Every Book I Finished in 2022

I Have Tsundoku

2022 was a bigger than usual book acquisition year for me. Because I myself had a new book out, and spent some time running across the globe reading from it in independent bookstores. In an independent bookstore I feel like a faithful Christian in a church, or a drooling lothario at a strip bar: you got to put some money in the coffers, make it rain upon the stage. You’ve got to buy a book! And as the book I was touring was a hardcover  - my second hardcover ever published, not counting my McSweeney’s trilogy because that’s just McSweeney’s being lovely and publishing nauseatingly gorgeous books. I fear my readership is not one that buys hardcovers? They’re expensive! So much of my writing has been about being a broke person, thereby catching the attention and appreciation of other broke people; like myself, they tend to be the type of readers who’ll wait a year for the paperback to come out. But on this book tour, as I endeavored to always support the bookstores who hosted me by making a purchase, I also strived to support my fellow writers who were also hustling their hardcovers, and stuffed my luggage with brick upon brick of literature, scarcity issues be damned.

from Studyingram.com

Many of these I have not finished reading yet. I read in a bizarre and mentally ill way; as the Buddhists say (and Kate Bornstein, who I first heard this phrase from): The way you do anything is the way you do everything. I have a pile of books in play, and I take a bite of this one, a nibble of that, slowly crunching my way through the glut. I have Tsundoku (you probably do, too), the Japanese word for acquiring more books than one can ever read. I love that the Japanese have coined a term for this; it feels so forgiving, it situates this tendency amongst other human behaviors we have names for, things that are named because they are common and we need to be able to talk about them. I need to talk about the bookshelves of books in my home that I may never actually get around to reading. I mean, I almost certainly will not, because the books come in faster than I can eat them. They come unsolicited through the mail, the gifts of publishers and authors who thought I might like to see them and they are correct! Getting unasked for books in the mail is 100% one of the major perks of my writerly life. Because I became a writer, first and foremost, because I love to read, and longed to be amongst the people who did this number one most marvelous thing.

So, here’s what I finished this year. I keep a list, because it’s fun to add a completed book, it augments that sensation of accomplishment. It’s also handy when people ask me for book recs, and end of the year recaps, like this one.

Me and my pal Clement have a mutual library going on. One of my favorite parts of our hangouts is when they show up at my door with a stack of books to return, and I get to dig through my shelves, curating a new pile for them. I’m a book yenta! They return the favor, and for putting Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby into my hands I will be forever grateful. Easily one of my favorite books, period, for the seemingly effortless way the author delves into the messy, trauma-informed psychology of everyone, in particular queers and especially trans women. It’s funny and harsh and real and dirty and hot and genius and I can’t wait til it’s a TV show.

I mean

Because I nagged Harper’s into saying yes to an essay about Adobeland, the women’s separatist land I almost moved to in my 20s (I flipped a coin and it landed on San Francisco, Hail Satan!), I bummed a copy of the out-of-print classic Lesbian Land by Joyce Cheney off a very kind lesbian who sent it to me all the way from her private collection in Colorado (thanks, Dawn!). This book was in my personal library during my early 90s lesbian-separatist-nervous-breakdown, when it seemed like taking to the woods to hide from men was the only sane strategy. Never mind that I had always lived in a dystopic urban environment and couldn’t keep an air plant alive. Must every queer pass through an imaginary back to the land phase before settling into their rent-controlled digs? Anyway, yes, the book contains much terfyness, as one would imagine, but there were also people opposed to such bigotry. Adobeland seems to have been one of the less-xenophobic lands, and allowed the straight women in residence to sneak their male lovers in under cover of darkness, as well as honored the choices and labor of sex workers. I still have not written this essay, because I cannot bear to transcribe the fucking interviews I did for it, and this unfinished work haunts me daily. If anyone is looking for extra cash I will fucking Venmo you to take this hideous task off my shoulders. I really do want to tell the story of this fascinating, collapsed utopia.

