Tomorrow, July 16, will be the first anniversary of my mother’s death. Recently, when I think of my mother, the same visceral image springs to mind. Over and over: a slit opens in my chest like a fault line in the earth of my body. I picture an inverted mountain, a kind of V, descending deep through this fracture, boring through me to a wild darkness below. I feel it now in my chest and try not to cry. I mean, I feel it now and cry.
I was unprepared for how shattered I would feel this year.
For upside-down mountains.
Tomorrow I will take the train down to the Philly burbs like I did so many times when my mom was sick, to spend the anniversary with my father, to take him to a minor surgery, and to bring home all the teapots my mother collected for me over the years. We were big into high tea, she and I. Give us all the scones and clotted cream forever. My dad wants these objects out of his house, objects I am not quite ready to take possession of. I will also bring home my mother’s 1979 set of Collier MacMillan Encyclopedias, the brand she sold to pay for my college and which will now form the basis for my next novel. My next novel, which I am starting today right now let’s go.
This is a kind of pilgrimage. I will also visit the little library where I took The Artist’s Way a year ago today. My next novel is about an artist, and it was poignant to find this particular book on that particular day. I have known this novel was coming for a long time and Artist’s Way had been on my list to read in preparation. I’ve owed the little library a replacement book for the whole year, and I will bring them one this week. The last time I visited it, the owner of the house came out just as I was grabbing Artist’s Way, and I told him I was in the neighborhood visiting my mother who was about to die. Then I started sobbing. This neighbor probably never wants to see me again, it was such an awkward thing I did to him, to us. To tell a stranger your mom is going to die.
I’m writing this post to decide which book to leave in the library, but also as a kind of distraction from the feelings I’m having this week. Mid-summer seems a good time to share some reading recs anyway, right? I hope you find one here that suits whatever moment you are in:
Just Kids by Patti Smith. I’ll give you a rec from my mom first. Smith’s coming-of-age memoir—about her early Chelsea Hotel days in NYC with Robert Mapplethorpe—was the second to last book my mom read. I had suggested it to her in the hopes of doing our own End of Your Life Book Club (a book I also highly recommend). But she was too sick for much reading after that. Of course, she adored it. Everyone adores this book.
My mom and I spent hours on the phone talking about it. At one point she said, “You know, Mo, you’re a better writer than Patti Smith. But she lived a much more interesting life.” My mom was good at doling out truth bombs. This one is half a-mother’s-love, half bomb. It’s a love-bomb I will always treasure. If you haven’t read Just Kids, please treat yourself. I’ve been revisiting it in audio form myself, a way of being with my mom and with Patti (who is so soulful and whose voice always makes me feel better). I also recently went for tapas at the Chelsea Hotel with the extraordinary writer Amy Stuber, and while the place has been spiffed up beyond recognition, you can still feel the presence of Patti and Robert in the raw ceiling overhead.
How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast. We can’t talk about memoirs or about losing our mothers without talking about Molly. This memoir about growing up the daughter of a famous writer and then losing that mother to dementia is my favorite nonfiction of the year. All I do this summer is tell people to read it; this has been my main contribution to society in 2025. Full disclosure: Molly and I are friends and I love her. I think she’s an amazing person and mom and defender of democracy with an enormous heart. There’s something indomitable about her that I deeply admire. But I think I would love her memoir even if I didn’t know her because of its killer voice—unique, self-deprecating, surprising.
Molly can make you laugh and cry in the span of a single sentence. Like Patti Smith, she has a ton of fascinating life material and has been through a lot. She writes about all life’s difficulties and good fortunes with grace, wit, and love. She is brutally honest about everything, but especially about herself. Oh, how I wish my mom could read this book. She would have loved it.
Bitter Sweet by Hattie Williams. Every summer reading list needs at least one good page-turner, and this is mine. Bitter Sweet is about a young woman working her first PR job at a London publishing house who gets involved with a much older, famous writer. The fame angle makes it a great book to read beside Molly’s. The relationship is all-consuming and completely messed up; I could not stop reading about it. In fact, like Molly’s memoir, I read it in two days. The first twenty pages or so contain some summary and backstory, but once you get past these opening bits, it is riveting. It’s one of those novels where you keeping wanting to scream at the main character: “No, don’t!” But also: “Yes, do!”
This Is Happiness by Niall Williams: Staying on the other side of the Atlantic for a moment longer, let’s talk about this absolutely spectacular 2019 novel set in a small, rainy town in Ireland the summer the rain stops and the place finally gets electricity. A love story to be lingered over it, not page-turned, this is a “lifetime” book for me. As in, once in a lifetime do I read something so dear. I hold it alongside Song of Solomon, Mrs. Dalloway, Jane Eyre, The Bell Jar. My mother’s best friend from childhood sent it to me after my mother’s memorial in March with the following note:
This is sent in memory of your mother and in memory of how much she loved you. I hope you enjoy the read as much as I did. My years of friendship with her is part of my personal ‘this is happiness.’
Cue the tears, right? My mother and her BFF grew up on the same suburban Chicago street in big Irish-Catholic families, and the book evoked so many memories of my mother’s wild and wonderful childhood stories. This was one of the most everything books I’ve ever read. Hilarious and sad with so many observations and truths about humanity and life and friendship and love, especially this one:
[Y]ou could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it. I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness.
