. Vivi, the eldest, lives an orderly and predictable life. She works as an art conservator at a museum in Chicago, carefully preserving pieces of the past, all the while refusing to examine her own dark history. Calla leads a much bolder, if occasionally reckless, existence. She’s an accomplished artist with a flair for the dramatic, charming and intriguing everyone she meets. She’s also a recovering addict, constantly causing Vivi to worry.

Months after the two fall out in the wake of their father’s death, Calla appears on the steps of the museum with a sketch and a letter she found in their father’s belongings. The sketch is an exact copy of Blue Mirror, a striking painting by a Vietnamese painter named K.P. Lý. In the letter, Lý writes about a mysterious lost work of art. Calla is convinced it is meant for their family, and that it was their father’s deathbed wish for her and Vivi to find it together. Intrigued yet reluctant to follow her capricious sister, Vivi must decide whether she’s willing to face or shut the door to the past.

From the ghostly Wisconsin woods to a glittering estate in the French countryside to a sprawling ancestral home teetering on the edge of a ravine in Việt Nam, The Seekers of Deer Creek is a story of sisters, art, and the irresistible gravity of the past—how it endures across time and generations, always present even when buried.

When you’re in a rut, it can feel impossible to see your way out. That frustrating sameness wrestles you back into the muck until you think: well, maybe I will never do the things I loved ever again. Reading ruts are particularly burdensome, because, unlike cleaning ruts and relationship ruts and food ruts, no societal force is really compelling you to do the thing you’re avoiding, so you can not read with impunity. You can not read indefinitely, until not reading becomes more the norm than its alternative.

I suspect that’s happened to many of us in the wake of world doom and piles of everyday distractions that keep our imaginations leashed. There’s a video series that occasionally pops up on my feed where a man roams around town and asks strangers, “How many books have you read this month?” The median answer skews closer to zero. I’ve been there. Time and time again, I’ve slogged through the mire of the DNF, a wasteland of uninspired hours and apathetic page turns, wondering if I’d ever find my way out.

After my BA in English literature, I went through what felt like a five-year reading rut. I entered graduate school right after undergrad and dutifully consumed every book on the syllabi: the classics, the heavy-hitting theorists, the scholars who liked to contradict the heavy-hitting theorists. But it all felt dry as toast to me. I could have been reading the back of a toothpaste tube. Years later, as I wandered in my postpartum fog, I tried to spend the midnight feeding hours with an e-reader, but it felt like no information could pass through my filter of interest. After I published my debut novel, every book on my TBR felt like a confrontation, rather than an invitation (a discussion for another time!).

But, like all ruts, the reading rut is not a terminal condition. It takes just one interesting book to pull you out, landing on the banks with a gasp of relief, coming to yourself like a long-lost friend. I can’t remember the exact books that wrenched me from my various ruts over the years, but I can picture their commonalities. They were likely inventive in form or arresting in voice. They were also probably short; or, if not short, they were—excuse the cliched blurb-speak—propulsive in pacing. Reading them did not feel like work. My rut-breaking books aren’t usually the award-winners or the books that challenge me. They’re books that turn the lens of perception ever so slightly, enough to make language feel new and surprising again.

Everyone’s rut-breaker will be different, but, in case you find yourself in one of those prolonged reading slumps, here are five books that’ll turn the lens a bit for you.

Wedding People by Alison Espach

After I finished this one, I thought, “Why did I wait so long to read it?” The concept isn’t, on its surface, terribly novel: A woman shows up at a hotel where a wedding will be held, the odd one out in a sea of moneyed celebrants. But the writing, like all of Espach’s work, is keen and insightful, flush with fresh dialogue and gentle yet interesting twists. It’s not hard to see how this book was a runaway hit: it brings all the pleasures of reading to the fore.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

This epistolary novel makes a reader feel as if they’ve been allowed to rifle through the mail of an imminently interesting human. On a whim, I picked up a sample late one night when I couldn’t sleep, then immediately purchased the e-book, staying up into the wee hours to finish. Through gradual revelations, we are let into the intimate spaces of a brilliant woman’s mind and allowed to know her life and past through the letters that connect her to those around her. She writes everyone from Joan Didion to the customer service agent with whom she’s struck a virtual friendship, each letter entertaining and unusual.

Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill

Can a surly and carnivorous lake monster be loveable? Jenny Greenteeth is. We’re introduced to green-skinned, long-taloned Jenny at the moment when a shackled witch gets thrown into her lake, an inconvenience that ends up leading Jenny, a decided creature of habit, into a months-long adventure she never saw coming. Combining elements of folk horror with an epically magical quest, Greenteeth is a warm fairy tale for adults who love Arthurian legends, grumpy heroes, and sly humor.

Talking at Night by Claire Daverley

If you crave the pull of unrequited romance, Daverley’s love story sweeps you into the story of Will and Rosie, two humans whose need for one another is outweighed only by the circumstances that pry them apart, time after time. The quick dialogue is reminiscent of early Sally Rooney while the seaside setting only adds to that sense of nostalgic yearning. Because we get to follow the lovers over the years, we become more and more invested with each chapter.

The Names by Florence Knapp

The hook got me. In this novel, Cora must settle on a name for her newborn son. Her husband expects her to choose a family name. Her nine-year-old daughter suggests another. And Cora herself is circling around a name she knows that her husband will despise. In alternating chapters, over the span of thirty-five years, we see how the baby’s life will unfold as he bears each of these three names. The writing is spare and lovely, while the plot gallops forward with an emotional gravitas and urgency that keeps a reader turning pages. I think about this book all the time and wish I could read it for the first time again.

Like many, my first word was “ba”—or Dad, in Vietnamese—uttered in a rambling patter song that, perhaps, echoed the urgency of longing. I wish I could remember the first English word I ever spoke. Probably, it was something like “hello” or “please,” or one of the many other building blocks en route to social courtesy. In that way, a simple word can ease open a new story.

Science tells us that after the age of one, children will typically be able to understand about 50 words; four short years later, at the age of five, those same kids can understand up to 10,000 words. This leap only accelerates with every passing year, though the progress does stall into adulthood, with an average twenty-year-old only amassing 42,000 words. With a 79% rate in U.S. literacy as of 2024, I can only imagine a collapse of the word acquisition curve in years to come.

Once, after a speech at a book festival, a participant approached me and said, “You love words.” I began to agree, but she cut in and said, “No, I mean, you really love words.” And that’s true. My logophilia isn’t a passing fancy; at times, it skirts the edge of propriety. If I encounter a word I haven’t heard, I’m compelled to sit with that word for minutes at a time, turning it over and over on my tongue the way one might roll a sweet morsel in the mouth. I want to taste it, to consume it and make it mine. I doodle it in my notebook like a lover’s name. If I’ve searched too long and fruitlessly for the correct word, I am glum and remote. I recognize in myself an avariciousness about language that is, maybe, rooted in an erstwhile dearth of it.

When I entered kindergarten, I knew only a handful of English words. I didn’t understand how to tell the teachers that I was to ride on the school bus at the end of the day, resulting in a frenzied pickup from my poor mother, who spoke about the same amount of English as me. For months, I was marooned into myself, a castaway without a means of communicating to the outside world of the classroom. My thoughts and desires were stagnant; I moldered in loneliness. And then, miraculously, I began to reach for a new word, and another, juggling each in my mind until I discovered that their mellifluous arrangement could build a door for me to walk through. As I was learning to speak English, I concurrently learned to read and write in English, so the three are interconnected for me, pillars of logic and emotion. Without them, I am deserted again on the island, adrift in incomprehension.

These days I collect words like a magpie, running to my dictionary app each time I encounter a word I don’t understand. I want to dissect its definition like a specimen on a lab table, teasing apart the etymology and precise cultural connotation until I can confidently use that word in my own life. In my most joyful moments, I can hear the harmony of words strung together with lift and rhythm. Sometimes, I see words as tiny animals crawling on the page, each with its specific character and motivation. An unexpected pun can spin me on my axis of delight for hours. Portmanteaus jog my pulse. And when I misplace the meaning of a word, I feel despair and self-betrayal, as if I’ve lost a precious object. Words are more alive to me than many other things I have encountered.