This year I got to read not one but two books by graphic novelist Aminder Dhaliwal, Cyclopedia Exotica and Woman World. I liked them both very much, but especially Cyclopedia Exotica, which explores racism and anti-Asian hate via the creation of a race of Cyclops trying to live their best lives on a planet full of ignorant two-eye-having assholes.

After having astrologer Naranyana Montufar on my Your Magic podcast I checked out her lunar astrology book Moon Signs: Unlock Your Inner Luminary Power. I love astrology books that talk about placements other than sun signs, and I lllooovveeee my Sag moon and know that it informs my personality at least as much as my Aquarian sun – maybe even more, as it’s part of a larger Sag Stellium in the 5th house, making me a fucking good time, as well as pathologically optimistic.

One of the best things to happen to me in 2022 was getting accepted to my first ever writing residency. I spent two incredible weeks at Loghaven in Knoxville, working on a young adult novel that no publisher will ever allow me to call Little Faggot, in a freaking log cabin in the woods, a flock of wild turkeys digging in the dry grass outside my window. In addition to finishing the book (!), I bonded with my truly excellent cohort – the poet Chana Feldman, dancer/performer/genius of life NIC Kay, and artist Carlie Trosclair, who does freaking latex casts of various pieces of architecture. The cast she took of one of the decommissioned log cabins on site was so incredible – it looked like a wild corpse of some kind, and was stuck with splinters of wood and age-old mountain dirt. A sculpture, a record, high art Silly Putty, it’s amazing. I fucking just missed Carlie’s show in Los Angeles because I have poor time management and a child, and I will continue punish myself for this, in my brain.

Anyway, in addition to working and fraternizing with my peers, I also cooked myself the best cacao y pepe yet, binged The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and read three books. Gordo by Jaimie Cortez is so great, interconnected short stories about a fucking hilarious and wise and chubby little Mexican boy whose family are farm workers. It’s smart and harrowing and funny, and the voice is so strong  - like, Gordo is real, and I love him. I know Jaimie from non-profit queer art shit back in San Francisco and to think this masterpiece was hiding out in him for years, biding its time. What pieces of genius are you presently incubating?

My husband – my marriage to whom in March of 2022 is easily the highlight of my year/decade/life bought me the other two books I chilled with in my log cabin – Foucault in California (A True Story – Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death) by Simeon Wade, and Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille. Clearly my husband thinks I am VERY FUCKING SMART, dropping these tomes on me! I wanted to rise to the occasion – and, possessed as I am of a fleeting intellectual insecurity from not having gone to college and so frequently not knowing what the fuck the theory-people I often find myself around – so, I accepted the challenge of these works. The Foucault book was not at all intimidating; it’s actually a fantastic work of love by a Foucault super-fan, an academic fag who once lured the theorist into Death Valley to do acid one fine weekend in 1975. Simeon Wade seems like, in the parlance of Phoebe Bridgers, a punisher: a fan so obsessed it’s painful to interact with them. In spite of this – maybe also due to a longing to try acid and experience the American desert – Foucault goes along with the whole scheme, affable, somewhat self-deprecating, very French and also, in his skin-tight attire, wicked gay. It’s a fun book.

Erotism? Not so much. I’d hoped that this dense work of darksided sexual theory would at least provide material to jerk off to and feel bad about it later, but no, not even that. At one point I did actually grasp the thesis, but it’s eluding me now. Lemme Google it. Okay yeah, it’s basically exploring the connections between sex and death, check, tres Scorpio. Now I remember! I like the bit about how those who have transgressive sex are not trying to make a case that such sex should not be transgressive – they want to keep it transgressive cause therein lies the thrill. If it becomes acceptable than that hot and terrible frisson of criminality vanishes and you’re just having vanilla sex or something. What do you think, did I get an A? My husband also got me the beautifully designed Emily Dickinson Envelope Poems, after I became obsessed with the poet watching Dickinson, which is fucking brilliant. I loved seeing the originals of her work, sketched out in tiny, exacting pencil on the backsides of envelopes and whatnot.  Also, one night while binging Dickinson on pills due to some oral surgery, I ordered A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century by Jerome Charwyn, and really liked how it fed my obsession. Once, on a Sister Spit tour, everyone went to the Emily Dickinson house but me. I was having drama or something. I will now regret this forever.

