I was folding laundry when Ann Patchett got me, which is the least literary sentence I have ever written and also exactly how it happened.

There is a thread running through Whistler about a house being sold, and about the particular finality of that. Not just leaving a house, but losing your standing to ever walk back into it. You can drive past it, slow down, and know exactly which window is which, but you cannot go in. Whatever happened in those rooms is still in there, and it is in there without you now.

I put the basket down in the middle of the hallway and stood there like an idiot with one sock in my hand.

Here is the thing I should tell you up front. The house I thought of first was not the farmhouse I grew up in. It was the one my kids were little in, the one we moved out of, and that feeling showed up fast and it was plain old missing.

My own childhood house, the farmhouse, arrived about ten minutes behind it, uninvited, and that one had not been missed at all.

I am going to tell you about the farmhouse first anyway, because it turns out it explains the rest.

And the farmhouse is a strange thing to be handed by Patchett’s paragraph, because I can walk back into it. My dad still lives there. I could drive out tomorrow and go in the front door and nobody would stop me, and I could stand in my childhood bedroom if I wanted.

So let me tell you: The house I grew up in was a farmhouse, and it was beautiful, and I was not allowed to have anyone in it.

The rule

My mother had a thing about the farmhouse. I have never landed on the right word for it. Decorator is not right, because that sounds like a job. Collector is closer, because there were antiques, and the antiques had value, and the value was the whole point. But neither really encompasses the entirety.

She was always redoing something, and I want to be precise about what that means, because it was never repair. The farmhouse was old but it was not falling down. We were not patching a roof because water was coming in. We were tearing up perfectly good tile because the hardwoods underneath would look better, painting cupboards to match a photograph in Country Living, and tearing off a side porch we actually used and loved because she had an idea about the landscaping. None of it came from necessity. All of it came from wanting, and from style, and from how a room would look to someone who was not going to be allowed to sit in it anyway.

What that meant, practically, for a kid, was that no other kid ever came over.

I want to be fair, because adults came over, occasionally. My parents had friends, and those friends were in the house sometimes, and that was fine. It was children who could not be in it. Children break things and ruin things, and ruin was her word, and it is not the right word either, because ruin in her vocabulary meant a water ring on a table or a scuff mark on a wall or a spill that came up with a cloth. A thing could be visibly and completely fine and still be ruined.

So I asked constantly, and the answer was always no. I asked for sleepovers the way other kids ask for a dog, with a full campaign and a rotating cast of arguments, and the reason was always some version of a cup. Somebody would set a cup down on the antique trunk we used as a coffee table, or put their feet somewhere, or just exist in the room in a way that left a mark on it.

So I had few friends. That is the part I did not understand until I was much older, because when you are 10 you do not think of it as cause and effect, you just think you are the kind of person who does not have a lot of friends. Friendship at that age is built almost entirely out of proximity and unstructured hours, and unstructured hours happen in houses. If you cannot host, you are outside the loop that everyone else is inside of. You get invited a few times, you never reciprocate, and then you stop getting invited, and nobody is even being mean about it. It is just math.

The house I was jealous of

My best friend lived thirty minutes away. We were both country kids on opposite ends of the same county, which meant every time we saw each other outside of school somebody’s mother spent an hour in a car.

That somebody was always my mother, driving me to her house and back, which she would do cheerfully and repeatedly rather than let my friend come to ours one single time. The math is identical either way. Somebody drives, somebody picks up. She chose the version that kept a child out of her living room.

My friend had six brothers and sisters. Bedrooms were shared. Nothing in that house matched anything else in it, and I have thought about that house more in my adult life than I have thought about almost any other building.

The couch was worn out because people sat on it, together, to watch a movie. You could put your feet on the coffee table. There was a piano and you could play it whenever you felt like playing it, badly, in the middle of the afternoon. You could run up the stairs. Nobody grabbed your arm on the landing to tell you to be careful, because there was no antique hanging in the single dumbest possible place on the wall for you to knock down.

The kitchen was the best part, and the reason is that it was built and organized for using, not for looking at. They canned and cooked and baked constantly, and the counters had stuff on them and the stuff was where it was because that is where a person’s hand goes when a person is actually making something.

They lived in that house. And they let me live in it with them while I was there, which I understood at the time was generosity and did not have the words for.

Lived in. That was the thing I was jealous of, and I did not have that phrase until much later in life either. Not their piano and not their siblings. The wear.

My room, three times

My mom redid my bedroom at least three times while I lived in it, and I was never once asked.

Some summers I went to stay with my grandparents, who I adored, and more than once I came home to a completely different room. Different color, different arrangement, different (new) everything, chosen entirely without me, and then handed to me with a set of instructions. Don’t do that in here, be careful of this, watch out for that.

There was never a place for my boom box or a shelf for my CDs, and I couldn’t do my art because that was too messy and would ruin something. Nothing went on the walls that I picked, because the walls were part of the room and the room was part of the house and the house was for show. And it was for show to an audience that never came, because I still was not allowed to have anyone over.

What the house was actually like

The farmhouse was not a nice place to be, which is the part I skipped over for about thirty years.

My parents fought. Not occasionally, constantly, and at least half of it was about money, which is its own kind of joke in a house where we were demolishing a porch we liked for aesthetic reasons. The only stretches of genuine peace I can remember are the ones where my grandparents came in from out of state, because then the adults seemed to perform and behave. Christmas especially. My grandparents would show up and buy my sister and me the gifts my parents could not afford, and for a few days the house would go quiet and warm and my parents would act like people who liked each other.

So the antiques were being protected inside a house that was not, by any other measure, being taken care of.

The purple

My parents finally divorced when I was a senior in high school. My dad’s girlfriend moved in the day my mom moved out, which, after some therapy, is a sentence I can now say in a normal voice. I did not go anywhere until college. I floated between the two of them, my Mom and Dad’s, a night here, a week there, wherever I felt like being.

Two things happened that summer, about a month apart, and I have never been able to think about one without the other.

My mom had moved into a different house. New to her, not new by any stretch of the word. And when I asked about my room there, she told me I would be sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and that I was not to decorate it, not to hang anything, not to make it mine in any way, because I was leaving for college in a few months and she had plans for the room.

I understood that sentence perfectly at seventeen. The room was going to be nice. It was going to be nice after I was gone. But would it be for me when I came home from college? I knew that answer was no.

And then my dad’s girlfriend told me I could paint my bedroom at the farmhouse any color I wanted.

I think she meant it kindly. I’d like to think it’s so I would know I had a space to come back to during my college breaks. A space that would always be mine. I think she was trying to be a friend to me, or a decent stepmother, or both, and she reached for the one thing she had to give. I do not think she had any idea what she had just done.

I picked the brightest purple in the store. Not lavender, and not a nice grown-up plum, but a purple that a paint company invented in a fit of optimism and probably regrets. It was, objectively, a terrible choice. I painted every wall.

Because here is what had never happened in that house: I had never picked anything. Not the color, not the furniture, not where the bed went. My room got redone the way the rest of the house got redone, on somebody else’s schedule, to somebody else’s taste, and I lived in it the way you live in a hotel. So when I finally got a vote, I did not cast a reasonable one. I cast the loudest one available.

I have thought about that day a lot since, and I have never once been embarrassed about the color. It was one of the best days of my life. I got to make the room mine for four weeks, and four weeks was enough. I even got to hang my artwork on the walls which I can’t even explain how that made me feel.

That room is red now. My step brother had the room after I left and it has been red for a long time. I could go stand in it this weekend if I wanted to. My dad would put coffee on.

I do not particularly want to.

What I carried out of it

Here is the part I actually did not expect Whistler to hand me.

When my husband and I bought our first house I furnished it beautifully, immediately, on purpose, and I knew there were going to be kids in it soon. I did it anyway. I bought the nice version of everything, and I did not experience it as a decision, because it was not one. That was what a house was. You made it pleasing and made it look like something. It was the assignment, and I had been handed it so early that I did not know a different assignment existed.

Nobody ever told me the other thing, which is that you are supposed to be building a home, and that a home and a house are not the same object and are sometimes in direct competition with each other.

And I have said my mom’s exact sentences that traumatized me so much. Out loud. In my own house, to my own kids, in her exact cadence, about a cup on a table. I hear it leave my mouth and I want to reach out and grab it back. You do not get to grab it back.

The thing is, I was never actually upset about the cup or the spill.

That is what I have only recently worked out. One of my kids would knock something over and I would feel nothing in particular about it, because it is a spill, and it comes up with a cloth, and cleaning it takes ninety seconds and I do not mind cleaning. Left to myself I would have laughed about it with my kid, and we would have gotten a towel, and it would have been a small funny thing that happened on a Tuesday.

But I thought I was supposed to be mad. I had been trained that a spill is an event, that somebody is supposed to react, and so I performed a reaction I did not feel, at a child, over something I genuinely did not care about. And in doing that I took a moment that was going to be fine and made it into a moment about being careful. However many times I did that, I passed the whole thing down another generation, and one of my kids is going to stand in their own kitchen someday feeling a false flare of anger about a countertop and not know where it came from.

And I keep doing this math I hate. All the money that went into nice things, into the good version of a room, during the years there were small kids in it. Every one of those things could have been secondhand. Every single one. Get the beat-up thing, let it get more beat up, let it be a house where people come in and put a cup down, and then when everyone is grown and gone, then go buy the nice table. Nobody would have known or cared, and the house would have been so much happier.

A house that gets lived in is what a happy house looks like. The wear is not the damage. It is the evidence.

The part I am still in the middle of

There is a worse version of this, and I am still inside it.

I redecorate when I am sad.

I did not see the pattern until the last few years, which is a humbling thing to admit to strangers. A kid leaves for college and the quiet is unbearable, and within a week I am repainting an entire level, buying pillow covers, hanging different art. I am not tearing up flooring and I am not adding rooms, so for a long time I told myself it was not the same thing. It is the same thing. It is a smaller version of the identical instinct, which is to answer a feeling by rearranging a building.

I can count it, which is the embarrassing part. Some rooms in our current house have changed their whole look five or six times in ten years. I have put wallpaper up and taken it down a few years later, and I have painted a room a color I was sure about, decided I did not like it and painted it right back to the safe gray it started as.

And I know the difference, because I have done the other kind. We once bought a house in a college town to run as an Airbnb, and it needed real work before anyone could stay in it. That renovation had a reason and a finish line. The wallpaper did not. Renovating because a house needs it is one thing, and renovating because I am sad or bored is something else entirely.

It does not work, and it never has. I finish the room and the kid is still gone and now I have also spent money, so I get to feel the original thing plus a new layer of being annoyed at myself for not noticing sooner.

We want a lake house someday. That is the semi-retirement plan, the actual one, and every one of those sad-week paint projects is money that was not going toward it. I am not worried about the spending itself anymore. I am worried about the pattern I inherited without ever agreeing to it, and whether I can put it down before it costs me the one house I actually want.

And I wonder about this every time I open Instagram, honestly. A whole industry of people redoing their homes on camera. New rooms constantly. And I find myself wanting to ask a rude question, which is whether anybody lives in there, whether the couch is comfortable, whether a kid has ever put a cup down on that table without somebody flinching, or whether it is a set, being redone for views and sponsorships, the same way my mother’s house was being redone for an audience that never came.

I do not actually know. I just recognize the shape of it.

I want to be clear about that, though. I am not knocking anyone who loves decorating or a good renovation. Wanting a house that is nice and feels like you is a completely normal thing to want, and plenty of people redo a room because it makes them happy and it actually does. I am not writing about them. I am writing about me, and about how much money I have spent on rooms I was sure would make me feel better.

The second house

There is another house, and this one was ours, and it is the one that actually gets me. It is also, as I said at the top, the one I thought of first. Everything else in this essay came in behind it.

My family of five moved when my kids were in junior high and elementary school. It was a good move for the right reasons, and I don’t regret it. But I want to go back to the old one so badly sometimes that it is almost physical. Not to live there, just to walk through it.

There was a tree in the backyard that was theirs, in the way a tree becomes a specific tree. The front yard was where the sprinkler went in July and the sled came out in January, and I could not tell you a single individual day of either one, which I think is the point.

We moved bedrooms around when our surprise third arrived. My daughter was thrilled it was a boy, and not for any of the reasons you would expect. It meant the boys went upstairs and she got the downstairs room to herself, and it meant she got to pick. The paint color, the bedspread and the curtains were all hers.

I got to stand there and watch a kid choose her own walls. Nobody ever handed me that, and I did not know until it was happening how much I wanted to see it.