If you’re reading this newsletter, I suspect that you also nurse a keen affection for language and its manifold pleasures. It’s labyrinthine, full of hidden corridors we might explore, mental traps we must avoid. I think of language—that ancient art of expression—as a sort of treasure hunt. You rifle through the not-quites until you land upon that word or phrase that is the just-right. That resulting satisfaction is an exultant triumph of aptitude over its dolorous opposite, helplessness. Each time I add a new word to my ever-expanding satchel, I find myself pulled into the light of understanding, as I was so many years ago in that tiny kindergarten classroom that housed a rotating spectrum of curious, word-hungry minds.

Just for fun, here are a handful of magpie-gatherings I’ve jotted down from the last weeks of reading*:

• Susurration: a murmur, or a whispering sound

• Shambolic: obviously disorganized or confused

• Psychopomp: a conductor of souls to the afterworld

• Pellucid: reflecting light evenly from all surfaces; easy to understand

• Turbid**: deficient in clarity; characterized by or producing obscurity

• Borborygmus: intestinal rumbling

• Frangible: readily or easily broken

* Definitions from Merriam-Webster.

** Frustratingly, I’ve looked this word up many times over and can’t seem to cement its meaning into my personal lexicon.

What words have given you pause or delight? Let’s share them with each other. Language is rich and plentiful. In a time of scarcity in good and true things, we can all revel in the abundance of words.

Last night, we held our first bonfire of the season. Ribbons of smoke curled into a lengthening dusk as our feet wiggled toward the flames. Toasty marshmallows wilted on sticks, while at the edge of the yard dimples of light blinked from the descent of the evening fireflies. It was an ordinary, essential moment within the slurry of travel and chores and back-to-school events. As I sat with my husband and daughter, I thought of how relieved I was for a dispensation from the brutal heat. I could nearly catch that brief but potent glimpse of something new on the horizon.

It’s been a sweet summer. But fall is upon us and fall is a time for kindling.

Kindling works on our creativity in much the same way it acts upon logs and tinder. It’s a process of igniting what lies underneath by finding a tender, combustible beginning of an idea, then nurturing that idea into something we want to own. If we’re lucky, the kindling catches into spark and flame, a warm breath to part the cold reaches. Unlike the quick-spreading urgency of a bonfire, I think of emotional kindling as a slower act that requires patience and stamina in order to unearth what hides within our bones. It’s a meditative pause that, with the gentlest of prods, can become something so much greater than the sum of its parts.

I’m tiptoeing into a fledgling novel now and I am finding that this is the most deliberate period of discovery I’ve experienced with a project. Because I’ve adhered to deadlines for other books, arbitrary or otherwise, I’ve never allowed myself to linger in the moment of inception for so long. This time, rather than measuring my progress in word counts or external milestones, I’ve been tracking movement by the flickers of life I see in my characters, their erratic yet satisfying leaps from the plane of imagination into some in-between space on the page. I keep feeling that the world I’m trying to reach is flitting in my periphery, accessible only by a cautious turn of the head.

This is kindling, a blush of heat and light, an unhurried pivot toward curiosity.

I’ve found this sensation in other, unexpected areas of my life. Friendships I want to excavate more deeply, a partnership I get to regard anew. Classic books that I skipped out on in my teen years but want to reexamine. The gradual transformation of the trees outside my window, a shift that feels like the opening strains of an old song. Sometimes this sense of kindling can be a tease; a frustration, even. I’m seized with a keen ache for that future moment of conflagration. But what happens before, the first gasp when an incandescent particle touches ignitable matter, can be just as radiant. Just as essential. For now, I’ll dawdle in that unformed country of kindling, knowing that traveling there is also a gift.

Wherever you are in this life, I hope that you are kindled by the ideas and people around you. I hope you can nurture what is meaningful, what is joyful, what is warm and bright. Because the kindling heralds change, and change, for better or worse, is the only thing promised within this cusp of seasons.

Et Cetera

• Room to Read, a wonderful organization that focuses on global literacy, is hosting a reading pledge in celebration of International Literacy Day. Just twenty minutes of reading a day to enhance our lives immeasurably. And if you’re able, please consider making a donation to this cause—all donations are matched this month!

• On the book front: we have an elegant interior design for The Seekers of Deer Creek, one sprinkled with many thoughtful visual references. I’ll see cover designs this week and will share the final with great eagerness. This is the phase in book publishing that swivels the lens from that internal editing cave to all that goes out into the world. I love this moment; it’s one of hope and excitement.

• And a read for kindling the heart: The Leaving Season, a memoir in essays by Kelly McMasters. This is a thoughtful examination on marriage, art, and parenthood, exploring what it means to stay and what it means to leave your love story behind.

• In personal news, we adopted a cat named Marshmallow Bandit, an affectionate colorpoint with an incredible knack for finding the secret corners of our home. She’s brought joy and peace into our household, and also, an element of mystery! I keep threatening to take her to a cat psychic to learn about the lives she’s lived before she joined ours.

I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be releasing another novel with Mariner early next summer (exact date coming). The Seekers of Deer Creek is a whirlwind mystery and family saga rooted in sisterhood and the resurrective promise of art. In this book, two estranged sisters travel the world, trailing a Surrealist painting with the power to unleash a storm of secrets about their past.

I began the novel two years ago, shortly before Banyan Moon published, and it took me some time to find the story I wanted to tell. If every novel teaches a writer something, The Seekers of Deer Creek has taught me the art of patience and surrender. As I drafted the novel, each time I attempted to steer the story in one direction, the Nguyễn sisters stubbornly tugged me the opposite way, onto the path they wanted to follow. Back into the dark fairytale of their past. Back to the art, to the love waiting for them there. Eventually, I let go of the reins, and the novel is all the better for it.

In the next months, I’m eager to share more about the inspiration for the book, the cover (forthcoming from brilliant designer Ploy Siripant, who designed my last two covers), and any other news, but for now, I’ll say that I’m grateful that The Seekers of Deer Creek is officially making its way into the world and that you’ll soon meet the sisters, Vivi and Calla, two determined women who’ve crashed into my heart and built themselves a little hideaway there.

At a recent book event, a lovely reader asked when she might expect something new from me. Hesitantly, she asked, “It’s been a moment, hasn’t it?” I paused to consider. By the time The Seekers of Deer Creek makes its way into the world, three years will have passed since my debut novel published. Time has felt elastic in many ways, with a teeming news cycle, disorderly days that domino together, drafts upon drafts that folded under the weight of all I left unsaid. These have been challenging years in which I’ve had to silence the shoulds to make way for the musts. I wouldn’t have been able to keep going without the team around me, professional and personal. My agent and my editors, my husband and daughter, my friends, none of whom ever lost faith. The stardust inside the moments.

A moment can hold so much growth. Growth as an artist, as a person. Private struggles; public humility. That reader was right; it has been a moment, however you choose to quantify that notch of time. But I hope this moment—this novel—is one worth waiting for.

Thanks so much for being here and supporting my work!

When you start paying attention to writing advice, you’ll find that there are lots of decrees surrounding the proper use of punctuation. I had a professor in graduate school who called for a ban on exclamation points; another, on excess italics. All in good faith—we could each stand to be more concise and self-suppressed. But one mark you’ll never be able to pry from my cold, dead hands is the almighty em dash. Because it’s more than a punctuation mark. It’s an ethos, a state, a heady rush of feeling that tolerates no space between thought to thought. It’s an energy! (Exclamation point and italics all at once, for you rule-breakers out there.)

My brilliant friend Lizzie recently forwarded this tweet that likened the em dash to a vibe, subject only to the dictates of one’s heart. I reshared the tweet, to lots of agreement among my writer- and reader-friends. Punctuation, after all, is a potent tool of communication, and one that has fallen by the wayside in the efficiency era of text-speak. Since I read that tweet, I’ve been thinking of the purpose of the versatile—sometimes ambiguous—em dash and why it strikes such a chord in our ethos.

