And now, I would like to draw your attention to four matters!

1. A Paperback You Can Buy: The paperback version of my book We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine is due out in a few weeks, on June 23. If you pre-order by June 16 from The Strand or Books Are Magic, I’ll sign your copy. (They’ll mail it to you, of course.)
   
   Look, the paperback cover matches the hardcover, I can’t get over how cute this matching set is:

2. A Reviews Workshop You Can Take: As I occasionally do, I am teaching a little workshop on “The Art of the Review” through the Center for Fiction this summer. And this year, good news, it is on Zoom! And it’s just a weekend long! The dates are Saturday and Sunday, August 8 and 9, from 11am to 2pm ET. It’s $175, and the Center offers a limited number of need-based scholarships covering 50% of tuition, so if you want to take the workshop and that describes you, definitely consider applying.

3. An Event You Can Attend: My good friend Isaac Butler has written yet another brilliant book that, if you’re a subscriber here, you almost certainly will want to read: “The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars.” It also comes out June 23 (serendipity) and it’s about the battles over art and the NEA and — well, I mean, it is really good. I’ll be chatting with Isaac about his book after he screens Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens on Saturday, June 27 at 12:30pm, and you should come. (It’s obviously more than a little relevant to “We Tell Ourselves Stories,” too.) He’ll be signing books afterward and, given the timing, I’ll have some too.

4. An Artist Development Program You Should Check Out: I suppose many people don’t know this, so: My husband runs a pretty awesome year-long artist development program (facilitated online) called Artist Commons, and their new cohort starts on July 1, with applications due June 15. They have weekly lectures on the business, history, and philosophy of art, and every artist is paired with a small group of artists and a mentor who offer weekly feedback and support in their art practice. I’m not involved at all other than being a cheerleader, but I think it’s worth looking at if you’re a visual artist in any discipline and could use that support!

That’s all for now.

Just a little note to say that the paperback version of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the Dream Machine is due out on June 23, with a cute paperback cover.

As you probably know, pre-orders are the best way to support any book (much more than buying on day of release!).

And I’m working with two iconic independent bookstores here in New York City — if you pre-order from them, you’ll get a signed copy. (Like a real signed copy! I’m going there and signing the copies with my own hand before they send them out!)

Obviously you don’t have to be living in New York to order from them; they’ll send them to you.

You can order from The Strand (located in Manhattan) here.

And you can order from Books are Magic (located in Brooklyn) here.

And if you are new here and have no idea what this book even is, read about it here!

I am making a little pit stop in your inbox with a few announcements and things that might be of interest to you, and also some well wishes. Mostly I hope you are doing okay. Everything feels uphill, and I hope you’re doing what you can with what you have, and that you are finding comfort and beauty in the midst of it all.

So, some stuff:

• It has been a very busy summer and fall at work, and I have been thinking about many things and writing about them, too. Here is a sampling: I got in front of the camera to talk about why “Jaws” would never get greenlit today. I wrote about That Salary Figure in “Materialists,” the context collapse of 21st century movies, how to watch a Hitchcock movie and “The Rehearsal,” the best show on TV. I reviewed wild movies about the moment (“Superman” and “Eddington”) and documentaries about international politics that play like too-close-to-the-bone horror films (“Apocalypse in the Tropics” and “My Undesirable Friends”). I reviewed some terrible movies. I wrote about cinema heroes like Robert Redford and Diane Keaton. I snuck over to the Book Review to review Jen Hatmaker’s new memoir. And I went to Las Vegas for the premiere of “The Wizard of Oz” at Sphere, which was really weird.

• I wrote a whole lot more than that, and you can find it all here. (Also we send out a movies newsletter, which is a good way to get stuff in your inbox.)

• Alert! On Sunday, November 2, at 8pm EST, I’ll be doing a two-hour online seminar with Five Things I’ve Learned about what makes a review great. This is a slimmed-down version of the longer eight-week workshop I sometimes teach with the Center for Fiction (which in turn is a slimmed-down version of the senior-level semester-long criticism capstone I used to teach). If you register, you can attend live and/or have access to the playback; please do!

• Some time this summer, I announced that I’ll be joining the faculty of the newly reconstituted low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Whitworth University for the next year, as the first-year creative nonfiction mentor. This used to be the Seattle Pacific University program, but they dropped it for … honestly I have no idea why, but in any case, I graduated from this program in 2013, so I can vouch. Low-residency means you have five residencies (out in eastern Washington, at least for now) of roughly a week over two years, and the rest of the work is done in correspondence from your home with your mentors. It is, I can testify, very doable in “real life.” The application deadline for the first cohort is November 1 (to begin in the late January residency), so get on that.

• I also announced another book deal! I’m thrilled to be back with Liveright for my next book, which is currently titled “Afterglow: Undone by Beauty in an Anti-Wonder World.” My overt pitch is basically that technocrats want to make us into little predictable atomized profit units and we resist by engaging with big scary communal art. In my head I am just expanding on a bit of Wendell Berry’s poetry that has not stopped running through my head for the past few years: “As soon as the generals and the politicos / can predict the motions of your mind, / lose it. Leave it as a sign / to mark the false trail, the way / you didn’t go.” It’s going to be fun.

• And of course, if you haven’t checked it out, don’t forget that I wrote a book about Joan Didion that is actually about Hollywood and American political culture! People keep emailing me to tell me that they like it. You can buy it and read it on paper, or as an ebook, or you can listen to the audiobook, which I narrated. They’re all at the retailer of your choice. (But please shop independent, or go to the library!)

Holler if you have a question!

So that I have somewhere to direct future inquiries, I’m dropping my usual response here. It’s messy and incomplete, but it’s the pieces I think are most important to keep in mind. Any staff critic working today came up in a different media landscape than the one that young people are enterting today, for better or worse. But these principles are the ones I think are most important.

A note, to begin: Until November 2023 — 18 years into writing criticism — I always had a full-time job that paid more than my writing did, because I don't have any other way of paying my bills.

So this is the advice that I have:

1. First, the most important thing is to learn to write really well. You don't need an MFA or any graduate degrees, but you do need to develop into an excellent writer who understands rhythm, tone, voice, structure, narrator, and all of that in order to succeed. Criticism is not about listing off what's good or bad; it's about making an argument in a beautiful way. Spend time reading good film criticism and figuring out how they do it. I think of everything I write as a new piece of art, and I believe it should be interesting to the reader whether or not they are ever going to see the movie.

