If anxiety is merely the fear of something that has yet to happen — that, in fact, may never happen — well then, I should have entered into 2023 feeling very anxious, because I knew on both an intellectual and a visceral level that it would be a year of big changes, a year of loss, even if I wasn’t yet sure of its contours.
Looking back now, 2023 fits almost too neatly into a series of frames; something unspeakably sad happened at its start, and for a time it felt like the tide would only be going in one direction, flowing out forever; everything endlessly emptying.
Then came the shift, imperceptible at first, but then impossible to ignore. Perhaps what is most interesting, in retrospect, is how much of this change wasn’t merely the introduction of new things, but the return of what I’d accepted as having been fully lost. It was as if absence were only an illusion, as if bringing things back could be as simple as just asking for their return.
Perversely, maybe, all of this change has made me more comfortable with the idea of permanence, of making a home for transient things, of accepting that an object might remain static, but the meaning attached to it will be mercurial. Or, you know, the reverse. All of which is to say, I finally framed several posters that I’d had tacked or taped or even nailed (my poor posters) on the walls of my apartment for several years.
When I was bringing in my posters to the framers, I worried I was making a mistake. What if I was somehow ruining them? What if their beauty, their value, was inextricable from their lack of intentionality? What if, in framing these things, my perspective changed, and I didn’t like what I saw anymore?
In the weeks between dropping them off and picking them up, I grew used to the empty spaces on my walls. I questioned my need for them at all. But, after picking up each framed piece, hanging them again — though not in the same spots they’d occupied before — I saw that I had been wrong. Maybe I didn’t need them, but I wanted them. And I saw them more clearly than ever. I fell in love with them again, and with the person I’d been when I’d first found them, and with the places where I’d discovered them (in a flea market in Paris, at a museum in the Hudson Valley, in a loft in DUMBO, in a closet at my grandmother’s house).
It would not be true to say this was the year I found myself again, as if I’d been lost. But it wouldn’t be untrue to say this was the year I was reminded of how possible it is to reframe a life, to adjust its positioning, to see it more clearly, to fall in love with it all over again.
And so, some books! I ended this year reading about death, an unfortunately appropriate coda for 2023, but especially so because while Sloane Crosley’s forthcoming Grief Is for People (available for pre-order here) is suffused with pain, it is also piercingly funny, profound and incisive about those things that make us feel the most disoriented: love and loss (and, also, living in New York and work, specifically publishing). Perhaps what resonated most with me, though, is Crosley’s experience of loss as theft — both when her apartment was broken into and all her jewelry was stolen and when her beloved friend and professional mentor died. This element of grief is rarely spoken about, the way in which an entire understanding of the world can vanish in a moment, the way in which things can disappear and you will forever have to negotiate what it means to exist without them, without a part of yourself, the way in which there is nobody to complain to, nobody who can do anything about it. At once intimate and sprawling, Grief Is for People grapples with the darkest of emotions and experiences without succumbing to despair; it is fundamentally, uncomfortably human, a reminder of what a sacred thing it is to get to love and be loved.
There might be no better book to follow Crosley’s heartrending memoir with than Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool (available here), a delightfully profane take on similar topics (love, loss, beauty, and the publishing industry). An epistolary novella that manages to skewer those benighted individuals who fail to appreciate the importance of discerning appetites, and rather choose to trade in far crasser currency, to the detriment of themselves and, like, society, DeWitt’s latest only has one flaw: that it doesn’t keep going forever and ever. Instead, it is perfectly contained — a nasty little bite of a book, it sinks its teeth in and makes you long for a world in which more people had intellectual rigor, dizzyingly high standards — taste.
In the vein of satirical looks at systems in desperate need of dismantling, Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking (available here) targets the type of empowerment capitalism that makes things like workplace equity seem like nothing more than trends that can be adopted and abandoned at will. Set in the near future, but in a world whose landscape is wholly different than our present one, Yours for the Taking balances the serious with the irreverent, and is an important reminder that even in the midst of an apocalypse, when swaths of the population have been forced to retreat to controlled environments called Inside, there will still always be room for plenty of relationship drama. Some things never change.
But also…
For more thoughts on framing things, Durga Chew-Bose’s Letter of Recommendation on the topic from a few years back is a lovely, lucid look at the “uncomplicated purpose” of the process, and the “funny,” if not miraculous way that “adding four corners brings out the thing.” (New York Times Magazine)
Besides framing things, I’ve also spent some time reorganizing my bookshelves, most of which are big open things, requiring structure so that the books don’t all topple to the floor. I’ve been scooping up brightly colored vintage metal bookends on Etsy that are, admittedly, a little clowncore, but I like the paradox of items designed to restrain and corral simultaneously being riotously hued. (Etsy)
Every single frame of May December, the latest Todd Haynes film, is worth studying, but perhaps my favorite scene is the one in which Gracie (Julianne Moore) applies her own makeup to Elizabeth (Natalie Portman). Should you be interested in emulating these characters in this one way (and truly, only in this one way), the product Gracie is using is the Ilia Multi-Stick in Tenderly, a “soft pink.” Or, as Gracie would say, a “th-oft pink.” (Ilia)