So, What's Next?

TBR lists and our perpetual longings

When I first saw the listing for our house upstate, I didn’t think it was worth the boomerang day trip from Brooklyn. On paper, it didn’t check off all the boxes of what we were looking for. It didn’t have a garage, a mudroom, or washer and dryer. But my partner Jason offered me my own advice and said that the more places we saw, the more informed we would be about different locations and other factors that we may not have been considering. It was a learning opportunity, he insisted, and so we went. 

It was my birthday weekend, November 2019, and spending it in the car with an infant sounded less than ideal. I had to remind myself as we were leaving how good it felt to get out of the city, and how good it would feel to return home; how much I love spending time upstate and that there was no better place I’d rather spend my day, with no other people than my own family. 

Once we got off the highway and inched closer to (what is now) our little valley, up the hill of a seven mile road running parallel to a river, we felt a joint sense of awe. Mind you, this was in November — the trees were bare, there were dirty mounds of snow lingering on the sides of the road, and all the natural waterfalls were frozen or barren. Even then, we could see its majesty. I rolled down my window and smelled the warmth of burning wood sprawling out from each home’s chimney and was flooded with excitement. My favorite smell. 

When we pulled into the pseudo-driveway beside the house, I remembered the facts of the listing— this house was not what we were looking for. We entered through the back patio, into the extremely tiny renovated kitchen with very little cabinet space. We toured through the three bedroom home which was actually two bedrooms in disguise. I pointed out there was no formal dining space or living room the way it was staged. There was no pantry, no laundry room, no guest room, nowhere to put an office so Jason could work from home. 

We left and went to a brand new brewery in the nearest hotspot, Livingston Manor. While Jason ordered us two IPAs, I discovered our son had popped his first two teeth. He was barely four months old. I began to cry. 

When deciding on a place to live, many of us compile a list of requirements. A certain size home, or kitchen, or bathroom; outdoor space; close to a coffee shop, restaurants, a downtown area, or other friends. 

When I walked into our current house for the first time, I only saw the reasons why we couldn’t live here. But when we came back home to our roomy Brooklyn apartment, I didn’t feel the same sense of homecoming I’d normally get from returning after a long adventure. I only felt the reasons why we also couldn’t live there for another year. A fear began to grow in me: I couldn’t answer why. Why did I feel an urgent need to make that house upstate work all of a sudden? Why did I find myself wanting to return, to reconsider this house that doesn’t have all the things we were looking for? 

At a friends’ apartment in Brooklyn for our annual Christmas gathering in December 2019, Jason and I revealed we had put in an offer on a house in the Catskills. Everyone’s faces lit up in astonishment. Then we continued on to say that if closing went smoothly, we’d be moving up there full-time. Their minds exploded.

Sometimes, taking a step forward can feel like taking two steps back. But momentum only moves in one direction. The direction of velocity. Sometimes, we think we’re looking for answers when what we actually need is to immerse ourselves in more questions. 

*

Last summer in Maine, Jason dropped me off to peruse the local bookstore while he continued to drive our children through their afternoon slumber. I felt a familiar discomfort: to be efficient with my time and turn the luxury of personal space into a calculated mission; to be swallowed whole by the world, by the contents of this shop, completely surrendered in time and space. The ever present conflicting tensions of who I am and who I need to be. 

When I got to the cash wrap, the bookseller commented on my selection, noting he could see the connective tissue between my choices: Sloane Crosley’s Cult Classic, Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins, and Can’t And Won’t by Lydia Davis. I wasn’t at all aware of their connections, and still am not entirely because eight months later I have yet to read any of them. They sit on my living room console table in a long line of TBR books that both haunt and inspire me with each new day. But this bookseller. His comment sparked something within me. This spark of excitement said, this stranger sees the work happening within you. He grounded me with a sense of purpose. 

I asked him for his most intriguing read of late— The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki— and added it to my pile without hesitation.

While visiting some friends in Nashville this Spring, there was only one place I was interested in going to outside of their new home: Ann Patchett’s bookstore, Parnassus. I’ve had this location starred on my Google maps for at least five years. I imagined a walkable downtown strip of shops, toy stores, home goods stores filled with locally made candles and stationary, and artisan coffee shops all surrounding this quaint little author-owned storefront. I think I even imagined a cobblestone road. That should have been my first mental flag that I’d let my imagination go too far. 