2. The next most important thing to remember is that most of film criticism is not writing about esoteric movies from the 1970s or even the films the Criterion Collection puts out. It's writing about Marvel movies and awards bait and a lot of really mediocre movies. If you're not willing or even excited to figure out how to do that and make it interesting, then you won't be able to get anywhere in criticism as a career.

3. Also, you need to learn to write things that aren't reviews. It's basically impossible for freelance writers to publish reviews until they're quite established; most publications have a stable of staff / freelance writers they work with. To break in, you have to get really good at writing trend pieces, profiles, Q&As, critics' notebooks. You have to get good at writing about film but also TV, books, art, all kinds of other things. I didn't write predominately about film till I joined the Times in 2023. Almost nobody does.

4. Next, educate yourself on how to pitch publications as a freelancer. Writing a pitch is a particular skill that you have to get good at, and while I could explain the whole thing right now, the Internet is full of resources to help you learn -- that's how I taught myself 20 years ago when I was just starting out. You just have to be realistic about it: you'll freelance for a long time (I did for a decade) and then, if you're very lucky, you might land a staff job. But many of the freelancers writing today — people whose names you see in major publications and Criterion booklets — once had staff jobs, and then were forced to go freelance when the publication folded, which happens literally all the time. So you need to be versatile, adaptable, and willing to hustle.

5. Finally, there are some basic tips for succeeding as a culture writer. Always turn in work early, or at least on time. Be constantly thinking of ideas you can pitch. Turn in extremely clean copy that you have edited, and possibly had someone else edit too. Do not be precious about edits, meaning let editors do what they do best. Keep in mind that if you're not in a major city, writing about film is probably going to be tricky; you'll have more success writing about TV — that's just how the business is, for now. And have a day job for backup; writing pays next to nothing.

Also, be normal and nice and a team player even when you’re freelancing. That goes a long way.

All that said, nothing is keeping you from starting right now — you can write on a blog or a newsletter/Substack, or in a local paper or on a website or Letterboxd. The question is whether you're willing to do what it really takes to have a career at this, which is far from guaranteed even if you work really hard and do all the right things. If you decide you'd rather only write about films that interest you personally, or that feel significant, that's totally fine — you can do that, enjoy it, and even get pieces published sometimes. But you almost certainly cannot make a career of it that way. I can't think of anyone who does.

I’ll be talking about all the things I’ve learned about how and why we construct mythologies from studying and writing about Joan Didion, including in my book We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, which as you probably know is about Didion and Hollywood and American public culture. It’s fun! And the class will be too.

There’s a video on the site of me gabbing about the workshop. I’d love to see you there!

And if you can’t make it, Five Things has passes you can grab to watch the replay as well as workshops by all the other (truly) amazing writers and artists who’ve done masterclasses for them.

I’ve been off work for two weeks, which is why I haven’t sent you a lot of links of things to read. But don’t miss my review of Wes Anderson’s latest film The Phoenician Scheme, aka Wes Gets Religious, and a little column on a new documentary about The Day After.

And while I’m here, some upcoming Didion-related and workshop-related things:

• Next Tuesday, June 10 - I’ll be at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York for a book event related to their screening of Play It As It Lays. More info and tickets here.

• Starting June 23, I’ll be teaching another round of my popular Center for Fiction workshop on the review as creative writing, which will meet for 8 Monday nights at 6pm. This sold out last fall so don’t wait too long. Here are more details and the registration link.

• Beginning July 12, I’ll also teach another round of my four-week Center for Fiction course on reading and writing Joan Didion, which is more of a craft course and discussion of Didion’s lesser-read essays. We’ll look at how she did what she did, and why. This time we’ll meet on Zoom! Saturdays, 1:00-3:00pm EST, for four weeks, more details and registration here.

• For the New Yorkers, I’ll be chatting about Joan and Hollywood in Bryant Park around lunchtime on July 28 — more details here.

But I have two things of note to pass along:

• “The Rehearsal,” the most audacious and jaw-dropping TV show around these days, came to the audacious and jaw-dropping conclusion of its second season this weekend. (I can’t really even explain this show to you if you haven’t seen it, unless the words “Nathan Fielder” mean something to you.) Anyhow, the Times’s chief TV critic Jim Poniewozik and I teamed up to discuss it, as best we could, and you can read our attempt here if you like. Discussed herein: is anything real, is this just low-fi AI maybe, empathy, neurodivergence, Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life” …

• The audiobook of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine is out today! I read it myself! I think you might like it. You can get it from anywhere you get your audiobooks, including Audible or, might I suggest, Libro.fm, which supports indie booksellers. Tell your friends!!

But, I have the hang of it. So I thought I would post five things that make my Cannes, and travel generally, a lot better and easier and just overall less friction-fraught. (None of these are sponsored, obviously, but I guess I have to say that, especially because this festival has become loaded with influencers and aspiring influencers.)

Before we get there, here are some quick things I want you to know I’m doing or have done:

• On Thursday, June 5 at 8pm EST, I’ll be over at Five Things I’ve Learned, teaching a little 90-minute seminar on five things I’ve learned about mythmaking — how and why we do it, and what it all means — from my work writing and researching Joan Didion. It will be recorded and you can access it with a pass to just the class or to the whole site, which includes similar lectures by everyone from Rebecca Solnit to Kaveh Akbar to Maggie Smith to Cheryl Strayed and Andre Dubus. I’m excited!

• I’m teaching two courses this summer — both of which are repeats of courses I taught last fall — through the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, one in person and one online. They filled up fast last time and there was a lengthy waiting list, so I wouldn’t wait too long.

  • Online: A 4-week course on Joan Didion’s writing craft — aka, how did she do that? — which I am teaching ON ZOOM on Saturdays, July 12 - August 2. Here’s more on that.

  • In person (in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, near BAM): An 8-week workshop focusing specifically on the review as creative writing. Everybody gets workshopped, we talk about crafting reviews and the business of writing them, it’s a good time. Monday nights in Brooklyn, June 23 to August 11, more here!

