March 2024: Things I read, saw, spent money on...

the monthly recap is here!

Well, here we are! It has been Exactly one month of this newsletter, which means this is the second ever monthly recap (read the February one, which started it all, here). I tried to set myself a goal of once a week, but somehow I have written seven of these in the last four weeks, which must mean I am having fun. So, here goes - the reason I started all of these (p.s. the books will happen on Instagram stories too, always):

BOOKS:

I look at this list and it feels… random? But then I remembered what happened - I start every year swearing not to (over)buy books and as a band-aid engage in some enthusiastic “putting things on hold at the Library” activity instead. And then, inevitably, they all become available at once and before you know it, you’re reading 2 male authors back to back during Women’s History Month and God only knows what else. But still - a little something for everyone (side note: I always just write the books up in the order I read them, there’s no ranking or anything here):

The Bee Sting - Paul Murray - This was a beast of a book (600+ pages) but maybe the first legitimate masterpiece I’ve read this year? Set in post-crash Ireland it flips and flops between perspectives of the members of a once-well-to-do-now-kind-of-in-a-crisis family (parents, a teenage daughter and a tween son) as they navigate the general messiness of life and make decisions they’ll have to live with forever. It is incredibly sad, incredibly funny, and almost cathartic at the end. Just a sweeping, epic story of everyday life, seemingly small decisions and the monumental consequences of it all. I will say that during the Mother’s sections (which are written without almost any punctuation, as run-on thoughts of stressed women often are) I almost gave up on it more than once, but I am deeply glad I stuck with it.

Bye, Baby - Carola Lovering - I have not read Lovering’s first best seller “Tell Me Lies” but I did watch 2 episodes of the TV show on Hulu (couldn’t really hack it beyond that - everyone was great looking and super basic but also tortured which is my least favorite combination of people) and I think, in some weird way, she is the voice of a very particular segment of the elder millennial generation: the unpleasant, toxic relationship-y kind. This book (which I can’t say I enjoyed but I did read in a day) involves two friends in their mid-30s - one is a trophy wife / clothing entrepreneur/ solid-D-list-instagram-celebrity / new mom and the other is single / willingly child-less / career minded. Their codependency runs deep (and dark) and the book kicks off with a baby being stolen in the middle of a 35th birthday party - but don’t let that fool you - this isn’t a thriller, just a deep psychodrama that reminds us that, well, hell is a female friendship. (Shout out to anyone who caught both Hannah Horvath and Diablo Cody references in here - if we’re not friends already, we should be)

A Woman Is No Man - Etaf Rum - This was our neighborhood book club’s pick (full disclosure - I picked it) and it is gorgeous and enraging and deeply devastating (all the more so due to it being set in contemporary Brooklyn vs 1930s or some other equally removed time). I can’t even type about it without getting upset again - but I do recommend it if you’re in the mood for some emotional galvanizing.

Monsters - Emerald Fennel - I had to follow up A Woman Is No Man with something a little jaunty so when I discovered that Emerald Fennel, in a past life, wrote an inappropriate children’s (YA?) book filled with murder and summer vacations gone wrong, I had to take a dip. I didn’t actually think it was very good, but it is VERY Fennel-y, and if you were an upbeatly morbid twelve year old that would tell adults you wanted to solve murders for a living (I was one of those, having seen “Silence of the Lambs” at 10 and then proceeded to read my first Agatha Christie at 11, and thusly developed my entire personality and concept for this newsletter before I hit puberty) - you will find something to enjoy here, relatability wise.

Anna O - Matthew Blake - This was fun in a way 90s blockbuster thrillers were fun (think: Jagged Edge, Final Analysis, Jennifer 8) - a very over the top story of a beautiful, privileged young woman who supposedly killed her two best friends (potentially while sleep walking) and then fell asleep never to wake up for four years and counting. Now, a handsome psychologist specializing in sleep disorders (whose wife, wait for it, was the first detective on site for the murders) is tasked with waking her up. There’s some genuinely fun, sinister things happening here (the middle, which typically lags for me in most thrillers, had me carrying the book around all weekend), but then it loses steam a bit towards the end. Still, a worthy contender for your thriller TBR.

The English Understand Wool - Helen DeWitt - A razor sharp novella that is equal parts a Mother/Daughter meditation, a heist, and a how-to in terms of dealing with both a crisis and literary agents. Loved it.

Dead in Long Beach, California - Venita Blackburn - A book that is definitely not for everyone but that I will definitely be thinking about for a while. Blackburn is a poet and it shows in how she handles language in this almost impossibly sad set-up: Coral’s brother Jay is dead (from suicide, which he committed 15 minutes after they last spoke, knowing she would find him minutes later) and she can’t quite process it. She does the necessary things - gets the body out, arranges for burial etc - but she can’t tell anyone, and especially not his teenage daughter. So she takes his phone and starts communicating with people in it as him. The story takes place over a week - during which Coral does things she normally does (she is a single, queer, deeply lonely, sci-fi author of some acclaim, and so there’s a lot of that in the mix) while also going through this deep, unhinged falling apart. The narrator is a Greek chorus of her book’s characters (I think?) and there are lines in it that define our current state of humanity in a more precise and acute way than anything else I’ve read in a while. It is a short book (225 or so pages) but one that requires a slow read (I found that I could really only process a day in her life at a time, if that).

Love & Saffron - Kim Fay - and finally, a little balm for the soul. In the 1960s two women (a 27 year old Stanford educated food writer from LA, and a 60-ish secretary/home columnist from Washington State) embark on a letter writing friendship about food, life and beyond. It is darling (and includes recipes), heartbreaking, life affirming, and also a great reminder of how much more diverse and engaging our palates and menus have become in the last 60 years (the book opens with a mussels recipe which one of the women, despite living on water, has never had). Charming.

