Year In Review
I spent an evening cleaning up the Christmas decorations from the apartment. I put the candy canes and the string of bells we bought at TJ Maxx in a shoebox under the bed and threw away the popcorn garland I made just a few weeks ago. I unstrung the lights from the tree, carried the tree down the street to a drop-off location near the park. It was raining and I could feel the length of the rest of winter unraveling in a dark tunnel before me.
For now I’m floating through the lost week of beginnings and endings in varying indiscernible orders—an end here, a beginning there—fighting off a cold, failing to complete my annual reading goal. I’m never quite ready for the way Christmas folds into the New Year, I always expect the in-between time to last longer. Suddenly everything is new and I feel I’ve missed the window for reflection, quietness, consideration.
It's arbitrary, I know. Still the ritual of it all gets me every time, sweeps me into a full-throated belief in newness. I want to make one of those In/Out lists going around on the internet, predicting trends for the year.
2024 In:
Carrying a book everywhere (short commutes are for poetry)
Routine as ritual (per Alicia Kennedy)
More intentional art consumption
Attention to spaces//beautiful things
Movie theaters
Discipline as showing up anyway as love
Plans and lists
2024 Out:
Wallowing/despair
Ambient, vague, guilty rest
Being broke
40 hr work week (so you see my dilemma)
Thinking without writing
Grocery store produce
It is quite frankly absurd to think about reading Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost early this year at the kitchen table in my old apartment, dingy and lightless, spilling crumbs into the chasm where the pages split. I must be thinking of a different year, a different book, a different life. This year feels particularly fragmented, split off into vastly distinct sections that bear no resemblance to the ones that came before or after. I’m not sure why this feels so particular to this year, when previous years have held much greater, and more consequential, changes. We don’t really have a kitchen table at my new apartment, but we do have windows.
I read Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and remember wondering if good thinking is the presentation of entirely new ideas to a reader or the articulation of a reader’s unspoken but priorly deeply felt ideas. Sometimes Tolentino’s open-ended conclusions seemed defensive, as though identifying opposing arguments before they could be used against her. I’ve been thinking about this lately—how to be self-aware in writing without loosening the conviction of what is written, felt, experienced. How to invite doubt without completely undermining oneself.
The year got off to a slow start, reading-wise. There were—I am remembering now, after somehow having forgotten almost entirely—other things going on. There was an incident at work that turned the place I loved and knew best in the city into a site of complicated violence I don’t quite feel at liberty to expand upon here, and I spent a lot of time texting friends and sitting at bars trying to decipher the state of things in the first few months of 2023.
I started a part-time job as a pastry cook and carried a book with me to read on the train, though it was too short a commute to ever make much progress. I read many Ernaux books and couldn’t keep track of them all. I remember reading Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett over several hours at my old neighborhood bar, the lighting pink and blue and dim. I also read If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, my first Calvino, there, and I remember the bartender high-fiving me when he saw the book, saying something about Calvino’s effusive love for life. And in the morning I read Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero—mostly for street cred because I remember very little of it—in my old neighborhood café at a table near the window.
Life returned to its relentless normalcy, and Clare and I sat at her kitchen table parsing through it all. We ate oranges and grapes. We drank wine and whatever else was in the fridge.
Poetry I read this year: Maggie Millner’s Couplets, Hannah Sullivan’s Was It For This, Megan Fernandes’ I Do Everything I’m Told, Rachel Mannheimer’s Earth Room, Chris Nealon’s The Shore, Ana Božičević’s New Life, Ben Lerner’s The Lights (shortly after reading this, I sat next to Ben Lerner at a bar in the East Village), and Mary Ruefle’s The Book and Tristimania.
I cannot locate an image of reading Amina Cain’s A Horse At Night, a vaguely genred exploration of fiction and criticism, likely because this was right around the time Dylan and I moved, so I probably read a few sentences in every place I lived that month: Dylan’s apartment, my apartment, the bar at the Ryerson, our new apartment.
