Friday reads

New fiction from yours truly, nonfiction to warm your soul, and a party invite!

Hello and happy Friday, friends.

The days are getting shorter and darker—we’re entering peak Reading Season. This time of year all I want to do is curl up with a cat, a cup of tea, and a good read. I’ve got a number of those for you today—including one from yours truly!—but first I’d like to offer you an invitation I hope you’ll accept.

Join me on January 6th for a casual meetup in Chapel Hill where you can connect with other writers, figure out what to call ourselves, and celebrate our writing wins. I have a big one—finishing a first draft of a novel!—but any size or shape of accomplishment is welcome (including showing up at a gathering of strangers!). Together we'll toast the joy and frustration of the writing life and enjoy the company of other creatives. There will be food and drink and everybody who shows up gets a free book! RSVP here.

Time for this month’s reads. Paid subscribers get a reading round up on the second Friday of the month, but all my Substack content is free to all until 2024. I hope it feeds your writing in some way.

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Let’s start with a few short reads. First up: national treasure Anne Lamott on the wisdom we gather as we age, how to live in a broken world, and the grandness of the phrase “I don’t know.” One thing I don’t know is how we’d have made it this far without Anne.

Here’s a powerful piece about how minor interactions with strangers can be transformative—so much so that they saved this author’s life. Before you click, let me tell you the piece is about suicide, and it’s OK if you don’t want to read that.

Oh and I have a new piece of flash fiction out in the world. It’s called Dream Job, and it’s in the latest issue of print magazine Door is a Jar. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Now, time to explore a longer read—Lauren Groff’s most recent novel, The Vaster Wilds. It’s about a girl who escapes a colonial settlement and heads north through the wilderness. The whole book takes place over a matter of days and largely details her efforts to keep herself fed and safe from various predators. Although the setting is unfamiliar, Groff uses it to say some things that sound hella familiar. Here’s a passage with the narrator witnessing a field of bison:

There were so many of them, dozens or hundreds, all across the valley, farther than her eye could see…If she were to stand in the middle of them, she would feel overwhelmed with her own smallness, would fear that they would trample her.

O that this place could hold such lovable monsters in it!

She felt a warmth come over her for the land, as hard and unforgiving and wild as it was.

And how about this one, after she spots two men, one with a bow and arrows:

…she was chilled to her soul, for it was reflexive, for she feared the fate of women anywhere, women caught alone on a dark street in a city, in a country lane far from human ears, in any place where there were no other people nearby to witness.

I really enjoyed this book for those moments where she was nudging us with her elbow, making a very modern point. I also enjoyed imagining surviving in the wild (and felt glad I don’t have to.) Groff’s prose is lovely and her imagination astonishing.

All that said, if you read Matrix, this book will feel very familiar. They have similar arcs, similar styles, and indeed Groff said she was working on them at the same time. But here’s the thing: Groff is a genius. Her range is magnificent. Matrix is set in 12th century France, in an abbey. Florida is a collection of absolutely flawless short stories—one of the best books of short stories I’ve ever read, certainly among the top ten of the last few decades. Fates & Furies? I’m still thinking of that book. Those three are wildly, wildly different, and I think that’s one of the hardest things the best writers do, is inhabit totally different voices and styles from book to book. The fact that she wrote two books that are rather similar—well call me a softie, but I’ll give her a pass, because her books are still more thoughtful and well-crafted than most of what’s out there.

What are you reading? What have you put down? What’s in the queue? Whatever you choose, I hope you enjoy it.