Issue 124: Everything I Read in May
Love at the edge of comprehension
This month, I found myself reading toward a question:
What does it mean to love someone you can never fully understand?
That question echoed—not just within the books, but in how I experienced them. I read mostly familiar authors this month, writers I'd loved before, and noticed a strange tension between my expectations and the actual encounters with their new work. The way my past love for their writing shaped what I was able to see—or forgive. Did I love the book itself? Or was I loving the memory of what their work once opened up in me?
This layered strangely with the content of the books themselves, which were all, in some way, about the limits of knowing: people trying to stay close across cultural divides and social expectations, family roles, silence, heartbreak, grief. People trying to make sense of what was said—and what wasn’t. There were mothers and daughters, friends reunited after estrangement, lovers who weren’t quite what they seemed. All of them orbiting each other with tenderness, wariness, and a kind of ambient ache.
By the end of the month, I was thinking not just about characters, but about intimacy itself. How we read each other. How we project and interpret and revise. How the people we love surprise us, disappoint us, remain—despite deep closeness—somewhat unknown. These books made me think about how much effort it takes to stay in relationship not just when things are hard, but when they’re murky. And how maybe that’s the real shape of intimacy: not perfect knowledge, but a willingness to remain nearby when understanding fails.
Books mentioned:
Dream Count — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie*
Nova Scotia House — Charlie Porter
The Wilderness — Aysegul Savas*
The Safekeep — Yael van der Wouden
Audition — Katie Kitamura*
The Mobius Book — Catherine Lacey*
Bonjour Tristesse — Francoise Sagan
something bright, then holes — Maggie Nelson*
* Read other books by this author before
Note: I always share 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.
📚 Dream Count — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's much-anticipated return to fiction weaves together the lives of four friends as they navigate ambition, love, and betrayal between Nigeria and the U.S. Drawing inspiration from her own life, her mother's experiences, and high-profile news events—including the 2011 sexual assault case involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn—the novel grapples with questions of power, migration, gender norms, and justice. With Adichie's trademark lyrical power and willingness to “go there”, Dream Count explores how trauma and personal entanglements reverberate across borders and across time.
I read this book with my bookclub and even though it gave us a LOT to talk about, my overall sense of the book is one of mild disappointment. The biggest thing that bothered me was how polemical it felt—too self-aware of its cleverness, too eager to make its points. Adichie is urging us to think more expansively about African womanhood—nuanced, materialistic, emotionally rich—and that’s clearly welcomed and needed. But reading the book, I didn’t feel I was getting nuance. I wasn’t guided along, instead I felt like I was being clobbered with ideas already fully formed, rehearsed and articulated many times in many places before… by the author herself.
What troubled me the most: for a writer who once declared that we should all be feminists, this novel sometimes reads like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The four women at the center of the story spend a remarkable amount of time obsessing over emotionally or economically stunted men. It’s gender-essentialist in a way that seems to contradict the complexity the novel wants to champion. Adichie’s writing is still beautiful—she could describe a rock and I’d read on—but the whole time I felt like I was listening to a very smart older cousin, recounting lessons from Gender Studies 101 circa 1998. It left me wondering: has the conversation moved on… or have I?
📚 Nova Scotia House — Charlie Porter
This book felt almost the opposite of Dream Count. It felt to me that Porter wrote with NO pretense to know better… he only wanted to honor the lives commemorated in his story, and I think he did a beautiful job at that. A devastating intimate novel about love, loss, and chosen family in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Nova Scotia House follows Jerry and Johnny as they meet when Jerry is 45 and Johnny only 19, form a relationship and build a life together in the shadows of Jerry’s HIV diagnosis and a global public health pandemic that at the time is a guaranteed death sentence.
Through layered memories and tender conversations, the book becomes a meditation on how we survive the unbearable—by loving harder, grieving deeply, and making meaning in the margins. Themes of queer space, creative kinship, and the enduring power of friendship echo long after the last page. A book that made me journal mid-read, cry when I logged it, and reflect on whether I'm living in enough community myself.
I was in a field of happiness, I was terrified, I hid my terror, Jerry knew I was hiding it, he was the same. It was unbearable that these could exist together, happiness and the terror.
A true heart-check kind of read that I could not recommend highly enough especially as we witnessed the current assault on LGBTQIA+ rights in this country. If you are looking for a way to commemorate Pride Month through your reading, please consider reading this book.