• For the Times, I wrote about Nicolas Cage’s nuanced career, about Pope Francis the movie star, and about the many weird and surprising ways that actors on stage, screen, and social video have been playing a lot of parts. I also reviewed “Friendship” (are men okay?), “Love” (gentle, Norwegian), “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” (funny and sneakily deep), “The Legend of Ochi” (for the 80s kids), “The Wedding Banquet” (on chosen families), “On Swift Horses” (Jacob Elordi might be a time traveler, honestly), “Another Simple Favor” (big hats and big martinis!) and “Blue Sun Palace” (exquisite). And I wrote Documentary Lens columns on movies about Pavement (sort of), the 1970s NYC financial crisis, Sophia the robot (but really her creator), Ani DiFranco and “Deaf President Now!”

On to my favorite things! (Oprah voice.)

1. These amazing J.Crew pants

People tend to think of glamour when they think of Cannes, thanks to that red carpet, but as a journalist I almost never have to “walk the red carpet” (instead of just walking on a red carpet, which are everywhere). That belongs to evening gala premiere screenings held in the Lumiere theater, marked out on our ticketing schedules by an icon of a jaunty little bow tie. The dress code, as you may have heard, is pretty strict, though far less strict than previous years, in which you might have gotten the boot (or “c’est impossible” from a guard) for the great crime of wearing flats.

But this year I got an unexpected invitation to the gala premiere of Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest” and it fit my schedule, so I had to think fast, because I don’t really travel with a ballgown.

These “Stratus pants” to the rescue! They are absurdly comfortable. They feel like pajamas. They are “hammered satin” which basically means they don’t wrinkle, don’t have any static, and flow beautifully. They have a fully elastic waist. (I am usually a 14 in pants at J.Crew and I bought them in L, and they still are a little big, so keep that in mind.) Paired with a ruffly black top I nabbed at the Zara that everyone goes to a few blocks from the Palais des Festivals and some heels I did bring for my book event in Paris last week, they were entirely red carpet appropriate and I had a great time. They are also on sale.

2. Supergoop Glow Screen

Suncreen a must in the Mediterranean, and while French sunscreen has a deservedly legendary reputation, I brought along my trusty Glow Screen. I layer it on top of (currently) copper peptides, hyalauronic acid, and the Merit Great Skin serum and primer, and it all dries down nicely and my skin feels like silk and everyone seems to think I am younger than I am, which is only sometimes a little annoying. (Obligatory note: Merit is releasing a new sunscreen/primer/color thing today, which sounds nice too.)

3. Two battery bricks

Don’t bring just one external battery, because the sun is super bright here and if you take your phone out to do anything your battery will drain instantly, and unfortunately, you need that phone to pull up your tickets. (This is applicable to more than just Cannes.) Instead, bring a small one you can tuck into a purse and then a larger one that can do multiple charge-ups, in case you forget to charge overnight. My picks are this one that’s about the size of a phone but thinner (and is the pick of my colleagues at Wirecutter), and this one which is roughly the size of a squat lipstick and tucks into any clutch, no matter how small.

4. Lo & Sons Aoyama bag

Speaking of clutches. I own a fair number of bags — for a New Yorker, your bag is your car, and you have to treat it as such — but am not much of a sparkly little clutch gal. However, remember that red carpet? I needed to be carrying a notebook for the movie, my phone, lipstick, battery brick, keys, and a couple of other things.

Luckily I am traveling with my Aoyama bag, which I bought when it first came out as a big Lo & Sons fan, and use a lot. I have it in black. Yes, it’s a little spendy if you’re not a bag buyer, but after many months of hard-core wear, I am convinced it’s worth it. The key to a great bag for me is that it carries everything, can get totally beat up, and puts everything right where I need it, and that’s this one.

The convertible strap means you can wear it as a cross-body, a sling, an over-the-shoulder purse, or, yes, a clutch, which you can see me carrying in the photo above. It is soft as a baby’s cheek and has this very useful pocket in the front into which I usually stuff my phone for easy access. I can also fit my iPad Mini and fold-up keyboard in here, and/or Kindle, and/or a book or two, an extra notepad, an umbrella, a water bottle, and my camera if I want, and it never feels heavy. It’s got a key leash with a long strap so you can leave your keys (and in my case, Airpods) on the leash and use them, thus ensuring you can’t lose them. Has a great inner pocket for passport and money and whatever. Also, when emptied, it packs so flat that I just throw it in my suitcase and use my Cuyama zipper tote as a personal item on the plane. I am coveting, impractically but unavoidably, the cognac version.

5. TripIt app

I have been using TripIt forever, like maybe since it was released, and I couldn’t live without it. Whenever I make a travel plan, I forward it to the app and it populates out all the fields, like addresses and confirmation numbers and departure dates and times. I occasionally have to fiddle with it to combine legs of trips into one big agenda, but it is set up so that I always have access to whatever info I need, plus maps, and it even imports travel plans from your inbox (not seamlessly, but pretty close). It also keeps records of your trip, so you can see how many miles or countries you traveled each year. My record goes back to 2009!

It still feels far too cold here in New York for the spring semester to have earned its moniker, but the calendar doesn’t lie: three more class sessions and a pile of grading and I’ll have put in my first semester teaching graduate creative nonfiction. It has been delightful. I hope I get to do more really soon, and not just for the needed income. (I will, at minimum, be teaching this next spring, and I’m really excited!)

I know part of the reason this semester flew by was that I was on book tour! But from all of my many years of teaching I know that once you start counting time in weeks rather than days, it seems to disappear in big gulps.

Just a few weeks left.

Where I Popped Up

• Sonny Bunch had me on the “Bulwark Goes to Hollywood” podcast to talk about my book, and especially what I write about intersection between the movies and politics, an area we’re both especially interested in. It was a really great conversation.

• Also spoke with the California Sun podcast a few weeks ago about entertainment taking over politics through Didion’s eyes, and it came out this week.

What I Wrote

• A review of “The King of Kings,” the latest Easter-adjacent Jesus movie offering and my general frustration with the Christian movie industry’s fixation on reboots and remakes.

• A review of “The Amateur,” starring Rami Malek, a regrettable nothingburger of a film (technical term).

• From last week, a review of Michael Shannon’s feature directorial debut “Eric LaRue,” which I thought was going to mostly be about the mother of a school shooter (and it is) but is actually about people trying to use religious jargon for purposes of spiritual bypass? That was a twist!

• Documentary column from last week on “Thank You Very Much,” a pretty good documentary about the comedian Andy Kaufman that I’ve thought about a bit since I saw it.

