Reading—my most familiar and constant activity—has been more of a struggle for me during the pandemic years. There are the obvious distractions—stress, panic, despair, etc. But less obvious to me was just how communal my reading practice happens to be and so, perhaps paradoxically, these more isolated years have slowed it down a bit. By communal, I mean that, historically, a lot of my reading has been as a student and then as a professor—I’m technically (temporarily?) neither at the moment—and so I’m often consuming a text with the explicit intention of talking with a particular room of people about it. When I paused my academic life to write full time, I did not realize how much I’d miss the experience of moving with my reading from solitary spaces to the full classroom. Also, I often read what my friends were excited about or what they had recommended to me. I think one of the best ways to know the people I love is to try to see a piece of art through their perspective and to have a discussion about it, which often occurred at bars and restaurants and other places I spent less time in during 2020 and 2021.
But in 2022, I read a lot more and had meaningful conversations around what I read and so below are the texts that specifically prompted or came from the most important, life-giving conversations I had this year.
I had the incredible fortune of having my book, Easy Beauty, come out four months after Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, which meant I could watch and learn from the grace, perspective, good humor, and astonishing work ethic she applied to her promotional cycle—an endless cycle as her book, quite correctly, was one of the biggest fiction debuts of the year and people are still wanting her to talk about it. The School for Good Mothers is a high-concept novel about a dystopian near-future in which mothers who make mistakes are sent to re-education camp until they can parent “properly” in accordance societal values. It’s a brilliant, funny, painful, rage-inducing book that never loses touch with its undergirding current of deep empathy. I got to observe, from the front-row seat of friendship, a lot of incredible moments in the year of Jessamine Chan—rave reviews, award nominations, countless interviews and events—but the thing that impressed me the most was that Jessamine saw every public-facing opportunity as a chance to support other people’s writing. You cannot find an interview with her where she isn’t listing off other people’s books or works of journalism as sources of deep inspiration and admiration. Watching this, learning from her, talking with her constantly, feeling so supported by her and watching her support others…just the best, the best!
I was sent Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir by our mutual editor, Lauren Wein. I devoured it and then sent Julia a message that was basically like, well…we’re friends now, right? Because your brain? Need that brain in my life! I may have worded this message slightly differently…who knows, who can say? Luckily Lauren had also sent Julia a copy of Easy Beauty and Julia felt, after reading it, similarly enough to accept my deranged request of instant friendship. Talking to Julia, traveling with her to book festivals, seeing plays with her, and seeing her play, My Own Personal Exegesis, which is currently running at Lincoln Center, has expanded me, made me a better writer and thinker.
I read László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance after a friend recommended it. He kept trying to describe it to me, beginning a sentence like “It’s about a society on the brink of collapse” (he said a more nuanced and precisely descriptive sentence, but I can’t remember it right now). We were driving around Portland at 1am and every time he began that sentence, it would prompt some sort of real-life ominous event. We realized we were nearly out of gas and became worried we might be stranded. Every gas station we found looked open but was actually closed. Later, we witnessed some mental health distress and then an intense conflict between strangers. I saw a child left alone in the backseat of a car and became concerned. It was a weird night! Punctuated by my friend starting and restarting several times—but never being able to finish—the description of the book, which is about chaos. There’s never been a more fitting introduction to a text. I loved it.
I read a lot in relation to two profiles I wrote this year—one of the playwright Will Arbery for the New York Times Magazine and the other of Patti Smith for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. Writing these two profiles back-to-back was an interesting challenge as one writer is someone we’ve been talking about for 50 years and the other is someone I think we’ll be talking about for the next 50 years and so thinking about these two artists at the same time felt like reaching into the past and the future simultaneously and accessing a long, long conversation about what art can be.
For the Patti Smith profile I re-read Just Kids, M Train, Year of the Monkey, and Devotion. I read and talked to her about her newest, A Book of Days. For the Will Arbery profile, I read his plays Wheelchair, Heroes of the Fourth Turning (which was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2020), Corsicana, and Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, which is onstage now at the Signature Theatre. I also lobbied Will to send me the as-yet-unproduced plays, the secret plays lurking in the depths of his laptop, which he did with notes attached to each that read “don’t read it” and “turn the other way, delete it” and “you have better things to do than to read this.” I ignored him. One play he sent me was called You’re Sadder than You Realize and is kind of about Justin Bieber being eaten by Scooter Braun who is also the eighteenth-century cannibal Tarrare. Will Arbery? That’s a brain I love.
In addition to Will’s work, I read a lot of other plays this year and saw a lot of theatre. I love the work of Amy Herzog and re-read 4,000 Miles and Mary Jane. I also read the Annie Baker plays collected in The Vermont Plays. I read the play The Lark Ascending by Jacob Kyle Robinson and—in one of my favorite moments of “reading as conversation” of the year—I found myself sitting at a table at a party with Robinson and the director and producer of the first staged reading of The Lark Ascending and I got to listen to how it all came together and what their working dynamic was like. This was cool. I wish I could always sit at a table with writers and their collaborators right after reading their work and ask questions.
My son and I read poetry to each other at night. This sounds maybe either nice or cringe or whimsical or pretentious to you depending on your orientation, but the truth is we read poetry because I get very tired at night and don’t have the energy to read long chapter books to him. Poetry before bedtime is a parenting cheat. Would read him tweets instead if I were an inch more depraved. Also, when I’m traveling alone, he’ll read poems to me over FaceTime and that’s just about my favorite thing in the world. We read Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets. W.G. Sebald’s After Nature, and Sight Lines by Arthur Sze. We are currently working through The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara—a perfect poet for a boy who likes Coca-Cola, art museums, and has lived his entire life in New York City.
My same friend who recommended Krasnahorkai to me has been deeply engaged in a close reading/re-reading of Borges. He sent me one of the smartest, best, most beautiful emails I’ve ever received about his experience re-reading Borges and about infinity and so this prompted me to re-read Borges (for the first time in maybe a decade) so that I could talk to my friend about Borges. I returned to Ficcones and A Universal History of Iniquity.
I read several books that are coming out in 2023, but my two favorites were Leg by Greg Marshall (out June 2023) and The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland (out July 2023). These are really different books, but both are absurdly generous, by which I mean that these authors are giving their readers so much of themselves—their honesty, humor, brilliance. I’m so grateful that these books exist and I can’t wait for the world to get to hold them in their hands.
