the year in reading and writing

a vibes-based look back

After my family left the city on the 26th, I spent the entire afternoon in bed, reading half of a (disappointing) book, and then reading a couple dozen Year In Reading posts from The Millions.¹ I told myself I was doing this “for school”—for my MFA program I must come up with a list of 20-25 books I want to read each term—but in reality I was looking for a semi-productive internet browsing experience that had something to do with the concept of reading. It was indeed semi-productive: I have since ordered a book on invisibility in a time of transparency, a Brazilian modernist epic, and a study in the sociology of deviance; I have added this time management book (I know, I know) and this gardening memoir to my wishlists, and the latter has reminded me it’s time to finally finish Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (getting a reissue next year!). I’m not sure if any of this serves the actual book I’m supposed to be writing, but it does get me excited about reading, and the concept of writing in general, which is an important swell of feeling after a few months of claustrophobic professional overwhelm. Planning what I will read is even more soothing to me than planning what I will cook.

Aside from every single expense I incur and the weights I lift, the books I read are the one thing I track religiously. I have kept a spreadsheet of completed titles since 2018, sometimes with notes on what I liked or didn’t, sometimes just title and author. It’s part incentive structure, part accountability measure, part memory aide. Each year I aim to read 60 books but I’ve only ever maxed out at 56 (2020 and 2023). 

In 2020, when I was stuck inside with my kitchen and my books and my television, I tried to keep a list of everything I cooked, with notes. This is the sort of cook I want to be: annotative. In a year-end piece for Vittles (the best food magazine we currently have?), Jonathan Nunn mentions keeping a list of everything he ate this year, an idea stolen from the Oulipian writer Georges Perec. I can’t do this because it would likely plunge me back into the banal depths of disordered eating, but I am jealous of it. Similar to Bernadette Mayer’s List of Journal Ideas, it offers an arbitrarily specific way to track and reflect on time. I always want to start one of these but I know deep in my heart I would last a month. I am not a completist in this way; I often fall off any intended long-term plan for recording things that does not include a Google Sheet. But the dream still appeals, because it is a protection against forgetting. One reason we are afraid of the passing of time is that we cannot look accurately at what has passed us. Memory is flimsy and weak. All we have these days are photo rolls in our phones and decades of email correspondences and digital calendars.

And yet we still crane our necks back in these last days of December and see what we can see. The year feels small and hurried to me, and full of death. But I still know what I read and what I wrote, and offering some highlights is always a pleasant exercise, hopefully one that a reader might enjoy too.  Note that this whole post is too long for email, so if you want to read it all, click the little link above that says “view in browser”.

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2023, in writing

I published two big features this year that I continue to be proud of, both of which I pitched and started writing in the late summer of 2022. I often joke that I have one good idea per year; between 2022 and 2023, I had two.

• Mother Sauce, n+1: a longform review of Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen. When this published I told friends it was the best writing I am currently capable of and I continue to feel this way. I got to speak to Rebecca about the book in person a few weeks back at Molasses Books, an enormous pleasure and a highlight of my year.

• Orange Is the New Yolk, Eater: This is really the one time I’ve been able to observe and name a trend and write something big about it. Grateful that Eater gave me this much space. Also I talked about this on NPR? Another first, very fun.

I also launched a mostly-monthly column on Gothamist called Dishing, and had a lot of fun writing about gildas and performance art dinner parties, among other things.

2023 was the second year of Mess Hall’s relaunch, and the year I think I finally found my groove over here. I was able to achieve my goal of doubling my subscriber numbers (both paid and total), and hope to continue growing this thing in 2024. Here are a few of my favorite installments from the year. I am eating the chia pudding as I write this.

The bulk of my writing this year, though, was split between advertorial “content” work that pays my bills and the ongoing thrashing of trying to write a book. This thrashing is small and enormous work at once, and it keeps me something close to humble.

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2023 in reading

Here is an intentionally incomplete taxonomy of the books I’ve read this year. Please forgive my exclusion of cookbooks, but you can look at Mess Hall’s archives to learn more about the books I have cooked from happily over the past 12 months.

“Classics” I adored:

• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton (I will until my dying days remember finishing this book on my kindle in a hot January bath and shrieking)

• Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust trans. Lydia Davis (I still have 100 pages to go which I WILL finish soon; now those are SENTENCES; it is a blessing to be gay !!)

Top-Tier Weird Contemporary Fiction

• Blackouts, Justin Torres

• Lightning Rods, Helen Dewitt

• Lanny, Max Porter (a reread; one of my favorite most special novels of all time)

• Monstrilio, Gerardo Sámana Córdova

• Love Me Tender, Constance Debré

Nonfiction That Made Me Jealous and/or Made Me Rethink The Entire World

• Stay True, Hua Hsu

• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde

• Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn

• Lying, Lauren Slater

• Negroland, Margo Jefferson

• Working Girl, Sophia Giovannitti

• Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden

• Thin Skin, Jenn Shapland (read backward)

• The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm (my favorite Malcolm so far)

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A Brief Coda

This year will forever be marked by death. Marked by death in a small personal way because, in the last days of August, my ex love, Alan Hanson, died from an accidental overdose. We had not talked for over a year, maybe two; our years of knowing each other were tumultuous, intense bouts of painful love interspersed with periods of estrangement. We first met in the back of a bar, through a woman he was fucking at the time, and the first photo I have of him is actually of a pack of Camels, with a photo of Gwyneth Paltrow stuck under the cellophane. We were together, finally, during the strange five months I lived in Los Angeles, a city he loved to the bone. We played hooky and drove to the mountains and walked through snow, we got high in the morning and ate breakfast tacos at Home State, we went to all his favorite shitty bowling alleys. I only remember cooking for him once, when I was testing recipes for the Estela cookbook, and I made us a rack of lamb ribs with chermoula, and we ate in my kitchen, and five minutes into dinner he spilled an entire glass of red wine on himself, and got so angry he had to lay quietly on the couch while I successfully googled how to get red wine stain out and covered his shirt in salt. I am still figuring out how to mourn someone I have already long mourned, and it comes to me in patches, but I want to mention his name here, and his great imperfect love that I was able to feel. I will remember him always, his dark spots and the gentle coo of his voice alike, and next year I will find the correct frame for the polaroid nude of him I have kept, and he will live, beautifully hung, on my wall.

If Alan were still here I know that he would be in the streets regularly, screaming for Palestinian liberation. Not just a ceasefire but a free, free Palestine. Death has stained this year, mass death, genocidal killing that the U.S. government continues to fund. More than any book or meal or word from 2023, the impressions that will stay with me are these images and videos of death and mourning: a father placing a candy bar in the hand of his dead child before tucking the stiff arm back into its burial shroud; a young boy wailing let me kiss him one more time as his father’s body is carried away; a man sitting at the edge of some rubble, holding a slab of concrete once part of his house, wailing over his family killed in a blast: who will I hug now? These are the images many of us want to ignore, and that desire for distance means that they will haunt us and our souls until our last days. As I have for the last three months, I will walk into 2024 repeating prayers for a free Palestine.

A very short list of further reading:

• Can You Tell Us Why This Is Happening?, n+1

• Mosab Abu Toha’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza, The New Yorker

• The More of Us There Are, The More of Us There Are, n+1

• “A Mass Assassination Factory”: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza, 927 Magazine

if you have made it all the way down here to the bottom, I send you a gentle new years kiss through the screen <3

1. This is one of the ways in which the internet “used to be fun”—we once had more stuff like this. Remember when Medium was a thing and we all posted our Year in Writing on Medium??