ME: We have to do the thing where we eat 12 grapes at midnight to bring luck in the coming 12 months.
HUSBAND: What?
ME: It’s a thing. They do it in Spain.
HUSBAND: But why do we have to do it?
ME: I’m not going to risk it. I’ll take all the luck I can get.
HUSBAND: Fine.
ME: Oh, we also have to sit under the table when we do it. Or leaping over the threshold of our home? I can’t remember. Anyway, I have to wash the grapes. Meet me under the table in 5 minutes.
INT. UNDER THE KITCHEN TABLE – FIVE MIN. LATER
HUSBAND: Are you sure we have squeeze under the table to do this? My back hurts.
ME: Pretty sure. Now hush. Eat your grapes.
HUSBAND: I don’t even like green grapes. You’ll have to finish mine.
ME: Great. I’ll be the only prosperous one. Fine with me.
HUSBAND: It’s not even midnight.
ME: It’s well past midnight in Spain.
HUSBAND: (chewing)
ME: Maybe we could have just had a glass of wine instead.
My focus word for 2017 was “abundance,” and I spent all year trying my darnedest to cultivate that.
And failing. I failed so hard, you guys. My failures were abundant.
Financially, it was one of my driest years since I started freelancing. There were long and seemingly endless spans of time where nothing was accepted or published, even though I wrote, pitched, queried, and followed up obsessively. At one point I read an article that advised writers to aim for 100 rejections per year, and I cackled like a mad woman in a Brontë novel — I was hitting about 100 rejections (or non-responses) per month.
It was depressing. It felt like I was trying to climb a mountain, and even though I was doing my part, I couldn’t quite get there. I researched the trail, I showed up in hiking boots, I carried all the right gear, I had the motivation and desire to put in the work. Then mere steps from the top, I toppled for whatever reason, forcing me to start all over again.
Just when I considered calling it quits, I attended the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop in magical Granada, Spain. It helped recharge my batteries on just about every level, from inspiring me to write new things and look at my work in a different way to satisfying my itchy feet and proving I can still travel solo.
Soon after, I placed some of my favorite pieces, like this essay for LitHub about Silent Book Club, a piece about wildflowers and making my own roots in the desert for Palm Springs Life (the online version is a little wonky with some repeated paragraphs, but you can see it here anyway), and a funny/sad essay about a rat for Mutha Magazine.
I also started hosting a radio show about books with Tod Goldberg. I received an acceptance from an outlet that has been on my byline bucket list for decades. I registered for the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop, because I want to find my way toward humor writing again. I read 51 books.
Other good things happened: A road trip to Vegas, a quick jaunt to Portland, a terrific visit with my sister. I reconnected with old friends and made some new ones. As a family, Jason, Everest, and I slept in a tipi under the stars in Pioneertown, hiked through a couple of Canada’s spectacular national parks, and explored Vancouver, now one of our favorite cities.
Also Everest turned 3, and he has grown into someone I genuinely love to hang out with. He’s funny and weird and makes me laugh until I wheeze. We have dance parties, take silly selfies, and haven’t found a trail yet that we don’t want to explore.
In November Everest and I hiked 30 miles together, and most of those were quiet morning jaunts, clambering over rocks, scraping up knees, and listening to birdsong. I cherish every one of those miles.
Now we’re ending on a high note. We just finished a family road trip that was just about as perfect as those things get. We started by seeing the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at The Broad in Los Angeles, and stayed the night in Solvang, a quirky Danish-themed town. Then we spent a few easy days at Morro Bay, listening to seals bark, running on the beach, and sipping hot cocoa as the sun sank.
Our last morning in Morro Bay is a memory that I hope lasts, as it seems to sum up the whole year for me. It’s Everest, barreling down the pastel beach, gathering sand dollars by the handful. He carries them to me, holds these urchins to his chest, makes careful piles of them. He tosses some into the ocean; the rest he tucks into the pockets of my old college sweatshirt.
This is abundance. My pockets hang heavy with sand and salt and shells, and my heart is so full it’s buoyant. I am sand dollar rich, and I have all the things that matter.
