Issue 119: Everything I Read in April

Bypassing intellect, landing in the gut

Recently I have been writing a lot about reading and feeling. Obviously, we all read for a multitude of reasons – including learning and intellectual uplift – but man… I want my books to break skin and leave a mark.

Unsurprisingly, the books I ended up reading in April aligned with those desires. Each of them offered a kind of interior plunge: into grief, guilt, desire, chronic pain, psychic unraveling, and occasionally, ecstatic escape. They moved in spirals, fragments and feelings. They’re books that spoke to me in pulses and dreams. They are books that live in the tension between distance and need, control and surrender: about mothers and daughters, about bodies in revolt, about art as a journey and salvation.

Together, they formed a strange little chorus: prickly, raw, tender, and exacting. If you’re drawn to writing that operates by feel—books that bypass intellect to land in the gut—these may open something for you too

Books mentioned:

• Assembly — Natasha Brown

• Hot Milk — Deborah Levy

• Pathemata — Maggie Nelson

• Just Kids — Patti Smith

• Notes to John — Joan Didion

• Ecstasy — Alex Dimitrov

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.

📚 Assembly — Natasha Brown

In Assembly, Natasha Brown delivers a searing and minimalist portrayal of a professionally successful Black British woman navigating the dissonance between outward success and internal dislocation. The unnamed narrator, a high-achieving investment banker, is preparing to attend a garden party hosted by her white boyfriend’s upper-class family. As the day approaches, she’s also confronting a grim personal decision—I was shocked and HURT by this but trying to avoid spoilers.

The novella unfolds in spare, clipped vignettes, mirroring the narrator’s emotional detachment as she reflects on the cumulative weight of microaggressions, racism, and social expectation. Brown excavates the cost of respectability, the quiet violence of corporate culture, and the impossibility of truly assimilating into institutions built to exclude.

What makes Assembly exceptional is its refusal to offer resolution. Instead, it presents an interior reckoning: should the narrator continue performing a role that was never hers to claim—or dismantle it entirely? With a voice that is both razor-sharp and unflinchingly vulnerable, Brown crafts a book that reads like a slow detonation. A meditation on race, mortality, and freedom, Assembly is as tightly constructed as a poem, and just as devastating. I simply cannot shake this book nor do I want to.

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📚 Hot Milk — Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy's Hot Milk is a sensuous, enigmatic novel set in a sun-drenched Spanish coastal town. Twenty-five-year-old Sofia Papastergiadis has brought her hypochondriac mother Rose to a private clinic run by the enigmatic Dr. Gómez, who offers treatments as psychological as they are physical. Adrift and underemployed, Sofia begins unraveling her own identity and repressed resentment as the oppressive Mediterranean heat mirrors her emotional turmoil.

Levy's prose is elliptical and shimmering, her narrative punctuated with symbolic encounters—jellyfish stings, ancient ruins, poisoned dogs—that blur dream and reality. Sofia's affairs with Ingrid, a German seamstress, and Juan, a local man, become vessels through which she navigates her fractured sense of self.

At its core, Hot Milk explores the aching ambivalence of daughterhood and the disorientation of becoming. Levy's electric language—alternately clipped and lyrical—mirrors Sofia's interiority as she oscillates between submission and revolt. The novel poses unsettling questions about illness, power, and liberation without offering easy answers, remaining as hypnotic as it is elusive.

Though many consider Hot Milk Levy's masterpiece, it was my third and least favorite of her works. This makes me wonder if Levy's appeal lies partly in the earthquake of first encounter—that surprising singularity of voice that initially captivates. Not that subsequent novels diminish in quality, but nothing quite matches the seismic shift of discovering her distinctive literary world for the first time.

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📚 Pathemata — Maggie Nelson

A slender, intimate book that reads at times like a transmission from a dream-state, Pathemata is Maggie Nelson at her most vulnerable and unguarded. Composed during the early pandemic, it blends memoir with dream narration to document a time of intense physical pain, emotional liminality, and collective disorientation. The book centers on Nelson’s undiagnosed chronic jaw pain—frustratingly elusive, resistant to treatment—and her attempts to understand and live with it through a mix of medical inquiry, metaphysical questioning, and dream logic.

Structured from her pain diary and dream diary (as she revealed in an interview with the LA Review of Books), Pathemata unfolds in shards—raw, intimate, funny and often surreal. The writing is stripped of the academic scaffolding that underpins The Argonauts or On Freedom, and Nelson has said she felt freer here, liberated by its autobiographical nature and the absence of the need for bibliographic justification.

Threaded through the book is the heartbreak of losing her beloved former teacher, a woman she has written about before—a brilliant mind made severely disabled by a car accident who then succumbed to cancer. The pandemic made a proper goodbye impossible, compounding the grief and helplessness that permeate these pages.

If Bluets and The Argonauts represent Maggie Nelson’s intellectual heart laid bare, then Pathemata is a private ache, shared tenderly. It may be slighter in scope, but it is no less cherished—a delicate, profound record of a favorite writer working through pain, love, and unknowing. If you are a Maggie Nelson fan, you would love it. If you haven’t read any Nelson yet – which you must correct pronto – don’t make this one your first.

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📚 Just Kids —

Patti Smith

I picked up this book because Patti Smith is my friend

Charlee Brooks

’s favorite poet / artist / author. I had obviously seen the book online MANY TIMES and even had a copy at home, I just never read it because I didn’t know Patti Smith’s work and thought that I wouldn’t appreciate the book out of that context. I am so, so glad I finally read it.

