summer wrap-up :)
THE SEASON OF LOSING
BLOGGER’S NOTE: I started writing this post in August 2023, then left it alone for a while. In the time that elapsed before I returned to it, Israel has begun a genocidal bombardment of Gaza with an intent to kill or displace the 2.1 million Palestinians who live there. As of November 22, the Palestinian death toll is over 14,000. More than 40% of the dead are children. According to the Washington Post, “The United Nations — which has lost more than 100 of its employees — has called the conditions ‘horrific,’ describing Gaza as ‘a living nightmare’ and ‘a graveyard for children.'“ (Emphasis mine.)
I don’t feel I can self-publish anything without addressing this first. Please contact your representatives and demand that they support a ceasefire resolution. Until Israel allows aid into Gaza, your donations will not reach them, but there are so many other ways to get involved. Read about the current activism taking place in your area. Join or plan a protest/walkout/action. Support legal funds for activists who get arrested for calling for an end to this violence. Look up local Palestinian restaurants and businesses and bring your friends and family there. Speak out about Palestine wherever and however you can. They need you. It does make a difference.
Thank you for reading this. Now, here’s a very late summer recap. Tonally very different from what I just said, but I don’t have a better segue.
First off, WE HAVE A NEW LOGO!! Courtesy of my friend Madi. Isn’t she cute?
Second off, I’ve been gone for a minute. I was working on a melodramatic essay about why (not related to the content of my most recent post, a different melodramatic essay), but from the start it felt wrong and weird to share, and like I was too close in time to those events to fully understand all those emotions. Maybe this is a sign to actually use my journal for journaling. Withholding is good! Withholding is my new thing! says the writer working on not one, but Two autobiographical novels simultaneously. Don’t worry, I see the irony. But in my personal-slash-professional life, like, maybe I don’t need to sell my raw unformed thoughts. I can think about things before discussing them (incredible) and I don’t have to have an immediate take on anything.
But I digress. This summer was overwhelming and busy and slow and lazy all at once. It was the summer of reeling, the summer of whiplash, the summer of losing. I spent July in Portland / at Tin House, and August recovering from the post-workshop hangover and emotional exhaustion of the trip. I was born in San Francisco, and shortly after my family left for New York, most of our family friends also fled the rapidly-gentrifying Bay Area for the already-gentrified Portland. Included in this migration was my parents’ close friend Grace, a former student of my father’s during his brief stint as an art professor. Grace was an integral member of the rotating cast of glamorous artists and designers that surrounded my parents in San Francisco. She was just always around. I could count on her to read me books and wrap me in the warmest, safest hugs without hesitation. I was the flower girl at her wedding.
Five years after we moved, Grace and her husband Aaron had a daughter, who we’ll call Hana. As of last month, she just turned thirteen. We received a regular stream of photos and text updates throughout her life, but none of us had met her in person before. When I got my Tin House acceptance, the first person I thought of was Hana. Grace always told my mother how much Hana reminded her of me as a child – sibling-less, shy, and sweet, always with her nose in a book. I asked Grace if I could fly in a few days before the workshop and stay with them.
For three days, I went with Hana to bookstores and parks and an art book fair and tried very hard not to think about what would’ve happened had none of us left the Bay, if we’d gotten to grow up together, if I’d gotten to be a real fixture in her life. She’s hilarious, brilliant, creative – an endless well of empathy, gentleness, innocence. She tore through the 500-page Junji Ito manga I bought her in a single hour. She waxed poetic about the Warrior Cats book series and the elaborate lore of the Splatoon video games. The love I felt for her by the third day was overwhelming in its fierceness. It felt like she’d been in my life for years. We got boba and ice cream and so many books. She destroyed me in MarioKart every night.
In the kitchen on my last morning there, Grace told me, Hana told us last night while you were out that you feel like her big sister. She could barely finish the sentence before we both burst into tears and hugged each other tightly.
At the art book fair, I paid $20 for Hana’s first tarot reading (I am fully committed to providing her with accurate lesbian representation), and then paid a cartoonist $15 to draw us in a quasi-manga style.
How are you related? the cartoonist asked us as she selected her marker colors for our portrait.
I glanced at Hana, who was examining some handmade earrings in the booth, steeped in her characteristic silence. We’re sisters, I said, and I saw her tiny smile.
