Your birthday is a dreary, bone chiller this year. My hands—your hands—felt the intensity of this Midwest January day as I filled the birdfeeders at dawn. My aging skin is thinner than ever this year in winter cold, and although I venture out every day with my dog, I curse the clinging of winter to my bones and the hour or more of residual shivering.
Where are you today?
Did you pop into Tracy’s kitchen to rate her birthday chocolate cupcakes with that boiled caramel frosting you loved? She says the frosting is harder than it should be. But lots of things are harder these days. Do you know the planet is on fire? That the party you always voted for is waging war on truth and decency and American democracy? That cruelty is trying to best compassion once and for all?
Goodness, I hope you can’t know, that you don’t know. I like to imagine my beloved dead oblivious to the sorrows the living must witness in 2026.
On what would have been your 82nd birthday, I choose to see your spirit on a golf course in California. I do that sometimes, see you somewhere, the details as vivid as a picture. Your twenty-five-year absence has not dimmed my imagination, and Mack’s eleven-year absence has made me something of a professional daydreamer writing living scenarios for you both.
So, yes, it is a golf course for your spirit today, 36 holes with Mack. I see it as clearly as if I was standing on the tee box behind you. You in your Gilligan bucket hat and Mack in Old Navy flipflops. It is 78 degrees, and the sun is sparkling off the cerulean blue pond to the left of the fairway. You are drinking a Pepsi from one of those tall glass bottles and making a complicated wager with Mack about your respective shots to an emerald green.
It is both a wondrous and a disconcerting place here in this humble and quiet life (back in Illinois where you first brought me in 1979), now uncomfortably sandwiched as a human living between a lost father and a lost daughter. Yet here I am, breathing and searching, always searching, for myself and humanity. Two of my greatest teachers are now spirit guides, but I have found my way home.
Do you think I have needed my dad for too long? Is it a bother to be a member of the spirit committee of a skeptical and too-serious woman when you were ever the optimistic, joyful child? I hope watching the passing of my time and my imperfect life unfolding isn’t too much of a downer, but you must watch because I wish it. The living carry all the sorrow, and therefore we get to make all the rules for our honored dead.
I know this truth because I am older now than you. You may have noticed my hair is pepper and salt and there are these lines on my face that I thought I would outrun because I always looked so much younger than my years. Like you always looked younger than your years. But there they are, those lines, mocking my hubris; and there you are, no longer aging.
Dad kicking my ass in scrabble, c. 1993.
I am wiser now, too, I promise. But would you believe that I am also more tender? Do you see that these lines on my face mirror the cracking open of my heart? It took a lifetime and the weight of grief to learn it, and Mack still must remind me most days, but I am easier on myself and on the world than I was back in the days when you warned me to loosen my death grip on living.
I did come ‘round to your way of thinking. Eventually.
Thanks, Pops. For the freckles and the Disney vacations. For the silly games and the Ding Dongs and the Twinkies. For the smarts and the sarcasm and even the crooked pinkies you gave me. But I do wish you would have kept that fivehead to yourself. It didn’t bother me for most of my life, but it turns out it gave the sun too easy a target. Did you hear me cursing our fiveheads last week as the dermatologist dug out a small spot of basal cell carcinoma from the top of that great expanse of exposed skin you gave me?
Nothing in life is perfect or easy and that, I suppose, is the lesson. We get what we get and we do what we can do to survive it. These days I am holding my own. I have my previous Savannah. I have a lovely family and brilliant friends, adorable dogs, and a peaceful home. I have work that feeds my mind and yoga that nourishes my soul. Yet for all that is good, the milestones, like these missed birthdays, weigh heavy on my bones.
So, hey, Dad, since it’s your birthday, please pop in today while Tracy and I are shooting pool at the bar while eating your birthday cupcakes. Check in on Savannah from time to time, will ya? And please, please, please, will you remain on my spirit committee so long as I keep Mack as committee chair?
Savannah with my dad, Jim Pratt (17 January 1944-26 March 2001), c. 1993.
To say that 2025 was a busy year for me would be an understatement of literary proportion. I published my book Loving Lincoln, a project into which I poured my entire heart and spent six months promoting, giving book talks and lectures, book signings, online interviews and podcasts, and spending a magical week at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. I finished editing The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, Volume 4, Moving Beyond Hull-House, which will be published by University of Illinois Press in spring 2026. I also was busy doing preliminary work on a new creative project, picking a little at a novel I’ve been writing (it’s up to sixty-eight mostly dreadful pages), publishing nineteen essays on my personal and work blogs, and submitting an illustrated letter to a cool Substack publication called Letters to Dead Authors and Artists, which will be published in March.
It has been a productive, fulfilling, thrilling, and wonderfully exhausting year. Yet no matter how busy I was throughout the year, I was never too busy for reading or listening to an audio book. A friend of mine recently sent me a pair of socks that says “This Bitch Reads.”
I am guilty as charged. This bitch reads.
On top of all the daily reading I did for my day job as associate editor of the Jane Addams Papers, for a yoga teacher training course I started in August and will conclude in February, and all the political reading I do each week, I met my 2025 leisure reading goal. With more than a day to spare, I read fifty-two books (one book a week is my reading sweet spot), finishing the last book on December 30 at 2:35 p.m. I started 2025 with a book of poetry by Kate Baer, which was a 2024 Christmas gift from a favorite reading friend of mine; and I ended the year with a book of poetry by Kate Baer, a 2025 birthday gift from the same friend. This year I read thirty-seven novels, six memoirs, four works of nonfiction, three poetry collections, and two biographies. Eleven of the novels were historical fiction, my favorite genre. Five books had one-word titles, seven books made me sob, and nine books made me laugh out loud. Three of the books are going on my all-time favorite books list (numbers 1, 2 & 3 below), and I read two clunkers; however, the vast majority of the books I read this year were great or very good, a better reading pool overall than the past couple of years.
In my leisure reading this year, I learned about the writing rituals of two of my favorite writers, the gendered construct of time, a wee bit about radium, and way more than I needed to know (but loved learning) about hares in the English countryside. I got inside the head of a middle-aged woman hiding away in a convent, went on an explorer’s adventure with an old woman looking for a rare beetle, traveled on a train through France, and got lost in another twisty plot in a delightfully dark Liane Moriarty novel. In my year of reading there was friendship, grief, love, women in the present, women in history, a scholar in the future, octopuses, dogs, and poems about women losing their damned minds but finding, always with great surprise, that they are resilient.
Here are my 52 books of 2025. And special thanks to my dogs Lady Bug and Dorothy Parker for starring in two of the book pictures that follow.
#1 Loving Lincoln by Stacy Lynn (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ Shameless to put my book first? No. Not really. Because it’s true, Loving Lincoln IS my favorite book of the year. It it representative of my soul, I live and breathe on so many of its pages, and it is some of the very best writing I have ever done. It may, in fact, be my favorite book of all time. At least for now, I do not want to tamper down my pride of it.
#2 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ The Correspondent is breathtaking. On every page, this beautiful epistolary novel is pulsating with life, love and heartbreak, grit and grace. I have no adequate words to convey the perfection of this novel, at every level, the writing, the pace, the tone, the characters (oh my goddess, the characters!), and that patient, gentle unraveling of a mother’s grief, as the letters she writes over the years reveal all the layers of her heart. I first listened to the audio book, brilliantly produced with a large cast of great readers. When I finished well in advance of the fourteen days of my library loan of it, I immediately began listening to it again. I then purchased a hard copy of the book and read it a third time, this time reading slowly to bask in its radiant literary light. Yes. Instead of reading two different books, I read this book two extra times. The Correspondent is that damned good.
#3 There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ There are easy buoyant novels that carry us away. There is great literature that commands our attention and respect. And then there are those rare books of gorgeous words and grand imaginings that from the pen of a gifted writer become elemental. There are Rivers in the Sky is the latter, reaching far beyond the stories it tells of three human beings in three distinct historical settings, whose lives and histories are lost and found by the water. In this poetic, magical novel, the water is watching. A dispassionate observer, it holds all memory and knows all truth across the vast distances between beauty and cruelty, friend and foe, passion and power, right and wrong, past and present and future. History flows through time and space like water. History is water. Water is history. Always, no matter the form, the water is ever present. A raindrop on the head of an ancient king. A snowflake on the tongue of a swaddled baby in the gutter. A London rain drenching a young woman hesitant to be who she is in her heart. A flood. Water from a tap. A mighty river that never ceases to flow.
