Favorite library: Lilly Library, where I am sitting this very minute.
Favorite photo: Natalie Portman and Paul Mescal flirting in white t-shirts.
Favorite movie: Inside Out 2? Probably Inside Out 2. I went to the movies twice this year and it was to see Inside Out 2 and Moana 2. This pains me a little.
Favorite painting: Vanessa Bell. Landscape with Haystack, Asheham, 1912.
I started to write this to coincide with the Winter Solstice, but a preschool cold took me out and I barely recovered in time to enjoy Christmas. My sister said to me recently, when we were talking about traveling or dining out and risking Covid exposure, “Probably the biggest risk you’re taking is having your kid in preschool,” and I had never thought of it that way but she is absolutely right.
I worked hard this year, in many different ways. I also convalesced hard this year. The muscles in my legs atrophied from lack of use and are only now, very slowly, growing back to moderate 2023 levels. In June, I gave in and bought a whole new set of pants that actually fit me. I gardened in my new jeans and immediately stained the knees, but I don’t really mind.
I grew a lot of flowers from seed. I knit myself a funny little bandana of a scarf, and my dad a hat. I took my dad to see Brandi Carlile at Tanglewood for the—not to brag, but—second time. This time, it was acoustic, just her and her two bandmates/best friends since high school who happen to be identical twins. So she stood on stage, with the same exact man on either side of her, and they sang in three-part harmony and at one point all the hairs on my body stood on end and I cried.1
I visited New Jersey more than I have in the past four years and that felt good. I read some good books (see below) and didn’t watch much TV, but only because I go to bed around 8:30 and usually I’m still puttering around the house, putting the day to bed until 8:30. If I had to pick a favorite show it would be Somebody Somewhere, even though I haven’t finished the last season yet.
2024 was the first year since I was about fifteen that I didn’t have at least a part-time job. Every time I say that to someone, I usually hear one of two responses:
You had a book come out this year, didn’t you?
I did! Sometimes I forget! March honestly feels like years ago, but it was probably the highlight of my year. I think Book, Beast, and Crow is the best thing I’ve written and I’m happy with it and with the feedback I’ve gotten from people who’ve read it.2 Which feels like TRIUMPH. I await the offers for screen adaptation(s), which should be rolling in imminently.
And then the second response to my joblessness—
You’re taking care of a child! That’s a huge job!
And it is. It is. And my reply to that is always: I didn’t say I wasn’t working.
Favorite books:
Hild by Nicola Griffith, and Sandwich by Catherine Newman, both of which I wrote about here. These books almost couldn’t be more different, but they both live equally in my mind alongside my own memories.
The Dory Fantasmagory series by Abby Hanlon. Pure delight. There are six books, you can read them all back-to-back in a single sitting, and they are both realistic and laugh-out-loud (lol) funny. I took the first one out of the library to see if Gil might like it, then somehow—I don’t know how it happened—I had bought books 1-5 and was reading them in secret while he was at school.
Favorite of the favorites: Rural Hours by Harriet Baker
I ordered Rural Hours as a birthday gift to myself. It hasn’t been published in the US yet, so I spent more on shipping than on the book itself3 and to be honest, I’d never heard of Sylvia Townsend Warner or Rosamond Lehmann before, so my expectations were low.4 I only bought it because the first third of the book is about Virginia Woolf moving to the country to recover from “nervous exhaustion,” and having been really sick with influenza. She starts writing a diary. Some days she can hear the gunfire from the Great War going on in France. Her sister, Vanessa Bell, rents a house nearby and paints the haystacks in the fields. The same frickin’ haystack painting that is in the Smith frickin’ College collection, which I happened to see the day after I read about its frickin’ creation! I almost shouted, WHAT, but I contained myself. Also, Gil was with me, and he takes museums at a jog.
As it turned out, the Woolf section was the slowest and saddest, but I still loved it.5 The other two sections were wonderful and fascinating. It wasn’t really a shared biography at all! I’ve never read a book about how writers write and support themselves and have a family and change their location to facilitate their work. Each woman was completely unique and bizarre in her own way. Sylvia Townsend Warner lived without indoor plumbing and taught herself to grow most of her own food. Rosamond Lehmann wrote several novels while conducting an affair in the country with Cecil Day-Lewis, father of Daniel, who hadn’t been born yet because Cecil hadn’t left both Rosamond and his *actual* wife for Daniel’s mother yet. I read the book very slowly, just a few pages every night before bed, and I felt genuinely sad when it ended. Give me more books like this!6
At another point, she sang a Linda Ronstadt song and I cried.
The most common thing I’ve heard is that it kept people up late reading because each chapter was a cliff-hanger and/or it was too suspenseful or scary and they had to find out what happened next. THIS IS THE BEST COMPLIMENT. It’s like someone saying, You did it. It worked.
Worth it.
I read biographies of writers very infrequently—bios in general aren’t my cup of tea, they can be so dry and tedious. In the last ten years, I think I’ve only read three: Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother. In every instance, they were inspiring and good for my writing soul, and simultaneously bad for my marriage. The theme of every single one is basically: she became a writer in spite of all the men in her life.
I probably shouldn’t be surprised by that, huh?
Not biographies full of facts and dates, stories of how life and work braid together. Stories about writers’ minds! Gimme gimme.