Rozz Williams by Edward Colver

A belated wedding present arrived from my friend Kate – Christian Death: Only Theater of Pain: Photography by Edward Colver. It’s a gorgeous, glossy, oversized book featuring photos primarily of Christian Death’s iconic lead singer Rozz Williams, alongside interviews with people who were around when the band was doing shows throughout Los Angeles, as well as the writing and recording of this very classic album. Christian Death were my favorite band in high school – I had them painted on the back of my leather jacket, which meant they were mine, and in the weird, competitive teenage girl (and fag) jockeying of who was truly the biggest fan of whatever band, thereby sort of owning them, I got Christian Death. I remember knowing, in whatever weird way once learned things about bands without the internet, that Rozz had a previous band called Premature Ejaculation, and I was astounded, reading this book, to learn he’d been in it with his then-boyfriend Ron Athey! Who is the best! Reading is fundamental! I will save the story for how I tried to run away with this band for another time because this is fucking long. Is anyone even still reading this? Anyone?

I read High-Risk Homosexual, and fucking loved it, in preparation for having its author, Edgar Gomez, on Your Magic, but then we sort of stopped doing that, and so I have not gotten to read his cards, but – someday. I did get to speak with Fariha Roisin – and am so thankful to her for being in conversation with me at Skylight Books back in August! – and I found Who is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who it Leaves Behind, super moving and vulnerable, daring, smart, angry, all the good things.

Aesthetical Relations by Christina Catherine Martinez is a brilliant mashup of memoir and art criticism and one of my favorite books of the year. I grabbed Post-Traumatic by Chantal V Johnson at Stories, where I love to buy books, and man it was also one of the best ones this year. I just recommended it to a friend who concurred it’s powerful but also spoke to how challenging it was to stay in the narrator’s head, as the narrator is in the throes of a pretty severe eating disorder and this is a fantastically written book. This friend is a hardy Scorpio who doesn’t require trigger warnings, so it does speak to what a fantastic and terrible job the author did rendering this reality. I fucking loved it. I also loved All of This Could Be Different by Sarah Thakam Matthews, another year fave, I love it’s narrator so much – so tormented and dirty and scared and strong and smart and funny. I feel so lucky to have gotten to live in her world for the duration.

I was asked to blurb the unearthed Katherine Dunn book, Toad, which blew my mind, all of it – that there was a still unpublished novel by one of my favorite fiction writers, that there was some gossamer thread that connected us, leading to my blurb now being on the book. Life is an excellent mystery sometime. Obviously Geek Love is an all-time favorite, but her early books Attic and Truck both meant a lot to me when I was in my 20s, the age she was at when she wrote this great, wild book, wild but also very still, as it tells the story of a woman who has lived through a lot of wildness and bullshit, also observing other peoples’ problems, and winds up in a sort of spinsters paradise at the end of it all.

Katherine Dunn. Sigh.

2022 is when Los Angeles lost the fantastic artist and curator Nathan Rapport for elsewhere in our country. Thankfully some of his cultural output can be acquired from afar, such as Dream Brother, his queer art quarterly. Vision One gave me a bunch of new artists to follow on the internet. Another book that turned up in my mailbox was The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams by Jonathan Ned Katz, a really, really important piece of queer history. A Polish immigrant to the US, Eve Adams was a writer; she self-published a book called Lesbian Love IN 1925!!! (reprinted in the volume) and ran a queer coffee house called Eve’s Hangout, a sort of Bearded Lady but in the 20s when shit was VERY DANGEROUS. All sorts of malicious people set out to harm Eve, for being a socialist as well as a handsome lesbian; she was arrested in a sting by a lady cop posing as a femme dyke. Others were complicit in their inaction. Her deportation to Poland in the 1940s went as tragically as you can imagine. I’m so grateful for the work this author did in preserving her/our history, telling her story.