#4 Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ I am drawn to memoirs of grief, compelled to know how grieving people put suffering to words. Memorial Days is wise and journalistic, as excepted from Brooks, a former war correspondent; but it is also tender and vulnerable in its simplicity and its depth of feeling. While it is a wonderful grief memoir, inviting the reader into a broken heart, I enjoyed it even more for its invitation into the brain of a writer I have long admired. Brooks’ brilliance here is twofold—she opens a window to her thoughts as a gifted giver of words, and she bravely shares her story as a grieving widow. In the afterword, Brooks offers several observations about how American society makes loss and grief (a natural part of life) even harder by working to render it silent. In my own experience with grief and my hard-won acceptance of my melancholy, I know how true it is. “Our culture is averse to sad,” Brooks writes. “We want people to be happy. We are chagrined and slightly offended when they’re not. There is desire to cheer them up. And then, later, there will be a glancing at the wristwatch, a tapping of the foot if they cannot be cheered, if their grief is perceived to go on too long. I wish we could resist those things.” I, too, wish we could resist those things. And you can start by reading this memoir and I challenge you to let your tears flow freely as you turn every page.
#5 The Names by Florence Knapp (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ This gorgeous, richly textured novel considers the question of the power of a name to determine the course of our lives. Cora is powerless, trapped in an abusive marriage, her light nearly extinguished. But what if she found the courage to defy her husband by choosing her own name for their infant son and giving him a chance to escape the tyranny of his father? Three names, three stories, three divergent futures. Across the thirty-five years of each imagining emerge the uncomfortable knots of family, the intergenerational trauma of domestic violence, and the ability of even the most broken spirits to find love and acceptance. Original, lyrical, laced with heartbreak and redemption, this novel offers some of the most beautiful writing I read all year.
#6 Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce (2020) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ This is the story of two broken women, Margery and Enid, who go on an impossible expedition to New Caledonia to find a gold beetle and who forge an unlikely friendship along the way. I am sorry I missed this book when it came out during the COVID pandemic. I could have then benefited from its quiet wit, matter-of-fact commentary on hardship and hope, and its nuggets of wisdom about life. “It occurred to Margery that this was how it was that, there was always darkness, and in this darkness was unspeakable suffering, and yet there were also the daily things—there was even the search for a gold beetle—and while they could not cancel the appalling horror they were as real.” This novel is full of adventure, laughter, dignity and indignity, courage, fear, resilience, suspense, sorrow, joy, and beetles. I laughed, I cried, I held my heart and danced with pompoms on my sandals and a pith helmet upon my head. Recommended by the brilliant writer Barbara Kingsolver on her Instagram, and now I recommend it to you!
#7 Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Would that I could take leave of my life and hide myself away in reflection of all I cannot hold. But I am not the kind of person who could do the letting go required for such a journey. The protagonist checking out her life inspires both my envy and my disdain. What stories would you tell if there was only quiet and plagues of mice and stories of your past to haunt you? I am not sure what to think and to feel about this novel of grief and a woman who cannot cope unless she locks herself away in a convent, away from a life that most would be happy to live. But the writing here is poetry, the emotion is rain and sunshine, and the healing light of quiet is provocative and lonely and a fire in the hearth on a dark, cold night. Beautiful. Awful. And true.
#8 The River We Remember by William Kent Kruger (2023) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ This engaging novel is set in 1958 in rural Minnesota when World War II is well past but not done wreaking its terrible havoc. It is a novel about secrets and love, racism and community, and the choice human beings always have to do right by others, no matter the cruelties they themselves have endured. “We are all broken,” opines one of the characters in the novel; but how we choose to live with the broken pieces of ourselves and help others pick up their own shattered selves is the only thing, in the end, that truly matters. Kruger (a prolific writer I only discovered two years ago when I read This Tender Land) is a great writer who weaves stories that make you laugh and cry and catch your breath. This novel broke my heart; and I always appreciate a novel that makes me cry for compelling characters, a well-told story, and beautiful prose. “Our lives and the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end. Because we are only one part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different, and there are many versions of the stories we tell about the past. In all of them there is truth, and in all of them a good deal of innocent misremembering.”
#9 The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ It is 1895. The historical setting and the novel are thrilling and textured. A train full of fascinating characters, richly detailed and representing all classes and qualities of people—among them a seasoned railroad engineer, an elderly Russian woman, a boy traveling alone who misses his stop, a Black American artist, a brilliant young medical student, a cabaret performer who refuses to remove her voluminous hat, an ambitious secretary traveling with her boss, and an anti-government radical with a mysterious lunchbox, still unopened way past noon. Suspense. Humanity. A train speeding toward Paris. A propulsive story speeding toward disaster. What more could any reader ever need or want?
#10 Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ I admit that I am predisposed to love a book about writing written by a writer I admire. Writing Creativity and Soul was both a window to Kidd’s writing life and a bursting fountain of ideas, such as the inspiration of writing rituals, the value of creative loitering, and learning to have constructive conversations with self-doubt. The book left me with much to ponder, as I seek in 2026 to live a more creative and soulful life, focused on writing and art and telling stories. “When we are lost, when our world is full of brokenness,” Kidd writes, “it is stories that will re-create us.” Kidd offers insight on the crafting of stories and evidence from her life and in her writing of the power of stories to heal, to inspire, to lessen our burdens, and to tap into the collective heart. In the beginning of the book, Kidd defines “soul” as heart plus imagination. She offers a vivid description of the magic of that equation, which reminded me of the way I felt when I wrote my book Loving Lincoln. I felt the magic of writing with my soul, my unique blend of heart and imagination. This book—a memoir of writing—is written primarily for writers, but I suspect readers who love great writing will gain insight about the craft as well as the magic.
#11 Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Who knew a book about death and grief and terrifying prognosticating could be so funny and sweet, light and dark, and fun?! This is Moriarty’s best work. The writing is so good and the original storytelling style makes for a crazy-good ride. Cherry, the daughter of a fortune teller, is a wonderfully imagined protagonist, and Moriarty is a master storyteller, unfolding Cherry’s life story among the stories of the people whose lives she upends when she predicts their deaths on a fateful flight from Hobart to Sydney. And peppered throughout this hefty, hearty novel are memorable nuggets about love and loss, family and friendships, life and death, chance and choices, and the truth that what we make of all of it is always within our own power to foretell.
#12 The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Currently, as I enter my own dotage, I tend to gravitate toward novels with mature female characters; and the prickly Augusta Stern is a good example of the literary women I love. She’s smart and ahead of her time but also vulnerable despite all the hard edges she constructed to protect herself from disappointment. Set in a Jewish neighborhood in 1920s Brooklyn and a southern Florida retirement community in the late 1980s, the novel tells the life story of a woman who lived a long and full professional life as a pharmacist but who spent sixty-two years missing the only man she ever loved. When Augusta is reunited with her lost love, the mystery of their parting unfolds, and she learns that age doesn’t change who you are in your heart and it is never too late to begin again. I am not a lover of romance novels, but this one was not sappy. It is an enjoyable human story with fascinating historical context—Jewish food and folk remedies, old fashioned drugstores, gangsters, and women breaking the rules.
The rest of the books I LOVED and highly recommend (but not in any particular order)
What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer (2020) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ The first book I read in 2025 was this collection of poetry. This visceral, sensible book of poetry is all about being a sensitive and strong woman in a crazy world. I could rant and rave, rage, and rattle on about what it is to be a woman. I could do it with drama and a tad of style and be, perhaps, somewhat persuasive about what this life gives women to carry. But nothing I could say in an hour of rambling could say better than what one of the quiet little poems in this collection says about the life of a woman. Poetry is power to carry us forward toward light and wisdom. Daughter, mother, sister, wife, lover, caregiver, brilliant and fucked up all in one fell swoop. We are women. We are life and death, fury and love, says Kate Baer. And we are here, dammit. And from the best author’s note ever: “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is either purely coincidental or an act of deep-seated revenge.”
How About Now by Kate Baer (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ The last book I read in 2025 was Baer’s latest collection of poetry. As visceral and sensible as the collection above, but more nuanced and more soothing. In the five years between the two collections, the poet has not so much mellowed as she has wizened to the myth of women’s inferiority and is now matter-of-fact standing in her female power. Baer is less enraged, more accepting of the truth that we can control little in our lives and that we can (and should) let go of the ropes that bloody our palms holding on too tight. “The problem is the new life costs you the old one,” Baer opines. “How long it’s taken you to understand the difference between letting go and cutting through the rind.”
