A Dozen Great Things I Read in 2023

My year in reading was all about luxuriating in lovely ruts. Why does a rut always have to mean something negative, or stagnant, or boring? Sometimes a rut is a real groove, and you roll along, picking up speed, feeling the wind rustle your hair, the music blaring, like, “Yeah, baby, this is IT!”

I did try to be serious and intentional at the start of the year. I told myself I would read more nonfiction, the kind about politics and climate change and feminist theory. Become more informed and intellectual. But then…I just didn’t feel like it. Instead, I gravitated toward reading a string of journals and memoirs of women writers about their craft and lives and work. I read Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Non-Existence, May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez (QUEEN), and A Horse at Night by Amina Cain, to name a few. I couldn’t get enough of being inside the cogs and wheels of their brains, of feeling relieved to discover that even these exceptional artists and actualized creators harbored wild insecurities and petty obsessions and deep grudges, of the tiny details about their writing desks and processes and fixations.

Simultaneously, for some reason we were never able to account for, my beloved book club also became fixated on body horror. We voted to read Crash by J.G. Ballard, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, and Mariana Enriquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed in quick, gory succession. These novels and stories pushed me out of my comfort zone—literally, as sometimes what we were reading made me physically recoil with discomfort—but offered a great adventure. (Although, I did loudly advocate we take a break from the genre, at least for the time being. I’m happy to report my plea was heard.)

So yeah, 2023 was rutty as hell! And I loved it. It gave me the opportunity to think deeply, to connect the dots between different books and writers, to indulge in tiny obsessions. Were you in a reading rut of your own this year? If so, I’d love to hear about it. If not, might I propose trying one out? Think about it, and in the meantime, here are 12 of my favorite books and poems published in the last year. Maybe one of them will spark a revelatory rut of your own:

1. I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel: Truly a banger. Patel uses an all-consuming, self-destructive crush as the lens through which to examine white feminism, misogyny, social-media envy, and all the various toxicities of our time. I loved the narrator’s ferocious rants about the Instagram influencer she despises but also wants to be, her unabashed hunger for fame, and the internal monologues wherein she justifies her increasingly obsessive behavior. It’s an uncomfortable read for the ways it skewers all our worst impulses while refusing to excuse the injustices done against women over and over and over again. But it’s the kind of squirminess that has real value.

2. “American Sonnet for the New Year” by Terrance Hayes: I just read this poem last night and was like, fuck it, this is making THE LIST. Hayes so captures the futility and necessity of hopefulness, and the particularly American insistence that things have taken some kind of shocking turn that no one saw coming instead of just, like, reaching their natural conclusions or being a more obvious version of what has always been. Anyway, this resonates so deeply in this precise American moment, when I think so many of us are feeling a sense of ominous pre-exhaustion at the prospect of what new horrors 2024 can possibly bring. (I personally am not sure how I can physically or spiritually survive another Trump campaign!)

3. Death Valley by Melissa Broder: I have loved Broder’s writing since stumbling on her @sosadtoday Twitter feed many years ago. It’s goofy and exposed and simply refuses to be embarrassed by the indignities of being human. This is a book that contends with grief as honestly as possible by using a surreal frame: the protagonist journeys out into the Joshua Tree-adjacent desert to work on her book while her dad is on the edge of death in the hospital. On a hike, she stumbles upon a magical cactus. Inside it, she experiences a kind of revelatory hallucination, and even comes up against death herself. While the tone and style are starkly different, this novel shares elements in common with Sheila Heti’s also wonderful Pure Colour, a book that was on my list last year.

4. Big Swiss by Jen Beagin: The plot of this book is easy enough to describe: when a psychiatrist’s transcriber becomes obsessed with one of his patients, all manner of chaos is unleashed. The many unhinged delights of this book, however, are harder to capture. Simply put, I haven’t had this much fun reading in eons. Big Swiss is extremely sexy, delightfully weird, and the kind of book you’ll want to give to all your friends.

5. Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein: During the pandemic, the writer Naomi Wolf retweeted something I posted on Twitter about masking, holding it up as an example of pandemic hysteria and mass brainwashing. I can’t remember exactly what I’d said; it seemed pretty innocuous. I do remember that I just kind of rolled my eyes as my replies became a hot mess. Because by then, I was already aware that she—the writer of The Beauty Myth, who shaped a lot of my early understanding of feminism as a teen—had fallen (or actively plunged herself) down the COVID-denier, right-wing rabbit hole. Also very aware of this was Naomi Klein, another cultural critic and writer, who was being constantly confused for “that Naomi”—at first online, but then increasingly in real life. In fact, the Wolf/Klein confusion became so maddening and pervasive, Klein wrote an entire book about it. Or, more accurately, she wrote a book about all the things it brought up about the rise of COVID conspiracies, our tenuous identities, the way we treat the internet as both not really real and also the ultimate harbinger of who is right and wrong, good and bad. This is a fascinating, meandering meditation on all those things—including a particularly timely recounting of a trip Klein took to Israel and Gaza—that is worth your time.

6. Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter: This is a fierce little shiv of a book. Etter tells the story of a writer who lands a “dream job” at a Silicon Valley tech firm and how she grapples with the ensuing alienation and complicity that eventually threaten to destroy her. The writing here is spare and effective. The plot is smart and taut. And coming-of-age stories that tackle the transition from nascent to “real” adulthood always do it for me.

7. Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery: I loved this book about a wallflower teen typist who ends up working at Andy Warhol’s Factory. It captures all the particular textures of 1960s New York City—or, at least, the textures I’ve always imagined and harbored a totally unearned nostalgia for—in a story that’s as tender as it is cynical about growing up, art-making, and how we both discover and shape the people we become.

8. The Creative Independent newsletter: One of the best things I do for myself every week is taking the uninterrupted minutes required to read this newsletter. It’s full of interviews with writers, painters, filmmakers, composers, critics, producers, and all manner of “creatives”—sorry to employ what has become a deeply cringe term—that bring me comfort, inspiration, and new ways of thinking. My favorite thing is discovering some useful pebble of wisdom from an artist who works in a medium I could never fathom attempting—like, say, stand-up comedy or playwriting. Do yourself a favor and, in the parlance of the YouTube era, SLAM that subscribe button.

9. The Guest by Emma Cline: Was this book one of my actual favorite things I read this year? Probably not. Not to say it isn’t extremely well written and totally gripping! It’s an elevated beach read about a desperate woman determined to cling to the tenuous, wealth-adjacent life she’s stumbled into in the Hamptons, at all costs. But what I truly loved about this book was less the book itself than the conversation around the book. It is increasingly difficult for a novel to become this kind of cultural talking point or bellwether anymore as the internet and society at large become more fragmented. But if you weren’t reading this book this Summer, someone at a dinner party was probably asking you if you’d read this book, or you were seeing a picture of someone resting this book on their bare legs poolside on Instagram, until you finally caved or at least read a summary of it online so you could be part of the literary moment. How fun was that feeling?! Very.

10. “What if We Call This Tenderness” by Sampson Starkweather: I could read this poem 1,000 times, and I’ve definitely read it dozens since it was first published in The New York Times in September. It is such a sweet, dark ode to longing and loneliness under late capitalism.

11. Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung: This was one of my book club’s picks this year, and one of my favorite things we read together. (Please do not ask me if you can join this club, because the waitlist is long, and the membership is highly exclusive. After all, I’m in it.) Chung’s short stories bridge magical realism, body horror, and fairy tales in inventive, funny, sometimes terrifying ways. From the opening story, about a woman who is haunted by a literal shit monster, you know this book is going places you haven’t gone before. And if you’re smart, you will surrender completely to the ride.

As an honorable mention, I must shoutout my friend Gabrielle Korn’s new queer sci-fi novel, Yours For the Taking. It came out earlier this month to glowing reviews from people far more influential and relevant than myself, and is next on my TBR pile. I can’t wait.

10 Great Things I Read in 2022

As I started compiling my annual best-of-reading list a few weeks ago, a common denominator emerged: everything that immediately came to mind had been written by a woman. Beyond my obvious self interest in this category of work, it also made sense in a year when womanhood felt particularly precarious and dangerous. The social safety net’s gaping holes made ever more apparent by the ongoing COVID crisis. The overturning of Roe v. Wade by a Supreme Court not just hostile toward, but actively opposed to, bodily autonomy for anyone but cisgendered white men. The women and girls of Iran risking imprisonment or worse as they pushed back against their own diminishment and disempowerment. The heightened—and disturbingly ‘90s-reminiscent—body chatter on “trends” like buccal fat removal and BBLs and the proclaimed resurgence of “skinny” instead of “curvy” as desirable, at least for now.

I craved writing that would capture and question what it meant to be a woman in this world, in this moment. It is something I have spent a lifetime attempting to do for myself, and something I’ll certainly remain doing until the minute I die.

For almost a decade, I’ve shared a list of books, poems, and essays to match the year in question: 22 of the best things I read in 2022, for example. But the last 12 months were full of radical upheaval in my life, which meant I read far fewer books than I hoped, and it seemed silly to bind myself to some rule that only ever mattered to me. The one tradition I did maintain to was to only include things published this calendar year. (Though I will preemptively state that I’m not sure if Nicole Callihan’s poem was published elsewhere and earlier).

So, here are stories of women grieving. Women grappling with beauty. Women reckoning with abuse. Women seeking. Women lusting. Women failing. Women owning their desires. Women, just . . . womening. Read them and weep. Read them and cackle. Read them and feel awed. Read them and, if you’re like me, find recognition.

1. Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom: Rowbottom tells the story of a former influencer who decides to undergo Aesthetica, a revolutionary—and extremely risky—procedure meant to undo fillers, Botox, and augmentations of all sorts to reveal the untouched, naturally aged face one should have. Woven with anxiety and feminist theory and social-media critique—and anchored by a mother-daughter relationship that tugs at me still—it’s a novel written with surgical precision and a palpable sensation of dread and longing.

2. Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson: Johnson’s radically original novel about sex, striving, family dynamics, and (obviously) trauma made me laugh out loud. When Vivian, a public defender who has had it with her job, her poisonously dysfunctional mother and brother, and men in general, aims to start fresh, she realizes she might first have to spiral out of control in order to gain some.

3. Vladimir by Julia May Jonas: It’s unfortunate that a novel about a woman on the other side of 50 experiencing desire is so rare, but…it is so rare. Jones’s novel about obsession and, well, horniness, is a tense, unexpected, and delightfully complicated story I couldn’t put down.

4. “A Recipe for Forgiveness” by Helen Longstreth: Longstreth’s memory of her father’s love, decline, and beloved sausage pasta has stayed with me since I first read it in July. It’s rare to be able to render a loved one in all their shades, with all the honesty that can be mustered, and all the care they deserve. While I didn’t know Longstreth’s father, obviously, this ode to a parent who couldn’t be rescued from himself made me miss him, too.

5. Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou: When Ingrid, a PhD student struggling to make it in academia, discovers the disturbing truth about the Chinese-American poet who is the begrudging focus of her dissertation, all hell breaks loose on campus and in her personal life. It had been years since I read a true satire, and I’ll admit, it took me time to settle into some of the more absurd aspects of Chou’s novel. But I’m glad I was capable of it, because this book is a stunning achievement, a tour de force, and an incisive look at the toxic ways racism and misogyny permeate not just institutions, but our most intimate relationships. This is the kind of novel you want to talk about, and it made for one of the most spirited gatherings of my book club all year. I can’t wait to read what she writes next.

6. Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz: Schulz’s reflections on her father’s death and falling in love—two things that happened in her life in a compressed, chaotic span of time—is nothing short of poetic. With resonant writing that plucks influence from nature, science, religion, and literature, Schulz captures loss and discovery, pain and pleasure, ends and beginnings in one awe-inspiring collection of impressions and stories.

7. Pure Color by Sheila Heti: No one really writes like Sheila Heti writes. I’ve been enamored not just of her way with words, but of her one-of-a-kind worldview, since I read How Should a Person Be so many years ago. This tender, verging on psychedelic novel about a young woman who becomes a leaf (really, that’s something that occurs in this book, and yes, it makes perfect sense) explores what it means to be a soul in a body with humor and clarity.

8. “The Extravagant Stars” by Nicole Callihan: In a poem anchored by statistics both made-up and real— 1 in 2 women can’t remember 1 in 2 things—Nicole Callihan ruminates on the desire to overcome ourselves, finding faith in what’s bigger than us, and what it means to persist. I came across this remarkable piece in one of my favorite poetry podcasts and newsletters, “The Slowdown,” which is hosted by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. (Do you subscribe? If not, you should subscribe.)

9. The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan: Chan’s dystopian novel takes place in a world where mothers deemed failures by the state are sent to reeducation centers. Their only hope of reuniting with their kids demands compliance, cooperation, and participating successfully in a disturbing parental simulation. If you are not up for having your heart irrevocably broken, do not read this book. But seriously, read this book.

10. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy: Speaking anything but “respectfully” of the dead remains one of our most persistent cultural taboos — and if the title of former tween star Jennette McCurdy’s memoir doesn’t make it clear, it’s a taboo she’s uninterested in upholding. Raised in a Mormon family with very little money or stability, McCurdy’s success as a child star became her mother’s obsession. The truth is, it is one thing to have a remarkable life, and it’s entirely another to be able to tell a remarkable life story. McCurdy has done both in a riveting account of abuse and recovery and growing up.

21 Great Things I Read in 2021

I read something in The New Yorker that referred to 2021 as a year that “feels as though it does and does not exist.” This was a time caught in the middle. It was a year the most hopeful among us (at one point, at least) thought might spell a moment between COVID and after COVID. Instead, it became a kind of lived fugue state that was a little bit before, during, and after all at once. Time felt murky, and slippery, and alternately long and short. Sometimes I read in furious spurts, downing a few books in a week. Other times, I barely read at all for weeks on end. I feel fine about that. If you found yourself in similar straits during this supremely weird time, I hope you do, too.

As usual, this list is in no particular order, and it’s not meant to be a catalog of everything I read and loved. Because, after all, I’m a mere mortal who forgets things, and one who forgot things a lot more in this last blurry year. It’s just my best attempt to sum up my year in reading in a way that might be handy or exciting to someone else. And to remind me that, no matter what happens, words will persist.

NOVELS AND NONFICTION:

• Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters: This novel knocked me off my feet in every way. It’s a portrait of the knotty relationship between three people — a cisgender woman, transgender woman, and man who de-transitioned after living as a woman — and what happens when one of them floats the idea that they raise a child together. Peters is a deft writer with a special gift for dialogue: her characters’ words are the kind that seem just slightly heightened and a tad smarter than anything you might actually hear in conversation, but also somehow perfectly realistic and revealing.

• Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder: Rachel Yoder’s novel about motherhood, art, and the animal at the heart of us all makes me want to borrow the word “rollicking” from old movie reviews. It was just that fun and visceral and sharp. As a young mother struggles to raise her toddler, she finds herself drawn back to the art career she left behind . . . and drawn into a new and strange kind of metamorphosis.

• Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford: Ashley C. Ford’s memoir might surprise you if you’ve just read short blurbs about it on the internet. Yes, it’s the story of her father’s incarceration and the indelible impact it made on her childhood. But it’s also a story of triumph and first love and abuse and victory and grief. And when it’s earned praise from everyone from Oprah to Brene Brown, who really needs to hear any more from me about it?

• The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen: Before Tove Ditlevsen’s literary memoir, I don’t think I had read a book that so expertly captured what it feels like to be a child. Or maybe just so expertly captures what it feels like to be an adult remembering what it feels like to be a child. The story of her life is is told in three sections: Childhood, Youth and Dependency. (I assumed the last section would be about old age, but instead, it is about her drug use and abusive marriage.) Her unsparing eye and spare sentences offered a portrait of life as a woman who defied convention as boldly as she did in her time.

• Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov: This biography of painter Helen Frankenthaler captured my imagination from the first page. Nemerov's portrait makes you feel as though you’re right in the mix in the art scene of 1950s New York, with all its petty dramas and outsized personalities and grandiose talents. It’s a scene from which women’s contributions still haven’t been properly lauded and documented — but this book makes an excellent contribution to fixing that.

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro: I love authors who wear their fascinations on their sleeve, and Ishiguro is certainly one of them. In this tale of a girl and her robot, he mines the same deep questions of what makes us human — or not — that he does in so much of his work, with his singular emotional clarity. A heartache of a novel I will absolutely subject myself to again.

• LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin: This brief book, which takes place in an Apple repair store in 1990s New York, surprised the hell out of me. It has the humor and familiarity of a sitcom in syndication and the sort of observational power of a great graphic novel — which makes perfect sense, since Shopsin is also an illustrator.

• Girlhood by Melissa Febos: I reviewed Girlhood for POPSUGAR this year and I couldn’t get it out of my head for months. Febos is easily one of the most masterful essay writers of our generation, and in this book, she captures the nauseating, euphoric thrill ride that is existing in that liminal space between girl and woman.

• Milk Fed by Melissa Broder: How I love, love, love this book. A Hollywood talent agency assistant who has bad relationships with both food and her mother takes a turn toward indulgence — in both love and frozen yogurt — in this sensory Tilt-a-Whirl of a novel.

• Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins: I’ve long admired Morgan Jerkins’ culture writing, and her first novel draws on her unique talent to pull together seemingly disparate threads into satisfying narratives that make you say “Oooh, now I get it.” Her book about a family’s long tradition of selling their caul — a magical, protective layer of skin they’re born with — largely takes place in their matriarch’s decaying old brownstone. Jerkins weaves together themes from gentrification to motherhood and finds all the places they might intersect in this compelling story. This novel stunned and surprised me each time Jerkins led me around another of the brownstone’s corners.

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS:

• "Writing an Ordinary Existence" by Kyle Lucia Wu: Catapult publishes such great writing, and this essay by Kyle Lucia Wu was one that I couldn’t forget as I came to this list. In it, she ponders what it means to live and write about life and identity…and where our life stories can be found, in the incredible, the ordinary, and all the hard spaces in between.

• "Why isn’t she texting me back? The pandemic has us doubting our friendships." by Caroline Kitchener: Before you ask, this wasn’t that one story that claimed something like one in four of the people you think are your friends actually like you. This story recognized a fear that many of us who rely on our intimate friendships felt during the pandemic: the fear that those friendships were falling away, that we were navigating the social dynamics of this uncertain time incorrectly, that we were doing too much or too little to sustain those bonds. Coining the term “friendship doubt,” my hunch is that Caroline Kitchener inadvertently rekindled plenty of dormant group chats, putting a name to something so many of us felt but hadn’t shared.

• “How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted” by Kyle Chayka: Kyle Chayka also wrote that great New Yorker piece I referenced in the intro to this list, and as further evidence of his genius, I present this essay. In a world that offers us stimulation, excess and access at every waking moment (and even our un-waking ones), he asks, is it any wonder we’re craving absence?

• The Creative Independent interview with Ross Gay: We are just so lucky to have Ross Gay in this world. In this charming interview with The Creative Independent (which has easily become one of my favorite newsletters in a writing ecosphere full of newsletters) we get a close look at his creative process and general views on being alive. My favorite part was his delineation between a “task” and a “pursuit” — and how he tries to focus on the latter in his work. Something I want to bring forward in my own life.

• "Old Women" by Jillian Steinhauer: As Jillian Steinhauer writes in the provocative first sentence of this essay: “The best way to succeed as a woman artist is to be old.” Her essay critiques our tokenization of aging women artists as curiosities—especially aging women of color—and the limited worldview that still makes the art world go ‘round. How can we trust an art establishment with such a failing of imagination, she asks? And she makes you ask it, too.

SHORT STORIES:

• “Human Development” by Anthony Veasna So: My book club’s last read of the year was Anthony Veasna So’s posthumous Afterparties, a collection of wry coming-of-age stories and the Cambodian diaspora. I loved the entire book, but I was struck by the one story that wasn’t previously published: “Human Development.” It’s a complicated piece about a relationship between two men, one older and more successful, one younger and a little messier. But it’s really about the intersection of identity and technology, the ways we disappoint each other, and what we owe — or don’t owe — to anyone else.

• Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen: I was overjoyed to see this book land a spot on Barack Obama’s annual list of favorite reads. Te-Ping Chen’s debut short story collection masterfully blends magical realism with the mundane, the personal and the political, in a series of vignettes about live in modern-day China.

POEMS:

• “Alive at the End of the World” by Saeed Jones: As I revisited Saeed Jones’s poem while making this list — a poem which he published just earlier this month — I was struck by my momentary inability to recall which school shooting it followed. The discomfort and guilt I felt at being unable to distinguish the particulars was upsetting, but it also seems a uniquely American response he speaks to with this piece, which recognizes the blurry pervasiveness of gun violence in the United States: “The end of the world / was mistaken for just another midday massacre / in America.”

• “Vaccinated” by Jericho Brown: Jericho Brown is one of our greatest living poets, and this will remind you why. As he writes about attending a drag show, during what I interpreted as one of those confusing "are we OK to go out?” pandemic moments, he pulls back layers to reflect on more than one kind of sickness.

• “A True Account of Talking to the Moon at Fire Island,” by Alex Dimitrov: I absolutely loved Alex Dimitrov’s third poetry collection, Love and Other Poems, but I have a special affection for this weird and tender piece in particular. I have never laughed so hard, so loudly, while reading a poem that then brought me to grateful tears by the end. Goddamn this guy. He gets me every time.