My sister read Station Eleven years ago and urged me to get it. I did and it got lost in the Tsundoku of my home until the show premiered on HBO this year. I wanted to watch it but felt I should read the book first. The book is fucking magnificent. I devoured it. I broke all my bizarre and mentally ill rules for reading and became completely monogamous with it. When I caught Covid at a Jonathan Van Ness show this spring, all I did was watch Call My Agent and read Station Eleven. And I no longer wish to watch the show.

Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book was a highlight of my reading year, a morose yet dynamic memoir, as if hit with negative lightening, a black bolt searing across our rainbow-flagged sky. I think so often about the lived trauma of coming of age as a queer person in the 80s and 90s, how fucking brutal it was, how we are all waiting for a massive apology, maybe a monument somewhere? I deeply appreciate the artful, stylistic realness of this book which deals with queerness, sex work, HIV, and aging as a queer I share a generation with. It made me think of so many important works and literary moments – David Wojnarowicz, the beginning of Semiotext(e) Native Agents, High Risk, Serpent’s Tail. We need this book, and we need more like it. At least I hungrily do.

Because I recommended some decks for the incredible and glamorous Library of Esoterica: Tarot book, I got a free copy. Because Taschen forgot to send it to me, they tossed in Library of Esoterica: Astrology. I blissed out on both of them quite hard. My fave deck in the tarot book is sadly one that was made as a promotional thingie for a makeup company!

In Chris Belcher’s memoir Pretty Baby we get to follow the author down the rabbit hole of sex work as she becomes a prominent lezzie dominatrix in Los Angeles. It felt close to home in many ways, all of which I enjoyed. Matilda Bernstein Sycamore is one of my favorite writers, her work makes me feel all keyed up and like I want to write, too, and that is the best thing a book can give me. Her newest (is it, still?), The Freezer Door, was as fantastic and inspiring and smart and vulnerable and weird and expected.

I had this wild experience this year, of trying to write and edit a piece of personal narrative for a literary journal with, I guess, a conservative readership. The journal is edited by a really great person – a great writer, great editor, great character. It was a challenging piece to write – in a nutshell, it dealt with, how during a particularly gaslighty phase of my divorce, I changed my medication, thinking the problem was me and not my marriage. I was put on Wellbutrin, and swiftly had a psychotic episode. That sounds so intense, I didn’t actually think that could be what it was. I was basically Googling what the fuck just happened to me and, yes, suddenly thinking that we’re all controlled by uncaring robot overlords absolutely counts as psychosis. So that happened. Writing about it was rough, because it was impossible not to bring in my crumbling marriage and the cruelty of its death-gasps, not to mention its polyamorous dénouement. Editing it was a nightmare. The readership apparently would not be able to handle my conjugating of the word cunnilingus. What about people who’d say whatdidshethinkwasgonnahappen regarding my open relationship? What about people who’d think I was dogging alternative romantic structures by being bummed out by my non-monogamous experience? I didn’t care about any of this. I did care that they wanted to take the entire essay and share it with my ex-spouse for fact checking. CAN YOU EVEN. Readers, as you may know, I have penned many a memoir. I have never ever ever had my memoirs fact-checked. I couldn’t do it. It is hard enough to stay true to your own experience, conjure and continue whatever chutzpah may be needed to talk about it publicly, make a baseline effort to be as discreet as creativity permits. But then to have to all brought to your ex’s face and ask them Did this really happen???? Oh my god kill me now.

I pulled the piece. But not before my editor – who, you remember, I actually adore – recommended I read some D.H. Lawrence. I read his essays, as suggested, The Bad Side of Books. Eh. These antiquarian white guys are on the outs for a reason. So racist! I get he was doing something for his time and all, but that time is over. I did enjoy Geoff Dyers’ Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, which my editor also recommended. It’s an unhinged, gonzo memoir about the author trying to write an autobiography of DH Lawrence. I love books about failure, especially spiraling, electric failure, even if it sticks in my craw how many literary ‘failure’ such as this is in the real world anything but. For perhaps the worst offense, see Karl Knausgaard’s My Saga, about how he can’t fulfil his mission to write about the Vikings for the New York Times because he lost his driver’s license. It’s in the New York Times. It’s fucking great. Maybe I can do something like this with my lost Adobeland piece for Harper’s? Or does it only work for men?

