December 2020, and we're all in misery

I used to be so enthusiastic about Christmas that it almost embarrasses me to think about. I guess I wasn’t always into it because when I was young, I told my mother that I wanted to celebrate Kwanzaa instead of Christmas because Christmas was for white people. (She said no.)

My feelings changed and by the time I was in high school, I was obsessed with it. I lived for the end of August, when the average person would start to complain that it was way too soon for Christmas to be creeping in on us from the corners of big department stores. “What about Thanksgiving,” everyone would balk, while I silently and entirely disagreed. Eyeing the upper shelves in my local Walgreens or whatever, I would be elated to see the beginning signs of the most wonderful time of the year. Looking back, I’m sure I was leaning into Christmas — the time of year, not the day — because it is supposed to be So Memorable and So Magical and So Fun and So Special, and I was missing that. As the reality of how tough my family had it really sunk in, the Christmas magic could so easily have been lost. Instead, I desperately clung onto it and made loving Christmas my whole damn personality.

And now? I kinda just wish I celebrated nothing at all, not even Kwanzaa. (Sorry Kwanzaa.) The holiday season is cripplingly stressful for so many people, even if you have the money, which my family doesn’t. No one in my family has kids. We’re a bunch of 30ish adults sitting around shooting the shit, and while that can be enjoyable, it is not particular to the holidays. I am a thoughtful and considerate gift giver, but I also hate capitalism, even as I feel drawn to give into it, racking up my credit card as I buy multiple “happy lights” for all of my brothers. And yes, I bought them from Amazon because I am an imperfect person (and can’t afford to buy everything local, if we’re being honest!) even if you have the wrong impression of me because I read all of these damn books. It’s been a dark, confusing, frustrating, devastating year and we’re not quite through it yet. We all deserve a happy light, even if purchased from a horrible monopoly by your sister who is overcompensating for being the sternest about the pandemic guidelines.

Thanks for being with me all year. I hope you had a nice holiday season and I hope we all have a brighter, healthier, more selfless 2021.

[Books I Read With My Eyes]

No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality by Michael J. Fox
Michael J. Fox is one of my favorite people in the world. I don’t even quite know how or why it happened but I got really into Spin City in my early teens and I have just been very endeared to him ever since. I have read all of Michael’s books but this one holds a different weight. While it has his signature sense of humor — even his dad jokes are cuter than everyone else’s — it was hard to read. He’s extremely vulnerable and honest about where he is on his health journey and it’s not the most uplifting news. Hearing all that Michael has been through in the past two years, even outside of Parkinson’s, is really hard to process. To have the kind of bravery and boldness that sharing this takes is admirable. There are, of course, also lessons in acceptance and realism — it’s nice to hear that it’s not always okay, especially from a natural optimist.

Michael also does a really nice job crediting the surgeons and healthcare workers who have helped him regain a semblance of his life and mobility. As a society, we herald these actors and their performances and idealize them and oftentimes, the reason we know about a disease is because of the famous people who have it and not because of the people who work to make it better and easier for them to live within their bodies and the reality of their lives. I know this is the year that celebrity has taken a huge hit — we kinda just don’t like famous people anymore — but without intending to, this book really drove that point home.
[celebrity memoir, written by a white cisgender man, shorter read]

Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Wow, I liked this. This was the perfect book for me. When you boil it all down, I just really like stories about people and their relationships and that’s what this is but with specifics that are more interesting, like Ireland and Hong Kong and bisexuality. I’m also not sure I’ve ever read a book that is more realistic to how it is to be a person today without being too heavy-handed. There are little things like Ava peeking at an instagram story quickly so it doesn’t register as seen, which we have all done some version of. Or the stray line about people who travel and make not working a regular job seem like a choice and not an option simply because of the extreme privilege of being born into a family who provides for them. The line, “Charming for Charlie to be a free spirit. For me, whatever paid rent was the decision,” made me snap like I was at a poetry night. And even the littler things that have nothing to do with the plot but are just normal things people should do in present-day stories: the dot dot dot when you’re typing at the same time, the drafting a text in a note first, the drafting a text IN the box of the person you are sending it to so you might accidentally send it and then you can’t back out of having the conversation! I love reading or hearing about a thing that I thought was exclusive to me and my most embarrassing, least prideful moments. But the reason I love to read so much is because that’s not real. You’re never alone, even in your internet creeping style. Perfect novel.
[contemporary fiction, queer love story, written by a white cisgender woman, medium-length read]

