recommendations - june 2025

I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, Glynnis MacNicol. I follow some writers on Instagram who are friends with Glynnis MacNicol and consequently the very beautiful cover of this book has popped up on my feed or in my stories from time to time. But the description – a forty-something woman sleeps with a lot of dudes in Paris – didn't exactly speak to me. However, I'm going to Paris in September and the trip is getting near enough that it feels real and like I need to start planning. (Fear not: I have flights and hotels booked. But, like, what am I going to do there?) This past week, while on semi-vacation in South Carolina with my family, I downloaded it to my Kobo on a whim. For the vibes.

And I really loved it. I ordered a (paper) copy of her previous book, No One Tells You This, before I'd finished this one. It's an exceptionally quick read – I blew through it in a day or two – and was actually surprised at how relevant it felt to me, someone who is decidedly not going to spend her week in Paris hooking up with men 20 years my junior from a dating app called Fruitz. And, to be fair, MacNicol does not hook up with that many dudes in the course of this book. She's only in Paris for six weeks, after all. But she does, as the title proclaims, seem to have a good time.

What I connected with, however, was the broader question the book poses: How does one make meaning in one's life when one has forsaken – or just been excluded from – the standard ways meaning is constructed in society ( i.e., long-term partnership and children)? And specifically for women, who, even now, mostly find financial security and social position through their relationship to men. (It's wild, getting older, and seeing people you know have their lives completely transformed – socioeconomically – by getting married. It's one thing to talk about social reproduction – it's another to watch it unfold in front of you.)

Everything is Tuberculosis, John Green. Another very quick Kobo read, for my office book club. I like John Green – though like many online people occasionally I need him to Bring It Down a bit – but I have actually read very little by him. I have possibly read excerpts of The Fault in Our Stars? I'm just not a YA person and I mean that with no judgement. I genuinely struggle to get into it. (Aside from The Hunger Games. Loved that shit. 2011 – what a time!) I feel like people who enjoy YA enjoyed being a teen more than I did, or were miserable in a way that was more aesthetically pleasing. It is just not an era I care to revisit. All that said – almost cried in an airport reading this, and that was very refreshing.

Fat City, Leonard Gardner. A slim paperback I impulse bought because around Oscar time the New York Review of Books was having a sale on books in their collection that had been adapted into films. This was adapted in the early 70s, by Leonard Gardner himself. I really liked it, but I'm wary of recommending it to others. Like, it's such a particular type of book. It's a very dude book. A very stoic – but actually very emotional – dude kind of book. Denis Johnson wrote the forward, which should be meaningful if you are at all familiar with Denis Johnson. It made me think of this guy from my MFA program, a dude who loved like Raymond Carver and really lean, spare writing of that Gordon Lish school (or whatever you might call it) and who had been a bartender in Austin and would not hesitate to tell you that he had been a bartender in Austin at almost any opportunity. His stories were all thinly concealed memoir with a strong undercurrent of despair and insecurity. He was an asshole, and a drunk, but he would have loved this book. I bet he does love this book. And I loved it, too. (Terry – that was his name – once recommended Stoner by John Williams to me and I read it. My advisor, when she learned that I was reading it, looked at me archly, as though she knew there was only one person who could have recommended it to me. But it was good! None other than Paul Mescal was seen reading it in January 2024.) In Fat City, there are these great descriptions of agricultural workers, like, hopping onions or of the bus ride out to some random field. Who knew that you "hopped" onions? And people getting drunk and living in boarding houses. It's just incredibly post-war. Very the lost promise of California. The plot, to the extent that it has one, is about two different men exploring boxing careers in Stockton – one a has been at 30 years old who's trying to get back into the game (but is too drunk and depressed to manage it) and a young guy with a lot of talent who might be spared the former's sad fate because he accidentally knocked some girl up and got married, bestowing upon his life a little structure and accountability. (Or that was my read, anyway.) There's a section describing the younger guy's marriage and how he relates to his wife and I was like, "Oh, he has an avoidant attachment style." Like, the Instagram relationship influencers and their little skits could never compare to Leonard Gardner's perfect depiction.