The em dash is one of the most widely used marks nowadays, with uses ranging from the addition of suspense to the substitution of quotation marks. These varied uses are dependent almost entirely on context; where the dash appears in the sentence, who is using the dash, and what words surround it. A handy and inscrutable little tool. As someone with mild typographical synesthesia, I imagine the em dash in two ways. It’s either a nail set on its side, stiff and stalwart, or a spread wing, graceful and expansive. These disparate images tell me something about the flexibility of the em dash.

A brief history of the em dash—

Em dashes are differentiated from other dashes by their width. The term “em” comes from the days of wood- and metal-set typography, delineating a space or mark that is roughly the size of the letter “m” in that particular typeface. (An en dash is a truncated version that set to the width of the letter “n”. I have little use for en dashes.) Dashes are called such because the marks on paper are often forceful and swift. The em dash, in particular, was used as a space-savings device, acting as a convenient bridge between sentiments. It was once the everyman of punctuation, serving many applications across fiction and journalism.

Though em dashes were popular in the early days of printing, they fell out of use with typewriters, which didn’t have a designated em dash key. A writer would have to use double hyphens (“--”) to signal an em dash, a practice that feels unsightly at best and mildly sacrilegious at worst. Nowadays, word processing programs and messaging apps will often automatically convert double hyphens to an em dash. Thankfully, the mark has been restored to our keyboards, so we needn’t suffer from a paucity of dashes.

Apparently, there are such things as two-em-dashes and three-em-dashes, in which multiple em dashes are smushed together. For what purpose? I truly cannot tell you. I haven’t seen either in the wild, but they might finally push a furrow in my dash-approbative brow.

As for the em dash’s modern use—

The em dash isn’t without detractors. Editors will rightfully begin to notice if you use too many. An excess can make you look unhinged or, at least, as breathless as an Emily Dickinson poem.* And it’s true that an em dash can become a crutch, releasing the writer of the responsibility for clear and ordered thought. But that can be said of any lazily used communication device.

What we know for certain is that punctuation, like people, is ever-evolving. For a time, em dashes were eschewed as the mark of punctuational profligacy. Now, the tide seems to have turned for my battered little friend. In my own writing, I find that a well-placed em dash can revive a turn of phrase and provide access to the writer’s interiority. Here, the em dash proclaims, is the moment when the soul pauses, when the mind trips over itself. The em dash is humanity, scattered and unfettered.

In moments of tension, my characters sometimes end their statements with an em dash, which denotes an abrupt stop. At the end of the day— For me, this device often signals that there’s a world underneath the silence, one in which emotions riot. And like their author, my characters’ thoughts often overlap, fighting for dominance. The em dash can signal this quick hopscotch from thought to thought. This might be true—or maybe it’s more like this. The em dash complicates the experience of interiority on the page like no other punctuation mark.

In my first corporate job, one of my editors insisted on adding a space before and after my em dashes, creating a duet of unfilled breaths that bothered me to no end. Even though many modern publications disagree, I hold that there should be no space before or after an em dash. This choice is deliberate, historical. So, hunched in my cramped cubicle, I went back into my red-lined doc and removed each space again in an act of petty rebellion. (I’ve since let go of this rigidity, especially in casual correspondence.) In my brief time as a typographer, I was a hawk about the use of a hyphen versus an en dash versus an em dash. Each are distinct in usage and character. Conflating them could change the meaning of a sentence entirely. Punctuation is the joinery of a piece of writing, no matter how brief, and it behooves us to honor it where we can.

Of course, once I started paying attention to em dashes, I noticed them in everything I read. It’s the frequency illusion. Are em dashes really taking over or am I just more receptive to them? Both, probably. (I certainly became more aware of em dashes when writing this post!)

I wonder if there’s a surge of em dashes in the zeitgeist because it reflects the urgency we feel in public discourse. The need to be heard amid screaming headlines and run-on commentary. Many of us feel interrupted and disenfranchised in our daily lives, so it makes sense that the em dash presents an apt representation of this disconnect.

Or perhaps an em dash is the antidote to AI corporate-speak. It’s a flush of enthusiasm and uncertainty in places where we could stand to have a little less efficiency. The em dash offers a breakage of thought that fractures possibilities of expression. Our sentences become kaleidoscopic, rather than linear. And maybe that’s just what we need in this post-narrative reality.

For my part, I enjoy those who can employ an em dash to great effect. They’re my people. And the detractors, well—

Ultimately, em dashes remind us that we are not sets of distilled bullet points but unfurling landscapes of dots and dashes that, even after five millennia of written words, can still feel new. The em dash makes us believe that our human consciousnesses—messy, beautiful, sublime—remain ​​sui generis and, mercifully, irreplaceable.

* In Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour, one of the characters writes Dickinsonian emails in which em dashes precede each of her line breaks. About Dickinson’s em dashes, critics opine aplenty. One wrote that the dashes are “graphic representation[s] in the poem of the presence of the creative impulse, of the spontaneity of the emotional force that went into the composition.” That feels like the truest explanation of this inscrutable mark.

There are three warp whistles hidden inside the landscape of the original NES Super Mario Bros. 3 video game. The whistles transport players to an island of magic pipes, which will let you leapfrog into different worlds, like a treacherous underwater kingdom, the ochre-toned Desert Land, and—my favorite—a world where everything is comically oversized. Players can only complete Super Mario Bros. 3 in record time with the aid of these warp whistles.

I can’t overstate the triumph of finding your first warp whistle. It feels like peeling back the layers of (virtual) existence and finding a secret gift from the game creators, who are, after all, the world creators. With a warp whistle, you’re no longer just a cog of goomba-stomping and pipe-climbing, forced to contend with the realities of linear gameplay. A whistle gives you the power to travel at light speed. To transform your surroundings. It maximizes your experience in a game that doesn’t allow save-states. And a whistle does what all good game features should—it surprises the player.

I’m not sure how I stumbled across my first whistle. Back in the ‘90s, when I first started playing video games, there weren’t as many online forums dedicated to cheats and shortcuts. I don’t recall talking to friends about Super Mario Bros. 3 or playing with anyone. But it’s implausible that I would have had the spontaneous notion to force my avatar to kneel on a specific white block, then run beyond the limits of the first level to find a warp whistle. I wasn’t adventurous like that. But maybe this is the case of the whistle finding the player, rather than the other way around.

Over the years, the warp whistle has become a satisfying metaphor for my family’s immigration path to the States, though we were hopping across worlds to find safety and prosperity, rather than to rescue a princess. In 1990, we flew from Vietnam to Thailand for a layover before crossing the Pacific and landing somewhere off the white-sand shores of Florida. The journey had the trappings of a fantasy quest, especially for a wide-eyed kid who’d never been outside the radius of her small town. There were new landscapes to traverse, helpers to find, and enemies aplenty to defeat. With each arrival in a new place, we were once again pioneers, grasping for a rulebook even as we forged blindly ahead.

Like many, I was introduced to video games through playing Oregon Trail at the school computer lab—and later, its less-popular cousin, Amazon Trail. The Oregon Trail graphics weren’t all that impressive, but I relished the clear-cut, immensely satisfying goal. You just had to survive. Isn’t that, really, the point of any game? I’ve always been drawn to the ones that plunk the protagonist in a new place, forcing them to use their wits to navigate novel challenges. Those are the games that seem to have the most staying power, because they prod at some innate, evolutionary urge to adapt and find our footing in a world unknown.

Such, of course, is the immigrant’s most prized survival tactic. Matt Ortile, author of The Groom Will Keep His Name, remembers his first experiences with gaming: “I grew up in a household where my parents should have been divorced. I also went to an all-boys school as a femme kid who would later grow up to be a queer adult. With games, I had my own little world wherein I could weather the storm of everything that was going on around me.”

