“Attention Span—A groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness andProductivity” by Gloria Mark, Ph.D.
Imagine opening your laptop at the beginning of the day.
I am drawn to any book that explores our technology addictions and diminishing attention spans. I struggle with it daily.
The book comes at the issue from a more scientific perspective, filled with studies and data, tracking our attention in real time.
Drawing from decades of research, Mark shines a light on the relationship with our screens and the way it impacts our attention. We spend just 47 seconds on a screen before shifting our attention and it takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to the task after an interruption. That one fact is enough to make me want to create more balance with my devices. But the book is filled with so many more insights as well as suggestions to create a more sustainable, balanced connection to technology.
Sentences I underlined:
“We can, though, learn to use our personal devices in a way that does not induce stress, where we feel positive psychologically balanced and productive.”
“Then, for no apparent reason to the observer, this person suddenly stopped what they were doing and checked their email or picked up their phone.”
“Dropping out just doesn’t work because we live in an interrelated web of people and information. It is the reality of the digital age we have created. Our devices are smart, but we must be smarter in how we use them.”
“Atlas of the Heart—Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience” by Brené Brown
I am not a sentimental keeper of things.
I don’t now about you, but I have always had a hard time naming emotions. Glad, mad, sad, bad and I’m out. That is not helpful as a writer and definitely not helpful as a human experiencing emotions.
This book is a guide through the human experience. I love how she groups the emotions and discerns the subtle differences between ones that I often use interchangeably. I love how she offers us a map so that we can fully inhabit as we travel the path of being human.
Sentences I underlined:
“We run from anger and grief straight into the arms of perfectionism, and the desperate need for control.”
“To live without regret is to believe we have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with our lives.”
“Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greater measure of courage.”
“Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow—A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories” by Steve Almond
I have a list of writers that I keep hoping will write a book on the writing process and Steve Almond was at the top of that list!
He shares his own writing success, but more importantly, his failures along the way. His advice feels both wise and hard won. And is infused with much humor.
He offers guidance then prompts to put that guidance to action. We can read about writing all we want but until we pick up the pen or open the laptop, nothing will happen.
I came away with inspiration as well as an excellent reading list. This is one that I will turn to again and again as I continue on this writing journey.
Sentences I underlined:
“The reason you sit down to write any story—beyond your ego needs—is because you want to tell the truth about some part of your life that haunts you.”
“The pleasure of storytelling is that the author boils away all the fruitless session work and delivers only the vital moments of transformation and self-revelation.”
“In fiction, it is our duty to engineer the plot so as to slam our characters up against their desires.”
“Splinters—another kind of love story” by Leslie Jamison
The baby and i arrive at our sublet tis garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet.
One of the best memoirs I have ever read.
Jamison weaves together her consuming love for her brand new daughter, the dissolving of her marriage and the guilt that came with it, new relationships and how they fit into her new and old lives as well as the old relationship of her parents and how they impacted her.
I found myself utterly mesmerized by her writing, her honesty and her story. It felt like a masterclass in memoir-writing.
Sentences I underlined:
“If being good enough wasn’t the answer, what was?”
“I said no. Without any explanation, or apology. What little person lived inside me, saying no like the? She was someone I wanted to get to know better.”
“Smell came back slowly. i couldn’t tell of the fait, almost floral taste of cantaloupe was really there or not. It kept flickering in and out, like a stuttering light bulb.”
“Quarantine taught me what I’d been taught so many times before but still had trouble remembering—that there were so many other ways to be lonely besides the particular way I was lonely.”
“Hagitude—Reimagining the Second Half of Life” by Sharon Blackie
When I look back to the early years of my menopause, what I remember most is a quality of experience that resembled British journalist Suzanne Moore’s description of her own: “I don’t really have the mood sings the some talk about. I just have the one mood. Rage.”
As 60 looms on the horizon next year, I find myself for the first time, seriously contemplating my age. Needing to finally get down to it. To stop caring what others think of me. To stop people-pleasing and contorting myself to fit in, to make myself smaller so others are more comfortable. Books like this one really help with that mission.
Blackie explores this second half of a woman’s life through myths, psychology, modern mentors and her own personal experience She frames it as a time for flourishing and profound transformation.
This will sit on my permanent bookshelf.
Sentences I underlined:
“There can be a certain perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.”
“We hide our anger by refusing even to use the word—instead of saying we’re utterly furious, we talk about being ‘annoyed,’ or ‘upset,’ or ‘irritated.” We take refuge in sarcasm, we nurse grudges, or we simply withdraw.”
“As I grow older, I realize that my own writing is very much more than just a pleasureless form of self-expression—at its heart, it’s a way of trying to change the story, of weaving the possibility of a better world into being through the power of words.”
“Living the Artist’ s Way—An Intuitive Path to Greater Creativity” by Julia Cameron
I’ll begin at the beginning.
I recently finished working through this 6-week program with two friends. It is similar to the other variations of the Artist’s Way she has offered over the years: morning pages, artist’s date, walks, questions to reflect on. This time there is one more tool specific to the book: asking for guidance.
I have actually been doing this intuitively for a while now, before I even read this. As I write in my journal, if I am struggling with something or about to spin out into a shame spiral, this wise, nurturing voice appears on the page.
Cameron advises us to ask for guidance on anything from the mundane to the profound. The more we connect with it, the more we can trust in it.
Sentences I underlined:
“The essential message of guidance is the assurance that all is well; difficulties will work out; we are safe, guided, and protected.”