Jane Austen's Bookshelf, Rebecca Romney. Not technically finished with this one yet, which is for my pandemic-era college-friends Zoom book club. I'm liking it, but it's not as quick a read as any of the others. And that's partially because Romney is not as engaging company as John Green or Glynnis MacNicol. This isn't her fault, really, and there are a lot of biographical details that explain why she is the way she is, but...it's not an amazing match for me, narrator-wise. It's like talking to someone who maybe just sort of discovered feminism, or, who, like Romney, grew up in a very conservative, religious community and thus things I take for granted are more...shocking? Or calling them out feels more...revolutionary? Like, the past was very sexist and misogynistic? I don't mean to be blase but it just doesn't strike me that much anymore. It's like, "yep." But the subject itself is quite fascinating, and I'm learning a lot about book binding. I do love that Ann Radcliffe got her money and then was like "Peace out, I will not be writing more. I'm going to FRANCE." Only vaguely related (it's Austen-focused) is this piece from B.D. McClay about Northanger Abbey in The Paris Review.

Adaptogens, maybe? Or a regular running practice? So, in the past few weeks, my resting heart rate has...plummeted? And I'm mostly happy about that. It's been consistently elevated for the past few years (at least by my standards), and, as someone who for a long time had a very low resting heart rate (dipping into the 40s at times), I was saddened by this. Like, why spend years as a child and teen playing sports if not to reap the benefits forever without having to do anything? But I joined an actual gym/fitness organization (it's OrangeTheory, okay?), and last week while I was at the beach, I went for a jog every morning, going a little further every day. And this has possibly...caused me to chill out in a way that had previously eluded me? Jump started my somewhat atrophied cardiac muscle? It could also be attributed to this "super foods" nighttime supplement I ordered off of Instagram called Moonbrew. But that seems a stretch! I just don't think L-theanine has such powers. It's also possible I'm dying. I went to an Orange Theory class today and actually started to get worried because my heart rate was...not rising as quickly as I wanted! I stayed pretty solidly in the green zone for a while.

Coconut yogurt with fresh mango and raspberries. I stopped at the Whole Foods in Charleston on my way out to Edisto Island, where my family was staying, to grab things that would not be available at the small Food Lion on the island. Among them was a tub of cultured coconut product (can't technically call it yogurt, I guess) from Harmless Harvest (vegan foods have the most hilarious names) and four champagne mangos (they were 4 for $5). Anyway, if you ever need a tasty snack, put a little Harmless Harvest in a bowl, slice up – the best you can, it was strangely challenging – a mango and throw it on there with a few raspberries. Like sorbet almost.

Arthur Russell, as a concept. This is something else that is still in progress, but I've come to accept that I need to provide myself novelty in a very structured way to be happy. I'm probably going to make a spreadsheet of all the books I own that I haven't read, and then rank them in order of how much I want to read them and then....read them in that order. Similarly, left to myself, I will listen to the same 8 songs from various eras of my past. Last week, I decided I was going to get into Arthur Russell, partially because of this post from Jacqui Shine over on her newsletter, Well, Actually.

It's not that Arthur Russell is new to me. I've listened to some songs now and again. The very idea of him has always been appealing. I mean, look at this picture of him:

The vaguely dorky hair, the acne scars. The very casual yet cool grey sweatshirt. He also was just very talented, with work ranging from instrumental/experimental to disco to country pop. I've downloaded a lot of his music to my phone. Alongside the Glynnis MacNicol book, I ordered a biography of Russell, Hold onto Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene. He died in 1992 at age 40 of an AIDS-related illness.

While I'm recommending, I also can't really think of Russell without thinking of another disco pioneer, Larry Levan, who also died very young (38), also in 1992, of heart failure caused by endocarditis. Levan did a remix of Russell's classic disco hit, "Is It All Over My Face?":

I am also partial to Levan's remix of Taana Gardner's "Heartbeat":

Levan played primarily at Paradise Garage, a members-only, no-alcohol dance club in Soho. I recently got a new router, and named my WiFi network something French, but I almost called it Paradise Garage. (Very misleading about what goes on in my apartment.) I may still change it.

Happy Pride, I guess.