I want to stand in the room where they were babies and see how big it actually is, because I have a feeling my memory has the dimensions wrong.

You do not realize how much a house is holding until you do not have access to it anymore. It is not that the memories are gone. It is that they were partly stored in the building, in the specific way the light came through one window in the afternoon, in the sound a particular door made, and I did not know I had outsourced that much of it. I thought I was keeping all of it in my head. I was keeping about sixty percent of it in my head and the rest of it in the drywall.

Somebody lives there now and their kids are the ones who know what that door sounds like.

That is the house Patchett was talking about. Not the farmhouse. I can walk into the farmhouse whenever I want and it turns out that was never what I was missing.

What Whistler actually did

None of this is what Whistler is about, exactly. It is a novel about a woman and the stepfather she lost for forty-five years and got back for a minute, and about a story he told her once in an overturned car in the snow, and about a horse. It is about impermanence in the largest possible sense, and it is generous and calm about it in a way I was not prepared for.

But there is that one thread about the house, and about the door closing on a place you used to be allowed inside of, and Patchett does not overwork it. She just puts it down and leaves it there, and that is the whole trick: she lets you be the one who supplies the farmhouse.

I listened to this on audio, and she narrates it herself, and I want to be careful about how much I gush here, because “read by the author” is usually a warning label. This is not that. She reads it like someone telling you something true across a kitchen table, and there are places where she gets quieter instead of louder, which is a choice almost nobody makes.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Ann Patchett) | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars

The structure is two timelines, present-day New York and one night in 1980, and they braid tighter as you go until the seam disappears. It is short, 304 pages, and it does not feel short. My one honest critique is that the ending refuses to resolve on purpose, and if you are a reader who needs the door closed at the end, this will bother you. It did not bother me. It felt like the only ending that matched the argument the book had been making the whole time, which is that connection is the thing, and closure is a story we tell about connection after the fact.

Where this one is sending me next: Horse by Geraldine Brooks, which I have not started yet, and more Ann Patchett, because I am nowhere near done with her. Whistler also left me with a question about the difference between a house and a home, and I have not found another book that picks that up. If you know it, tell me.

Where else Whistler has shown up:

• August: I Was Wrong Twice, 7 Books, $0 Spent, and My First Reading Tree Miss (where I first ranked it)

Grab a copy of Whistler. Library first, always. But if you are buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links back indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.

One question

I want to know about your house. Not the one you live in. The one you would walk through if somebody handed you a key and thirty seconds and no explanation.

Which room would you go to first?

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If this one stayed with you, these two are close cousins. One is about the house going quiet before any of my kids actually left, and the other is about the season of my life I would step back into if I could.

The mom, Johanna, is sitting at the dinner table with her family, trying to have a conversation and hold everyone in one place for one meal. One by one, each of her three kids says they have somewhere else to be. They get up and leave, not dramatically and not in anger. They just have other things to do.

And Johanna sits there and realizes this is over. The family she built around these people being together is done, not because something terrible happened, but because her kids grew up and stopped needing to be there.

I had to pause the audiobook because I was crying in my car.

Not because I was afraid that scene was coming for me. Because I’ve already lived it.

Before anyone left

The table started getting quieter before anyone moved out.

My three kids all had busy school and sports schedules, so we didn’t always get to eat together. But we tried. We didn’t allow phones at the table or eating in rooms. We made it a thing, and for a while it worked. The conversations were real. We talked about our days, our struggles, what was funny, what was hard.

But somewhere in the high school years, the drift started. The conversations got shorter and the answers got vague. One of them would cut dinner short for some reason that didn’t seem important enough, and I’d sit there feeling something tighten in my chest. When it was time to clean up, suddenly everyone had somewhere critical to be. And I’d think, this is winding down. They can’t see it, but I can. The clock is running out on all of us being under this roof, and they’re already halfway out the door before they’ve actually left.

My daughter and I are both eldest daughters. We carried things without talking about it. We were the ones who tried to make dinners feel like something, who asked the questions, who kept the conversation going when everyone else was ready to check out. I didn’t fully realize how much of the family’s connective tissue ran through the two of us until she was gone.

The first shift

When my daughter left for college, the house changed overnight.

It wasn’t just quieter, it was a different house. My best friend was gone, and suddenly it was me and three boys, two sons and a husband. I didn’t realize until she left how much she and I had carried the conversation together. Without her, dinners went from meaningful to a lot of guy jokes, or the three of them ganging up to make fun of me, which is their love language when they’re all together but is a very different energy than what the table used to feel like.

I missed her in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Not just as my daughter, but as my partner in trying to hold the family together, the person who cared about making it special the way I did.

The second shift

When my middle son left for college, it was a different kind of hole entirely.

I can’t fully explain why, but losing the second kid felt different than losing the first. My middle son and my youngest are very different personalities, and when the middle one left, the dynamic shifted again in a way I didn’t expect. Now it’s just three of us. The conversations are more personal in some ways because there’s only one kid to focus on instead of three. But they’re also quieter, or they’re my son and husband talking about sports or Star Wars or things I’m not as familiar with as I was with the interests of my other two kids.

Three people at a table that used to seat five. That math never stops being strange.

Ships in the night

As I write this, all three of my kids are home. That only happens about twice a year now, around Christmas and sometime in the summer. My two college kids both play college sports, so they’re lucky to get a week to ten days off at a time. Between their jobs and friends and schedules, we’re lucky to overlap for four or five days.

This is one of those weeks. And here’s the honest truth: even with everyone under one roof, we’re passing like ships in the night.

My husband and I both work during the day. I go to bed early and the kids stay up late. My middle son has always been a social butterfly, and he makes plans with his hometown friends at the worst possible times, missing family dinners that are the only chances all four of us (minus him) are together. I can usually grab my daughter for breakfast or a walk or coffee, but I can never seem to get her and my middle son in the same room at the same time.

And the thing I worry about most isn’t whether they’ll stay close to me. It’s whether they’ll stay close to each other.

My daughter and my youngest are tight. They do a great job of staying in touch even living hours apart. But my daughter and my middle son don’t, and they have differing political views that lead to arguments that leave someone angry for days of the visit. Days we don’t have enough of to waste.

When they were little, they were inseparable. We lived in the country and there weren’t a lot of other kids nearby during summers, so they made their own fun and did everything together. I would have bet anything they’d always be that close.

The mirror I don’t want

I have one sister. We’re not close. We weren’t that close growing up either, but once I left for college, I didn’t look back. She was younger, and I was gone. The time passed, the bond never really formed, and neither of us put in the effort to fix it. Now we see each other on holidays because we’re expected to, and we don’t know much about each other’s actual lives.

I see that same story starting to write itself with my kids, and it terrifies me.

The political arguments between two of them that go nowhere and cost everyone days of tension. The one who’d rather see his hometown friends than sit at a table with his family for an hour. The slow, quiet drifting that doesn’t feel like a crisis until you look back and realize the distance became permanent somewhere along the way, and you can’t pinpoint when.

I can’t preach about it, either. I’m not a good example. I did the same thing to my sister that I’m afraid my kids will do to each other. So I just watch, and hope, and try to make the times we’re all together matter enough to hold.

What Johanna knew

Johanna doesn’t scream or cry or beg her kids to stay at the table. She just sits there. And that quiet sitting, that moment of recognition without any power to change it, is the most honest thing I’ve ever encountered in fiction about a specific kind of parental grief.

It’s not the grief of something going wrong. It’s the grief of something going exactly the way it’s supposed to. Kids grow up and leave and build their own lives. Every parenting book will tell you this is healthy and good and developmentally appropriate, as if knowing it’s normal makes it hurt less.

It doesn’t.

Every mom I know carries this somewhere, even if she doesn’t name it. The fear that the closeness was the peak. That the noise and the mess and the fighting over who sits where was actually the golden age, and you were too tired and too busy to recognize it while it was happening. That one day you’ll sit at the table and realize you didn’t know the last time everyone was there together was the last time.

I didn’t know, and I don’t think any of us ever do.

I just got back from a trip with my college-aged son and his girlfriend. While we were there, I don’t think he cared that I was there. I was the Uber and the grocery shopper and the adult with the credit card. He never said, “Hey Mom, let me just do something with just you.” And that stung. But he’s in love, so I get it. I just wonder if someday he’ll look back and realize that trip could have been as great for me as it was for him, if he’d just looked up for a minute.

Contrast that with my daughter. When she turned 13, we let her pick a place to visit and plan the trip. That place has become ours. We’ve been back just the two of us and with the whole family a handful of times. It’s on the ocean, which happens to be a weakness for both of us. But what makes it special isn’t the place. It’s the memories we built there. That’s the trip where the gratitude already arrived. She sees it, and she holds it the way I hold it.

The other two aren’t there yet, and that’s okay. The gratitude runs on a delay, and I know that. I just have to survive the in-between.

When did your table start getting quiet? I’d love to hear yours in the comments.

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The review

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Julia Whelan) | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars

I picked this up strictly because Julia Whelan narrated it and it was available when I needed a new audiobook. I didn’t do any research beforehand, because a Julia Whelan narration rarely lets me down, and that turned out to be the right call. The first half builds a portrait of a family held together by grief and obligation, triplets conceived through IVF after their parents lost their first child, and you think you know what kind of book this is. Then the second half takes a turn you don’t see coming, and the whole thing opens up into something bigger and stranger and more interesting than a family drama.

Julia Whelan’s voice is what sent me to The Latecomer. The Latecomer sent me down a Mormon history rabbit hole that ended at The Nineteenth Wife, and it kept handing me essays along the way. This is the first. The next one, about the gap between loving your kids and savoring them, is coming soon.

Where else The Latecomer has shown up:

• Love is a Pie and You Only Get So Many Slices (the Mormon rabbit hole it sent me down)

• What I Read in May 2026 (where I first ranked it)

Grab a copy of The Latecomer. Library first, always. But if you’re buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links back indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.

That is not a monster. That is a Tuesday’s worth of worst-case scenarios, and I have been running them in my head for as long as I can remember.

What travel looks like for me

Here is what travel looks like for me. Any trip without my husband, I do not really sleep. If I do, it is not until the third or fourth night, and I have come to understand that it is not calm. It is my body finally overriding me and shutting down because it has to. The first nights I lie there fully awake, cataloging exits, listening to the building breathe, running the reel. What if someone comes through the door. The window. What if someone is already in the closet, or under the bed. What would they want, and why.

I am a worst-case-scenario person by nature, I have written about that before, and you stack that on top of a lifetime of movies and books and headlines that all quietly agree women are the targets, and this is what you get. A grown woman who travels with a corkscrew within reach of the bed, or something worse than a corkscrew. Who wedges a chair under the door handle. Who packs a little door-alarm device, because they make those now, and they make them for women like me, by the thousands.

When my daughter went off to college I gave her a personal alarm for her keychain. I taught her how to read an empty parking lot before she walks into it, how to tell whether someone is behind her and what to do if they are, how to get home if a route starts to feel wrong. I have drilled all of my kids on the basics. Check the license plate before you get in the car. Watch your drink, and never set it down. I know how it sounds. I also know I would do every bit of it again tomorrow, because the alternative is pretending the world is something it has spent my whole life proving it is not.

The part I like least about myself

I want to be honest about the part I like least about myself, because it is the part the book was really pointing at. The fear is not evenly distributed, and the unevenness is the whole point. I lie awake rehearsing how I would protect my daughter and how I would defend myself. I do not lie awake like that for my son. The shape of the worry for him is just different, lighter somehow, and I am self-aware enough to know I did not invent that difference. The world handed it to me, the same way it hands it to every mother, a quiet running tally of who it has decided is prey.

And when I travel with my husband or with my son, both of them large men, the fear drops so far and so fast it is almost funny. I sleep. I unclench. I become a person on a vacation instead of a sentry at a post. I hate that. I hate being a woman who leans, even a little, on the idea that the big men around her will keep her safe, because the truth underneath it is uglier and simpler than that. It is not really that they can protect me. It is that I cannot protect myself, not against most of what I lie awake imagining, and no corkscrew or door alarm or parking-lot tactic actually changes that math. It just helps me get to sleep by the fourth night.

The night before she got there

This past trip, I was meeting a girlfriend for a few days, and I got there a night before she did. One night alone. And every single noise kept me up, every scenario on its loop, and it was bad. The part that gets me is where I was. A gated community. A secured one. A good place, by every measure we use to decide a place is safe. She is the same friend I wrote about in the friendship anniversary piece, the trips we take just to sit in a room together, and it says something about this whole essay that even meeting her somewhere safe could not talk my body out of standing guard for a night.