Lula Dean’s Little Free Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Belly laughing hilarious but also drop dead serious, this novel tells the story of a small southern town in the grips of a book-banning controversy. Archenemies since high school, Lula Dean (the town crank) and Beverly Underwood (a member of the school board), face off and all hell breaks loose. And when Beverly’s college student daughter returns to town and puts banned books in the covers of Lula’s “wholesome” books in her little free library, the town residents start reading and choosing sides. Miller is so clever in her use of well-known banned books—like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret and The Hemingses of Monticello—and she takes delicious digs at the circus of book banning in Florida and Senator Josh Hawley’s ridiculous book Manhood. The novel deals with issues of race and racism, sexuality, slavery and history, friendship and family, community, and the power of books and reading to enlighten us, bring us together, and set us fucking free.
Go As a River by Shelley Read (2023) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ It is rare that I enjoy a coming of age story. I simply do not find the mistakes and naivety of youth compelling (maybe because I’m entering my dotage). But the protagonist here is a woman, not a man, which is relatively novel, and the historical landscape is intriguing. Set in rural Colorado after WWII, the story bends along side a river, forbidden love, peaches, and a dam project that destroys a town and makes a flood of memories and mistakes and grief. I cannot relate to most of the choices Victoria makes, but I admire this protagonist’s strength, resilience, and inspirational effort to save her grandfather’s famous peach trees. A great story, good writing, and deft sensitivity overcome an awkward detour toward the end of the novel to leave the reader pondering the meanings of family, racism, war, the power of secrets to drown us, and the remedy of time to see us safely to the shore.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ A tale of two brothers, separated by ten years, misunderstandings, and profound grief. Both are struggling to cope with the death of their father and to find their footing in the world. They need each other, but neither knows how to traverse the chasm between them. Written with heart and melody, this story is about the space between a great loss and the beginning of a new life that must be charted out of sorrow. Intermezzo is hauntingly beautiful music about love and family, loss, meaning, the terror of loneliness, and the healing gift of forgiveness.
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Classic Anne Tyler. Absolutely nothing happens and you’re not disappointed. Because most days in our lives absolutely nothing happens. We are just ordinary folks doing the best we can, just like Tyler’s human characters. Simple weddings go off without a hitch. The routes of Sunday walks never vary. And maybe we adopt a cat. Not my favorite Anne Tyler, but solid writing, as always. She is an American literary treasure, and I LOVE her!
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ The God of the Woods is a brilliantly crafted novel. Quietly suspenseful, less the monsters of nightmares and more the horrors of our waking hours when we fear the world we know might swallow us whole. The parents at the heart of this horrifying story are loathsome. The father is cruel, and the mother is pathetic in her acceptance of her husband’s cruelty. But the stories of their lost children are compelling, heartbreaking, brutal. The stories of all the adults in the lives of the children who fail them offer a layered answer to the question: is it ever too late to do what is right? And, more to point of the god in the woods that haunts us, what price would we be willing to pay to free ourselves from the darkness?
The Bright Forever by Lee Martin (2006) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ A gripping, devastating tale about the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl in a small Indiana town, The Bright Forever is brilliant storytelling that unfolds from several perspectives, each stabbing you in the heart. Lee Martin is tender in his telling but also demanding, as his readers must turn every page with eyes wide open to the sometimes horrifying complexities of human character. Martin is a beautiful writer I greatly admire. I first read this book in 2018 after I met him at a book talk in St. Louis; and I reread it to prepare for his sequel to it, which was released in 2025 (The Evening Shades, below). I loved the novel at both readings, but this time around I appreciated its lovely crafting even more.
The Evening Shades by Lee Martin (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Lee Martin has an unassuming, quiet way with words. He writes like he is telling you a story on the front porch in the cooling evening hours of summer. But by the end of his telling, your heart is breaking and something in your soul has shifted. I love that genius in a writer. I admire that calm belief in the whisper of words by a writer who refuses to shout. Sneaky brilliant bastards—and I mean that in the bestest way! I envy this talent in great writers. Lee Martin is one of those writers, and The Evening Shades, a sequel to The Bright Forever (above), will quietly break your heart and shift something deep within your soul. It is a story about loneliness, the sometimes devastating consequences of our human failings, and the truth that love may come late and change everything.
A Bit Much by Lyndsay Rush (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Funny and light but brimming with wisdom, this laugh-out-loud and cry-every-20-poems collection is simply delightful. It is a diverting playlist of songs for women moving along imperfectly, juggling joy and madness, and being more than enough (and sometimes a bit much) though constantly undermined and undervalued by American society. “I’m going off the deep end/anyone want anything?…If anyone needs me for the next 2 hours/I’ll be just down the road/losing my mind.” I enjoyed losing my mind in this creative collection of poems, many to which I will return often.
The Wedding People by Alison Espach (2024) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Stuck in a dead-end job as an adjunct professor of English literature, reeling from her husband’s infidelity and her recent divorce, and still devastated by her failed attempts to get pregnant, Phoebe Stone is depressed and desperate. She has no parents or close friends to lean on, and when her cat dies she loses all faith in her ability to move forward. So she books a flight to Newport, Rhode Island, and a room in a swanky seaside hotel, where she has long dreamed of staying. She arrives at the hotel wearing a fancy green dress she’s had for years but has never worn, and she carries no luggage, her only needs at this point are the room service menu and the three remaining pills of her dead cat’s cancer meds she has tucked up in her purse. Although she’s not supposed to be there at all, the entire hotel having been reserved for a week-long wedding, she’s given the unoccupied penthouse room for one night. But as soon as she steps into the elevator with Lila, the force-of-nature bride, her suicide plan begins to unravel. What happens next is an extravagant wedding whirlwind, Phoebe swept up in Lila’s own personal drama as the two women strike up a quick, mutually fortuitous friendship. Phoebe endures awkward activities and hilarious interactions with the wedding people, and there is a deep and dark psychological dive into Phoebe’s life. It may sound crazy but it doesn’t read crazy at all that Lila and the wedding people will save Phoebe’s life (no spoiler here, because it’s clear early on that the pills Phoebe brought are hilariously insufficient, and she quickly admits to herself she wants to live but just doesn’t know how). Good pace, decent writing, and many tender moments as Phoebe faces her demons and leans into the oddly soothing company of strangers.
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ During the pandemic lockdown, Chloe Dalton raised a hare and learned everything there is to know about hares, in biology and literature and art; and then she let that hare teach her things about life she didn’t know she needed to learn. I bet you didn’t know you needed to know a thing or two about hares. But you do. And you also need a chance to learn what Dalton learned, that a relationship with one animal might be a good start for changing your perspective on the world.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2019) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel more poetry than prose, is … well … gorgeous. Words whisper and scream the cruelty and beauty of love and being made separate for difference, though that difference is the lovely texture of your soul. I had read Vuong’s poetry but missed this haunting immigrant story until a friend sent me a copy. Told in the form of a letter to a mother this novel paints the depths of longing and hurt, Vietnam, the war inside a son, and light that glimmers in the darkness.
Skinfolk by Matthew Pratt Guterl (2023) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Skinfolk is fine memoir, punching the reader in the heart while eschewing the sentimental. Guterl, a historian of race, writes frankly about his racially diverse family—white and black and brown, close and loving, bonded by kinship and shaped by the jagged edges of racism, from which their picket-fence, middle-class suburban upbringing cannot keep them safe. Without being a treatise on the privilege of whiteness, it exposes the depressing reality of a persistent racism in American society that cannot even be softened by liberal parents with all the best intentions in the world.
The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago before the Fire by Ann Durkin Keating (2019) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ This biography of Juliette Kinzie, an early white Chicago settler and historian of the city and the region, is a stellar example of the form. Keating not only makes the life of a woman mostly forgotten by history come to life, but she also uses biography as a lens to answer wider questions. Particularly fascinating is the erasure of Kinzie’s histories (not to mention her personal story), replaced by histories focused less on the family and community relationship of society and more on an individualistic, industrial, capitalist, male story that privileged politics and business and deemphasized women and the family. As the Great Chicago Fire became the before and after marker in the city’s history, so too the relevance of one woman. Who it is that writes our history is consequential, and within the ashes are stories told and retold, untold and rewritten. Juliette Kinzie understood this truth in 1844 when she published her first work, and it is no less true today, 181 years later. I don’t read many biographies, and when I select one to read I set a very high standard. The World of Juliette Kinzie ticks all of my persnickety boxes.
The Thursday Murder Club Series This year I read all five books in the Thursday Murder Club series, thanks to an old Springfield friend who thought I would like them. In fact, I loved them all. They are funny and fun and deeply human. The heroes are old people I want to be when I get old, and the stories of friendship and vulnerability and resilience are heartwarming as well as instructive. I recommend all of them, and here they are in the order in which I read them.