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen
I really do like Anne Helen Petersen. What she is interested in is interesting to me and we are similar in lifestyle choice — if only in our active decisions to not marry or have children. So, I was excited about this book because I like her and because I think the topic of burnout is relevant and interesting. It is absolutely not AHP’s fault that this book came out at the exact wrong time, but unfortunately it did. If this book existed just six months later, it would be entirely different. There is so much that felt outdated already, like a small paragraph on boredom or the last bit of the chapter on digital media intake and work seeping into our home lives. There are ample pages on how we used to have hobbies for leisure and the specificity of naming “model airplanes” as an example, which plenty of people have gotten back into doing during the pandemic, is just really bad timing. If you can look past the pandemic changing everything about everything (and if you can, wow, good for you, and also maybe do some critical thinking), there still is very good stuff in this book, though I will admit that I don’t think it’s really for me. I am so deeply rooted in the systemic issues that have cultivated and continue to reinforce millennial (and all other!) burnout.

I’m pretty introspective and additionally, I work my ass off in therapy every week to understand my own particular actions and thoughts and feelings and history. I know everything in this book, even the parenting stuff, and though it helps to feel validated, this felt a bit too general for me. I need the next step up. (And also, as always, could not help but obsess over how differently this would have been tackled if written by a Black or brown woman.)
[social sciences, nonfiction, written by a white cisgender woman, medium-length read]

Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
Excuse my Stefon, but this book has everything — feminist criticism, music theory, a personal deep dive into anxiety disorders, references to the movie Titanic, the phrase “Milli Violini.” For obvious reasons, I noted this book’s existence at some point last year when aimlessly wandering around The Elliott Bay Book Company, rifling through the bargain tables for little treasures; a simple pleasure I could once do, something among many things this era has taken from us. Regardless, I snapped a pic of the book to buy at another time and the time was a few months ago and here I am, finally getting to it now.* I am not even slightly musically inclined beyond my friend Joseph saying “you have a great voice!!!!” when I send him like, a voice note of me singing to The Sopranos theme song after three glasses of wine. If I were a music person, this book would be 100% perfect for me. And actually, now that I say that, this book is 100% perfect for me because it is also a cultural observation about how many people would flock to a mall to hear music that is not quite the soundtrack to the movie Titanic but is almost the soundtrack to the movie Titanic and sometimes is, fraudulently and dishonestly, the soundtrack to the movie Titanic. And these people would cry and say, oh my son was just killed in Iraq and your music has healed me, and these people claim the soundtrack to the movie Titanic has soothed them for years and as someone who used to only be able to sleep to the soundtrack to the movie Titanic during a tumultuous and unstable childhood, I gotta say, this book was for me.

*I bought it from Elliott Bay when I was ready for it! I do not take pics of books in bookstores and then buy them from other bookstores!
[memoir, nonfiction, written by a white cisgender woman, shortish read]

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
My friend Brady asked me if I wanted to read a book with him and I said sure and this is what we read and neither of us really liked it but it was fun to read it together anyway. This book tried too hard to be very modern, the metaphors were far too obvious, and I don’t have the ability to find the different personas of the boroughs of New York interesting, as I have never been! (I bought a Details magazine with Leonardo DiCaprio on it at the JFK airport once but I think we can all agree that doesn’t count as being really in New York.) Anyway, sci-fi isn’t my genre and I like to read stuff I usually wouldn’t read so shout-out to Brady for gently making me do this with him. Oh and also I have, or am pretty sure I have, trypophobia and this book was a nightmare in that regard. I’m not sure if a doctor would diagnose this officially or not but when I first learned the term a few years ago, I fell into a quick but deep google hole and nearly threw up and had to take a shower so even if it’s not official, I don’t like fucking weird holes or anything growing in or out of anything and now I’m grossed out again so I’ll stop here. (What a weird thing!!!!)
[sci-fi and fantasy novel, apparently the first in a trilogy, fiction, written by a Black cisgender woman, longish read]