Speaking of men, my newfound interest, as a sober person, in psychedelics, led me to Distilled Spirits: Getting High, Then Sober, With a Famous Writer, A Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk, by Don Lattin. I really came to the book for info about how Bill W., founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, took acid as part of his recovery, believing it to be a possible helper to sober alcoholics having a hard time contacting the ol’ Higher Power. And I did like that part a lot. It also nurtured my crush on Aldous Huxley, which is real, and introduced me to Gerald Heard, an inspiring, mystical gay who attempted to start a utopic mystical college in California. I love the underground, bohemian history of the 30s and 40s. The author is himself a sober alcoholic who once covered the religion beat for a major San Francisco newspaper, and I also liked the history embedded in his own tale. Plus, I’m a sucker for a cocaine-fueled drunkalogue.

<3 Aldous <3

I made it to an actual center of Zen Buddhism exactly once in 2022, the Angel City Zen Center in Echo Park. I really liked it, and it felt good to face the a zendo wall after years and years away, and I of course loved the dharma talk, the walking meditation, around and around in the teeny room. So what’s my problem? Having to take a lyft to and from Echo Park each week feels like too much! In 2022 I did take 10 hours of driving instruction, but fucked up at the end and my permit expired so I have to do that again, ugh. Must I really learn to drive? I’m fifty-one, for christ’s sake! I read a bunch of The Journals of Anais Nin in 2022 and did love hearing about her learning to drive in Los Angeles at, I gather, a fairly adult age. But still! I don’t think I’m meant to. Anyway, though I never did return to Angel City I did take their recommendation and read The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering Into Peace, Joy and Liberation by Thich Nhat Hahn, who we sadly lost this year.

Goddammit I didn’t think this would take so long, even understanding how long winded I am. My sweet friend Vanessa is visiting and I have to go and eat food with her and meet her fiancé so I am just burning through the finale here and not doing these books justice. The London Review Cake Shop 02 Winter Recipes and 01 Summer Recipes, both by Terry Glover and Megan Marsh, are gorgeous zines of recipes by the folks who make the delicious food one can eat whilst visiting the London Review Book Shop, which I was very lucky to get to do in 2022. Sadly, I left both volumes on a plane, and will not get to cook the delights.

As I’ve blogged, 2022 is the year I took a perfume-making class and leveled-up my perfume obsession. I plan to always have a perfume-centric book in the rotation, and this year I worked through The Perfume Companion: The Definitive Guide to Choosing Your Next Scent, by Sarah McCartney and Samantha Scriven. McCartney runs 4160 Tuesdays, an indie perfume joint out of London that I learned about from a friend who worked there. I ordered samples of the 4160 scents Sunshine & Pancakes and The Sexiest Scent on the Planet. Ever. (IMHO) I liked them both a lot, and I liked this book, which I bought at Lucky Scent Bar – it was the cheapest thing in there, aside from the samples they sell, which I love them for. I can make a $5 perfume sample go a looooong way. That day I’d bought two samples – Bee by Zoologist Perfumes, by Cristiano Canali, which is the most scrumptious honey scent I ever have smelled, and the first day I wore it I got stung by a bee! So bee careful! I also got a sample of Comme de Garcons Concrete, which has something in it that I swear smells just like my kid’s breath when he was a little baby. Something in his sweet breath smelled maybe like cilantro? I loved to huff it and I swooned when I picked up the hint of it in Concrete, which smells awesome regardless of whether you’re getting a baby-related dopamine hit. Also, on Christmas Eve while my kid was making sugar cookies I caught a whiff of his breath and it still had the smell! It made me so happy. Anyway, this book is mainly UK-based perfumes but I still got a lot out of it, learning more about notes and layers and also how perfume is written about.