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman (2023) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Hard to believe murder, drug dealing, and antiques fraud can be adorable. But when the people cracking the case are four quirky pensioners at a retirement village it cannot help itself, I suppose. This fourth installment of the Thursday Murder Mystery Club series is funny and surprisingly poignant in places and I adored the characters. It’s Murder She Wrote x 4 + a British accent, which my daughter Mack always said makes everything better. I wish I could have read the series in order, but that’s the way the page turns when you want to read popular books from the library. I’d rather take them as they become available than wait for them one by one.
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (2021) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ The second installment of the Thursday Murder Club Mystery series is a hoot, same as the fourth installment. Long waiting times for library loans of these popular books forced me to be flexible in reading them. But I get why people love these Osman novels, and I am happy to share and wait my turn. They are murder mysteries, yes, cozies as amateur sleuthing novels are called; but I rather think their primary goal is to offer evidence that adventure and purpose are possible in our golden years, especially when we have great friends with whom to share them. The septuagenarian characters themselves are the point, not the murders they solve. I adore these old geezers (Ron’s term, not mine) who are grappling with all of the frailties and sorrows of old age but who are also, still, very much alive and kicking. I am especially fond of Joyce who says things like: “Blowing a man’s head off from four feet away probably doesn’t suit everyone. It wouldn’t suit me… Actually, perhaps it would suit me. You never know until you try, do you? I never thought I would like dark chocolate, for example.”
The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman (2022) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ The third installment of the Thursday Murder Club is more complex murder mystery plot and a bit darker than the other two I have read, but no less enjoyable. Great pace and punch and wonderful supporting characters—Viktor the ex-KGB spy is hilarious! But, of course, the four Thursday Murder Club members are the stars (Joyce is still my fave). I hope I am as sharp and as game for adventure when I’m eighty as this glorious gang of geezers—“each and every one…barking mad!”
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (2020) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Because of Richard Osman, I now want to live in a sleepy (wink wink) retirement community when I grow up. What a romp, this series, delightful and witty, tender and jolly good fun. I mean, who wouldn’t want to hang out with these four quirky septuagenarians, eating lemon drizzle cake and solving murders? “We are around death here a lot,” says Joyce, “but even so, not everyone is bludgeoned, are they?” I’ve now read all four books in the series and anxiously await the movie this summer and the next book this fall. (P.S. I enjoyed the movie, brilliantly cast, but it wasn’t as good as the book).
The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman (2025) ❤️❤️❤️❤️ Installment number 5 of the Thursday Murder Club is delightful, as expected. It is charmed with all the same qualities I love about the series: humor, fierce friendship, and old folks living life to the fullest. And, oh Joyce, you are still my favorite; although Ron is hobbling close behind you.
My three-heart books I enjoyed and recommend (in rough rank order)
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (2025) ❤️❤️❤️ Reading this book was a bit like looking down on myself as a historian. In this enjoyable novel, the protagonist Thomas Metcalfe is an English scholar in 2119 hunting a lost poem written in 2014. The historical empathy he feels for the poet and his wife Vivien, for whom the poem was written, is similar to the empathy I feel for the historical figures I study. Matcalfe’s work is set in the future, in the context of catastrophic rising seas and destroyed and endangered archives, which I suppose helps the author see scholarly research as a treasure hunt. I have news for him, scholarly research by a passionate scholar in any decade is a treasure hunt. I found myself cheering for Metcalfe and finding my own empathy for the flawed Vivien, although the poet himself possessed few redeeming qualities. In the end, I liked the novel as well as I am capable of liking a novel set in the future. I would have been happy to give the story an extra heart if it was set in the present or the past.
The London Séance Society by Sarah Penner (2023) ❤️❤️❤️ “May mercy be upon the man who finds himself the enemy of a vengeful medium.” Well, indeed, Mr. Morley, men who prey on women deserve their ghostly purgatory. Penner’s follow-up to the delightfully twisted The Lost Apothecary gives another woman, this time an apprentice of the occult in Victorian London, the power to dispense her unique form of justice. Given all the bad men currently in power, I could use a healthy dose of these stories, Sarah Penner, pretty please!
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig (2024) ❤️❤️❤️ Whether you give into the fantasy or read the protagonist’s story as embellished by her to give one young man, her former student, hope, The Life Impossible is a story of second chances. No matter how old we are or how much we have suffered, we can always find a way to see the world as new. Grace, a retired math teacher, is heartbroken and lost to herself, her life given up for dead, but on the island of Ibiza off the coast of Spain, she embarks on a magical (and ordinary) adventure.
The Switch by Beth O’Leary (2020) ❤️❤️❤️ Leena Cotton, 29, is a mess. She’s struggling to cope with the death of her younger sister, and she just blew a big meeting at work and has been put on a forced leave of absence to get her head on straight. Eileen Cotton, 79, is not only grieving the death of her granddaughter but she’s reeling from her husband’s desertion for a younger woman. The struggling Cotton women hatch a hail-Mary plan to save themselves by swapping places. Leena moves into her grandmother’s folksy Yorkshire cottage, and Eileen moves into her granddaughter’s hip London flat. What happens next is hilarious and heartwarming, as these two lovely and brave women go all in to make new friends, search for healing, and find new love as well as themselves.
Knife by Salman Rushdie (2024) ❤️❤️❤️ Rushdie’s tale of the knife attack at Chautauqua Institution in 2022 that nearly killed him and cost him an eye, seeks no pity. It is a matter-of-fact telling, a writer using his talent to try to make sense of a horrifying human experience (if that is even possible). It is a brave exploration of trauma and what happens when we lose our sense of security. Rushdie also weighs in on freedom of expression, the power of family, one-eyed characters in literature, and the dangers of religious fanaticism. I read this book right before going to Chautauqua, which was super freaky. But I can report that was not attacked when I delivered my lecture there, thank goodness. But then again, I do Abraham Lincoln and Rushdie does religious fanaticism.
The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (2015) ❤️❤️❤️ A couple of years ago, I fell in love with a fictional talking octopus named Marcellus. After reading his story in the phenomenal Remarkably Bright Creatures (on my all-time favorite book list), a friend recommended this lovely book. I finally got around to reading it, and now I love real octopuses, too! They really are remarkable and bright.
Saving Time by Jenny Odell (2023) ❤️❤️❤️ Hmm. Time. To contemplate it in some ways is to breathe it away with every word of the book and every thought it conjured. It was interesting to learn about the gendered, economic, social, and climate-crisis context of time, so much of which I had never before considered. It was fascinating to think about how time owns us, the ways it is commodified, and how people and jobs and society define it for us. I appreciated the historic context of time the author provided, particularly the background of CPT, a term my Black sister-in-law always used; a term I understood but had never fully comprehended its roots in resistance. And how humbling it was as I read to interrogate my own resistance and compliance and all the energy expended to control time across the decades and changing circumstances of my life. It is a privileged position to spend time thinking about time. Yet I am left wondering if knowledge regarding time is a sad substitute for the naïve mind of the child who believes time is endless and she will never die. As I have far more time behind me than in front of me now, I rather think I will now try to forget about time entirely.
Benevolence by Julie Janson (2022) ❤️❤️❤️ This story of a native Australian woman and the horrific cruelties of British colonialism is hard to take, page after page of violence and injustice. But you keep your heart open, because Muraging’s heart is open, her voice defiant, and her spirit strong.
James by Purcival Everett (2024) ❤️❤️❤️ James is a wonderful compliment to Huckleberry Finn. How obvious, and also how provocative, that two people can be on a journey together, but that one chose the journey and the other was forced to the journey changes everything. The good sense and compassion of James is breathtaking; and the juxtaposition of Huck’s youthful ignorance and James’s quiet intelligence is revealing. But this is an adventure story at its heart, and the relentless disasters—a house floating down river, a stint as a singer in a minstrel show, the explosion of a steamboat, and multiple captures and running away is too much for me. Man stories like this one just don’t float my river boat. However, I do honor Everett’s creativity in offering a brave counter narrative to an iconic story by one of the best American storytellers.
Good Taste by Caroline Scott (2023) ❤️❤️❤️ Stella is a writer working on a history of English food. It’s 1932, and she’s struggling to make ends meet while grieving the death of her mother and helping her father to cope. Despite the dark backdrop, this is a light-hearted novel, full of friendship and food. The history of various English dishes is interesting and the descriptions of food are wonderful (except when they get too British and veer into the offal). Stella’s journey as a writer and a woman finding her footing in an uncertain world is compelling, her collection of recipes and tradition is good fun, and watching her find herself and the spirit of her mother along the way makes for perfect escape reading.
