These are the best books I read in this year chock full of every last feeling on the Feelings Wheel.

I spent a good part of 2021 learning how to parent my teenagers. I also changed jobs, sent a kid to college, finally realized I needed glasses to read, enjoyed a very short hot vax unmasked summer, then masked back up again. I commuted to San Francisco to an office to Zoom and also commuted all the way to NYC for a canceled holiday party.

And I read a lot, but not as much as I wanted to. Here’s my list for this year.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw. This collection of short stories was my favorite book I read this year and the one I remember the details of most vividly. There’s an HBO show coming soon and I will watch the hell out of it.

Sea Wife by Amity Gaige. The Sea Wife is the kind of book that ruins you for any other book for a long time. It’s a portrait of a marriage that’s struggling. It’s a sea story. It’s the story of a great adventure and a woman who is so much stronger than she thinks she is.

Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill. I tried to read this book when it came out in 2014. I might have even finished reading it in 2014. But I was much more tired then and didn’t appreciate it nearly as much as I did when I read it this year.

The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker. This was the first book I read in 2021 that was actually written in 2021. If you don’t like dark and violent novels, don’t read this one. But if you “enjoy” novels where the darkness and violence are there to tell an important story about motherhood and mental health, then do read this one.

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin. If you spend as much time thinking about technology and surveillance as I do, then add this book to your queue. It’s so weird and wonderful and if you need an excuse to set all your smart home devices with cameras on fire, reading this will give you one.

Luster by Raven Leilani. I love reading books about lost and vaguely depressed millennials who make very bad choices. Is this a particular kind of Gen Z schadenfreude? I don’t know and I don’t care. This was a lovely read.

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier Another book about a lost millennial! The main character doesn’t know what to do with her life and is pregnant. More bad choices, more good pages.

When All Else Failed in 2020, I Read

And in no particular order, here are the rest of the books that I enjoyed this year:

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

But You Seemed So Happy by Kimberly Harrington

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Dear Girls by Ali Wong

Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan

Facing the Climate Emergency by Margaret Klein Salamon and Molly Gage

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Don’t Let It Get You Down by Savala Nolan

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Breath by James Nestor

I am trying to buy the plane tickets.

I have three billion and twelve Chrome tabs open and I keep clicking through them to find the best ticket price or the best times of day to fly or the smallest number of stops or the optimal number of airline miles I can use. I am convinced that if I keep opening more tabs and entering the specifics into more cheap flight aggregator websites that eventually I will find the result that will tell me that I do not, in fact, have to fly my daughter to college across the country in the Fall. Are your dates flexible, the website asks me, with a sly presumption of which only corporate websites are capable. Are your dates flexible? Could we put off this going to college thing for a week or ten years?

I am pre-grieving. She’s still here, but she’ll be leaving in September. I have to find flights for her and for me too and hotel rooms and I have to plan a trip right after I drop her off because that’s what people say you are supposed to do in order to survive the grief of your child leaving home.

I am a “that’s what people say I’m supposed to do” kind of woman, a rule follower, a consummate advice taker. It’s only parenting her that has allowed me a tiny respite from this subjugation, learning early on that the baby advice books were almost entirely bullshit. I did what felt right parenting her, following some of the rules that made sense, but mostly winging it and pretending to know what I was doing. But this self-care advice about distracting myself right after delivering her to college seems about right. I’ll take it.

I am pre-grieving. She’s still here, but she’ll be leaving in September.

I will deliver her to college, just as I delivered her into this world eighteen years ago. Maybe now, like then, she’ll be a week late and they’ll have to cut her right out of me. Drop off weekend is Labor Day. Labor and delivery day. It is a curse to think about words as much as I do.

The other advice I’ve been given is to “name the grief.” That advice came from Twitter, from a former co-worker who has a baby who is not even yet two years old. I overshared and exploded my pre-grief in a tweet and this person responded that naming what I was feeling would help. This mother has just started the journey of raising a daughter only so that she can pack up and leave her after eighteen years of her hard work. How does this mother already know how to do it and I don’t?

But I do know how to do it. I do know how to name the grief, the loss. We all know it after this year of losing people and events and things and a sense of ourselves. We know it. And we can name it if we let ourselves.

It is grief. Or pre-grief. Because my daughter is still here and I still need to book plane tickets. Last time I checked the Chrome tabs, all the prices had gone up.