They say that is always exactly what the dead girl thought, too.

The review

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Julia Whelan) | Source: Library | Rating: 4 stars

That rating lives closer to 4.5 or 4.75 for me if I am honest. Julia Whelan narrating was the reason I picked this one up in the first place, and she is exactly as good as everyone says. Underneath the hotel-room fear it put in me, The Villa is a genuinely satisfying dual-timeline book club thriller, the kind you want to talk through with someone the second you finish it.

Julia Whelan’s voice is what sent me to The Villa. It didn’t send me to another book. It kept handing me essays instead, and this is the third.

The other two essays The Villa handed me:

• I have a work voice and my family makes fun of it

• I Want to Throw Anniversary Parties for My Friendships

Grab a copy of The Villa. Borrow it if you can. Buy it if you must. And if you’re buying, my Bookshop.org link keeps it with the indies.

I should tell you I came to this one sideways. Kate Quinn is an automatic read for me, one of maybe three authors where I don’t ask what it’s about, I just get in line at the library. The Alice Network, The Rose Code, The Huntress, The Diamond Eye, The Briar Club, all five stars, all of them one of the reasons I found out I loved historical fiction in the first place. So when she took her first step into magical realism I was going to be there no matter what it was.

The question that wouldn't leave me alone

And then I read that rule and stopped thinking about the plot entirely. I started thinking about my own life, and the question that wouldn’t leave me alone: if I had a library like that, if I could bookmark my own life, step into that stopped time for a breath, and come back to the exact same moment, which part would I choose?

My first instinct was the obvious one. I’d bookmark the hard parts. The years when I was raising little kids and building a business at the same time, traveling for work, running on the kind of broken, worried sleep you get for years after a baby comes, three of them in my case.

I even know the exact week I’d pick. One of the kids had rotavirus, which meant liquid diapers every few minutes and a continuous loop of laundry and Lysol that never once caught up to itself. Then my husband and I both got it and neither of us could move, and my mother-in-law had to drive over and take the kids. I’d have slid a bookmark right into the middle of that and gone somewhere quiet to sleep for a week, then come back rested and patient and whole.

But the longer I sat with it, the more the question turned over on me. Because I don’t actually want to skip those years. I want to redo them. There’s a difference, and it took me until now to feel it.

What the rushing cost me

The truth I don’t love admitting is that I rushed. I rushed through feedings to get back to my laptop. I laid my babies down the second they fell asleep on my chest instead of staying in the chair and rocking, because there was always something waiting for me to finish it. I told myself the work was the responsible choice, the grown-up one, and a lot of it I would give back in a heartbeat now for one more hour of a sleeping kid going heavy against me. Work, work, work. I can see how much of it didn’t matter, and I can see exactly what it cost, and the math is not in my favor.

So I changed my answer. I wouldn’t bookmark those years to escape them. I’d bookmark them to come back in as the mother I wish I’d been the first time, the one who saw a sick week or a clingy toddler as the whole point instead of an interruption to something more important.

The one I'd go back to first

There’s one moment I’d go back to before any other. It was a snowy weekend years ago, and I was newly pregnant with (surprise) baby #3 and we hadn’t told a soul yet. I was scared in a way I couldn’t say out loud, doing frantic private math about insurance and leave I wouldn’t get and whether I had it in me to start over. My kids wanted to go sledding more than they had ever wanted anything, and they stood at the door begging me to come. I said no. I sat on the couch, numb, and watched them leave with their dad and disappear into the best kind of winter day, the kind you don’t get back.

If the Astral Library were real, that’s where I’d slide the bookmark. I’d step into that stopped time, take every hour I needed to talk myself down and remember what actually mattered, and then walk back into that exact minute, stand up, and go get my coat. I’d make the day. I’d be cold and out of breath and present, and I wouldn’t have to spend years afterward wishing I had.

The version of this I can’t stop turning over isn’t even about the big, dramatic days. It’s the small ones. The times I’d give anything to have paused for three seconds before I answered, before a tired reaction became a sharper word than I meant, before a fight got bigger than it needed to, before I handed out advice I hadn’t actually thought through. A bookmark wouldn’t have given me a different child or a different life. It would have given me the one thing I never had enough of in the moment, which was time to choose how I showed up.

My kids are mostly grown now. The house is quieter than it used to be and I am almost on the other side of all of it, and even now, when I catch myself parenting on autopilot, too tired and too distracted to be the person I want to be, I still want the bookmark. Not because the season is unbearable. Because it’s the living part, and I finally know that’s exactly why you’d always walk back in.

Two libraries, six years apart

Here's where it gets interesting, and where I have to be honest about a book by an author I'd follow anywhere. For a story built entirely on the fantasy of escaping into books, I needed to ache for the real world Alix Watson walked away from, and I never quite did. I felt the cleverness of the structure more than I felt her longing.

Then I went looking, and found something I didn’t expect. I have been reading books about stepping out of your life for six years without noticing I was doing it. In Five Years, The Midnight Library, Maybe in Another Life, The Measure, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Our Infinite Fates, This Is How You Lose the Time War. Seven of them, and a shelf I only made on Goodreads this week, once I could finally see it was there.

Then I lined them up by how the escape actually works. There are exactly two where the way out is a building you walk into, and it’s The Midnight Library in 2022 and The Astral Library this June. Three stars and three stars. I never even wrote a review for the first one. Every book I gave five stars to on that shelf has no door in it at all. Maybe in Another Life, The Measure, Addie LaRue, Our Infinite Fates, the other life just happens, inside a life, with no room to step into and no chance to get your head straight first.

The two that don’t fit tell on themselves. In Five Years was 2020, the very first one, before I knew I was collecting anything. Time War was three weeks ago and it lost me on the writing, not the premise. Neither one is a door.

Which is the whole thing I just spent this essay figuring out. When the way out is a room you can enter, escape becomes the point, and I admire it from a distance. When there’s no room and no door and you’re just stuck in the life, it takes me apart. Kate Quinn built a beautiful library. I think I only ever wanted the walking back in.

That’s what the book got right, underneath the magic. The fantasy isn’t escaping your life. The fantasy is being allowed to return to it as the person you wish you’d been, before the moment is gone. We don’t get the bookmark. We just get the moment, once, in real time, moving at its normal speed with no library to step into and slow it down. So I’m trying to stop rushing through the pages I’m still in.

If you could bookmark your own life and step back into one moment as the person you are now, which one would you choose? I’d love to hear yours in the comments. Mine is a snowy driveway and a sled I should have grabbed.

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The review

Format: Physical | Source: Library | Rating: 3 stars

I picked this up from the library on a whim, mostly because Kate Quinn wrote it, and the concept is easily the best part. The time-stop mechanic gave me more to sit with than most novels manage in twice the pages, and that alone made it worth the read. What kept it at three was the emotional middle, where I felt how clever the structure was more than I felt what Alix had given up to be there. Go in for the idea and the charm rather than a gut punch and it delivers. Worth a library hold rather than a shelf spot for me, and a fond three stars.

Where this one is sending me next: if The Astral Library worked for you, go read The Midnight Library, and it works in the other direction too. Same idea wearing a different cover, same three stars from me, and if you liked one of them you’ll like the other.

Then there’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which I haven’t read and can’t tell you a thing about yet. It’s a doors-and-portals book, which by my own theory should land at another three, so I’m reading it next specifically to find out whether I’m right about myself. I’ll tell you either way.

Grab a copy of The Astral Library.

How I think about buying books: the library is always the right answer if it’s an option for you. But some books you just want to keep. If this is one of those, my Bookshop.org link supports independent bookstores and tosses a few cents to me.

The book doesn’t pause for a lesson. It just lets it be true. And that quiet certainty is what makes it so powerful.

I would not have found this one on my own. It came to me the way most of my books do now, by being the next thing after something else. I loved The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, this was pitched straight at people who loved Addie LaRue, and that is the only reason it ended up on my Kindle. One book handing me the next.

The map so far: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue → Our Infinite Fates → This Is How You Lose the Time War, which I am currently reading.

This book sent my brain somewhere the author maybe didn’t intend.

The soulmate question we don’t ask

We love the idea of soulmates. Someone out there for you, connected across time and space. But here’s the question we skip: if soulmates are real and come back in different bodies, what happens when yours shows up in a body you’re not attracted to?

Say you’re a straight woman in this life. Your soulmate has been your partner across 50 lifetimes. This time, they come back as a woman. Do you recognize them? Does the soul connection override the body?

Our Infinite Fates creates a world where the answer is obvious: love doesn’t care about the container. The soul is what connects. Everything else is just the outfit it’s wearing this time.

That’s a beautiful idea. It’s also an uncomfortable one, and I think that discomfort is worth sitting with.

What it means for how we think about love

If love transcends gender and physical form, the categories we build around attraction start to look less like hard rules and more like current settings on a dial that keeps turning. You’re a soul that’s been everything, attracted to another soul that’s been everything. This lifetime you happen to be in this particular body with this particular orientation.

I’m not saying that’s how it works. I’m saying that’s the thought experiment this book creates, and it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve sat with in a while.

The souls that find their way back

There’s a passage in the book that stopped me: “Lost souls were drawn to the love still felt for them by the living. This meant that parents were often reborn as their children’s own children, and siblings who died together were reborn as twins, and various other dynamics that I’d found troubling and yet strangely resonant.”

Troubling and yet strangely resonant. That's exactly right. The idea that love is a kind of gravity, that the people who loved you hardest pull you back, is one of those ideas that sounds impossible and feels true at the same time. And the implications are wild: your child might be your mother, come back to you. Your twin might be the sibling you lost in another life.

It’s the kind of thought that makes you look at the people around you differently.

The notebook

“Whatever a soul was, it could be carried in a notebook.”

This one line carries the whole book. The poetry book at the center of the story is the proof that love leaves evidence, not in grand gestures or monuments but in words, in a notebook. It was written across lifetimes, carried from life to life, and nobody knows whose hand started it.

It makes you wonder how many remarkable books in our world’s history could have been written from exactly that kind of love and pain. Written by someone who remembered too much.

The families

In each lifetime, these characters are born as babies. To new parents. With new siblings. People who love them and will grieve them when they die before 18. Evelyn remembers all of it.

Imagine having 20 different mothers and carrying the love and loss of every single one.

As a mom of three, that detail destroyed me. My child could be living their 20th life and remember 19 other mothers before me. Devastating. But it also means the love doesn’t disappear. It accumulates.

Big joy and small joy

There’s a passage where a character says something I can’t stop thinking about: “I think I understood a long time ago that big joy and small joy are the same. It sounds trite, but it’s true.” He describes winning a major tennis tournament and bringing home a huge cash prize, and says that victory felt no different from curling up in an old armchair with a faded blanket and reading his little sister a bedtime story. No different from a perfect pot of coffee or a warm croissant fresh from the bakery.

And then: “Even when there’s no big joy, even when it feels like we’ll never leave this trench alive, there’s still the small joy. A sunset, a flask of tea. Your hand in mine.”

The older I get, the more I agree with this. The big wins feel great in the moment, but the feeling fades to the same warmth as a quiet morning with good coffee. And the small joys, when you really notice them, feel exactly as big as the trophies. Maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe when you’ve lived enough lives (or just enough years), you stop ranking joy and start collecting it.

Why evil can’t win

There’s a thread about evil trying to recruit and win by numbers. It never works. Love, even outnumbered, is stronger. Not magic. Just what it makes people capable of.

Don’t follow bad. Love more. That’s it.

Our Infinite Fates. Five stars. Read it especially if you think you know what love looks like.

Where this one is sending me next: enough people told me that if I loved Addie LaRue and I loved this, then This Is How You Lose the Time War was the next stop. I'm reading it now. I'll tell you whether they were right.

Get your own copy of Our Infinite Fates here. My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

The idea never really gets off the ground in the book. One friend imagines it for another and it stays a thought. But it lodged in me and would not leave, and I have spent weeks since planning these parties in my head. I want to walk you through them, because somewhere in the planning I found something I did not expect.

The thirty-five-year party

My oldest friend and I hit thirty-five years this year. Thirty-five. She has known me through every single version of myself, including the ones I would rather forget. She has seen my lowest moments and my most embarrassing ones, the stretches I am not proud of, the years I was barely holding it together. She is, hands down, the better friend of the two of us. She remembers the birthdays and the small anniversaries and the inside jokes, and she is the one who pushes to get us together. She will tell you it is because she does not run a business and does not have as many kids pulling her in every direction, but I will tell you the truth, which is that she is simply one of the kindest people alive.

