What I’m Writing

**“The Pleasure and Communion of Austen’s Country Dance”** | Literary Hub | August 2023

What I’m Reading

Book Reviews

*The Covenant of Water* by Abraham Verghese: Click **here** to read my review

*Hello Beautiful* by Ann Napolitano: Click **here** to read my review

*Brideshead Revisited* by Evelyn Waugh: Click **here** to read my review

*Social Engagement* by Avery Carpenter Forrey: Click **here** to read my review

*Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It* by Jennifer Breheny Wallace: Razor-sharp and utterly captivating —a must-read for parents, grandparents, etc.!

*Pineapple Street* by Jenny Jackson: One of the **buzziest books of 2023** that is tons of fun, especially for those with a Brooklyn Heights connection!

Articles

**“When the Sky Offers an Unexpected Gift of Time”** by **Margaret Renkl** | The New York Times | January 22, 2024

**“Why Are Millennials Still Attached to American Girl”** by **Lizzie Feidelson** | The New Yorker | November 17, 2023

**“Emily Blunt Doesn’t Care If Her Oppenheimer Character Is Likable”** by **Marc Tracy** | The New York Times | January 1, 2024

**“Pets Can Really Be Like Human Family”** by **Katherine J. Wu** | The Atlantic | January 16, 2024

**“Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre”** by **Adam Bradley** | The New York Times | November 10, 2023

**“The Crown Is Dead, Long Live The Crown”** by **Richard Lawson** | Vanity Fair | December 14, 2023

The Book

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate each and every one of you for following along on this journey. The process of getting a book published is not for the faint of heart — there are so many ups and downs and so many stops and starts. Yet as I wrote a couple of weeks back, we keep going, trusting in the power of our ancestors’ untold stories. With some luck, my “irons in the fire” will soon amount to something more shareable and concrete. But for now, there is so much reason to hope.

For starters, we are living in an entirely unprecedented era for women in sports. Last spring, the Women’s NCAA Basketball National Championship pulled in an astounding 9.9 million viewers – nearly five times larger than any NBA game over the past season – while Coco Gauff’s final match against Aryna Sabalenka at the U.S. Open was the most-viewed match of the entire tournament. In golf, the trends have been even more pronounced: Viewership at last summer’s U.S. Women’s Open at Pebble Beach was up an unprecedented 119%, making this past July the most watched month ever for women’s golf.

“Women are driving golf’s growth since the pandemic”

*The Washington Post*
January 16, 2024

Which leads me to my next reason to hope: Over the past three years, golf has experienced a HUGE boom, driven largely by women and girls. Today, women represent 40% of all first-time golfers, with more than 800,000 American women taking up the sport between 2020 and 2022. To top it off, girls under 18 are now the fastest-growing segment of the country’s golf population, representing more than a third of all junior golfers (and counting!).

For its entire history, golf has been considered a “man’s game.” But as Bessie’s story begins to see the light, things appear to be changing — for the game we play as well as the stories we tell.