“Counting your positives—the things you did right—helps you build grounded and optimistic sense of self.”
“Lessons in Chemistry” a novel by Bonnie Garmus
Back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought; back before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants wold spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big was were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of jus tone thing: her life was over.
Elizabeth Zott is a chemist on an all-male team. All but one man accepts her and she falls in love with that one man: Calvin Evans. In love but refuses to marry him. She becomes the lone women on his rowing team where, once again, her presence is not welcome.
Elizabeth only knows how to speak her truth and that makes everyone around her uncomfortable, including her new boss who hires her to host a cooking show to fill an afternoon TV slot. Instead of seeing herself as a cook, she sees and presents herself as a chemist and says what is on her mind whether it’s that she is an atheist or that the soup a sponsor wants her to promote is poison.
Reading this reminded me of how I often felt while watching “Mad Men.” Furious and appalled at how women were treated. Given our present political circumstances, it’s a very timely read.
Sentences I underlined:
“Sometimes I think,” she said slowly, “that if a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn’t make it past noon.”
“Courage is the root of change—and change is what we’re chemically designed to do.”
“Imagine if all men took women seriously. Education would change. The workforce would revolutionize. Marriage counsellors would go out of business. Do you see my point?”
“Chemistry is change and change is the core of your belief system. Which is good because that’s what we need more of—people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren’t afraid to take on the unacceptable.”
“Radiant Rebellion—Reclaim Again, Practice Joy, and Raise a Little Hell” by Karen Walrond
A funny thing happens when you tell people you’re writing a book about joyful aging.
My age has never really been a thing I focused on or worried over. Now that 60 is staring me in the face next summer, I find I am more curious about aging. How I want to age. Who I want to be as I age. This is my third act so I find myself being pulled toward books by women on growing older.
I underlined so much in this book. I love the sections she broke it into: Ignite, Disrupt, Connect, Envision. I could write a lot on each one. She offers a toolkit at the end so that we can actually engage with her content instead of merely consuming it. She covers everything from aging parents and an empty nest to finding your own style as well as your purpose.
It’s a guidebook that I will return to often over the coming decades as I continue to curate my third act.
Sentences I underlined:
“What would it take to greet this new milestone time in my life in a way that set me up for aging gratefully, soulfully, purposefully?”
“No, my goal is to remain bien dans ma peau—to feel “well in my skin.”
“I want to keep my body, mind, and spirit in the best health required to remain curious and optimistic and open, from day to day. Because, really, it is in the living that we create a well-lived life.”
“Class—A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education” by Stephanie Land
My daughter arrived at her first day of kindergarten with a back[ack full of donated supplies.
This book truly opened my eyes. To everything from the barriers people in poverty face daily, to the way I reactively judged her for some of her choices. Hearing her story, in her own words not only opened my eyes, but also my heart. Who the hell am I to judge the choices anyone makes in their own private lives?
The writing is crisp and elegant, giving a clarifying look at what it truly means to be trying to better yourself (the old pull yourself by your bootstraps schtick) but how so many obstacles are in place to keep you from doing what they say they want you to do: succeed in America.
It’s a story of motherhood and art and how to fit the two together while struggling everyday to stay financially afloat.
It’s a story of surviving domestic abuse and yet still being tied to the abuser.
It’s a story of finding your voice on the page and in life.
It’s a story of persistence, of stumbling and getting up again over and over because you have no choice.
A riveting and compelling book that I could not put down.
Sentences I underlined:
“Immediate acceptance of any shitty situation was what most people seemed to mean by resilience, and they needed poor people like me to be that way.”
“My life may be relentless, I wrote in a notebook, but goddammit so am I.”
“Drawing Breath—Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss” by Gayle Brandeis
The girl writes her first poem when she is four years old:
This collection of essays (and that word doesn’t feel large enough to contain the magic that these pieces are) drew breath into my sad, deflated creative lungs.
I inhaled the book in less than two days, underlining along the way, stopping to check her website to see if she offered any writing classes then diving back into the book.
Each piece is structured in such a creative way from the way she braids disparate things together to how the words form shapes on the flat page.
She explores the connection between breath and writing (as a writer and yoga teacher/student I loved this), the grief of losing parents, the fragility and strength of marriage, the impact of long Covid on her body and her writing and so, so much more.
I want to carefully study and pull apart each essay to teach myself how to write my own essays that vibrate with such clarity and authenticity.
Sentences (just a few of the many) I underlined:
“We are made of breath; breath enlivens us, acts as conduit between ourselves and the elements, ourselves and whatever we might consider the divine.”
“Writing about her death gave me a valve—the story wasn’t always ready to explode from my throat.”
“Maybe that’s what it feels like to have your memory erased—you can just be a mammal in your body, living from moment to moment.”
“How we’re part of all of it—all this budding, all this flowering; all this generous falling away.”
“How to Do Nothing—Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny Odell Nothing is harder to do than nothing.
That is especially true these days with 24/7 news access, 24/7 social media access, 24/7 TV (remember when the stations used to go off the air late at night?). Then there’s the immediacy of texting and feeling like we are on call all of the time.
Odell explores this and so much more in this thought-provoking book. It is not only about setting boundaries with technology for our own well-being but for our collective well-being, including that of our planet.
She wants us to do nothing, to drop out of the productivity race so we can drop in to how we can have a positive impact on the world we live in. Instead of experiencing it from behind a screen, she encourages us to jump in and make a difference.