I was a person before I became a mother. I have photographs and video and other official documentation that proves this. But sometimes, most of the time, it doesn’t feel this way. It feels like I was born when she was born in 2003. I was gestating for those nine months that she was gestating.

The early years were so hard — the crying and the pooping and the figuring out how to go back to work after the paltry maternity leave doled out by the State of California. They called it disability pay. I was unable to perform my duties as a worker because I had a new and more important and decidedly unpaid job to keep a human alive, to feed her from my body, to swaddle her and hold her tight and make her feel secure in this scary, awful, not two years from 9/11 world.

And did I? Did I make her feel secure? Or worse, did I make her feel too secure? Was I a helicopter or a benign neglector? My parents were seventies parents and I turned out OK (despite this inability to book the plane tickets).

I often dream about the coolness of my seventies mom, wearing a bikini and holding me on her hip while she smoked a cigarette in the backyard of our Connecticut home. Did she miss her life in New York City or was she happy to have landed there with two kids and a pool and a bearded husband, not even going grey yet, who still took the train to the city for his job as a Manhattan ad man? Did she remember that she was a person before she had children? In high school, she played field hockey and always smiled with closed lips because she had a gap in the middle of her two front teeth that she later got fixed. She was a person. I was a person. Women are all just people before they become mothers. But sometimes we forget.

I am not that two-year-old on my mother’s hip, inhaling her secondhand cigarette smoke before anyone knew that was one of the more dangerous things for a two-year-old to be inhaling. As it turns out, the most dangerous thing for a human to inhale is the baby scent of their child’s soft newborn head. Because once you get a whiff of that, my friends, you are done for. You will love this child with all your heart no matter how often she refuses to take a nap when you have work deadlines or begs to be signed up for soccer and then quits after one practice or hides a laptop in her bedroom so she can stay up all night for a week streaming entire seasons of Glee. You will love her when she’s very mean to you, looking at you with those eyes that say that every single thing you do is totally exhausting. You will still love her. You will love her when she lies to you and does unhealthy things to her body and soul even though you did everything those books tell you to do to keep her from doing those things. You will love her when she passes through that phase and stops doing the dangerous stuff she did to her body and soul and you will hate yourself a little for thinking that she was never going to get out of that phase and you’d be, I don’t know, visiting her in jail, or worse. But you’d still love her because loving her is the easiest thing about parenting because you got that whiff. Because you inhaled. And then she turns eighteen and goes to college and it feels like a death. And everyone is implying that you should get over it. Get your shit together. This is what’s supposed to happen. Only the mom on Twitter with the not-yet two-year-old can understand. Name the grief, she says. All right. I’ll name it. It’s grief.

When my daughter goes to college in the Fall, we will not live in an empty nest. We have two more kids, twins, sixteen years old, here with us for the next two years, and maybe more, if we’re being honest. Surely I will be irreparably damaging them in some way by moping around the house mooning for the one who is gone, when they are still here. “We’re still here, mom.” But are they? The real truth is that they’re already gone too. They won’t even notice the mooning. They only need me to drive them places and that need is about to expire too, as soon as they get their driver’s licenses. Then they’ll just need to borrow the car and I have no excuse not to let them because I am at home, busy with the aforementioned mooning.

There’s a teenage pop star who sings about getting her driver’s license. And everyone looks at that as a sign that she’s impossibly young, this very popular singer. She’s rich and famous. She’s hit her absolute zenith and she’s only just barely old enough to get her driver’s license. But to me, the driver’s license is the sign of an almost-adult. These kids whose whole entire world was once ME, now look at the current me and say, “bye” and then they’re gone down the driveway and I thought I’d feel relief that they didn’t need me to drive them anywhere anymore, but instead I feel a grief as heavy and mysterious as the moon.

I can’t seem to book those flights to New York to drop her off at school in September. New York never seemed as far away as it does to me now. And so sometimes in my darker moments, I worry that she must be fleeing something because there are so many perfectly good schools in California and Oregon and New Mexico and other places not as far away as New York.

In 1980 my dad got a job in Dallas and our family moved from Connecticut to Texas. My parents’ parents must have been very sad about this. Did they think, “Texas? What even is Texas?” Did they also think we were fleeing something? My grandparents lived in New Jersey and New York. They’d been born there and then chose to live there and raise their own children there. Nobody even considered moving away. They were immigrants planting roots in a place that mostly accepted them. They worked with their hands and fought in their wars and they rented tiny houses and then saved to buy slightly bigger houses for prices that would make someone buying their first house right now weep openly.