To mark the end of 2017, I mashed up my favorite songs of the year with the best books I read this year – kind of like a “Like that tune? Then you’ll love this book!” (This is not my idea, by the way. I saw @keyairruh do this on Twitter with pairings of albums and books, and I loved it.)
Some of the books and songs are paired because they are thematically similar or share the same sensibility. A few of the songs had lyrics that reminded me of the text. And some are mashed together just because they evoked similar feelings in me.
Keep in mind, I’ve been sick for one-going-on-two weeks and I’m delirious right now. So if these pairings don’t make sense, blame it on Flupocalypse 2017. But if the results are totally awesome, then it was me, all me.
Thirty-year-old Ruth, fresh from a breakup, quits her job and returns home to help her father, who is slipping into dementia. This is a beautiful story about devotion and what it means to be a family, and I found it almost painfully relatable.
I won’t try to describe this novel because then you won’t read it. I’ll just say that it made me feel better about being a human, which is exactly what I needed this year.
One of the most exquisite books I’ve ever read. It’s a masterful memoir about obsession and how scars can last for generations.
Feel It Still • Portugal, the Man + The Power • Naomi Alderman
I’m still high on this book, in which women suddenly gain the power to shock people with their hands, an exhilarating antidote to the news cycle.
What were your top books and songs this year? Do you have any good pairings for me?
Note: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you purchase a book through my links, it’s no additional cost to you and Amazon will throw a few cents my way. It’s helps to keep the lights on around here, and I appreciate it. Thank you!
Checking in on my reading goal for the year. I hope to read at least 50 books in 2017, and so far I’m two ahead of schedule. Here’s what I loved, loathed, and meh-ed.
The death of a beloved uncle triggers a fascination with ruins and hollowed out places in this graphic memoir. Luminous, melancholy, and unlike anything I’ve read before.
A solid collection of essays and interviews about writing and commerce. It’s rare and refreshing to hear real talk about money, especially in my field, and I highly recommend this to other writers.
A young adult novel about a teenager drawn to activism after the police shooting of a close friend. This is the book everyone should be reading right now.
These stories plunge the reader into the lives of very different women — two sisters haunted by a past crime, a stripper with a stalker, a black engineer in a small, Midwestern town, a woman who loves her husband’s identical twin. The women aren’t so difficult, after all; the world is.
A quiet thriller about a woman searching for her estranged husband, who has gone missing in a foreign country. I loved this book. I loved it as a character study, I loved it as a rumination on love, marriage, grief, and endings. I loved it because there’s not a lot of action, but the plot never felt empty.
I am such a fan of Ariel Levy’s writing in the New Yorker, and this memoir did not live up to my (admittedly very high) expectations. It felt like the entire book was constructed around Levy’s stunning and memorable Thanksgiving in Mongolia essay, which is fine — but I don’t think the narrator has lived the ending of her story yet.
I read this one after I watched the TV show, because I was curious how Jay Asher wrote certain scenes. Unfortunately, already knowing every twist and surprise meant I didn’t find the book to be as compelling. Had I done it the other way around, it would be a different story.
This novel follows K., a man transformed by grief after the death of his wife, who finds himself the hapless star of a reality TV show. It’s both timely and clever, and it brought to light some uncomfortable truths about the world. I read this with tears streaming down my cheeks, and they were inspired by an even split of laughter/heartbreak. (Though judging from the reviews, I think I felt more maternal and tender toward K. than most readers.)
Erik Larson is all about using precise research to weave a fascinating work of nonfiction that reads like fiction, and this book is no different. This story focuses on the American ambassador to Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, and his flamboyant daughter, who slept with everybody but Hitler. The book took a fascinating approach to a subject I thought I was already familiar with, but it was kind of like watching the Titanic crash in slow motion. I kept shouting, “Nooo!” at the page, but nobody listened to me.
I read this when I wanted to employ some calculus theorems in one of my essays. Then I discovered the essay worked better without them. I finished this book anyway, which says a lot about the conversational voice and the author’s unique lens on calculus.