20 Great Things I Read in 2020

As we emerge from the year that was — and look cautiously ahead to whatever awaits us on the other side — I’m struck by what an outstanding twelve months in literature we were fortunate to have, despite it all. There was very little in our lives this year, and what was left in them was often shitty and dismal, but at least not the books.

There were times in 2020 I found myself unable to read much at all, which is how I knew things were bad. During those stretches I was unable to focus, or find remnants of pleasure in every day acts, or set aside pain and fear for long enough to feel something else in the pages of a book. I know many of us experienced this, in different ways, and to different degrees — and, obviously, that many people suffered tremendously worse than I did. My own paltry struggling manifested itself in shutting myself away and isolating, even when I knew what would help was to reach outward, to be in the world, to seek out reminders of our shared humanity. But in the moments when I wandered out from that fog, I was voracious for words that helped me do just that.

My annual reading list is never ranked or ordered, and I exempted straightforward journalism but left room for culture stories in 2020. There was simply too much vital and groundbreaking reporting from organizations like ProPublica in 2020, and this list is a separate kind of thing, anyway. Another disclaimer: while I read quite a bit, there are many people who read far more than me. This is just a collection of new-in-2020 books, essays, poems, and short stories I encountered that struck me and stayed with me, and that I hope might do the same for you.

1. The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans: Danielle Evans can Write. With a capital W. “Boys Go to Jupiter,” which begins when a college student’s Confederate flag bikini sets off a firestorm on campus, is the kind of short story that will linger with me forever. But there is not a character or page or sentence wasted in this outstanding collection.

2. Eartheater by Dolores Reyes: This book, about a young woman who communes with the dead, absorbed me from the start. It’s part magical realism, part mystery novel, and part coming-of-age story, and the meticulous, brutal language Reyes uses to tell it will slice you to the core.

3. “The Feminist” by Tony Tulathimutte, n+1: OK, this came out toward the end of 2019, but this is my list and I can DO WHAT I WANT! Tulathimutte’s insidious little story about the making of an incel picks up speed and sneaks up on you before you quite realize what’s happening. Also, if you do not follow Tony on Twitter, you must.

4. For Now by Eileen Myles: This speech Myles gave at Yale is an exquisite reflection on the splendor and mundanity of the writing life. If you love Myles’s poems like I do, this is one of those books you’ll keep cracking open over and over again, just to spend a little more time inside their brain.

5. “Running For Your Life: A Community Poem for Ahmaud Arbery” by Kwame Alexander, NPR: As a runner, I witnessed how Ahmaud Arbery’s killing sparked a long-overdue realization of how racism and hatred seeps into every human experience — even an act like running, which so many privileged people assume is the ultimate expression of freedom and ease. This beautiful shared tribute to a young man who deserved that very freedom and ease was spearheaded by NPR poet in residence Kwame Alexander. I recommend reading and listening to it to experience it fully.

6. “Our Shared Unsharing” by Stella Bugbee, The Cut: Bugbee’s essay spoke to so many of the reasons my own personal Instagram was dormant for much of 2020. What are the right parts of ourselves to share online, and when, and exactly how? These questions felt murkier than ever in a year when life often felt overwhelming and ugly and, yes, so much bigger than our selfies.

7. "Why We Can't Stop Thinking About George Floyd's Neck" by Soraya Nadia McDonald, The Undefeated: McDonald was a Pulitzer finalist his year and is one of the definitive culture writers of our generation. This astonishing piece, written in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, is a prime example of her power. In it, she reflects on the human neck as a historical site of vulnerability, intimacy, violence, and exposure. But, as she writes, “of all the associations it carries along with it, for Black Americans, a boot on the neck remains an enduring metonym for state-sanctioned and extrajudicial violence.”

8. What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez: No one writes about death and dying with more lifeforce than Sigrid Nunez. In this follow-up to The Friend, a woman grapples with joining a terminally ill acquaintance on her mission to end her life, pondering the point of pain and friendship as she does.

9. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson: Wilkerson’s book opens with an anecdote about anthrax and Donald Trump that may be the most compelling analysis of his presidency I’ve read to date. As the book continues, she traces the caste systems in India, Nazi Germany, and America; while there are plenty of worthy critiques of her selection of caste as the dominant determinant in each of these cultures or historical moments, I found this book to be a powerful and valuable reading experience. Wilkerson’s stellar writing and ability to draw throughlines across borders and time will help any reader gain a broader perspective on how systems of inequality are emulated and propped up.

10. "The Winged Thing" by Patricia Lockwood, The New Yorker: Patricia Lockwood is one of the strangest, funniest, and most visceral writers you’ll encounter these days. (If you haven’t read Priestdaddy, get on it.) In this heartcrushing story for The New Yorker, about a family coping with a precarious pregnancy, she once again made me cackle and cry like a maniac, often at the same time.

11. A Burning by Megha Majumdar: When Jivan, a girl from the slums, is accused of a terror attack, her fate is pinned between a right-wing politician determined to make a name for himself and the outcast who can save her by providing her alibi . . . but only at great personal cost. This book had the pace of a great thriller while deftly tackling themes of class and politics in modern-day India, all through characters you couldn’t help but want to get to know.

12. “I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead” by Brit Marling, The New York Times: As filmmaker and actor Brit Marling writes, when we think of the cliched “strong female lead” archetype — which is usually meant as high praise — it’s usually because she’s emulating masculine ideals of power. Holding a gun. Kicking ass. Wielding influence as the head of some government or capitalist institution. And, she notes, “what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: ‘Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked.’” Marling doesn’t pretend to have the answer to this conundrum — though in admitting it’s what’s driven her increasingly to sci-fi and speculative stories, she makes clear that our art can’t change until we do.

13. Bravey by Alexi Pappas: Runners know Alexi Pappas. Writers know Alexi Pappas. Filmmakers know Alexi Pappas. But few except the closest to her know her full story. While the Olympic Dreams actor and filmmaker, poet, and Olympic athlete has never been reticent to share the broad strokes of her life story, Bravey is the first time she delves so intimately into the first 30 years of her life and the losses and triumphs that shaped her. Whether she is writing about her mother’s death by suicide when she was a young girl, her affection for Jerry Seinfeld, or her own post-Olympic struggle with depression, her affection for each person who has come and gone and stayed in her life — and finally, now, for herself — make this memoir stand apart. (Out Jan. 12)

14. “Guy Fieri is the Last Unproblematic Food Person” by Scaachi Koul, Buzzfeed: Scaachi’s pop-culture writing is a joy to read, but it’s never fluff. This defense of the inventor of Trash Can Nachos and Donkey Sauce spoke to a fulcrum point in the food world this year, and while Fieri might not seem the likeliest of heroes in a time when Bon Appetit, Alison Roman, and countless others were called to the carpet for racism in the industry, Scaachi makes a compelling case for this spiky-haired savant of garbage food. “I do realize by even writing this, I’m effectively inviting some kind of compromising information on Fieri to be released, something that proves the opposite of what’s been proven thus far,” she wrote in conclusion. But guess what? There wasn’t any, as far as I know!

15. Luster by Raven Leilani: As I wrote in my review of this book on POPSUGAR: “Encountering Raven Leilani's one-of-a kind debut jolted me out of my mid-pandemic stasis. Leilani's vibrant language and unflinching willingness to get down into the muck of human behavior make each sentence of this novel feel like a revelation and a discovery." I can’t wait to see what Leilani, who is also a gorgeous personal essayist, puts out into the world next.

16. “For My Friends, in Reply to a Question” by Safia Elhillo, Catapult: Safia Elhillo’s pandemic poem is the best example of successful art created in this time, about this time, that I can think of. (We’ve seen plenty of examples of unsuccessful attempts, amIright?) I read it over and over again when I first came upon it, and it still captures so much of the dreamlinke terror of 2020 in its lines. “I sleep twelve hours each night / & in my dreams I am fleeing a war, in my dreams / I am touching the faces of my friends, we are / each one of us touching, & even in the dream / we are afraid.”

17. The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe: I thought Thorpe’s novel was one of the most underrated of the year. Not that it exactly went under the radar — I got it as a Book of the Month selection — just that I think it deserved big praise. Told from the perspective of a teen boy coming into his sexuality and intrigued by the strange, hyperathletic girl next door, it’s a pageturner about who gets to be violent, who gets to feel safe, and who gets to decide those things.

18. “On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed By a Pandemic,” by Jesmyn Ward, Vanity Fair: I hesitate to try and sum up this remarkable essay in any short little space, because it feels to me like a piece that future generations will turn to again and again to try and understand this moment in time, both in its most intimate specifics and cultural complexities. In writing about losing her husband to COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter reckoning of the Summer, Ward exposes and documents her grief, our grief, a nation’s grief.

19. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett: This is one of those books you want to slow down and savor but can’t help devour in no time. Bennett’s novel is about two sisters whose paths diverge — and then come back together thanks to an unexpected run-in. It’s intricate, soapy (I use that word in the most complimentary way possible here), and a layered examination of our power — or lackthereof — to reshape or reject our identities.

20. “I’m the Mother of a Toddler. This is Why I No Longer Life in Fear” by Lindzi Scharf, Los Angeles Times: In this essay, Lindzi — a longtime red-carpet cohort of mine and a warm, witty writer — reflects on raising her daughter, Evan, who has a rare mitochondrial condition. She shared her story this spring as the world came to terms with the threat of coronavirus, and reflects on how existing in a constant state of uncertainty has shifted her perspective on how to live with more joy and presence, even when you are scared.

Let me know what your favorite read of the year was, or what 2020 books are currently on top of your to-be-read pile. For me, that includes Stephanie LaCava’s The Superrationals, Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, Emma Cline’s Daddy and Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to one or two of them by 2021.

19 of the Best Things I Read in 2019

At our final meeting of the year, everyone in my book club buys and gift-wraps a book they love, and we all settle in for a spirited white elephant. (Stealing is allowed and we are cutthroat.) This year, my contribution was Philippe Besson’s “Lie With Me,” a stunning novel I thought was unfairly overlooked in a year flooded with stunning novels. I mean, Molly Ringwald herself translated it from French, because apparently being a defining actor of her generation and a lauded short story writer simply is not enough to keep her satisfied. And the book that landed in my lap? “I Lost It at the Movies” by film critic Pauline Kael. I am embarrassed to say I hadn’t read her work before, but by the end of page one, it was easy to see why she is legendary — and why my friend Jenny chose this book.

As an adult, I don’t feel a lot of anticipation around the holidays anymore, but this gift exchange is an exception. I love hearing people talk about how the book they’re passing on changed them, or is one of those rare novels they find themselves returning to over and over again, or was simply one of the best things they read all year. Reading and writing are often considered solitary acts. But in my life, they’ve also been the conduits for some of my deepest friendships and those moments, like our book club tradition, that make me feel embedded in something greater.

