It’s August already? It feels like the year flew. I spent the first bit of July being outside and wearing good outfits, the middle being serious—I started writing in earnest and going to the gym and eating at home—and then the back half letting it all fall apart. I felt good during the stretch where I found the steady hum of my routine, proving that in designing my perfect day and living it, everything else improves. Turns out it was the consistency all along. It’s giving me something to shoot for in August. In July I also realized that I’m the best writer I've ever been because I have the most clarity about what I'm trying to say. It was a tectonic shift for me, to recognize in real time, that I was making something that felt good. I’m usually blessed with that in hindsight. Even if the feeling only lasts for a few days or a week. It’s good to know I can feel that at all.
Anyway, onto the post!
Early in the month I went to Wine For Me with Allie and C, a natural wine party with good music, beautiful people, and great-tasting wines. This was one of my good outfit days. After I had a little time to kill between a birthday karaoke thing and the party so we went to dinner at Daphne’s which, once upon a time, made a half-chicken so good it made me like olives. It’s off the menu now, which feels like a crime, but the night was salvaged because not long after I sat down in walks Alex and her girlfriend. It was the best kind of surprise, funnier because we’d said we needed to go back. Turns out we had the same idea on the same day under different circumstances. We hugged and per usual, she told me to leave Queens and move to Bed Stuy (no <3).
During my daily scroll I came across a video about Louise E. Jefferson, a cartographer from DC whose work went largely unacknowledged in the field. She used maps as a way to visually locate the history of people. In one, she documents the history of Native Americans, in another, she charts the dislocation of uprooted people in the US due to World War II. Her work places things in context, an invaluable contribution and I’m grateful for that. It reminds me of W.E.B. DuBois’s graphs and Faith Ringgold’s map of the United States. I hope someone picks up the mantle and continues to use maps as a medium. If this is already happening, please put me on!
The following weekend, we went down to DC for C’s aunt’s 70th. It also coincided with my baby sister’s swim meet and my uncle being in town so we got to spend lots of time with family, which I always love. We woke up at 5AM to make it to the meet and I’m glad we did. She placed second in her backstroke and in her relay (she was the third leg!) She is so good at swimming it makes me emotional. Who knew the passage of time had such an effect?! Another cute moment: a friend came up to Taszie and asked her if C was her mom. She said no, she’s my sister in law. Then she pointed at me and said that’s my sister, they’re married. I melted! Later on, after the party, we swung back around because my sister was camping near the river with her friends and their respective parents. When we drove up I was immediately surrounded by the sounds of kids playing, adults chatting, crickets chirping and my dad watching some movie on his Kindle Fire. It felt like a core memory. I love watching my little sister grow up to be this opinionated, brilliant, curious and energetic kid. The next day, we went to St. James (one of the best restaurants in DC) with my aunt and uncle and cousins. On the way there, I called my uncle, who’s my dad’s best friend. We don’t talk often because he’s been sick the past few years but it was great to hear from him, talk to him about books and politics and how to fix the world. I needed to be with my family, something I never know until after I leave them.
T and C on the dock I discovered a fourth gray hair on my head and I’m starting to realize this is a very real thing. When I brought it up to my grandmother she said, “oh yeah girl, I started going gray around 30, your daddy too.” I wish somebody would’ve warned me! My dad is really her child though, because she basically said what he did, which is that I would’ve found out anyway.
Moderated Natalie Guerrero’s book event to celebrate her debut My Train Leaves At Three, a coming-of-age story about a girl named Xiomara who’s trying to pursue a career on the stage. It was beautiful to be part of celebrating her debut.
I went on a book date with Hunter, which we’d been meaning to do for a while but was sponsored by Hinge which feels right somehow (a Leo sun and Leo moon not having to pay for their stuff—as it should be!).
I made a note that I felt blissful and deeply grateful. I can’t remember what was happening or why I wrote that, but clearly I felt moved so I’m happy to say that that was the case.
I’ve been sending all my sappy notes app musings about things I should be past but am somehow still writing about to Mal and Alex and they don’t judge me (or if they do, they don’t say it). It’s sweet and I love them for it.