• Documentary column from this week on “Pets,” which is basically 80 minutes of people talking about their pets — mostly children — and works as a documentary for children. It’s not really art but it’s fine!

After 18 events in about three weeks, the major portion of the book tour is basically over. (Wow, that’s a lot.) I’ll be showing up a few places in the near future, and hopefully more too — if you’re interested, let’s talk — and you can always find that info on my website.

In the meantime, though, you can watch video from two of my events:

• A packed-out conversation with Aidan Flax-Clark at the New York Public Library on March 26, the day that the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne archive opened.

• A virtual event with Lauren Winner (hosted by Image Journal) from March 12.

There will also be a livestream for my event at the American Library in Paris on May 13 (1:30pm EST), where I’ll be in conversation with the wonderful cultural historian Joanna Scutts. (And if you’re in Paris, the event is at 7:30pm local time.)

I hope you’re enjoying the book if you’ve read it! I’d love to hear what you think.

Take Class With Me

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a craft lecture to the creative writing MFA at NYU — my students also came — and have been pretty happy about how much feedback and interest it generated. Maybe talking about “the second person and reality” sounds overly nerdy but let’s be real: we’re all nerds.

Anyhow, I’m teaching a version of it in Brooklyn next weekend at the Center for Fiction, and you can sign up!

As the spring semester starts veering towards its conclusion, I’m hoping to have more ways to teach courses on writing, literature, film and criticism in the near future. I’m working on some things, but in the meantime, if you’ve been thinking “gee, I wish I could get Alissa to teach a class for us,” please do get in touch!

I Also Have Been Working Very Hard At My Job

March is a strange time at the movies, and also I haven’t posted a lot of links to things this year. So here’s a tiny selection of what you might have missed from my broader list of work (which you can always access here). Gift links, mostly.

• A notebook on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Cory Booker, and the moral duty of lost causes.

• Extremely proud of this notebook about the shared visual style between Best Picture nominee Nickel Boys and its director’s earlier movie, the Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening — and what it means.

• A probably very singular notebook on perhaps the greatest living American director, Frederick Wiseman, and also my Instagram Reels algorithm.

• Maybe you saw it on your Instagram, but I did a video about the messed-up state of the Oscars Best International Film category!

• On Sean Baker and Anora.

• What it means to say something is Lynchian, in several scenes.

• Review of Eephus, a baseball movie that I just love.

• There’s a very excellent new documentary about Thomas Kinkade (and his secret stash of scary paintings) that you have to see.

• Review of I’m Still Here, the Oscar-nominated historically accurate movie about how everything feels normal under authoritarianism until people start disappearing.

Mainly because yesterday was the day that We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine was released! We had a lovely launch event in Brooklyn at Barnes & Noble. The night before I was in Boston at Harvard Bookstore; the previous weekend I introduced two sold-out showings of a new restoration of Play It As It Lays at Film Forum here in New York; and the week before that I was at Skylark Books in Columbia, Missouri with a great group.

Being on a book tour is very weird, especially if you’re the person who’s accustomed to doing the interviewing, not being interviewed. I very purposely chose the smartest people I know to be my conversation partners at all of these events, but that means I’m actually having to think! Which I love!

But there are other good things that come with book events, such as — for instance — having to catch a 6am train back to New York in Boston, but then being able to see the sun rise over the Rhode Island coastline from the train window:

Or collecting snaps and pics and memories all over the place:

More to come soon, from D.C. and L.A. and Summerland and Berkeley and San Francisco, promise.

This is the part with all the links

Launch day means reviews — always a fraught proposition, for someone whose career largely consists of reviewing — but I was thrilled with the results. Here’s the New York Times Book Review piece, which felt like it really understood the project and is an absolute thrill to see. Also had kind reviews in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and Booklist (which doesn’t seem to be on the web).

A few other fun media things:

• Honored to have an excerpt from the book published in the New York Times (this is not, despite what you might think, a foregone conclusion, so I am extra happy about it and grateful to Errol Morris for releasing a perfectly timed documentary about the Manson murders, which I also reviewed).

• I wrote a little piece (with the blessing of my workplace) for Airmail about the most interesting I learned while writing this book — hint, it’s about movie reviews.

• I talked to the Los Angeles Times about this book a bunch — it is, understandably, directly in their wheelhouse! So here is a beautiful, astute feature on the book (and me), and a piece on Didion’s Los Angeles.

• (Missed this in the email version of this post, sorry!) A really fantastic interview with me in Variety about the book!

• A wide-ranging interview in Cambridge Day.

• A conversation with the Columbia Daily Tribune.

• An article in the San Francisco Examiner / Nob Hill Gazette.

• Was delighted to see this great piece in Vogue — Didion’s youthful stomping grounds! — about Didion and Dunne’s screenwriting.

• A few podcasts: Linoleum Knife, Dedicated with Doug Brunt, Grey Matter with Michael Krasny, Shifting Culture, The Substance.

And just a reminder about future tour dates! There are a couple of new ones since my last update, so I’ve bolded them (two have virtual options, even). A couple more are on the way as well.

• March 13, The Strand, Manhattan, NY (with Rachel Syme)*

• March 14, Politics & Prose, Washington, DC (with Dan Kois)

• March 15, Book Soup, Los Angeles, CA (with Justin Chang)

• March 16, Godmothers Bookstore, Summerland, CA (with Amy Nicholson)*

• March 17, Mrs. Dalloway's Books, Berkeley, CA (with Lee Kravetz)

• March 18, Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, CA (with Kevin Smokler)*

• March 20, NYU Creative Writing Lillian Vernon House, NY

• March 22, Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY (following A Star Is Born with Lauren Sandler)*

• March 26, New York Public Library (main branch), Manhattan, NY and livestream!

• March 28, Barnes & Noble Colonie Center, Albany, NY (with Linda Hall)

• March 29, Panel discussion with Carrie Courogen (Miss May Does Not Exist) at Albany Film Festival

• March 30, The Orpheum, Saugerties, NY*

• April 27, LA Times Festival of Books (with Lili Anolik, Katherine Bucknell and Patt Morrison), Los Angeles, CA*

• May 13, The American Library in Paris, France and livestream!

* Ticket purchase required; see the event for details. (In some cases the tickets aren't available yet, but they will be.)

Hope to see you somewhere!

At long last, I'm here to let you know that my book We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine will be published by Liveright in just under one month, on Tuesday, March 11! And I'm going on tour! Read on for more!