I have old photographs of my grandparents visiting us in Texas from the East Coast, slightly uncomfortable looking in the cowboy hats my parents bought for them and made them wear. But those photographs don’t tell any real story. Everyone before boomers always looked uncomfortable in photographs, like someone was stealing something from them.

I will deliver her to college, just as I delivered her into this world eighteen years ago.

I won’t ever know if my parents’ parents felt slighted by the fact that their children chose to move so far away from them. My grandparents are all gone now and I can’t ask them. But their families were immigrants, I remind myself. And my parents’ parents’ parents moved away from them too, a distance much further than this distance between New York and California. My parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ let their children move to new countries, new continents. They moved from Russia and England and Ireland and Lithuania. Some of them really were fleeing something.

I know how to buy plane tickets. But I look at the screen and my eyes go blurry.

I try to express the struggle with the Chrome tabs and the cheap flight aggregators to a friend, hoping she will acknowledge how painful this is for me. Instead, she casually says, “Are you booking her a one-way ticket? You’d be surprised at how cheap it is to buy a one-way ticket these days.”

A one-way ticket? She says this and I faint right away. I fall onto the grass of her yard where we are speaking and previously having a normal conversation. I can’t stand back up. The truth is that I don’t even try. When I think about the one-way ticket, I sink into the dirt. I sink so far that the grass grows over me and my friend looks around wondering where I’ve gone and assumes that I was late for an appointment. But I am still sinking deeper into the ground near her feet as the grass grows so tall that someone has to mow it and I am still sinking as they decide that they’re tired of mowing and they get rid of the grass and replace it with mulch. Because California is in a drought anyway. But I’m still down there, not even getting watered now. Still sinking.

So I won’t be buying her a one-way ticket, thank you very much. I need to decide when she will return. Thanksgiving? That seems expensive. But also, I’d gladly not eat for a week or I’d work three extra jobs or rob a bank so that I could see her at Thanksgiving. “Plan the next time you’re going to see her,” an article on the internet about this topic tells me. And so I decide, Thanksgiving.

I practice talking more about the tickets with friends, casually, without falling down and sinking deep below someone’s mulch. I am at an event, a get-together where I am trying to talk to a small group of people even though we all know that at least one of us in this group has forgotten how to do this after a year inside. I complain about how expensive the tickets are as if that’s the real reason I hadn’t bought them yet.

Women are all just people before they become mothers. But sometimes we forget.

“Are you looking for the tickets on Chrome?” a person asks me. I say, “yes,” suddenly afraid that she knows about the three billion and twelve Chrome tabs I have open on my laptop. My secret shame.

“You need to look for tickets using incognito mode,” this person tells me. This woman claims that Google follows us around and sees that we’re shopping for airline tickets and that as soon as we see the highest-priced ticket and go back to the cheaper one, it will raise the prices of that first ticket. This sounds like it could be true, but it probably isn’t. Like how it always feels like Facebook is listening to us because of the ads we see of stuff that we’ve talked about in our kitchens.

Incognito mode seems like a good idea, even if Google isn’t really following us around. As if incognito mode will somehow protect me from something bigger — my daughter leaving and going to college and then maybe never living under our roof again. “Or maybe she’ll live with you forever,” people joke when I lament about the future. And I say, “If only.” My own father says he’d be happy if his daughters lived at home with them forever. Although I suspect that this isn’t really true.

Could I do this whole trip, the flights and hotels, and the drop-off in “incognito mode?” Could I help her bring her suitcases up the flights of stairs in her dorm room with dark glasses and a hat with the brim pulled down? Don’t mind me, I would say to the very cool Gen Z residential advisors helping the new kids move in. I’m in incognito mode.

What am I afraid of, besides the grief, which I have already named? What else can I name? Fear. Terror. In the past few weeks, I have played and replayed the memory of the first night of my college orientation. I ended up at some kind of dance or a party or a party with dancing that was sponsored by the school. I can’t remember who I went there with so I suspect that I went there alone. But I did not leave alone. I ran into a cute kid and we danced and he knew about a real party, a not-sponsored-by-the-college party where there would be more than just dancing. So I left with him to go to this party, swept away by the newness of it all. I was in college! I knew no one here. No one knew me. I could be anything and anyone I wanted to be. There was never a single moment of time in all my life before or since that has ever been so new. Maybe at birth, but who remembers that, all covered in sticky goo like we were.