By the time I moved on to Monsters, we had a bed, keys, a rug on the living room floor. My new neighborhood felt bigger than the old one, less contained. I had to walk five blocks to the grocery store, whereas at the old apartment there was a Met Foods across the street. I remained unsure whether the question of what to do with bad artists and their good art could be solved, but I was moved by Claire Dederer’s dedication to honesty, despite her discomfort with what that truth may reveal about herself—how to reconcile a moral idea with an instinctual feeling.
Dylan and I went to California for my brother’s college graduation; it was the first time Dylan had met my extended family, the first time we’d traveled together. We took walks on the beach near the motel we stayed in, a reprieve from the chaotic—but mostly warm and frictionless—gatherings that occurred at all hours of the day on the patio outside our rooms. I packed Susan Sontag’s On Women, Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, and Sophia Giovinitti’s Working Girl. I made Dylan sit through several quotes from the latter, the two of us sitting on the bench at the lake house where we stayed after graduation. “…potentialities are different from a momentary feeling that all is right in the world; they are moments where this world has vanished entirely. I don’t know how one could seek a life without the hope of a new world; I don’t know how one could be satisfied with this one. There is so much more to feel, and to be had.” Seems particularly poignant now, in light of the ongoing (somehow, still) Palestinian genocide by the Israeli government, funded by our tax dollars. How can we be satisfied with a world in which this happens, and continues?
Time did not seem to pass in the context of books this year—or, I don’t know, maybe I’ve just forgotten everything I read, having not paid enough attention in the moment, to the moment. I’ve left so much out. Playing pool on Valentine’s Day. Carving leaflike shapes into loaves of bread. Dying my hair blonde by the hands of several different friends, in several different bathtubs. Wandering through museums with Dylan, whispering about our favorite pieces, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. Apartment hunting, falling down the stairs, the giant bruise on my ass. Sitting on Clare’s roof, late summer, the pale blue of illuminated dusk.
I read a series of essay collections in an attempt to learn something about how to write them. Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard taught me the value of research and reportage, how to organize information into a story with tension and surprise. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib was sweeping and expansive, a way of thinking that includes and invites—always more humanity, more complexity, more room. Then I read Girlhood by Melissa Febos, which was fine but to me not electrifying. Febos is an expert at incorporating information from a variety of sources into her intimate, ornate prose. Sometimes I wondered if she had too firm a grasp on her subjects, was at times so precise the work lacked surprise—the wildness of wandering without a set destination. I don’t know. I could be wrong.
Some of my favorite reads this year were two of the three books in Nathalie Léger’s triptych that asks, per The New Yorker, “what a woman recognizes when she sees herself in another woman.” I read The White Dress (translated by Natasha Lehrer) first, which was the final one released, and then, months later, Exposition (translated by Amanda DeMarco)—Suite for Barbara Loden is for the new year. The women Léger chooses as subjects encircle Léger’s own life, come closer and grow distant, reflect and reveal. “Like death …, the subject is simply the name for what cannot be spoken,” she writes in Exposition, in which her subject is, ostensibly, the Countess of Castiglione, famous for being the most photographed woman in the world in the mid-late 1800s. “Its appearance is trivial, a word or phrase overheard in chance meetings—for example this one, which I either read or heard, I can’t remember: ‘We’re afraid to look upon shame.’ What, what does that have to do with anything, why associate it immediately, brutally, with the subject, why think that this phrase could be essential to it?” Léger’s prose itself is gorgeous—flowing and tumbling over itself, each paragraph the beginning of its own story, sentences interrupted by the writer’s doubts and questions and interludes. I apologize for this giant block of text full of mostly quotes, but the following, from The White Dress, about the performance artist Pippa Bacca, who traversed war-torn countries in a wedding dress in some maligned notion of reparation, “for the good of the world,” is particularly emblematic of Léger’s style and ethos:
“…it is normal that the description of complex things should be complex, it is about feelings, some people even call this literature, because we cannot simplify everything, I say by way of a preamble, and don’t believe that a subject, a verb, and a complement cannot be in and of themselves a frightening complexity; she is dead, for example, contains plenty of digressions, but that’s not what it’s about, I say exhaling, it's about goodness.”