The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Steeds (2025) ❤️❤️❤️ Moody as well as vibrant in its description of art and food and color this is the story of a French painter, the young Englishman who has come to write his story, and a young woman trapped between life and art. Good story, good writing, what more does a reader need? Well, I guess I need a bit more, because something was missing for me—although I don’t have any idea what it was.
Books I enjoyed but might not be for everyone… (In alphabetical order)
Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell (2025) ❤️❤️❤️ A psychopath. A bunch of wronged women. Diabolical deception. Murder. The latest Jewell is dark, twisty, horrifying, and uncomfortably delicious. Note: for the thriller reader.
The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel (2024) ❤️❤️❤️ The publisher called it a “radiant biography” (har har), but I’m not sure the book lived up to the polonium and radium (the two chemical elements Curie discovered), let alone the whole life of the most famous woman ever in the history of science. There is much detail and insight in the book about the chemist and her work, but the biography is not a particularly human portrait. Yet it is a decent, historically grounded biography that reveals much about Curie’s pioneering path in science and offers evidence of her personal integrity, her parenting of two brilliant daughters, and the women she mentored and inspired. And P.S. Did you know Marie Curie died from aplastic anemia, a result of her long exposure to radiation? Goodness sakes, but then again maybe that just makes her ordinary, just another woman in the history of the world broken down by her work. Note: for the science reader or lover of biographies, particularly those of women.
None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell (2023) ❤️❤️❤️ There are lies, damned lies, and the lies of Josie Fair. A fast and suspenseful story about birthday twins—Josie, a desperate housewife clad in denim; and Alix Summer, a glamorous podcaster who tells women’s truths. But Josie’s story is full of holes, and when she shows up at Alix’s home bloodied and bruised, it all goes dark and twisty in a hurry. I listened to the audio book, and the readers, music, and sound design made the listen great fun. The story lived up to its billing as a thriller. I probably won’t remember the plot or the characters a year from now, but None of This Is True was a very entertaining, 10.5-hour ride. Note: for the thriller reader.
This Dog Will Save Your Life by Elias Weiss Friedman (2025) ❤️❤️❤️ There might not be anyone in the world who loves dogs more than Friedman. He’s made a career celebrating dogs, making his mark on social media with The Dogist. His easy breezy book of short essays is an ode to our best furry friends, filled with heartwarming (and a few heartbreaking) stories. It’s a real dog treat, better than a whole box of milk bones! Follow the Dogist on Instagram. Note: for the dog lover.
Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic by Darren Main (2010) ❤️❤️❤️ Contrary to the word mystic in the title and the ancient traditions of yoga the author seeks to explain, this book is a readable, down-to-earth, modern interpretation of the eight limbs of yoga. It is one thing to practice the poses and breathing of yoga. It is another to integrate breath and movement and mindfulness on the yoga mat. And it is yet another to bring the totality of yoga and its benefits into a modern, American life. Darren Main offers stories and suggestions to do the latter. You don’t have to cloister yourself away from the world to be a true yogi and, in fact, to be a modern yogi is to take what we learn on the mat about our humanity and be better members of our families, our communities, and the world. I’m doing a lot of reading for my yoga teacher training course and had no intention of reviewing any of the books. But this one is as much about living a wholehearted life as it is about the ancient practice of yoga. And there is the deeply personal and lovely quality of good memoir here, too; it’s about one yogi’s yoga practice and his life journey to peace and wisdom. Note: for the serious yoga practitioner.
And, finally, the books I did not much like at all and do not recommend
The Women by Kristin Hannah (2024) ❤️❤️ Ugh. I hate it when I fail to take my own advice. I said I would not read another of Hannah’s novels, which always give me hope of a great journey and then drive me off the cliff of disappointment. But the audio version of The Women was available and I love historical fiction, so I checked it out of the library while I was waiting for my next requested audio book to be available. The writing is good and the beginning of this novel is solid (thus the two hearts). At first, I really liked the protagonist, a young nurse who volunteers to go to Vietnam. Frankie’s courage to serve, the development of her nursing skills practiced in terrifying conditions, and her tender relationships with other nurses are compelling. And then Frankie comes home from the war, and this book’s journey drives right off the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. Almost everything Frankie does after her return home is exasperating. Her stutters in peace given the courage she showed in war often make no sense whatsoever in the storyline. There are three ridiculous coincidences (a bad habit of Hannah novels) and one bizarre plot choice not worth explaining. Hannah’s point is to give life to the forgotten story of women serving in Vietnam, and that is important and I appreciate it. But by the end of the novel, I really didn’t care what happened to Frankie anymore.
Small World by Laura Zigman (2023) ❤️ ❤️ Joyce and Lydia are the most unlikable sisters I have ever read. Two divorced, childless, middle-aged women, they move in together and try and fail and try and fail to become friends. Though they blame their brokenness on their childhood, they really have only themselves to blame for being the annoying, grumpy grown-up women they are. I kind of hate them for hating their mother for spending so much of her energy on her third child, a severely disabled girl who died at the age of ten. I came around a little in the end, when Joyce and Lydia finally had an honest discussion, the pace of the story was easy, and I wanted to see what happened with their neighbors upstairs. But, meh. This novel is another one for my long list of books the New York Times book reviewers got wrong.
The Mango Tree by Annabelle Tometich (2024) ❤️❤️ If you believe people can remember dialogue from when they were five years old, then by all means, tuck into this memoir about a kid stuck between her Filipino and white identities. It is a decent story, albeit sluggish at the end, and it has some good writing and funny bits set in the Philippines. But crikey, I just didn’t find this memoirist a trustworthy storyteller.
The Woman in Suite 11 by Ruth Ware (2025) ❤️ This sequel to The Woman in Cabin 10 missed the mark by 10, at least, and the child voices the narrator performed in the audio book made the book ten times worse than it had to be. It was my first disappointing Ruth Ware. I wish the heroine Lo Blacklock had never got out of the North Sea alive in the first novel.
The Mysterious Bakery on Rue du Paris by Evie Woods (2025) ❤️ The ingredients of this half-baked pastry are lots of sap, a heaping cup of sleepy-time tea, and a few pinches of bullshit. I like cupcakes but not cupcakes like this female protagonist who goes to Paris to find herself and ends up in the burbs wearing a sexy red dress and high heels for a Frenchman in a Land Rover. Started okay, fell in the middle like an underbaked genoise sponge, and what a disappointing, fake-vanilla finish. Not mysterious at all. Just a damned Disney princess romance set in a French bakery. Yuck. I enjoyed Woods’ previous book, The Lost Bookshop, but this one’s a real claggy clunker unless you like stories where the man saves the day and sweeps the little lady off her feet.
She is still here, my Mack. She resides in my heart. She dances daily in my thoughts. She is every four-leaf clover. I tell her all the big stuff and the hard stuff and the stuff about which I know not what to do. Her good spirit laughs with me, cheers me on, and gives me courage in the dark. I will always need her, like I need water and air and doughnuts.
Mack Day, her birthday, is always a bad day and a good day. My tears and longing for her are more bitter, but I also celebrate her joy of being a leprechaun, quarter Irish and born on St. Patrick’s Day. As I have done eleven years now, I will take Mack Day to grieve my girl and to give myself space and a little extra grace. To sob alone and feel in my bones the loss of her. To eat something decadent for her. To belly laugh at least once for her.
This year is a discombobulating year of contrasts for me, and I have been thrown off balance.
As a historian supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, my livelihood, health benefits, and life’s work are in jeopardy. The assault on American democracy, the dismantling of our government, and the turning away of our country’s core values are making me physically and emotionally unwell. As a voter, what is happening enrages me. As a woman and a mother, I am horrified. As a human being who cares about the vulnerable people among us, I am terrified. And as a historian of American history, I am profoundly sad.
If Mack were here today, she would have wisdom for me to better navigate my anger, horror, terror, and sadness. She had this way of diffusing catastrophe, of redirecting negativity, and soothing anxiety. Her wit and her silly songs could walk me back from every ledge.
As I am missing her ever so keenly in this difficult historical moment, so too is her absence a fresh heartbreak as I meet my own personal, triumphant moment. I would do anything to have Mack with me to celebrate in April the publication of my new book Loving Lincoln, the deeply personal and most important creative achievement of my life. Oh my, would she have loved the cover of this book. It would have produced one of her famous cackles, and she would have been so proud of her Momma Bear and the book, giddy that her kindergarten drawing of Abraham Lincoln was published within it. I can hear her voice in her favorite refrain, “Lincoln is dead, mom, you know that, right?”