I listened to The Villa on a quick trip to see her, actually. She was already on the road for one of her kids, which happened to bring her closer to me than she usually lives, so we each drove about seven hours and met in the middle for a few days. We did nothing special. We walked and talked and ate and drank, and it filled my cup all the way up.

So her party would be easy to plan and impossible to fake. It would be entirely about her. And here is the strange part: the guest list would be tiny. I would only invite our families. Our kids, our husbands, our siblings, our parents, our grandparents if they were still here. Because those are the only people left who have actually witnessed our friendship. Everyone we met through, the whole original group, are strangers to me now. None of them made it past the ten-year mark with either of us. She and I did, and that is the whole guest list, and it is enough.

The twenty-two-year party

Then there is the friend I met at a barbecue, the two of us holding our oldest babies, who turned out to be about four months apart. Those two grew up as best friends until we moved away and I accidentally ruined it. I had heard about this woman for years before we ever met, all of it good, and then one summer at one barbecue we finally clicked and never looked back.

Even after I moved a few hours away, we kept it alive. Dinners, drinks, vacations together. Our husbands actually like each other. Our kids are the same ages and tangled up in each other’s lives. We pick up exactly where we left off every time, like no months have passed.

Her party would be a barbecue, obviously, and it would be enormous, because she is the kind of person dozens of women claim and brag about. She has the coolest sisters I know and a family people orbit. And here is where the planning turned on me, because thinking about her big, loving guest list, I felt a flicker of something ugly. Jealousy. I would be jealous that so many of those guests have gotten to know her better than I have over the last ten years, the years since I moved. I lost a little of what made us so close, and other people filled the space. We talk about getting lake houses near each other someday when we are older. I hope we do.

The five-way party

And then there are the friends I made in the last decade, the ones who came into my life through what I can only call forced proximity. Four moms and me, all bound together because our kids are bound together. Same schools, same teams, same endless events. Our kids even threw their graduation parties together. There is no untangling us at this point, and inside that group there are the ones I am naturally closer to and the ones I am not, the way these things always go. One of them is my workout buddy, the one I have written about before, and she would almost deserve her own little party except it would inevitably just become all five of us anyway.

That one would be the biggest bash of all, because it is not really five women, it is five families fused at the school-and-sports seams. These women do not know the younger versions of me. They never met the girl my thirty-five-year friend grew up with. But they know exactly who I am right now. They know the mom wrestling with the same things they are, the kids leaving for college, the aging parents, the health that is shifting, the husbands who are wonderful and exhausting, where to go on vacation, what is happening at work. My workout buddy knows today-me down to the bone, because we say all of it out loud while we lift and walk.

The thing I found while planning

Here is what undid me, and I did not see it coming until I had all three guest lists side by side.

The two friends who have witnessed every version of me, the thirty-five years and the twenty-two, are both people I had to move away from. And the women who are closest to me now, the ones who could be at my door in ten minutes, only know the version of me standing here today.

Nobody who lives near me has seen my whole arc. The people who have are a seven-hour drive away.

I do not know what to do with that, exactly. I am not sure there is anything to do with it except notice it, and maybe love all of them a little more deliberately for the specific stretch of my life they hold. The far-away ones who remember who I was. The close ones who know who I am. The truth is I need both, and the parties I keep planning in my head are really just me trying to thank each of them for the part they witnessed.

Maybe that is the whole point of an anniversary. Not the years. The witnessing.

Sometimes the only one who will say it out loud is a book. The Villa handed me a throwaway idea about a party, and I am still standing in the middle of it, counting who would come.

Grab a copy of The Villa. My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

In the context of the book, this is about polygamy. A man with five wives, ten wives, nineteen wives. Children numbering in the dozens. The math alone is enough to make your chest tight. How do you love fifty kids? How do you even know fifty kids? One wife watches her husband move into a new home with a new favorite, and she’s left calculating whether she’ll get a visit this week or next month. The jealousy is corrosive, but it isn’t petty. It’s survival-level. These women needed their husband’s attention to have food, shelter, and standing in the community. Love wasn’t just emotional. It was currency.

And the children? The book describes fathers who couldn’t name all of their kids. Who didn’t know their ages. Who showed up for the ones who were useful and forgot about the rest. That’s what happens when you slice a pie into fifty pieces. Nobody gets enough.

I kept thinking about this after I finished the book. Not about polygamy specifically, but about the metaphor itself.

Because I don’t have nineteen partners, but I do have a finite amount of love-energy. There are the obvious slices: my kids, my husband, my closest friends. But then there are the slices I don’t always think about. The slice that goes to my parents. The slice I save for myself, when I remember to. The slice that goes to work, because let’s be honest, work takes a slice whether you offer it or not. The slice that goes to the version of myself I’m trying to become.

Some weeks the pie is generous, big and warm with plenty to go around, the kind everyone who gets a slice lingers over. Other weeks it’s one of those sad little mini pies from the two-day-old bakery shelf, the kind nobody should really buy, but you talk yourself into it anyway and just feel let down a few bites in.

And it isn’t only the size of the pie that changes week to week. It’s who I cut it for. Some weeks my husband is easier to love than my kids, and it has nothing to do with them. Maybe it’s their schedule, maybe it’s mine, maybe work already took its cut before anyone at home got served, or maybe we finally got a rare date night and I handed him a bigger piece than usual. The part nobody warns you about is that the bigger piece has to come from somewhere, and that week it came out of the kids’ servings. Other weeks it flips, and the kids get the biggest slices while my husband just waits patiently for his turn to come back around. And then there are the weeks one of my parents ends up in the hospital, and I give a mom or a dad the entire pie and come home with nothing left to serve the hungry mouths at my own table.

What struck me about The Nineteenth Wife wasn’t just that these women had to share a husband. It’s that the book forced me to look at my own pie and ask some uncomfortable questions. Who’s getting a real slice? Who’s getting the smaller pieces, the ones I cut a little thinner and then cover with extra whipped cream so nobody notices? Who’s getting just crumbs? And who have I quietly stopped serving altogether?

I think we all walk around pretending the pie is infinite, that we can keep adding people, projects, obligations, and commitments without any of it getting thinner. But it does get thinner. And the people who feel it first are usually the ones who won’t say anything. The ones who’ll tell you your baking is just as good as it ever was. The ones who would never complain that their slices keep getting smaller and more misshapen, or that you used to serve them every night and somehow slid into handing them a piece only every few dinners.

The Nineteenth Wife is about a lot of things: Mormon history, murder, religious control, women’s autonomy. But the thing that stuck with me most was a line about pie, because it made me count my slices, and I didn’t love the number I came up with.

If you’ve read The Nineteenth Wife, I’d love to know what stuck with you. And if you haven’t, maybe start by asking yourself this: how many slices is your pie cut into right now?

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Grab a copy of The Nineteenth Wife. My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

But one small detail from the book has been living in my head ever since.

There’s a traveler in one of the stories who only buys paperback books. Not because of weight or cost or preference. Because when she finishes them, she leaves them on benches at train platforms for the next person to find.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And it wrecked me in a way the rest of the book couldn’t.

Why a book on a bench matters

Think about the life of that paperback.

Someone wrote it. Someone printed it. Someone put it on a shelf in a bookstore. Someone bought it, read it, maybe loved it, maybe didn’t. It ended up in a donation bin or a thrift store or a box in someone’s garage. Then this woman picks it up, reads it on a train, and sets it down on a bench for a complete stranger. She walks away. She doesn’t know who will pick it up. She doesn’t care if they love it or hate it or leave it there for the next person. She just trusts that someone will find it when they need it.

That book has lived more lives than most people I know.

And that’s what I keep coming back to. Books aren’t objects. They’re travelers. They pass through hands and lives and they carry a little bit of every person who held them. The dog-eared pages someone left behind. The cracked spine from being read in one sitting. The coffee ring on the cover. Those aren’t damage. Those are proof of life.

Sometimes the traces a reader leaves are even more personal than that. Someone underlines the line that gutted them, and years later you find yourself stopping cold on the exact same sentence. Someone fills the margins with notes, a question mark here, a little “yes” scrawled next to a paragraph, a quiet argument with the author that nobody else will ever see. Some people even write their name and the date they finished it inside the cover, so the book carries a record of everyone who has ever lived in it. When you open a copy like that, you’re not just reading the story anymore. You’re reading everyone who read it before you.

The Shelfless Reader builds a shelf

If you read my first post on here, you know the deal. I read over a hundred books a year. I don’t own a bookshelf. Almost everything I read is on Kindle or audiobook, and I’ve never felt like I was missing anything.

But I also told you I was thinking about making one exception. A small shelf. Not a library, not a wall. Just my all-time favorites, the six-star reads, the ones I want to be able to physically hand to someone.

I’ve started building it. Slowly. I thrift my five-star reads when I can find them, buying used copies at Goodwill or secondhand shops whenever I spot one. I find maybe one every three trips. It’s slow going, and that’s part of what makes it special. Every book on that future shelf will have been hunted for, not ordered.

The copy I’m secretly hoping to stumble on is one that somebody else already made their own. Underlined passages, thoughts pencilled into the margins, a name and a date written on the first page. There’s something about holding a book like that, knowing a stranger sat with the same words and left their fingerprints all over them, that feels like connecting with another reader I’ll never meet. I’d get to see the whole life the book lived before it reached me, which lines stopped someone else cold and which ones they argued with. Give me a marked-up, dog-eared copy over a pristine one any day.

I recently found The Women by Kristin Hannah at my favorite thrift store. I was browsing the book section and the worker had her restocking cart out. I spotted it on the cart before it even hit the shelf and asked if I could grab it. Hardcover, near-perfect condition, three dollars. The old lady pushing the cart just gave me this smile. Not a customer service smile. A reader’s smile. The kind that says “I know exactly why you just grabbed that.” And as I walked through the store with it in my cart, I caught more than a few glances from other shoppers who saw what I had and knew they’d missed it.

But it was meant for me. That’s how I felt about it. That copy had a life before me and it found its way to my cart at the exact right moment.

The old book lady I want to become

I have this vision of myself in thirty years. Gray hair, probably with some color in it. Cool glasses. The kind of style that makes people look twice. And I’m walking down a street having just finished a paperback, and I see someone sitting on a bench or waiting for a bus, and I just hand it to them.

“Here. I just finished this. I think you might need it.”

Maybe they read it. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they pass it on to someone else. But that book keeps moving. It went from a thrift store with a full life already behind it, to me, to a stranger, and on and on through its own journey. Just like us. We pass through each other’s lives and leave something behind, whether we know it or not.

I’ve actually been thinking about getting book stamps made. The kind you press into the front page that says something like “This book is meant to be passed on. When you’re done, give it to someone who needs it.” A little nudge to keep the journey going. Because a book sitting on a shelf you’ve already read isn’t doing its full job. A book in someone’s hands? That’s a book at work.

Books find you when you need them

I don’t think I’ve ever picked a book up off a bench from a stranger. Nothing that cinematic. But I do believe that books find you when you need them, even if the way they arrive is completely unglamorous.

Far from the Tree found me because it had no wait on Libby and Julia Whelan narrated it. That’s it. No grand recommendation, no algorithm, no curated list. Just availability and a narrator I trust. And it gave me a metaphor about training wheels that I’m still thinking about weeks later.

The Latecomer cracked open fears about my kids that I’d been carrying for years but never had the words for. I picked it up for the same boring reason: Julia Whelan, no wait.

Kristin Hannah found me because The Great Alone popped up at the right time, and within six weeks I’d torn through three of her books and discovered that historical fiction was the genre I’d been looking for my entire reading life without knowing it. ACOTAR proved I could love fantasy when I’d sworn I never would. The Tattooist of Auschwitz taught me more about WWII than school ever did and opened a door to an entire world of historical fiction I haven’t stopped walking through.

None of these were planned. None of them came from a bestseller list or a bookstagram recommendation. They just showed up. And every single one of them sent me somewhere I didn’t expect, whether that was down a Google rabbit hole at midnight, into a new genre, or straight into my own feelings about something I’d been avoiding.

That’s what I write about here. The rabbit holes, the reading trees that connect one book to the next, the moments where fiction cracks open something real. Every series on this Substack exists because a book found me and did something I wasn’t expecting.

The woman on the bench knew something

The woman in Flights who leaves paperbacks on train benches understood something simple: a book’s job isn’t finished when you close it. It’s finished when it runs out of people to reach.