It is 2019 — at least, for a few more days — so in keeping with another longstanding tradition, I rounded up 19 of the best pieces of new writing I encountered this year. They’re in no kind of order or hierarchy. They’re just the stories I keep thinking about as I prepare to embark on a whole new decade of reading. Stories I think just might make you feel embedded in something greater, too.

1. The Code of Hammurabi by Jenny Slate, The Paris Review: This excerpt from Slate’s book Little Weirds (which I admittedly have not yet read) is a provocative and introspective delight about patriarchy, history, and curry. And if it doesn’t make you want to go set the world on fire, I’m not sure what to tell you.

2. A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions by Ian Parker, The New Yorker: This wild (and I mean WILD) tale about a successful novelist's decades-long web of lies is exhaustively reported and smartly crafted. It's also a great example of creativity in form, unfolding just like one of the mystery novels its subject might write.

3. Normal People by Sally Rooney: What can be said about Normal People that hasn’t already? Rooney’s power of observation and ability to capture the unspeakable feelings we all know too well is so remarkable it’s occasionally irritating. This novel about young love and how we make ourselves into ourselves is devastating and wonderful.

4. The Time I Went On A Lesbian Cruise And It Blew Up My Entire Life by Shannon Keating, Buzzfeed: This is a break-up story. This is a love story. This is a personal essay. This is experiential journalism. This is political. This is personal. Keating’s piece is all those things, and after it made a splash (no pun intended) on Writer Twitter over the summer, I read it and found out why.

5. For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity by Liz Plank: As I wrote in my interview with Plank, which, coincidentally, is one of my favorite things I wrote this year: “Plank's empathy and hope are palpable in For the Love of Men's meticulously researched pages — pages that are also just plain enjoyable to read. (Yes, feminists can be funny.) The overarching feeling Plank's work left me with was excitement about what our future could, and hopefully will, look like once we banish harmful gender norms and progress past patriarchy.” This book regularly surprised me and made me think about gender in new ways and I’m certain it will do the same for anyone, of any gender, who gives it a read.

6. He’d been kept alive with tubes for nearly 17 years. Who is he, and is it possible he’s conscious? by Joanne Faryon, The Los Angeles Times: This story is everything journalism should strive to be: dogged, empathetic, and a tool to help tell the stories of the most neglected and marginalized among us. Faryon followed this story for years, and her dedication to illuminating the human story of a patient known for years as only as “Sixty-Six Garage” continues to astound me.

7. Godshot by Chelsea Bieker: Including this book on this list is a bit of a cheat. Technically, it’s not out until April of 2020. Nonetheless, I was so wholly absorbed by this cyclone of a debut novel that I wanted to include it while my feelings were still humming at the surface. Bieker’s book — about mothers and daughters, religion and patriarchy, environmental and personal ruin — calls to mind voices and stories from Janet Fitch’s White Oleander, Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus, and Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room. But it’s also entirely its own species of a novel. One that you should preorder immediately.

8. The Fight for Gender Equality in One of the Most Dangerous Sports on Earth by Daniel Duane, The New York Times: I dare you to start reading this feature and pause before you finish. This riveting piece tells the story of an unstoppable group of female big-wave surfers. They take on swells five stories (!) high and suffer the kinds of injuries that will have you full-body cringing . . . all while having to fight for even the minimum of recognition and inclusion in a male-dominated sport. This story details the plainly misogynistic and discriminatory practices that, until recently, still poisoned a major sport for women. And the writing is a master class in how to beautifully capture action in words. 

9. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo: Just a few pages into Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, I had to put the book down in my lap to marvel over this passage: “Her legs, even in her old age, were absurdly feminine. I can imagine being inside this man’s head and seeing my mother’s legs and following them. One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would.” This book is a slippery thing to describe, because it is unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Taddeo follows three women’s radically different stories of desire, abuse, and longing to poke at truths about gender and power in unexpected ways. While this isn’t a scholarly work, it’s still one that attempts to shift the paradigm by confronting women’s sex lives via messy and explicit truths.

10. A Second Chance by Emily Giambalvo, The Washington Post: This was perhaps the most heartwarming thing I read all year long. Giambalvo and her team at WaPo made it their mission to track down all 47 of the dogs rescued from Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation 12 years ago and share their stories. As Vick enjoys something of a comeback, this piece struck me a vital reckoning with the horrific damage he inflicted — but also as a celebration of resilience and the overwhelming good in the world.

11. Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas: It can be hard to reckon a love of fashion with leading an ethical life. Not only is it one of the most exploitative global industries when it comes to labor and human rights, but a 2018 study determined textile production is the second-most polluting industry on earth. I have been a huge fan of Thomas since her book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster, which very much inspired my graduate thesis on IP in fashion design. Her latest introduces you to the leaders in sustainable fashion design — like Stella McCartney’s fascinating journey to perfect vegan leather — and tracks newer innovations like 3D printing and the advent of synthetic silk. As usual, Thomas pulls back the curtain on the ugly way the items we covet and wear are made, but also offers an exciting vision of how the industry is poised to transform. I haven’t learned so much from a single book in years.

12. Judge Judy Is Still Judging You by Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Magazine: It seems odd that a profile of Judge Judy in the year 2019 could offer something new or worthy. After all, the woman has been famous for more than two decades, and she’s been famous for being bluntly herself. But Hughes’ delightful story with the predictably no-nonsense Sheindlen seemed to reveal a new facet of someone we all think we know. Not to mention the fact that it was some of the most fun I had reading all year. As I tweeted at the time: “There are two types of people in this world: those who support Judge Judy’s right to wear a $29.95 clip-on ponytail on TV and those who do not. If you are the latter, please unfollow me.”

13. There’s Nothing Wrong With Posing for Photos at Chernobyl by Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic: Lorenz, who hopped over to the NYT style section this year, is our generation’s chief internet translator. Whether she’s taking a look at the “OK Boomer” trend (at the peril of her mentions) or explaining the rise of TikTok to Gen X, she offers a never-condescending and nuanced view of how social media is shaping, and is shaped by, us all. This piece reflecting on a moment of outrage over influencers taking photographs at Chernobyl was a perfect example of what she does well: finding the humanity in the way we approach technology and helping us better understand the why and impact of how we use it.

14. The Tradition by Jericho Brown: Brown’s poetry is the kind that makes you want to run into the street, wave the book in a stranger’s face, and invite them to his revelations. The title poem of this collection is a masterwork. It’s an ode to nurturing living things, to name-giving, and to remembrance:

The Tradition

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat, in elements classical
Philosophers said could change us. Star Gazer. 
Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will
Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter
On this planet than when our dead fathers
Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby’s Breath. 
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems
Where the world ends, everything cut down.

-Jericho Brown

15. Lie With Me by Philippe Besson: This novel, as I mentioned in my introduction, is one I think deserved more attention than it garnered this year. It’s a lush love story, simply but expansively told. And much like first romances tend to be, it is full of grace and sadness.

16. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell: I first heard about this book when Odell was a guest on an episode of Call Your Girlfriend, one of the few podcasts I listen to on the regular. I ordered this book in time to take it with me on vacation to the Colorado mountains, where my boyfriend Martin was gearing up for his first 100-mile race (Run Rabbit Run) and I planned to do little else but read and go on runs. It was the perfect companion. Odell’s philosophy on reclaiming our lives from the capitalist demand of constant productivity is delightfully anarchist. In this book, she maintains that simple acts of resistance like getting to know the birds in our neighborhood are radical and rewarding ways to refuse the monetization of each of our moments and welcome more joy into daily living. I might still be relatively glued to my phone, but I have a new awareness about choosing to disconnect, and a new appreciation for time simply spent wandering, whether outside or just around the corners of my mind.

17. ‘Giovanni’s Room’ Revisited by Hilton Als, The New York Times Style Magazine: Giovanni’s Room is one of my all-time favorite novels; one I have read several times and spent hours thinking about. And as I read this piece on my couch one Sunday afternoon, I found myself saying, “Oh, wow” out loud to an empty room. Als is one of our most surgical and lyrical cultural critics, and in this piece, he draws parallels between Baldwin’s novel and The Bell Jar, evaluates its role in the context of Baldwin’s career and life, and reveals this work was “less as a way of discussing his sexuality than as a way of discussing what America had done to his sexuality.” Als’ reckoning with this book altered the way I will view and experience it forever—and the photography is equally stunning.

18. Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer L. Eberhardt: Eberhardt’s book on race, bias, and discrimination is full of compelling research and illuminating studies. But its most exacting arguments are found in the anecdotes and stories of her own, revealing the ways racism wields its insidious force in our institutions as well as our daily lives. It should be required reading for anyone who works or lives alongside other human beings, but especially anyone with a modicum of power.

19. Running to the Edge by Matthew Futterman: I don’t think many non-runners are privy to what a long and deep tradition writing and running share. Joyce Carole Oates loves to run. And Haruki Marukami’s book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” is a book almost any runner-slash-writer who’s read it holds in deep reverence — me included. My point is, there is a wealth of great writing about running in the world, and this book is yet another example. Futterman’s book about the rise of legendary running coach Bob Larsen is interspersed with tales from his own amateur running life, and together, those narratives tell an absorbing story about the potential of human ability, the desire to surpass our limitations, and the beauty to be found in running farther and faster.

18 of the Best Things I Read in 2018

Last weekend, I was sitting at a crowded Starbucks with my teenage writing mentee looking for a creative prompt we could work on together. I found one that read: You have discovered what appears to be an ordinary room. But as soon as you enter the room, time stops for you. When you leave the room, time picks up right where you left off. What do you use this room for? Too easy, I thought. Obviously, I’d use it to become the first person in the world to read all the books.

Unfortunately, all the rooms I know appear to be ordinary because they are ordinary, and I have begrudgingly accepted that I will never be able to read even a fraction of everything I want to read. So the act of reading is something I undertake with intention as much as pleasure. I will no longer suffer through a book that’s not giving me anything to think about or entertaining me or forcing me to confront or wrestle with something new — there’s just no time to waste.

Even as I sat down to put together this annual look back at my own year in reading, there are at least a dozen 2018 books that I still need to read, off the top of my head: The Friend. There, There. Motherhood. Good and Mad. Cherry. . . I could go on and on. But instead, I’ll get to the point. As we’re about to leave 2018 in the rearview, I rounded up 18 of the best poems, novels, short stories, and journalism I read (and that were first published) this year. It’s not an exhaustive list, but until I discover an ordinary-seeming-but-time-stopping room of my own, it’ll have to do.

1. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo: Every white person should be assigned Robin DiAngelo’s unflinching book on the mundane and insidious ways racism is perpetuated — and why white people have such a challenging time even discussing it. In chapters like “White Women’s Tears,” she challenges some of the most defensive and destructive behaviors white people use to deflect, distract, deny, and center themselves in conversations about race, and gives real, tangible advice on how to knock it the f*ck off.

2. ”She Was My World, but We Couldn’t Marry” by Ari Diaconis for The New York Times’s Modern Love: I knew I had to include this remarkable Modern Love essay on the list for a simple reason: as I looked back on my social media shares this year to remember which pieces I loved enough to evangelize, I saw this in my Facebook feed and was immediately brought to tears all these months later. Diaconis somehow wrote this masterful essay while in the midst of a debilitating, undiagnosable illness — one which would eventually take his life. In it, he reflects on the painful incompatibility of the mortal and eternal things we treasure in this world.

3. Educated by Tara Westover: Tara Westover’s journey from a destitute, fundamentalist compound in the mountains of Southern Idaho, to Cambridge University, to The New York Times's bestseller list is the kind of against-all-odds story that might, on its surface, make you roll your eyes. But Westover’s telling of her astounding and abusive family history and how she broke away from her dominating, mentally ill patriarch is never cloyingly inspirational. Instead, it’s a clear-eyed examination of how family shapes us — and how we can find the strength to reshape ourselves despite it.

4. ”The Sexual Abuse Epidemic No One Talks About” by Joseph Shapiro for NPR: This story was part of an excellent NPR series that looked at how some of society’s most vulnerable people — the developmentally disabled — are at particular risk of sexual abuse. An incredible volume of paradigm-shifting journalism emerged out of the #MeToo movement in the last year, and to me, this piece exemplifies some of the best of it. Not only does it examine how institutions, prejudice, and a lack of empathy all intertwine to contribute to our society’s worst human rights violations, but it tells a story for people who may otherwise never have been able to tell it themselves.

5. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee: As an essayist, Chee is a true master of the form. This collection examines identity and the writing life; those moments in front of mirrors and blank paper that transform and reveal us. I often say some of the best books about running aren’t really about running. This is one of the best books about writing that isn’t really strictly about writing, either. This is a book I’ll go back to repeatedly, always knowing I can glean something new from its pages.

6. “An Oral History of the Time Bob Costas Had Pink Eye at the Olympics” by Kelly Conaboy for Vulture: I maintain that Bob Costas’s Olympic pink eye is one of the most unifying Olympic moments of our time, and this piece detailing the entire optometric debacle was easily one of the most enjoyably nostalgic things I read in all of 2018. Like any great Olympics story, there is heartbreak, surprise, and triumph — if you’ll recall, Costas bowing out made Meredith Viera the first woman to ever singlehandedly host primetime Olympics coverage on broadcast TV. (Luckily, you’ll find that Matt Lauer was not interviewed for this piece, which also includes mercifully few references to him.)

7. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers had an indelible impact on me as a reader and writer, and The Mars Room remains just as vivid in my imagination. In Kushner’s novel, Romy, a young mother, is sentenced to jail for killing her stalker, leaving her small son Jackson with nowhere to go. It’s an indictment of the prison system, misogyny, and poverty in the world’s richest nation. But it’s mostly a lyrical portrait of one woman’s life and loss.

8. "Omakase" by Weike Wang in The New Yorker: While it makes no real sense — and is certainly not fair — to directly compare short stories, I so wish “Omakase” had earned the kind of attention that another New Yorker story published less than a year before did. (That story is “Cat Person.”) Weike Wang’s tale of one straight, interracial couple’s date night is a witty and dismal snapshot of the cavernous gaps that so often open up between us and the people to whom we attempt to be closest.

9. On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case For Hope by DeRay Mckesson: As one of the most public faces of the Black Lives Matter movement, Mckesson has become one of the most identifiable activists of our generation, but most of us know far more about his work on behalf of others than about his own origin story. In this memoir, Mckesson tells his own coming-of-age story as an activist, gay person, and black man in America, gracefully weaving in his own meticulously argued philosophies about race, homophobia, and injustice. It’s an emotional, compelling look at a life shaped by a passion for social justice — and how his passion for social justice was shaped by his life. (Bonus: Mckesson’s appearance on my dear friend Jeffrey Masters’s LGBTQ+A podcast earlier this year is a great listen and conversational companion piece to his book.)

10. “Our Sister Becky” by Kate Beaton for The Cut: This year, the conversation about how women’s pain and suffering is systematically devalued and ignored in America finally split wide open. We heard it in the stories of Serena Williams and Beyonce, both of whom faced the measurable maternal healthcare failures that black women experience at exponential rates, despite their fame and wealth. And we read about it in pieces like this soul-shifting feature from Kate Beaton, which was both a remembrance of her sister, Beth, and an indictment of the deeply broken healthcare system that couldn’t — or more accurately, wouldn’t — save her. As cancer killed her, doctors wrote her off as “paranoid,” disbelieved her pain, and ignored abnormal test results. Beaton wrote this piece as both an indictment and a remembrance, in the hopes that stories like Beth’s won’t be lived or told in vain.

11. All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung: Nicole Chung was born to Korean parents and adopted by a white couple as an infant — but she knew little more about the details of her origins and how she came to be raised until adulthood, when nagging questions led her to investigate her own life story. Chung asks deeply persona and widely resonant questions about race, identity, family, adoption, and how we shape our very sense of self in this book’s clear-eyed, riveting prose. It’s an immensely moving memoir that will leave you changed.

12. ”A Few Words to the Graduates” by David Sedaris: David Sedaris’s advice to outgoing college seniors is free of the typical graduation speech platitudes, as LOL-able as you’d expect, and full of actually useful, practical advice. (The latter is more than I can say for any graduation speech I ever sat through.) For example: “Choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by, and be offended by this as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling.” Also: don’t even bother buying scented candles until you can afford Diptyque.

13. Severance by Ling Ma: Apocalyptic novels are having a moment. Some proof: earlier this year I was introduced to the concept of “cli-fi” — aka climate fiction — which is apparently common enough these days that it’s earned its own moniker in the publishing world. But I digress. While Severance might technically be an apocalyptic novel, it’s a transcendent one. Candace Chen, a first-generation millennial, works in publishing in New York City as civilization starts to unravel in the wake of a global virus. Ma examines how the dehumanizing effects of labor, technology, consumerism, and capitalism conspire against us just as much as they reflect who we are as “civilized” humans. While the conceit might sound a little on the nose — the virus turns people into virtual zombies, reduced to going through the literal motions of modern life — I promise the story as it unfolds is not.

14. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh: Moshfegh’s coldly funny stories and deeply weird characters make her a mainstay on my favorite reading lists. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a privileged 20-something in New York City becomes consumed with the desire to sleep. Via a cocktail of pills, minders, a deeply deranged psychiatrist, a trust fund, and a frenemy, she sets out to spend a year awake as infrequently impossible. This novel is set in the early 2000s but just as easily reads as an indictment of 2018’s self-care culture. It’s pitch-black in its darkness and wicked-funny and equal parts riveting and repulsive, just like all of Moshfegh’s best work.

15. "A Question Looking at Men Looking at Women" by Jameson Fitzpatrick in The Believer: Fitzpatrick’s poem is a captivating study of desire and envy, of gender and sexuality, of loneliness and attraction. Its name is a reference to the title of Siri Hustvedt’s feminist essay collection, but turns its perspective on its head from his viewpoint as a man examining the male gaze.

16. Evening in Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin: It’s a great sadness that it took more than a decade after Berlin’s death for her writing to become widely celebrated. Her short stories about women’s lives are stunning, observant, and lingering. This second collection published since her death takes place around the world: from Mexican fishing towns to Chilean estates to New York City, all places where Berlin lived moments of her vibrant and troubled life. "La Barca de la Ilusión,” and “The Wives” are two of the standouts, in my mind: thought their settings and stories are radically different, they get at the heart of what it is to be disappointed by what we’re promised in life and carry on anyway. And, as a lovely and unexpected bonus, this book is kicked off by a truly touching foreword by her son, which I found particularly illuminating.

17. “Terry Gross of Fresh Air Talks About the Art of Getting Personal” by KK Otteson for The Washington Post: This piece certainly looks like your standard, workaday Q&A — but it’s so much more. It’s a brief but truly revealing look at how Gross became one of the most masterful interviewers of our era, and it’s jampacked with wisdom on reporting, empathy, and how to be a better person in the world.

18. “The New Gwen Stefani is a Lot Like the Old One” by Anne Helen Peterson for Buzzfeed: Peterson, one of the best pop-cultural critics around, takes a look at one of the most confounding celebrities of our time in this piece. How do we reconcile the woman who wrote “Just a Girl” — which marked a feminist awakening for many an American tween, yours truly included — with the saccharine, Blake Shelton-dating, feminist label-eschewing cipher who is still the woman who wrote “Just a Girl”? This piece is a deep dive into Stefani’s making, revealing her contradictions and homing in on her decades-long appeal.

17 Great Things I Read in 2017

What can be said about the apocalyptic horrorshow that was 2017 that hasn't yet been said? Not much, I think. (I had a laugh when I discovered I initially titled the draft of this post "18 Great Things I Read in 2018." Clearly, my subconscious is ready to move on, too.) 

Still, it's notable that amid the political turmoil, and the natural disasters, and the onslaught of sexual harassment and assault stories, writing — in seemingly all its forms — thrived. (Except, perhaps, CDC reports.) 2017 was a banner year for journalism, an incredible year for fiction, a remarkable year in poetry, and a meditative year in criticism. For many of us, reading was more of a necessity than usual; a salve, a refuge, a place to rediscover we were not alone with our feelings or ideas. 

I am lucky to have a job that requires me to read voraciously — one of my favorite things to do ever since the day I picked up a copy of "Freddy the Frog" in Mrs. Hornack's kindergarten class in El Paso, Texas, and discovered I could. So this is, by no means, an exhaustive list of every wonderful and affecting new piece of 2017 writing I encountered in my 2017 reading. There were too many of those things. Also: it was impossible to read everything I wanted to read. I did leave out many stories that dominated our cultural conversation, like Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey's exhaustive and, truly, exhausting investigation into Harvey Weinstein's crimes, because we all (hopefully) have read them.

Instead, this is simply a selection of stories that moved me, caught a moment, made me change out the lens on my worldview, or simply stayed knocking around in my brain long enough to be remembered throughout the course of a year that felt like an eon.

What did you read and love this year? Please tell me so I can read it, too.

1. "Sing, Unburied, Sing" by Jesmyn Ward. Ward won the National Book Award for this remarkable novel, which examines the struggles of being a family, and the weight of history, through the eyes of 13-year-old Jojo. Ward melds the classic road-trip novel, the coming-of-age story, and the way our nation's painful, racist past haunts to this day to craft an indelible, quintessentially American epic.  