The morning the workshop started, Grace and Hana drove me to Reed College. I hauled my suitcase out of the trunk and gave Hana a last tight hug. She pressed an envelope and tiny Pusheen keychain plushie into my hand. This is for you. Grace teared up taking a photo of us. They got back in their car and drove off. I checked in with the Tin House organizers and went to my dorm room. In a daze I unpacked my books, put my sheets on the regulation twin XL, and finally opened Hana’s card. Inside, she had drawn a replica of the cartoon of us. Arrows labeled me “Big sis Mia” and her “Little sis Hana.”
I put the card and Pusheen down on my desk and broke down in sobs.
Naturally, it was hard to focus on the life-changing workshop I’d flown across the country for while reeling from the pain of suddenly having the little sister I’d always dreamed of, then being forced to leave her right when I found her. Throughout the week of Tin House I often woke up gasping in the middle of the night, missing her.
When I got back to New York, I was fucking wasted. I felt I hadn’t made the most of my Tin House experience, but at the same time it was more social interaction with strangers in five days than I’d had in five years. The social burnout combined with all the missing – missing Grace, Aaron, Hana, my godmother, countless other family friends, my distinguished ex Emma who made her parents drive three hours down from Seattle so we could hang out – left me completely emotionally wrung out. I spent most of the month of August in recovery, surrounding myself every day with my closest friends, and my heart filled to bursting. All that feeling had to go somewhere, so on the second-to-last day of August I fell for a stranger – just in time to count as the summer fling I had been trying to manifest all year. And sure, most of that fling took place in September, but it was also during a gnarly heatwave, so I say it counts as summer. All I have left to say on that whole situation is: be careful what you wish for.
I said at the top of this newsletter that this was the summer of losing. I don’t mean that in terms of, like, winning vs. losing, but in the more literal sense. It felt like I kept getting everything I ever wanted and then losing it after just a taste of what it felt like: Hana, the community I made at Tin House, the girl I met in late August. I know I haven’t lost Hana, not really – after Portland I’ve been making a huge effort to be a more consistent presence in her life, and we Facetime twice a month, but you know what I mean. She’s on the other side of the country, and she’s entering her teenage years, and I’m so scared that when she starts high school and the puberty and angst set in it’ll tear her away from me again. Boarding my flight back to New York felt like a small death.
In the aftermath of this summer, I’ve been trying to reframe my thinking. I struggle with living in the present. I’m always worrying about the inevitable partings. I channel my inner Roman Roy and pre-grieve every heartbreak. I bring the future sadness into the now, wasting the precious little time we have left together by devastating everyone involved. So instead of viewing myself as having “lost” these people, I’m trying to just be grateful for the time we spent together. I’m trying to #liveinthemoment and let myself feel the joy people bring me without any self-imposed strings, no matter how long they remain in my life.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, this summer I read so many good books and was introduced to so much good music. While in Portland, another family friend took me to a Le Tigre concert. I knew of Kathleen Hanna – Bikini Kill was a favorite band of many staff writers at the feminist magazine I wrote for in college. (Typical.) But I had never listened to Le Tigre seriously until this show. (In the pit beforehand, this friend told me Le Tigre was my MUNA, which was a perfect analogy to get me hooked.) Now I can’t stop bumping to “TKO” and mourning the riot grrrl movement I never got to experience. I should’ve been a feminist punk in the 90s. Instead, I’m an overly literate waif with a blog.
Without further ado, the blog in question. Wrap-ups for September and October are in progress, but I want to keep releasing these in order, so they’ll come a bit later. I hope you enjoy this taste of summer in November. <3
Monthly playlists of 2023 so far: January / February / March / April / May / June
My top songs of the summer (in no particular order, courtesy of my brain):
This song is the auditory equivalent of doing a line of coke cut with glitter. I listen to it when I’m running late to something and need to push my legs into higher gear – it unlocks my turbo mode, even in heels (as I’m often running late because of heels). I feel like I am literally Margot Robbie’s Barbie running from Will Ferrell in an office complex. If we could bottle the sheer power of this song, we could eliminate fossil fuel use in this country by the end of the year.