Went to the Liberty game, one of my favorite activities of the summer. We won, which capped off the night.
Just in time for Mercury retrograde I did something vulnerable, which cleared some head space and helped me to reflect on how far I’ve come emotionally in just a year. It also reminded me of the space I’ve made in my life to love and be loved, a worthwhile endeavor.
I dropped in on the Stuyvesant Writing Workshop, a workshop run by the brilliant Nicole Dennis-Benn. It was very full circle to talk to her current group, given that I’d started Homebodies there five years earlier.
A few days later I headed down to McNally at the Seaport for an event with Eloghosa Osunde and Nicole to celebrate the release of Necessary Fiction, which I loved. Osunde said so many things that resonated, specifically about respecting how their brain works. What I appreciated about NF was its relationship to linearity and time. There’s a disinterest in chronology, which feels more akin to the way I think about things and also how Black storytelling functions. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Yaa Gyasi, where she spoke of how stories are constructed with a sort of eye toward the white and masculine. NF totally disrupts that. Often, non-linear storytelling is used as a way to create confusion or suspense or indicate trauma but here it’s something else. Maybe I’ll write about that one day, when I have more to say. For now, I’m impressed.
I had a six hour phone call with Noor, who left me for LA in May. It has felt like forever but I’m a long distance best friend expert, so I’m managing. We talked about everything, as we always do and she said lots of profound things because she’s a profound girl. One thing that stuck with me, or at least the thing I had enough presence of mind to write down: If we live long enough there are versions of ourselves we wouldn’t want to revisit. If you see that line in the novel somewhere, know it was cleared by the original speaker.
I put myself in Tiktok jail and quit cold turkey a couple weeks ago. It has done wonders for my productivity.
Tamara is in New York from Brazil and she made a post about everything she wanted to tick off her list. As soon as I saw ‘go to a bookstore’, I slid into her DMs. We went to Liz's Book Bar and talked about love and caught up. The wine is great there (so much so we asked for the bottle names), as is the music. I can’t wait to go back.
Leaving the gym the other day, I saw two old women laughing so hard together they nearly fell over. One of them walked with a cane and it had a cup holder, which I found iconic. I hope to be laughing like that when I’m their age with the same people I’m laughing with now.
I went back to DC the third weekend of July for two wedding events—my soon to be sister-in-law Janice had her bridal shower and Mbiye and Sean had their engagement party. It has been a celebration of life and love and I’m glad to be part of it. The brides-to-be looked beautiful.
I spent the day after by the pool reading Dominion, watching my siblings splashing around and my stepmom teach herself how to swim. I loved it.
Alex is always saying random smart shit but I caught this line recently: Just because you keep things light doesn’t mean your energy isn’t heavy.
Went to the Lost Lambs event (the book is out in January!) and met up with Yaminah, which turned into us heading to Brooklyn to pickup my preorder of Lonely Crowds (one of my most anticipated reads) and drinking frozen mojitos and piña coladas at Habana Outpost.
A beautiful sunset.
Reading
Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde
In the first 20 pages of this I knew I was reading something special. Osunde is asking big questions here, about what it means to make a life in a landscape that refuses to acknowledge you. Pushes back on whether that visibility is important. Gives voice to characters, archetypes who exist whether we see them or not. It’s an assertion of authority I find powerful and necessary. It’s a book I hope everyone will read, though I know it’s the kind of thing that you’ll either like or be resistant to. I’d be surprised to find someone who feels somewhere in-between. Out now.