I mean??!!!!
I read a lot of books about women by women—many motherhood books factored into my list this year, all recommended by each other or through each other somehow: Kate Zambreno’s new essay collection, The Light Room, Kate Briggs’ The Long Form, and Olga Ravn’s My Work, all of which were extremely important to me in thinking about form and also relationality, community, what a self means. (I wrote about The Long Form for Barrelhouse!) Both Flaneuse by Lauren Elkin and The Halt during the Chase by Rosemary Tonks, which I discovered after attending a reading with Clare hosted by a critic we both love, portrayed women who were steadfast in their roaming. Tonks is one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read, and I was constantly taking pictures of pages in the dim living room light to send to Clare, or reciting sentences to Dylan. There is once scene in which the narrator tells her boyfriend that the windshield wipers sound like they’re repeating Oh the brethren, Oh the brethren. He does not find much humor in it—they’re kind of on the rocks, as they say—and instead accuses her of trying to annoy him. “I was huddled up in my seat,” writes Tonks, “ like a miserable clammy frog with bolting eyes, asking to be forgiven. What for? For—making life funny.” Just wait til you hear about how, after writing novels, poetry, and a children’s book, Tonks became a born-again Christian late in life, burned the books she’d written, and read nothing but the Bible until she died.
What else: Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras (funny, bold, honest), The Dog of the South by Charles Portis (read this because of what Rose Lyster wrote about it in the Paris Review: “What Portis’s novel is actually about, I think, is the exhilaration of noticing, and of keeping a record so that you can look at it later and see what kind of person you are, or were.”), Being Here Is Everything by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston (gorgeous, intimate biography). The Ryerson became a bar. Dylan and I went to a Mets game and saw Channing Tatum. The Ryerson closed. I read Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson, a perfect book, made for me specifically and probably a few others. I didn’t finish my own book again and again and still. How can a thing ever be done? I found a new job I didn’t like. I got really obsessed with a terrible TV show and didn’t rest until I’d finished it. I read Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno and Event Factory by Renee Gladman. I made a sign on a pizza box and marched through Manhattan chanting Free Free Palestine and felt warm and proud and useless. I sat on the couch while Dylan made me breakfast.
There are some years that last one million years, and this was one of them. For me it has been a year of great joy and great tragedy. How to allow both—to not abandon one for the other. It is very easy, as a white person in this country, to go shopping and be in love and go out for dinner. It is also very easy to feel hopeless in a world where a video of a man tucking a candy bar under the arm of his dead child as he wraps the body into a sheet makes no difference to the relentlessness of colonialism and the American military complex, which reaches its grimy little hands into everything. Isabella Hammad writes, in this beautiful exchange between her and Sally Rooney: “I don’t believe we can afford to despair, nor do I think despair is ethical.” I’m not sure exactly how to guarantee I am feeling everything, holding everything, not closing myself off to detail nor ideal, whether tragic or joyful or, I don’t know, just a regular happening in a pedestrian day. An effort towards simultaneity, even a small one, seems something like hope in a world with climate clocks and billionaires and bombs.
I know I always make these things too long (can’t believe this is my third NYE post??), but I can’t help but get carried away this time of year. The lights, the toasts, the outfits. A collective attempt at letting go. A collective belief in something new, and good. It’s a season for simultaneity—for taking stock, accepting our failures, making plans.
I’ll be working tonight, wearing the same all-black outfit I always wear, passing out canapes and cocktails with various allergens I haven’t memorized yet. But I’m excited to be on a rooftop in Brooklyn when all the fireworks go off, and apparently we all get to participate in a champagne toast at midnight. And the moment everyone will sort of coyly concede to sentimentality, all of us together in our misguided belief in something cheesy and impossible like hope—the brief sparkling countdown in which we allow ourselves to be moved by it.