There are few things in this mortal life we can control. While I must face this Mack Day alone, I will go forth into the sunshine as best I can, with Mack’s good cheer in tow. I will let the tears flow (sorry, my dear girl), but I will also raise a Guinness. To Mackenzie Kathleen McDermott, I am grateful you were here. I was damned lucky to have such a daughter, a bright light who touched the lives of every person who knew her.
As I have always done, I will hug Mack’s spirit close to my heart, keep her quiet wisdom in my mind, and let her joy put the spring in my step. But perhaps during this year—this unbalanced, terrible, joyful year—I will find new ways for Mack to guide me, to inspire me, and to sally me forth through all the darkness and all of the light. And no matter what happens to me or my job or my country, I will endeavor to be good and to be true. To locate a new and lasting peace of mind. To honor Mack’s faith in me. To do justice to all she was and all she taught me.
Cheers and peace and happy Mack Day.
Mack poking fun of the scholarly nature of my first book, The Jury in Lincoln’s America, in 2012.
Pandemic. Social distancing. Restaurants and bars shuttered. Cultural institutions and libraries closed. Economic crisis. Political dysfunction. Sickness and death. Uncertainty. Shelter in place. Isolation. Time. Oh my god, it is bonkers, and there are hours and hours of extra time to allow my anxiety to overwhelm me and surrender my spirit to despair and loneliness. And Netflix. And biting my cuticles bloody and freaking the fuck out.
Breathe in through the nose. Breathe out through the mouth.
I refuse to give myself over to loneliness in this time of quarantine, because I am finally starting to crack the code for living alone in peace. Besides, I am not alone. I have my dogs, the internet, and a cell phone with unlimited usage. I’ve already had countless text conversations with my mom, sister, and several friends. I’ve enjoyed lengthy telephone calls with my daughter Savannah in Chicago and my friend Sandra in Springfield. I had a scheduled video chat with my friend Bridgett in Olney, who doubles as my writing coach. All of these “social distance” interactions with beloved people in my life brought laughter, wisdom, and brilliant inspiration.
Deep Sigh regarding Netflix, though, because it is tempting to settle down in front of it and binge watch for days and days. I will not waste time watching Netflix. I refuse to give myself over to Netflix. Ok, so here’s my plan: I will allow Netflix to provide limited, curated therapy. Because if I’m honest, all the news about infection rates and death tolls, economic losses and news about people who are losing their livelihoods, and the daily buffoonage from the White House will make me crazy. The kind of crazy that yoga or meditation or contemplative walking cannot soothe, let alone undo. That’s the kind of crazy that requires me to get out of my own head. That’s the kind of crazy I usually combat by hanging out with friends in a cozy, noisy pub or cheering for a team during a televised sporting event. Netflix will have to step up and be the pub or the basketball game. Periodic episodes of Schitt$ Creek will lighten my mood on rainy days when I cannot work in my yard or go for a long walk. Father Brown’s singular concern for the souls of murderers will make me believe, at least for an hour, that all humans can be cast in their own tales of redemption. And when I think the entire world is going to hell in a hand-basket, I’ll watch a few episodes of the Great British Baking Show and remind myself that healthy competition is, indeed, possible, and you do not have to kill everyone around you or step on people to win at cake, politics, or life.
I am lucky. I am grateful. I have worked from home as a scholarly editor for eight years, so I don’t have to figure it out or patch it together like so many people now are scrambling to do. My job relies on NEH funding, which makes me nervous. But for now, it is secure, my paychecks are coming, and I do not have to worry about food or shelter or paying my bills. My daily life will not change all that much, and I will continue to do work that challenges my mind and makes my heart sing. I am going to continue my yoga and meditation routine, and I intend to be restful and calm during this isolation. Instead of seeing this predicament as forced isolation, let’s say we are hibernating. We are bears, cute and cuddly and warm in our homes, resting up for all the living we will do when humanity finally kicks this pandemic’s ass.
With a little help from my human, furry, and television friends, I will be calm and keep my cool. In the space of that quiet solitude, that beautiful serenity in my lovely new home, I vow not only to stay calm and keep my cool but to also make the most of my time. To cook. To draw and to color. To freestyle my yoga practice. To read half a dozen books and make a worthy effort to catch up on the New Yorker. But most importantly to write. Hours and hours and hours of extra writing. I will keep writing in my daily journal as well as blog and work on the revisions of my memoir. I am going to spend so much glorious time at my computer writing that my aging knuckles will get sticky.
Last week in the Washington Post I read an interesting story about Isaac Newton. During the Bubonic Plague of the 1660s, Newton’s college closed, forcing him home to his family’s estate. While at home, he wrote a paper about some math he was working on (math that became calculus); and he sat under that famous apple tree. I will do nothing so important as inventing calculus or defining gravity in my isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. None of the trees in my yard produce anything big enough to knock brilliance into my head. However, like Newton I’m going to be creatively productive in my isolation. I’m going to engage my brain. I’m going to see all this extra me-time as a gift and do my amateur best to make the most of it.
I’ve already made scones and homemade granola and expended a lot of nervous energy doing “art.” Living well, especially under duress, is about the process and the journey. I’m not a chef or an artist, but I enjoy cooking; and drawing, I very recently learned, is a scary challenge that makes me smile like a fearless six-year-old on the monkeybars.
Writing a memoir walks a fine line between therapy and self-destruction. I know it, because that is what I have been doing since February 2019. I have been writing a memoir and walking a delicately fine line between healing my shattered spirit and endangering any healing progress I have made since losing my sweet Mackenzie in October 2014. Honest reflection is tricky business, and my honest report is that peering into your soul is both perilous and breathlessly rewarding. Finding the words to explain and to understand the difficult and winding path of my journey through grief has been a balancing act, indeed. But the reward for finding the words and striking that balance, through the very process of the writing itself, is peace.
When my daughter died, writing was the weapon I selected to battle my grief and to repair the many damages it inflicted upon my body and my being. Writing became my assertion of agency against the frailty of my humanity. The process of writing became a search for peace and the practice of writing its own kind of solace. Five years of steady writing—137 blog posts here at Being Mack’s Momma Bear and a nearly 200-page memoir of my experiences with grief redefined for me the meaning of peace and showed me how to find it.
When I started writing for my life, I did not understand that peace is not a destination; it is not a paradise at the end of a long journey or a utopia you win after a hard struggle. Rather peace is a state of mind you achieve for yourself at the precise moment, any moment along your way, when you find your balance within the disorienting storm of living. Every time you breathe in joy and exhale pain in the same breath, or level your achievements with your disappointments, or bank love against loss, or successfully walk the fine line between your therapy and your self-destruction, peace is your gift. Peace is not the absence of pain and sorrow; it is the acceptance of the hardships of living along with the precious gifts of being human. Peace is not a reward for traveling, it is your traveling companion.
Some people learn this truth far earlier in their lives than I did. Some people are born with this wisdom. Mack was. I think for most of us, however, real peace only comes after a great deal of eyes-wide-open, whole-hearted effort. For me, it was revealed through difficult, personal writing and honest evaluation of my experience with grief. My writing began as a personal journal but quickly became my therapy, and it was, ultimately, also a companion, a witness, and a great teacher. As I stand here at the doorway of a brand new decade, I am healthier for having spent half of the last decade writing my grief. I credit the personal writing I published on Being Mack’s Momma Bear for leading me toward peace and the memoir writing for revealing to me my capacity for finding it.
For the rest of my life, surviving the loss of my daughter will require eyes-wide-open, whole-hearted effort. A mother’s grief does not fade. I know there will be times when I will fail to maintain my equilibrium and to walk peacefully with all of my love for Mack and with all of the pain of losing her. Mack is still with me, I converse with her each and every day, and she will be with me for the coming decade, just as she was in the previous two. I am not done writing about my daughter. I am not done writing about my grief. I have just finally arrived at a place in my journey of grief that requires less therapy.
Mack in Monsaraz, Portugal, 2011.
Going forward, Being Mack’s Momma Bear will remain a space for me to share my memories of Mack and continue to process my grief when the need for it arises. Writing will always be the therapy I choose first for healing. But Being Mack’s Momma Bear will also be a space for me to write about books and writing, dogs, walking and yoga, friends, food, flowers and birds, history, politics, and peace. No matter the headspace I inhabit— mom, friend, professional historian, dog lover, bad poet, angry liberal voter, or middle-aged, single woman trying to understand our crazy and beautiful world—I am still Mack’s Momma Bear. I will always be Mack’s Momma Bear.
And so I keep the name Mack herself gave me, Momma Bear, to honor her; and I retain the blog title Being Mack’s Momma Bear to memorialize the continued presence in my life of Mack’s inspirational spirit. Hopefully, with a lot of grit, a little grace, and a dash of Mack-style humor, I will offer some insights about history and life along the way, share some honest reflections that might be of use, and serve up some simple truths about the loving, grieving, thrilling, terrifying, lonely, joyful nature of being human.