WHAT THE BOOK IS (AND ISN'T)

Almost exactly five years ago, I got the idea to write about America, and the way Hollywood has shaped America, through the lens of Joan Didion's work. That was well before she passed away in December 2021, and a lot of books about her have been published since then. But I think mine's unique: it's as much a biography of American movies and American political media as it is of Didion herself. It's been named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, W Magazine, and The Millions, and I'm so excited to finally share it with you.

WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME

And yes, I am going on tour, reading from the book and having conversations with a whole array of dizzyingly smart people along the way. I'll be in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Summerland, the Bay Area, Paris, and Albany, and probably a bunch of other places eventually. I'm keeping a list of events on my website and here is an amazing GRAPHIC!

Most are free, but require registration ahead of time. And the virtual event has an extra-special perk courtesy of my buddies at Image Journal. See below for a little bit on that.

WHERE YOU CAN FIND THE BOOK

The book will be available through whoever you use to get your books, like the wonderful Bookshop. But, please do pre-order if you're thinking of buying the book. It is much much much more helpful to me, and indeed to every author, if you pre-order rather than waiting for the book to come out. The best way to do this, from my perspective, is to pre-order through your local independent bookstore, which in turn encourages them to consider stocking the book on their shelf or putting it on a table, thereby selling more books. Everybody wins.

(Also great: request the book from your local library.)

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

I had no way of knowing I'd be writing a book that would feel quite so urgent right now, but people who've read it already have told me it is, and for better or worse, I think they're right. But it's also fun to read, whether you don't know a single thing about Joan Didion or have read everything she's ever written and carry around that tote bag all the time.

Finally please, please do share this with literally anyone who might be interested -- in Joan, in America, in Hollywood, in the weird messy combination of it all.

Brief roundup of tour locations and dates

• Feb 27, Skylark Bookstore, Columbia, MO (with Eric Hynes)

• March 7 & 9, Film Forum, New York, NY (introducing Play It As It Lays)*

• March 10, Harvard Bookstore, Boston, MA (with Bradford Winters)

• March 11, Barnes & Noble Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY (with Isaac Butler)

• March 12, Virtual Event hosted by Image Journal (with Lauren Winner)**

• March 13, The Strand, Manhattan, NY (with Rachel Syme)*

• March 14, Politics & Prose, Washington, DC (with Dan Kois)

• March 15, Book Soup, Los Angeles, CA (with Justin Chang)

• March 16, Godmothers Bookstore, Summerland, CA (with Amy Nicholson)

• March 17, Mrs. Dalloway's Books, Berkeley, CA (with Lee Kravetz)

• March 18, Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, CA (with Kevin Smokler)

• March 20, NYU Creative Writing Lillian Vernon House, NY

• March 22, Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY (following A Star Is Born with Lauren Sandler)*

• March 28, Barnes & Noble Colonie Center, Albany, NY (with Linda Hall)

• March 30, The Orpheum, Saugerties, NY

• May 13, The American Library in Paris, France

* Ticket purchase required; see the event for details. (In some cases the tickets aren't available yet, but they will be.)

** This event is free, but Image Journal has generously offered a free subscription to their beautiful literary journal to those registrants who upload proof of pre-order to their website (like a screenshot of your receipt). More details here.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter to his wife Clara Rilke-Westhoff
January 1, 1907

A lot of this year was really hard, though a different kind of hard from last year, and always with a matching good thing. Longed-for stability, financial and otherwise, still eludes me; then again, I have a really good job that I like doing and incredibly grateful to have earned that spot. We faced a bunch of big, weird disappointments and losses in my household this year, but we also had some really gratifying, delightful experiences. I pushed myself, some: I’m proud that I managed to go from run-walking two miles with some difficulty back to medium-distance running with relative ease (8 miles this morning!). I am glad that I got to take a whirlwind solo research trip through some of Europe in May — Paris, Cannes, Milan, Vienna, Prague, Berlin. I had 182 bylines at the New York Times, a wild sentence to read. I taught a couple classes and will be teaching more in the spring. I ate great meals and drank great martinis. I read some good books and saw a ton of theater and dance and art. I finished the final touches on my own good book.

Also, as the year moved forward I spent more time with friends, something I was missing acutely this time last year. A number of them got married, which was delightful. We cooked dinners and saw shows and had picnics and went hiking. I went to a lot of book parties and watched friends who make art succeed wildly. I am hoping for more of that — both new friends and old — this year. Sometimes I’m very aware that life is running past me at top speed, and the only way to reach out and grab it is make sure I am paying attention. I am always thinking about paying attention now.

I have a lot of hopes for 2025, which at least right now looks both totally uncertain and also holds the possibility for abundance. I have ideas for new books, new projects, new classes, new articles, new dinner party menus. Having a book come out that’s being supported by the publisher is so novel and thrilling. When the world is chaotic, the solution is to ground down into the real.

Here are 13 (+1) articles I loved writing this year. Remember: you can always find everything I write on this page.

• This close-read of the opening moments of “The Taste of Things,” which I wrote for our Oscar issue, resonated with a lot of the audience and was an absolute delight to write.

• I also went in close to think about the moral weight of sound as it was used in “Oppenheimer” and in “The Zone of Interest,” two of the best movies of 2023.

• I wrote a lot about documentaries this year; this piece on “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus” was one of my favorites.

• The excellent new Netflix series “Ripley” gave me an excuse to think about all the many cinematic Tom Ripleys, and what they mean.

• I found Ethan Hawke's film “Wildcat,” about Flannery O'Connor, to be rich ground on which to think about O'Connor's work and what the film got so right.

• The new “Planet of the Apes” movies are perhaps the best blockbuster filmmaking of their kind — ever — and also the smartest. I explored!

• The whole weird dust-up with Scarlett Johansson's voice and ChatGPT was surely a harbinger of things to come, but it turns out we've been there before.

• Part of my job is writing appraisals of people when they die; I banged out this one on Donald Sutherland in about two hours and I love it.

• One of the year's most incredible, innovative, and misunderstood documentaries was “Eno,” and luckily I was well-versed in the tech behind it. So I loved reviewing it.

• People really responded to this exploration of “The Matrix” (on the occasion of its 25th anniversary). You can thank my former life as a postmodernism professor, I guess!