I didn’t love Flights. I probably won’t ever recommend it. But that one image changed how I think about every book I touch. The thrifted copy of The Women in my cart wasn’t just a three-dollar find. It was a book in the middle of its life, passing through my hands on the way to whoever comes next. Maybe my daughter. Maybe a friend who’s never been a reader and needs the right book to start. Maybe, someday, a stranger on a bench.

I’m building a shelf, but I’m not building a museum. I’m building a lending library. A rest stop for books that are just passing through on their way to the next person who needs them.

The Shelfless Reader is getting a little less shelfless. And I think that’s exactly right.

Grab a copy of Flights. (I didn’t love it, but that one detail might be worth the trip.) My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

Not in a sad way, exactly. More in the way you get quiet when someone is telling you something real and you know you’re supposed to just listen.

Girl at War isn’t the kind of historical fiction where you’re watching events unfold from a safe distance. You’re inside Ana’s head. You’re a kid in Zagreb when things start to go wrong, and then you’re a twenty-something in the US pretending none of it happened. And the whole time you can feel the weight of what she’s carrying because she won’t put it down.

I think what this book did to me is make me realize I’ve been reading about war from a very specific angle. Almost everything on my virtual shelves is WWII. The same theaters. The same broad strokes. I know the shape of those stories. I know what to expect from them.

This was different. I didn’t know the shape. I didn’t know the history. I didn’t even know what the correct name for the war was. And that meant I couldn’t hold the story at arm’s length the way I usually do with historical fiction. I had to sit in it.

The part that stuck with me the most is the cyclical nature of it. The book touches on this idea that in the Balkans, it’s like every fifty years there’s a new version of the same violence. Different people, different justifications, same destruction. And when you read it from inside one person’s life, you feel how unfair that is. Not in a political way. In a human way. How do you build a life when the ground under you has never been stable?

I spent a lot of time thinking about that after I finished. About what it means to read about a war you didn’t know existed until a book put you inside it. About how many more of those stories are out there.

I was somber for a few days. I wanted a second book. I wanted to know if Ana goes back to Croatia with her sister, if she patches things up with the people she shut out, if she ever stops running from the thing that shaped her. I know standalone literary fiction doesn’t work that way. But I wanted it anyway.

Who I was while I read this: quieter. More aware of the limits of my own reading history. Ready to find more stories I don’t already know the shape of.

I read Girl at War by Sara Novic on audio from the library. If you want your own copy, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

What’s the book that changed the shape of what you read after it? Not your favorite, the one that showed you a gap you didn’t know was there. Tell me in the comments. I’m trying to fill mine.

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And it is all of those things. But here’s what nobody told me: this book has some of the most honest, gut-level writing about love and marriage I’ve read in a long time. Not the romance-novel version where everything resolves in a grand gesture, but the real version, the one that makes you set the book down and sit with it for a while.

I gave it 4 stars for the plot. But the quotes about love? Those are 5-star sentences hiding in a 4-star thriller.

The Tapestry

“Marriage is made of a million beautiful and ugly moments stitched together into a shared tapestry of memories, all of which are viewed and remembered slightly differently, like two people staring at the same painting from opposite ends of a room.”

This one got me. Because it’s not just about marriage. It’s about every long relationship. You live through the same moments side by side, and you still walk away remembering different versions. Not because anyone is lying, but because you’re literally standing in different places, seeing it from different angles.

My husband likes to tell this story about a scar on his foot. It involves him standing at the bottom of our stairs, needing something, and me deciding to toss it down instead of walking it to him. He claims I added spin to the object so it was impossible to catch and nearly cut his toe clean off. I claim I just tossed it normal. Same moment, two completely different versions, and we’ve been telling them both for years.

It shows up in the bigger memories too. Over the years we’ve taken our kids to every kind of professional sporting event you can think of because each kid had a different obsession: one loved NFL, one MLB, another pro soccer and NBA. My husband remembers the games, the leading scorers, the train or bus we had to take to get there.

I remember the look on his face when one of the kids lost their mind over a play or player he’d been waiting for them to see. He was living inside the event. I was watching him be a father. Same stadium, same afternoon, and we weren’t even having the same experience.

And then there's the version that catches you off guard. My husband and I were bickering over something dumb at dinner one night, not a real fight, just overtired and snippier than usual. My youngest looked at us and said "you guys fight all the time." We both stopped because we genuinely couldn't remember the last time we'd had an actual fight. To us it was barely a moment, one of those minor ugly patches you don't even register. But to our son watching from the outside, it looks like a flaw in the whole thing. Same tapestry, completely different angles.

Beautiful Because It’s Ugly

The "beautiful and ugly" part is the title of the book, but it's also the truth of being with someone long enough. The beauty and the ugliness aren't separate chapters. They're stitched together, same tapestry, same thread. And sometimes the ugly is what makes the beautiful. The scar story is ugly (sorry, babe) but twenty years later it's one of our funniest stories. Sitting in the same stadium and not even having the same experience is ugly in a quieter way, but it's also proof that we each bring something different to this family. The overtired fights are ugly in the moment, but they're proof we're still in it, still building something, still close enough to irritate each other.

And then there’s the pottery shop. The female lead runs a studio called Beautiful Ugly, where she makes intentionally misshapen mugs and ceramics. There’s a whole conversation in the book about the name, about how something can be both at once. It’s not a throwaway detail. Feeney is layering the title into everything: the marriage, the art, the way this woman shapes something imperfect on purpose and calls it finished. The shop name does the same work as the quote above, just quieter. Beauty and ugliness aren’t opposites. They’re the same thing, held at different angles.

The Mismatch

“Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.”

Short and brutal, and one of those things you read and immediately think of three couples you know, including maybe your own.

There’s no judgment in it, just observation. And the older I get, the more I think this is one of the most accurate sentences ever written about heterosexual marriage. Not because it’s cynical, but because it names the specific mismatch that creates friction: one person waiting for change that won’t come, the other blindsided by change they didn’t expect.

My husband still has to have the last word in every conversation. He uses his loud teacher voice at home because after decades in a classroom he doesn't know how to turn it off, and it drives me insane. He eats chips in the kitchen and I have misophonia so I want to leave the room every single time. I still point these things out. I still ask. But there are other things I've let go. He's snored for years, and I used to wake him up every time because it kept me up. About five years ago I bought sleep earplugs instead, and now I only wake him when the volume gets past what the earplugs can handle. That's not fixing the problem. That's just finding a way to live next to it. And I think there's something worth sitting with in that, because when you stop bringing up the things that bother you, you're not just "letting the small stuff go." You might be giving up on them changing, which might also be giving up on each other a little bit. The little things are the big things. They just don't look like it from the outside.

But then there’s the other side of change, the kind you didn’t see coming. We were babies when we got married, straight out of college, high school sweethearts who thought they knew exactly who they were marrying. I used to travel constantly for work and put in long hours when I was home, trying to manage all the household stuff on top of running a business. My husband has been a teacher, coach, and administrator over the years, which means his summers are more relaxed than mine ever were. One summer I came home from a work trip fully braced to spend the weekend catching up on chores, and the laundry was done and the kitchen was clean. No announcement, no “look what I did.” Just handled. And I realized that had become a pattern I hadn’t noticed forming.

He didn’t change because I asked. He changed because he saw what was needed and just did it. That’s not the boy I married at twenty-two.

And I’m not the girl he married either. Somewhere around COVID I stopped traveling as much for work, realized I loved being home, and slowly became a different person socially. I used to be the one who made us new friends, who brought us into groups, who said yes to every parent gathering and neighborhood thing. Then I realized I was doing most of it out of obligation, not enjoyment, and I just stopped. My husband points it out sometimes, mostly because our social circle got a lot smaller when I stopped being the connector. We get excluded from things now because I don’t care enough to keep up, and he’s supportive of me protecting my energy even though he feels the trade-off too. Sometimes he talks me into going out anyway, and I’m almost always glad he did. I make sure to tell him that, which I think matters.

When I look at pictures of that high school boy I dated or that college kid I married (both him, by the way), I can barely imagine or remember those people. It feels like so long and so many changes ago. We’ve shed so many skins since then. I like 90% of who we are now, and the other 10% we can keep working on.

I ride in a golf cart with a book now because he loves golf and I love being outside with him, even if I rarely pick up a club. I bike with him because I eventually got an ebike for the hills after I rage-quit our first ride on a regular bike and he had to come pick me up on the side of the road at the bottom of a hill I refused to go up. That’s change I didn’t expect in myself. And the fact that he didn’t laugh at me on that roadside (okay, he probably did) and just showed up with the car is the kind of love that doesn’t make it into the highlight reel but holds the whole thing together.

The Quiet Bomb

“Is being with someone who used to love you better than being alone?”

This is the quiet bomb in the book. No dramatic setup, no big reveal, just this question sitting there on the page, waiting for you to answer it.

I think at some point in a 25-year marriage, you question whether the person sleeping across from you still loves you, or if they still love you the way you love them. And I’d be lying if I said I’ve never had moments where being alone sounded great. When he leaves cupboard doors open, trims his beard over the sink and doesn’t clean it up, leaves the toilet seat up at 2 AM. In those moments my answer to Feeney’s question is yes, absolutely, being alone sounds incredible. I’ll take a rural chicken farm with a few like-minded women and never share a bathroom again.

But then I think about what I’d actually miss. My mom has been single and living alone for many years, and I’ve watched what that kind of solitude changes in a person over time. And I think about the fact that my husband is still trying. Still trying to change the things I’ve been asking him to change for 25 years. That’s not someone who used to love me. That’s someone who’s still in it.

I don’t have a clean answer to Feeney’s question. I go back and forth. I think most people in long relationships do, even if they’d never say it out loud.

The Darkest Way to Say I Love You

“I hope you die in your sleep.”

Full quote: “I hope you die in your sleep. I’ve been thinking about it lately, death, and it’s got to be the best way to go. If you truly loved someone, that’s how you’d want them to die, and I love you more than anything. So I hope you die in your sleep.”

They said that to each other every night before bed. “I hope you die in your sleep” was their way of saying “I love you.”

This one broke me. Because it’s dark and weird and also one of the most tender things I’ve ever read. It reframes love as wanting the softest possible ending for someone. Not “I hope nothing bad ever happens to you,” because we all know that’s not realistic. But “when the bad thing comes, I hope it’s gentle.”

That’s love that has looked at mortality and decided to be gentle with it instead of afraid.

My husband and I don’t have anything like that. I’ve always loved the “ditto” from Ghost, but it never caught on with us. We’re just regular “love you, goodnight” people. But reading this made me wonder if we’re missing something by not having our own version of it. So I actually want to ask: do you and your person have a weird or special way of saying I love you or goodnight? What is it?

The Warning

“People rarely know what they have until they lose it. They spend their lives searching for a better one, wanting more, needing more, blind to the fact that they already had it all. I think sometimes it’s only when something gets taken from a person that they appreciate what they had.”

This isn’t a new idea. We’ve all heard “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” But Feeney writes it with a specificity that makes it land differently. “Searching for a better one,” not a better life but a better person, a better version of the relationship. Always looking for the upgrade, missing what’s already in your hands.

I can’t speak to this one from experience, and I hope I never have to. But I read it and felt it in my chest anyway, which is maybe the point. You don’t have to have lost someone to understand the warning in it.

Why Does This Matter in a Thriller?

Because the best thrillers aren’t just about plot twists. They’re about people being human in extreme circumstances. And Feeney uses the mystery framework to sneak in observations about love and loss that would feel heavy-handed in a literary novel but land perfectly inside a page-turner.

You don’t expect a thriller to make you think about your own marriage. That’s exactly why it works.

Beautiful Ugly. 4 stars for the story, but these quotes are worth the whole book.

Every quote here is from Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney. If you want it, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

What’s the memory you and your person remember completely differently? The scar story, the stadium afternoon, the fight your kid swears happened. Tell me your version in the comments, then go ask them for theirs. I’d bet it doesn’t match.

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The first time, I was going to combine fashion and reading. The idea was to share the outfits I wore based on the mood of whatever book I was in that week. Not cosplay, not dressing up as characters. More like: when you’re deep in a book, you kind of live in its world for a while, and whether you realize it or not, it comes through in how you dress, where you go for coffee, what you make for dinner. I thought that was interesting enough to share.