2. "Gloria Allred's Crusade" by Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker. Tolentino's profile on the attorney, who most of us only encounter via televised soundbites, afforded Allred a level of nuance I've never seen her granted before. It struck me as I read how rarely powerful women — or any women, really — are afforded that nuance. In Tolentino's telling, Allred emerges as a complicated symbol of American feminism and how it's morphed and influenced the culture in recent decades. "I'm controversial because the status of women is controversial," Allred says, and I'd defy anyone not to agree. After all, as my boyfriend astutely found shortly after reading it, Google "controversial attorney Gloria Allred" and more than 150 results pop up. Google the same for Mark Geragos and you didn't get a single one. 

3. "What's Wrong With You? What's Wrong With Me?" by J.M. Holmes for The Paris Review. If I could will a second short story to go viral before 2017 ends — much in the way "Cat People" did — this would be it. Holmes weaves a confrontational and poignant tale about race, machismo, sex, and intimacy in this stunner of a story. When it ended, it made me stop and put down the issue of The Paris Review it appeared in, just so I could ruminate for a few minutes longer. It's worth subscribing to TPR just to read the full story online — and then following it up with this interview with the author.

4. "Priestdaddy" by Patricia Lockwood. Lockwood's memoir of her exceedingly unusual childhood — she grew up the daughter of a Catholic priest — is hands down one of the funniest books I've read in years. But there's a weird, raw heart at its center that will nag at you long after the laughs have ceased. (And if you don't follow her on Twitter, do so immediately.)

5. "Sylvia Plath Looked Good in a Bikini—Deal With It" by Emily Van Duyne for Electric Literature. Goddamn, did this essay speak to me. A new edition of "The Letters of Sylvia Plath" sparked a literary outrage this year for *gasp* featuring a photo the author in a white bikini, her white-toothed grin and pale hair glittering in the summer heat. Van Duyne did not share in the outrage. Instead, she found it a symptom of the way we confine women artists to a certain limitation of themselves, punishing them for daring to be both sexual and intellectual. "The reality," Van Duyne reminds us, "and it’s astounding to me that I have to write this sentence down, is that we can take a writer who wears a bikini seriously." 

6. "Hunger" by Roxane Gay. Roxane Gay is easily one of the leading literary voices and feminist thinkers of our new era. This memoir of her body, Hunger, bridges both. It's triumphant in its unflinchingness about feminism, fat, and how we see — and treat — ourselves. 

7. "Are Disability Rights and Animal Rights Connected?" by Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker. This story bent my thinking and challenged my own sense of morality more than any piece of writing has in a long time. Sunaura Taylor, an artist, thinker, and activist, was born with a condition that causes her legs and arms to be shorter than usual — and she has compared her own experiences with the lives of animals in a truly astounding way. Rothman sums up the philosophical worldview she operates from as such: "Disabled people should be proud to associate themselves with animals, Taylor argues, because the same ideology, ableism, oppresses both groups. If you’re cognitively or physically disabled, it’s ableism that tells you that you’re worth less than a more capable person; similarly, if you’re an animal, it’s ableism that makes eating you permissible, since you can’t do what humans do." 

8. "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" by Sherman Alexie. Alexie 's memoir of his mother, an American Indian woman, a rare beauty, and an oftentimes cruel alcoholic, is gorgeously devastating. Alexie doesn't shy away from portraying her as rarely kind, but he just as often shows us how rarely the world was kind to her. I was lucky enough to see Alexie speak on one of the last dates before he abruptly stopped his book tour, finding the experience to be too emotionally draining. Hearing him talk — his background as a stand-up comic lending itself to his own brand of bleak hilarity — was an unforgettable experience. He's a livewire of empathy, and will leave a legacy as a teller of stories that are too often silenced. 

9. "The War to Sell You a Mattress is an Internet Nightmare" by David Zax for Fast Company. To say this piece pulled back the covers on an industry I didn't even know existed would be an understatement — and, yes, a terrible pun. Zax happened to stumble upon this story through a series of personal events that sparked his reporter's curiousity. When a friend of a friend offered to let him have a free mattress, Zax discovered an entire world of mattress blogging...and the shady dealings and million-dollar stakes within it. Who knew an investigation into home furnishings could be so compelling?

10. "The Body Trade" by Brian Grow and John Shiffman for Reuters. The word "shocking" is overused as a descriptor. But it is a fitting way to describe this investigation into the market for cadavers and the disturbing lack of regulation around it. Grow and Shiffman begin their story with an anecdote about Southern Nevada Donor Services. People living near the company's warehouse began complaining, in 2015, of finding bloody boxes in a dumpster and a disturbing smell. "That December, local health records show, someone contacted authorities to report odd activity in the courtyard. Health inspectors found a man in medical scrubs holding a garden hose. He was thawing a frozen human torso in the midday sun. As the man sprayed the remains, 'bits of tissue and blood were washed into the gutters,' a state health report said." Grow and Shiffman did an incredible amount of work in uncovering a pattern of sometimes illegal, but clearly unethical, behavior by body brokers that left me stunned. 

11. "Brave Enough to Be Angry" by Lindy West for The New York Times. In the moment after the Weinstein moment, women writers reflected on what came next. West's reckoning with our discomfort around female anger was an eloquent deep dive into misogny's roots — and how we prevent women's voices from raising themselves above a whisper, even when they deserve to scream and rage. 

12. "Dirty John" by Christopher Goffard for The Los Angeles Times. This story is fascinating on many levels: it's a feat of reporting and a triumph of storytelling. But it's also an example of how new forms of media are influencing the old; "Dear John" was released as both a series in the paper and a podcast, and unbelievably managed to feel equally at home in both forms. When successful Orange County real-estate agent Debra Newell is wooed by a handsome doctor, she goes all in on their romance, which becomes increasingly rocky. Who is John? What does he want? And what lengths will he go to in order to get it? Those questions will keep you reading — or listening, if you prefer — until the story reaches its truly astonishing conclusion.  

13. "Theft by Finding" by David Sedaris. "Theft By Finding"'s off-kilter insights and strange musings about the mundanities of Sedaris's daily life, captured over the course of several decades, made me cackle out loud. You can read this collection of journal entries in spurts or in one go — but I warn you that, either way, it will make you exceptionally sad that Sedaris doesn't tweet. Take this entry from July7, 1995, in New York City: "Someone stopped Mitch on the street last night and said, 'I need another severnty-five cents so I can buy a cheeseburger. How about helping me?' Mitch said, 'Get it without the cheese,' and continued walking."

14. "Lost Mothers: Maternal Mortality in the US" by Nina Martin and Renee Montagne for ProPublica/NPR. I cried actual tears of sorrow and rage on my drive home from work as I listened to the first installment in this series, which felt so visceral and urgent this year. Maternal deaths have been on the rise in the U.S. in recent years. The CDC finds that 60% of those deaths are preventable. And while all American women are at risk, those in rural areas, black women, and poor women face the greatest threat. Through heartbreaking and infuriating stories, Martin and Montagne illuminated an often ignored public health crisis. This incredible feat of reporting and empathy highlights how little, as a society, we care about women. 

15. "I'm Not Like Other Girls. I'm Much, Much Worse" by Reductress. This was an incredible 12 months for humor and satire. We needed it, didn't we? Whether I was awaiting Wonkette's next profane take on the daily political churn or laughing at my desk over Alexandra Petri's quirky musings on the culture over at The Washington Post, funny women fucking saved more than one dismal day for me. This brutally hysterical Reductress piece obliterating the "cool girl" myth turns internalized sexism on its head in the most ferocious way possible.

16. "Sex and Rage" by Eve Babitz. This inclusion is a bit of a cheat, since "Sex and Rage" was originally published in the 1970s and reissued this year. Babitz, whose writing offered a wry window on the bohemian socialites of 1960s and 1970s LA, was a queen of cutting observation. For example: the passage below, which in my view should be considered the defining take on the ever-raging NY vs. LA debate. (You can read my full review of the book here.)

17. "horror movie pitch" by Eve L. Ewing in The Rumpus.

okay you guys are gonna love it. get this

all the black women turn invisible,
all of them

just overnight. America goes to sleep and they’re there
and they wake up and they’re not

the scary part? ______stick with me
they’re not gone. YOU JUST CAN’T SEE EM

That's how Ewing's poem starts. It's a pitch, but it's also a threat, a fantasy, a vengeance, a thought experiment, an alternate reality. Her poem was written as part of a series of poems in response Trump's inauguration before it happened in January. Now, almost 12 months later, it's scary how both timely and eternal Ewing's words were — and will certainly remain. 

Honorable mention: "When They Call You a Terrorist" by Patrisse Cullors. Okay, so this book isn't out yet. It's not technically on shelves until 2018, but it's available for preorder now, and I couldn't prevent myself from including it on this list. Cullors's journey to activism and her personal pain and determination are both laid bare in this lyrical autobiography. "When They Call You a Terrorist" is a visceral mediation on the forces that gave rise to Black Lives Matter — and a clear-eyed manifesto about a social justice movement we sorely need.  

*You may have noticed I linked to Skylight Books, my favorite — and, in my opinion, simply the best — bookstore in Los Angeles. If you're compelled to read any of the books on this list, please consider shopping with them and supporting the ever-dwindling local bookstore.*

15 Great Things I Read in 2015

In 2015, I worried that something might go very wrong with my reading. I was spending a lot of time on a long writing project, traveling more frequently and widely than I ever have in a 12-month span before — or likely ever will again — and started a rigorous new job. It was a more filled-to-the-brim year than maybe any of my previous 30. So, naturally, I was concerned I would find less time to read, and because of that my brain would erode, and because of that I'd just up and lose my will to live. But that's not what happened. It turned out that my busy-ness somehow cemented my devotion to reading. I needed it, relied on it, sought it out more than ever.

Every year I compile a list of the most compelling, funniest, still-nagging-at-me books, articles, poems, essays and short stories I've read. Every year, this list is an excuse I make for myself to revisit all those wonderful, hard, sublime pieces of writing.  I'm not sure if it's really of much use or interest to anyone else and, frankly, don't care. But here are 15 of those very things, in no particular order. *

1.  "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine" by Alexandra Kleeman: There was so much hype around this book it should have been impossible for it to live up to it. But it did. Alexandra Kleeman's vivid and weird novel about a young woman negotiating selfhood in a society obsessed with sex and consumerism and image lands right in the highly uncomfortable place between over-the-top parody and everyday realism.  Where other novels have skewered our culture, Kleeman's impaled it on a stake and paraded it around town.