The Feather Room by Anis Mojgani
Right after the first break-up that ever really devastated me, my friend Mikey dragged me out of my bed to go see some slam poetry up at the school. Slam poetry (and really poetry in general) was not my thing but I knew he was right — I needed to get out and do something. Anis was one of the poets there and I was so deeply moved by his words and just really held onto the specific poem, “This is how she makes me feel.” I’ve been chasing the line, “This is how she makes me feel; like honey and trombones” for most of my adult life. My friend Rachel bought me this book for my birthday and I didn’t even know that poem is in it (she did, though), but it is and I cried when I got to it. (Also this came out in 2011 and Anis’s later poetry is very good too, and oftentimes a little less love-y after his divorce.)
[poetry collection, written by a Black-Iranian cisgender man, short read]

[Audiobooks]

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
I’ve heard so much about this book since it came out that it’s unbelievable I somehow missed that it’s fiction? So about 1/4 of the way through, I was like, there’s no way this is real, right? And right. It’s not real. So then I was like, “well now that I know it’s not real, it feels a bit dramatic, no?” And then I was like, “wow this is very fun to listen to and what a well-done audiobook!” I listened to it in about three days so obviously I liked it and sometimes it’s okay to just say, you know what? I am not better than this relatively mindless popular book!!!! (Though I think Amazon making it into a fake docuseries is weird because it’s like, similar to Fleetwood Mac or a band like that and why not just watch a documentary about the real band? But whatever. I’ll prob watch.)
[fictional oral history, written by a white cisgender woman, medium-ish listen that goes quick, read by a whole cast of characters including Jennifer Beals, which kinda makes Daisy Jones Black but not if you look at the casting for the show on Prime]

A Song For You: My Life With Whitney Houston by Robyn Crawford
I am always wary of the stories that come out about famous people posthumously, and though Whitney was about as famous as they get, Robyn Crawford wrote this delicately, gently, and with a lot of love. I’ll never forget finding out Whitney died, over a big mama margarita at 7pm on a cold night in February. It was nice to learn more about her life, even as the stories got progressively more stressful. I’d also like to shout out the detailed credit Robyn gives to therapy for helping her process her childhood and her life alongside Whitney, and I’m sure, her death.
[memoir, nonfiction, written by a Black queer woman, longish listen, read by the author]

The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity by Esther Perel
I have really admired Esther Perel’s work for a few years, since my first-ever therapist referenced something she said. I read her writing a lot, newsletters and such, and listen to her excellent podcast Where Should We Begin from time to time. Perel said something that stuck with me once about how sometimes listening to other peoples’ issues make us realize we’re looking in a mirror. Maybe it’s not a revolutionary thought, but it does explain why I would pick up a book about infidelity when I’m not experiencing this situation in any way in my current relationship. I find nothing more interesting than humans and our behaviors and will happily consume anything about why we do the things we do.
[psychology, nonfiction, written by a white cisgender woman, longish listen, read by the author]

[What I Recommend]

Exciting Times and Sounds Like Titanic were both so damn good. You’ll hear a lot of Sally Rooney comparisons with Exciting Times, but I much preferred this to Normal People, if that helps. And don’t let the Titanic reference scare you away! It’s much more than it seems.

I also really do recommend looking into Esther Perel’s work.

Okay you’ll be getting a BONUS LETTER from me with a little top 10 of the year. Look for that soon. I love you bye.

“The best wedges of words were the ones my eight-year-olds wrote: I like her face. With her I am happy. I wished I’d never learned more advanced grammar and could only make sentences like that.” Exciting Times

“Faking is pedagogy. Faking is teaching and faking is learning and faking is the way that all human beings grow, from babies faking speech to teenagers faking coolness to professors faking wisdom.” Sounds Like Titanic

“There are cities growing inside my chest. The cities look like New York in the fifties. The buildings scrape the clouds. Every automobile is a convertible. The men all wear neckties and hats. The women have beautiful shapes of color on their bodies. Someone has saved a baby, there is a parade. Someone has saved all of the babies—there is the biggest parade moving inside of me. The sky explodes with ticker tape. Strangers are kissing in the streets. Their kisses are what make me live forever.” The Feather Room

“When we select a partner, we commit to a story, yet we remain forever curious. What other stories could we have been part of?” The State of Affairs