Peace, and Happy New Year to you all.
Me in Monsaraz, Portugal, 2011.
P.S. Wish me luck with the memoir. I spent half of one decade doing the personal work and writing it required, and editing and publishing the manuscript is my first goal for the new decade.
Writing saved my life. No joke. No lie. No hyperbole here.
I’ve been a writer my entire life—poetry and short stories in high school, creative writing minor in college, a few years as a journalist, an unsuccessful cookbook and children’s book author in adulthood, and twenty-six years as a historian, publishing two books and dozens of articles and essays. BUT, when Mack died in October 2014, I started writing for my life. I invested my Being Mack’s Momma Bear blog with the purpose of a life-preserver. The early days of writing helped keep my head above the water in the dark and stormy sea that was my grief. The writing helped me examine my experience with sorrow in real-time. It was a hard, ugly, messy business, but I felt the power of writing’s balm upon my shattered body and spirit. Turning the twisted knots of my grief into words and sentences that made sense in black and white was constructive and therapeutic and cathartic. Writing was a remedy for all the ways my grief ailed me. It saw me through the darkest tunnel and into the light. And it continues to fill my lungs with air, with life, and with courage.
Last year, I decided I wanted to make writing a bigger and bolder part of my life. I have a dream to purchase a large historic home and to create a serene writer’s retreat within it. I want to establish a place where all types of writers can come for quiet reflection and work, where authors visit to share their books with others, where poets practice, where creativity thrives, and where writing classes embrace the writing dreams of children, college-bound students, and adults who want to explore writing in their own lives. I can’t make this dream a reality tomorrow, or likely even soon, but I will someday make Mack’s Manor a reality in some form or another. The writing and the dream give me hope, push me onward, and are such good friends for my life’s journey, no matter what happens in the end.
While I save money and formulate plans for my writing retreat, I decided I wanted to teach some writing classes, to learn more about the process of writing and how different people approach it, and to share my enthusiasm for its healing power. I wanted to practice, if you will, what my writing retreat might be able to do. I created a Write Your Life class for an adult education program in St. Charles, MO, and I have spent the last six weeks as an excited newbie writing instructor working with a patient, kind, and creative group of students. Poor guinea pigs that they are, my first writing students will occupy a corner of my heart forever. Tonight will be my final class. Endings make me weepy, always have, and this ending will be no different. I do feel a happy sense of accomplishment for doing something scary, but I am sad it went by so quickly that I barely had time to breathe in all of the joy of it.
This little Write Your Life class of mine has been another important step on my road back to the core of my old self, and it marks good progress along my journey forward to a new life, to a new place, where there is peace and joy and grace. My first seven students have been a treat, and it has been my pleasure to inspire them to stretch the muscles of their creative spirits. Last week, one of those students—a delightful retired woman named Gloria who is finding a poet within her—gave me a thank-you box of chocolates and a little owl with solar-powered, light-up eyes. The owl was a perfect sentiment, because from this first class I was seeking wisdom to inform the future of the writer’s life I want to live. I think I found a little wisdom, at least I certainly learned a lot about the life in front of me. And in the eyes of my wise little mascot, the future looks bright (and happy?), indeed.
The milestones faced on the journey of grief generate profound feelings of loss and longing. Emotionally and physically painful are holidays, Mack’s birthdays, and the anniversaries marking the last day I saw her and the terrible day that I lost her. But as parents across the country are celebrating the First Day of School and marking important academic milestones in their children’s lives, I am celebrating the First Day of School, too. August back-to-school season stirs in me more joy and gratitude than sadness, because it marks the beginning of a new academic year for another talented recipient of the Mackenzie Kathleen McDermott Memorial Scholarship at Truman State University.
As fragile mortal beings, our time on the planet is limited, and there is so little time to make an imprint on the world. The best that most human beings can do over the course of a lifetime is be true to themselves, be kind to others, and apply their particular talents for some sort of greater good. In just twenty short years, Mack accomplished what it takes most of us sixty years or more to understand and to achieve. She was always true to herself, comfortable in her freckled skin and confident in her definition of herself as an athletic, nail-polish wearing, goofy intellectual. She was never mean-spirited, judgmental, or unkind. She used her talents of humor, charm, and unconditional love to make a significant and lasting impression on the lives of her family members and friends. And because of the impact Mack made on the people who had the good fortune to know her or to make her unforgettable acquaintance, an endowed scholarship in her name at her alma mater perpetuates her beautiful spirit. Therefore, every August, Mack goes back to school, too, making a difference in the life of another special young person who is preparing to share their talents with the world.
Laurie Shipley, a senior from Kansas City, Missouri, is this year’s scholarship recipient. Laurie, who will earn a BFA in the spring, is a creative writing major, a Spanish minor, and a member of the Truman State Color Guard. Her Spanish minor led her to a study-abroad term last summer in Costa Rica, where she took classes in Alajuela. After graduation, Laurie will be staying on at Truman to earn a Master’s degree in education. She plans to become an elementary school teacher and is anxious to share her love of literature and writing with students.
The reason why back-to-school season is special for me should be abundantly clear, and I am sending big-Mack hugs to everyone who is celebrating a milestone First Day of School this August. For me, the season will always be a time to celebrate Mack’s beautiful life, to rejoice in her spirit alive in the world, and to feel gratitude for all of the people who have contributed to the scholarship these past four years (a special shout-out to the Sunrise Rotary Club in Springfield, Illinois, for their renewed annual contribution). Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for loving Mack. And thank you for helping us to immortalize the impact of Mack’s beautiful life, one beautiful student at a time.
The Mackenzie Kathleen Memorial Scholarship Fund
Truman State University Foundation
205 McClain Hall, Kirksville, MO 63501
800-452-6678 http://www.truman.edu/giving/ways-of-giving/
I was there to seek the company of the dawn redwood trees, upon the deeply fissured trunks of which there is written an ancient wisdom and under the branches of which I often find comfort. I was feeling a great deal of anxiety, as I always do at the end of a project that has consumed much of my creative energy and intellect over a long stretch of time. Instead of embracing a contented feeling of achievement, my mind was restless from the release of its previous intensity of purpose; my body was stiff and sore with the lingering memory of the labor, hanging tight and clinging heavy to my bones. It is a regular, and peculiar, ritual with me that the completion of a piece of writing about which I feel so damn good also leaves me, in the bargain, feeling so damned lost. It is similar to the sorrow that overcomes me when I read the last word on the last page of an extraordinary book. It feels something like the loss of a friend, or a missed opportunity, or a misplaced treasure. To complicate my trouble with endings, I also frequently feel a little off-balance within the uncomfortable and uncertain space in my mind that occupies the time between the end (or death) of one creative project and the beginning (or birth) of a new one. It makes me feel quite lonely, very sad, and sometimes a little crazy, too. Usually I can conquer on my own any negative energy that should never cling to a successfully completed project in the first place, but sometimes I need a little outside help to do so.
The Missouri Botanical Garden has become for me not only a physical sanctuary but an emotional and intellectual one. It is a place where nonjudgmental spirits reside and where I find both relief and inspiration. The garden has become my happy refuge and a cherished friend. It grounds my restless spirit to the earth, provides solace to my broken heart, and refreshes my tired mind. It is where I go to be uplifted by the songs of birds and to be renewed by the wondrous, ever-changing colors and shadows of all of the seasons of nature. It is where I go to walk with my memories, my sorrows, my hopes, my worries, and my intellectual and creative ideas. It is where I go to conquer the uncertain and uncomfortable in-between spaces in my mind. Yesterday, the latter was my need for the garden, and to be in the presence of the majestic Metasequoia was my singular purpose. I made a brisk and determined path to the redwoods in the back of the garden, noticing neither the birds nor the colors and shadows along the way. So eager was I for those trees to release me from my burdens, I had ignored all other greetings of the garden and offered my happy refuge, my cherished friend, no greeting of my own, either.
But, thankfully, Mack was in the garden yesterday, too.
As I followed the path, curving around the Victorian section of the garden and leading toward the stand of the dawn redwood trees, Mack popped up in my mind at precisely the moment that a single snow crocus, poking up through a carpet of old autumn leaves, popped into my peripheral vision. “Slow down, Mamma Bear,” she whispered. “Walk with me.”