From watching Ann’s weekly “New to You” recommended reads on Parnassus’s Instagram stories, I had created an entire layout of their store: tall ceilings, rolling library ladders, and various types of doodle breeds congregating a huge cash wrap in the center of the store. (Solely because doodle breeds are my favorite type of dogs, and because this is my fantasy we’re talking about.) 

When I pulled into the parking lot with my friend— that’s right, parking lot —I realized that I was in a familiar place: Suburbia. This long awaited bookstore was in a shopping mall beside a sushi restaurant, a smoothie spot, and a busy intersection congested with traffic from a car accident. It could not have been farther away from what I envisioned in my mind.

Still, it was a room filled with books, and I was very happy to have spent my time there.

*

The books we choose to read, or even buy for a later date, are a type of reflection of ourselves: Who we were, who we are, who we aspire to be. 

Jason always picks up these huge ass books. Biographies mostly, or dense bodies of work that lay out a life, a process, a string of choices made that make a man revered aka the hero’s journey. It’s not the only thing he’s drawn to, but I see the artist in him looking for camaraderie when he picks up Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, or As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling; I see the empathetic giver looking to impact marginalized communities or rethink antiquated systems when he picks up A People’s History Of The United States or Weapons of Math Destruction. I recognize the threads of narrative he’s weaving into his selfhood. 

Books are reminders of all our many facets. The depths of our souls, the inner longings we may or may not ever share with the outside world. These deep internal selves that cannot be wholly held by life’s circumstances. 

Making sense of our decisions doesn’t always happen in real time. When I look at that stack of books from Maine, I can see retrospectively where I was at six months postpartum: drawn to female-driven narratives and re-examined origin stories, the fantasy of a happy ending, and a witty refusal to comply.

So far this year, I’ve had a handful of job interviews at various publishers and literary agencies. You see, I desire to have another child but I long to have something substantive to return to on the other side that doesn’t tamp down my literary cravings and sense of worth. No matter how well these interviews went, I found myself crying before bed because I wanted this “job security” so badly, and also because I was getting such similar feedback everywhere. Things like, Have you considered writing about that? Or Have you tried writing book reviews? Or worse, I wish I had better news because your cover letter was so beautifully written… WHY IS EVERYONE TELLING ME TO WRITE, I DON’T WANT TO WRITE! I’d confess to Jason in tears. 

Oftentimes, we fail to see the opportunities in front of us because we aren’t ready for them, or we don’t want to accept them yet. It can be so much easier to look at what isn’t and try to conjure up what could be. 

The pandemic has had all of us fervently reassessing our life’s structures to reflect what we value. Culturally, it seems like we can’t stop asking ourselves and each other, So, what’s next? 

*

The house we bought was less than ideal, and even now, we often feel plagued by all the things we want to do to make our living arrangements more comfortable as our family grows. And yet, this little home of ours is exactly what we need for this season of our lives. It’s the place where our son slept through the night for the very first time; the place where he first learned how to ride a bike down the middle of the road; the place Jason learned how to chop wood correctly (lol); the place I started introducing myself to new friends as a writer; the place we became a family of four. It’s our first home, not our last. 

When I walked into Parnassus, I had a list in my Notes app of all the books I wanted to walk out with: Flight by Lynn Steger Strong, Essential Labor by Angela Garbes, The Guest by Emma Cline, Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv, All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, Cleanness by Garth Greenwell, Brutes by Dizz Tate, All That Man Is by David Szalay, Lone Women by Victor Lavalle, A Little Bit of Land by Jessica Gigot. I could have purchased all of these online instead of letting my desires build up. But immersing myself into the experience of that romanticized shop, I didn’t know what I was actually going to find. I went in knowing exactly what I wanted, and came out with exactly what I needed instead. It might take me months or even years to understand the connective tissue in this haul but I trust their covers will open, as will the doors into some other version of myself, at just the right time. 

Here’s what I picked up in Nashville, still sitting in my TBR pile:

The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery by Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik’s work is nothing short of aspirational. He’s a brilliant essayist whose been a staff writer for the New Yorker since the ‘80s and has many books to his name. His most recent obsession meditates on the idea of mastery and the processes behind a wide range of such niche and well-achieved endeavors, from the perfect loaf of sourdough bread to teaching someone how to drive for the first time. He explores the threads of mystery in these various tasks including the process of breaking down and building up, and intentional imperfection. Gopnik’s big takeaway: mastery is a commonplace experience if you know how to look for it.

