The year in writing
Putting 2022 in the rearview
I’ve only had this newsletter for a little more than a month, but I wrote many, many words all year long. On the last workday of the year (I hope you’re not really working!), here are some highlights of my year in writing.
January
For the first time in seven years (!), I didn’t teach any semester-long, university-level writing courses. Instead, my goal was to freelance full-time and sell my book proposal on orphans. Reader, I did it!
The publication I wrote the most for was NPR, and I kicked off the year with a review of Kathryn Schulz’s memoir Lost & Found, which is as much a philosophical reckoning with the experiences of losing and finding as it is a record of Schulz's personal grief and love stories. I read this book in the waning days of 2021, and I think its reflective mood is perfect for ending one year and greeting the next.
February
At long, long last, I got a book deal! Fun fact: this is the third time I have done the whole having-a-manuscript/proposal-out-on-submission gambit, which is a special circle of hell that I do not particularly recommend but that is impossible to avoid if you want to do the thing. Another fun fact: one of my freelance gigs for the past few years has been copyediting for Publishers Marketplace (yes, our house style is quirky, and also yes, I don’t usually touch the deal reports until after the morning email goes out. Surreal to draft and edit my very own PM rectangle. Thank you to my steadfast agent, Jamie Carr, to my acquiring editor, Hillary Brenhouse, and to my lovely new editor, Anu Roy-Chaudhury, for shepherding American Orphan. I’ve spent most of this year researching and writing thousands of words of this book that readers will lay eyes on in the not-so-distant future (2024?).
Also in February, I got to write about one of my favorite writers—Sarah Manguso—again for The Baffler, this time on the occasion of her first novel after seven books of poetry, short stories, and nonfiction.
March
So much excellent fiction hit the shelves in March! My favorite novel of the year was Candice Wuehle’s MONARCH. Here’s the opening of my NPR review, for a taste:
Poet Candice Wuehle's irresistibly weird debut novel Monarch is the kind of book that you want to start reading again immediately after turning the last page — not just to trace the conspiracy at its heart, but to appreciate how its kaleidoscope of beauty pageants, Y2K anxieties, famous dead girls, and deep state machinations synthesizes into an exploration of what makes up a self.
And for The Los Angeles Times, I wrote about Ella Baxter’s novel New Animal, which follows a cosmetic mortician unhinged by her mother’s sudden death—by turns a comedy of errors and a profound meditation on how to find mooring in the world when you have lost your anchor. My pal Joslyn mailed me a hard copy so I could luxuriate in the newsprint <333.
April
In my first for The Atlantic, I rounded up nine “backdoor memoirs”: books that seem at first to focus on an outside phenomenon—the reproductive cycle of eels, say, or the love letters of a Southern Gothic novelist, or the oil-and-gas industry in the North Sea—but end up revealing just as much about their authors as they do their topics.
May
I spent the month of May thinking too much about Little Orphan Annie for my book—culling back over 1920 and 1930s comic strips that I had read in February, watching clips of the Broadway musical and the movie version with Bernadette Peters, and parsing out why it is that we are so inured to all the frankly sick and weird parts of this story that we can’t stop retelling ourselves.
June
The first book I tried and failed to sell—twice—was an essay collection about grief. One of the pieces, which will maybe see the light of day, is about retail therapy and shopping with my mom and department stores and Roosevelt Field Mall and the history of Long Island. I was able to apply some of that thinking to this review of Alexandra Lange’s Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall for The Atlantic.
July
Remember that viral braided essay about cranes and crane wives for The Paris Review a few years ago? I did not like it very much then, and I did not like the book that resulted from it. I wrote about why for Gawker.
Also in June and July, I spent a lot of time steeping in the archives of two major child welfare charities—the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital—at the New-York Historical Society. The CAS pioneered the orphan train movement, and the Foundling amended it for Catholic toddlers.
August
Back to NPR, this time for a review of Emi Nietfeld’s Acceptance, a memoir of coming to terms with the reality of a traumatic upbringing without reaching for redemption.
For my book, I watched a lot of 1990s and 2000s foster care-adjacent television, from Boy Meets World to The O.C., and thought about how Shawn Hunter is basically Huckleberry Finn and Ryan Atwood is basically Heathcliff.
September
Twelve years ago, when I was in the Kelly Writers House Fellows seminar at Penn, I watched all of David Milch’s television up to that point—from the groundbreaking police procedurals Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, to the Shakespeare-meets-the-profane Western Deadwood, to the odd and awe-inspiring surfing drama John from Cincinnati—in preparation for his visit to our class. I was so pleased to write about his memoir Life’s Work for NPR.
October
I had the extreme good fortune to spend the last two weeks of October at Yaddo, a residency in Saratoga Springs, where I wrote about foundlings and the New York Foundling Hospital, ate so much good food that I did not have to cook, and met brilliant artists whom I now count as friends.
November
With Twitter imploding thanks to the world’s biggest dingus, I decided to start this very Substack while I was in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on a book research trip. Here’s that post:
I also wrote my first review for The New Republic, a publication I have been trying to break into for literal years! Don’t stop pitching, pals!
December
The last thing I published this year is also the piece I am most proud of—a long screed on evangelical foster momfluencers—an outgrowth of my book—for the latest issue of The Baffler.
Looking ahead to 2023, in addition to, you know, finishing my book manuscript (!), I want to write longer-form, more ambitious cultural criticism that looks at trends in the stories we want to tell and hear and why. I’ve got one such essay in the cooker for January and will share it with you when it’s out. Until then, stay warm and cozy and happy (almost) new year!