The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers
In this millennial ennui novel, a woman wants to be an adulterer but finds it hard to get there because of her own constraints. Instead of actually having an affair with a man she meets in a baby group she fantasizes about him, building an alternate cerebral world where they do lots of fucking and go on trips and fall deeply, madly in love. In real time, they have a much more staid, if not entirely appropriate relationship. The families become friends, which feels weirder if you ask me. There’s something very chaste and almost Victorian about it, which I think will appeal to people who like that sort of thing. I liked that sort of thing. I enjoyed the writing here—it’s in the same vein as the other simply written, slightly detached novels that are preoccupied with the character’s interiority but tempered by an SSRI. No one is yelling, everyone is pensive and appropriately medicated. People randomly act out and everyone acts like it didn’t happen. This detached style also helps, I think, with the reader maintaining a certain level of acceptance when the characters do act in kind of insane ways. The betrayals never feel that deep because you never get the sense that they feel that deeply about the people they betray. Does that make sense? Anyway, I liked it enough. I think it’ll do well with its intended audience, which is to say people that liked Something Rotten for the family plot and not the masculinity musings and fans of All Fours and Big Swiss who were in it not for the kookiness but the voyeurism of upper middle class life. Out in October.
Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie
I picked this up because it reminds me of another book my editor mentioned that sold for a lot of money but isn’t out yet. It follows a journalist who is sharing an apartment during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a hotshot reviewer known for being a nepo baby and giving out one-stars. In the early days of the festival, he sleeps with the star of a one-woman show after panning the performance, which kicks off a series of increasingly dramatic events. It’s also about grief, as Sophie, our main character, recently lost her mom and became a mom. The twin experiences tug at her throughout, reminding us that there are so many ways grief encroaches on the everyday. I liked the writing in this, and the premise. Where I struggled was the thesis. This is one of those books that isn’t quite sure about what to do with people who have behaved badly. If not illegally, then in a morally gray way. She paints a sympathetic picture of a man who spends his time disposing of women and not really understanding why it upsets them. These women are ultimately painted as being a bit histrionic and sad, a projection that ends up being an assessment of how Sophie feels about herself. So what then? Is it internalized misogyny? A clever narrative trick? I believe this was intentional but I’m unclear what the ultimate point was, especially when it culminates in nothing really happening to Alex and her retreating into the domestic sphere and learning to be happy with what she has in life. It all sputters to a perplexing stop, which I should’ve clocked when there was a random fire. A word from experience: if an interesting book starts toying with a fire in the back third, stop there, it will only piss you off (see: Vladimir and Wellness). But back to the novel—there was a lot of opportunity for Sophie to engage with her complicity and enabling but she never reaches self-awareness except to berate herself for being so submerged in her grief she lost sight of how good her husband is. It ultimately has a sort of traditional gender role politic, which I think choked it. It refused to bear out the ideas it set up, which I think is to its detriment. Out now.
Dominion by Addie E. Citchens
I haven’t shut up about this book since I started reading it. It’s about a family in the Mississippi Delta, but it’s also about gender and class and expectations and the patriarchy and how we see ourselves versus the way we’re experienced. The characterization here is masterful. It’s the closest I’ve read to Morrison, in its deft weaving of society and its demands and the characters within it. It is incredibly well done. It is unflinching in its portrayals and you can tell Citchens loves everybody in Dominion, even the people who act in horrific ways. It makes them human. This is not a perfect novel, personally I didn’t love the last bit and wish it was maybe 30 pages longer—there are some things I wanted explained, but even without that, this is one of the best books I’ve read this year, second to Sula and just barely beating NF. I need everyone to read it so we can discuss. Out later this month.
Watching
Belly - Does it even matter what this film is about? No, because if you think too hard and watch too closely there are lots of things to take issue with and parts that don’t make a ton of sense but that is genuinely beside the point. It is so sexy, so lush, so juicy, I want to curl up on one of these sets and just be. No one is lighting like this anymore, if ever. The things Hype Williams accomplishes in low lighting should be studied and applied.
