Shoes and ships and sealing wax

What I've been reading and watching

Confession: I completely flaked on this year’s Oscars and didn’t see a single Best Picture nomination in time for the ceremony.

My excuse is that I’ve been in a time of personal upheaval – in the best way – and needed a rest year. Did I watch any Oscar-nominated movies? No. Did I see Godzilla vs. Kong, and was it a delightful movie spectacle and a much-needed escape from everyday life? Yes.

I’ve also been re-watching The Dick Van Dyke Show (through Amazon Prime, if you need to find it) because there is nothing more comforting to me in a hectic time of life than being able to mouth lines of dialogue along with people in black-and-white. The writing still holds up after 60 years (and many, many viewings for me).

I love re-watching my favorites to the point that I could almost just do that and not take in any new stories, but luckily for me, I’m also one of the last people watching WandaVision for the very first time, so that’s been my “new story” for this month. While I’m not the biggest Marvel fan, WandaVision caught my eye because I love old TV shows. The black-and-white pilot featuring Wanda and Vision as a 1950s suburban couple with a laugh track was – of course – exactly my jam, and the uniqueness of taking superhero characters and putting them into an I Love Lucy meets The Twilight Zone setting for a whole new saga has me thinking about the countless ways there are to tell a story.

Reading and watching are ways that we get to explore new stories and other lives without changing our own (and they’re a reminder that if we need to reimagine our real lives, we can do that too). I think we all imagine the different directions our lives could have taken. I wrote about The Midnight Library a couple of weeks ago, and I recently finished another read that explores the idea of alternative universes and lives.

Maybe in Another Life walks the line between breezy beach read and something more thoughtful. Is anything “meant to be,” or is our fate simply the sum of the choices we make? In this novel, Hannah Martin makes one decision that could take her life in two very different directions. We readers get to see both scenarios play out in this unique novel that alternates between two different universes — both of which (spoiler alert) eventually take Hannah to happily ever after.

If you follow the book world and/or you’re intrigued by examples of creativity, it’s interesting to note that Maybe in Another Life is an early Taylor Jenkins Reid novel. Before she wrote bestselling historical fiction (Daisy Jones and the Six, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo), she started in contemporary women’s fiction.

A current read that has me musing on old lives I’ve actually lived is The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren. Built in the 1920s, the Barbizon was an exclusive hotel for women that gave them a safe place to land when first finding their feet in New York City. Everyone from Molly Brown to Grace Kelly to Joan Didion came to the Barbizon to pursue a dream, and Sylvia Plath wrote a fictionalized account of her time there in The Bell Jar.

I didn’t know the history of the Barbizon when I moved to New York at age 22 with three suitcases, two messy fistfuls of dreams, and one broken heart, but there’s something universal about the experience of being young and trying to find your way in that big city. Reading about all those women who came to New York with similar dreams – whether or not they ended up being successful – makes me glad that I had that life experience and can say, “Oh, hey, I did that, too, even if it didn’t work out exactly the way I pictured.”

Reading The Barbizon is partly for pleasure and partly preparation for a new season of my book podcast, Reading Like an Adult. I’m hoping it will be released later this year. I say “hoping” because these days, I’m in both a season of creating and a season of slowing down. I’m full of ideas with less time than ever to work on them. I’m trying to show up and write whenever I can, while also not pressuring myself on quotas when I do have creative time.

I’ve had fewer ideas for this newsletter as my creative brain runs away with other projects. Part of that may be because I’m closing in on my “Creative Reckoning” series – the final installment will be in your inbox on the first Thursday in June. This newsletter has always been peppered with my personal stories, but writing that series in particular was a vulnerable experience. I find myself needing to slow down and let this space lie fallow for a time, so to speak. I’m not planning to pause the newsletter altogether, but look for me every other Thursday for the time being.

I hope you have wonderful plans for your summer reading (and/or watching). Please keep reaching out to me with your stories of creativity and discovery, and I’ll see you around the inbox.