The catch was I didn’t want to show my face. So every video had me holding the book that inspired the outfit in front of it, and each one took forever to make. I was filming three or four outfit changes, making a mess of my bedroom, editing clips together, all while working a full-time job. The worst part wasn’t the time. It was that I was shrinking the books down to fit a format that had nothing to do with what I actually wanted to say about them. I wanted to talk about what a book made me think or feel or become, and instead I was showing you what I wore the week I was reading it.

So I stopped.

The second time, I had the idea I’m still most excited about: Things I Googled While Reading. Because that’s what I do. I read a romance novel and end up down a rabbit hole about the history of a town in Italy. I read a dystopian thriller and spend an hour researching the science behind it. People who don’t read much think that’s weird. “It’s just a romance book, why would you Google anything?” But that’s how my brain works, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

So I tried to build content around that, and I ran straight into the same problem. I didn’t want to be on camera. I tried holding a book over my face, which was awkward, then I tried putting a sticky smiley face over my face in the editing software, which was somehow worse. I made about ten videos and never posted a single one.

It wasn’t that they weren’t good. It was that the format didn’t feel like me. I was trying to say something real about how books change the way you think, and I was doing it from behind a cartoon sticker. The whole thing felt forced.

So I stopped again.

The problem was never the ideas

Here’s what I’ve figured out after three attempts and a lot of frustration. The problem was never my ideas. The problem was that every path I could see for sharing them required me to be the content, not my words or my thoughts about the books but me. My face, my voice, my house, my whole aesthetic.

And I just don’t want to do that.

I don’t want to film talking head reels. I don’t want my living room to have to be “content ready.” I don’t want strangers judging my house or my hair or whether my bookshelf is photogenic enough. (I don’t even have a bookshelf. That’s kind of the whole point of the name.)

This isn’t insecurity, it’s a boundary. My house is my safe space, and my face is not my brand. I think a lot of people feel this way but don’t say it, because the internet has made it seem like the only way to build an audience is to put yourself on camera and perform.

Show your face, says the algorithm

Let’s talk about that for a second, because it isn’t just a feeling, it’s structural.

Social media algorithms reward video, and specifically they reward face-on-camera video. Every piece of creator advice out there says the same thing: show your face more, be relatable, let people see the real you. If you follow that advice, it works. I’m not arguing that.

What I’m arguing is that “show your face” shouldn’t be the only viable path, because when it is, it filters out an entire population of people who have something worth sharing and will never share it because the format feels wrong.

Think about how many people you know who are incredible thinkers, readers, writers, artists, but would never in a million years post a video of themselves talking to a camera. Not because they have nothing to say, but because that’s not how they want to say it.

I know painters who spend more time setting up camera angles to film their process than they spend actually painting. I saw a creator post the other day, “If it looks like this took a long time to make, it did,” and she was talking about the reel, not the art. That’s where we are. The documentation of the creative process has become more work than the creative process itself.

And for what? So the algorithm picks it up and you get a few thousand views from people who watch for three seconds and scroll?

I’m not anti-video, and I’m not anti-social media. I consume both, happily. Some of my favorite creators are people who are magnetic on camera, and I love watching them. I just don’t want to be them, and I don’t think I should have to be in order to share what I care about.

Where the words are the product

That’s why I’m here on Substack, writing.

Because on Substack, the writing is the product. Not my face, not my house, not a carefully curated background, just the words. You’re reading this right now and you have no idea what I look like, what my living room looks like, or whether I got dressed today. It doesn’t matter. What matters is whether these words are making you feel something or think about something differently. That’s it.

I write about books here, but this one sits closer to the center of why The Shelfless Reader exists than almost anything else I'll post. I spelled out the bigger why in my manifesto, and this is the lived version of it. I tried three times to build a book account, and I failed twice because I kept trying to squeeze myself into formats that required me to perform instead of write. The third time, I stopped trying to be a content creator and just started being a writer.

I think there’s a whole world of people out there like me, people who are happy to consume social media but have zero desire to be on the other side of the screen. People who have thoughts worth sharing, recommendations worth making, stories worth telling, but the gap between “I have something to say” and “I have to film myself saying it” feels uncrossable.

It doesn’t have to be.

If this sounds like you

You can build something real with words. You can have personality without showing your face. You can create a brand that’s about what you say, not what you look like. You can reach people, move people, build a community of people who care about the same things you do, and you can do all of it without ever recording a single talking head reel.

I’m not saying it’s easy, and I’m not even saying I’ve figured it out yet. I’m literally two posts in. But I know this feels different than the first two attempts, because this time the format matches the thing I actually want to do: read books, think about books, write about books, and share that with anyone who wants to come along.

If you’ve been sitting on an idea, a blog, a newsletter, a creative project, but you haven’t started because you can’t stomach the idea of being “on” all the time, this is me telling you that you don’t have to be. Find the format that fits your voice, not someone else’s, and start there.

The world doesn’t need another face on a screen. It needs more people who are willing to say something real, in whatever way feels true to them.

What about you? If you’re sitting on an idea or a project you haven’t started because you don’t want to be on camera, hit the comment button and tell me what it is. I want to know what the world is missing because the format scared someone off.

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I felt that scene in my chest, because I have a switch like that, and the people who love me can see it every time.

The voice I built on purpose

There is a running joke in my house. My husband and kids say I have a work voice. They can hear it land the second I answer a work call or join a work Zoom, this brighter, smoother, warmer version of me that they find frankly hilarious because it sounds so fake to them. And honestly, it probably is fake. It is a persona I built a long time ago, back when I decided who I needed to be in public in order to grow my business. I picked her, and I have kept her forward facing in that business ever since. If I talked to a sales lead the way I talk to my own kids on the days they are testing every last nerve I have, I would never close a thing.

For years I ran that persona at full power on the road. I would be wrung out, physically and mentally, from the travel and the selling and from being a mom and a wife on top of all of it, and none of it mattered. The second I walked into the building or stepped behind my booth, I turned her on whether I had it in me or not. Full smile. Bright and peppy. Always positive, always on, always reaching out first.

The days were long in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not done it. Breakfast in the hotel lobby at seven, where customers are already milling around and you are already on, already chatting them up before you have finished your coffee. The convention floor by eight and there until six. Then dinner and drinks with a group of customers you did not choose, where the whole game becomes praying you land a seat next to someone who will not drain the last of the social battery you have left, and they almost always do. If my head hit the pillow by eleven I was lucky, and then I got up and did it again for two or three more days before rushing home, where there was no recovery and no recharging, because home meant going straight back into mom mode and then doing the entire thing over again the next week.

I want to be clear about something, because it is the real point. The persona was never the problem. She is good at her job. The problem is that she was never actually me.

I am not bubbly. I am not extroverted. I am not naturally upbeat or chatty or on. I am someone who grinds, who wants to grow the thing, who likes making money as much as the next person. But the public face of all of that was a costume, and the older I got, the heavier the costume got to wear.

For most of those years I traveled with one of my staff, the same woman more often than not, brought along for the extra hands when the sales inquiries and the customer load got heavy. We got close. Close enough that we could each clock the exact moment the other one switched from her real self to her work self, the smile going up, the charm clicking into place, exactly like the two friends in the book. The difference between us is that she is still out there doing it, still turning it on, and she genuinely loves it. There is no burnout coming for her, knock on wood, because it is not a costume for her. It is just who she gets to be. Watching her is how I finally understood that the persona was never the villain. It just was never mine.

The night the switch stopped working

I should tell you about the night the switch stopped working.

It was one of the last conventions I traveled to. End of a long event, day two or three, when the social tank is already running on fumes. I got wrangled into a dinner with about twenty customers and prospects, and I drew the worst possible seat, dead center of the table. If you have never sat there, it is its own kind of trap. Nobody talks to you directly, but you are surrounded on every side, so you have to stay on, constantly, tracking five conversations at once, which is brutal when there is nothing left in you.

And I got this feeling in my chest that I needed to leave. Not wanted. Needed. I could not do it for one more minute. I could not smile through ‘Jim’ telling the same story I had already heard him tell three other times that same weekend, even though the people he was telling it to now were hearing it fresh. I faked a call from one of my kids and stepped outside for air. I gave myself the whole pep talk. Ten years of this, I am a pro, I can walk back in there and finish strong. So I did. I walked back through all of them, sat down, and lasted about two minutes before I faked a second call from home, got up, drove out of the parking lot to my hotel, and went to bed feeling completely numb.

Nobody thought a thing of it. I had blamed kid stuff, and I am a woman, so kid stuff is a get-out-of-jail-free card nobody questions. The next day, one or two people asked if everything was okay, if they had seen me slip out. Everyone else carried on as if I had never been there at all.

And that was the lightbulb. Not a triumphant one. A quiet, almost lonely one, sitting in my car in a dark parking lot. I didn’t have to be there. I could keep the business running and growing from behind the scenes, and I could start spending some of that energy on being me instead of performing her.

Where else was I doing this?

Here is the part I didn’t see coming. The permission I gave myself in that parking lot didn’t stay parked at work. Once I watched the whole event carry on without me, once I saw that the building didn’t fall down just because I went to bed, I started asking where else I was throwing that switch for no reason. The answer was basically everywhere.

So these days the switch gets harder to flip at all, and I have mostly stopped trying for anything that isn’t work. The extended family gathering that leaves me hollow for the rest of the day. The friend of a friend who wants to start a thing. The same-school, same-team mom angling for a deep, soul-baring talk when we don’t actually know each other. I used to fake my way through all of it because that is what you do, and now I mostly don’t, or I show up as myself and leave when I’m done.

If that makes people read me as cold, or decide I have a resting bitch face, or call me difficult, then we were probably never going to be close anyway.

The book never tells us how the woman doing the switching really feels about it. We watch her flip from herself to the public version and back, but the story closes the door before we learn whether it ever costs her anything. Maybe she is like my old coworker and it never will. Or maybe she is the version of me who never got stuck in the wrong seat at the wrong dinner, still turning it on, still assuming that is just the price of the life she built.

Take me as I am. The real one. The one who left the dinner.

The scene that started this is in The Villa by Rachel Hawkins. If you want it, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

Do you have a work voice? Hit the comment button and tell me what yours sounds like, and whether the people who love you can hear it the second it switches on.

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Joaquin, one of three biological siblings separated as children, is talking about a bike he got as a little kid. He didn’t know how to ride it, so his foster dad put training wheels on. Normal enough. But even after Joaquin learned to ride, he didn’t want the training wheels taken off. Because training wheels always catch you. No matter what. And he had spent his whole life in foster care, never sure that anyone would be there to catch him. So he wanted those wheels to stay.

I paused the audiobook when I heard that. Not because it was a big dramatic scene or a climactic reveal. It was quiet. Almost offhand. But it stopped me cold, because I realized I could map my entire life onto that metaphor. Every stage, every hard season, every version of myself that needed steadying. There were always training wheels. Sometimes they were people. Sometimes they were habits or routines. Sometimes they were just me, white-knuckling it alone and pretending that counted.

And sometimes the wheels got taken off before I was ready.

The ones I didn’t know I needed

My maternal grandparents were training wheels I didn’t fully appreciate until they were gone.

I only saw them during summers and holidays and the occasional special event, so they weren’t part of my everyday life. But they were always, always there. They called. They showed up to piano and dance recitals. They made every Christmas feel like something out of a movie. Their home was this place where everything felt orderly and safe and warm in a way that my regular life didn’t always feel.

I remember one time sitting on my grandpa’s lap and just breaking down. Something had happened with my parents, something I was too young to process and too old to ignore, and I just fell apart. He didn’t try to fix it. He didn’t give me a speech. He just held me and told me things would be okay. He just radiated love. And somehow that was everything.

They brought order with them wherever they went. That sounds like a small thing, but when you’re a kid and parts of your world feel chaotic, the person who shows up and makes everything feel steady is doing more than they’ll ever know. I didn’t think of them as training wheels at the time. I just thought of them as my favorite grandparents. But they were the reason I didn’t tip over during some of the shakiest parts of growing up.

The ones I had to become

When I started my business, there were no training wheels waiting for me. I had to build them myself, in real time, while already pedaling.

My husband was supportive. I want to be clear about that because it matters. He believed in what I was building and he never made me feel crazy for trying. But support from the outside and being in it with you are two different things. He wasn’t the one fighting for leads every day, staying up late chasing deadlines, trying to keep current customers happy while finding new ones. That was just me. I was my own training wheels, my own safety net, and my own pep talk at two in the morning when I wasn’t sure any of it was going to work.

