January, cold and warm

Consumption Diaries No. 16

Welcome to the first Consumption Diaries of 2024!

I had a busy hectic January — in a mostly good way, for once — and therefore didn’t get around to much consuming in the ways I typically document here. I read a few books, saw a few movies, hugged a lot of friends. I officiated my best friend’s Colorado wedding in the coldest temperatures I can remember experiencing, and then I went to the Pacific Northwest where I felt some of the coldest temperatures the region experienced too.

I spent most of the month thawing out, but also feeling so incredibly grateful for the people in my life. What a gift it is to be able to maintain friendships across long distances. Relationships in which there is a physical distance will always be tinged with sadness, which makes the joy bigger too, and so I treasure them dearly. If all my cold winters could be like this January, I’d build myself an ice cave and get comfortable.

The new year should feel like a fresh start, to lean completely into the cliche. Humans love an opportunity to reset. It’s easier to do so in the winter months when we’re already retreating into ourselves.

But it’s hard to view this January as anything but a continuation of humanity revealing itself as cruel, and it feels so wrong to be engaging in any “new year new me!” behavior, even quietly and to myself, when the only thing allowing me to do so is my little privilege bubble.

Of course, time doesn’t stop in the face of tragedy or despair or corruption, no matter how large the scale of it is, but if we must move forward, then I can at least try to do so a little more conscientiously and compassionately.

what I read

1. Three Holidays and a Wedding by Uzma Jalaluddin, Marissa Stapley — carried over from my December holiday romance fugue state. That’s really all I can say!

2. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan — All that trauma and Catholic guilt must be worth something because Irish literature is on another level. In Small Things Like These, set in 1985, the main character is a simple man with a simple life, which isn’t meaningless; he appreciates it all, however small. Around Christmas, he makes a delivery to a convent, where he discovers something that compels him to make an ethical decision while confronting two intertwined forces: his past and the influence of the church.
   
   It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s poignant. I’ve never read any Keegan before, but I’m looking forward to more. If you have any recommendations, let me know!

3. Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton — When I first read this, I was 16 and it was assigned reading, which is to say I did so half-assed. I hardly remembered the characters or plot. Every time I read a classic I either never read or never paid attention to, I kick myself for not doing so sooner.

   
   You don’t need me to tell you that Age of Innocence is good. It is juicy and you get to roll your eyes at men. Edith Wharton is a messy bitch who loves drama! But what struck me the most, and does in so many classics, was how subtle the drama is. What’s left unsaid is more devastating than what’s spoken, and what the reader has to infer leaves a larger impact.
   
   I think often about how we exist on the internet, occupying the black and white spaces, and the literature we consume because of it. We are so interested in performing our humanity that we don’t always practice it by allowing nuance. Morally gray characters must mean morally gray authors, unless the gray is making an incredibly obvious point (e.g., Yellowface). If a book’s message doesn’t hit you over the head, we question the book’s entire existence. If good does not clearly prevail over evil, the author must be on the side of evil. Two truths cannot exist at the same time.
   
   Bookstagram and Booktok do not rule the publishing world, but they are the places I spend my time and therefore where I notice this most. So many of us read as an “escape,” which is understandable. But I wonder what we’re doing when we seek a personal utopia in books and forget the reality we exist in, where being a good person has nothing to do with how many bad people we point out and everything to do with the various subtleties we dislike in our escapism.

4. The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar — This was one of the most visceral and validating works of fiction describing motherhood that I’ve come across. In it, the unnamed protagonist is going through the fragile early postpartum days, processing her fear and pain, both physical and emotional. She fights intrusive thoughts of harming her baby. She feels lonely because giving birth is lonely. She sees her identity slipping away because the identity of “mother” can swallow your old self whole, and so she spirals. Understandably so. The structure itself is twisty and disorienting, which I loved because it felt so reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.
   
   The top review on Goodreads has a line, “Won’t recommend it to anyone who wants to experience motherhood some day – this book might turn you off the idea for life!” It’s not an uncommon sentiment, and it’s one I mostly share because I do not want to scare my friends. I am in constant awe of what people who have given birth have endured, but sometimes I wonder — did anyone give them a heads up? Is there any sort of heads up that could even suffice?
   
   Since finishing the book, I can’t stop thinking about the idea that we need to hide the horrors of childbirth and recovery from women so that they’re not turned off entirely, as if this experience is so vital to womanhood itself that we must all endure it. In this interview with The 19th, Molnar says: “I had a few early reviews of my book say that they would warn new mothers against reading it, and that, to me, is exactly the point. I’m very fascinated by the fact that so many people think what I have written would be so terrible for new mothers to know.”
   
   For more reading, I enjoyed Molnar’s discussion of her writing process, and I wrote a newsletter here ages ago about bad mothers in literature.

what I clicked on

1. This Substack essay by

   Clara
   , “no, calling out hyperconsumption isn’t sexist” about Stanley Cups, what else!

   no, calling out hyperconsumption is not sexist

2. “What the rise of babygirl men means for fashion” in Vogue Business — good things, I hope, starting with my push to make more men carry bags.

3. “How Group Chats Rule the World,” The New York Times Magazine (thank you to Sarah, who features in probably 75% of my group chats, for sending this one)

4. From

   Freya India
   on Substack, “You Don’t Need To Document Everything” (and yet, here I am)

   You Don't Need To Document Everything

5. “Hark, the Millennial Death Wail,” The New York Times

what I watched: movies

1. Ferrari (2023) — RIP Enzo Ferrari you would have hated Lewis Hamilton’s move from Mercedes to Ferrari

2. American Fiction (2023)

3. Society of the Snow (2023) — only the first of two cannibalism movies I watched this month, I am now realizing to my horror

4. Bones and All (2022)

5. Anatomy of a Fall (2023) — I think (?) this is my favorite of the Oscar noms this year. If she didn’t do it, she should have!

6. Zone of Interest (2023) — one of the most visceral moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had. Incredibly well-done, especially the sound (my god, the sound), but a hard watch.
   An aside: Because we were at the Alamo Drafthouse here in DC and presented with a full menu, I told my partner we were not eating chicken tenders (my standard Alamo food of choice) during a Holocaust movie, but then someone next to us fucking did! I don’t know why that felt so unhinged to me!

7. Return of the King (2003) — I watched this in theaters as part of a screening of the series the theater was doing, and it was so special to see a movie that has meant so much to me in theaters again. I was 11 or 12 the first time, and despite seeing all three LOTR movies countless times since then, I had to really fight back tears at the “you bow to no one” scene !!

8. The Great Gatsby (2013) (rewatch)

what I watched: TV

Not a big TV month for me, but I did watch The Curse with a friend — hives. Hives! I’d praise this show to the high heavens for its ability to say everything by saying nothing, but the last episode ruined it for me. Anyway, Emma Stone is a star.

what I bought

Lots of books! This is a problem I am trying to control, but I just really fucking love books.

1. At Old Firehouse Books in Fort Collins, CO: The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

2. I went a little wild in Powell’s while I was visiting one of my oldest friends in Portland: How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm; How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler; Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba; and the aforementioned Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.

3. I also bought The Nursery (above) while I was in Tacoma because the person who I’d trust with my life both worldly and bookishly told me to buy it and she was right.

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Before you go: Find me on Instagram, Goodreads, StoryGraph, or Letterboxd to keep up with my obsessive tracking habits in real-time.

Consumption Diaries is a monthly series on what I’ve consumed and been consumed by. 

If you missed last month’s newsletter you can find it here, and the full archive of these posts lives here.