I underlined a lot and can not wait to discuss it at our book club. One thing I really appreciated is how I had to really focus. It is not a book you skim. So, on a book about reclaiming our attention from the commercialized social media whose sole purpose is to keep our attention in order to monetize it, I reclaimed my attention as I read this book.
Sentences I underlined:
“The point of doing nothing as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.”
“But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercialized social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.”
“For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.”
“I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again together.”
“Happy Place” a novel by Emily Henry
A cottage on the rocky shoreline, with knotty pine floorboards and windows that are nearly always open.
To give my brain a little rest, I picked up this fun, lighter book. While I missed the backdrop of publishing and/or writing, I enjoyed the friendship group and how the landscape of Maine became almost like another character.
Harriet and Wyn have broken up but have neglected to tell their family and closest friends. So when Harriet shows up to Maine to be with her best friends since college, she is shocked to see Wyn there. They agree to pretend to be together so that they don’t ruin their friends’ vacation. The longer they spend together, the more they still feel the attraction to each other and the more confusion and anger rises to the surface.
It’s a story of friendship, place, secrets and learning to face the truth of what we want, who we want to be with and who we want to be.
Sentences I underlined:
“My best friends taught me a new kind of quiet, the peaceful stillness of knowing one another so well you don’t need to fill the space. And a new kind of loud: noise as a celebration, as the overflow of joy at being alive, here, now.”
“Want is a kind of thief. It’s a door in your heart, and once you know it’s there, you’ll spend your life longing for whatever’s behind it.”
“Broken (in the best possible way)” by Jenny Lawson
You probably just picked up this book thinking, What the shit is this all about?
One of the few writers that make me literally laugh out loud as I am reading.
She is as open as ever about her struggles with mental health and explores trying a new treatment for depression (TMS) in one of the essays. In another, she brutally takes down our healthcare system and medical insurance as she battles them to cover the treatments and meds that she needs. It is spot on.
Her humor is dark and her hallmark raw honesty is on display in this collection which seem to dovetail beautifully with a line from her introduction: “What we really want is to know we’re not alone in our terribleness.”
A sentence I underlined:
“What really brought the world together was dropping the pretense that everything is shiny and perfect so that, for a moment, we could all accept how wonderfully human we are.
“If You Want to Write—a Book about Art, Independence and Spirit” by Brenda Ueland
I have been writing a long time and have learned some things, not only from my own long hard work, but from a writing class I had for three years.
A friend recently sent me a quote from this book. I had read it decades ago but it was still on my shelf so I decided to read it again.This was one of the first books on writing I picked up back when I first started teaching myself how to write. I remember it being so inspiring.
Today, easily 20 years (if not more) later, I still found parts of it inspiring but I also found some relief that I am no longer dependent on such books to inspire me to write. I’ve been writing for decades. And I’ve been writing something every single day for seven years.
Her advice is practical. Her voice is sassy, embodying the independent spirit in the subtitle. I remember reading the writing samples she shares way back when and hoping that some day I could write like that. I am happy to say that I do write like that.
A sentence I underlined:
“Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks fro himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be.”
“The Senator’s Wife” a novel by Sue Miller
From her perch in the middle of the backseat, Meri surveys the two in front—her husband, Nathan, and Sheila, the real estate agent.
Sue Miller is a master at bringing readers deep into the private lives of women. In this case, Delia and Meri. They live next to each other in a duplex. Delia is the the wife of a senator she still loves after forty years of marriage but because of his many infidelities, they live apart. Meri and Nathan are just beginning their lives together: a new home, new jobs and, unexpectedly, a new baby.
The chapters alternate between Meri and Delia revealing their separate and private, internal lives as well as all the moments where they intersect. One particular moment of intersection changes everything for both of them.
It is ultimately a story about home. The literal homes we live in, that we create for ourselves, the people that are home to us and finding home within ourselves.
A passage I underlined:
“She’d calmed herself by carefully setting the table on the balcony for her usual breakfast. She’d had to wipe the table and chair dry with a towel. Then she brought out a tray with the croissant, the seedless raspberry jam, the rich dark coffee with steamed milk. She sat down and laid her napkin across her lap. The consolation of the daily, she thought.”
“The Wound Makes the Medicine” by Pixie Lighthorse
These writings are the pieces of me that rose up during deep healing after a shattering heartbreak touched off many older, yet un-healed heartbreaks.
This books shines a light into what we tend to keep hidden in the dark: grief, loss, suffering, pain. She shines a light so that we may heal.
Emerging from her own deep healing process, she leads us through the four elements and how we can turn to them in times of hardship. How we can lean on them to heal. Each chapter is brief and ends with an affirmation. You can read it in order or at random as needed.
It is a balm to any battered soul longing to heal.
Sentences I underlined:
“New grief has a way of stirring up ancient grief.”
“Remember that your liberation begins inside, and can be supported by the cycles of nature moving in and around you.”
“We ‘clear the air’ with caring communication, amends, reflections, validations of our and others’ experiences, and bringing truth to strenuous situations.”
“Hello Beautiful” a novel by Ann Napolitano
For the first six days of William Water’s life, he was not an only child.
That one, essential fact has a ripple effect on several generations, forward and back.
I don’t even know what to say about this gorgeous novel. I finished it last night and then laid it on my heart and just bathed in the afterglow of the characters and the writing and the story.
While it is an homage to “Little Women” I also felt an echo of “Virgin Suicides. In all three books, there are the individual sisters, then there is the entity of their sisterhood which becomes a character in and of itself.