During my own summers as a kid, I stayed at a daycare with one Nintendo set that all the kids crowded around. I couldn’t get enough of Super Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong. The sounds of the falling barrels still remind me of afternoons sprawled on the rug of a sunny playroom, cheering my fellow players on. Once, while the other daycare kids gathered outside for drippy popsicles by the playground, I begged to be allowed to stay inside, playing Nintendo in blessed solitude. I’d transpose myself into another world, where life could be as simple as jumping for a glowing star that would make you invincible.

In video games, I saw myself as a hero, a conqueror with agency. About gamers, Dino Roman says, “We know how to celebrate the victories, but we also know how to handle defeat. We understand the formula: If life gets tough, go out and grind some more. Recruit some help and come back for the win.” There’s something so matter-of-fact yet empowering about that statement. “Coming back for the win” hints at a sense of persistence in the face of the impossible.

When my mother remarried, we moved into a new house with my stepfather. It was rough going, merging three disparate personalities into one small household. I stayed in my room a lot. But one summer, my mother bought me my own Nintendo set from a garage sale down the street. She paid $20 for the console, plus the Duck Hunt shooters, and a cardboard box full of games, like Super Mario Brothers, Kirby’s Adventure, and Mega Man, along with a bunch of sports games that I never touched. She installed an old boxy television in my room and allowed me to hook the console up to it.

It was an unexpected gift from my tired, generally undemonstrative mother. We saved our gift-giving for birthdays and Christmas, and she had never given me any indication that she was listening when I rambled about the video games I played at daycare. Games as a whole just weren’t part of our vernacular as a family; there were no board game nights, no hands of cards played after dinner. Unlike my American-born stepfather, who made time for hunting and fishing, I’d never truly seen the adults in my immigrant family engaging with hobbies. I’d never seen them play.

That day, though, my mother watched me defeat a few levels of Mario before disappearing back into the kitchen. I couldn’t believe that she would allow me to spend time playing games, when I knew she preferred me to study or practice the violin. I’d grown up with the weight of my family’s yearning for a better life, which usually boiled down to some instruction to “study harder.” Try harder, be more than the sum of your parts.

Video games seemed a categorical waste. There was nothing educational about them. I couldn’t add my high score to a college application. They didn’t even make for great dinner table conversation. My grandparents were highly disapproving of the whole thing, warning my mother about the dangers of screens and violence (a cautionary tale echoed through the annals of video game discourse). But, in an unexpected act of rebellion, she let me play on, into bedtime, through long weekend afternoons. After that first day, she never again sat down to watch me play. But she didn’t stop me, either.

In retrospect, I think she was trying to give me something of my own. Within a video game is the promise of space. They’re designed to simulate escape. My family’s lives, at that point, were tightly prescribed around school and work. Games provided me with something outside of my typical routine. A chance to sink into imagination, without worrying about a tangible, real-world end goal. To exist outside of myself and the urge to perform in the world, as a straight-A student or a dutiful daughter. What my mom was giving me was permission to play, like any other kid.

Over the years, I’ve dipped back into gaming a few times. In college, a friend taught me how to install a simulator on my computer that replicated the NES experience, though it lagged horribly and I could never get used to the computer commands. Later, I got on the Atari Flashback train, though I’d never played Atari as a kid. When Animal Crossing became the most popular cozy game a few years ago, a coworker raved about the meditative quality of diving for pearls on her virtual island each morning before work. She gifted me a Nintendo Switch for Christmas, and it soon became a standby in our household.

Unlike in my own childhood gaming days, my husband, daughter, and I all played games regularly on the Switch together, particularly during the first winters of the pandemic. My friend gave us a copy of Mario Odyssey, and I watched as my six-year-old daughter’s eyes widened at the beautifully rendered opening—much more complex than any of the graphics from her favorite television shows, and a far cry from the Super Mario Bros. of yore. She wanted to spend hours watching us play, though she had no desire to play herself, calling the challenges “too scary.” Her fists clenched, squat-bouncing from the sheer adrenaline rush, she’d cheer, “Go, Mario, go!”

I think about how differently her childhood looks from mine. She has a thousand extracurriculars and a full calendar of playdates. Her rooms are stacked with toys, some of which she routinely forgets about. We are privileged now to have a surplus of time on our hands, and many options with which to fill that time. Play is a regular part of our vocabulary, and as such, my daughter is distanced from much of the struggle my family went through as immigrants in a new country. That was, after all, the goal: to make a life of broader possibility for our children. And yet, the guilt never quite leaves you.

Gaming has always been a site of joy and escape for me, but when I escaped into a virtual world, I couldn’t help thinking about the people I left behind—people who never had the option of play themselves. My mother showering late at night after a shift, then falling into bed quickly after. My grandparents’ cabinet of portable massagers, meant to soothe their limbs from standing at a factory throughout the day. Even now, far removed from those early days in America, leisure will always feel to me like a kind of cheat; a gift from the game gods or, more accurately, an unearned warp whistle bestowed by another player.

These days, I’m less drawn to games of constant action; the ones where you must fly to avoid balls of lava or rain lasers on a slew of robots. At night, while watching TV with my husband, I play Dr. Mario on the Switch, lulling myself with the simple task of matching colors on the screen. I stop after the first loss, never bothering to retry a level. What draws me to gaming is no longer adventure, or mystery, as when I was a kid. Now, my life open to more possibility than ever, what I crave is the routine of the play. The tidiness of clearing a board. As far as I can tell, you can play Dr. Mario indefinitely, as long as your fingers are deft enough to control the falling blocks.

There’s no glory in a game like that, perhaps. But there is a satisfying pace, a kind of relentless momentum that promises everlasting play. There is no damsel to save. You don’t return to a home planet after the last level. You just keep going. And sometimes, when life crowds with responsibilities and worries, that sense of moving forward is its own quiet reward.

On the morning of November 6th, I jolted out of a restless sleep around four in the morning, as if tugged by an internal alarm signaling that things were about to change again. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of other women experiencing this strange and prescient awakening around that same hour on that same day. That thread of knowing, strong as ever. 

While I waited for the sun to rise, I paged through the election results on my phone, knowing what I would find, yet not entirely understanding it. Eventually, my actual alarm sounded. I got dressed—all in black, which is of course very dramatic, but mostly unintentional—and silently hugged my husband and woke my daughter up with her usual good morning song. Onward, I said to myself. While walking to school, she and I practiced multiplication facts and planned an upcoming trip to a water park. I smiled at the student crossing guards who were doing silly jigs as they helped us cross. But none of it—the smiles, the jokes, the normalcy—really pierced beneath the surface. Underneath, there was just a river of numbness. A question rising through the murk: What is the next right thing?

In the past two weeks, I’ve listened to thinkers and politicians talk about the necessity of leaning on community. They say community will save us. That it will matter more in the next four years than ever. On an intellectual level, I can comprehend this. I believe it, too. But on the level of feeling, I’m still puzzling over what community actually looks like in practice. Is community the people we see every day walking through our neighborhoods, ones whose values may not align with ours? Or is community just our closest circle of friends, who may be scattered across the country and struggling in their own specific ways? What levels of proximity, both geographical and emotional, constitute the atlas of a thriving community? And, can community also be an instrument of harm?

The simplest and least satisfying answer is that there are manifold versions of community. And there are so many ways to create one. That should feel empowering. But my ever-analytical mind hooks onto a flag of doubt. At its most essential level, community depends on trust and, since the election, I’d lost a good amount of trust in the people around me. Can we—should we—build community without that grain of trust?

When my daughter was born, a friend sent us a copy of Counting on Community, a beloved board book by author and activist Innosanto Nagara. We loved the rich colors and the textured dimensionality of the illustrations. The book so quickly became a family favorite that I could read it without really reading it, sliding into that bouncy, rote rhythm of recitation that we use for well-paged children’s classics. Even now, I hear that familiar lilt of whimsy and optimism:

One stuffed piñata for every holiday. Two neighbor friends always there to play. 

