Issue 115: Everything I Read in March
Who am I when I stop performing? What happens if I rewrite the story entirely?
In this post:
March reading wrap-up: 10 novels, 1 poetry collection and a new author obsession
An invitation to Ask Me Anything and take advantage of my Anniversary Sale as I celebrate a year of reading publicly
In March my reading felt unusually cohesive—like the books had been conspiring behind my back. I didn’t intend to put together a syllabus on identity, solitude, and resistance, but that’s what emerged. Again and again, I found myself in the company of characters who were quietly unraveling the stories they’d once told about who they were. Some were trapped in literal time loops; others just felt like they were.
I read about women who left everything behind. Women who tried to disappear but kept getting pulled back into other people’s expectations—or their own memories. I read about artists and writers questioning what it means to create, to perform, to remain visible… especially when the price of continuing to do so was pain. Many of these books were stripped down, formally daring, or deliberately quiet. They required—and rewarded—close attention.
Looking back, I think I was craving something a little elliptical. Not answers, but good questions. Not closure, but friction. I didn’t want tidy arcs or dramatic reveals, I hardly ever do. I wanted to sit in the fog, to wander through a mind mid-transformation, to be reminded that meaning doesn’t always arrive on schedule. Most of these books pushed several of my pleasure buttons and reminded me that the best way into reading — for me — is to go after what stirs my soul.
Books mentioned:
The Summer Book — Tove Jansson
On the Calculation of Volume v1 — Solvej Balle
Bibliophobia — Sarah Chihaya
Name — Constance Debré
Women — Chloe Caldwell
White on white — Ayşegül Savaş
Swimming Home — Deborah Levy
August Blue — Deborah Levy
Fish out of water — Claire-Louise Bennett
Good Girl — Aria Aber
Helen of Troy, 1993 — Maria Zuccola
Note: I am sharing the books in the order I read them. I am very much a mood reader and I think sharing this way also gives you some indication for how one book leads into or influences what I read next.
Fiction
📚 The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
On a remote Finnish island, six year old Sophia and her grandmother spend the summer exploring nature, sharing quiet rituals, and tending to each other’s inner worlds. Through a series of tender vignettes, Jansson paints a portrait of intergenerational love, grief, and solitude. A deeply humane novel that celebrates stillness and small moments of connection… also a celebration of character and the innate ability that some people have to truly march to the beat of their own drum.
Wise as she was, (Sophia) realized that people can postpone their rebellious phases until they're eighty-five years old, and she decided to keep an eye on herself.
I had a grandmother like the grandmother in this book and reading Jansson’s work made me miss her terribly but also reminded me how much a person’s spirit can truly stay with you, move you, inspire you.
As I was putting my thoughts together on this book my eyes continue to well up just thinking about it. It is so wonderful and I just learned that a film adaptation featuring the inimitable Glenn Close will be out later this year. I can’t wait to watch it but will probably re-read this book many times over my lifetime.
📚 On The Calculation of Volume v1 by Solvej Balle
Tara Selter wakes up to find she’s living the same day - November 18 - again and again. As time freezes around her, she begins to track its dimensions, both literal and emotional. A cerebral yet moving meditation on isolation, perception, and the strangeness of reality. At least on Substack, I seem to be in the minority as I didn’t love it — both Mike of and of did and you guys know I absolutely trust their takes — so it may be the case that I was not in the right mental state for it.
I told Mike, the book has stayed with me since I read it. I catch myself thinking about where it may be going — how will Tara get herself out of the time loop she is in or will she — but I feel like the point of the book is to accept that there is no resolution to the mundanity of life, to the micro-aggressions of daily existence, to the eerie cruelty of marriage… You just wake up one day and SEE it, while those around you may or may not be on that same wavelength as you.
With that in mind, one book on the topic feels enough to me and even though I purchased the second part in the series, I am feeling no drive to pick it up. The part of me that wonders what happens next is very small because I know that nothing really does. Not really. Even if Balle gives us a clever way of Tara’s loop, she would still feel like she were in it. We are all still in it.
Reading is not an area of life where I choose to gaslight myself — so, I will say once more that this book did not work for me despite feeling the discomfort of disagreeing with my friends. 🤣🤣
📚 Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya
alerted me that my review of this book was missing — somehow I deleted it as I was editing!!! Here is roughly what I said about it…reconstructing from memory and wow, what a reminder to draft my posts elsewhere first.