By the end of that first night of college orientation, I had already started forming who I would be. I was the girl that was making out with this cute boy in front of my dorm and it was at that exact moment (and not a moment before) when I realized that this cute kid wanted to have sex with me. It was exactly as the cartoons portrayed it, a lightbulb in my brain. “Oh.” And I thought, “That’s not what I want. That’s not who I want to be.” So I said something that let him know that I was not going to be having sex with him that night. And he was OK with it and we said goodbye.

Don’t mind me, I would say to the very cool Gen Z residential advisors helping the new kids move in. I’m in incognito mode.

But oh how that night could have ended differently. And now, thirty years later when I Googled this cute kid, I found that he graduated from Harvard Business School and then went on to start a few companies. And I am so happy for him that he had such success. Because I know too many women who have memories of the same kinds of boys not being OK with not having sex after a night of heaving kissing had made them believe that they would. These boys might whine about blue balls or just get mad. Or maybe they’ll just pretend that they didn’t hear you say no or they’ll go so far as to hold you down a little and then pretend afterwards that they didn’t. But that’s not what happened with me and this cute boy. Instead, I remember him as someone who was sorry he wasn’t going to have sex that night, but also fine with it. I want to call him up and thank him for this. I don’t of course. This is not something for which we should go around thanking men. I am not unhinged. I just can’t book these plane tickets.

Because now I worry that despite all the consent education that everyone has had in the 30 years since that night, there’s a real possibility that my daughter might meet a boy who is not so nice. Or a group of boys, a pack of them, a gang. I tried to explain this to her and she tried to explain to me that she knew how to stay in a group of people she trusts. “I know how to kick a guy in the balls, Mom,” she tells me in just the same way she assures me that she knows how much detergent to use when she does her own laundry.

I need to buy those plane tickets. But hear me out: What if I did not buy those plane tickets? What if I locked the front door of our house and didn’t let anyone out. Not her, not her two younger brothers. It worked well enough for the past year, didn’t it? Didn’t we all have fun streaming entire seasons of shows together on the couch, eating meals around the table every night now that everything else had been canceled? But no, they are all ready to get out of this quarantine house as often as they can.

I’ll have to come up with alternate measures. What if I created a fake website that declared that the college my daughter was planning to go to had been forced to close suddenly. I would bring up this fake website on my phone and hold my phone up to her face and say, “Look. I’m so sorry. I guess you’ll have to stay home and try to apply to another college for next year. Or how about the year after that?”

Gap year. Gap year Gap year. Why didn’t she want to take a gap year? Gap years are good for you.

And those plane tickets. California to New York. It can’t be that hard. I will buy those plane tickets today.

Can anyone know what it’s like to send your first child off to college? My friend did it a few years ago and felt grief and loss and I was like, “maybe you should get over it?” I didn’t understand. I don’t expect you to either.

But how does a person get over the loss? This is not real loss. She isn’t dead, after all. I’m just afraid that she could die.

I remember going to the fair when she was, I don’t know, six or eight, and letting her ride the roller coaster that goes upside down. This was one of those scary fairs that travel from town to town and sprout up in a day. They can’t be safe. People die. People have died at this very fair. I read about it in the newspaper. And then we let her ride the roller coaster that goes upside down anyway. And I remember saying out loud to my husband, “We put them in these five-point harness car seats until they’re eight years old and then we let them ride in a rickety old roller coaster that goes upside down?” And then we let them go to college, where we don’t know if the boys have listened to the consent lecture. We don’t know if they’re privileged assholes who take what they want because they think it’s theirs. Maybe they will be more like the boy I met on my first night. Probably? Shouldn’t I trust her to know the difference? Shouldn’t I trust boys to be better?

The plane tickets. The plane tickets. I must buy those plane tickets. I must accept that this is the natural way of things. That this is what I raised her to do, to go to college across the country and start her new life and be whoever she wants to be.

And it hurts. Because I did my work. And I didn’t always do it that well, I can assure you. Her brothers absorbed a lot of my attention. Sometimes I didn’t trust her when I should have. Sometimes she lied. Sometimes I lied. I thought the days of parenting her would last for fucking ever.