It is a beautiful story of love, family, sisterhood, betrayal, forgiveness and being true to yourself. The sentences are exquisite. It is the kind of book I long to write myself. In fact, the way she structured this novel, has given me insight into how I could proceed with my current novel.
I don’t often save novels to reread but I absolutely will with this one.
Sentences I underlined:
“Her family was a mirror in which she recognized her reflection.”
“I didn’t know that you could lose someone, and that meant you lost so much else.”
“William rarely laughed, and his hands tingled, as if they’d just woken up from an oxygen-deprived sleep.
“The passage of time, and the details that spun some moments into unforgettable memories and others into thin air, traveled with Sylvie—the swirling atmosphere of her own life—while she walked.”
“She was no longer who she used to be, and she wasn’t yet whoever she was becoming.”
“1000 Words—A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round” by Jami Attenberg
Have you ever made something that has changed your life forever completely by accident?
I don’t read as many books on writing as when I first started out. I used to read more about writing, now write more. But when I saw that this was coming out, I pre-ordered it.
I have participated in Jami’s mini writing boot camps several times. It feels good to be writing in community. The daily letters of inspiration and motivation from her and other writers do indeed inspire and motivate me. I have kept them all in a specific gmail folder to refer back to. But now to have so many others, plus news pieces by Jami herself all in one book is just what I needed.
Woven in between Jami’s reflections on being a writer and living a writing life, are contributions from other writers such as Melissa Febos, Benjamin Percy and Meg Wolitzer.
The subtitle promises to offer guidance to stay creative, focused, and productive all year round and I can see it doing exactly that. This will be a book that sits on my desk so I can return to it again and again whenever I need inspiration or motivation.
(It also fits together perfectly with “A Year In Practice––Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression” by Jacqueline Suskin)
I underlined many sentences but here are a few:
“How do we get out of our own way so we can succeed?”
“Look at the source of the pain, I thought, and track the way it radiates.”
“Reading stimulates growth, both as a person and an artist.”
I especially love this:
“There are two questions I ask myself repeatedly about my writing until I’m so far along a project I don’t need to ask them anymore:
Who are you writing this for?
What do you hope to accomplish with this work?
It’s truly the best way to check in with yourself when you sit down to write. When the page feels at its blankest, you can immediately fill it by answering those questions.
“Girlhood” by Melissa Febos
1. First, the knees. They meet the gravel, then street, the blunt hips of curbs.
This is a stunning, powerful look at the bodies of girls and women, what it is like to inhabit them, what it is like when they change, how they become the lens though which the world sees us and thus, how we see and experience the world.
Each essay is so thought-provoking and each feels like a master class in writing an essay. She weaves personal narrative with history and interviews with other women. From the back cover: “This is a philosophic treaty, an anthem, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a closed self.”
Sentences I underlined;
“Desire filled my bones with air.”
“My story is an ordinary one. All of ours are. Many worse iterations of it are playing out right now and will continue to until we all understand that slut is a word that men invented, like witch, to maintain power over women and to keep them in service to men.”
“What bodies are more docile, more reflexively policed, than women’s? Not even those of children, I suspect.”
“I had spend most of my life thinking of my body as an instrument, an object connected to my psyche but not integrated with it. My body, I realized, was not the box that held myself, it was my self.”
“The How—Notes on the Great Work of Meeting Yourself” by Yrsa Daley-Ward
We are afraid of small things. Large things. Dead things.
I highlighted the entire first paragraph which is always a good sign that a book is going to resonate and this one absolutely did.
It is not all new information to me, but she slides in sideways, offering a slightly different take. And the writing itself is just beautiful, poetic. It is a beautiful blending of short reflections on the work of being human with her powerful poetry.
Sentences I underlined:
“Everything needs upkeep, and it’s tiring.
Everything needs upkeep, and it’s terrifying.”
“We must pay attention to what adds meaning to our life and what steals from it. We have to choose.”
“Be intentional with the story you are designing. You are your life’s work.”
“We remember our bodies in pain or worry about the threat of pain. We remember them in illness or the idea of illness. We fear the fragility of our homes.”
“Day” a novel by Michael Cunningham
This early, the East River takes on a thin layer of translucence, a bright steely skin that appears to float over the river itself as the water turns from its nocturnal black to the opaque deep green of the approaching sky.
A moving story told over the course of three years on the exact same date, with the pandemic right in the middle. That structure was so interesting and was really the spine of the novel, holding up the narratives from the points of view of different characters.
In Brooklyn, Dan and Isobel’s marriage is slowly but steadily unraveling. Their daughter Violet is five and sees more than her parents are aware of while their son Nathan is taking steps out into his own life and friends at the age of ten. Then there is Isobel’s brother Robbie who is staying with them until he can afford a place of his own. He has a deep bond with each member of the family so when he moves to Iceland, the cracks in the family deepen and the pandemic puts additional pressure on them.
The writing is almost poetic. It is fluid and has such depth. While the pandemic is definitely part of the story, it does not overwhelm but rather informs it. It is a lovely exploration of the complications of being family and being human in the midst of ordinary and extraordinary times and all that entails.
A sentence I underlined:
“What I do want to try and say is that up here I feel time passing through me, passing through the world, in ways I never have before.”
“White Fragility—Why It’s for Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” by Robin Diangelo
White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separateness and inequality.
That is the first sentence. Diangelo just throws us right into the deep end with facts. Hard facts. Facts that we white people try desperately to deny and ignore but that doesn’t make them any less true. All it does is keep racism in place.
I underlined so much in this book. She shines a light on racism and white fragility, white supremacy, white privilege, white women tears, and so much more that made me see it all in a clearer perspective. I see it in our society and, most importantly, I see it in me.