WHAT I HAD SAID was that I am continuing to revel in the aftermath of Chihaya’s beautifully vulnerable, genre-crossing work of criticism and memoir that explores what it means to fall in and out of love with reading. Chihaya writes about books as both comfort and pressure, especially in moments of grief, anxiety, and caretaking. It’s sharp, intimate, and refreshingly unsentimental—a reflection on literary life for people who sometimes wish they could opt out of the discourse around books and simply enjoy… reading. Honestly, if you are reading this newsletter, I am pretty confident you would be similarly obsessed with the book as I am.
What I have also loved about Bibliophobia is that it introduced the concept of The Life Ruiner into the reading zeitgeist. The Life Ruiner, according to Chihaya, is the book that has such a profound impact on your as a reader that it almost literally ruins all other books for you as nothing would ever measure up to it. I have loved reflecting (and deflecting on this concept) but also peeking into other reader’s inner lives as they’ve shared theirs. I really loved reading this essay by and her 10-year-old self falling madly, deeply in love with the language in Tuck Everlasting:
Right book, right time. If I’d read Tuck Everlasting for the first time now, maybe I’d have forgotten about it a month later. There’s an alchemy. There’s luck. There are the books you read over and over again and the books you’ll only read once. There are the books you love, and the books for which love does not nearly mean enough.
The alchemy. Love does not nearly mean enough.
📚 Name by Constance Debré
This is the final book that completes Debré’s Trilogie. Many of you share my obsession with Debré — the first book in the series - Playboy - completely knocked me on my ass last year. And I wanted to cry tears of gratitude when the ARC for this one hit my mailbox. Semiotext(e) consistently publish the most exciting and unconventional books here in the States and they are just so cool.
Name is focused on the narrator’s desire to make a break with her family’s history, inheritance and looming power. In this story of immense privilege, disfunction and addiction, Debré continues to examine her childhood in the shadow of the Family Name1 that defines her but she wants to reject. What struck me the most about this account of her upbringing was what so clearly to me amounts to child abuse or, at minimum, neglect. But, I guess, in high society circles… that’s normal and branded as eccentricity:
Everyone in that family was violent. Aristocracy makes you crazy. Not because of the inbreeding, but because of the faith. Faith that it is real, being noble.
Debré herself says she holds no bitterness or anger around her now deceased parents, sees no need to see a therapist and simply wants to leave that name behind and move forward with her life. Reading so much of the book, as someone who has gotten so attached to this narrator and the author’s story, I couldn’t help but see so much of her behavior and total rejection of “bourgeois normalcy” as the response of someone with profound childhood trauma. Also, again, I found her so incredibly raw and honest as she documents how deeply penetrating classist upbringing is and how much it takes in order to combat it, even for someone as radically committed to that idea as she is.
I have a fuller review of this book coming out next week because I want to put it back in context with the first two works in the collection but I will say that if, like me, you are drawn to stories about what Debré refers to as “the miserable life” — the life of THINGS, of relationships that are basically chosen for or unquestioned by you, the life lived on auto-pilot — this book will move you profoundly. It will tug at your heart and annoy you, too, but it will move you profoundly. Debré forever.
The book will be out on April 15 and is available for pre-order.
📚 Women by Chloe Caldwell
I picked up this book when I was browsing in Barnes & Noble of all places, on a total whim and without absolutely any research. I bought her because I thought she was cute. I was then completely shocked to find out the book carries cult status in the lesbian community AND to me felt like the American, light-hearted version of Debré’s PLAYBOY. Similar subject matter, much less dread.
Caldwell has written this stunningly charming novella — taut and emotionally vivid — about the narrator’s obsessive, destabilizing relationship with an older woman who is also already in a long-term relationship (so, technically, it’s an affair). It’s the narrator’s first experience of queer love.
It’s a coming-of-age story disguised as a breakup, full of longing, ambivalence, and the total liberating ecstasy of self-knowledge and self-discovery. Caldwell captures that specific kind of big love heartbreak — which my online reading tells me is especially spectacular in intense lesbian relationships — just raw, confusing, and illuminating all at once. Pick this up when you are in a slump. It is fast, it is messy, it is sexy. I read it in one sitting.
read it and love it, too.📚 White on white by Ayşegül Savaş
I read and loved The Anthropologists and Walking On The Ceiling by Savaş earlier this year. This month I read White On White, which completely cemented Savas as one of my most favorite contemporary writers.
This is a quiet, mesmerizing novel about a female PhD student in art history. In order to work in solitude she rents out an apartment owned by one of the academic rockstar professors in her department. The rent is cheap because she would sometimes be sharing the space with the professor’s wife who is a painter and has a studio in the apartment. As the wife begins to spend more and more time in the studio, the two women develop a close friendship — sharing coffee and meals together — our protagonist enjoying having a first row seat to the kind of grown up academic life that PhD students lust after — the books, the paintings, the paid-for international conference travel. However, we soon realize that perhaps beneath the surface of the professor/painter marriage things are not as perfect as they seem.
As the what-academia-loves-to-call “the trailing spouse” of a former university professor, I found the commentary and play on gender and power dynamics in this book just fantastic. What does academia require of everyone who participates in it and what about their partners? What happens to the professional and creative ambitions of women who become mothers? What kind of friendship and connection is possible for women cross-class and cross-generation? Savaş’s prose is clean and controlled, but the emotional undercurrents are disorienting in the best way. A meditation on proximity, aesthetics, and the subtle trespasses of intimacy. There is so much that I loved about this book.
I hope to read Savaş’s short story collection The Wilderness soon so that I am fully caught up and ready for Long Distance which comes out in July.
📚 Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Reading Swimming Home was definitely the highest point of my reading month — which says A LOT because as you can see I read so much AMAZING stuff in March. A little backstory: last year I read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living which I liked a lot but it did not live up to the insanely high expectations I had about it. Then I found out that my friend was a fan and begged her to write me a primer on Levy…. which she did because she is not only brilliant but also incredibly kind. And, catch this, a few months ago she sent me a copy of Swimming Home — her favorite Levy novel — in the mail. I was overjoyed.
Fastforeward to this month and I am now officially obsessed. In Swimming Home, a poet and his family vacation in the south of France, where their lives are quietly undone by the arrival of a young woman with a fragile grip on reality. Who is she?Why is she there? Why does the wife invite her to stay with them? I felt transfixed from page one. The book is stunningly cinematic with alternating descriptions of beauty and decay, of love and loss, of certainty and dread. Levy’s writing is full of symbolism. This will feel a little bit like insider baseball but here is what said about Kitty French — one of the main characters in the book:
Levy is queen of symbols! (Spoilers ahead...) There is Kitty Finch whose name is this unholy marriage between cat and bird. It captured, for me, her occupying a borderline between predator and prey. At times she is the bird. She wears the feathered cape when she goes out with Joe. She is perhaps prey in that scenario - the vulnerable bird - but then later buys the blue sugar mouse. It seems to mark the changeover to cat. The dynamic between her and Joe shifts in the car home. She is knowing and in control. At other times, in cat mode, she arranges the rabbit tails in a vase and puts Nina's toy rabbit in Mitchell's rat trap. She has an animal quality in her predisposition towards nudity. Is Kitty some sort of personification of depression? Bird and Cat. Both vulnerable and vicious.
I had not picked up on this while reading the book but Tash’s comment made me realize how rich and multi-layered Levy’s work is — the ultra-realism of the narrative (Isabel, the wife, struggles to reconcile her roles as a mother, wife and war correspondent) regularly punctured by almost-surrealist scenes (the novel opens with the family discovering Kitty, a young woman, skinny-dipping in their pool, initially mistaken for a bear; later Isabel leads a pony into a beachfront restaurant, to the owner's spluttering outrage) … Totally dreamlike but also packed with sharp psychological insight over what drives our professional ambitions, our desire to create and our longing to feel known and seen by others, even if it is through the intensity of our pain.
I loved this so much that I wanted to read MORE of her right away.2
📚 August Blue by Deborah Levy
Serendipity has been a big word for me this month, especially on the reading front. Things just seem to be happening in magical and undirected ways. I live for this feeling of joy and ease that for me is always a sign of living in alignment with myself. When I do, and say, and write, and think, and speak in ways that are in tune with my values and I honor my needs and feel connected to my husband and kid and live authentically without pretense — the world feels beautiful and harmonious and, truly, it feels like signs appear around me to show me that I am on the right path. I know it sounds a little kooky but when my friend sent me a surprise copy of Deborah Levy’s August Blue as I was reading and drooling over Swimming Home… I just felt that the universe was conspiring with me.3
I loved August Blue probably as much as I loved Swimming Home. I found it beautiful and sensitive and so tender. We meet Elsa, a virtuosic pianist, reeling from a spectacular career implosion after walking off stage during a failed performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No2. She drifts through Europe — including Greece, IYKYK — in search of peace and perhaps a new sense of self. When she sees a woman who seems to mirror her, her identity begins to blur. Levy’s signature style—cool, elliptical, intelligent—is in full force here. It’s a novel about reinvention, doubles, and the strange ways we come back to ourselves.