Ironheart - I’m trying to give this show a chance but it feels like AI propaganda. Basically a young brilliant girl who’s positioned as Tony Stark’s intellectual progeny is trying to build a functioning suit. She has a scholarship then loses it and moves home. While there, she ends up conjuring her own version of Jarvis, who’s a digital copy of her dead best friend. Here’s my issue with this. There’s a lot of stories out right now about AI-induced psychosis and shows like this sort of exacerbate that issue by positing that we can continue to have our loved ones in this Frankensteined format. The emotional connection they share allows the main character to overlook misalignment—at some points the AI-copy does rogue things—and it’s almost framed as the best friend doing what she would’ve when alive rather than code gone awry. It’s spooky, and feels like an ideological step we have to be aware of. Assigning human traits or building emotional relationships with LLMs is already here, so if and when it “disobeys” do people take that as evidence of its sentience rather than its malfunction? So yeah this lost me. Maybe I would’ve liked it before the release of OpenAI and all that, but where we are right now, I’m trying to get away from that as much as possible.
Love and Other Drugs - I’d never seen this (I know, I know) and was impressed by how good it is. It came out in 2010, a time when all romances seemed to be commenting on the social system in some way—see: The Proposal (2009) and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007). I miss this era. Now we’re stuck with movies like The Materialists, which wants to be about money but never actually talks about it and Anyone But You, which is so perplexingly dumb I sort of can’t believe it got made. Anyway, this one is about a drug salesman who falls in love with a sick woman and has to confront his complicity within a system while also grappling with the fact that he’s falling in love with someone who does not want to be pitied or be seen as vulnerable. There’s little moments of emotional poignancy I found really powerful, like when she goes to a conference and meets other people living with Parkinson’s. She feels so deeply for him then and he, meeting a man who married a woman with the condition and told him to run, is spooked. Narratively, it’s a really great moment of two people being in different places in the relationship, because that’s real. Sometimes we’re not equally in love at the same time or we have misgivings or we get scared. A lot of contemporary films shy away from this, which is why they seem so devoid of real emotion and heavy on “attractive” co-leads who do little more than stare at each other and trade empty banter. These two felt like a couple, one I could root for and wanted to see win.
The Luckiest Man in America (AMC) - A random film I watched about a guy who won a game show because he memorized the patterns, frustrating the producers. I kept waiting for it to get sinister but instead it got sad.
Girls - I’m watching Girls for the first time because my friend Hannah recommended I dive in. It is so funny, and I think I appreciated it because I didn’t watch it when it was fun house mirror (or maybe just a regular mirror) to society. I get to watch it with some distance. The characters are well drawn and take themselves very seriously and think they’re saying smart things when they’re really being insane. There’s a certain distance and self-awareness I appreciate along with lots of situational comedy I generally find funny. One of the best moments of the show for me so far is when Marnie turns “Stronger” by Kanye West into a ballad and changes the lyrics to you can be my white Kate Moss tonight. I screamed. Because what? I also love that the characters can never be more than who they are and every time it seems like they’re doing something thoughtful or selfless, it’s usually self-absorbed. I haven’t made it past season three yet, but I’ll probably pick it back up one day soon.
Before Sunrise - I watched this and it completely blew open my novel. I can’t say much about how (because what if it changes again!) but essentially it’s about a couple that meets on a train and ends up spending all night walking around Vienna getting to know each other and falling in love. The night-long conversation moves deftly between topics, revealing their attitudes toward life, love, mortality. It’s interesting. It’s part one of a trilogy, which revisits the characters at various points throughout their life and relationship.
Opus - I watched a lot of movies that made me confused this month, and this was one of them. It follows a journalist who goes to a commune to interview a reclusive pop star releasing his first album in decades. The opening creates lots of intrigue but not only does it fall flat it veers into being outright confusing, just genuine doesn’t make sense territory.. We never really understand why the cult does what it does or what it believes, and for me, if you’re gonna stick a cult in there, I need to know the lore. I will say Ayo looks great in this, which didn’t save it, but made it bearable to watch.
The Worst Person in The World - This one is about a woman who, adrift, leaves school, picks up psychology, then photography, and then falls in love with a man 15 years older than her. It deftly portrays the power dynamic undergirding their relationship—why they stay together, where they fall short. There’s a sort of twist with the introduction of someone new in the middle and it’s interesting to see how she acts when put into a different dynamic. The characterization is great here, subtle but true. I liked it. There were some beautiful scenes here too, particularly the one where she runs and everyone else is still. I was perusing reddit for people's thoughts after and was struck by how relatable she was to people, like looking in a mirror. I want people to read my work and think that I’ve captured something honest about life and love. Something to aim for.
