May & June Recommendations

Events, odds, ends.

Hello to those in New York City - I have two very exciting events coming up:

I’ll be talking to Melissa Febos at The Strand about her latest memoir & masterpiece, The Dry Season, on June 10th. She’s one of my favorite writers and we share a lot of the same obsessions: desire, addiction, shame, sex, systems and identity. Did you already read Girlhood (if you’re rasing girl child you should)? Did you read Abandon Me, which is a kind of younger sibling to Dry Season? How is a book about celibacy so sexy? Melissa will tell us all.

On Thursday, June 12th, I’ll be at the 92nd Street Y talking with Griffin Dunne about the re-release of his late uncle John Gregory Dunne’s 1974 “novel,” Vegas: Memoir of a Dark Season.

I wrote about my love for this out-of-print book, which covers the months Dunne left his wife and child (that’s Joan and Quintana) to live in Las Vegas. Then, like magic, McNally Editions reached out to say they were reissuing the book and asked me to write the intro. I can’t think of a better use for my totally irrelevant, encyclopedic knowledge of the Didion-Dunne canon. Griffin Dunne is the author of the best “growing-up-in-Hollywood” memoir, Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir, and I’m such a fan—this is going to be very fun.

Update from the weekend: the TSA lady in New Orleans tapped me on the head and said, "Good for you, sweetheart."

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I’ve been wearing my McNally Editions Ex-Wife hat for about a year now. It was one of my first purchases after my marriage crisis, to which my friend replied, “Too soon?” Probably. I just wanted to feel like being an ex-wife (twice) could be cool.

But the cool part about the hat is how your people find you. At the Red Dog Saloon in Joshua Tree, I waited for my drinks and a brunette in a sundress nodded to me. “I need one of those,” she said, just before her husband and two children descended on her. Then there was the person collecting signatures outside Whole Foods, who stuck up his hand for a high five: “Twice divorced,” he said. “Me too!” I slapped his hand.

I wore it to Disneyland on a slightly demented solo trip with my kids. The gray-haired, weathered popcorn vendor said, “I was married three times and finally got some sense. I take out the garbage myself now—never been happier.” And a mother, this time of three, who was across from us in line, laughed. “How do you get one of those?” she asked.

“It’s not pleasant,” I said. “But it’s a great hat.”

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Some recent reading standouts:

Like others, I’m finding this an extremely hard time in midlife/history to focus and see further than a foot in front of me. I was so impressed by Jia Tolentino’s latest about her broken brain. I think the essay will be a touchstone for a generation whose world has passed beyond what we were previously capable of imagining. This essay felt landmark to me, like The White Album or Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It expressed a collective feeling, moment, mood, that had yet to be articulated.

Talking too much about the writing of Jane Smiley works against the strange, submersive experience of reading her. It’s like, partway through a seemingly normal story, the floor starts to fall through. When I asked Rufi Thorpe (a Smiley superfan) what Smiley’s best book was, she said it was two novellas: Ordinary Love & Good Will. File each under marriage, parenthood (first one a mother, second one a father), and lost Edens. They’re just so good. At a technical level, they’re full of narrative moves I could never accomplish (all the scaffolding is invisible). At an emotional level, they will leave you a slightly different person than you were when you started.

And while the rest of you were watching White Lotus, I was Knausgaard-pilled. Oof, the way I judged all the Knausgaard fans. Yikes, that fuckboy and his relentless male gaze—seriously?? But a trip to Scandinavia last year inspired me to take on some of its native authors (I’m a big Tove Jansson fan, from Moomin to The Summer Book and my favorite, Fair Play), and I thought I could stand to read fifty pages about his daddy issues and see what it was about.

Good fucking god. A book about a father’s fall from grace and lonely, ugly death is both a little too close to home and divine timing. I was also awed by the youthful parts, the agony and awkwardness of adolescence. There’s a section toward the middle of Book 1 where teenage Karl Ove is trying to get to a New Year’s party, and it has so much humor, tension, and pathos—my high school experience could not have been more different, but I was him, he was me. Send help.

Odds, ends

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Iced tea season is upon us and it’s an underrated delight. I do tisanes (mint or lemon verbena), hibiscus, matchas with coconut water, but I collect ultra-bitter decaffeinated teas for this very purpose. These teas look like coffee, taste like stems or roots or bark—hojicha is the classic. A few years ago, author Chelsea Bieker sent me a tea called Witches Brew, which is perfect: dandelion, burdock, and chicory.

Then, at my annual writing retreat in Santa Ynez, Jade Chang brought a sample of Hua Tea, made by her sister, and I lost it for the Goodnight Coffee—chicory, ginger, fennel seeds. Divine. The website posits it as a digestif, but I’ve been enjoying it in glass jars with tons of ice cubes, all day long.

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Other pantry hits:

This candy. I don’t even like candy! But I was peer-pressured into trying a piece of this extremely expensive Swedish candy—a kind of blackcurrant Swedish Fish—and I was humbled. I think candy and writing might go together spiritually—at least better than the tasteless rice crackers I usually eat.

And this sea moss. This is not seaweed. It’s dehydrated, roasted sea moss blended with sea salt. It’s like furikake if you kicked the umami up to max volume. I used it over roasted asparagus, on avocado toast, and, of course, 9-minute boiled eggs.

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Finally, Wi Spa, the legendary Korean spa in LA, doesn’t have an age limit. I took my four-year-old, Paloma, a few months ago, and it has changed our lives. I was in quiet awe of the way she threw herself into the culture. In each very hot room, she laid out her towel, laid back, and shut her eyes. We didn’t last more than three minutes in a room and went to the ice room between, but we did the circuit for hours. It included corn silk tea and aloe vera drinks, an ice cream for her, and a couple of games of Uno lying on the mats in the lounge.

When it was time for the wet rooms, she wanted to wear her bathing suit. Upon entering, she raised her eyebrows. So many naked women. Unselfconscious, chatty, naked women. And while at first she told me that all the bodies were “weird,” by our second time through, she was also naked—squatting on a little stool to shower, scrubbing my back, bossing me from pool to pool, and asking strangers about their nipples and tattoos.

If you don’t have a Korean spa near you, I can recommend a gorgeous children’s book: The Big Bath House by Kyo Maclear. It’s the story of the author’s childhood visits to Japan to stay with her Baachan (grandmother), and how, despite not sharing a language, she, her grandmother, and aunties all spoke the language of bathing together at the community’s big bath house.

We were at a wedding last weekend, and Paloma was asked if she wanted to get married when she grew up. She said, “No. I just want to live with my mom and go to the Korean spa.”

From her mouth to God’s ears.

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