So inundated in diapers and cardboardy teething wafers, sunk in sleep regressions and the cadence of happy and often boring days, I didn’t stop to ask myself why we so often reached for Counting on Community. The scenes in the book were almost arcadian in nature: families surrounding heaped tables, children in the streets with soccer balls and nubs of chalk. Maybe, for me, it was a glimpse of a future I assumed would be waiting for us. Now, looking at those old pages, I feel the sting of loneliness. Had we been promised this idyll? Where did I begin to stray from the path of community?

Then I realized: for some, this hopeful little book might reflect a version of reality. For me, it’s become a sidelong glance into a pasture that sometimes feels too foolish to hope for. 

I didn’t grow up within the coils of a tight-knit community. Any community, really. Contained by their various struggles, most of my family members did not often seek the companionship of others. They were stubbornly insulated unto themselves, a unit that held together with crushing strain, until it couldn’t any longer. So when somebody tells me to lean on community, that old, individualistic and cynical part of me rebels. You can’t count on anyone but yourself. If you don’t save you, no one will. 

But aren’t beliefs like that, after all, what got us into this mess? 

If I’m honest, I’ll say that community is probably too big a word for me just now. But another word keeps echoing in my mind, one that feels truer and more attainable. Rootedness. I want to root into the life I’m making. I’m called to go deeper, rather than wider, into my relationships. And I want to find the patience to understand that the tender shoots that arise from the roots, the ones that strain toward the sun, will be transformation enough.

Neither my husband nor I are religious, but we’ve mutually admired the community founded around synagogues, churches, and temples. We longed to find a secular alternative to church that fits our family in this stage of life. Now, perhaps, it’s becoming more clear that we must shape this for ourselves.

In an episode of Erin and Sarah Foster’s podcast, the sisters speak with friendship expert Anna Goldfarb, who suggests that we are asking the wrong questions when it comes to relationships. We wonder why the other party isn’t doing more for us, when the question we should really be asking is: What are we doing for our friends? This service-oriented perspective isn’t altogether comfortable in a society where we consider time a dwindling commodity, but it’s an interesting one to try on. 

When I think about who I want to be in community with, I’ve also begun asking myself whether they would consider me part of their community. Am I a person they can trust with their joys and pains, their trembling cores of humanity? Is my language one of care and commitment? These concerns, at least, feel as if they’re within my control. A small prod of agency, again at my disposal. Intentionality, a more immediate tool to wield.

Maybe trust isn’t the first step to community after all. Maybe the first step looks a little more like faith. For me, it’s not a spiritual faith. It certainly isn’t a faith in our politicians or our systems of justice. The faith I’m reaching for is a smaller sort, yet somehow more enormous, a flawed and human conviction that sputters like a flame, then revives in great and surprising leaps. 

To start, then: a community of one, a flicker of faith, a root that nudges deep into the soil, like a promise settling in. Not everything, no; but one next, right thing.

As a getting-to-know-you question, I sometimes ask people if they remember their first-ever email addresses. I came of age in the early aughts, when you connected to the world wide web via ethernet, when chatrooms loomed large and teens posted cryptic song lyrics as AIM away messages. My first email address was RAINS12343948@aol.com (not the real one; I can’t possibly remember that sequence of nonsense numbers now!). Under duress, I chose that address because, well, I really liked rain? I’ve done more for less, I guess.

And since that original email address, I’ve made half a dozen more accounts, transitioning with jobs and pen names; designating certain accounts for niche purposes, like school newsletters or test emails for my stints in e-commerce. Over the years, I’ve let go of the goofy email addresses in favor of more professional ones. Within that heap of discarded email addresses are identities I’ve shed: the student, the intern, the baby writer who blithely sent her first essay to the New Yorker.

Recently, in order to find a lost password, I had to log into an account that I hadn’t checked in almost a decade. Once I opened it, I was flooded with unread messages that I forgot to forward to myself. Ads from stores where I used to shop, ones I couldn’t picture patronizing anymore, so divorced is my current lifestyle from that glorious miniskirts-and-statement-necklace epoch. There were countless surveys from a film festival I attended in downtown Austin. A sweet note from a friend I’d lost touch with. An odd ask from an ex who I hadn’t heard from in years. As I deleted most of these emails, I couldn’t resist taking a peek at my Sent folder, that graveyard of silly jokes and self-righteous forwards and earnest job applications. 

In the midst of all those dusty communications, there were also pages upon pages of emails that I’d exchanged with my husband, back in the early days of our courtship. At the time, we both worked office jobs that compounded periods of frantic activity with ones of mind-numbing boredom. During those downtimes, we’d often shoot one another quick messages: complaints of our coworkers, suggestions of places to go for dinner, random trivia we’d picked up in the course of the day. I found the first time we wrote “I love you” and the first time he invited me to meet his extended family in Ohio. I remember workshopping my initial email to him with a friend, wondering if the “xo” in the signature was too forward, if I was being too verbose (yes, the answer was/is always yes). Those messages were our version of an epistolary romance. Without them, I wonder if we’d fallen in love so quickly.

In rereading all those old messages, I caught a glimpse of the person I was. Struggling to find my purpose at a job I didn’t altogether like; living in a city I couldn’t afford; experimenting with all the myriad forms of expression that come with being young and hopeful and unwritten. As much as the evidence delivers some pretty potent cringing, I also melt when I encounter the version of me who wasn’t afraid of risks, both emotional and practical. Former Me was sometimes over-confident, often cripplingly sensitive, but always vulnerable. Almost always brave. I like to think that I can find my way back there, to that place where leaps of the heart were the default, not the exception. Maybe in the process, I’ll recover my belief that the future is not, in fact, written in stone.

Halloween has descended on my fall-flecked reach of suburbia, which means that the veil between our world and the spirit world is thin. Perhaps, on this day of possibility, we’ll discover that the veil between our current selves and our past selves isn’t quite so opaque either. What a gift it is to revisit our pasts again, to encounter the ghosts that populate our memories, and to embrace them for what they are: essential markers in an existence that always manages to surprise us. 

Having an alter ego is a funny thing. It’s freeing and exciting, and also, sometimes, more than a little confusing. A few weeks ago, I attended a panel under my romance novelist pen name and found myself staring off into space for a solid five seconds as someone called, repeatedly, for Nora Nguyen. Then, with a terrible flash, I realized that I was Nora Nguyen. In another instance, I apologized profusely to a friend for not responding to some good news on her social media feed, only to realize I had responded, under my other account. And just the other day, I signed a book under the wrong name.

The eggs, they are in all the baskets! But I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Today, Nora and Thao (how annoying that we are speaking in the third person) are incredibly excited to share that Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour is officially out in the world! Look for the book in your local bookstore, as an e-book, or as an audiobook (narrated by the brilliant VyVy Nguyen and Ewan Chung)—all the forms for all the readers. 

One of the questions I’ve been asked is: Why romance? Why now?

Truth is, I’m no romance neophyte. I’ve been reading romance novels since the summer I turned ten, when, bored and mildly delinquent, I roamed the library aisles all day in search of something to pull me from yet another rerun of The Torkelsons. An intrepid South Florida librarian (bless her) had stocked the shelves heavily with Amish romances featuring sun-kissed, white-bonneted heroines staring off into the distant fields as suspendered rogues hung about the periphery. After the first bonnet-ripper, I was hooked! Then came regency romances, romantasies, and all the other niches that fill this warm and welcoming hug of a genre.

The first novel I ever wrote—even before Banyan Moon—was a romance. I stole away to coffee shops before my day job just to clack away at a happy little novel that wasn’t intended for anything but my own delight. That book never went anywhere, but I learned a lot in the process and eventually found the story I was meant to tell, one that speaks to all the yearnings in my heart. Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour is a love letter to so many things: travel, creativity, finding one’s footing after world-shattering grief, surprising community, and—yes, a caveside tryst that had one of my editors fanning herself on the subway. 