She does a good job of pointing out these hard truths with compassion but without coddling us. She gives us real world examples from her work as a diversity educator. She gives us tools to use to confront our own racism and to call it out when we encounter it in our lives.
So much to unpack. I will read it again and she offered an extensive reading and video list to continue educating myself.
Sentences I underlined:
“When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the united States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color. People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people.”
“The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic.”
Photo by Andres Ayrton on Pexels.com This is not my belly but I would often do this exact thing.
In the two to three months leading up to the holidays, I was in a really bad body image space. Worse than usual. My social media feeds became littered with menopause quizzes to determine how I could lose what they called my “meno-belly.” Every one promised that their way was the right way. Every one was expensive.
I was so self-conscious of my body. So unhappy with her. So ashamed of her.
This isn’t new, but this level of shame and contempt was.
I tried intermittent fasting which is basically just starving myself. I cut out sugar which basically cuts out joy. I moved more, ate less. Not much changed physically, but mentally and emotionally, I felt worse.
I began to notice how many food rules I had absorbed over the years: no white foods, gluten is bad, only consume low sugar fruits like berries instead of watermelon or bananas (even though I love watermelon and bananas), oatmeal is bad, get at least 30 grams of protein at every meal, eat whole foods instead of processed, eat your biggest meal at midday. The list goes on and on.
For so long, I’ve heard many voices judging me from the outside and the inside. Body size is a familiar topic of conversation in my family. A family member once commented on the amount of oatmeal I made myself for breakfast, implying it was too much and that she would only have a quarter of that. Large gatherings often consisted of noticing who had gained weight and who had lost weight. A friend once mentioned that I had lost weight in my belly. At first I was proud but then quickly ashamed. It basically confirmed my fear that people were judging my body. If she noticed when I lost weight, then she definitely noticed when I gained weight.
At some point, something shifted. I can’t even pinpoint exactly what it was.
It may have started when I ran across this quote from Cheryl Strayed:
“There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally”
Yes, I thought. YES!!! So boring. So fucking boring. There is so much about me that is infinitely more interesting than how much flesh I carry around the middle of my body. There are so many more serious and tragic things happening in the world than the size of my belly.
These days, the obsession is diminished for sure, but not gone. I’m not even sure that is possible given the culture we live in. But I do notice more ease in my body. I do notice that I am eating what I want instead of only what I think I should eat. I do notice that I am not waiting until i am starving in the morning to eat.
I am 58 years old. Menopause is real and it is hard and I am getting through it but I won’t come out the other side looking, feeling or thinking the same. And that is a good thing.
I recently underlined this sentence in “Girlhood” by Melissa Febos:
“To hate my own body was to suffer from an autoimmune disease of the mind.”
Yet another epiphany gifted to me from the heart and mind of a woman who gets it. Life is too precious and short to waste time hating, shaming and judging my body as it changes and ages. So, I am learning to release that hatred and shame. It’s a process and I will fumble along the way but I feel like something has irrevocably shifted and I am oh so grateful.
And please do me a favor, if you think I’ve lost weight or noticed I’ve gained wait, don’t say anything. There are so many more interesting things in my life we can talk about.
“Enchantment—Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age” by Katherine May
Lately I wake in the night and a few panic seconds pass in which I can’t locate myself.
Struggling with work, family and the aftereffects of the pandemic, May sets out on a journey to reawaken wonder and awe within her daily life.
Just as her second book, “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times” came out at the perfect time, right as the pandemic locked us down, this book has the perfect timing as we try to adjust as the world rushes to reopen and get back to some level of normalcy.
Beyond the residue of the pandemic and the lingering impacts of it, we deal with astonishing heartbreaking news on a daily basis. This book can help us begin to balance some of that despair with hope and wonder.
She explores the restorative qualities of the natural world through earth, water, fire and air. She shows us how quiet wonder and subtle magic surrounds us if we only awaken to them.
Some sentences I underlined:
“Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines: it feels as though we’ve undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble.”
“I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect.”
“The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” by Suzanne Collins
Coriolanus released the fistful of cabbage into the pot of boiling water and swore that one day it would never pass his lips again.
I’m a sucker for a villain origin story and I had to finish this before seeing the movie.
We discover who President Snow was as a teenager. How he thought, what he dreamed of, how he related to his family and friends. We see him struggle with choices to protect himself, his family and his female tribute, straddling the line between good and evil, between the personal and patriotism. It offers insight into how he eventually came to be the power-hungry president of Panem.
A sentence I underlined:
“I think there’s a natural goodness built into human beings. You know when you’ve stepped across the line into evil, and it’s your life’s challenge to try and stay on the right side of that line.”
“Thicker Than Water” a memoir by Kerry Washington
I got a text from my mother.
Little did she realize what a journey of transformation this text would initiate.
Washington can write. The prose is lovely. The story is structured in a beautiful way that weaves together the past and present as well as the personal and public sides of her.
It was revelatory to discover that a woman as successful and beautiful as Kerry Fucking Washington struggles with the same issues as me: body image, food, people-pleasing and good girl syndrome.
It’s a story of secrets and truth, of the truth setting you free.
It’s a story of looking deeply at a life and becoming who you were meant to be.
It’s story of looking back and seeing the clues that had been dropped like breadcrumbs to lead you to the truth of who you are.
It’s a story beautifully told and breathtakingly honest.
