November 2022, the month it all fell down

I hate when people are cryptic about tragedy or anything really, but I’m going to be cryptic about tragedy right now. I’m not personally ready, nor do I think it’s appropriate, for me to share what is easily the most tragic news I’ve ever experienced. It’s not my tragedy to share even though it’s absolutely my tragedy to help bear. I’m only even mentioning it because I have a series of newsletters I’ll be very proud of myself if I send out this month, including this sort-of-tardy November one, and I have this fear that people will think everything is okay, and it’s not.

As I navigate more death, grief, and loss than I have really ever in my life, I know I’ll want to write about it. For now, I want to not write about it. I want to write about the best and worst things I’ve read and watched this year. I want to write about why I actually don’t think Love, Actually is that problematic. I want to be transported back to a time when being online and being a friend and being a person felt lighter and easier, and this is coming from someone who has had depression for most of her life. Romanticizing easier times when life has never been easy? You know shit’s bad then.

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Here’s what I struggled to read in November.

[Books I read]

The Shining by Stephen King (1977) | Quick summary: A family serves as a haunted hotel’s caretakers.
One of my favorite movies of all time, I’d never previously read the book. In fact, a lifelong reader who grew up with a bunch of King novels lining her mother’s shelf has really no excuse for never having read anything by this guy. The Shining felt really familiar immediately because of my adoration and insistence on repeated watches every spooky season. I greatly enjoyed getting to know these scary ass characters better. My biggest takeaway of all is that the fucking Black guy lives in the book. Justice for Dick Hallorann!!
[fiction, suspense, horror, written by a white American male author]

Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner (2021) | Quick summary: The details of a mother and daughter’s relationship, particularly as the mother slowly loses her life.
This has been on my cute ass book cart since August 2021 when my friend Jenna bought it for me. I love getting books as gifts—obviously—but I also love not rushing to read a book that someone has purchased while thinking of me. I find that all books, but especially those ones, come to you right when you need them the most. I do not know why I picked up Crying in H Mart when I did but it hit just right. My friend Mackenzie dying bore no resemblance to Zauner’s personal story. There are almost zero similarities other than a real person died in my life and in Zauner’s life, but I was fresh in the depths of sadness and reading the gutting honesty of this relationship was just what I needed. I cried way more reading this memoir than I probably would have had I read it in August 2021. It held me tight and I loved it.
[nonfiction, memoir, writing on grief, written by a Korean-American musician and author]

[Books I heard]

Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir by Lacy Crawford (2020) | Quick summary: Lacy Crawford tells her story of coming forward during the state investigation of an elite prep school that covered up her—and others’—assault for decades.
I don’t know much about prep school and nothing about Saint Johns in particular but Lacy Crawford built a case against them, without meaning to. Or maybe she did. Reading and listening to memoirs about rape and rape culture and sexual assault is obviously not for everyone. I have a deep interest, and often commitment to, the treatment of children and youth in vulnerable settings. Vulnerable settings are often (most often?) churches and schools and home. When you combine a private prep school, you get all three. Lacy Crawford is a strong and sincere person whose entire life has been dictated by the experiences she had at that fucked up school. And she had the courage to not just write her story, but read it out loud in an audiobook. Incredible.
[nonfiction, memoir, written by a white American author, journalist, novelist, and memoirist, read by author]

The Two Towers: Lord of the Rings Part II by J. R. R. Tolkien (1983, this version re-recorded in 2021) | Quick summary: The Fellowship is scattered, some fighting, some doing other stuff while Sam and Frodo are guided toward Mordor by Gollum.
Just like the movie, I think The Two Towers will be my least favorite of the trilogy. It was still a fun listen but took me twice as long to consume as Fellowship did. I continue to enjoy Andy Serkis’s narration and am looking forward to the third one!
[classic fiction, fantasy trilogy, written by a white English writer and philologist, read by actor Andy Serkis]

[What I recommend]

• If you’re an avid reader, I recommend reading something by Stephen King if you haven’t. And if you’re a The Shining movie person like me, that’s a good option.
• Probably everyone who doesn’t intimately understand the realities of sexual assault and rape should read Notes on a Silencing and/or memoirs and stories similar to it because it’s just the reality of how things are.
• I am re-reading/listening to it right now but it’s just a good time-of-year to plug Katherine May’s Wintering. I read it last year and I’m listening to it this year and what a vibe.
• Lord of the Rings, I guess? The movies are fun, this particular audiobook is fun, it’s history. Idk, I’d never fault anyone for not getting into it but if you’ve resisted LOTR because of its popularity in the early aughts like I did…maybe relinquish that and have a good time.
• Being gracious and kind during the holiday months.

“This inhuman place makes human monsters.” The Shining

“I envied and feared my mother's ability to keep matters private, as every secret I tried to hold close ate away at me. She possessed a rare talent for keeping secrets, even from us. She did not need anyone. She could surprise you with how little she needed you. All those years she instructed me to save 10 percent of myself like she did, I never knew it meant she had also been keeping a part of herself from me too.” Crying in H Mart

“What interests me is not what happened. I remember. I have always remembered. What interests me is the near impossibility of telling what happened in a way that discharges its power.” Notes on a Silencing

“And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy?” The Two Towers

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