I Went Back to the Light

My Year in Books

As I mentioned a few newsletters ago, for the foreseeable future, I will not be paywalling any more content. This particular newsletter, in which I write about really personal mental health struggles, is one I normally would have paywalled because it is so vulnerable and frightening to discuss openly. But my hope is that by writing about it publicly, there may be more chance of someone in need reading it and feeling less alone. My deep gratitude to all of you who read and especially those of you who pay for your subscriptions. Your support means so much to me.

Who needs Goodreads

I am sitting in my bedroom in Italy, the afternoon sun warming my face. It snowed here the other night and there’s an icy wind, so we usually light a fire in the fireplace in the afternoon, once the sun has gone and we still have a few hours to go until dinner. At the moment, I am debating whether to go to the grocery store one last time before things close up for Christmas to pick up some calamari. For some reason, I am craving them stuffed with seasoned breadcrumbs and cooked in tomato sauce. But the truth is that we already have our Christmas Eve dinner planned and purchased (fennel-orange salad, potato-octopus salad, smoked salmon on toast) so torpor will probably win out. That’s just fine.

Next to me on the bedside table is Kelly Link’s Book of Love. I asked for it for Christmas and my husband kindly delivered. It is 625 pages long and I keep falling asleep at bedtime when I read, so I believe this will be my last book of 2024. It is, if my calculations are correct, the 51st book I read this year. (For whatever reason, I don’t include cookbooks in this accounting, even though I do read them cover to cover.) Of course, it doesn’t really matter precisely how many books one reads in a year, but I like keeping track. I read 53 books in 2023 and 55 in 2022.

One of the reasons for the lower book count in 2024 is that in October my mother passed on to me from a friend a stack of back issues of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. I took them with me on book tour, so that I wouldn’t have extra book weight while I traveled. I loved reading them, but I lost about a month of book reading to those issues. It reminded me just how essential my decision years ago to cancel all my magazine subscriptions was to the goal of reading more books.

(But oh, how I miss those magazines. So much. Of course I read a lot of magazine articles online, but I feel a lot of guilt about not subscribing and supporting the publications I love so much, especially the New Yorker. And then there’s the matter of kismet: I read Daphne Merkin’s NYRB piece on Paula Modersohn Becker whilst falling asleep in a friend’s guest apartment in Chicago. That article alerted me to the Art Institute’s brilliant Paula Modersohn Becker exhibit that I promptly attended the next day and that I would have certainly missed otherwise! Incidentally, for more reading on Paula Modersohn Becker, here are two books I have put on my list for next year: First, a fascinating collection of letters between her and Rainer Maria Rilke called Dear Friend, and second, Marie Darrieussecq’s Being Here is Everything - originally published in French and also available in German, recommended to me by my friend Celeste.)

Back to the books. I keep a little brown Moleskine notebook on the shelves next to my bed in which I write down the books that finish. A pen keeps my place. The notebook is a bit of a mess because, in the past, I’ve also used it to take notes in school meetings, jotted down lists of home improvement projects that need to be done, and taken it with me to restaurants with the boys for games of Hangman. In the middle, though, there are still lots of creamy blank pages and now I carefully guard those for future years. I like my old-fashioned method of listing by hand the books in the order that I’ve read them. At the end of the year, I go back over the list and marvel at how far away last January seems, how long ago a book read last winter can feel. It feels different than a typed list in my phone, more substantial, more real.

Last winter. We were in Italy for the Christmas break. I was vibrating with tension about the impending photo shoot for Classic German Cooking. I knew that as soon as we came back to Berlin, I’d have to hit the ground running. I felt very alone and very overwhelmed with the massive responsibility that lay before me. I wasn’t sleeping well, despite the quiet and rest and restorative nature of being at our house in Italy in wintertime, when fog blankets the hills and wood smoke curls up over the houses and we roll from one meal to the next, wrapped up in thick sweaters and daily portions of panettone and torrone. I lay awake at night next to Max and worried that it was all too much to handle, that I’d somehow fail, that I couldn’t do it all. That feeling of overwhelm built into a powerful wave of anxiety and depression that began during the photoshoot and then swallowed me whole.

When I look at the books on my list from the first months of 2024, I see a desperate scrabbling to find some modicum of peace. My mind felt out of control and frantic with worry and exhaustion. I lay awake night after night, humming with tension and fear and sadness. For comfort, I buried myself in Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series, books I had loved as a child, sometimes crawling under the blanket in Hugo’s bed to read them next to him, trying desperately to anchor myself to the warmth and steadiness of his body next to mine without him noticing too much. On a disastrous ski trip to Austria, I read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and Wintering by Katherine May, trying to calm myself with stories of other people’s sadness, curled up next to the oven that heated our apartment. Then Max succumbed to a terrifying pneumonia and we had to come home early.

Later, I see Directions to Myself by Heidi Julavits and Group by Christie Tate and Wellness by Nathan Hill and Bittersweet by Susan Cain and I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee and Flash Count Diary by Darcy Steinke, all read in the tender weeks and months after I checked myself into an out-patient clinic and started slowly getting better, as attempts to better understand myself and this frightening moment in my life.

When I read Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting in late June, I was feeling mostly myself again. Medication and hormones and therapy and meditation and mindfulness and sunlight were working. What a triumphant feeling that was, realizing that I was going to be alright, that I had needed help, had asked for and received it, that I had the love and support of so many people all around me, and that I could rely on myself again, after going through the wilderness and feeling so alone and abandoned by my own mind. The books that followed, like Percival Everettt’s James and Anne Berest’s The Postcard and Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword and Miranda July’s All Fours, those I was able to read with pleasure and abandon and joy and freedom and relief. I was me again. I was going to be okay.

I approach the end of this year with curiosity. Part of me, still traumatized by the experience of last winter, is worried about the darkness and the feeling that descends upon many of us in Berlin in January and February. That winter will never end, that the darkness will never lift. But more of me feels brave and strong. I have plans for what comes next, both big and small. I know that rather than isolate myself when things get sticky and hard, I have to keep reaching out. I have built new communities for myself. I am making new rituals. I talk openly about what happened to me and how I got better. I listen to myself more, take care of myself the way I need to. And I keep present in my mind at all times that at my lowest moment, I saw the bottom and I turned away from it and paddled upwards again. I saw the dark and went back to the light. I did that. I can do it again.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

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