Beeware

The next perfume book I read in 2022 is an antiquarian, out of print beauty the lovelies at Bart’s Books in Ojai gave me a break on after I did a reading out there. I swear, the scene at Bart’s Books is enough to make me want to move to Ojai – that, plus there is that old, mystical bohemian history involving my crush Aldous Huxley. But anyway, this book, The Mystery and Lure of Perfume by C.J.S. Thompson, is very colonial, white/English man exploring the world and reporting back the exotic things used by other cultures. I had to read it with a grain but read it I did because I actually did love to learn about what ingredients humans used in different places and times to scent their bodies and homes. It inspired me to buy a bottle of Frankincense to mess around with, and come myrrh that I still haven’t broken into.

I love Maggie Nelson’s work so much and I loved On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, especially the chapters on sex and drugs (duh). I’m going to be in conversation with Maggie in January at the Hammer Museum in LA, so I’ll be giving it a light re-read/hard skim soon to formulate my questions. The first book of Maggie’s I ever read was the book-length poem Jane, and I became so enraptured in it – the concept of the project, the actual work – that I totally missed a massage appointment. And massages are like my favorite thing in the world, so I’m really telling you something.

A publisher sent So Happy for You by Celia Laskey, and I enjoyed the it – a strange, queer, feminist send-up of wedding culture wrapped in a thriller set in a future that mostly looks like today except wedding culture has gotten super bonkers. From my local library I borrowed both Nightcrawling by Leila Motley which is written in such a great voice and is pretty heartbreaking, and also Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates which, frankly, I didn’t get. Just couldn’t connect with the extreme masochism and checked-out-ed-ness of the lady main character. I LOVE extreme masochism, but coupled with a total lack of inner depth/self-understanding, it just didn’t make sense to me and I felt like I was being set up to hate a female character and I don’t like when writers do that. But whatever, JCO writes a billion books a minute, they can’t all be winners.

I finished some poetry books this year – The Human Body is a Hive was gifted to me by its author, Erica Gillingham, who I met when I popped into the Gay’s the Word bookstore in London to sign stock. She’s a queer new mom and I loved her tender, funny queer poems. One of my fave events of 2022 was getting to read at the Something Something series in LA, at the Oracle Bar. I got turned on to Coco Mellors at that reading, and I’m almost done with her incredible book (next year!) and I noticed on the book sellers table (thanks, Skylight!) that there were some Morgan Parker books I hadn’t read, so I grabbed them. Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night is fantastic, everything I love about Morgan Parker’s work and voice, a world-weariness, a hard-won inner wisdom, humor, hard reads on racism and whiteness, on being female, it’s fucking great and you should literally get any one of her wonderful books and read them.

After teaching some tarot workshops in 2022 I felt hungry for more understanding of the system of Kabbalah that informs the tarot’s numerical system. I got this book on Amazon, Kabbalah by Mari Silva, and it didn’t tell me anything helpful, or that I didn’t already know, but now I am obsessed with the mystery of ‘Mari Silva’ who has these thin beginners volumes on all sorts of occult topics – astral projection, mediumship, Orishas, telepathy, the fucking pineal gland, the Akashic records – she is the JCO of self-published metaphysics! Is she real? I could find no info on her. She seemed to really know what she was talking about with Kabbalah – there was a lot of Rabbinical history in the book. Is this a company? Is ‘Mari Silva’ a name many writers are writing under? If so, can I? Does it pay ok? I’m always in search of a hustle. If anyone knows the secret of Mari Silva, please let me know!

I met the writer Jesse Leon when we were in a memoir panel together at a lovely, crumbling theater in Palm Springs that the Palm Springs Library put together during pride. I was invited by my sweet friend Meredith Maran, a fellow queer memoirist, and was so happy to have an excuse to drag my husband and kid out to Desert Hot Springs and stay at the Desert Hot Springs in which is truly a dump but wow they have like nine different mineral pools of varying sizes and temperatures, and it was really so fun to be there. The dumpiness was part of the charm, at least by the end. Anyway, Jesse’s book, I’m Not Broken, tracks his life, from growing up in an immigrant home in San Diego, surviving a truly horrific sexual abuse situation, becoming addicted to stuff that took the edge off the anguish of the abuse plus the secret understanding of himself as queer – from here he winds up, ultimately, at Harvard, and it’s such a soulful fucking story that the writer puts his whole heart into, I felt grateful to have met him and to get to read his story. We’re going to try to do an Instagram live at some point in 2023 so stay tuned.