I also started “Come and Get It” by Kiley Reid but couldn’t get into it - sorry? (I enjoyed “Such A Fun Age”, but this was just not my story for this month)

WHAT’S AHEAD: I have a feeling April will involve a bunch of thrillers as a stress management mechanism (work always ramps up in Spring), but we’ll see.

MOVIES/TV!

Ok, so - my #1 jam this month has been rewatching “Girls” (more on that soon, just have 2 more seasons to go) so this section is not going to be overly extensive. Having said that, in an attempt to be current, I have watched the first few episodes of both Palm Royale and The Regime and while I love everyone in them - I may not watch these to the end - they’re sort of unpleasant and not in a fun way? I feel America, in general, struggles with satire as a concept, and these two are a good example of that struggle.

I am saving Apples Never Fall to watch with my Mom since she loves Annette Benning more than any other actress, so here’s a collection of some maybe slightly under-the-radar recommendations:

Last Stop Larrimah (streaming on Max) - I have almost completely stopped watching true crime but this is Duplass Brothers true crime AND the premise was just too fun: in a 11 person town (within spitting distance of Deadloch, btw!!!! Everyone on this newsletter has seen Deadloch by now, right?) a man disappears (is maybe killed?) with his dog. The remaining 10 are all (obviously) suspects. The level of small town drama crammed in the two hours (this is a movie, not a show) here is breath-taking, the amount of Foster’s consumed is worthy of drowning in, and the characters are almost too good to be true. It is also all very dark too, obviously.

Extraordinary (streaming on Hulu) - I adore sitcoms but I often feel (“Abbot Elementary” aside, which is blessedly finding its groove after a slow-ish season 3 start) they don’t really make them anymore. Anyway - this is a little high concept and quirky: a 25 year old slacker-ish type lives in a world where everyone has a super-power and she doesn’t have one. The rest is very Broad City/Girls stuff - a little rowdy, horny (there is a cat that becomes a boy(friend) called JizzLord) and messy, but with this Good Place twist and it is pretty damn great.

A Familiar Stranger (streaming on PBS Masterpiece) - Do you remember “The Family” and “The Imposter” (it is ok if you don’t, these are kind of thriller-y deep cuts) - well, this is the same (always delicious) premise: a child goes missing, a family falls apart, a young person shows up many years claiming to be the missing child, the family desperately wants it to be true, but is it? But this time, make it French, give us a massively pregnant detective, and set it in Dunkirk (all moody beaches and boats you can use for good or bad). I loved it.

Love Lies Bleeding - wrote a stand-alone newsletter about this, that’s how much I loved it (plus, all the adjacent recommendations in there are well worth it)

Birth (streaming on Criterion and probably elsewhere) - after reading “Dead in Long Beach, California”, I needed a book-end and this truly insane, profoundly beautiful Jonathan Glazer meditation on grief fit the bill. Nicole Kidman plays Anna, a gorgeous, fragile, pixie-cut widow of ten years who is readying to marry again (a space-occupying, confident Danny Houston). And then - a 10 year old boy appears (Cameron Bright, who I hoped had some therapy as part of his contract here) and claims to be her dead husband. The cast is insane (Lauren Bacall, Anne Heche, Peter Stormare), the music hits (is Glazer the BEST sound driven filmmaker out there?) and there are more heartbreaking and more uncomfortable moments than I can handle.

Above Suspicion (streaming on Prime) - this is a rewatch but a. I love Lynda La Plante (who also brought us “Prime Suspect”), I love Kelly Reilly’s and Ciaran Hinds’s faces (even if I object to where their relationship is headed here) and the 4 mysteries are super dark, triggering, and compelling. Kind of a masterclass in 2000s thriller writing - I am actually surprised the US didn’t try to remake and ruin this already.

P.S. We are headed to see the new Ghostbusters and Immaculate soon -- wish us luck.

THINGS!

Ok, I will keep this short because:

a. I am actively trying to promote non-consumerism at least for a month or so (How many sweatshirts does one actually need? Don’t answer that)

b. I feel your entire Spring style strategy can be reduced to two icons anyway: Whatever Jessica Fletcher is wearing while riding a bike in “Murder, She Wrote” and Chandler Bing’s unwavering commitment to a white t-shirt poking underneath a v-neck sweater or a gray sweatshirt - so here’s a few things to keep that vibe going:

• This classic gray Cabot Cove sweatshirt (kind of a Clare V meets 8th grade gym vibe and the price is right)

• The Brandy Melville cotton one-sized oversized sweaters I mentioned in the first newsletter (though I fear I may be burning these after watching the upcoming “Brandy Hellville” documentary)

• This $7.47 clearance v-neck from Old Navy that somehow feels like a perfect combo between a sweater and a sweatshirt (wearing it as I type this)

• These slightly cropped, slightly high necked, kind-of expensive t-shirts from AYR which provide the perfect peek-of-white on anything.

• Gap Icon Trench (runs large, I own a M Tall and it is perfectly oversized)

• Reebok’s iconic, super comfortable, under $40 (!!!) Princess sneakers beloved equally by commuters in the 80s, nurses in the 90s and grown women in 2024.

• For a final touch: pair these with “Une Balade De Foret” perfume (shout out to one of my neighbors who said she is a paid subscriber just so I would share which perfume I am wearing - hi Christy! Here it is! Please don’t unsubscribe now) - deliciously genderless, oddly centering, and evocative of spring at all times.

You are good to go.

THANK YOU ALL FOR MAKING IT ALL THE WAY DOWN HERE! We did it! We made it through another month (and so many parentheses)! Please share any recs, feelings, thoughts, etc (or not).