One interesting and occasionally brutal thing about my son, though, is that he tells me exactly how a story resonates within him. Like, within his body.
“That was so funny, mom, I felt it all the way up here,” he’ll say, drawing an imaginary line from his toes to his mouth.
“You scared me to here,” he’ll say, motioning to his hip. Then he’ll put his hand next to his chin. “Next time see if you can scare me to here.”
A couple of my tall tales were so bad, they didn’t even rank. “That story fell on the ground. I didn’t even feel it,” he said. “It didn’t touch me.”
It’s strange to be edited in real time by my own 6-year-old child, yes. But his feedback made me fiercer in my telling. I went bolder and weirder and wilder, all for the sake of garnering a reaction.
The body is more than 60% water, which is why music, chanting, and sound therapies have such an impact on how we feel. They change the vibration within us. (Think: That glass of water in Jurassic Park when the T. rex approaches the car, only you’re the cup of water.)
But I also like to believe on some level we’re made up of stories — at least 60%, if not more. So I can’t help but thrill at how my child receives a narrative and considers it a full-body experience. The stories are in his heart, up to his neck, even pooling on the ground around him.
First: Make a list of things to do before you die. Realize that you are always inching toward death and still haven’t done a single thing on that list. This is the same thing your mom did; she put things off until it was too late.
Decide to do something about it.
Quit your job. Leave home. Book some flights.
Tell yourself, “If I make it to Ha Long Bay, this trip will be a success.”
Go to Peru. Go to Bolivia. Go to Argentina. Check some things off the list.
Meet a couple of Americans and drive around South Africa with them. Live in a village. Learn to carry buckets of water on your head. Go to Uganda. Ride across the country in a minibus with 24 people and a pregnant goat. Find work as a country-western DJ for the local radio station. Learn to harvest rice.
Go to Rwanda. Spend your days teaching English to genocide survivors. Cry. Teach them to play bingo. Laugh.
Fly to Egypt and immerse yourself in ruins. Find out your grandmother died. Find out your mom is dying, really dying. Fall down a tunnel of darkness. Hole up in a yoga camp on the Red Sea.
Go to your mother’s funeral. Wrap yourself in grief. Return to Egypt on the day a revolution begins. Feel yourself unraveling.
Take a boat to Jordan. Leave when protests begin. Go to Bahrain. Leave when protests begin. Get the nagging feeling that you are creating a trail of destruction around the world.
Go to Ethiopia, an extraordinary country, and plod your way through it. Feel like you’re something less than human.
Go to India, where something in your soul clicks. Love it. Embrace it. Drink in every hot day, every fragrant spice, every bit of eye-popping color. Move into an ashram. Pray.
Go to Thailand. Work with elephants. Meet a friend from home in Bangkok. Travel with her to Cambodia. Stay with more friends. Say goodbye.
Take a bus to Vietnam. Battle Saigon’s scooter-clogged streets and get a feel for the city. Slurp down bowls of noodles. Take a bus north. When the bus breaks down for 12 hours, sleep at a bus station. When the bus works again, it’s the hottest part of the day and the air-conditioning is now broken. Sweat. Make an unplanned stop in a beach town just because you desperately need a shower.
Take more buses. Take a train. Sleep in a dirty train car on soiled sheets. Arrive in Hanoi. Ride on the back of a motorcycle with a man even sweatier than you.
Schedule a boat tour. Pack up. Get picked up at 7 a.m.
Go to Ha Long Bay.
Wake up on a boat in a bay where everything is still. Everything is perfect.
Write that story.
Go to grad school to really dig into it.
Write that story again and again, edit it, excavate it. Work on it in scraps of time between your day job, when you stay up late, when you rise at 4 a.m. to have 20 quiet minutes before the baby wakes.
Sell it.
Have the perfect editor push you where you need it. He makes you laugh, he makes you cry, but most importantly, he makes you better. He reminds you to slow down where it hurts.
This might be my favorite thing I do all year long: It’s a great, big mashup of the best books I enjoyed reading in 2018 (though not necessarily published this year), along with my favorite songs released this year. So if you like a song, you’ll probably like the book I’ve paired it with — and vice versa.
I always like making annual lists of my top books and favorite music as a way to reflect on what I’ve consumed and enjoyed during the year. But last year I smooshed the two lists together, and it changed the whole game. (You can see that here.)
I liked it enough to do it again. So here we go! You’re welcome.
A harrowing novel told through intersecting stories of urban Native Americans in Oakland, There There delves into the kind of trauma that endures through generations. I paired it with Arrows, a song of grief and many facets of heartache.
Circe is a lesser god-turned-island witch who sleeps with inappropriate men, tames wild beasts, and makes questionable decisions for love — similar to the narrator in this Bishop Briggs song, who sings, “My baby’s got a fucked up head, doesn’t matter ’cause he’s so damn good in bed … yeah, he’s fucking crazy, but he’s still my baby.”
