what I read, January-June 2025
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.
What’s it like, living in Los Angeles in summer of 2025?
It’s noticing any vehicles that look suspicious and wondering about the intent of the people in the vehicle. It’s driving past the fewer and fewer street food stands and wondering how people are coping. It’s fearing that someone you know and love, or someone you know on the periphery of your life, will be disappeared. It’s wondering how you will be and what you will do if you witness an abduction of a stranger. It’s watching video upon video and photo upon photo of people randomly being kidnapped, sometimes from businesses or street corners you’re familiar with. It’s watching these videos and wondering what you would do if you were abruptly taken. It’s talking with loved ones about how far you would be willing to go to interrupt a kidnapping in progress. It’s hoping that the people doing the terrorizing experience zero peace, and worse, from now until forever.
Living in this country in 2025: how can you focus?
I began the year with poetry.
WHAT I READ, JANUARY 2025-JUNE 2025
I’ve been a longtime fan of Louise Mathias. Her latest book, What If the Invader Is Beautiful, contains all the evocative and provocative language I can expect from her work. Titles like “Hello, Panic, My Old Friend,” “Before We Become a Danger to Each Other”—I often get the sense that there is so much behind the curtain that I want to linger extra-long on each word of each poem. I want to live in their moods. Butterflies killing/all pretty on my windshield, she writes. Deserts, plains, the inside of the car, the inside of a flower—all of these and more tumble out of this beauty.
I bring doom into the conversation to show that it is a place to begin, not to end, Johanna Hedva writes in their stunning book of essays, How to Tell When We Will Die. Hell, yeah. Doom is where we are, let’s go.
I’ve ended up unintentionally reading a number of books in the last few years that heavily feature Berlin, which Hedva’s book does, as does Health and Safety by Emily Witt:
After a full bodily immersion into techno for hours the sound of it continues to ambiently throb for a few more. I heard the beat in the sound of water coming out of a faucet, in construction noise, in the rush of the train past the window, in the compressor of the refrigerator. A DJ named Eris Drew has called this continuing resonance the “motherbeat.”
Yes, give me that motherbeat. The motherbeat reverberated through Aria Aber’s novel Good Girl, and the poetry of this book sang. From Berlin I went back to the U.S., but 1980s U.S., which I am deeply familiar with—though Nora Lange took me into the farmland where family farms were going bankrupt and children of the ‘80s were trying to make sense of their surroundings in her novel Us Fools, a book I haven’t stopped thinking about.
I was teaching in the winter and spring and had assigned What It Is by Lynda Barry though I’d never read it before, so I took what felt like a carnivalesque detour into the Barry Brain. From there I took a poetry byway with Xochitl-Julissa Bermejo’s Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites, in which the poet literally situates herself at Civil War battle sites in the U.S., and can you see how this is connected already to some of the other titles I’ve already mentioned? What sites in the U.S. aren’t nationally recognized battle sites at this point in history? Which ones will be disappeared by fascists intent on rewriting history?
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case held the familiar scent of Pacific Northwest mold up to my nose and it smelled like beauty, tragedy, anarchy. It is so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion, writes Omar El Akkad in the essential book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He continues:
…Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we’ll learn to lay tracks on air.
Meanwhile, Nate Lippens has another stellar book out, Ripcord. I’m loving seeing Nate’s work featured in so many places! Go read My Dead Book, then read Ripcord.
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami was…disquieting, as it should be. I did not love this book as much as critics, as much as I appreciated the premise. Hmmm. From The Dream Hotel I ventured into A Room With a Darker View by Claire Phillips: also disquieting, intense. This book revealed another vision of Los Angeles, and of mental illness, and mothers, all of which I am the perfect reader for.
Before I had a kid, before I was becoming domesticated, I used to meet Emily Rapp Black at a gritty, grimy cafe in Santa Monica every Friday morning for four hours of writing time. Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg is an inviting little red hardcover book with a red ribbon bookmark, and it reminds me of what I have appreciated most about Emily’s writing over the years. She takes me to the depths, she helps me resurface. She has imprinted herself in my brain.
But I fall for the hype once in a while, okay? Especially when trying to take my mind off the fascism that went from creeping to galloping in. So I read Audition by Katie Kitamura, and I say: Alright. I like the style, but I do wonder if you ask me in a few years what it’s about, will I be able to tell you? Just being real here…
In October 2022, while at my Tin House residency working on my next book, I met my upstairs neighbor who was also in residence and got to hear about her forthcoming book. The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza is astounding. Poetic revelry in every line. Anorexia. Queerness. “Citizenship” and racism, Palestinian identity, and wholeness: this book bursts with defiance, elegance, literary and social criticism.
Veering from memoir into fiction, I lounged and gloriously lazed about in the world of Barbara by Joni Murphy—another book where practically every sentence was stunning and built up such an encompassing portrait of a character perfectly placed in the milieu of the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s as she becomes. It was difficult to leave the worlds of this book. I started staying up later reading the books I’ve been slow-reading for some time, the books I turn to when trying to fall asleep: I reread My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, in part because my kid finished the book and we’re watching the HBO series and now into the second season. I finally finished Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell, ironically, in the hours before I fell asleep.
After meeting up with a friend I haven’t seen in a while, I had to text her to say, I forgot to ask what you’ve been reading! She mentioned Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth. I borrowed it from the library. Oh my god. Have you seen Festen (The Celebration)? Did you love it? It’s one of those films I saw ages ago, possibly in Olympia? and it never left me. I even rewatched it in the last few years because I wanted my partner to see it, and I wanted to know if it would still be as devastating and incredible as I remembered it. It was. Anyway, Will and Testament is enthralling. I came away feeling extremely satisfied with the narration, the loops and drops that happen in the traumatized psyche, and the ending. Thank you to all the artists writing endings that counter prevailing notions of “forgiveness.” Let’s write new ones! We don’t have to “forgive and forget,” for fuck’s sake. Ice can melt! We can survive, we can write, we can make art amidst all the current fuckery.
And that is what I read, January 2025 through June 2025.
Take care, You. If you’re in New York, or Portland, hope to see you in a few weeks. xo
COMING ATTRACTIONS
AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST
