KEEP MOVING: NOTES ON LOSS, CREATIVITY, AND CHANGE by Maggie Smith

A small gem of a book that cheerleads the energy within all of us to create change. If you know someone depleted, discouraged, and depressed in your life, this book might speak to them. Or, open to a random page on any given day, and maybe its message “speaks to you like an encouraging friend reminding you that you can feel and survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new.”

Some of my favorites from the pages:

There is nothing you need to do differently to be lovable—no emotional debt you have to pay, no change you have to make. Know this like you know your own voice, your own pulse.

Think about Pluto—how it continues to exist as itself, as always, oblivious to human categories. No one else gets to define you or determine your worth. Be a planet despite what they may call you. 

When you think you know the shape and size of your life, when you think you know what is possible, something will happen to prove you wrong. Be open to this—you want to be wrong! Trust that your life is more elastic than you think: it can grow, be more, hold more.

BLUETS by Maggie Nelson

Nelson is a poet and critical essayist. This slim volume begins with “1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” The color blue in all its various connotations. Blue in music (think Joni Mitchell’s iconic album), the blue in paintings, the blue in everyday life: the sky, water, and even depression. Each introspection is given its own numbered paragraph or page. Unusual in structure, more unusual in Nelson’s journey toward discovering what role beauty plays in grief and heartache. It’s a satisfying walk through Nelson’s imaginative musings. 

Favorite line(s): One thing they don’t tell you ‘bout the blues when you got ‘em, you keep on fallin’ ‘cause there ain’t no bottom,” sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.

WAYWARD by Dana Spiotta

Spunky Sam Raymond is falling apart along with the country. After the 2016 election, the fifty-three-year-old can’t sleep, can’t figure out why her mother doesn’t want to see her, can’t understand her teenage daughter’s distance from her, and doesn’t want to be married anymore. Sam buys a historic fixer-upper in a “hardscrabble” neighborhood and sits alone in front of a fire in the fireplace when she can’t sleep—which is most nights. Seething with rage about the world, its unfairness, the hormonal fluctuations of her aging body, Sam wonders where everything took a wrong turn. Funny and sad, Wayward brings the complexities of life to life in the everyday. 

Favorite line(s): She was right, righteous. Her bag was small. She had followed the rules, which were clearly delineated in the carry-on sizing measure at the gate. True, she did have the advantage of being first. Guarding her advantage felt awful, her sorry purchase on getting ahead, getting in. She knew she protected these small things jealously, ridiculously, but she could not help it. She wanted to scream. She was right, but the post-snarl feeling was shameful, humiliating. She had become this snarly, awful person. A person who snapped at fellow passengers if they dared to touch her property in the overhead bin. What was worse was that afterward, she compensated by acting super friendly to everyone: flight attendant, fellow seatmate, even tried to catch the eye of hoodie guy to smile at him. She forced her unctuous smiles and nods, pretended sanity, stability, calm. She fooled no one. “Thank you so much!” she said to the attendant when he gave her a club soda with a mildewed lemon wedge.

LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE by Valeria Luiselli

A family of four sets off on a cross-country trip from New York City to Arizona. The parents, whose marriage is disintegrating day by day, are documentarians. The father documents sounds while actively researching the ghosts of Native Americans on the battlefields where they fought, surrendered to the “white-eyes,” and were buried. The mother is helping a woman try to find her missing daughters while working on a story about missing children refugees. With a Polaroid camera, the 10-year-old son takes photos, documenting the places they stop to sleep, eat, to stretch their legs. In the backseat, the five-year-old daughter play-acts the troubling explanations her parents give to the scary news on the radio of missing children who crossed through jungles and desert toward the U.S. border. Heartbreaking but important, Lost Children Archive shows the human side of politics rendered so evocatively through these individual stories. 

Favorite line(s): Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?