The book gave me deep flashbacks to Ali Smith’s Autumn — especially in the relationship between Elsa and her piano teacher — a Maestro who also adopts her as a child. And made me want to get deeper into psychoanalytic theory as Levy is so clearly fascinated by human’s conflicting instincts to live and thrive while also doing our best to self-destruct.
Last but not least this book is a deeply musical piece of work and includes many references to mostly musical pieces that I felt compelled to put together in a playlist that I am sharing with you guys today!
I went through the book and added every single piece mentioned into my playlist and as I was doing so, I also noticed that some of the pieces appear in Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding which — check this — was blurbed by Deborah Levy. So, now, I hope that maybe one of you reading this knows music and can take a little peak and share what you notice about the specific musical references in this book, too. Because if I’ve learned anything about Levy so far is that nothing in her work is accidental.
📚 Fish out of water by Claire-Louise Bennett
Fish out of water is a book-length essay based on Self-Portrait by the late surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning (see, serendipity) and in true Bennett creates an evocative journey through the author’s journey as a young, deeply feeling child who grows up to be a writer — inspired and haunted by a no-nonsense grandmother figure (not unlike the grandmother from The Summer Book).
If you’ve read anything by Claire-Louise Bennett you know how difficult it is to describe her work. It’s equal parts poetic and maddening because … what are we talking about again?!… but… It’s so vivid, funny and singular… in this book, for example, she shares:
But when a woman’s breasts look identical to your own that took so long to come you find you can’t do otherwise than gladly trust her with your life.
LOL. Sure.
My favorite little piece from this book:
We had many emotions didn’t we when were a child that we preferred not to speak of. Mammoth emotions such as grienf and longing and anger. Oh yes. Those whopping feelings had the power to take us over yet for all that they had no place here. THere was nothing here was there that we could point to in order to make our insuperabe emotions cleaer to anyone. They simply had no origin here. No, they didn’t, not at all. As such we felt stranded. Our emotions, which we treasured, because they indicated much more than anything else did what we were truly made of, also alienated us more or less entirely.
And that right there was the childhood of every single highly sensitive person I know, present company included. Grateful for books and art who help us make it through.
📚 Good Girl by Aria Aber
This book was the “funnest” one I read this month — Berlin, techno clubs, recreational drug usage in the name of hiding the discomfort of being young, sensitive, Afghan in a deeply Islamophobic culture, poor, ambitious and female while also trying not to fall in love. Heartbreak, yearning, shame, longing… just earnest writing that felt genuine and lovable without being saccharine.
I feel like I have read many books in the last year that centered twenty-something women with brains and ambition, coming up against the world — but none have captivated me in the way Aber’s did. There is something truly soulful in her Good Girl… the deep fear and loathing one can experience towards our own family and origin but also the unworldly strength you can derive from those very same sources once you reach a certain level of self-awareness and self-acceptance. Aber’s Nila is a real, living, breathing human being on the page — her friendships and her love affairs equally endearing and infuriating. Her masochistic tendencies are logical and justified.
Reading this book felt deeply — pardon the word — healing for me. In many ways I felt like I was watching a film of myself (although… no drugs for me because I am a square) in my 20s — just trying to keep breathing while also wondering if you would ever get to a point where you would be able to tell the difference between:
Ambition and delusion → you can’t
Being in love and feeling wanted → you can
Familial devotion and personal freedom → absolutely
Boring prejudice and real harm → TBD
As someone who chose to leave at 18 because I felt similarly out of place albeit among my own — I just felt vindicated in reading this book. Sometimes, the path you choose is messy but like many of the authors I read this month, Aber reminds us that there is nothing more beautiful than the agency to choose your own mess.
Poetry
📚 Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zuccola
I am continuing my journey of learning how to read and appreciate poetry. This month I read Helen of Troy, 1993 together with who has the awesome habit of reading poetry collections on his lunch break! How cool is that?!
In this book, Maria Zoccola reimagines the mythic figure of Helen in small-town Tennessee, capturing the ennui, defiance, and longing of a young Southern housewife. Through wit and lyrical detail, the collection explores domesticity, cultural barrenness, and female identity. Zoccola’s Helen is no victim—her voice is raw, funny, and searching, blending mythology with the grit of everyday life in poems that speak for a generation of women craving more than their prescribed roles. I found it fascinating—even if I wasn’t always sure how much I was truly processing and how much went over my head.