I’m still a parent. I will always be a parent. Now, I’ll just be a different kind of parent, a parent of an adult who can drive a car, vote, get a tattoo, and buy pepper spray; an adult who still can’t legally rent a car, drink alcohol, or become the President of the United States. But I am no longer the parent of a baby with a baby smell or a girl who doesn’t know how to kick a guy in the balls if she needs to.

I will buy those plane tickets.

This essay was originally published in August 2021 in the newsletter Homeculture.

One writer shares his secret to success on Medium and beyond

Nobody ever said making a living from writing was easy, but it doesn’t have to be rocket science either. I’m the lead editor of the Medium gadget blog Debugger where I regularly work with Partner Program writers to help them find a bigger audience and get paid for their writing. I first started working with Nick Wolny due in no small part to the adorable picture he sent me of his dog named Hefty.

It wasn’t just that Nick and I shared a love of dogs, although that helped. It was that at the very end of my Debugger launch post, I’d said that writers could send Medium drafts, pitches, and dog pics to debugger@medium.com. Sending the photo and referencing this quip in his first email to me meant that Nick had read to the very end of the post. It’s hard to explain how important this is to editors whose inboxes are often full of pitches that are sometimes wildly outside of the topics the publication covers. I don’t expect everyone to have read my Debugger launch post and have a cute dog pic at the ready, but you’d be surprised at how often I get pitches from people who I’m certain have never read one word of what we’ve published on Debugger.

Nick’s initial email led to a story about how to look great on Zoom, why you really need a password manager, how to use an old iPhone to set better work boundaries, and others. In addition to stories in Elemental, Mind Cafe, and Entrepreneur’s Handbook, Nick also writes a regular column for The Writing Cooperative. Here he tackles everything a freelance writer needs to know about the business of writing.

On defining your rates:

“A tried-and-true formula to identify your hourly freelance rate is to take your desired salary and divide it by 2,000 hours/year (This accounts for two weeks of paid time off). Be sure to budget for taxes and any expenses.”

3 Ways To Define Your Freelance Rates

On how to write while you still have a day job:

There’s nothing worse than moving mountains to free up two hours of your day to write, only to spend that time staring at a blank page and making no progress whatsoever. To prevent this as much as possible, have a repository of ideas ready to go. Then when you sit down to write, write about the next article in your queue — even if you don’t feel like it.

3 Tips For Writing Articles Consistently If You Have A Day Job

On Gmail shortcuts that can help you spend more time writing and less time wading through your email:

I take just one of five actions with every email I come across: reply or forward, file into a “do later” folder, file into a “read later” folder (for newsletters or articles), file into a client folder, or delete.

3 Gmail Shortcuts That Save Writers 90+ Minutes A Week

I’ve been writing online and off for fun and profit for over 20 years and I still regularly learn new things from Nick’s columns. So, follow Nick, read his work, and if you write about gadgets or consumer technology, send me your pitches (and dog pics) to debugger@medium.com.