Frances Ha - If you gave Hannah Horvath a movie deal, I think this is pretty close to what she’d come up with. It’s about two close friends who drift apart when, faced with the same decision they make different choices. It’s a simple but powerful premise and everything unfolds from there. I really enjoyed it. Thought the ending was pitch perfect.
In Too Deep - Omar Epps is an undercover cop that infiltrates LL Cool J’s gang. It’s okay but he looks good in this, which kept me glued to the screen. He also has a little fling with Nia Long, and they look so good together.
Juice - After, I watched Juice, which we should be talking about as one of the best serial killer movies of all time. It’s also a movie about brotherhood and what happens when someone expects you to hold up a covenant that they don’t honor themselves. It’s better than I remember and a classic for a reason. Plus you get young Tupac and Omar Epps, who were charming leading men.
Mr and Mrs Murder - This documentary about four best friends whose life shatters when one goes missing is very good. It would make a great novel—the kind of thing that goes on to sell a million copies.
Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print - This documentary reminder to create and persevere. It shows us the power of parallel institutions, how power contracts and bends if you pull. The thing about Ms. is that it was always aware of its politic, it was dangerous and agitated empire, by telling the truth. I talk a lot about America blowing a generational lead, an empire-sized lead, but I am also turning that toward myself, asking what does it mean to be nihilistic when I was born free? Do I walk to chains I’ve only seen in history books as if it was an inevitability? or refuse to put them on? To even allow the image of a shackle to enter my mind? Do I not have a choice? How do we support and create and write counter narratives that tell the truth? The one we know and would have said freely just a year ago? In speaking with my friend Jet about it, she pointed out that the documentary failed to address the wealth of the founding editors and I agree. Almost all ideas need capital and their positions helped with reach and ability to jump and do this thing at scale. If only.
Dr. Dolittle - I’ve never seen the first movie, only the second, so I recently fixed that. I’m sure I’m the last one to the party so I won’t go too deep into the plot. The apartment in this movie was beautiful. Like 10 out of 10. It made San Francisco look sexy. Also baby Raven! Great energy here overall.
Miss Congeniality - Watched this randomly because it came on in the hotel. I liked that, stumbling into a random film, not having everything on demand. Anyway. That periwinkle dress? Sandy Bullock you will always be famous! Also while watching this I realized I couldn’t come up with an actress with the same level of charm. If anyone has any candidates for this, please sound off.
The Materialists - I disliked this movie so much, I called two people to rant about it. It’s about a matchmaker who is sort of cynical about love and meets a handsome, wealthy man whose greatest flaw is that he had knee extension surgery. Battling for her affection, if you can even call it that, is a struggling actor she used to date who is in this position, not for the love of the game, but because someone said to him once that he was good at it. The whole thing is perplexing. The movie is devoid of conflict, narratively inconsistent and looks like it was run through a VSCO filter. 0/10, would not recommend.
Food
As always, everything at St. James
Wine at Liz's Book Bar, particularly the lambrusco and the erbaluce
Rainier cherries
Watermelon
Coldstone ice cream
Sam’s club chicken tenders
Fish from Tommie’s
Wish List
This swimsuit from J Crew, spotted on author Latonya Yvette
And this one from Victoria’s Secret
Blush from Haus Labs (Alex says it’s good)
This shirt that was served to me in a Pinterest ad that says mozzarella sticks
The Norma Kamali jumpsuit Emilia Petrarca wore on vacation in Italy
A light cover switch from MAGSi
A shoulder bag from Aest Studio, which reminds me of the Tory Burch one Tahirah has
Expense Report
Some stuff from ASOS and H&M, including two pair of heels from Topshop I ended up loving—these and these
Books, including Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
Lip gloss and brushes from Ami Colé
Until next time.
I really enjoy the format of this newsletter xxx
those boots ! 🔥