The poem titles in this book are incredible—helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine, helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu—they pulled me in immediately. There were phrases that made me stop and read out loud, like “coats of flashing fuschia frost.” I kept thinking, how did her brain even come up with that? It’s been so long since I read The Iliad that I couldn’t tell if the references to Helen of Troy were meant to be subtle, or if I was just missing some of the connections. Still, I was really into the poems that involved Menelaus—especially the washing machine one, which might’ve been my favorite.
Because I live in Memphis and went to school in Sewanee, TN, so much of the imagery felt familiar—rural youth culture, dirt roads, working class lives, bonfires by the train tracks. The poems felt cinematic in that way. I did wonder if I was reading that into the poems or if it was really there—but even if I was projecting a bit, I figured that’s part of how we all read, right? I probably read the collection a little too fast, so I marked the ones I liked and planned to go back and reread them more slowly
helen of troy avoids her school reunion
you start off all bowl-cut tube-sock schoolhouse rock and end up a bitch, and i’ve never been able to clock when it happened, what fine day that lemon soured, what burger i’d snarfed for lunch, what copy of tiger beat i was caking in doodle hearts while the proclamation rang out: i was, i wam, i ever shall be, bitch-hood delivered by angels on high gumming vicious wads of bubble yum and sliding each other these sweet little scheming glances, as if i hadn’t already tea-leaved my fate straight out of the horror of the morning bus ride. their cherry-pie faces, of course i was gagging to know: was it my hair, my clothes, was it the way i didn’t good-girl freeze when kevin smith touched my waist, the way i laughed and loosened the buckled cage of my ribs, how i reached in right away to dig out my heart?
This poem felt so true to girlhood and young womanhood, that shift you can’t quite pinpoint … but feel in your bones. When do we shift from girls to targets? From bowl-cuts and tube-socks to “that bitch”?
Overall, I really admired the voice and ambition of the book even if I am not quite confident in how well I read it. For April — which is National Poetry Month!!! —I’m thinking about reading one of the Pádraig Ó Tuama anthologies — just to help me find a way forward in my poetry reading without getting discouraged. I’m trying to stay curious and keep learning.
❤️ Favorite books of 2025:
January - Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
February - Open Throat by Henry Hoke
March - Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
I can’t believe it’s gone by so fast but this April marks ONE YEAR since I started sharing my reading life on Substack. 🥹🥹🥹 I can’t decide how to celebrate the occasion but I really want to — this space and our community has had such a profound impact on my life and has given me precisely what I had been craving — a community of readers, a space of mutual accountability, an opportunity to really challenge myself and activate my brain. It has also given me friends which I did not think I needed nor was I looking for. But here you are and I cannot even begin to tell you how much our little book chats mean to me.
And some questions for you:
Did we overlap on any of these titles this month?
What did you read in March that stirred your soul?
I am considering including an Ask Me Anything post later in the month — feel free to email or message me with anything you may be curious about! You know how nosy I am about other people’s reading lives, I will try to be as open as possible!
Constance Debré's parents were journalist François Debré (1942–2020) and former model Maylis Ybarnégaray (1942–1988); the judge and politician Jean-Louis Debré is her uncle. Her grandparents included Michel Debré (1912–1996), former Prime Minister under General de Gaulle, and Jean Ybarnégaray (1883–1956), a minister of the Vichy regime and resistance fighter. She was 16 when her mother died.
, I could never thank you enough for introducing me to Levy in such a special, thoughtful way.
Thank you so much, .
an exceptional reading month!!! I haven't read any Levy myself yet but I got Hot Milk as a Christmas gift this year and can't wait to finally get around to it! Also so excited you're loving Savas so much– I've been eager to dive into more by her since reading The Anthropologists in January and they all seem so up my alley (our alleys are very similar Petya!!). I had such similar feelings about Good Girl, too, so I'm glad you had a good time with it :) Whenever I get to your list of monthly favorites at the bottom of your newsletters, I'm equally intimidated/admiring; it feels so difficult to just pick one per month (and I usually make it through about half as many books as you!). But as a challenge, if I were to pick for March, I'd have to say the new Hunger Games (sue me), or Rita Halász's debut Deep Breath, translated from the Hungarian, which is right up there as well
and– wondering if I'm missing something, but can't seem to find your Bibliophobia review in the line-up?? 👀 interested to hear what you thought of it!
YOU DIDN'T THINK YOU NEEDED US? But book friends are the best friends... 😃
I love witnessing you find these books that speak to your soul. One of the greatest gifts is learning what moves you as an individual. I feel like I'm starting to get there too.
I need to read Good Girl because I certainly did enough drugs for the both of us and it sounds like Required Reading. Also got Checkout 19 on my shelf that clearly needs some reading as well