How to Impress Editors and Other Tips on the Business of Writing was originally published in The Medium Handbook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Read articles on how to parent your children during a pandemic and get super frustrated at anyone who claims to be an expert on an experience that no one on earth has ever experienced. (Teenagers did not exist during the 1918 Flu Pandemic and neither did TikTok, I don’t think.)
2. Remind yourself every day that your teenagers are not your friends. They would rather be with people their own age. They would prefer to be with their friends, but hanging out with their enemies would also be better than hanging out with you.
3. Puzzles > Board Games
4. Check-in on your teenagers once a day to make sure that they are breathing. Once a day is enough. More than that is smothering them.
5. If your teenagers let you follow them on social media, like everything they post, but NEVER comment on anything. I learned this the hard way, so you don’t have to.
6. Don’t complain to them about your work Zoom meetings because school for them is literally all work Zoom meetings.
7. Make it OK that your teenagers hate this time. Maybe in the pre-pandemic or post-pandemic world, teenagers can “thrive” or “live their best lives,” but even if it looks like they’re doing either of these things now, do not suggest this to them or even near them.
8. If your teenagers want to watch Netflix at 1.25x speed, let them, even if this seems totally deranged to you.
9. Drink coffee. If you previously didn’t drink coffee, start drinking coffee. Now is not the time to not drink coffee.
10. If your teenagers ask you for a sip of your wine, give them a sip, but only if it’s one of the nights that you’re drinking the cheap stuff. No need to refine their tastes so much that they’ll end up being disappointed when they’re buying their own.
11. Encourage them to develop a hobby, but hope that that hobby isn’t anarcho-capitalism.
12. Even though you’re all living under one roof 24/7, accept that most of your best conversations will still happen on your family group chat.
13. Your children get to decide whether or not to keep their cameras on during Zoom school. If any school administrators disagree with this, flood their inboxes with the angriest emails you can muster.
14. Do accept their Zoom tips.
15. Don’t listen in on their Zoom classes.
16. If they don't want Alexas or Google Homes or HomePods in their bedrooms, respect that. You can’t use them to listen in to what they’re doing in there anyway. Not that I’ve tried. (I’ve tried.)
17. Schedule Zoom calls with your friends so you can all talk about your children, but don’t forget that you are not in a bar and your children are in the next room and can probably hear you.
18. Get plants. Overwater them until they die. Replace plants. This is better than overwhelming your children with this kind of attention that has to go somewhere.
19. Don’t be offended if your daughter who is applying to college doesn’t let you read any of her personal essays. Do not waste any time thinking about whether or not they are about you. Because seriously, is it worse if they are about you or if they aren’t about you?
20. Pressure them into following you on Twitter, just to keep yourself honest. Enjoy that they will occasionally like your tweets, but NEVER ask them what they thought of those tweets because then you will learn that they like the tweets of yours that they see, but they don’t actually read any of them.
21. Tweet something embarrassing about them just to make sure they’re really not reading your tweets. Nope. They’re not.
22. Don’t bother asking them if they’ve ever read anything that you’ve written on Medium. If they do eventually make time to read what you’ve written on Medium (because I mean, really, what else do they have to do?), they will probably tell you that you made several typos.
23. Burst into song on occasion because one out of ten times you do this, your teenagers might crack a very small smile at how embarrassing you are, and it might be the first time they’ve smiled all day.

In mid-February of 2020, I took a trip alone to the desert. It was the first and only vacation I’d taken by myself in my entire 47 years on this planet. I am the mother of three teenagers and an elderly dog. I’m also married to a man who loves solitude, and he thought that I would love it too, so he encouraged me to go away for a week. I don’t do well by myself, and I’m terrible at relaxing, but I managed. I took the week off work and social media and taught myself how to be alone. I also read more than I had in a long time.

A month later, when I stopped going into the office, and my kids and husband stopped going to school and work, I was grateful for that time alone. I’ve been lonely a lot this year, but I haven’t really been alone since February.

We all have our own adjectives that we’ve used to describe this indescribable year. And I know that for some, the stress of this year made it impossible for them to focus on books, but for me, reading was often the only thing that I could count on to transport me from the anxiety, confusion, frustration, and terror of what was going on in our world.

Here are my ten favorite books I read this year, roughly in the order that I read them.

Normal People by Sally Rooney. Definitely read this before you watch the show on Hulu. But do both, because they are both fantastic. Arguing over which is better is as fruitless as arguing over which of Rooney’s novels, this or Conversations With Friends, is better. Both are dumb arguments because everyone should consume all content that Rooney helped create. Normal People has the most complicated male protagonist I’ve ever read, and Rooney’s dialogue will crush you, but in a good way.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. Mandel is perhaps most well known for Station 11, a novel about a global pandemic. This one is a fictionalized account of the Bernie Madoff scandal combined with mysterious events at sea. I love it mostly because I’m fond of novels with characters whose lives intersect in surprising ways, and I simply love Mandel’s writing. If you read the first 15 pages and you decide it’s not for you, then I might have to decide that we can’t be friends anymore. Bonus: There are ghosts in it.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. I read this one in February and remember thinking, can you imagine spending an entire year inside your home? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I wonder if this year would have been easier or harder if I’d had the kind of kooky psychiatrist in this book who dispenses hard drugs like candy. Like Normal People and The Glass Hotel, Moshfegh’s main character is a charming and lost young woman searching for something that others seem to be able to grasp with a kind of unimaginable ease.

Severance by Ling Ma. No one will blame you if right now you don’t want to read a book about a fictional virus that spreads all over the world. I’m sure there are a thousand think pieces about why reading about a pandemic during a pandemic is so soothing. For me, it was definitely a comfort to repeatedly think, “at least things aren’t that bad.” Maybe it’s the same reason we watch reality shows to feel good about our own relationships. Severance is dark and sweet and sad and also a reminder that even when things get really bad, some of us just still keep showing up to work every day because what else can we do?