📚 The Wilderness — Ayşegül Savaş
Savaş's The Wilderness is a bleary, brief account of the forty days following birth—an elastic space where time unspools and the self becomes unrecognizable. Savaş, newly postpartum, exists in a fog of exhaustion and bodily tenderness, suspended between presence and disappearance
Her mother arrives in Paris from Turkey to help and with her comes a quiet cultural current: gratitude laced with guilt, attention received as indictment. Savaş cannot always name her needs, yet feels the shame of having them. There is a friction between their ways of caring, a generational distance disguised as help.
In drawing on Halberstam's1 notion of wildness as that which exceeds classification, the narrator aligns early motherhood with a kind of wilderness—not idyllic, but raw and untamed. The baby, once imagined, now lives and breathes and cries; the mother, once singular, now multiplies. The wild is not a metaphor but a condition: temporal, aching, formless. It resists tidy reflection. What remains are glimpses, trace moments, an immense terrain with no documentation. A fog.
As I have written before, I adore Savaş and this little book was the only one of hers that I was avoiding reading because of the subject. I have mentioned in some of my earliest posts on this newsletter – early motherhood was really tough for me. I found the loss of my pre-motherhood self completely disorienting and I lived under water for years until I gradually found my way back to the surface. At the same time, I found books about early motherhood unbearable to read. Even titles such as the much lauded Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk or Sheila Heti’s Motherhood which “women like me” seem to love have felt incredibly annoying but, more importantly, inaccurate to me. The focus too much on the physicality of motherhood – the sleeplessness, the bleariness, the sore nipples – when, for me, the hardest thing about that period is that you feel like you are walking beside a ghost of yourself while simultaneously discovering that inside you lives a heart that is capable of such complete devotion that it scares you.
I think that Savaş’s little book is the first book on the subject that I found both triggering of the memories of those early days while also revealing a quality, a texture, an air about them that escaped me at the time. Of all the things I felt while reading it – and there were many – the primary one that stood out was my profound gratitude for her helping me reconstruct a story of the time that does not erase the difficulty but replaces the guilt and terror with a sense of awe and pride that I walked through that wilderness and while there came in contact a force that is out of this world.
P.S. I am now officially a Savaş completionist and cannot wait to read her upcoming short collection Long Distance – forthcoming in July. Nobody else writes warmth without sentimentality like she does.
📚 The Safekeep — Yael van der Wouden
I think that everyone has already read and reviewed this book – and I will join the chorus of saying – it’s so good, I honestly can’t believe it’s a debut… The Safekeep was probably the most fun I had while reading last month. The book just pushed so many of pleasure buttons – the historical/political setting, young sapphic love, yearning and pent up desire out the wazoo… It was incredibly propelling to read. Set in post-WWII Netherlands, this book follows Isabel, a lonely woman in a large countryside house, who takes in her brother's mysterious fiancée, Eva. What begins as an uneasy companionship evolves into a simmering, erotically charged power dynamic as secrets unravel.
There is a twist / big reveal in the latter part of the book that I saw coming from a mile away — I don’t know if that was due to intentional storytelling, me being that kind of reader (I am always trying to figure out the twist)... or maybe the online chatter about the book somehow transmitted this to me — but I didn’t care. I loved the weird uneasy energy generated by this book – a strange vacillation between trust and threat, intimacy and power.
I didn’t love the ending because it felt too neat for my taste but that didn’t stop me from trolling Dutch real estate sites, looking for summer houses in the Overijssel province. Delulu, I know, but isn’t that a testament to the transportative quality of the writing?! Not only did it make me feel immersed in the atmosphere of the book, it made me want to literally LIVE in it. How cool is that?!
📚 Audition — Katie Kitamura
Audition was the third novel I read last month as a devotee. I am so obsessed with Katie Kitamura’s writing that I felt guilty last year when I couldn’t finish her husband’s book. Truly, it wrecked me. So… I approached Audition with such enthusiasm and anticipation that … well… I set myself up for… something.
Kitamura has given us a cerebral narrative that blurs the line between theater and reality. An unnamed actress preparing for a role is confronted by a young man who claims to be her son—a revelation that unsettles you right off the bat. The encounter is so upsetting to the protagonist that you can’t help but feel defensive and protective of her, wondering who this person is sitting across from her while simultaneously wondering if there is a way, somehow, for her to have a son without actually knowing that she did. In the second part of the book the same two characters are together in a very similar setting but different circumstances. And thus your adventure – may I say, mindfuck?! – unfolds.