• Just an absolute delight to get the assignment to review “Anora,” one of the most exhilarating experiences in a cinema of the year.

• I was also so glad to review “Blitz,” which is doing something marvelously subversive to the WWII film tropes. I felt like I really got this movie.

• To my utter delight, I got to return to the interviewer's chair and talk to Robert Eggers about “Nosferatu” and death and beauty and maggots and a lot of other things.

• Bonus, because this was for the NYT Book Review (which is technically a whole different department): I wrote the Essential Guide to Joan Didion.

Also, one more thing: I was on TV twice over the holidays to talk about movies. Here I am on CBS News, and here I am on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

See you next year, friends.

That said: if I don’t have to rank the art, I won’t. This year was pretty bruising and hard in the mental arena, and I also wasn’t teaching or writing a book, which means I read fewer overall than usual — about 30 in all, and mostly novels. So, instead of ranking them, I present them here, with small comments.

All Fours, Miranda July

Like every vaguely middle-aged woman who reads books, I also read this book this summer. I am generally interested in July’s work, even if I don’t always enjoy it. But this one felt more assured, and I plowed through my galley in a day. I did not always like it, but I admire it, and see why it became such a phenomenon.

Amanda Wakes Up, Alisyn Camerota

A very light read — I listened to it while painting the interiors of several closets in my apartment — that feels weirdly prescient about media moguls’ obsession with “bias meters” and the like, though not always in a good way.

Attention: A Personal History of Finding Focus, Casey Schwartz

Initially acquired in a big pile of books about the topic of attention, an ongoing research project as well as the theme of the class I’m teaching at NYU next semester. I really enjoyed this memoir, and only found out as I was finishing it that Casey was working on a piece in which my book is mentioned for the NYT Book Review. Serendipity!

The Coin, Yazmin Zuher

I picked this novel up off a book table at P&T Knitwear because I’d kept hearing about it. It’s exceptionally strange, capturing the strange feeling of those early pandemic days but in a voice that was unlike anything I’ve encountered.

Crush, Ada Calhoun

I loved Calhoun’s book Also a Poet, a beautifully complex and lyrical and deeply-researched memoir about her, her father (the late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl), their complicated relationship, and also her father’s attempts to write a biography of Frank O’Hara. So I nabbed a galley of Crush and found it pretty wonderful. There are a lot of divorce / urban woman finding herself books floating around these days, but this one got something right about the dizzying emotional landscape we live in.

Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik

I read this one for obvious reasons; there’s been a proliferation of Didion books lately, and of course my own is coming out soon. Happy to report this was different in virtually every way from my own book; you should buy both!

Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Claire Bishop

More research, but profoundly fascinating. It’s heady, it’s academic, but I love how Bishop is confronting and rethinking some of the things we take for granted about art, attention, and the digital landscape. Some of it has gone on my syllabus.

The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer

Took me a while only because I bought it while in Toronto this fall and have only had time here and there to read it. But I really enjoyed it, in the end. An engaging story about women and feminism and activism, as they morph over generations, and also what it’s like to meet your heroes.

The Glow, Jessie Gaynor

I don’t even remember why I picked this up, but I found it light and enjoyable, especially since I read it while sitting at a sidewalk wine bar in Greenwich Village on a perfect late summer day. I mean.

Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham

I know I’m not ranking, but if forced to pick this is my favorite book of the year. This is unfair to all, since Vinson is also a friend of mine and one of the most talented people on the planet. But I cannot, cannot, cannot recommend it enough: a novel about a young man hired somewhat haphazardly to work on the Obama campaign, and a very specific moment in American history.

Here in the Dark, Alexis Soloski

And if we are choosing the most purely pleasurable book I read, here it is — a murder mystery in which the narrator is a fairly bitter second-string critic at an alt-weekly, and her life is sort of falling apart. Suspense! Thrillers! Weird theater people! Alexis is also a friend (and colleague at the Times), but I would love this no matter what.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell

I had read piece of this before — it’s kind of a seminal text for a lot of people in my circles — but I read the whole things straight through and am assigning it. I have to say: it’s become only more convincing, and more vital, in the years since it was published.

I Have Some Questions for You, Rebecca Makkai

Listened to it on my runs this fall. I do love a good campus murder mystery novel; I think it felt a little too self-consciously topical, but it made for a good audiobook.

I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasures in Paris, Glynnis MacNicol

Light and delightful, a memoir of a month in Paris just post-pandemic and a search for everything delicious and sensual in life. I, of course, enjoyed it greatly.

Lo Fi, Liz Riggs

Liz (another friend! so many talented friends!) wrote one of my favorite types of novels — young woman, immersed in art, swirling life on the verge of something — and it’s so beautiful and fun and musical and rooted in her own Nashville life. Just a total blast.

Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I mean, if you pay attention to books you already know this, but this is just such a terrific novel. It has been (correctly) compared to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, in structure and scope and, well, length, but Taffy (yet another friend) has done something wild and fantastic and it is so incredibly funny. And dark and hilarious and dirty and satirical and sincere and beautiful. She loves her characters. I love them too.

The Mother of All Things, Alexis Landau

Picked this up off a table at work. It’s engrossing, the story of a woman finding herself in the midst of real life and also maybe some supernatural mythical occurrences. I’m not sure it totally lands, but I liked reading it.

The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

Read this ahead of seeing RaMell Ross’s adaptation (the best movie of the year, by my lights), and it is, in fact, a great novel. I’m also really glad I read it because it foregrounds how radical and wise the adaptation to cinema is.

The Paris Novel, Ruth Reichl

Obviously if Ruth Reichl, the great food writer and critic, writes a novel, then you read it. This felt surprisingly more like a midcentury novel than I expected — plotted, with little turns and musings — and it was a perfect bathtub read.

The Plot and The Sequel, Jean Hanff Korelitz

Downloaded The Plot audiobook on my way to a 10-mile race this fall, thanks to a recommendation on the NYT Book Review podcast I was listening to, and it was so engrossing and hilarious that I barely noticed the miles tick by. When I finished I immediately downloaded The Sequel, which came out this year. I don’t want to spoil any of it, but they’re suspense, they’re thrillers, and they’re also books about writers being annoyed with writers, which is totally my jam. I loved them both so much.

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell

Another research read; I don’t love this one as much as How to Do Nothing, but it is worth reading regardless, especially if the title appeals to you.

Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses, D. Graham Burnett

More research; this one is an anthology, so the writing is kind of all over the place, but there’s a lot of good stuff in here.

Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell, Arden Reed

Picked this up on a trip to Dia:Beacon this summer and found it pretty remarkable, a well-informed and well-written look at a particular kind of art and the way we experience it.

Splinters, Leslie Jamison

Another buzzy book from this year. I often love Leslie’s writing but I hesitated over this one because the topics (motherhood, divorce, pandemic) didn’t appeal, life is short, etc. But actually: it’s great. I loved it. There’s so much compassion and honesty in it, and I felt seen, oddly enough.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

Read for research (for this piece), and I mean, it’s Highsmith. She never misses.

The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay

This one was chosen by my friend Lauren for us to read, and then call and chat about. What a weird little book. I liked it, for the most part, but it was not even a bit what I was expecting — and that is what you should want from a book, I think.

Two-Step Devil, Jamie Quatro

So this is just a banger of a novel, virtuosic, gorgeous, continually surprising. My friend Jamie weaves texture and language like nobody else, and the ending had me gasping on the subway. Read it read it read it.

The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: A Memoir, Cory Leadbetter

My first review for the NYT Book Review!

What Are You Going Through, Sigrid Nunez

So this is a funny one. I picked it up because I was reviewing Pedro Almodovar’s new film The Room Next Door, which is based on this novel (semi-loosely). Halfway through I realized I’d read it before but didn’t remember it at all. Does that mean it’s good? Or not good? I can’t say. It’s really moving, and I’m glad I (re-)read it.

I’m reading a few books right now — a novel by Dawn Powell, a Hollywood biography, and an audiobook of (of course) Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, so there’s a good chance I’ll finish a few more before the end of the year. But looking back over this, I’ve had a pretty good reading year. I hope you have too.

As I note in the introduction to my list, it’s been one of those more eclectic years, with no obvious winners. These years are a lot more fun for those of us who are paid to pay attention to the upcoming interminable awards season, but also for list-making. Manohla and I have exactly one overlapping film, which means 19 total made it onto our combined list. And both of us really liked a lot of the movies on the other’s list.

I have heard people say it was a “bad” year for movies, which is utterly untrue. There were dozens of terrific movies this year. But often they weren’t the ones being pushed at you by giant corporations, which means you might have to do like we did in the pre-algorithm days and read some reviews and seek out movies that you may like, or may not, and then talk about them with other people. (This, also, is good.)

Anyhow, you can read the list at the website or, eventually, in the paper. I also posted my runners-up to social media! And then you should go watch some movies.

Also, here’s a trip: this was first published in 1973, in Berry’s book The Country of Marriage. Fifty-one years ago. A prophet, indeed.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
By Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Tuesdays, though — this makes sense. It’s a good way to grease the gears. Let’s say it’s Tuesday emails now.

First, a reminder

We’re deep in the weeds of book tour planning for March, when the book is released, and I’ll have more to tell you on that soon.

But in the meantime, please do pre-order if you’re planning on getting it anyhow. (At that link you can see the shiny new reviews and endorsements too! I am inordinately proud of them.)

In fact, please pre-order from your local bookstore if you can. Why? Well, here is a fun fact that you might not know, as summarized by someone I don’t know on BlueSky:

On to the funner stuff.

Culture Diet

• Over the weekend we watched an early screener of the upcoming Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, which is coming to Netflix on January 3. Mark your calendar.

• On TV, I recently worked my way through Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, which came out earlier this year. It is lumpy, but I am helpless in the face of anything about mid-20th century writers and socialites. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote reigns supreme, but I liked Tom Hollander’s, too.

• We also watched my screeners of the full third (and last) season of Somebody Somewhere, which is currently airing. I love this show so much. It means a lot to me that someone made it, and treated its characters so tenderly. It sticks the landing.

• I am surrounded by piles of books as I prepare my syllabus for next semester’s class. I have always enjoyed syllabus design, but I haven’t done it in a while and it’s a little overwhelming. A few from the pile: “Ways of Seeing” (John Berger), “Disordered Attention” (Claire Bishop), “Attention: A Personal History of Trying to Focus (or Trying To)” (Casey Schwartz), “Camera Lucida” (Roland Barthes), “Known and Strange Things” (Teju Cole), “How to Do Nothing” (Jenny Odell), the list goes on …

Actual Diet

• Obviously all food energy is directed toward Thursday’s big meal, a goodly portion of which I am preparing for nine people. My personal plans include the following:

  • Spatchcocked turkey and a supplementary roast pork loin with rosemary and garlic

  • The “You-Only-Need-One” stuffing from Katherine Lewin’s “Big Night” cookbook

  • Sheet pan brussels sprouts and bacon

  • The best mashed potatoes

• On Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s marvelous podcast “Wiser Than Me,” the great Alice Waters recommended pu-erh tea for lowering chloresterol, which is something I have recently had to do (and succeeded at). So I’ve been drinking this one and it is very good. (Also that episode is an absolute delight.)

Publishings

• An entry in the Culture desk’s new advice column, on whether you have to sit through all those end credits.

• An audio roundtable with two of my colleagues, TV critic Margaret Lyons and critic at large Amanda Hess, on the most urgent pop culture of our time: Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” show, which is very bad, even for its genre.

• Reviews of “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” “Blitz,” “Bird,” “Small Things Like These,” “Dream Team,” “A Photographic Memory,” and “The Piano Lesson.”

• Documentary Lens columns on that “Martha” Stewart documentary, the final installment in Wang Bing’s “Youth” trilogy, “The World According to Allee Willis,” and “Night Is Not Eternal,” an absolute banger of a documentary that really twists back on itself halfway through and could not feel more urgent (and is streaming on Max).

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends, and I hope you eat fantastic stuffing.

Just popping in this week with what I’ve published, and also to say that we’re in the midst of scheduling book events for We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, all timed somewhat around the release date on March 11. (If you missed the cover announcement, you can see it here and also pre-order, which I would be ever so grateful to you for doing.) Keep your ear to the ground for those!

Reviews of:

• The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (don’t sleep on this one, it’s on Netflix)

• Memoir of a Snail (in theaters)

• Woman of the Hour (on Netflix)

• Anora (in theaters, you will be hearing a lot more about this one)

Columns about:

• Dahomey (in theaters, terrific)

• Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara (on Hulu)

• The Last of the Sea Women (on Apple TV+)

And a notebook on:

• Dana Carvey’s Biden impression and what Sebastian Stan is really doing in “The Apprentice”

See you soon.