I hope you fall in love with stern (but passionate) Adam and reckless (but captivating) Evie, along with the meddlesome aunties and audacious besties that pepper their unforgettable tour through Vietnam. Most of all, I hope you fall in love with all the surprises, big and small, that lead to a happily-ever-after.

These initial weeks are so meaningful to authors in terms of word-of-mouth, reviews, and any other form of support you’re encouraged to offer. I’d love it if you checked out this steamy, whirlwind debut romance of mine, and I hope it fills you with as much joy as it has given me!

And if you’re in central Ohio, I’m hopping around to a few events over the next few months. Please come say hello, if you can! And THANK YOU for your support. I owe this beautiful life and career to readers like you.

Hello! How was your summer? We recently got back from a trip to Portland, Maine, a city that’s successfully captured my lobster-and-donut-loving heart. While there, our little trio visited a couple of bookstores and rode a coastal trolley that’s been around for centuries and dipped into the ice-cold bay. During a turbulence-filled plane ride back home (thank u, climate change!), our chatty flight attendant (Southwest, of course) caught sight of Dan’s paperback cover and asked what he was reading (Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions or You). They talked about the book and then she moved on with the drink cart. She doubled back a little later with a notepad, ready to write down the title, so she could pick it up when we landed. (I, on my Kindle, did not present such a ready invitation for bookish conversation and I was very envious to miss out!)

The sweet interaction got me thinking about how books can be such a powerful form of connection, no matter how fleeting. Of course, we readers tend to share thoughts about books with friends and family, but there’s something about spying a familiar book cover in the wild, in the hands of a stranger, that opens a new door for conversation. It’s a surprise and delight to recognize a cover of a book you’ve read or one you want to read. And it’s a great excuse to mentally pile onto your TBR.

In Portland, I couldn’t stop peeking at the books people were reading. Some were the hot picks of summer, like Percival Everett’s James, Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, Kristin Hannah’s The Women, and Abby Jiminez’s Just for the Summer (many appearances from that bright cover in particular!). Other readers, lounging on sunlit benches or waiting for friends at tiny tables tucked into buzzy restaurants, were engrossed in backlist titles I hadn’t thought about in awhile: Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Still more—at the beach, on their porches, in crowded airport terminals—were bent over books I’d never heard of. There are so many books in the world for so many tastes and styles. It’s the coolest!

If a stranger was reading something I’d finished, I’d speculate on which part of the story they were in based on where the spine opened. Sometimes, if it was a twisty book, like Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast, I’d get a little thrill thinking of them stumbling across the parts that made me gasp. Other times, if it was a book that made me cry, like M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans, I’d long to be paging through those familiar passages again. I’d vicariously live, for a moment, inside their reading lives. 

If the person were reading a book I hadn’t read, I’d sometimes ask how they were liking it; whether they would recommend it. Usually, people are happy to—briefly—share their thoughts about books. (Readers, I find, are some of the nicest people. I am not at all biased!) Even those small and seemingly insignificant moments are enough to sow the seeds of commonality.

Once, someone on an airplane asked me about the ARC I was reading, and we got to talking about what ARCs were and why I had one (blurbing). Then we discovered that she’d recently picked up a copy of *my* book! It was one of my favorite book-snooping conclusions.

E-readers are wonderfully convenient, but one of the best things about them—their discretion—is also the quality that thwarts conversation. People don’t typically lean over to ask what you’re reading on your Kindle (and they shouldn’t, because, in my case, it’s usually smut). 

I also find myself less liable to linger in public places these days, where such interactions might be possible. Working from home, I don’t encounter many people in the course of a day; fewer, still, who are reading. Once, I used to ride the subway for three hours a day, an endless trickle of stops that let on waves of commuters, many with creased paperbacks in hand. This was the earlyish 2000s, before data was reliable and streaming was efficient, and before e-readers, so we got more access to one another’s reading lives then. (I am, predictably, riveted by a TikTok account dedicated to what people are reading on the subways of New York.)

I miss that knowing feeling of seeing a familiar book cover across the way—like glimpsing a friend in a sea of strangers. That comfort, somehow, endeared me to the person reading too. It was the briefest of antidotes to the loneliness that we all, on various levels, find ourselves battling. Books, the unifying force. The equalizer and bridge.

So let’s pretend we’re in a third space now. Imagine me glancing at you from the next table in a crowded coffee shop or across from your seat on the metro, where you’re cradling your latest book. What would you be reading? Would you recommend it? 

In my corner, pumpkin-flavored-something in hand, you’ll find me turning the last pages of Cloud Cuckoo Land by Jonathan Doerr, a masterful door-stopper that moved me immeasurably and still seizes my imagination at unexpected moments. You and I will chat—briefly!—about books. Then we’ll part ways, soaked in the residual warmth of a friendly, low-lift interaction that makes us forget that we’re all just strangers commuting through a lonely world. 

If you’d like to read more from me, please take a look at Banyan Moon, my debut novel, and Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour, my debut romance! Thanks for being here.

Hello! It’s been a moment. I’m currently sizzling in this heat wave, daydreaming about gelato and beaches (is everyone on your feed also in Europe? And are you swooning with jealousy like me?). But not to worry—I’m also enjoying pool time with my family, I’ve written the beginnings of a new book, and I’ve made a significant dent in my towering TBR (more on that below!). I also went to Key West and got reacquainted with Hemingway’s six-toed cats. 

Amidst all this, I’m putting some thought into the state of Wallflower Chats. To be honest, part of what’s kept me away from this newsletter for so long has been my reluctance to define what I want it to be. I know many of you originally subscribed for the longer essays (thank you!), but I’ve felt a greater reluctance to write in-depth about my personal life. As my daughter grows, I want to be respectful of her privacy, and as an author and oversharer, I’m never quite sure what to reveal and what not to reveal about my work. Publishing has so many highs and so many lows! It’s a fine line to straddle—being forthcoming, but also having the right boundaries in place for my mental health. And the newsletter space is crowded—I never want to waste anyone’s time! In any case, I think it’s natural to evolve and I also think it’s okay not to have everything perfectly defined. (My Type 1 tendencies do not enjoy admitting that.)

I recently listened to this podcast episode on stress management and it unlocked something for me about the way I exist in the world. In the episode, Dr. Aditi Nerurkar mentions popcorn brain, a recent phenomenon of compulsive distraction and topic-switching that echoes our experience with social media. Because of the way we scroll through our feeds, often absorbing information in minute and fast-paced clips, many of our brains are now conditioned to mirror this frantic cognitive pattern in our real lives. In my case, I’m finding myself more impatient and unfocused. As I said to my doctor, I feel like it’s so noisy in my head, and there’s a sense of urgency that’s never rooted in anything concrete. Popcorn brain has affected the way I interact with people and even the way I read and write. So one of my goals for this season in life is to find my quiet again, which entails being a little more intentional about how I’m using channels of communication like this one. 

All this to say that I’m still figuring it out, but I miss popping in to say hello, so here I am and hello!

But generally—things are going pretty well in my corner of the universe. Banyan Moon is now in paperback, and it’s fun to see people with the more portable version. Thank you so much to everyone who’s read and supported the novel. You made my debut experience extraordinary!

I’m also very excited to share that I have a whirlwind romance novel coming out under my pen name (Nora Nguyen) called Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour. It’s about two very different personalities (a grumpy CMO and a free-spirited poetess) who are thrown together on a matchmaking tour of a lifetime through the most breathtaking sights in Vietnam. I wrote the book as a love letter to wanderlust and surprising happily-ever-afters, and I hope that you’ll pick up a copy for your swoony, late-summer escape. (It’s out September 24!) Isn’t the cover the best? All my thanks to my cover designer Ploy Siripant and illustrator Decue Wu. If you’re in central Ohio, stay tuned for an update on the launch event!

For Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour, I flew to New York to attend an event appropriately called Shelves and the City, where I got to meet some talented authors, bookish content creators, and the fabulous teams at HarperCollins. I took my requisite selfie at the romance bookshop of my dreams, The Ripped Bodice, learned how to make a paper peony, and ate an enormous lobster roll that I’m still salivating over.