Who are these people?! What is their relationship? What distinguished the two sections of the book? Did I miss something?! Of course… to know the answer to that question, you would need to have read with a magnfying glass AND under a microscope simultaneously — because Katie Kitamura’s writing is so spare and minimal, it’s hard to imagine that you could have missed anything. But maybe you have?!
I listened to an interview with Katie Kitamura, in which she said that Audition is the last book in a trilogy that includes her earlier book Separation and the critically acclaimed Intimacies. I was surprised to hear that but I do see how Audition expands on Kitamura's ongoing fascinations with estrangement, disassociation, and feminine interiority. I love the characters she writes — internally super active and fire while being perceived as incredibly passive by those around them. Still waters run deep. I also love that she never over-explains or justifies her choices – you get what you get and even though it may be sketchy, it still gives you so much to work with…
But, I will say, that of the three … this is the book that left the most to the imagination. I appreciate an open question of a book probably more than most readers but this one really left me thinking that maybe my fandom was filling in too many a gap that should be have been addressed by the author? I am not sure I would have loved it if I didn’t already love Kitamura. Still thinking this one through.
📚 The Mobius Book —
A formally experimental project with two covers and no fixed beginning, The Möbius Book is equal parts memoir and fiction—each informing and reflecting the other. The memoir half chronicles a real-life relationship: it begins with love-bombing and gradually spirals into emotional abuse. It captures the raw aftermath— Lacey’s incomprehension, her search for stability, for faith, for a way to keep writing when life’s mess bleeds into everything. The other half of the book is about three college friends as one of them returns from a long absence and whose recent past echoes Lacey’s own. The book is a meditation on storytelling, trauma, and doubleness—a fascinating, demanding read. I tandem-read the book with my friend and, honestly, I worry I may have scared her with how obsessive I became. Especially with the memoir part. I tracked down a frankly absurd number of people referenced in the book and a wide constellation of adjacent publishing-world characters. Yes, I’m a gossip—but also the writing invited that.
In her write-up about it, Martha quoted Lacey who shared the book was an object of rage, and you feel it. If her goal was to convince you there’s a side worth rooting for—mission accomplished. Jesse Ball, write your own book. And I don’t feel even a little bit guilty saying that. As someone who's been on the wrong end of a disorienting, psychologically brutal breakup, I found myself cheering for Lacey all the way through. I think women are expected to be gracious and wise in our victimhood—and I loved that this book is very much not that.
As Lacey moves across the country in the wake of it all, staying with friends and trying to pull herself together, I was struck by how much love she’s offered—and how much she’s able to accept. Her artist and writer friends are also falling apart, each in their own way. I found myself wondering: is this a function of age (the obligatory midlife unmaking)? Or is it something about the artistic life itself—this open, porous quality that makes you especially susceptible to heartbreak? Is the same thin skin that makes you an artist the thing that leaves you vulnerable to messy, magnetic people? Is the job of an artist to be open to accept questionable romantic advances the same way they make themselves available and willing participants in odd exorcisms… all in the name of conjuring a super-human version of themselves, the one that creates SOMETHING out of NOTHING?! Or is that just what it’s like to be human?
This book was the third for me in recent memory (the other two were Notes to John by Joan Didion and Pathemata by Maggie Nelson, both of which I reviewed last month)... where I got a front row seat to a favorite writer’s brain and heart at work. In all three cases, the experience was a little discombobulating – I am not sure what to do with all this humanness you are sharing with me?! – but of all three, I felt that this one was the most generous and satisfying to a reader, because of the fiction section that lives side by side with the memoir. I read that part almost as a “let me now show you where all this life GOES once the writing floodgates open”... and maybe I am not correct to diminish the import of the section this way… but to me it read a lot like sketches, early drafts of how that type of novel might go and how the lived experiences of the memoir make their way into the core work, eventually.
The passage from this book that you will probably start seeing quoted and re-quoted:
Nearly every time I’ve written a novel, something happens between its completion and its publication that makes it clear to me that I knew something I didn’t know I knew while I was writing, and that buried knowledge, that unknown known, has been expressed in the fiction, just beyond my awareness.
On a craft level, I think that this book is a master class on the question of how to write fiction that is personal without being autofictional. How the energy and minutia of lived experience makes its way into prose, how the made-up fictional story sometimes brings to light truths that are undetectable in real life – even if you are the master of perception as Lacey is.
As Martha mentioned, this book may feel a little too opaque if you are not familiar with Catherine Lacey’s work. However, if this discussion triggers something in you, please read Pew and/or Biography of X first / too.
