honestly, what are you reading?

ICYMI: Come write with me! We recently launched a No Country for Old Women writing group with daily writing hours! I’m leading several sessions a week at an array of different times (working on my new book while I do) and will be offering workshops on topics like pitching and writing book proposals soon.

I am currently in the strangest floating-around-with-no-anchor headspace, which is maybe best reflected in my bedside book pile, where I seem to be making my way through everything from Sula to a biography of Agnes Varda to Chris Kraus’s treatise on Kathy Acker to Sharon Olds’s poems about getting old. I’m in a real forensic-reading, PLEASE INJECT BOOK INSPIRATION INTO MY BRAIN VEINS consumption period, re-perusing favorites from Heti and Dreiser, trying to back my way into this novel’s spine.

My friend Mary Pauline Lowry rather forcefully instructed me to pick up The Nutshell Technique a few weeks ago when I lamented to her, once again, that I do not know how to outline a work of fiction, an argument I believe we both recognize as a long-standing excuse to NOT START THE THING I CLAIM TO WANT TO START. Whether it’s because this book is actually genius about plot mechanics (it is) or I am finally over my own hedging/hemming/hawing bullshit (probably also true!), it is helping me quite a bit.

I’ve been trying a version of the old Ray Bradbury "stuff your head" strategy, reading a variety of things before bed while keeping Instagram in Brick’s blessed phone jail. I tore out the fiction sections of over six months' worth of dusty-uncracked New Yorkers and read excellent short stories I would have otherwise never found. While cleaning a bottom shelf that has perhaps never been cleaned, I discovered I own Sharon Olds’s entire oeuvre.

The world is wide open when you’re jobless and possess the attention span of a wallaby. I’m bouncing off every wall of this house and also those inside my brain, still looking for THE novel to grab me next (suggestions welcome!), aware that this speed-date reading style can only last so long before I crash from fractured-focus fatigue.

• In other news, I discovered the best and least skin-irritating natural deodorant, which doesn’t matter to the world, but will in fact eradicate sweat funk and give you an olfactory thrill/make your armpits smell like the summer of your dreams. I don’t know that deodorant needs to be this pleasurable, but we’ll take it wherever we can.

• We got the viral Gen-Z camera that doesn’t let you see the photos you take until you download them and also doesn’t require that you develop film. It is making for an array of spontaneous, oddly-cropped, more candid-seeming, and unpracticed shots that feel like something more akin to photos from our youth. MORE PLEASURE (less phone!)

• And, last, if I were a rich empress, I would own at least 14 pairs of Coclico shoes (an NYC brand, all handcrafted in Spain). They’re interesting without being fussy, artsy-sexy but not uptight. Right now, many of their best summer styles are on sale, should you want to dream, browse, or even splurge, including gold flats, sumptuous mules, and architectural low-heeled sandals ideal for any fancy early-fall event and so cool I might (gently) stab an enemy for.

Happy weekend, everybody.

I’ll be back here on Sunday with something new!