The London Plane by Katherine Anderson and friends. My dear college friend Katherine Anderson has published an exquisite book about the Seattle restaurant she founded and co-owned for a decade—The London Plane. The book, like the restaurant, was crafted with such love and care that it feels appropriate to arrive here directly from This is Happiness. The London Plane is happiness. It was a very special place, bringing together Katherine’s obsession with flowers and food and all things beautiful—and also bringing together an incredible group of bakers, cooks, florists, and artists.
The photography in this book is so gorgeous I want to eat it (see the picture of flowers to the right). The recipes are unique and almost, dare I say, sensual. I hope I have the courage to make Michael Sanders’s Plane Bread someday! This is one of those multi-page recipes, composed with such delight, that is its own art. Happiness indeed! A stunning art book to set on the coffee table but also a workaday cookbook to keep on the counter. A book of stories and memoir. A fantastic book to gift. Again, I wish I could send a copy to my mom. She would have died (again) over this book.
Things in Nature Simply Grow by Yiyun Li. From Katherine’s flowers, I take you to Yiyun Li’s garden, where she writes that last year she “planted twelve hundred bulbs, an addition to the seven hundred and the five hundred from the previous two autumns.” This is a hard book. This is a book about a parent’s abyss after the loss of two children to suicide. I came to this book in part because my own family has been touched by this choice: whether to live. What I loved most about Li’s heart-wrenching and beautiful book is her defiance: “My garden is not a metaphor for hope or regeneration, the flowers are never tasked to be the heralds for brightness and optimism. Things in nature merely grow.”
I adore the noncompliance of this passage in particular:
[I]f you think suicide is too depressing a subject; if the fact that all things insoluble in life remain insoluble is too bleak for you; and if you prefer that radical acceptance remain a foreign concept to you, this is a good time for you to stop reading.
This book is about life’s extremities … This book will neither ask the questions you want me to ask nor provide the closure you may expect the book to offer …
This book will not provide a neat narrative arc, which some readers may hanker for … This book will not provide the easy satisfaction of fulfillment, inspiration, and transformation.
I want to inject Li’s words, this rejection of the inadequate narrative arc, of the easy satisfaction, in my veins as I begin my next novel. I want to inject this defiance into the next chapter of my life. I also want to thank Li for sharing her incredible boys with us. (Little/big moments like: “I once edited out a few adjectives from Vincent’s writing when he was in sixth grade, which led him to protest: ‘Adjectives and adverbs are my guilty pleasure!’”)
“The Piano Tuner’s Wives” by William Trevor. If you can’t handle that things in nature simply grow, then maybe instead go for a walk and listen to Yiyun Li read William Trevor’s captivating story on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. Li calls Trevor her “mentor on the page,” and her analysis of her mentor’s work in the Q&A after the story is well worth the listen. This is a story where a character does something so devastating to another character that it took my breath away. I love stories like that. Also, by the way, listening to a whole story on a single walk is a terrific way to start a summer day.
Andrew Martin’s novel Early Work and collection Cool for America. I did a deep dive into the witty and gritty work of Andrew Martin recently, and talk about truth bombs! “New York was a nightmare of pointless ambition, people waiting in endless lines for nothing.” Yes, true! And also: OUCH! Another from the same story, “No Cops”: “But wasn’t every year a hard year? Even a good year took a lot out of you.” Again: painfully true. Fiction writers will learn a lot from Martin’s clever use of dialogue (I loved one of his character’s “machine-gun approach to conversation” in particular) and searing commentary on writers and the writing life. Early Work is a great novel to pair with Bitter Sweet—both dig deep into troubled relationships, one from a male perspective, the other from a female.
Pork Fluff by Tiffany Hsieh. No summer reading list would be complete without poetry, and this debut prose poetry collection hits the spot. Hsieh writes about the experience of immigrating from Taiwan to Canada with vivid images, lots of food, and blistering observations about both cultures. “We didn’t come here to be us. We came here to be like you… Ma and Ba paid a price to come and my brother and I played our parts to stay.”
Hsieh shifts gears from hilarious to heartbreaking, from childhood to death, from whimsy to realism, from tenderness to critique in ways that are absolutely invigorating. She is a genius at juxtaposition, at peppering her work with perfectly placed gaps. Thank you to Rita Mookerjee, the book’s brilliant editor, for sending the collection my way.
The Pink Lady, The Honeycrisp. If you missed it, here’s my latest short short fiction. It’s got pie, per usual.
Morgan Parker in The Paris Review. Are you still copying poems like I am? If you are, here’s a great one by Morgan Parker to write out by hand: The High Priestess of Soul’s Sunday Morning Visit to the Wall of Respect. I saw Parker perform her poetry at the 92Y years ago; if you ever have the chance to see her, I highly recommend the experience! And if you missed the daily poem practice I’m trying, here’s a post about it. And another about Martha Silano’s poem “Self-Elegies,” published in May, the month she died of ALS.
Resurrection. If you want to know a bit more about my mom, ICYMI, here’s a post I wrote about her last fall.
Okay, that’s all! Thanks for bearing with my long post, friends. You got me through a difficult weekend. And, after writing this post, I realize I can’t part with any of these books! I’ll have to think of something else for the little library…