The premise of this alt-history thriller is compelling: It’s the present-day world, and almost everything is the same. Except the Civil War never happened. The execution of this story is a little uneven at times, and I was more interested in learning more about the world Winters constructed than in solving the actual mystery at the heart of the book, but it’s definitely worth reading.
I’m always suspicious when an author’s name is bigger than the actual title on a book cover, which is the case with Small Great Things, but I read this book anyway. I wish I hadn’t. It is tries so hard to be A Very Important Novel, in the same overwrought vein as A Very Special Episode of Growing Pains.
Teenage love between a Jamaican immigrant who is about to be deported and a first-generation Korean-American poet boy, plus fleeting looks at the other characters who cross their paths.
This novel is written in the second-person in the style of a self-help book, so the structure is what initially attracted me. The exquisite prose made me stay.
An American writer makes a home with her new husband on the dividing line between East and West Jerusalem. This is an empathetic and lovely memoir that makes me desperately want to visit the Middle East again — this time for an extended period.
An unsettling LA noir about a writer, a nanny, a boy, a bunny, and how their lives intertwine high in the Hollywood Hills. Every few pages I found myself pulling out a highlighter to preserve some of the most sumptuous passages — and by the end of the book I was highlighting every damn thing.
Antoine Leiris is a French journalist whose wife was killed by terrorists at the Bataclan in Paris. His heartbreaking Facebook post inspired this slim tribute to the exceptional and enduring power of love. It feels both shockingly intimate and universal.
This is the true story of a man who walks the entirety of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — his goal is to have conversations about climate change, fossil fuels, and the oil industry with the people who will be directly affected by the pipeline. What’s really incredible about this book is that my staunchly conservative dad read it first, recommended it to me (<– not a conservative), and then we had a fairly reasonable discussion about climate change.
This is the book that helped me plow through the high-anxiety period around Inauguration Day, waking each morning at 3 a.m. with a racing heart and fretful mind. In those wee hours I turned to this sassy piece of historical fiction, in which one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs defended her family against the gang of bullies who threatened them. #Relevant
A story about a serial killer that’s violent, gripping, thrilling AND funny? JoAnn Chaney makes it happen. Bonus: Her female journalist character is spot-on.
This was my first time actually reading Frankenstein, and I’m embarrassed it has taken so long. Turns out the story is nothing like I thought it would be, this book is breathtaking and gorgeous, and Hollywood’s version of Frankenstein’s monster is a lie.
This one is the sweetest one of all, because I’m in it! When I made my backpacking trip around the world, I carried a couple volumes of The Best Women’s Travel Writing with me. My wish was that someday I would have a story compelling enough to share and the ability to write it well. Seeing my own name inside this book was that dream realized.
I’m biased, but I think this is the very best book on my list.
This page contains affiliate links. All opinions are my own.
It’s New Year’s Eve 2016. I’m freshly showered, about to get ready to go out.
I’m sitting in my bathrobe when my son, Everest, notices a cut on my leg. First, he crouches down to examine it. Then he kisses it, because that’s how health and wellness works for 2-year-olds. Find the hurt, press lips to it, make it better.
A minute later he carries a pillow over, carefully places it on my leg and says, “Right here. Hold it right here.”
“Why?”
“So you won’t get hurt again,” he says.
It is a fragile thing, this love. Sometimes I don’t want to move for fear of crushing it.
I hold the pillow to my leg for a long time, afraid to let the moment go. When I finally do, I tell my son that I’m all better, and it’s true. The cut is minimal, unremarkable. It will not leave a scar. But I want my child to know that what he did matters. I want him to know that tenderness has the capacity to heal. That his love is momentous even in its smallness.
Too often it feels like the world is whooshing past, like I’ve been plunged into a loud and rushing river, and this — this tangle of love — is the knotted rope that gives me something to hold on to. It’s pure and precious and good.
We are just a few hours into the new year now, and the future is too far away for any of us to see. It will certainly bring battles and wounds. Some of us will carry scars. Some will never heal.
My hope for 2017 is that as we move forward, we find ways to protect rather than inflict. That in the face of fear, confusion, blind panic, and downright evil, we move from arguments into action. That we find a pillow and apply it liberally.