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. In the weekly 1:1 I have with my boss, sometimes we just talk about books. He recommended this one, and I’m so glad that he did. The story spans seven decades and tells the story of four generations of a Korean family living mostly in Japan. Lee wrote Pachinko in 2017, but reading it this year when I was reminded about my own country’s historical roots of racism made me realize how people the world over treat each other terribly in the name of race and ethnicity.

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. I’d been meaning to read Oluo’s book for a while, but in June, I (like many other white ladies) turned to books to understand my complicity in systemic racism. Oluo has kids around the same age as mine, lives on the so-called woke West Coast, and has worked in tech as I have, but that’s about where our similarities end. Still, I felt like she was talking to me when I read this book. I think about parts of it often and recommend it to everyone I know. This should be required reading for any white person who thinks they know how to talk about race. There is always more to learn.

Machines Like Us by Ian McEwan. As I look back on my list of favorite books from this year, I was surprised that this was the only one written by a man. I read a few other books by men, but they weren’t my favorites. I still like men, though. I usually don’t enjoy reading fictionalized accounts of technology's perils because I often find that authors get things very wrong. But McEwan’s story of the perils of humanoid robots also takes place in the past, which I found to be a neat trick.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. I fell in love with the characters in this book from the first page and then kept falling in love with the new ones who Bennet introduced. This is a story about passing, colorism, and transgender identity, but it’s also a story about love and family and pain. If you don’t trust me, Obama also named The Vanishing Half as one of his favorite books of 2020, so maybe you trust him more?

Wandering In Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins. This story of a young woman’s search for her roots across the United States is beautifully written and both funny and sad. Jerkins tracks her family from New Jersey to Los Angeles to New Orleans and beyond. I immediately fell in love with Jerkins's thoughtfully introspective storytelling, and in a year when I reckoned with unacknowledged aspects of my own white privilege, it was helpful to read Jerkin’s memoir to better understand some of the impacts of The Great Migration.

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life & Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby. Technically listing both of Irby’s books brings this list to 11 books, but it doesn’t count since I listened to both of these books of essays, which I highly recommend since Irby herself reads them. When I look back to this long and lonely summer, I’m reminded of the hours I spent walking the same laps around my neighborhood, and I often wondered if my neighbors thought that I’d finally lost it when they heard me constantly chuckling at Irby’s stories beneath my mask.

Some Dogs Kill Chickens and That’s Okay

Or why your idiosyncrasies make me feel better about mine

When I moved to Petaluma, California (former egg capital of the world), I thought I would get chickens. Instead, I got three children. And then I got a dog. Our neighbor had chickens. But they didn’t have a chicken coop or a fence. And one morning as my family was sitting down to breakfast we saw our dog, Gilbert, run past the glass doors, a cloud of white feathers in his wake. Our neighbor had one less chicken.

People are weird when they hear that our dog killed the neighbor’s chicken. But they shouldn’t be. “They are predators, after all,” Anna Venishnick Shomsky writes of dogs in her piece, “Sometimes I Like to Pretend I’m a Farmer When Really I’ve Just Collected Too Many Animals.”

What I love about Venishnick Shomsky’s story (aside from the amazing, shareable headline) is how it is both absurd and relatable. I first read this story back in August and when I was recently asked about spotlighting a story from Medium, I still remembered this line:

When we first got the dog, the cat gave me a look so scornful that she erased my personality.

And also this one:

Around nine months, my baby started saying ‘hi,’ but she said it exclusively to the cat.

Maybe you’ll read this story if you love chickens or if you love dogs who kill chickens or cats who drool on you when you try to sleep. Maybe you’ll read this if you believe in your heart that animals are better than people in all the important ways and we are lucky that they let us live with them. There are so many gems in this eight-minute read, that it’s easy to find something to relate to, even if you don’t live anywhere near the former egg capital of the world.

Too many of us are afraid to be specific in our writing, especially when referring to our own idiosyncrasies. But as a reader, that’s precisely what makes me keep reading, highlighting, and clapping like a maniac.

Sometimes I like to Pretend I’m a Farmer When Really I’ve Just Collected Too Many Animals

Some Dogs Kill Chickens And That’s OK was originally published in The Medium Handbook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.