2. "Hope and the Artist" by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:  Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me" is one of the most remarkable and profound books of the year, if not the decade, if not in recent American history. It will be on every 2015 list, so in an effort to avoid redundancy, I'm shining my miniature spotlight on an essay he wrote in the wake of that book. It's about whether art has to offer hope, or, at least, solutions. His own work has been criticized for often offering none of either—unfairly, I think on one hand. On the other hand, I think, why should it matter? Coates's conclusion that "hope for hope's sake...is the enemy of intelligence" is not just well supported and logically made, but it's a nuanced idea about art and activism that will encourage you to think about the real roles of each.

3. This passage from "Chelsea Girls" by Eileen Myles: I've only just started reading Myles's new—and first—novel, so it wouldn't really be fair to add it in full to this list. (I'm sure as the preeminent poet of our time, a Guggenheim fellow, and all-around celebrated genius, she will be utterly distraught by this news. Forgive me, Eileen!) The novel is a fictionalized memoir of her coming of age, and her writing is deep as bones and lovely all over, as usual. But this passage about an old girlfriend was so extreme in its beauty it nearly made my heart forget to beat:

"I'm looking at her standing there, looking at her in her orange construction boots and everything else dark. I'm really adoring her as she's leaving and by the second she's getting more and more beautiful look at her eyes all green and golden brown and gigantic and these unreal lashes. Two are caught between her nose and her eyes are just sitting there and you know how people who really love you or who you irritate are always coming over and picking something off you. Well I can't even tell her I like those two lashes just where they are. Her entirety goes out the door."

Wow, right?

4. "A Survivor's Life" by Eli Saslow in The Washington Post: It's unavoidable, in a time where mass shootings pile up and bleed together and never seem to stop leading the nightly news, to let them all smear into one faceless, person-less blur. To move our grief and attention onto the next one when it inevitably comes. To forget. Roseburg, Oregon shooting survivor Cheyeanne Fitzgerald's story is one that goes mostly untold. It's the story of the aftermath, of what it's like to live through — at least in the strictly physical, bare-bones sense — one of these nightmares. The reporting is merciless and the details are excruciating and Cheyeanne and the dozens like her deserve our attention, still.

5. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh: Moshfegh's dark and oddly funny short stories have been mainstays in "The New Yorker" and "The Paris Review" for years and I love them even when I don't really like them. She traffics in the gross, awkward, shameful corners of our humanity and she is not at all hesitant to make you squirm. Her debut novel, set during Christmastime, revolves around the odd relationship that forms between two women working at a juvenile prison. There's little that's merry or bright about the story, but it's easily one of the most unique and brutal books of the year. When the big twist arrives toward the end of the novel, I felt an actual, physical chill.

6. "Friends" by Lucia Berlin: Lucia Berlin's "A Manual For Cleaning Women" was published this year, though she died in 2004. She spent her life publishing and writing, but never achieved the degree of mainstream notoriety or attention her spare, witty stories probably should have earned her. This excellent story, about the gap — or sometimes gaping cavern — between our own self-image and how others actually see us, is an excellent introduction to her acerbic and startling work. 

7. "Letter to Our Daughters: Do Not Be Good" by Megan Mayhew Bergman in Ploughshares: Megan Mayhew Bergman's love of unruly ladies guides her life and work. Her book of short stories, "Almost Famous Women," tells tales of females forgotten by history, like Lord Byron's illegitimate daughter, Lucia, and aviator and author Beryl Markham. This letter to her own daughters is half urgent plea, half cheer. She implores them to swing for the bleachers, avoid sacrificing too much of themselves to others, to fail and fail again. "What if you woke up one morning and told yourself: 'Starting today, you no longer have to be good.' Starting today, you can do what you want to do, not what you ought to do." What if?

7. "The Year We Obsessed Over Identity" by Welsey Morris in The New York Times: Morris's kind of prophetic sum-up of our 2015 fixation on selfhood — he did write this in early October, after all — gets to the heart of what he calls "the great cultural identity migration" of our time. Caitlyn Jenner. Rachel Dolezal. Hamilton. Key & Peele. Morris bridges the gap between all these different explorations of selfhood and identity to get to the heart of just how malleable the idea of who we are is — or sometimes, is not. 

8. "The Parapet" by Jess Walters: You can't read this short story, because I own the only copy. Well, kind of. Let me explain: I grew up in Boise, Idaho, and spent a few summers taking writing classes at its quaintly named Log Cabin Literary Center, writing poems about the artwork in the museum across the street or musing in that excruciating adolescent way about a moldy leaf that fell on the lawn outside it. My mom invited me to come home this year and go with her to the Center's fundraiser, which featured a conversation between Jess Walter and Anthony Doerr, so of course I said yes. Anthony, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning "All the Light We Cannot See," lives in Boise for some reason. Jess, who wrote "Beautiful Ruins," lives in Spokane, Washington, for some reason. (Given Spokane's proximity to Boise and the cities' shared Pacific Northwestern-ness, both men qualify as hometown heroes.) I sat next to Jess at dinner and we talked about Hollywood and writing and Italy. Later, at the event, he and Anthony both read short stories they'd written using a line from a Log Cabin Literary Center kid's poem. Both stories were playful and lovely and new and never-published or performed until that night. On Christmas morning, I opened a present to find a manilla envelope containing the signed manuscript of "The Parapet," which my mom had sneakily bid on at the gala's silent auction. I could tell you what the story's about, but wouldn't that ruin the mystery?

9. "Drake Dance Revolution" by Rembert Browne on Grantland: Goddamn, Grantland. This glorious defense of Drake's ubiquitous "Hotline Bling" video, and his dad dancing within, is incisive and hilarious and swaggering and fun and exactly why we're all poorer for this website no longer existing. RIP.

10. "Hedi Slimane on Saint Laurent's Rebirth" by Dirk Standen for Yahoo! Style: This long, dense, interview with designer Hedi Slimane is essential reading for any creative person. It's rare that fashion ever gets this kind of long-form, attentive writing in such a mainstream outlet. While you are free to despise the grunge-for-the-1% transformation Hedi's applied since taking the reigns at Saint Laurent, this piece lifts the veil on his intentions and aims and influences. For me, it greatly justified why he is doing what he is doing and forced me to reconsider what both building and honoring a creative legacy can mean. 

11. "The Art of Fiction No. 227: Lydia Davis" in The Paris Review Spring 2015 issue: There's no one quite like Lydia Davis and there's no writing quite like Lydia Davis's writing. Her (often extremely) short stories are sharp and simple and often very funny, and as this interview about her writing life proves, her approach to her craft is similarly bullshit-less and not mystical or self-important. "I realized that you could write a story that was really just a narration of something that had happened to you, and change it slightly, without really having to fictionalize it," she says at one point. At another, when asked about whether she purposely includes symbols and metaphors in her writing: "No, I don't think symbolically at all." Vive la Lydia!

12. "Inside the Legendary Breakup of Barbra Streisand and Superagent Sue Mengers" by Peter Borsari in Vanity Fair: I couldn't get enough of this story of frenemyship, betrayal, and power. In an excerpt from his book "Can I Go Now: The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood's First Superagent," Borsari details the explosive and intimate bond between Barbra and Sue with the kind of wicked, scandalous details that bring to life the best and worst of Hollywood stereotypes. Just one example: "After the Manson murders, Barbra confided to Sue her concerns about her personal safety. 'Don't worry, honey,' Sue told her. 'Stars aren't being murdered. Only featured players.'" Obviously, I was engrossed in every word of it.

13. "My Own Life" by Oliver Sacks in The New York Times: Oliver Sacks contemplated everything with his signature thoughtful curiosity, including the end of his own life. His new approach to living upon learning he had terminal cancer — clearing the remaining time of anything "inessential" and redoubling his commitment to his work and those he loved — is a kind of poetic ethos for how we should strive to live each day. 

14. "I Have a Time Machine" by Brenda Shaughnessy: If I remember right, I came across this poem when someone I follow tweeted the opening lines: "But unfortunately it can only travel into the future/at the rate of one second per second." I smiled to myself and clicked the link to read it all and was delighted to find that this wasn't just a poem of wit, there was real heft to it. A beautiful reflection on the speed and slowness of a life. 

15. "How I Finally Let Go of My Grief for My Dead Mom" by Kate Spencer for Buzzfeed: Yes, this raw and painful and redeeming essay by the lovely Kate Spencer is about grief. But it's also about love and growing up and guilt and parenthood and identity. And it gives beautiful permission to anyone who has lost someone to let go in his or her own way. 

*This year's list only contains work I encountered in 2015 and that was also first published in 2015. There was just that much good stuff out there.

A Visit to the Helmut Newton Museum

In Berlin, I visit the Helmut Newton museum. There’s a wide staircase, carpeted in lipstick red, to the second floor. Five nudes hang suspended there above the steps, forcing your gaze. You walk underneath the challenge of their cavernous navels and knife-length stilettos.

Images courtesy the Helmut Newton Museum for Photography

It is the day I am leaving Germany. I spent the previous day working, interviewing the stars and director of a new movie filmed in Berlin; it’s why I’m here in the first place. While we waited for cameras to roll, the director and I made small talk about the city. I’ve never been. He asks what I plan to do. I say see the Berlin Wall, the Helmut Newton Museum. Helmut Newton? He tells me he’s a great fan, and that, funny enough, Newton crashed into his fence on the night he died, right next to the Chateau Marmont in LA. I’m astounded by the weirdness of the coincidence: two Angelenos in Berlin, and he comes up in conversation, and this story happens to be there. Really? I ask, and immediately feel a blazing self-consciousness at my interest, worry that my eagerness is macabre.  

On the main floor of the museum, they’ve recreated Newton’s office with all his things in it, like trying to summon a ghost. Like a room could be a séance.

His clothes, a wool suit from a different time, hang in a display case.

A wall features framed letters his wife, June, received after his death. They come from famous people like Richard Gere and Anna Wintour and Charlotte Rampling, who writes in the effusive poetry of creative people of a certain status.

I think about his death and wonder what it might feel like to suddenly be without a body, when you are a person obsessed with the body; with capturing it on film for posterity, with exploring its shapes and possibilities, with building a life out of all these other bodies.

Charlotte Rampling, Paris, 1977 by Helmut Newton

On the way out, I buy some postcards of his photographs. Rampling, a perfect composure of shadows and cheekbones, nestled in a nest of fur and her own fluffy hair. David Bowie, transparent with youth, in a white robe in a Berlin hotel room. An elegant hand of ferocious, red fingernails captured against a backdrop of hard stone. In the paper bag the gift shop girl hands me, a handful of pictures, making bodies immortal as memory.

The True Style Stars of the Palm Springs Film Festival Aren't the Celebrities

The Palm Springs International Film Festival gala draws its share of A-list stars — this year, Reese Witherspoon and Brad Pitt were among them — but more uniquely for a Hollywood award show, it also attracts glamorous women of a certain age who populate the tony bedroom communities of Palm Springs. They come in droves of mink and marabou to the annual event, where a dinner plate starts at $350, and where a spirit of giddy fandom permeates the evening. Unlike the Globes or the SAG Awards, where an invitation requires some industry or industry-adjacent career and a requisite ho-hum attitude about the whole "Hollywood" thing, this audience is just as equally populated by local cinephiles and philanthropists, and hence, has a refreshingly un-jaded aura hovering around it. 