📚 Bonjour Tristesse — Françoise Sagan
The only reason I wanted to read Bonjour Tristesse was that the trailers of the new film look so beautiful and our whole entire family adores Chloe Savigny. Fun fact: my sister-in-law Ellie was Chloe’s best friend in high-school, she even talked about her in an interview recently. When our kids were little, Chloe’s baby got some of Rumi’s hand-me-downs. 🥹 Anyway. I just wanted to read the book before I saw the movie.
Published when Sagan was just 18, this book is an absolutely cult classic and follows 17-year-old Cécile as she spends a languid summer on the Mediterranean with her libertine father and his young mistress. When a more respectable woman enters their lives, Cécile's carefree existence is threatened, leading her to manipulate events with tragic consequences.
A novel of adolescent desire, moral ambiguity, and existential ennui that still feels fresh despite the fact that it was published in the 50s. I found the book interesting enough to read but didn’t love it. I was talking to my husband about it and told him that it felt a little… mopey to me at which he laughed and said, oh yeah; people assign it in low-level Existentialism classes, undergrads love it. I hope I don’t hurt anybody’s feelings when I say this… but… this book was too young for me. I truly hope the movie is better.
Also, please tell me if you’ve read Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood? I am very curious about it.
📚 something bright, then holes — Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson's something bright, then holes was my collection of poetry for May. I am a huge of Nelson’s work and love her autotheory work — I have previously reviewed The Argonauts, Bluets and Pathemata — but this was my first time reading her poetry (which, I believe, is how she got her start as a writer).
As you may have heard, Nelson’s work is typically hard to categorize and this book is no exception, especially for a novice to poetry as me. On thematic level, this collection explores the intersections of love, loss, and the search for meaning amidst grief – which made it a good companion to the Charlie Porter novel I had read earlier in the month. The collection is divided into three sections, featuring meditative poems set along the polluted Gowanus Canal, a harrowing long poem written at her friend and teacher Christina’s hospital bedside, and a series of lyrics that honor the entwined forces of love and sorrow.
Nelson's writing is raw and moving, offering peeks into deeply personal territory. I found At the Hospital For Special Care (the Christina poem) particularly profound, here’s an excerpt:
This is my favorite time here—
You asleep, me keeping watch.
Making sure of the dusk.
In the low light I try to make out
the notes posted on pastel paper:
SOFT COLLAR IN BED ONLY, PUREE DIET.
TURN HEAD AND TRUNK TOGETHER.Outside: two birds at the feeder.
THIS is how present I want to be in my own life. To not miss any of it.
❤️ Favorite books of 2025:
January - Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
February - Open Throat by Henry Hoke
March - Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
April - Assembly by Natasha Brown
May - The Wilderness by Ayşegül Savaş
We talk so much about wanting to feel seen. But what about the grace of not seeing clearly? Of staying when the answers don’t come. Of realizing that the gaps between us aren’t necessarily failures—but the spaces where care lives.
Love at the edge of comprehension isn’t a compromise. It’s still love.
🤓 And some questions for you:
What's the last book that made you feel the strange, disorienting closeness of intimacy?
How does your fandom for certain writers affect your experience of reading them?
As well a series of other theorists which I plan to read. The one I am most excited about is my fellow Bulgarian, Julia Kristeva.
I used to teach Bonjour Tristesse to 17/18 year olds. It is a book which appeals to them (my sell was fast cars and sex in the south of France) but the longer I taught it and the more times I reread it the more I thought what an amazing piece of writing it is. When I read it at about the same age I thought the central character had behaved badly and let events get out of her control but I think with modern eyes it’s valid to question the behaviour of the adults around her. My question to my students was: whose fault is this? As a teacher (and a parent) I think it has things to say about how we treat young people and how our behaviour affects them. And it includes some excellent scenes of nature interacting with, reflecting and impacting on the story. (Desperately trying to avoid spoilers!)
Wait: Kitamura actually said it was a trilogy in an interview?!? I thought I made that up. Mindfuck is right— I felt like I was losing it reading that one. I skipped over your notes about The Safekeep because I just bought that one, but I did see the word *fun* so I am extra excited now. And I love how you read Lacey’s book— I did not quite know what to do with the surreal fiction piece, but what you say here seems just right to me. I am touched and happy for how you experienced the Savas memoir— I also just downloaded that story collection from Edelweiss this week and I am itching to get to it. What a month you had and thanks for sharing your thoughts in such a delightful, gossipy way.