Novelist As A Vocation by Haruki Murakami 

This is a book about dedicating one’s life to their craft. Murakami is an internationally best-selling author you’ve definitely heard of. Here, he discusses the personal anecdotes and moments of inspiration that set him forth to write his novels and other musings that have inspired artists, writers, and musicians. This writer’s origin story also divulges the author’s perspective of the novel in our society, the importance of memory, the necessity of loneliness, routine, and much more. I would love to read this in communion with another writer this summer — hit me up if that’s you.

Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro is more commonly known for her memoirs, and rightly so. She hasn’t written a work of fiction for like, fifteen years. The novel is set on a road, in a neighborhood, spanning 50 years of life and all its secrets. “A luminous meditation on family, memory, and the healing power of interconnectedness.”

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

A twenty something Jewish female takes a communication detox from her mother. She befriends an orthodox Jewish woman who is intent on feeding her. “Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts.” After a friend’s recent praise, I couldn’t resist.

Field Work: A Forager’s Memoir by Iliana Regan

I likely read an excerpt or mention of this book somewhere before adding it to be list of desired reads. That’s how most titles make their way into my master wish list. Funny enough, I spent a lot of time talking to Luke and Diandra about the upper peninsula of Michigan, where they are currently remodeling a home to return to and are dreaming up the possibilities for that area. When I found this book at Parnassus and realized that Regan is a Michelin star chef and founder of the Milkweed Inn, a small bnb in Hiawatha National Forest, I felt a bit of kismet. This memoir touches on “the meaning and beauty we seek in the landscapes, and stories, that reveal the forces which inform, shape, and nurture our lives.”

The Nursery by Szilvia Molner 

When this NYT book review came out, I had not only been exclusively reading (the reviewer) Claire Dederer’s work for a week straight in anticipation of her newest release, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, but many of my writing groups and writer friends grew immediate interest in Molner’s debut novel about a protagonist’s maternal prison (her home) and the reemergence from postpartum depression. What Dederder says is “so relentlessly quotable that I’ve found it impossible to resist opening [the review] with her own words” made it hard for me to pass this one up and see what all the buzz is about.

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv 

I read an excerpt of this book somewhere and, as someone with a very sick mother, felt an urgency to read it. This veers more in the psychology realm of reading from what I can gather, so if I finish it in its entirety it’ll be a profound testament to Aviv’s writing abilities. This book blends both personal accounts and reportage. “Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives--and our identities, too. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.”

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

All I know is that this is about a haunted bookstore in Minneapolis and a bookseller tries to navigate and understand the source of the haunting. “The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book.” Ummm. Yeah, I’m sold.

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace

This is an oldie and I have Ann’s “New to You” Instagram story to thank. She often discusses authors she deems essential in our reading lives but has this fun approach where she helps readers navigate where to start in an author’s work. If you want to tackle Infinite Jest some day, that’s great. I tried that too. According to Ann, Consider the Lobster is the entry point. The essay first appeared in Gourmet Magazine in 2004 and shook up heaps of controversy as it discusses the ethics of boiling a creature alive to enhance the consumer’s pleasure.

Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change by Angela Garbes 

My feminism didn’t really ignite until I became a mother. When being home with my child(ren) no longer became a personal choice thanks to COVID, it made for a very conflicting experience between me and my son(s) but also me and my origin story. And I am not alone here. Garbes writes about her upbringing as a first generation Filipino-American and the complicated history her family has had in relation to care work, bringing this tension of labor into a global context: “the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of color.” I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things.

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With all the sleepless nights we had in April, I was lucky to receive samples from Moon Juice of their Magnesi-OM powder in a new “blue lemon calm” flavor and it was legit some of the best sleep I’ve had.

A green tip feels fitting for beauty recs this month because I know our industry has some of the worst “foot prints” on our planet. Amika offers bulk refills of their shampoo and conditioner and they offer playful bottles if you don’t already have ones to keep your shower clutter down to a minimum.

As for the equivalent in skin care also offering refills, I wrote a review on Pharrell’s skincare line HUMANRACE for People magazine and fell in love with the results I got from their Three-Minute Facial pack. Hands down best moisturizer I’ve ever used — a little bit thankfully goes a very long way. May we all age as gracefully as Pharrell has.

Until next time…

xA