But usually, when I’m not at my laptop, I’m reading on my ratty old armchair. A few books I’ve loved this year  … 

• Leaving by Roxana Robinson: An author-friend recently shared this one on her feed and cautioned that it was slow going. It was, but I realized how much I loved sinking into a novel that devotes such profound attention to the characters and their dynamics. In this one, two former sweethearts rediscover one another in a later season of their lives and grapple with the consequences of their revived affair.

• Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies by Heather Fawcett: I’d characterize this novel as cozy fantasy. It was sweet and delightful and often very funny; an ideal book for an escape. In this first of a trio of books, stern Emily Wilde, Cambridge anthropologist of fae (fairies), finds herself on an unlikely adventure in a remote Norwegian village with her hapless and uncommonly charismatic colleague, Wendell Bambleby, who she suspects might actually be fae royalty. 

• Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino: A moving and powerful exploration of what it means to be human in a disconnected world. In 1977, Adina, a strangely astute infant, is born in Philadelphia at the moment that Voyager 1 launches into space. Her secret: she comes from a faraway planet and has been tasked with sending observations about Earth and its inhabitants to her leaders via a clunky old fax machine. I’ve never read a book like this before and doubt I ever will again.

• The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren: It almost feels trite to recommend a Christina Lauren, because their books are so beloved, but I truly enjoyed every moment of this romcom. Years ago, messy and unmoored Anna married a stranger named Liam for prime student housing, and never quite got around to divorcing him. Liam returns to her life with the grand reveal that he’s the heir to a multimillion-dollar grocery store empire. If Anna agrees to pretend to still be married to Liam (for real, this time) during his sister’s epic island wedding, he’ll pay her an enormous sum that will let her get her life together. It all sounds convoluted (or maybe that’s just my bad summary), but it’s really such a romp of a story. There’s a reason Christina Lauren books come out during the summer!

• Midnight Feast: I know some fell off the Lucy Foley train after The Paris Apartment, but this newest novel hooked me in. It’s all vibes and intrigue. The setting in this book is incomparable: a seaside estate in England bristling with luxury and secrets. There’s an enigmatic founder, disgruntled locals with grudges galore, multiple timelines, and high, high stakes. If you’re looking for a thriller that will transport you and keep you turning pages, this is the one to read. 

• The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo: This Gothic historical fantasy is so different from the other Bardugo books I’ve read, and I really enjoyed getting absorbed in the story. During the Spanish Golden Age, we meet Luzia, a housemaid who has many hidden gifts, including the ability to blend in with her surroundings. All that changes the day her mistress discovers her powers and displays her magic as a party trick. Luzia must now negotiate the treacherous world of Spanish nobility, walking a very fine line between devastating power and danger. The only person she can depend on is an immortal familiar named Santángel, who hoards centuries’ worth of secrets of his own. 

• North Woods by Daniel Mason: My favorite book of the year. With beautiful and precise prose, Mason traces the history of a New England house across the centuries, weaving the stories of its inhabitants in surprising and constantly moving ways. I experienced a wide range of emotion while reading this book: heartbreak, fury, horror, delight. Sometimes I find myself still thinking about the characters and wondering what they’re up to. North Woods was a book I never wanted to end. 

• Martyr by Kaveh Akbar: Bold, arresting, and very satisfying. Cyrus lost his mother as an infant, when her plane was shot out of the sky into the Persian Gulf. As he grows into young adulthood, he continues to grapple with the senseless violence in the world. His own struggles with addiction and obsessions with the past lead him down a path that will change everything he understands about his own identity. This book is voicey in the best way, with sharp dialogue and brilliant observations of humans in crisis.

• And of course, Leslie Stephens’s just-released dystopian novel You’re Safe Here, which I had the chance to blurb! Here’s a snippet of my blurb: “Part psychological thriller and part wry social commentary, You're Safe Here is a fresh and timely debut that deftly explores the potential--and betrayals--of a world bursting with unbound technological innovation. With deliciously paced storytelling sprinkled with secrets galore, Leslie Stephens's debut promises to guide you through uncertain waters with grace and authority." Congratulations, Leslie!!

I’ve forgotten a ton of great books, but I’ll add more next time! If you have a moment, let me know if you’re reading, watching, eating, or enjoying anything special lately. Thanks for being here <3 

Maybe it’s the unseasonable sixty-degree weather in central Ohio, and maybe it’s Maybelline, but I’ve been swerving toward the glimmers lately. I use the word “swerve” intentionally. Leaning toward joy suggests that the joy was sitting in your path all along, accessible by a gentle turn of the steering wheel. Swerving, however—swerving entails an abrupt departure from that eye-numbing sprawl of highway. Spying that billboard for the Largest Peahen Sculpture in America and making the conscious decision to go there, instead of wherever you were heading. Swerving is how we start to surprise ourselves.

Life has held some heaviness lately, which makes it difficult for me to pick things up that also feel weighed down. So most of the media I’ve been choosing is light and funny and curiosity-inducing, though not without heart. That seems to be the right spot for my mind at the moment. If you’re looking for a swerve toward joy too, I included a list of links and ideas below to prod you in that direction. Please add to the list in the comments, if you want!

Before all that, I also wanted to share that I’ll open up a future issue of Wallflower Chats to an AMA (Ask Me Anything*). There have been quite a few new subscribers since the last AMA (thank you for being here!), so I’d love to answer your questions about creativity, publishing, “bad” television, books, and whatever else you’re pondering. If you have a question, you can leave a comment on this post or respond to this email. 

Reading

• All the Dolly Alderton. Good Material was a funny and poignant look at breakups and male friendship, while her memoir Everything I Know About Love is perfect for consuming in short bursts. She well earns her title as the modern-day Nora Ephron.

• More romcoms I read and enjoyed: Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston, You, Again by Kate Goldbeck, Bride by Ali Hazelwood, Funny Story by Emily Henry (out April 23), Cole and Laila Are Just Friends by Bethany Turner (out June 4), The Improbable Meet Cute Collection by various authors

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline: A fun romp through ‘80s video games, movies, and pop culture, all surrounding a Willy-Wonka-like quest for an Easter egg of epic proportions. Immensely readable, especially if your patience is running thin at the moment. 

• ‘I Think My Husband Is Trashing My Novel on Goodreads!’ (The Cut): Wild. And, I hate to say it, but scant on evidence? What do you think? 

• Reader messages about my book. I’m lucky to receive notes from readers when they finish Banyan Moon, sharing what the characters meant to them, or telling me that they passed the book along to their mothers or daughters. For a novel about generational inheritance, this seems particularly resonant and special. Thank you for holding the book close; it keeps me going!

Watching

• Summer House, vintage Real Housewives, Vanderpump Rules (Peacock): The only thing that gets me to the gym is the prospect of mind-numbing audiovisual indulgence as I steadily walk the road to nowhere on the treadmill. This season of Summer House, in particular, promises to be satisfying. (Niche noodle content.)

• One Day (Netflix): I read the book and saw the movie back in the day, but I like this interpretation best of all. Ambika Mod, who plays Emma Morley, gives a wry and vulnerable spin to the character, which makes her irresistible to watch.

• The Brothers Sun (Netflix): Only one episode in, but I’m hooked. Two brothers, a strong matriarch, and multiple triad assassination attempts. Plus Michelle Yeoh. Plus a predominantly Asian cast. Yes to all that.

• Abbott Elementary (Hulu): This sitcom keeps getting better and better. Heartwarming, hilarious, and surprising, each episode continues to make me feel a little better about humanity. I giggled throughout the whole smoking episode.

• Clips of Ronny Chieng’s stand-up. His comedic timing and delivery hit every single time.

Listening

• Quinta Brunson’s podcast episode on What Now? With Trevor Noah: An honest and enlightening interview with the Emmy-winning star and creator of Abbott Elementary. I especially love what she says about the role of art in an age of message-driven content.