There’s a specific kind of loneliness to that. I remember being in my home office on the other side of the wall while my kids and husband ate dinner together. I could hear them laughing and talking, and I was fifteen feet away, missing it. Not because I didn’t want to be there but because I was terrified that if I didn’t meet a deadline or finish a project or keep growing the business, something bad would happen. The irony is that the bad thing was already happening: I was trading my kids’ childhoods for work. I was missing the games and the school events and hearing about them after, always from the other side of some wall I’d built myself.

Being your own training wheels is something people romanticize. The grind, the hustle, the “she built it all herself” narrative. And sure, there’s something real about the toughness it gives you. But I think it’s also just sad. Not a knock on anyone in my life. Just a true thing. When you’re the only thing keeping yourself upright, there’s no room to wobble. And everybody needs room to wobble sometimes.

The ones she won’t let me be

My oldest daughter is the toughest person I know. And it is both the thing I’m proudest of and the thing that breaks my heart the most.

She is strong in the way that makes you need to stand up straighter just being around her. She has been through the drama of high school, where teenage girls are cruel in ways that still shock me even though I lived through it myself. She has navigated boys coming in and out of the picture. She’s played college athletics and faced horrible leadership from adults who should have known better, dealt with a devastating injury, and pushed through things that would have flattened most people.

And through all of it, she’s maybe let me catch her once or twice but quickly realized it and recovered.

She doesn’t shut me out. That’s the thing, she lets me be there. She lets me stand right next to the bike. But she won’t let me touch the handlebars. She won’t lean into the training wheels even when she’s wobbling, because she is so determined to stay upright on her own.

I watch her and I want to scream “just let me catch you, just this once.” Not because she can’t handle it - she clearly can. But because there is nothing wrong with letting someone else hold you steady when the road gets rough. You don’t have to be constantly wrecking and tipping over for training wheels to matter. Sometimes you just need them for the one or two big spills. The ones that would hurt a lot less if you’d let somebody soften the landing. You don’t have to carry all that weight yourself and stay so tense and perfectly balanced, training wheels are sometimes there for a reason.

But she’s not wired that way. And I love her for exactly who she is, even when who she is makes me want to wrap her in bubble wrap and tell her the world doesn’t always deserve her toughness - the people sending big gusts in her direction and making her wobble, don’t always deserve her ability to stay upright and peddle on.

The one that never left

And then there’s the training wheel I’ve had the longest.

I’ve never been great at friendships. That’s not self-pity, it’s just the truth. I was always easy to forget, easy to walk away from when someone more fun or more outgoing came along. I’m introverted and sensitive. I wasn’t the one organizing the group hangouts or keeping the group chat alive because I’d rather have been home and alone (probably reading). And so people drifted, the way they do when you’re not loud enough to hold their attention.

But there’s this one friend. We met around junior high. We’ve lived several states apart for basically our entire lives. But, we were in each other’s weddings, she’s one of my boys’ Godmothers, and we still get together now, in our late forties, and it still feels like no time has passed.

She’s the wobbly training wheel on one side of the bike. The one that’s been there so long the treads are worn smooth. The wheel that’s starting to look more square than round from all the times the bike sat still for a while, or hit the brakes too hard, or caught me on a big spill. She didn’t have a matching wheel on the other side because she was only one person in what could have been, maybe should have been, a whole network of friends. But she was the lone survivor. And honestly, she probably worked harder than I did to make sure we stayed in each other’s lives, because she’s a better person than me in that way.

A handwritten letter when I needed one, always signed with LYLAS (Love You Like A Sister). An phone call or email or text that came at the right time. An Instagram meme DM’d that said “I’m still here” without having to say it. She’s the one wheel that never came off the bike. And I don’t think I’ve told her enough what that means.

The thing nobody tells you about training wheels

Here’s what Joaquin’s story unlocked for me, the part I’m still sitting with:

Training wheels don’t get a say in when they come off. And neither do you.

My grandparents didn’t choose to leave. I didn’t choose to lose them. I would have kept those wheels on my entire life if I could have, because I loved them beyond measure and they made the world feel safe. But they died, and the training wheels were removed without my agreement, without my will, without anyone asking if I was ready to ride without them. I wasn’t. You just do it anyway. I wish for them back, for even just an hour, every single day.

And then there are the wheels like my friend, the ones that are beat up and worn down and maybe don’t spin as smoothly as they used to, but they are still bolted on. Still there. Still catching you on the wobbles even after decades of road.

I think we spend a lot of time talking about independence. About learning to ride without the training wheels. About being strong enough to balance on your own. And that’s fine. I’ve done it. I’ve been my own wheels more times than I can count. But Joaquin didn’t want his training wheels off because he knew something most of us take too long to learn: there is nothing weak about wanting something there to catch you. The weakness is pretending you don’t need it.

So what are your training wheels? The people, the habits, the one friend who never left, the version of yourself that showed up when no one else did? Are they still there? Did you choose to take them off, or did someone else make that call for you?

I’m still figuring out my own answers. But I know this much: some of my training wheels were taken too soon, some of them I had to become myself, one of them won’t let me help no matter how much I want to, and one of them has been wobbling along beside me for thirty-five years with no intention of quitting.

I’ll take the wobbly wheel. Every time.

The line that started this is in Far from the Tree by Robin Benway. If you want the book, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

Tell me about your wobbly wheel. The one that’s beat up and worn smooth and still bolted on after all these years. Who is it? And does that person know what they are to you? The comment button is right here:

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And then it happened to me.

I became a woman who counts her words.

Not metaphorically. Literally. After listening, I started tracking how many words I was using — on work calls, talking to my kids when they got home from school, telling my husband about my day, chatting with my friend during our morning workout. I tried to keep count for just one hour. One hour. And 100 words was gone before I’d even said anything that mattered.

I’m an introvert. I’m the person who gets talked out by the end of a workday and doesn’t want to say another word to anyone by dinner. And even I cannot fathom being limited to 100 words a day. What do you spend them on? Your kids? Your job? Your marriage? What if you're having a terrible day and all you want to do is scream? Does the counter clock that as twenty words because you screamed for thirty seconds?

I became a woman who thought, even for a second, that it might be nice to stop.

And this one is harder to admit. Because there are these moments in the book like when the women can’t work, can’t get the mail, can’t really do anything but cook and clean and take care of kids, where a tiny, exhausted part of me thought: what if that was just... one day? One day where nobody expected me to run a business and be a great mom and handle the doctor appointment booking or school calls and work out and be a good wife and a good friend and a good daughter and still somehow take care of myself.

But the book won’t let you sit in that fantasy. Because the bracelet is there. The counter is there. And the cost of that “simple” life is your voice. Your daughter’s voice. And the brain of every little girl who should be learning sixty thousand words and is stuck at six thousand because the government decided she didn’t need them.

I became a woman who regrets not voting.

There's a scene where the main character reflects on the fact that she didn't vote. When all of this was happening around her, the slow creep of laws, the gradual erosion of rights, she didn't think it was important enough for her to show up.

I put the book down. Because I’ve been there. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that, but I have. There have been moments where I genuinely thought one voice couldn’t possibly matter. That my showing up or not showing up wouldn’t change anything.

This book sits you down and makes you feel, all the way through your body, how wrong that is. Not in a preachy way. Not in a lecture. Just in the way the story unfolds. How it shows you, through flashbacks, that none of this happened overnight. It crept. And the people who could have stopped it were busy thinking their one voice didn't count.

I became a woman who needs you to read this book.

Vox didn’t just make me angry. It made me angry in a way that felt personal. The kind of angry where you're not yelling at the book. You're yelling at yourself. At the world. At how close some of it feels to something that could actually happen.

Christina Dalcher wrote a story that could have been one thing, a dystopia about silenced women, and made it so much more. The main character has real problems beyond the hundred-word rule. The twists are genuinely surprising. The ending earns itself.

And Julia Whelan narrating it? She made me feel every single word. All hundred of them.

Vox by Christina Dalcher. Five stars. Listen on audio. And then go count your words for a day. I dare you.

I listened to Vox on audio, narrated by Julia Whelan. If you want your own copy, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

If you only got 100 words today, who would you spend them on? Your kids, your partner, your boss, the stranger who cut the line at pickup? Tell me in the comments. I know mine, and it’s not who I’d want it to be.

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Then Spring 2026 happened, and I DNF’d four books in six weeks.

Some Luck by Jane Smiley (Audio). It sounded like a cool premise. Every chapter covers a different year, Depression-era Iowa, generational family saga. But I just couldn’t get into it. The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy (also Audio). It came so highly recommended but it just never grabbed me. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (once again Audio). I really wanted to love that one, and parts of it did inspire me, but I couldn’t get myself to finish it. I did wonder if Julia Whelen’s narration started earlier in the book if I’d have been able to fight through, but I didn’t make it that far. And now A Crown of Ivy and Glass by Claire Legrand (Kindle), a fantasy that should be right in my wheelhouse. I love that whole world of ACOTAR, Fourth Wing, Throne of Glass, Divine Rivals, The Knight and the Moth. But the main female character just didn’t land for me, and I called it at about 20% in.

Four books in six weeks, from someone who almost never quits.

At first I did what I always do. I made excuses. Maybe I’m just tired, maybe I need to read in bigger chunks instead of a few pages before bed, maybe the next chapter will be the one that hooks me. But at some point you have to stop blaming the books.

Because it wasn’t just the books.

Around the same time, I started half-assing my workouts. My friend and I work out together every morning at 5 AM and we’ve done that for years, but lately we’ve been waking up at five, looking at each other, and going to get coffee instead. When we do stay in the gym, we’re just going through the motions, lifting lighter, cutting sets short, not really caring.

And it’s not just the gym either. I’ve been shorter with my youngest son, more irritated with my husband, less interested in things that used to light me up. I had all these plans to get back into painting, something I studied in college, and I wanted to learn how to sew because my daughter makes the most incredible thrifted and upcycled clothes. She’d been sewing me all these cool things, but it was eating into time she could’ve spent on her own projects, and I kept thinking, I can learn to do this myself. I started both of those things and then just...didn’t dig in.

Everything felt like I was standing in the shallow end of something I used to dive into.

Here’s what I think is actually going on.

My middle son left for college last fall. When my daughter left four years ago, I still had two boys at home keeping me busy, and I knew she’d always keep in touch because that’s just who she is. She’s the eldest daughter, she calls, she texts, she tells me about her week without me having to ask. My son is not like that. I’m the one reaching out to him, and he really only calls when he needs something or has a question. I love that he’s independent, I really do, but I miss our heart-to-hearts. With my daughter leaving, I didn’t have time to sit with the quiet because the house and the schedule were still full. But when it went from three kids to one, and that one is a teenager who’d rather be with his friends than hang out with his parents, and is involved in fewer weekend activities that require our attendance, the house got really still.

Suddenly it was just me and my husband. Going on dates because we could. Sitting by the pool we put up last summer because we were finally around on weekends. Reading on the deck in my favorite hammock swing with a drink. Going on more walks and bike rides. And all of it felt weird. Not bad, just unfamiliar, like I was wearing someone else’s schedule.

I’ve never had this much unstructured time in my adult life (that I can remember, anyway). My days used to be dictated by what my business needed from me and what my family needed from me, with no gap in between. Now there’s a gap, and I don’t know what to do with it.

My workout friend is going through the exact same thing. Same stage of life, same feelings, same fog. She has a son who just left for college, one kid left at home, and her husband is driving her up the wall too. We’ve talked about all of it: the health stuff that comes with being women in our 40s, the monotony of the same routine every day (wake up, work out, work, cook dinner, go to bed, repeat), the absolute soul-crushing cycle of “what are we having for dinner tonight.”

We don’t know if it’s hormonal, or the empty nest thing creeping in early, or just the season of life where everything you built starts shifting underneath you and you haven’t found your footing yet.

But we both know it’s real. And knowing someone else feels it too makes it a little less scary.

The thing I keep coming back to is this. I tried painting, I tried sewing, I tried the pool, I tried giving myself permission to just relax for the first time in twenty-plus years. None of it stuck.

The only thing that stuck is this. Reading and writing.

And I think I know why. Painting is beautiful and sewing is creative, but neither one makes you sit with what you’re actually feeling. You can paint for three hours and never once confront the thing that’s bugging you. You can sew a whole dress and come out the other side exactly where you started emotionally. (Does it hurt the potential for emotional development that during both painting and sewing I’m typically listening to an audiobook? Possibly, but I can’t imagine not.)