As an entertainment journalist, my (admittedly awesome) job at this weekend's event was to interview honorees like Eddie Redmayne, who looked divine in a velvet Gucci tux, and Julianne Moore in her bold, off-the-shoulder orange Delpozo gown. (Of Julianne, one gala-goer snapping photos on a pricey-looking camera informed me, completely unsolicited: "She used to be my neighbor. She was very down to earth. She used to work out with her garage door open!") Still, this year, much like every other year, I found myself craning my neck between interviews to catch a glimpse of those two women in matching floor-length minks, the lady holding a reflective, pink Jeff Koons-inspired rabbit clutch, the man in platform stiletto boots with flat-ironed, black locks spilling forth from underneath a driver's cap —and, wait, was that Joan Collins? — as they made their way into the convention center. If you were to pile up all the paillettes and ostrich feathers and sequins on display, they would easily have weighed enough to sink a small Carnival cruise liner. 

Inspired by the aggressive, caution-to-the-wind ensembles I've come to know and love from this event, I myself busted out not one, but two faux-fur accoutrements over my Jonathan Saunders colorblock jersey gown this year: a pink coat and a multicolored collar. It was my small tribute to the women and men the of Palm Springs Film Festival gala. I hope they never stop pulling out all the bling-drenched stops at their city's premiere social event . . . if only so I can one day publish a coffee-table book documenting all the memorable looks I've seen there.

14 Great Things I Read in 2014

Here's a sense memory that's been caught in my brain since I was 10 years old: reading a book in a warm room, sunlight streaming in through thin curtains, bare feet tucked between couch cushions, sucking on a sugar-coated lemon. But this isn't a scene from my own life. It's one my 5th-grade teacher, Mrs. Saum, recounted in front of our class once. Mrs. Saum had round glasses and a Sarah-Plain-and-Tall braid, and just as quickly as she recalled those lazy afternoons spent with her mother to us, she snapped out of her reverie: "But don't suck on lemons," she said, pointing a slim finger at the collective face of the classroom. "They'll rot your teeth. We just didn't know it back then."

Still, that image remains a gauzy, romantic thing lodged in my brain and one of my fantasies about reading: that the experience can be emotional and intellectual, but also tangible and physical. Maybe it's why I've always read a lot, in some endless quest to capture that imagined, sun-soaked bliss. (Maybe it's also why I never really warmed to my Kindle.) This year, I chased it more than ever. It was partly a disciplined effort — I set a rather modest goal of reading at least three books each month, in addition to literary magazines, essays, newspaper and magazine articles — and partly because everywhere I turned someone had turned out another unwavering and true and heart-busting piece of writing I simply had to give into. Without further ado, here are 14 great things I read in 2014. They are poems, they are essays, they are books, they are even Twitter feeds. But they all encouraged me to take up temporary residence in a new corner of my brain or feel something unique or unfamiliar, whether I read them in a warm, sunlit room or (more often) at a cold desk. 

• "The Empathy Exams" by Leslie Jamison. Leslie Jamison's essays are the kind of ruminations that encourage readers to wander inside ideas shoulder-to-shoulder with the writer. "The Devil's Bait," about people who suffer from the medically dubious disease Morgellons, crystallizes Jamison's approach: she is devoted to doing best work to understand that which she realizes she might never be able to fully understand, to channel and honor the anguish of others, to explain ourselves to ourselves. I debated including this collection since it has already popped up on nearly every "best books of 2014" list, but in the end, I'm happy to add my voice to the chorus. It's a book that will make you feel more human and demand your caring.  
• "In the Absence of Sparrows" by Daniel Johnson. James Foley's murder disturbed me deeply. But this poem, by his longtime friend Daniel Johnson, is a remembrance of the war journalist who was many more things than a war journalist to the people who knew him best.  It brings some context to a life rendered — for most of us — only in the blur of TV-news segments, with language stark and yearning and more indelible than the 24/7 news cycle ever allows.
• "The Book of Unknown Americans" by Cristina Henriquez. My favorite novel of the year. A group of South and Central American families, living improbably in a Delaware apartment complex, become entangled in each others' uncertain lives in myriad ways. Cristina Henriquez's plain-spoken language captures the small heartaches and joys that define a life and succeeds in creating one of the most vibrant, real depictions of first love I've ever read on the page. 
• "Twenty-Two Years Ago, I Asked My Dad if He Was Gay. Then He Was Gone" by Whitney Joiner for Slate Whitney Joiner's essay shovels down deep to the bedrock of the man her father — who died of AIDS when she was just a teenager and never was able to tell her he was gay — was. Despite the very specific circumstances of their lives, which is rendered with the unflinching directness of youth in her writing, she speaks to something about parent-child relationships in all their gradiations; the way our parents remain a strange, hyper-close enigma for most of us in childhood, like a star familiar and constant but held at a distance out of our reach. With this remembrance, Joiner pays tribute to the man her father was, publicly and privately, in the way each human deserves but not all get to experience.
• "The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking" by Olivia Laing Writing and drinking have been bedfellows for centuries, and in this well-researched but lively history, Laing sets out on an all-American road trip to unravel the particular love affairs some of our best writers have had with alcohol. Laing doesn't fret over or sidestep the romantic image of the drunken, tortured artist, but instead shows how drink alternately defined and destroyed the lives and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and John Berryman, and (maybe my personal favorite of the bunch) the incomparable Tennessee Williams.
• "Father-Daughter Dance" by Anne Helen Peterson for LA Review of Books. Anne Helen Peterson, a college professor who recently absconded from academia for a post at Buzzfeed, simply writes some of the best stuff out there about TV and humanity. This essay on "Mad Men" and the relationship between Don and Sally Draper deftly closes its hands around that "the feeling of Dadness." A nostalgic look at the fallability of fathers and the strange demands we make of parents, it also captures the imperceptible flashes in which our relationships change and morph, and argues that our best TV shows might be best just for letting these subtle moments exist. (I just noticed that I included two father-daughter stories on this list. Are any of you therapists?)
• "Creativity Creep" by Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker. "Make stuff" might be the mantra for the modern creative, but Joshua Rothman's essay asks us to revisit a lost definition of creativity: as a way of thinking rather than production, more in the mold of the Romantic idea of the word than our 21st-century iteration. A refreshing and original criticism of our culture's "creativity" obsession, which so often focuses on things and stuff and monetization rather than an approach to living a certain kind of intellectual life. 
• "Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets" by Zadie Smith for The Paris Review Zadie Smith has an almost supernatural power to channel the voices and brains and lives of others like some kind of literary medium. In this short story, she captures the indignities of an aging drag queen, Miss Adele, who just wants to buy a goddamn corset, with a bullet train's pace and force. 
•  "Zoo Animals and Their Discontents" by Alex Halberstadt for the New York Times Dr. Vint Virga doesn't speak to his patients, but he still manages to hear a litany of their complaints, fears, and pains. He's devoted his life to shepherding better lives for animals in captivity, and as research continues to uncover more about the inner lives and feelings of the creatures we share the planet with, this aim seems more morally necessary than ever. This fascinating story follows Virga as he tries to help Alice (a constipated elephant), Molly (a pathologically fearful sheep), and BaHee (a withdrawn gibbon) while illuminating new ideas and science about just what might be going on inside the brains (and souls) of animals. 
• "Difference Maker" by Meghan Daum, excerpted from "The Unspeakable." I had the pleasure of meeting Meghan Daum once, many years ago, when she spoke in my professor Dinah Lenney's personal essay class in the masters program at USC. I was already an admirer of hers then, of the memoir I'd read and the insightful pieces she wrote as a columnist for The LA Times. This piece about her work with an orphaned teen and how it dovetailed with her own ambivalence about parenthood busts apart so many deeply held ideas about the shape our lives, and especially women's lives, should take. It talks about privilege and pain and the unbridgeable distance between people and that endless quest for some semblance of peace most of us travel our entire lives. It is spellbinding and now I can't wait to read the rest of her book.   
• "Up From Pain" by Charles Blow, excerpted from "Fire Shut Up in My Bones." I first came to know Charles Blow as a sort of anti-pundit pundit. A fixture on cable news programs, he was the rare guest unconcerned with getting the last word — maybe because he always had the best word. Off screen, his essays on politics and race for The New York Times always shocked me in the eloquence they managed to wrest from the demands of deadline writing. But this harsh and tender essay about abuse, sexuality, blame, and how we define ourselves introduced me to yet another side of the author and thinker; fiercely personal, unabashedly willing to wallow in the things that deserve wallowing in, and a person whose deep well of humanity stunned me to my core. 

• Melissa Broder's Twitter feed. I have to stop myself from retweeting every single thing poet Melissa Broder commits to her feed. Her irreverent mashups of nihilistic philosophies — rendered in Valley Girl speak via the filter of text message lingo — will sometimes strike me as fucking hilarious or, at other times, gut me for a brief and terrible moment, depending on when I read them. Like: "just gonna let u do existence and i'll pretend 2 watch," which is equal parts ice-cold bravado and hovering-right-up-at-the-surface pain.

• "Thirteen Ways of (Not) Looking at a Crime Scene" by Travis Mushett for Blunderbuss. 2014: the year in voyeurism. Everywhere we looked over the past 12 months we saw or heard something we had not been intended to see or hear. The naked bodies of actresses. The private emails of Hollywood executives. Beheadings. The unhinged, racist ramblings of billionaires. "When we claim the right to stare at each other from all angles, we implicitly demand that everyone always act as one-sized-fits-all people," Travis Mushett writes in his essay on the desire and revulsion that comes with observing. "People for all contexts, homogenized people. That is, we demand that people not act like people at all." A powerful, poetic treatise on when we should look . . . and when we should look away. 

• "another day, another vow not to discuss politics on facebook" by Marty McConnell. "When I’m doing it right, this life/ is sweeter and more lethal/ than I could ever have imagined" From those first livewire, unforgettable lines, McConnell's poem slices deep and wild at the noisiness and bravado of our online selves and modern living. It's the kind of writing that makes me hopeful it might convert more people to poetry, which she proves is just as relevant and exciting a form as it ever has been. 

HONORABLE MENTION:

•  "When I Commented That I Was 'Literally Peeing My Pants and Dying Right Now,' I Meant It." by Jen Cordery for McSweeney's This truly deserves a spot in the classic McSweeney's vault alongside "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers." A send-up of our insane culture of hyperbole that will also make you feel like you are peeing your pants and dying (just hopefully not literally as in the case of its narrator.)