I was so excited to monetize the hobbies I picked up in 2022 – perfume and candle making – by having a little table at a women and queer folks comics pop-up organized by Nicole J Georges at Stories Bookstore + Café at the end of the year. One of the things I was stoked about was to meet Lisa Hanawalt, and in anticipation I grabbed the copy of Hot Dog Taste Test I got at Read Books in Eagle Rock years ago and ate it up in a single sitting. IT IS SO FUCKING GOOD. So funny and gross and relatable, so much about food and pooping. As it happened Lisa Hanawalt was not able to make it, but that’s okay because I met a bunch of other graphic novelists, as well as the writer Carta Monir who just showed up to, like, shop and hang, and I will certainly be telling you all about their work when I do this next year.

Lisa Hanawalt

Finally, I finished the Vivienne Westwood Catwalk tome my friend Clint got me for my birthday just days ago, and then the beloved Dame up and died on us! I guess no one lives forever. I cannot believe that I actually got to sit and watch one of her runway shows – and it is in the book! This was 2008 or 2009 (don’t make me run downstairs and find the book), the year Pamela Anderson walked in a minicrini that was starched to look blown up by the wind over her thighs. I was there as Beth Ditto’s biographer/hanger-on, and it was truly one of the best weeks of my life. I was with Beth when she walked up to Vivienne to say hello and thank you and whatnot, and she was so beautiful – her kabuki face etched with so much age, her hair gray and brilliant fire, ugh. There is a great documentary about her that I watched this year while on a post Halston fashion documentary bender, I really recommend it. And, you love fashion, pop culture, scene history, gossip, PLEASE run right to your nearest indie bookstore and grab Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the 90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion by Maureen Callahan. If you are feeling faint by just reading that title, and thinking, My God, this might be the best book ever, yes, you are right, it is, get it. I’ve been reading it for YEARS because I didn’t want it to end! At one point when I was flirting with Hollywood I tried to see about optioning it, but apparently there is no way it will ever get made into a movie because it is too scandalous and at the very least Marc Jacobs is pissed about it.

Pam + Viv

Finally – my excellent friend Kate Schatz, whose book RAD American Women A-Z, with illustrations by the wonderful Miriam Klein Stahl I got to publish as part of my old Sister Spit Books imprint at City Lights – she has a new book out and it’s fucking great and important. Co-created with the freaking excellent W. Kamau Bell, Do the Work: An Antiracist Activity Book is legit an activity book – with word puzzles and game board, coloring pages and lots and lots of prompts to get us white people thinking about privilege and white supremacy. It's a fantastic book for people who might think, oh yes, I get it, I am antiracist thus don’t need that book. We do need this book, need all the books, and Kate and Kamau have given us such a gift  by putting more than a spoonful of sugar into this particular medicine. It’s fucking FUN, and provocative. It’s genius. I see racism and white privilege and supremacy akin to alcoholism. I, personally, have inherited both illnesses. I got to remember I am an alcoholic, always; I have an alcoholic brain and I need to remind myself of my nature in order to not be at the mercy of it, wreaking havoc in my life and the lives of others.

Same with racism. As a white person raised in white supremacist culture, these evils are inside me, and they can produce blind spots that are harmful to myself and other people. I can be relieved of my racism if I am vigilant about knowing this, and always investigating, interrogating myself. In AA it is said that alcoholics have ‘a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition’ and I do think an antiracist practice is a spiritual practice. What I’m saying is, check this book out, even and especially if you think you don’t need it. It’s maintenance on your spiritual condition.

Okay can you believe I’m done? Thank you to anyone still reading. It made me really happy to write this, even if I did feel bits of dread at the length. I’m scared for 2023 where I may read even more books, as now my child has hit a reading level where he has moved past picture books into pictureless chapter books, and our bedtime routine has morphed from me reading to him to both of us reading side by side silently in his bed. It is the fucking sweetest thing in the world and 100% why I had a child. I hope your 2023 is full of lots of great books, time to read them, and deeply sweet moments.