But writing? Writing forces you to name it. To say “I think I’m in a slump and I don’t know why” and then keep typing until you figure out that it’s not about the books or the gym or the dinner rotation. It’s about the fact that your life is changing in ways you didn’t plan for, and you haven’t caught up yet. I used to journal constantly when I was growing up, filling notebooks with whatever was in my head, and I didn’t realize until way later in life how therapeutic that was for me. This writing project feels like a return to that, like I’m finally doing the thing that actually helps me process again.

Reading does something similar. When I’m deep in a book, I’m processing. I’m feeling things through characters and stories that help me understand my own. And when I can’t connect to a book, maybe it’s because I’m too disconnected from myself to connect to anything.

So here’s my question for you. And I actually want to know.

If you’re an avid reader, someone who reads across genres and styles and never stays in one lane for long, have you ever noticed that your reading slumps line up with slumps in the rest of your life? That when you can’t finish a book, it’s because something bigger is off?

And if so, how did you get out of it? Not just the reading slump, but the life slump. Because I’m starting to think they might be the same thing.

First, the disbelief. A hundred books? In a year? Like I just told them I run ultramarathons or speak six languages. Then the follow-up question, always some version of: Where do you keep them all?

And when I say I don’t, when I tell them I read on a Kindle and listen to audiobooks and maybe own five physical books total, that’s when it gets interesting. Some people are genuinely fascinated. They want to know the logistics, like I’ve unlocked some kind of reading cheat code. Others look at me like I just told them I don’t believe in bookshelves, which, honestly, I kind of don’t.

And a few of them, the ones who equate being a reader with having a wall of spines to prove it, give me this look like maybe I’m not a real reader at all.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been a library girl my whole life. Longer than I even realized.

When I was in grade school, from about fourth grade through eighth, we lived out in the country. My mom worked a regular 8-to-5 job, and she was our only ride to and from the small town where we went to school. So on the days when there were no after-school clubs or sports, my sister and I walked to the library. We’d sit there for three hours every afternoon in those hard, squeaky chairs, doing our homework first and then reading or drawing in our notebooks until Mom got off work. I’m pretty sure the librarian wasn’t thrilled about two kids camping out in her space every day. And I’m pretty sure some people had opinions about the kind of mom who makes the public library her after-school plan. But the books didn’t care who we were or why we were there. They just let us in. Once a week we’d go to the ice cream shop across the street instead, and that felt like the biggest treat in the world.

The funny thing is, being forced to spend so much time in a library might be what made me stop reading. Once I didn’t have to be there anymore, I didn’t want to. I resented it. Reading felt like something I’d been made to do because we didn’t have other options, not something I chose. So I barely read for pleasure through high school, college, or most of my adult life.

It took me until my forties to come back to it. And when I did, everything was different. Because the way we read had completely changed while I wasn’t paying attention.

I still never bought physical books unless they were for my kids. But now I didn’t have to. When Kindles came out, I was sold immediately. One device instead of a stack of heavy paperbacks, and I traveled constantly for work, so it was a no-brainer.

Then came audiobooks, and everything changed.

I’d gotten hooked on podcasts first (Crime Junkie was the one that did it but shout out to my daily favorite T.B.O.Y as well) because I was doing a lot of driving at the time. Work trips, and back and forth to see my daughter who’d just started college in another state. At some point I stumbled from podcasts into audiobooks and never looked back. But it took me a while to figure out that narrator matters enormously. Some narrators bored me to death. A lot of times it was older men’s voices that just put me to sleep. I was starting to wonder if maybe audiobooks weren’t for me.

And then I found Julia Whelan.

I think it was a Taylor Jenkins Reid book. And my life changed. I’m not being dramatic. There is something about this woman’s voice, the way she delivers emotion, the way she becomes the characters. It ruins you for other narrators. I devoured every TJR book after that, mostly on audio. Then Kristin Hannah. Then I basically worked my way through anything Julia Whelan has ever narrated. Educated. The Great Believers. One incredible book after another. I still can’t figure out if she only chooses to narrate outstanding books, or if the books become outstanding because she’s the one reading them. Either way, if Julia Whelan’s name is on it, I’m listening.

Now audiobooks are woven into every part of my day. I listen while I cook, while I clean, while I sew, while I paint, while I walk, while I drive. Sometimes alone, sometimes with my son or husband next to me scrolling their phones. I’ll squeeze in ten minutes while I’m making lunch or a cup of tea. Any moment I can press play, I do. I’m usually reading one book on Kindle while listening to a completely different one on audio, which means I’m finishing roughly two books a week, more if I’m on vacation. Books are in every crack of my day in a way they never could be if they only lived on a shelf.

And then there’s the part nobody talks about: money. The bulk of what I read comes from the library and Libby. It’s free. For the amount of books I go through, I never want to feel like I should cut back, like reading is a spending habit I need to assess or a hobby that’s gotten too expensive. That would break my heart. I’m someone who’s actively trying to be more intentional about where my money goes right now, and I am so grateful that books aren’t something I have to put on that list. We are incredibly fortunate that libraries exist and that this thing we love is free to access. I don’t take that for granted.

So no, I don’t need to buy books. And I don’t need to display them, either.

I know what those shelves look like. I see the photos on Pinterest, the perfectly styled reading nooks, the floor-to-ceiling libraries with the rolling ladders. They’re beautiful. I genuinely love looking at them. But clutter stresses me out. I went from a house of five to three, and soon it’ll be two, and every time the house gets a little quieter and a little more streamlined, I breathe a little easier. Having stacks of physical books in my space just isn't who I am. And I’ve stopped apologizing for that.

Though I’ll admit, lately I’ve been thinking about making one exception. A small shelf. Not a library, not a wall, just a single shelf of my all-time favorites. My six-star reads. The ones I want to be able to hand to my husband (who is finally getting into reading), or press into a friend’s hands and say you have to read this. Because sometimes telling someone about a book isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to physically give it to them.

And I don’t want pristine copies. I don’t want hardcovers with perfect dust jackets or collector’s editions still in shrink wrap. I want the ones that look loved, dog-eared, creased spines, pages soft from being turned. I want to find them for a quarter at a garage sale or at Goodwill and know they were read and loved by someone before me, and will be again after. That’s the kind of shelf I want. A shelf of books that have been lived in.

But that shelf would be tiny. And everything else lives in the cloud, on my Kindle, in my headphones. And that’s more than enough.

What reading gave me that school never did

Here’s the thing I wish someone had told me twenty years ago: you don’t have to read nonfiction to learn something.

Everyone says the older you get, the wiser you get. And maybe that’s true. But I’m almost fifty and I’m genuinely disappointed in myself for not taking reading seriously until my forties. Think about how much more I’d know, how much more life I’d have processed, if I’d started sooner. The problem was, I always assumed the books you learned from were the boring ones. Biographies, nonfiction, textbooks. The kind of reading that felt like homework. I never liked any of it. So I just… didn’t read much.

Nobody told me about historical fiction.

I know more about World War II now than I ever learned in high school and college combined. Mythology, a subject I literally dozed off to in class, I can’t get enough of now, as long as it comes through a retelling or a novel instead of a textbook. The Civil War, women’s history, entire eras I barely paid attention to in school. I’ve learned more from fiction in the last few years than from decades of formal education.

I’m traveling to Ireland later this year, and I’ve been working through a list of books set in Ireland or by Irish authors. The first one I finished, What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon, was a mix of historical fiction, time travel, and romance, and I learned so much about Irish history, like, an embarrassing amount that I probably should have already known. But I didn’t, and now I do, because a novel made me care enough to pay attention.

And then there are the books that don’t teach you anything except how to breathe for a minute. I just finished The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. I didn’t walk away with a history lesson, but every time I stepped into that book, I stepped out of the daily stress of running a business, being a mom, being a wife. I got to live in someone else’s world for a while. And sometimes that’s exactly what reading is for. Not learning, just escaping. Just getting to exist somewhere else for a few hours.

Books can crack you open or let you disappear. Sometimes both at the same time. And either way, you come back a little different than you left.

The streak I’ll never break

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I went from casual reader to someone who reads over a hundred books a year. There wasn’t a single switch that flipped. I remember reading the Twilight series like everyone else, and then a few years later I needed something to help me sleep better, and reading before bed seemed to work, and then one day I realized I’d read every single day for months. And then a year. And then four years.

I haven’t missed a day of reading in almost five years.

My Kindle used to track the streak for me, this unbroken chain of daily reading that I was irrationally proud of. I lost the official streak count when I started adding physical library books to the mix because I was tired of waiting months for popular new releases on Libby. But I know, in my head and in my heart, that I haven’t missed a day. Some nights during holidays and vacations, I’ve crawled into bed with my book by 11:30 just so I could read before midnight, and yes, sometimes that drives my kids crazy. Mom, just stay up with us. But just like working out and eating well, reading every day is a habit I’m proud of. It’s the one I never want to break.

I started The Shelfless Reader because I needed somewhere to put all the things books make me feel.

That probably sounds dramatic. But if you’re the kind of person who finishes a book and immediately needs to talk to someone about it, who lies awake replaying a scene, or Googles the real history behind a novel at midnight, or cries in the car because an audiobook narrator delivered a line that broke something open in you, then you know exactly what I mean.

Here’s something you should know about me: I’m an introvert. I wasn’t always, or at least I didn’t think I was. I built a successful business from scratch and spent years in rooms full of people, doing dinners and sales and all the schmoozing that comes with growing something. Then Covid hit, the travel slowed, the noise quieted down, and I realized that the quiet version of me wasn’t a pandemic side effect. It was who I’d been all along. I’m a woman of few words most of the time, and I’ve made my peace with that.

But books break that wide open. My closest friends, the ones who know I’m usually the quiet one, look at me like I’ve lost my mind when I start going off about a book I just finished. They can’t shut me up. It’s just a book. But it’s the one thing I will always choose to be loud about. The one subject where I can’t keep my thoughts protected and tucked away. I need to talk about it.

And here’s the part I’m still figuring out how to say: somewhere along the way, whether it’s age, or life, or just the weight of carrying everyone else’s feelings for long enough, the real world started to feel a little muted. Not numb, just… quieter. Like the volume got turned down on things I used to feel at full blast. But books never got quieter. If anything, they got louder. A really good book can rip me open in a way that real life rarely does anymore. It can make me feel joy and grief and longing at a volume I’d forgotten I was capable of. I think that’s why I need them so much.

I don’t know how to explain the thing that happens when words on a page, or words in your earbuds, written by a person who has never met you and doesn’t know your heart or your mind, somehow crack you open anyway. How does someone who’s never met me write the exact thing I didn’t know I needed to hear? How do fictional people make me feel more understood than real conversations sometimes do? It’s wild. And I needed a place to write about that.

I’m not a literary critic. I didn’t study writing or literature. I’m never going to break down a novel’s prose style or tell you whether the world-building holds up under scrutiny. That’s not what I do. What I do is tell you how a book made me feel, what it stirred up, what questions it left behind, what rabbit holes it sent me down, what I couldn’t stop thinking about for days afterward.

I write about the books that move me, at any star rating. If a book didn’t land for me, I’ll say so honestly and move on. But when one cracks something open or sends me spiraling into questions I hadn’t thought to ask, that’s when I write the most.

Here’s what you’ll find in this space:

Things I Googled While Reading is my favorite thing to write. When a book sends me down a rabbit hole (the real history behind the fiction, the science I had to look up, the obscure fact that changed how I understood the whole story), I write about it. It’s curious, personal, and hopefully the kind of thing that makes you immediately add the book to your list.

Reading Trees map how one book leads me to the next, and the next, and what each one did to me along the way.

Where My Mind Went While Reading is where the essays live. Each one starts with a book and goes somewhere bigger, like the dystopian novel that made me think about what I’d actually do if I could only say a hundred words a day, or the historical fiction set in Ireland that sent me spiraling into why we romanticize eras we’d never actually want to live in. Books are the lens. Life is the subject.

What I Read is every book I finished that month, with the kind of review I’d give a friend over coffee: how it made me feel, who should read it and why it mattered. Not a grade, but a conversation.

If you read fifty books a year or a hundred, on a Kindle, through your headphones, from the library, from a bookstore, or from a stack on your nightstand that’s starting to lean. If you care more about how a book makes you feel than whether it was “literary enough.” If you’ve ever tried to explain to someone why a novel wrecked you and gotten a blank stare in return.

You’re in the right place. It doesn’t matter how you read. It matters that you feel it.

Welcome to The Shelfless Reader.

I’m just getting started, and I’d love for you to be here from the beginning. Subscribe and I’ll send every new essay straight to your inbox.

- Charlie