A couple of sentences I underlined:
“With Jamie’s help, I remembered that acting was about discovery, about messy, flawed humanity, and about being open to something new each and every time, not about being perfect or doing the same thing twenty times in a row.”
“They were opportunities to move closer to myself, not some version of me born out of perfectionism and people-pleasing and being the good girl, but a version rooted in authenticity and the courage to be my true self, even as I grappled with knowing less about where that true self came from.”
“What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About—Fifteen Writers Break the Silence” edited by Michele Filgate
“On the first cold day of November, when it was so frigid the I finally needed to accept the fact that it was time to take me winter coat out of the closet, I had a craving for something warm and savory.”
Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re alway trying to return to them.”
Each essay explores these journeys home. The stories vary wildly from a mother who discloses too much to her daughter to a mother who is horribly abusive and everything in between.
Each essay is brutally and beautifully honest as each writer grapples with one of the most intimate and complicated relationships we have.
Sentences I underlined:
“Sometimes I had the impression that she was saying these things aloud for the first time, as if the memories were dawning on her, unfiltered.”
“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with ‘mother’ as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us.”
“That wouldn’t jibe with my long-established, uncontested role as The Good Daughter.’
“I hope this helps” by Nakeia Homer
Here you are.
I came across this quote online and immediately ordered this book:
What if what you want the most can’t find
you because you are dimming your own
light, hiding your own magic, downplaying
your own brilliance, and denying your own power?
As I read it, I discovered that she wrote another quote that I share often:
You are not lazy, unmotivated, or stuck.
After years of living you life in survival mode, you are exhausted.
There’s a difference.
I remember almost crying with relief the first time I read those words.
Each page is a sigh of recognition, of feeling seen and heard and most importantly, accepted. Considered daily “pep-talks you didn’t know you needed,” this is a book I will turn to again and again to nourish my soul.
Sentences I underlined:
“How do I find my way back?
I write. I write the words I need to hear.”
“You’ll change when staying the same becomes unbearable.”
“The other thing is: healing will cause you to show up differently.”
“You don’t need another resolution.
You need a declaration.”
“A Year In Practice––Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression” by Jacqueline Suskin
If you picked up this book, if you’re drawn to its title and concept, you’re likely interested in the intricacies, possibilities, and cycles of creative practice.
At the yoga studio here I teach, we often weave into our classes the sister science of Ayurveda which is about living in harmony with the seasons. I’m surprised I didn’t think about applying it to my creative practice. Luckily, Jacqueline Suskin did.
She takes us thorough each season, exploring the energy of each and how we can connect with and/or balance that energy to inspire our creativity. Many of her lovely poems are interspersed throughout, along with questions for reflection, suggestions activities to celebrate each season and how to transition between seasons.
It’s a beautiful book that I will turn to again and again as I look to nature for creative guidance.
Sentences I underlined:
“Each season is a Muse that evokes a particular artistic possibility if we take note of the instructions offered.”
“Every winter I end up clarifying which creative projects I want to spend time with during the rest of the year.”
“The Perishing” a novel by Natashia Deon
My name is Sarah Shipley and I’ve slept with five women.
Lou is a young black immortal woman who wakes up in a Los Angeles alley in the 1930’s with no memory of how she got there or her life before. She is taken in by a foster family and later becomes the first black female journalist at the Los Angeles Times. She soon meets a man that she has no memory of knowing but recognizes him as the face she has been drawing for year.s
Alternating between the 1930’s and 2102, between the stories of Lou and Sarah, we encounter a mystery as well as a history lesson on race in America in a profound, genre-breaking novel.
Sentences I underlined:
“Change a pattern in your own life, you change your whole life. But I tell you the truth, the only pattern worth repeating is kindness.”
“We’re all on the edge of somebody else’s violence.”
I have pages scribbled with notes of words that are fine but they don’t quite fit. I’ve scoured lists of core desired feelings, looking for the one that jumps out at me. Usually, it comes to me fairly easily. Not this year.
Then, this morning in meditation it came to me.
It landed so gently and felt so right.
Trust.
My word for 2024 is trust.
I struggle with anxiety and trust feels like the perfect balance to that.
A couple of things I need to learn to trust it:
~ How I eventually choose to share and publish my words will be revealed when the time is right
~ Relationships that are currently tense or distant will be mended when the time is right
Basically, it is about trusting in the timing of well, everything.
It is about trusting in my body, in myself. Accepting me as I am.
It is about trusting in the moment. Accepting it as it is.
How about you? Do you choose a word for the new year? Let me know in the comments or share a link to your own post.
It’s that time of year when nature begins its journey inward.
The days are shorter. There is less light.
Plants and animals hibernate.
Except for us.
We humans think we need to maintain the same level of energy year round.
We ignore our body’s need to slow down. To rest.
Rest is lazy.
Rest is for other people.
Rest doesn’t move me forward.
But the truth is, it does.
Rest is necessary.
Rest is for all of us.
Rest allows us to move forward but perhaps at a slower pace.
And that’s okay.
There have been times, recently in fact, when I wished for a brief and non-life threatening illness. Maybe a chest cold. Or even the flu.
Something that would give me a good excuse to lay in bed all day or all snuggled up on the couch to read or watch TV.
Part of me thinks I need an excuse to rest.
I’ve had people tell me that they could never read in the middle of the day because there is so many more productive things to be done.
Does every single we do need to be productive?
And why isn’t reading productive? It can be entertaining, informative, healing. All things worth my time.
As we move deeper into this yin season of reflection and rest, I invite you to take advantage of it.
Slow down.
Be still.
Sip tea.
