Currently
What I’m reading, watching, listening to, and thinking about
Reading: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix — set in 1970 Florida, where pregnant teenage girls are hidden away in a maternity home, stripped of their names and their choices, until a librarian slips one of them a book on witchcraft. It’s horror, but the scariest thing in it isn’t the witches — it’s the institution. The adults who believe they’re helping. The system that runs so smoothly on the shame of young girls.
I visited a place like this once. A friend from college was sent there when she got pregnant. A friend and I went to see her. I have never forgotten being inside that house — the feeling of it. She asked us to bring her a bra that fit. We did. She was so grateful for something that small. I think about her when I read this book. I’m still angry at the people who put her there.
Also, Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors — three sisters reuniting after the death of the fourth, navigating grief and old wounds and the particular intimacy of people who didn’t choose each other but are bound anyway. The book opens with the line: “A sister is not a friend.” I’ve been thinking about that all week. About the difference between the people you’re born into and the people you build. About how both kinds of love can save you, and both kinds can wreck you.
Watching: How to Get to Heaven from Belfast on Netflix, from Lisa McGee, who also created Derry Girls. It's technically a murder mystery — three women in their late 30s investigating the suspicious death of an estranged fourth friend across a chaotic, hilarious road trip through Ireland — but it feels like a buddy comedy. What I really love about it is how accurately it captures a particular kind of female friendship in midlife. The way these women pick up exactly where they left off. The shorthand. The arguing. The showing up anyway. It made me feel seen in a way I didn't expect from a murder mystery. I’ve watched six episodes in two days.
Listening: Blood Orange’s Essex Honey — Dev Hynes’ first full album in seven years, made after the death of his mother and shaped by grief, home, and memory. It’s ethereal and melancholy, experimental without being inaccessible. Collaborators include Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Mustafa, Zadie Smith — and somehow it all feels like one voice, like Hynes just opened a door and let people walk through. I’ve been playing it as a soundtrack while I work. I have a hard time finding music with words that I can actually work to — this is one I can listen to both ways.
Thinking About: Women finding each other in the dark. A book about girls who turn to witchcraft out of desperation. A show about women who show up for each other across decades of distance. A novel about sisters bound by blood and grief and the apartment they grew up in. An album made by someone processing the loss of the person who knew him first. I keep coming back to the same question: what holds people together when everything else comes apart? The answer keeps being the same. The people who knew you before. The ones who show up. The ones you’d call.