What I’m Writing

**“Do You Believe in Magic? On Allowing Fairy Stories to Awaken Us to Wonder”** | Comment Magazine | August 2023

**Thoughts on Fall** | November 2023 (Illustration by Loré Pemberton)

What I’m Reading

Book Reviews

*Search* by Michelle Huneven: Click **here** to read my review

*Drinking Games: A Memoir* by Sarah Levy: Click **here** to read my review

*Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives* by Mary Laura Philpott: Click **here** to read my review

*March* by Geraldine Brooks: Click **here** to read my review

*Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow* by Gabrielle Zevin: Click **here** to read my review

*Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved)* by Kate Bowler: Click **here** to read my review

Articles

**“The Man Who Became Uncle Tom”** by **Clint Smith** | The Atlantic | September 2023

**“The Feminine Way to Wisdom”** by **David Brooks** | Comment Magazine | August 2023

**“Matthew Perry’s Radical Honesty About Addiction Helped Us All”** by **Sarah Hepola** | Rolling Stone | October 2023

**“What to Do with Climate Emotions”** by **Jia Tolentino** | The New Yorker | July 2023

**“How Millennials Grew Up and Got Old”** by **Anne Helen Petersen** | Culture Study | October 2023

**“American Teenagers on Mental Health, Growing Up, and How to Cope”** by **Jamie Ducharme** and **Robin Hammond** | TIME | October 2023

The Book

Many of you know that November 22nd is a very meaningful day to me. It is the day Bessie died giving birth to a baby girl when she was just thirty-two – the same age I am today – as well as the day her granddaughter, my grandmother, Kathleen was born exactly twenty years later, on November 22, 1932.

Last year, the day took on new meaning as I finished the first draft of my book. It was also the day I found out I was pregnant with our daughter – another Kathleen.

Nine months later, our Kathleen (or “Kit”) made her arrival on my grandfather’s birthday, July 23rd. Bookended by the memory of these two special people, my nine months carrying Kit brought forth a piece of Heaven – a next chapter in a book that keeps going, year after year, even after we are gone.

Though my book is about Bessie, my grandparents were part of her story, just as Kit will be part of theirs. We tell our one long, interconnected story to remember and to bear witness – “to fill the silence that death imposes,” until it becomes a memory, a whisper, and then nothing at all.

“The past is never dead,” Faulkner tells us. At the end of the day, “it’s not even past.”