Sit by the fire.
Go for a gentle walk to move your body and get fresh air instead of only to accrue steps.
As I write this, I am sitting by the fireplace in my cozy nook, in cozy clothes and sipping a hot cup of tea before I need to go out and teach two yoga classes tonight.
Try to weave more moments of stillness and rest into your day.
“Oona Out of Order” a novel by Margarita Montimore
Oona stopped trusting the mirror years ago. After all, it only told a sliver of the story.
At the strike of midnight on her birthday, New Year’s Eve of 1982, Oona faints and wakes up in her future 51-one-year-old life and body. A stranger greets her and welcomes her into the home and life she has created for herself.
This begins an annual occurrence of starting the new year in a different segment of her own life. She never knows where or when she will land. She tries to leave herself a note that will help orient herself to the life she is awakening in.
Her life becomes like a jigsaw puzzle that she tries to fit together with very limited clues doled out in an out of order way.
It is a lovely and mesmerizing story about time, how it passes and doesn’t, how memory works, how we become who we are meant to become no matter what order our life unfolds in.
A sentence I underlined;
Oona’s fury and resentment simmered down some; it only twinged now and agin, like a healed broken bone does when it rains.
“Meredith, Alone” a novel by Claire Alexander
My name is Meredith Maggs and I haven’t left my home for 1, 214 days.
I love when a first sentence makes me buy the book. Of course I have to know her story. Why hasn’t she left the house for that many days? What does she do with all those days all alone? Or is she alone?
The chapters move ahead as more days without leaving her house accumulate, while other chapters drop back in time to show us what led her here.
Meredith believes she has all she needs. A best friend who completely accepts her, jigsaw puzzles to complete, a cat named Fred. Then the outside world comes knocking in the form of a man from a befriending charity called Holding Hands. This new, unwanted overture, begins to loosen the grip of her belief that she has all she needs.
We now know that loneliness is a dire health threat. The pandemic immersed us ion a new kind of isolation that we are still learning how to emerge from. This books is a lovely exploration of loneliness and isolation and how we are more connected than we believe we are.
A sentence I underlined:
Mysterious. I whisper the word in my mind, trying it on for size. Maybe it wasn’t too late to consider a different version of myself from the one Mama had strapped me into, like a too-tight coat.
“Time’s Mouth” a novel by Edan Lepucki
You’ve wondered about me. when a decade passes as quickly as a year, when you look up and see that life is half over, that it’s almost over—that’s when you wonder: How did it all pass so quickly?
Continuing my fascination with novels about time and memory and time travel, this may be my favorite one yet.
I am not even sure how to begin to encapsulate what this story is about. It’s too deep and rich. I can start by just laying out a few key points. Ursa has a gift of transporting back in time to to revisit her past. After fleeing her hometown she starts a commune of lost and searching women. Her power, while not known to all, is the power with which she creates this community.
Her son Ray runs away with one of the women, Cherry. They have a daughter Opal and after series of mysterious episodes, Cherry decides the only choice she has to protect Opal is to leave. Just as her mother, Ruth, left her at the commune all this years ago.
Ray is left to raise Opal on his own. Once she becomes a teenager with her own anguish and abilities, they are both left to reconcile with a past neither of them chose.
Ursa is one the least likable characters I’ve encountered in fiction but what a testament to the writer that I still felt empathy for her.
It is a breathtaking story with breathtaking writing about time and the past and memory. It’s a story about motherhood and childhood and what happens when a child is abandoned by a mother. It’s a story about moving forward instead of always looking back.
And that doesn’t even begin to do this novel justice. You just need to read it for yourself.
Oh, and the last couple of sentences made me both cry and smile.
A sentence I underlined:
Motherless girls kept secrets.
A passage I underlined:
Opal started taking dance, and she sometimes pushed the downstairs furniture out of the way to practice what she’d learned. It was funny how she counted time now, 5-6-7-8—it was the only manipulation she allowed herself, if you could call it that. How simple and beautiful, to follow time’s lead, to dance to it. Her body was the time machine.
“Recursion” a novel by Blake Crouch
Barry Sutton pulls over into the fire lane at the main entrance of the Poe Building, an Art Deco tower glowing white in the illumination of its exterior sconces.
From the writer of “Dark Matter” here is another thriller based on a mind-boggling premise that feels entirely plausible.
It’s a story of time and memory.
Of how we experience both.
It’s a love story.
It’s a story of creation and destruction.
A story of grief and hope.
Crouch is able to take a wild premise like being able to preserve our most precious memories with the help of technology seem so believable by layering the story with rich and specific details.
It’s another page-turner about identity, time, memory and what is is that truly makes reality reality.
Some sentences I underlined:
“Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol.“
“…and he thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe thier abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony o time and all that it steals and erases.”
“He has wondered lately of that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”
“The ache of memory is gone, but he doesn’t begrudge its visitation. He’s lived long enough to know that the memory hurt because many years ago, in a dead timeline, he experienced a perfect moment.”
“Hold Still—A Memoir with Photographs” by Sally Mann
We all have them: those boxes in storage, detritus left to us by our forebears.
Weaving together that detritus left by her own forebears with her own journals and memories and photographs, Mann mines the rich history of her life and family history, the landscape she was raised in and the “payload of southern gothic” and gives us a unique and extraordinary memoir.
Her writing is just as intriguing as her photos. I loved how she uncovered the origins of her creative life and juxtaposed it against the stories of her parents and southern culture.
Truly inspiring.
Some sentences I underlined:
“With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.”