What did they put in the Barbie movie soundtrack? And can I get it in pill form?
Le Tigre, to me, is tween slumber party rock. When their music comes on, especially this song, I want to start a pillow fight that bruises.
I am about to say a phrase that will age me ten years: they just don’t make music like this anymore.
NEXT STOP! ATLANTIC AVENUE! NEXT STOP! CHRISTOPHER STREET! NEXT STOP! TRANSFER TO THE! NEXT STOP! A, C, OR E!
self-portrait I love being a lesbian. And FUCK Jimmy Fallon. (According to JD Samson of Le Tigre, this song is partially about Jimmy Fallon treating them like shit at a party. But mostly, it’s a song about butch pride.)
For her birthday, I took Madi (the artist behind my new logo!) to a Le Tigre concert at Brooklyn Steel. We’d never been to a concert together before. The energy of the sold-out crowd filled with other lesbians, most ten or twenty years older but still ready to rock, healed a gash in my heart I hadn’t realized was there. “Viz” is Madi’s favorite song, and as JD sang the final pre-chorus (I find another butch, hat cocked, and we / we throw our hands in the crowd / and over and over we jump up and down / THEY CALL IT CLIMBING, WE CALL IT VISIBILITY) the two of us grabbed onto each other’s forearms and bounced wildly together, our faces sliced by massive grins, singing at the top of our lungs. It’s one of my happiest memories of this summer. THEY CALL IT WAY TOO ROWDY, WE CALL IT FINALLY FREE!
IT IS REALLY VERY SIMPLE: I DO WANNA BE IN LOVE! WHO DOESN’T!
“Expert In A Dying Field” – The Beths
When New Zealand sends its musicians, they are sending their best. The title track from the Kiwi quartet’s latest album asks the question: “what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life?” (Source: The Beths’ Spotify bio.) For the first quarter of this calendar year, I was in a relationship with someone who I needed to put all my energy into understanding if I wanted to anticipate the direction of her sudden mood shifts and attempt to head them off. It took too long after we ended for me to realize it had always been a losing game. She would never admit this, but what she wanted was someone who could read her mind, not a mere mortal like me. One second she’d shower me with kisses and twist with laughter beneath me in bed, the next she’d go cold and turn away from me. I feel like I’ve fucked something up without understanding how, I said way too often, pleading for clarity. You haven’t, she’d respond curtly, which provided little comfort. Then she’d turn off the lights.
Long after she was gone, I still found myself mentally behaving as though I was still in the relationship. Part of my day job is working on a truck filled with books, and every time I rode along with it during our summer season I found myself scanning the shelves for titles she’d enjoy. It was hard to admit I had lost myself. I spent so much time trying to figure someone else out that I no longer knew how to care for someone who wasn’t her. This song perfectly encapsulates this feeling of being “an expert in a dying field”–the dying field, in this case, being your lover. Down with academic curiosity! It’s time to move on!
I’m writing this in November 2023 and have just finished reading Biography of X by Catherine Lacey. No further spoilers at this time, but this song and this book pair extremely well together.
Several years too late I have finally entered my Lucy Dacus phase. Out of the sad white lady trifecta I was primarily a Phoebe Bridgers fan, but lately I’ve been finding more comfort in the uptempo softness of Dacus’ records, especially her latest, Home Video. “Brando,” a track from this record, reminisces on a juvenile relationship with someone “whose whole personality was the media he consumed,” according to Dacus. We all had a relationship with someone like this in high school – it’s a canon event in American adolescence. Listening to “Brando” takes me back to being thirteen and reading The Great Gatsby in one night because a girl I was crushing on said it was her favorite book and she couldn’t believe how uncultured I was. (Several years later, she would confess she had never read it.) Even though a decade’s passed since then, I only achieved catharsis after hearing this song and being able to declare you never knew me like you thought you did.
For the record, at age thirteen my favorite book was Fearless. A friend read it in sixth grade and made me check it out of our school library. I cried violently after reading it. Tim Lott’s no F. Scott Fitzgerald, but at age eleven (and twelve, and thirteen) I didn’t give a fuck.
I did know before it started that this August would be a hard one. It’s always the most mournful month. Face what you failed to achieve this summer. Face the coming end of the year and Virgo season with its expectations of renewed productivity even in soon-to-descend 4PM darkness. August is a precipice of a month and it has always felt this way to me, even without the pressure of going back to school. When I saw MUNA at Terminal 5 earlier this year, Katie Gavin said this song was about finding a way to make peace with your sadness and hold space for it instead of fighting it and hurting yourself – Tonight I feel I’m draped in it like a loose garment, I just let it flow. I am trying to be better at this, at letting myself just feel my feelings without resistance. It’s hard, but I’m trying.
Books I read this summer
Good Boys: Poems by Megan Fernandes ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Poetry is a genre that truly feels so subjective and which I myself have not studied enough, so I don’t feel capable of commenting with certainty on the quality of any given work. All I’m capable of is telling you how it felt to read. And Megan Fernandes’ first poetry collection, GOOD BOYS, felt like plane-hopping and rushing and running and dreading and raging, raging, raging. There is a propulsive urgency and fight in these pages that turns my body red-hot with grief.
Excerpt from “Amsterdam”:
I want to go back and see Anne Frank’s
house this time, because this time,
I am a woman and last time, I was a girl
and when you are a girl, all you see is another girl
and when you are a woman, all you see is history
careering towards a girl whom you cannot protect.
I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Two months after I first read this collection, a new lover told me, Your writing makes me want to pay more attention, to notice how it feels to fall in love. As I sit here, I can’t think of better words to describe the exact power of I Do Everything I’m Told, so I won’t try. Instead, I’ll leave you with the final lines of “Drive,” one of my favorites from the collection.
I say things and then unsay them. It was love. It was not love. It is raining. It is not raining.
Contradictions are a sign we are from god. We fall. We don’t always get to ask why.
Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This lush, brutal, unflinching short story collection set entirely in north Florida (!!!) mainly focuses on Black girlhood / coming of age. It’s haunting and visceral and completely, utterly gorgeous. Genuinely what more could you want?
The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 1 – 1931-1934 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Imagine being so smart and interesting and sexy and selfless that all your therapists keep falling in love with you…
Anaïs Nin might be the most interesting white bisexual woman to ever live. CANCEL ME FOR THIS IF YOU MUST. But it’s true.
Star deducted for being French.
Break.up by Joanna Walsh ⭐️⭐️
I’ve been wanting to read this book for years since I found it in my college’s library in sophomore year, but I regret to inform you all that I was sorely disappointed. It seemed right up my alley at first. A woman travels Europe to get over someone she never really dated, but exchanged many (often erotic) emails with… DEEPLY me-coded. But honestly this whole thing could’ve been a short story. There were individual lines I found beautiful, and the writing isn’t bad, but I spent the whole book Waiting for Anything to happen and nothing ever did.
I also wish her ex had been humanized more - autofiction about exes is only compelling if we understand why you loved them in the first place, but every line of dialogue from the ex is the most hurtful thing I’ve ever heard, and it had me wondering why the narrator even misses him. We never see any of the good parts, just his cruelty, which makes it hard to become fully invested in her emotional landscape. Ugh. I don’t know. I’m bummed out.
FREE STRAIGHT WOMEN. They are in CRISIS.
We Are Watching Eliza Bright by A.E. Osworth ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A novel about gamergate narrated by Reddit incels? Sign me the fuck UP!
Genius narrative choices. Tension so thick and intense the book itself seems to vibrate. I have never read 400 pages so fast. If you like fiction formatted as chatlogs (who doesn’t?) you need to pick this up expeditiously.
A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Do you like having your nipples twisted during sex? Then you’ll love this short story collection.
Real Americans by Rachel Khong (coming April 2024) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
RACHEL KHONG HIVE RISE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Khong’s debut, Goodbye, Vitamin is one of my favorite debut novels of all time – quiet, sad, darkly funny, peppered with random scientific facts about animals. Her sophomore novel, forthcoming in April from Knopf, is a gorgeous intergenerational epic that tells the story of Lily Chen, her son, and her mother as they each reckon in turn with life-shattering truths that alter the course of their family forever. Through each expertly-paced section, Khong explores themes of fate, luck, privilege, GENETICS, and destiny with incredible clarity and empathy. I am manifesting a national book award for this novel. Calling it right fucking now.