It was then that I first noticed the warmth of a long-missing sun and the crisp breeze upon my face. It was then that the nurturing characteristics of the garden began to work their magic upon my tired body and to ease the discomforts of my restless mind. We started walking, Mack and I, under the branches of the dawn redwoods, and for more than two hours we mindfully strolled. Along every path, we spied chipmunks scurrying in bushes and we looked for the shiny blades of new-born leaves peeking up through the dirt and promising the coming of spring flowers. In the Japanese garden, we chatted with some turtles sunning on rocks and laughed at the awkward and silly cypress knees randomly jutting up out of the ground. We lingered at every statue we passed, we found some pansies in the home garden, and we sat for a spell on a bench in the woodland garden, enjoying the soothing sound of the water gently falling over rocks on its way down the stream. Everywhere we walked, we listened to the songs of the birds and took in all of the colors and shadows that a glorious pre-Spring day in the Midwest has to offer.
I did not think about the past. I did not worry about the future. I did not think about the end of my completed project. I did not contemplate the challenges of my new one. I just walked, with Mack, breathing easy and settling my mind upon the present. When I finally made my way to the exit, the in-between space in my mind had closed. I whispered my gratitude to Mack and to the garden, and I headed for home, basking in the satisfaction connected to rewarding work and the successful completion of a creative project and happily looking forward to a new creative project on the horizon.
I am on a rough patch of the road on my journey without Mack. Since mid-December, the absence of her laughter is a loud and painful silence in my ears. My yearning for her wise commentary on our upside-down world is beating out of my chest. I am furious with the universe for stealing her away so soon. Too soon. Holiday blues, which fester into the January cold and gloom, sit heavy upon bones, intensifying the pain of all grief. I accept this truth, because I have seen it with my own brown eyes for four holiday seasons past. But this rough patch is different than the others. It is angrier and sharper, and it is palpable and relentless.
This time the road is not so much a sharp and treacherous s-curve through the loneliness of my loss, but rather it is a stretch of road bumpy with injustice. This rough patch is not only personal, but also political. It is a consequence of my grief for Mack, aggravated by my grief for the evil in the world. It is fueled by my anger at men who abuse their power over women, who use their authority to inflict harm upon women, and who disrespect the humanity of women. You see, Mack’s dream was to write TV shows with purpose. She was planning to create strong female characters, craft stories and dialogue that empowered women, depict the intelligence, dignity, and hearts of women, and demonstrate the beauty and strength of equality, diversity, and justice for all of us. Mack wanted to use her voice to celebrate women. And it really pisses me off that the universe gave despicable men like Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, and Larry Nassar so much time to degrade and to terrorize women and denied my sweet baby her chance to raise her voice in behalf of women.
Most of the tears of a mother’s grief fall for a bright future denied a promising child. Every single day I breathe, I miss Mack’s presence in my life, but I also mourn all of the years she is missing, all of the experiences she will never have, and all of the beauty she would have spread out into the world if she would have had more time. It is bitterly unfair that such a heart as hers is gone. Mack missing from the world enrages me. As anyone who has ever endured the loss of a child knows, much of the struggle is keeping yourself from becoming adrift in a sea of anger. Sometimes, however, our strength fails us and we wade out too far into the dangerous water.
This particular patch of angry grief sits at the intersection of personal and political grief. Or, in other words, it sits in juxtaposition with my anger over the ongoing stories of sexual assault and harassment these past weeks and, specifically, the horrendous story of abuse of girls at USA Gymnastics. The abuse, injustice, and inequality that women continue to experience in our supposed enlightened society has incensed the liberal feminist human in me as I know it would have incensed the liberal feminist human in my Macko. But late this week, my grief and anger overwhelmed me, as I read about the evil that Dr. Nassar perpetrated against the female gymnasts whose bodies and wellbeing were entrusted to his care. I wept as I listened to the courageous testimony of the survivors, whom so many grownups had failed to protect. In my grief for them, my grief for Mack bubbled over and beyond the bounds of my strength to endure it.
It is hard for me to explain this complicated emotion and to characterize the ways in which grief intensifies the force of all other feelings. But I think it is just simply this: that a broken heart forever breaks more easily. Since I have chosen to feel the pain of my grief, instead of to bury and deny it, I must feel the full force of every other emotion that comes over me. I accept the reality that the full force can be cruel and that my response to it is not always courageous. My knees buckled under the strain of it all on Friday evening, relentless tears and anxiety bearing down upon me. Therefore, I spent the weekend cleaning up the debris of this particularly violent collision between my grief for Mack and my grief for humanity. It was not a pleasant two days, I assure you. Yet the weekend culminated, finally and thank goodness, with a particularly therapeutic session of what writing coach Natalie Goldberg calls “writing down the bones.”
I am still angry and sad and probably vulnerable, too. But, oh my, I do feel a lot better. For me, writing releases the negative energy that threatens my wherewithal and zaps all of the resources of my survival. Thank goodness I can let it go out of me along with the emotions pouring out of my heart, through my fingertips, and onto the page. The sharing is good, too; so thank you for listening. And don’t you worry about me, because Mack is here. She never liked it when her Momma Bear was angry, so she’s with me now, helping me breathe. She also promises that tonight will bring a good sleep, and that tomorrow morning will bring…
Three years ago this day, Mack slipped away from us, quietly, unexpectedly, and so very far away in Spain. She was a towering, colossal presence in the lives of her family and her friends, and the holes in our hearts from her absence are deep and wide and enduring.
Recently, my dear friend Bridgett, who is both a writer and a gifted listener for wisdom on every breeze, wrote a blog about hope and an Emily Dickinson poem I once loved but had long forgotten: “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.” Deconstructing the image of hope as a delicate bird, my friend wrote: “hope is dogged and rough and resilient. Hope resides in the dimmest doorways and the darkest corners of our lives. Hope grows up from the disaster and the dirt, the fertile floor of grief.”
That passage got me thinking about the residence of my hope, along the path of my grief. Perhaps once…before…hope was “a thing with feathers” that perched in my soul. But when a soul is grieving, there is no room for the perching; and along the way these past three years, hope’s song has sometimes gone silent. In missing Mack’s giant presence in my life, in longing for her love and her laughter, and in lamenting all that a short life denied her, I have spent thirty-six months reflecting on loss, on life, and on learning the human balance of both. What I have been chasing all along, I now understand, is hope. Hope is the fire of our expectations, aspirations, desires, simple plans, and grand ambitions. Hope resides in that space between loss and living. Hope is food for a life worth living; and like all food, Mack would want us all to consume it, to take delight from it, and to appreciate the nourishment it offers.
In those bitter first days in early October 2014, I witnessed the flight of hope from my soul. Yet in the early fog of my grief I somehow knew, wondrously and thankfully, to reach out and grab it. When such a force of nature as Mack takes her leave, hope flies away with her. Hope was no longer within me, but I instinctively knew that I needed to keep it within sight. Hope came first in the face of my daughter Savannah, for hope resides, for mothers at least, in precious children. But since my mother’s hope for Mack could no longer reside in her body, I needed to find a way for hope to reside in her spirit, instead. The establishment of the Mackenzie Kathleen Memorial Scholarship at Truman State University, where Mack learned to fly, provided a residence for my lost hope for her. Now hope resides in that scholarship. It resides on a pretty little campus in northern Missouri. It resides in the students who have benefited already and will continue to benefit in the future. It resides in an enduring legacy of Mack’s passion for writing. Even though I will sometimes fail in my grief to see it, hope will always reside there, waiting for me to reclaim it.
Today, as we mark the third anniversary of Mack’s passing, I am so proud…and bursting with hope…to announce that the scholarship that bears her name has its third recipient, a small town, Missouri girl named Athena Geldbach. The scholarship will help this studious, serious-minded young woman minimize her college debt and play a small role in her hopes of writing books and pursuing a career in publishing so that she can also help other hopeful writers. Athena has some charming characteristics that remind me of Mack. She has a passion for books, a devotion to pets, and is a liberal arts dreamer who is also, oddly, a math whiz (Mack did calculus just for fun; Athena is a math tutor at Truman). Mack always said she had a super-powered, two-sided brain; and, apparently, Athena has one of those, too.
Today, while you are all, like me, grieving for Mack a little more tearfully, missing her a little more terribly, and feeling the hole she left in your hearts a little more keenly, I send you love and a big-Mack hug. And I send you hope. Because in loving Mack and keeping her spirit always with you, some of my hope resides in you. I have learned that it really doesn’t matter where hope resides; it simply matters that it lives.
The Mackenzie Kathleen Memorial Scholarship Fund (for creative writing students) Truman State University Foundation 205 McClain Hall, Kirksville, MO 63501 800-452-6678 http://www.truman.edu/giving/ways-of-giving/
enduring.
Being Mack's Momma Bear 