Just hitting your inboxes on this beautiful fall day to say that We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine has a cover!

Here it is, arranged nicely against an appropriate photo.

Isn’t it pretty?

And if you are so inclined, you can pre-order it on the platform of your choice here.

Okay, more soon!

When people find out what I do for a living, they usually have some follow-up question locked and loaded, and over the years I’ve gotten used to answering a few of the same ones over and over again. One is usually “how do you pick which movies to review?” Another is “what’s your favorite movie of all time?” And frequently, I’m asked this question: “How many movies do you watch in a week?”

The answer is that it varies. Sometimes it’s two. Sometimes it’s a lot more. And for the last six weeks, I’ve been in the “lot more” period, between popping up to Toronto during the festival for a few days and then taking the subway up to Lincoln Center nearly every day for about the last month for the New York Film Festival. Plus, there are non-festival movies to see and review. I just counted, and since September 1 I have seen 59 movies — even wilder when I consider that at least four of those run between 3.5 and 6 hours long.

Anyhow, the New York Film Festival has just concluded for me, and while the last 80 or so days of the year will also be intense (every movie that wants awards comes out before December 31, and it’s top-ten list season too), all this recent extra-helping festival watching means I’ve set myself up to have more time to write and think about the movies as they’re released, and to do my best work. Which is the whole point of being a movie critic.

Meanwhile, I am heading back into the classroom, sort of. This weekend marks the start of two short workshops I’m teaching at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, one on learning to write from Joan Didion’s craft and one on the review as creative writing. Both classes are full (hooray!), and to my delight the rosters included some former students of mine, alongside many new-to-me people. I am both happy to be back in a classroom for the first time since May 2023, and glad to have a chance to get my teaching chops back before I teach in my old graduate program at NYU in the spring.

The spring! Oh man. I have also spent the last couple of weeks talking with my publisher about a book tour (!), coinciding with the release of my next book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, on March 11. I will actually be in some cities in the weeks following that are not mine, as well as your friendly local bookstore Zoom (and, of course, in my own city too). We’re still in the throes of planning, but stay tuned! I’m quite excited to be with a publisher that’s so supportive of the book.

And of course, if you’re so inclined, please please do pre-order the book on the platform or through the bookstore of your choice. You may be tired of hearing this, but pre-orders help authors more than anything else. Good pre-order numbers help prompt bookstores to stock the book and promote it, and it does help with sales lists and other good things. Plus then you’ll have it on Day 1 (or sometimes a little sooner).

Some things I have cooked

I’ll be honest and say that this year has been pretty disorienting. I had so much upheaval and change last year — having to move, watching an academic position I’d poured myself into just disappear, and even shifting from one (good) media job to another (great) media job, plus family stuff and friend stuff, plus I turned 40 — that I’ve felt kind of dislocated. All of those changes, in the end, are very good; my job is good, my new apartment is still chaos but also good, 40 is good, all of it’s good. But I’ve felt a bit like a dried-up leaf skittering across the path, uncertain of where I’m going or where I am supposed to go.

Some of that is starting to settle, and next year looks, if very busy, also very exciting. But recently I realized part of the issue: owing to some apartment work that has stretched on forever and ever, we haven’t been able to have people over for dinner parties and celebrations. And if you know me, you know how much I thrive on those gatherings. (I did write an entire book about dinner parties.)

More than that, I love to cook; it is the activity that makes me feel most centered and in myself. We’re not quite ready for company yet, but I was ready to make some delicious autumn food.

All of that is a lengthy preamble to say that I moved some stuff around and have been cooking a little more recently, and it’s very therapeutic. Here are some things I made and loved:

• This delicious wild rice and soy salad with sesame ginger dressing, from NYT Cooking.

• Sheet-pan chicken thighs with apple and fennel, also from NYT Cooking.

• My favorite recipe for baked chicken breasts, the only one that results in perfectly juicy and delicious boneless skinless breasts.

• Braised chuck roast — oh dear, I don’t have a recipe. Okay. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees (I did this in a Breville smart oven). Cut a 2-5lb chuck roast into three pieces and brown them on all sides in a heavy oven-safe pot, in a tablespoon of melted butter. Remove the roast from the pot, then add about 5 cloves of chopped garlic and half a diced onion. Saute until they’re nearly see-through, then add roughly 1.5 cups of chopped carrots (I just chopped up some baby carrots), a box of sliced button mushrooms, some salt, and some rosemary and thyme (a couple sprigs of fresh is best). Cook for a minute, then pour in about 1/2 c of red wine and 2 cups of broth. Put the roast on top — it should be mostly submerged but not entirely — and put the top on. Place the whole thing in the oven, and in 3 hours you will have a very good roast. If you want, take the top off after 3 hours and put it back in for a half hour, which will cook down the liquid and result in a yummy sauce. (But you also don’t really have to do that.) This is good on its own or with mashed potatoes or noodles or roasted veggies of all kinds or, I presume, on a roll for sandwich yet, though I haven’t tried that.

• I also made a chicken soup, which I feel like everyone knows how to make. There are one zillion recipes out there. I’ll only say that I don’t put rice or noodles in mine unless I am adding them the day I eat it, because I tend to put it all in Mason jars in the fridge and eat slowly, and those can disintegrate.

Some things I have written

This is six weeks’ worth of stuff, sorry! I’ll be better in the future.

• A notebook on the (movie) apocalypse, for our megasized Fall Preview.

• A notebook on why the original Danish Speak No Evil is far superior to the recent remake.

• A notebook on the epic documentaries of the New York Film Festival and some of my frustrations with festivals and documentaries more generally.

• Reviews of My First Film, The Goldman Case, My Old Ass, A Different Man, The Substance, Apartment 7A, Sleep, The Outrun, It’s What’s Inside, Piece By Piece (aka the Lego Pharrell Williams doc), and Lonely Planet.

• Columns on documentaries about oysters, the human cost of the border crisis, the costume designer Patricia Field, two old friends on a revealing road trip, America’s food systems (guided by Ruth Reichl), and the women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s in Korea who dive without breathing gear for seafood.

• An audio roundtable with my colleagues Jason Zinoman and Margaret Lyons on hatewatching. We argue, it’s fun.