Thank you Rachel and Knopf for the ARC! I did not receive this copy in exchange for an honest review. Part of the second section takes place at my alma mater, which Rachel and I both attended. I helped her out with a few of the details related to how the school runs today, so she sent me a copy as a thank you. BUT I LOVED IT. SO HERE IS MY HONEST REVIEW. YOU SHOULD PREORDER IT NOW. It will change your LIFE.
Passing by Nella Larsen ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
My friend Olya loves stories that explore the dynamic of the one who stays and the one who leaves. This book might be the pinnacle of that trope – the fraught female friendship to end all fraught female friendships, but more creative and more politically salient than any of the similar narratives that followed.
What more can I say that hasn’t already been said about Passing? There is really no excuse not to read this book. It’s so short. It took me less than a day, and it taught me so much about a world I knew very little about. Just read it.
Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber (unrated)
I’m doing research for a novel I want to write someday about the UFO community and how far people will go to believe in something. This book was part of that research and is unrated as a result. I wasn’t particularly concerned about the factual accuracy of Strieber’s abduction recounting, but rather paid close attention to craft choices, whether conscious or not. It’s a unique and often frustrating experience to read a book that consists mostly of hedging – every claim Strieber makes is second- and triple-guessed by himself within the narrative, and copious counterevidence is provided to debunk any potential debunking of his experience. This makes for a thorough but exhaustingly repetitive book. While I understand the defensiveness that comes with telling a story few will ever believe, at some point you’ve just got to own it. Or at the VERY LEAST structure it more effectively!
While I can’t walk away from this one certain that Strieber had a real close encounter, I do leave with fascinating insights into how such a presumed event would impact a person’s psyche and reverberate throughout the rest of their “normal” lives, especially their familial relationships, which is what I came for anyway. I also learned a lot about hypnotherapy. Those “doctors” were really just doing whatever in the 80s.
My Baby First Birthday by Jenny Zhang ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
OOOO the Goodreads girlies did NOT like this one! Maybe because they aren’t aware of Jenny Zhang’s reputation as a provocateur who doesn’t shy away from addressing the visceral realities of having a physical body as a woman. Maybe because she dares to address that girls get pimples on their pussies and we aren’t supposed to talk about that, we’re supposed to pretend to be sensual hairless little mole rats without brains. Who’s to say. At the time of this writing, I’ve recently read Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval, and I’ve noticed literature that dares to address bodily functions (particularly those of women) gets absolutely reamed by squeamish readers unable to grasp the concept of a metaphor or symbol. We need to go beyond “gross,” you guys. We need to get out of the labyrinth. Don’t you want to get out of the labyrinth?
Concept: perhaps vulgarity IS substance? Or at least does not preclude substance? Perhaps Zhang couches deeper meditations on motherhood / innocence / sexuality in female vulgarity as an experiment to see who can handle it? Just spitballing.
In writing life updates, I am still working on a novel that I said would be done by October and now it is November and the novel is not done. I open that stupid google doc every damn day and stare at it for an hour hoping it will write itself. Then I write 100 of the worst words you’ve ever read and delete 90 of them. It’s slow going. But it’s GOING! Maybe one day it’ll even be DONE! I’m in too deep (I told too many people I’m writing a book) to turn back now. Me and my big fucking ideas.
HOWEVER! I DID publish an essay recently! Haven’t done THAT in a while! Last year I had six bylines – this year, I think this is going to be the only one. And I’m okay with that. There are years where shortform happens and years where novels happen, and 2023 was the latter. This essay is experimental and very special to me. I hope you’ll check it out if you have a minute or two.
September and October wrap-ups are in the pipeline, along with a tribute to Andre Iguodala of the Golden State Warriors, may he rest in peace (he’s not dead, just retired). Sometimes life just gets in the way of blogging, but I think I’ve had enough life in the past two months. It’s time to hibernate and get shit done.
Lastly, HAPPY SAGITTARIUS SEASON to all my fellow archers!! If you’d like to give me an early birthday gift, consider signing up for a paid subscription to my blog. Your money funds postage stamps for heartfelt, sentimental letters to lovers who apparently don’t care if I live or die. (More on this in the November wrap-up, if I can stomach it.)
XOXO, Mia 💋
Meme corner