“But, all the same, when I compare the lives of children today, monitored, protected, medicated, and over scheduled, to my own unsupervised, dirty, boring childhood, I believe I had the better deal.”
“Old in Art School—A Memoir of Starting Over” by Nell Painter
“How old are you?” she asked from a small face, a small body, a little dress, and Uggs; neutral words.
After a long and successful career as an historian, Nell Painter returned to school in her sixties. Art school specifically. First earning a BFA then an MFA in painting.
Navigating the often brutal crits (critiques) from classmates and teachers as well as racism, sexism, ageism within art school and the art world, not to mention caring for her parents from across the country, Painter delves into her passion for art.
She is a hard worker and loves to learn. Both qualities served her well. She immersed herself in researching other artists and in experimenting with various genres, determined to not let that often brutal criticism define or hold her back. If anything, it spurred her on as she churned out large quantities of work, trusting that the quality would follow.
As she turned her eye to her internal world and the eternal world, to her own family history and world history, her vision took hold on the stacks of drawings, paintings, sketches, prints and collages she created.
As she found her artistic voice she learned to see herself through her own eyes instead of other people’s eyes.
Another truly inspiring memoir that has reminded me to follow my curiosity, to work hard, to see myself through my own wyes and that it is never too late.
Some sentences underlined:
“Like Sarah, Irving reinforced my habit of working serially, for repetitive is how art finds its way.”
“Dying releases everything, like a stream feeling its way down a landscape, seeking its lowest level.”
“The Roughest Draft” a novel by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka
The bookstore is nothing like I remember.
This book has heavy Emily Henry vibes which I loved. It is told in alternating viewpoints between former writing partners, Katrina Freeling and Nathan Van Huysen. They had a huge success with a book they wrote together but a major falling out has left them estranged. Their individual writing careers are stalled and they are forced to reunite in order to fulfill their last contract.
They fly down to the house in Florida where they wrote their last book. Things have changed between them. Katrina is engaged to Chris who used to be both their agents. Now he is only Katrina’s. The tension is heavy between them along with everything left unsaid. This makes it tricky to write a romantic novel together. But they persevere, putting the writing at the forefront of their relationship. As they write deeper into this new story, they find they are unearthing old hurts and feelings.
Will they manage to finish the book? Will they mend their friendship?
I am a sucker for any stories with writing, books and publishing as the backdrop. It was a lovely, light, entertaining read.
A couple of sentences I underlined:
“It’s one of her greatest writerly gifts, the authenticity here prose has from the intuition-level understanding she’s developed of the world and of people in it.
“It’s one thing my dreams have in common with writing—their tendency to betray me to myself.
“I Am Definitely, Probably Enough (I think)—Revelations on the Journey to Self-Love” by Tori Press
Once upon a time, there lived a powerful, magical, wondrous, astounding being of limitless potential.
I inhaled this sweet little book in one sitting and can’t wait to pick it up again. It will be a book I turn to again and again in my life.
I felt like I could’ve written every single word.
She helped me feel not so alone on this journey into healing and growth.
She put into words what therapy has been for me.
This little book is like my own personal cheerleader.
A couple sentences I underlined because they felt like the true gifts of therapy:
“Therapist: a person who repeats patiently the message you need to hear until you hear it.”
“In therapy, I found myself in the safest of safe spaces. My therapist saw me fully and accepted me completely. (Really! No matter what I told her!!)”
“The Power” a novel by Naomi Alderman
The shape of power is always the same; it is the shape of a tree.
Heralded as our era’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” this novel evokes the same stunning creation of a world that feels not only possible but maybe even inevitable, leaving me deeply unsettled, just as when I read Atwood’s masterpiece decades ago.
Women and girls around the world are suddenly blessed (or cursed) with this new power that allows electricity to be channeled through their hands. The whole gendered power structure is up-ended when women finally discover freedom within society .No longer needing to fear men, men and boys are now being warned that it is not safe for them to be out at night alone.
Political power is disrupted around the world.
It made me question my belief that women running the world would be a vastly different place. A more peaceful, cooperative and compassionate place.
The idea the power corrupts no matter who has it left me deeply unsettled.
Some sentences I underlined:
“This is the trouble with history. You can’t see what’s not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something’s missing, but there’s no way to know what it was.”
“Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her.”
“One of them says, ‘Why did they do it?’
And the other answers, ‘Because they could.’
That is the only answer there ever is.”
“Groundskeeping” a novel by Lee Cole
I’ve always had the same predicament. When I’m home in Kentucky, all I want is to leave. When I’m away, I’m homesick for a place that never was.
An aspiring writer and a writer-in-residence meet at a small local college.
It’s the run-up to the 2016 election and Owen is back home. After wasting most of his twenties, he is trying to get back on track. He gets a job as a groundskeeper at the local college in exchange for taking a writing course.
Alma is the writer-in-residence, recently from New York, originally from a Bosnian immigrant family. She is writing a novel, and has already been published.
Their relationship is a reflection of the dynamic playing out across the country between conservatives and liberals, between different religions and cultures.
It’s a novel filled with yearning and homesickness. Belonging and not belonging. Wanting to change and feeling unable to do so.
Cole exquisitely explores the fragile bonds of families and going home and not feeling at home.
Sentences I underlined:
“No one was ever exactly who you wanted them to be. They became themselves the more time you spent with them, which is to say, they became what you never could have predicted.”
“It was like the feeling one has reading a good book, the sensation of being propelled toward the end and at the same time wishing to linger.”
Grace Unleashed 