Books briefly discussed: Emergency by Kathleen Alcott; Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy; Mega Milk by Megan Milks

I marked the 12th Saturday in a row emptying out my mother’s house, my childhood home. I’ve been keeping notes on the process. It was a week of fresh grief surfacing, riding the waves, then landing in a more solid place where I can sign the forms, agree to the contracts, and finish projects in a stable—ha! stable enough condition.

But it’s all temporary, isn’t it.

This week I re-started reading two books. Both had been borrowed by the library and in both cases, I did not finish them in time, so they were returned back in 2025. When they arrived back in my e-book shelf list as available, I decided to finish them.

The first is Emergency by Kathleen Alcott. I loved her novel America Is Hard to Find. As I read this book of short stories, I’m getting a little impatient with the voice(s). Are all the narrators alike or is this the same narrator, I keep asking myself. Maybe something will be revealed about this when I finish. I’m moving through it slowly.

The second is Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy. It’s a book that will for sure bring up a lot for readers who are survivors of sexual assault. In some ways I’m glad that there was an enforced pause in finishing the book, it’s so heavy. Ultimately I appreciated the book and its mix of cultural criticism, interviews, and personal essays. One of my highlights reads:

There is a dark side to self-preservation, our defenses keep us safe but draw us into their imprisoning powers. We go under.

Sometimes it looks like paralysis, psychic retreats, unconscious sanctuaries, utopian escapes.

Relatable. Sigh. We do go under.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who cherishes her “psychic retreats, unconscious sanctuaries, utopian escapes.”

There was a brief wrestling with the concept of using “my” to describe the experiences of assault. In a chapter in which she interviews a survivor:

As the blogs recommended, she also tried saying ‘my rape’ to give herself ownership over the event and its consequences. It was a way of speaking about violence that many Westerners used to describe rape. My rape or my assault…Luisa realized that calling the violence ‘my rape’ stopped her from seeing that the violence was also a social issue, which helped her see the rapist not just as someone who made the choice to harm her, but also as a produce of systems and structures. ‘There’s a danger of suffering alone,’ she said.

This was the first time I’ve come across someone writing about the choice to use “my” when it comes to abuse or assault. In my own language, I’ve chosen to call the teacher who abused me only “my teacher.” He is the man who sexually abused me. I have not wanted to think of him as mine in any other way since my 20s. So I appreciated this grappling, even if the context of it also included an example I’m not personally familiar with, which is having a community who is willing to bear the assault as a community, so the survivor does not have to bear it alone.

I suppose it could be said that when you write a book about a personal experience of sexual abuse, the readers of the book, in some ways, become a community (of sorts) that can bear the weight of it—inelegantly, practically, humanly. I think often of how Excavation seemed to draw a lot of different people, many of whom are survivors, into my orbit. Some asked me to bear the weight of their own experiences. Many did not, or did not do so so explicitly. I’ll continue to wrestle with the concept of “my” in part because it’s accepted, and many people whom I love use the term. I get it, and yet, for myself, I have not been able to use it to describe the sexual assaults I’ve survived.

Moving on to lighter fare—

I finished reading Mega Milk by Megan Milks, which, so far, is the best book I’ve read in 2026. I have a print copy and dog-eared so many pages that I think I want to come back and write more about it later.

This week (and many months preceding it) have felt like I’m pushing through: inflammation, pain, overwhelm, terrible global news, awful local news, etc. The list is long. Meanwhile, I keep pushing and when I’m not pushing, I’m resting. I returned briefly to the transcription project and noted AGAIN that it is emotionally draining as fuck and I have to create time before and after to rest and recharge. Plus, I hate crying and there’s been a lot of that.

Wishing everyone ease and a lot less to have to push through. xo

Buy Excavation, Hollywood Notebook, and Bruja from Bookshop.org for a discount, plus support your local independent bookstore at the same time.