Alan Lightman wrote some of my all-time favorite fiction, so I was already predisposed to enjoy this work of nonfiction, a lyrical meditation that explores the tension between our yearning for permanence and certainty. I’ve paired it with a song about getting older, significant life changes, and a literal birth.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you why Michelle Obama’s bestselling autobiography is worth reading. Here I’ve paired it with this Michl song for the line, “This house feels better with you.”
As in White House. I want her back in the White House. That house feels better with her.
I’ve raved about They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us to just about everyone, and I don’t think I ever do this book justice. Abdurraqib is a poet, so the prose is lyrical and precise, and his insightful essays blend pop culture and social justice, covering everything from a Carly Rae Jepsen concert to the shooting of Michael Brown, and everything in between. Each piece was a genuine surprise, and I never knew if I would end up crying or laughing.
I paired Abdurraqib’s collection with this pop confection, because it seems like the kind of thing he might write about someday. Also I’ve liked Cardi B ever since I read about her illegal butt filler injections, back when she was a stripper, because that’s the kind of dedication to craft that I admire.
Less, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year, is the story of an aging, failed novelist who receives an invitation to the wedding of his ex-boyfriend. Rather than confront his feelings, the novelist travels around the world and occupies his time in other ways, occasionally with other men.
Tieduprightnow is a perfect match, especially the chorus: “The one I need is tied up right now/So let’s just wait a while/The one I need is tied up right now/So let’s not draw the line …”
A summer romance blossoms between a 17-year-old boy and an older scholar staying at his house. It’s a powerful story about intimacy, undeniable attraction, and what happens when passion is indulged. Plus a peach.
This pairs nicely with Back to You, a song of desire from the perspective of someone willing to make the same choices all over again: “I want to hold you when I’m not supposed to/when I’m lying close to someone else/You’re stuck in my head and I can’t get you out of it/If I could do it all again, I know I’d go back to you.”
I’m Panio’s biggest fan, so I’ll read anything he writes. Truly. I once read an article he wrote about paying off student loans, even though my personal longterm repayment plan involves faking my own death, so that should tell you something. OF COURSE his achingly beautiful little package of stories ranks at the top of my list.
I paired it with Gang of Youth’s The Heart is a Muscle, because strengthening the heart feels like a good compliment to a book that examines many forms of love: relationships that exist within family, domestic chaos, fumbling for connection, a ridiculous Pomeranian.
But I just read through the lyrics again and realized this might be a Jesus song. Damn it.
This is an exquisite story about migrants and immigration in which people travel to new countries via literal doors that act as portals, but at the heart of it is the love story of refugees Nadia and Saeed.
I’ve paired it with a sweet pop song about memory and the things we cling to as reminders of love.
Touch is a sharp, insightful novel that skewers high-tech, modern consumer culture, and it was one of my best reading experiences of the year. Not only did it make me laugh, but I thought about the characters for a long time after I finished the book. I’m pairing it with Everybody Wants to Be Famous, because that’s an obvious match for a satire about a culture based on likes.
Citizen contains some of the most urgent, important writing I’ve ever read, and it dovetails so perfectly with this Childish Gambino song (and video) that looks at what it means to be a person of color in America.
It might seem weird to pair a song with a book about finding space for silence in a busy an chaotic world. And it is weird, which is exactly why I placed it with a quiet, slow burn of a song called Nevermind.
Woman World isabout a world without men, and I read it just after the Kavanaugh hearings, which made this charming comic even more of a delight. In Woman World, women rebuild society but better (the new flag is simply a picture of Beyoncé’s thighs) and study relics of the former world, like “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.”
Woman World started as an Instagram comic, so the graphic novel version doesn’t have a strong storyline to pull the reader through the book. But the panels are so cute and funny, it makes for a quick, entertaining read anyway. I paired it with the great bisexual anthem of 2018, although any Janelle Monáe song would work.
My experience of reading Ohio involved a lot of googling. First because the fictional town in this novel felt so real, I swore I had been there. And the characters — I knew them all.
Then I googled because I developed a deep, profound writer crush on author Stephen Markley. Every time I read a passage that I swore was the best thing I’ve ever read, it was followed by another greatest thing I’ve ever read.
Ohio is the story of four former classmates who converge one night in their hometown, a small rust belt town that has been gutted by the recession, opioids, and the loss of industry. It’s melancholy and perceptive, examining the Midwest through the compassionate lens of someone who’s been there.
I paired the book with this Lord Huron song about mistakes and second chances, which would resonate with any of the imperfect, disillusioned characters at the heart of this story. Also because “If I can’t change the weather, maybe I can change your mind” destroys me. Just like Markley’s writing.
I actually just started this book, so I can’t say yet that it’s one of my favorite reads of the year — mostly I just wanted an excuse to post this Kurt Vile song, which sounds like the desert to me.
“Some are weird as hell, but we love ’em/ Some are one trick ponies but we embrace ’em.”
I’ll have another post soon with a few more favorite tunes from 2018; I just couldn’t make them work with any books. In the meantime, what did I miss? Tell me about the books and songs you loved this year.
These days my 3-year-old son, Everest, is totally into letters, words, and writing. But yesterday he took this to a whole new level, and I’ve never been so proud.
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.
