A year in review, in books

Reading as a writer, and five novels that are better than anything you can find on TV

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My very first essay for Turtleneck Season flowed from the observation that, by keeping a list of everything I had read since the age of 24, I had kept an unwitting record of my life, of its moods and influences. The list was the closest thing I had to a consistent journaling practice, albeit one that told a story only in hindsight—my exhaustion in my first year of law school reflected in a dropping off of reading, an uptick in male authors admired by lovers at the start of a relationship.

Looking back at my 2024 list, the dots are easy to connect. At the beginning of the year, my maternity leave was coming to an end. Work ramped up slowly, and through March, I was able to breastfeed my daughter who was at home in the care of my husband. I spent those winter months reading an array of recently published fiction: The Suicide Museum by Ariel Dorman (2023), Mobility by Lydia Kiesling (2023), The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (2023), Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022), and Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (2023). I was also reading about motherhood, but the breadth of the list reflects a reader who cared about the literary zeitgeist and who wanted to be able to participate in conversation about the books that everyone else was reading. I was a new mom but I wanted to be on trend!

In March, the second half of my husband’s parental leave came to an end and we began dropping my daughter off next door to be cared for by a nanny. This was the first time that my daughter and I were regularly separated. While pumping breastmilk had previously been a choice, now if I wanted to continue to breastfeeding, which I did, it was a necessity. Pumping during the work day required me to cleave myself in half. From the shoulders up, I was a lawyer, writing emails that explained exceptions to the doctrine of exhaustion of administrative remedies. From the shoulders down, I was a body, one that was producing milk , leaking urine when I coughed, and that wasn’t quite sure how to be apart from the bundle of flesh I had birthed a few months earlier. That I was able to do these things at the exact same time could have felt like a feminist triumph—a unified theory of CAROLINE—but instead it triggered in me a profound sense of alienation from both my work and my body.