In Just Kids, Patti Smith offers a soulful, elegiac memoir of her formative years in New York City and her lifelong bond with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. The book begins with Smith arriving in Manhattan in 1967, broke, hungry, and full of longing to become an artist. She soon meets Mapplethorpe, and together they form a deep, complex partnership that oscillates between romantic, artistic, and spiritual love.

Set against the gritty, vibrant backdrop of late-60s and 70s New York—Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, St. Mark’s Church—the memoir charts their parallel evolutions: Smith as a poet turned punk icon, and Mapplethorpe as a provocative photographer. Throughout, Smith’s prose is infused with reverence—for poetry, for art, for the sheer act of making something beautiful and true. Their relationship, though tested by poverty, illness, and shifting desires (Mapplethorpe later comes out as gay), remains a steady force in both their lives.

Just Kids is ultimately a love letter—to a person, a place, and a time. It’s a memoir of creative becoming that feels devotional in its honesty, suffused with grace and grief. I didn’t feel the full impact of the book until the very end and when I finished it, I had a really good cry. I am not sure why … I think I felt really moved by the purity of this narrative, the almost child-like innocence that these two carried even after they were no longer “just kids”. The book also made me reach out to a good friend of mine from college who played a similar role in my life – as a friend and a creative partner – the first person who took my creative impulses seriously and encouraged me to be open and vulnerable through my work. Perhaps this is Smith's greatest gift: reminding us of those formative connections that shape not just our art, but our very selves.

For those of you who love audiobooks – the audio version of Just Kids is narrated by Patti Smith herself which is a gift in and of itself. But if you do choose to listen, be sure to still put your paws on the physical copy since it contains a lot of photographs that are essential to the narrative.

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📚 Notes to John — Joan Didion

Notes to John is an extraordinary, posthumously published collection of Joan Didion’s typed reflections from her therapy sessions between 1999 and 2001. Addressed to her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, the notes chronicle a period of deep personal crisis, prompted by their daughter Quintana’s escalating struggles with mental illness and addiction. At her psychiatrist’s urging, Joan began therapy herself—and, in true Didion fashion, started documenting it. The entries are repetitive, obsessive, circular, raw. They are not essays, but working pages: intimate, lucid, and sometimes painfully uncomfortable to read.

Themes of maternal guilt, emotional distance, inherited trauma, and the uses of work as a coping mechanism thread through the book. Didion grapples with how her own childhood—marked by a depressive, war-scarred father—echoes in her strained relationship with Quintana. Her psychiatrist helps her see how her desire to be endlessly available to her daughter is an attempt to repair past absences. He offers her a radical simplification: you don’t need to save her—just love her.

The book’s release of course stirred controversy. Some critics have argued that these notes were too private to publish; others feel Didion, famously meticulous and controlling, would have recoiled. But I think the opposite. Didion treated life as material. She and John had a long-standing agreement that anything could be used in service of the work – We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce – and she explicitly said so in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold that was produced by her nephew Griffin Dunn. These notes are the work: her attempt to understand, to narrate, to survive.

The prose may lack polish, but the project is pure Didion. If Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking are her polished elegies, Notes to John is the raw terrain beneath. A necessary companion to her late memoirs, it captures Didion mid-thought, mid-fear, mid-love—and shows us the private scaffolding of one of the greatest stylists of American letters. If you are not familiar with Didion’s work or have only read her earlier essay collections, be sure to read The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights before picking up this one as it will make little sense without the context of those two books.

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📚 Ecstasy — Alex Dimitrov

My poetry read for April was Ecstasy by

Alex Dimitrov

— my favorite Bulgaria-adjacent author (his family immigrated to the States when he was a young child) which I almost didn’t want to mention because it sounds so provincial but … I claim him, ok. I have to tell you that I have been reading Alex’s work since 2012 when American Boys came out and I clearly remember putting down my book so I could go and apply some red lipstick. Somehow it felt essential to my reading experience at the time and I must say – reading this new collection felt the same. His work continues to provoke in me this desire to become more vivid, more flamboyant, to mark myself as someone who is PRESENT.

For the two people who care, this red is the lip crayon by ILIA in Blue Note and it is excellent.

A lush, yearning collection that balances celestial wonder with earthbound longing, Ecstasy offers a portrait of queer desire that's both street-lit and transcendent. Dimitrov writes about love and loneliness, city nights and distant stars, in a voice that's casual yet aching for the divine. The poems feel like messages sent out into the void—flirtatious, desperate, defiant.

Whether musing on Mercury retrograde, texting an ex under starlight, or chasing connection in the electric blur of New York nightlife, Dimitrov makes space for messiness, beauty, and the sacredness of feeling everything all at once. His speaker wants to be seen, remembered, adored—and in that desire, there's clarity.

This is a book for people who've ever whispered a secret to the night sky or believed poetry might save them. Bold, glittery, and full of feeling.Poetry

❤️ Favorite books of 2025:

• January - Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

• February - Open Throat by Henry Hoke

• March - Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

• April - Assemby by Natasha Brown

I had to work really hard not to start this post with a justification or apology for not having read more this past month. The truth is, my newly 8-year-old—precise, observant, and very cautious—pointed out that I seem to rush through life just to get back to a book. My words, mostly. But hers were close. And she meant for me to notice. Her jab hurt in the way that truth does.

So…

Starting in May, and especially over the summer, I’m going to try reading less. Not out of neglect, but out of care. I want to plan my months with more intention. To be a little less restless, a little more rooted. Fewer books. Slower pages. More presence.

After all, what’s the point, if I’m not really there?

🤓 And some questions for you:

• How was your reading life in April?

• What’s your take on the Didion book?

• Do you ever feel that your love of reading is taking you out of life? How do we balance that?

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