Falling Trees and February Reading

Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels and story collections. Subscribe to My Fiction Obsession for exclusive fiction, reading recommendations, and updates on my forthcoming novel set in Paris.

I’ve spent the last few weeks in a small southern town, dreaming of California. You don’t know what the most challenging period of your life will be until it rises up to meet you and says, “Here I am!” Fortunately, I’m with my two favorite people in the world. We’ve been playing pool, eating waffles, and bingeing Patriot—the wisest, most devastating television show I’ve ever seen.

We first watched Patriot in 2016, and are going back through all three seasons now. Created by Steve Conrad, starring Michael Dorman, Tom Tavner, Kurtwood Smith, Aliette Opheim, and Michael Chernus, it’s a show about trauma and PTSD. It’s about sacrifice and depression and finding a path through something horrible. It’s about severe emotional damage. It’s about brothers (Kurtwood Smith plays the goofy, big-hearted Congressman brother to intelligence officer Dorman). It also happens to be very funny. Every episode features Dorman singing with his guitar, and each song beautifully mirrors or provides clues to the plot.

This weekend, during the rains, an oak tree fell across our driveway back home in the Bay Area. A small part of the tree fell on our house. (My brother-in-law Burl went to the house, assessed the damage, took this photo, and trecked down a few hundred steps to tame an errant water hose down in the canyon. The hose had somehow split and gone rogue and was flailing about in the air like one of those green blow-up dolls at a used-car lot).

The tree falling is the teeniest, tiniest annoyance in comparison to, well, everything. A lot of trees have fallen in my life—oak trees in particular. The first was a giant oak that fell in my family’s yard in Theodore, Alabama, during Hurricane Frederick, back in 1979. Actually, it wasn’t the entire tree that fell, just the limbs. The limbs, which were as big as the trunks of lesser oaks, fell across the road instead of on our house, blocking the entrance to our neighborhood. My sisters and I spent weeks climbing in the fallen limbs with the kids from the neighborhood. My father cut the limbs, bit by bit, with a chainsaw. The power and water were out for several days (maybe weeks?). Everyone on the street used the water from our above-ground swimming pool to flush their toilets.

Our home in Northern California is surrounded by trees. Especially oaks. These oaks have fallen before. I suppose one of the great gifts of my life is that I’ve never been beneath an oak tree when it fell, nor has anyone I loved. Or anyone at all. Each tree caused damage, but not the worst kind of damage.

Fortunately, we know a good tree service. I sent an email last night. They’re taking care of the problem today. Thank goodness for arborists and other experts. I’m happy to live in a world where a lot of good people know what they’re doing. There are times in one’s life when one must rely on good people, strangers and friends alike. Sometimes, during that period of reliance, strangers become friends.

But I digress. I promised you a post about reading. This one will be Substack-centric, so if you like what you see, just click through. Here goes:

Here’s a fascinating long read about The Chelsea Hotel, by Max Winter, whose father lived there for decades. (Max Winter is a pseudonym…watch for the Easter egg about where the name Max Winter came from!) This personal essay, filled with family lore and celebrity cameos, could easily be the basis for a book.

Although I haven’t been reading as much as usual lately, I’ve been watching Patti Smith’s videos from her bedroom (or perhaps guest bedroom?) religiously. Her videos are akin to a spiritual experience for me, or a meditation. Her voice is so soothing, her demeanor so kind.

Often, she reads from books she had as a child. She talks about people she knew and people she loved and places she’s been. She talks about the objects that surround her, many which are books, and what they mean to her. If I went to church, I’d want the pastor to be someone like Patti Smith. Or a combination of Patti Smith and Armistead Maupin, whose videos about compassion and love, filled with fascinating stories of his life as a writer and gay activist, are worth watching on repeat.

Patti writes,

In the energetic surge of shedding the last days of the Snake year, I had this uncontrollable need to release everything. It was barely a decision, more like an outside force taking over. I say this because it was so outside of my personality, my natural way of being. I didn’t feel remorse or pain about the shedding. I only felt the action itself and the resulting freedom of letting go.

I’m sharing this mostly for encouragement for all the Substack writers out there who think of their Substack as the testing grounds for a book.

Receipts from the Bookshop (the book) will be published in the US and Canada! In September! This September! In fact, I can give you an exact date - Tuesday 8th September 2026

Clapham, who writes the breath-of-fresh-bookshop-air Substack Receipt from the Bookshop, first got a book deal in the UK, where she lives, and now with a US publisher. The origin of all this? Substack! This reminds me of those gravy days of Blogspot, when writers like Julie Powell of The Julie/Julia Project turned blogs into major book deals and bestselling memoirs.

Of course, it’s not common…yet. This is one success story among thousands of newsletters. It helps that Katie Clapham is incredibly funny. And she owns a bookstore. And she lives somewhere cool and interesting, with a rotating cast of quirky characters. And every post is a delight.

Lena Dunham’s Good Thing Going is one of my favorite Substacks. Come April, she’ll have a memoir out. It’s called Famesick, and it’s available for pre-order now. My favorite thing I learned from this post: Lena’s dad lives so close by he can hear when she yells, and he calls her “doll.” (Okay, that’s two things).

There’s also some stuff about pigs, and the gentle demands one must make of them at feeding time.

One morning in late January, I was in the process of feeding my pigs— and it is a process. It was early, the valley still quiet except for the braying of the neighbor’s thirty-year-old donkey, the sun coming up pink above the pines…When pigs are hungry they don’t oink, they shriek. To curb this and avoid SPS (spoiled pig syndrome), you’re meant to demand they sing for their supper — or, more accurately, spin.

She drew a bunch of pictures and turned them into stamps, and then she had a book-stamping party, and now about a thousand of her books will have these cute little stamps—you don’t know which one you’re going to get, or which color.

Side note: if you loved Girls, don’t miss Too Much, last year’s ten-episode series starring Megan Stalter (you might remember her from Hacks).

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading My Fiction Obsession. What have you been reading, around Substack or elsewhere? What brings you peace? I’d love to know in the comments.

yours,

Michelle