• Dan Levy on We Can Do Hard Things: Another warm and often-hilarious interview. In this one, Levy talks a lot about grief and his motivation for creating a show like Schitt’s Creek. I’ve always appreciated what he says about the world of show. The creative team purposefully omitted instances of homophobia in the town, because they wanted to create a better world than the one we know. No wonder each episode always feels like the tightest hug.

• Don’t Ask Tig: This three-season podcast by Tig Notaro is no longer running but, being the late adopter I am, I found it just this week and loved it. The Jessi Klein and Julia Louis Dreyfus episodes are particularly good. (Tig has another podcast called Handsome, but I haven’t listened to it.)

• My friends sharing their experiences as People of Color in creative industries. I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and my takeaway is that we find our strength in unity and community. We rise by making visible that which systemic forces seek to obscure. These conversations aren’t exactly light, but they never fail to create deeper connections and spaces for vulnerability. And that is the best part of friendship, IMO.

And other miscellaneous things

• Walking the metroparks with my (new to me) Canon AE-1. The medium forces me to slow down. I’m more deliberate in my framing choices—even my decisions on whether a photo is “worth” memorializing. I did some film photography a decade ago (and had the same camera then too!) and it’s neat to see how everything circles back around. Speaking of—

• Trying out Clinique’s Black Honey Almost Lipstick. The second romcom (more on that below) is a very enthusiastic ode to the 1990s and early aughts, so between writing that and watching these amazing ‘90s mom TikToks, I’ve been happily reliving some of the trends of my teen years. I’m still not sure the whole vampy Cordelia Chase thing is for me, but YOMO.

• Playing Kirby Star Allies on the Nintendo Switch. This pink puffball warrior goes on an intergalactic mission, adopting some (pretty random) powers along the way. At one point, he cooks his friends as part of his “chef” power. It’s the best kind of weird.

• Shopping for fabric. My mother sews áo bà bas for my grandmother and I asked if I could send some cotton for these handmade sets. I’m also sewing summer pajamas for my daughter, so I hopped to the local fabric store to pick out some yardage. There’s something so intimate and inspiring about selecting fabric (and sewing) for someone you love. And I found space cats! I’ll let you guess whether that print went to my grandmother or my daughter.

• Drafting a new romcom. This one has been more joyful than any other project I’ve ever worked on, with characters who dance in my mind even when I’m far from my laptop. I’m usually pretty private about my books before they’re published, but I have been feeding my friends pieces of this story because I can’t keep these characters to myself. 

• Deleting social media from my phone. This one’s self-evident. Immediate results; no regrets.

*I won’t actually answer questions about anything, because: boundaries. But you know what I mean. 

Have you ever heard of the bird test? It comes from The Gottman Institute, a research organization that studies relational longevity based on how each person responds to small, seemingly insignificant observations or experiences that excite their partner (such as spying a bird out the window!). 

My version of the bird test—which my husband passes with flying colors—is how long he can listen to me talk about Greek mythology in one sitting. One morning before work, I rattled on for at least twenty minutes about the love triangle between Ares, Aphrodite, and Hephaestus. (This discussion might have been prompted by the new Percy Jackson show.) As I talked more about this myth, I began to consider its basic bones: two vastly different brothers feuding over a beautiful woman, amid a family that cannot get their shit together. A few of my favorite books are based on this very premise. Some are more overt retellings with specific references, while others use parts of the same story architecture, but ultimately deviate far from the original.

This week, I read Cursed, an anthology of short stories based on popular fairy tales (or creating brand-new ones). Some of the stories are deliberately close retellings, such as the twisted epilogue to Snow White, while others veer off from the originals entirely, using familiar elements of the genre (royalty, magic, cannibalism, so much cannibalism in fairy tales) to build something new. Here, I’m thinking of “Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie” by Charlie Jane Anders, a romp of a tale you should all check out. 

The short story I’m currently writing is very loosely based on Hansel and Gretel; so loosely that I wonder if readers might trace their way back to the original story if I didn’t name it. It’s been immensely satisfying to write this story because I have a clear sense of the path ahead, but I get to fill it with my own interpretations of the themes. I get to make a well-trodden tale mine.

As I was working on the first drafts for Banyan Moon, I felt that there was something flabby in the narrative. The story didn’t quite cohere the way I wanted it to. But once I discovered and incorporated the folklore of The Man in the Moon, which prominently features a banyan tree, the pieces snapped together. I could see the arc of the narrative, as well as the emotional heart of the story. Folklore has a way of pulling in universal storytelling threads and, through each telling, offering something new to a reader or listener. 

What’s similar about these fairytales, myths, and folk tales is how they can satisfy the cultural imagination through the repetition of tropes and the subversion of those same tropes. We return to these ur stories because they are comforting in their predictability. They don’t always end happily, but our consciousness knows the next beat, which affords a sort of psychic safety. Yet the best retellings are the ones that can capitalize on that sense of reader knowingness and manage to surprise us anyway. As readers, we are securely held and stirred into suspense.

During an introductory survey to folklore, I read Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, a structural analysis of Russian fairy tales. He found 31 underlying commonalities, or patterns, in those Russian tales. Though Propp’s work isn’t without its critics, I still find the Morphology fascinating in its revelation of how many stories can be broken down into a collection of discrete and familiar elements. I’ll bet if we analyzed any contemporary text—Succession or Barbie or Harry Potter—we’d find more discernible plot movements than we’d expect.

I’ve recently finished the developmental edits for my romance novel (more on that soon, including a dreamy cover I’m so proud to share!). One of the things I appreciate about the romance genre is its fidelity to convention. Almost every title in the genre mixes up the components of a.) boy-meets-girl, b.) boy-loses-girl, and c.) boy-gets-girl-back. The happily ever after (referred to as the HEA) is guaranteed, but all the steps to get there can vary widely from book to book. We could probably distill most genre writing, like horror or fantasy, into a handful of basic conventions too. I’ll even go so far as to say that there are few genuinely original plots in the world, at least when we consider them at their most stripped-down level. How we reanimate those plots, reimagine settings, and give characters voice make such stories ours.

Below, I’ve gathered a few bookish retellings of myth, folklore, fairy tales, and even retellings of famous literary works. Do you have any to add? I’m always looking for a new spin on a beloved tale.  

Mythology and Folklore 

Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann || Referent: Aphrodite-Ares-Hephaestus myth

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati || Referent: Homer’s Iliad*

House of Names by Colm Tóibín || Referent: Homer’s Iliad*

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood || Referent: Homer’s Odyssey*

A Touch of Malice || Referent: Persephone and Hades myth

American Gods by Neil Gaiman || Referent: the old Irish, Norse, Slavic, African, and Middle Eastern gods

Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan || Referent: Chinese folklore of the Moon Goddess

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden || Referent: Russian folk tale of Frost 

The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh || Referent: Korean folktale of Shim Cheong

Fairy Tale and Fable 

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi || Referent: Mr. Fox

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey || Referent: the Changeling

The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman || Referent: The Ice Queen

The Book of Gothel by Mary McMyne || Referent: Rapunzel

Darling Girl by Liz Michalski || Referent: Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie*

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik || Referent: Rumpelstiltskin

Literary Retellings

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver || Referent: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano || Referent: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

March by Geraldine Brooks || Referent: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia || Referent: The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo || Referent: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin ||  Referent: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld ||  Referent: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley || Referent: King Lear by William Shakespeare

* This denotes a title that could also be placed in the category of literary retellings.

Please note that there is so much nuance when we talk about the differences between categories of storytelling, such as mythology versus folklore. A book might use mythic or fairy-tale-like language (Starling House; anything by Alice Hoffman), or it may lean on fairy tale tropes, yet might not be identified as a retelling. The term “retelling” can also be hotly debated. But in order to keep this newsletter from turning into a full-fledged (messily conceived) scholarly paper, I took some shortcuts in defining and eliding terms. Happy reading!