The Keepthings

writing about loss, and douchebags

I was thrilled to see MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR on Town & Country’s list of The 30 Must-Read Books of Winter 2023. They called it “a deeply timely and relevant campus novel.”

The novel was also included on the Jewish Book Council’s Winter 2023 Bookshelf. Because my book is Jewish! in case you didn't know.

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As soon as I heard about Deborah Way’s Instagram account The Keepthings, I knew I wanted to send her a story. The account collects stories about the objects we keep from those we have have loved and lost, our “keepthings.” When my mother died in 2000, she lived alone so we had to clear out her whole apartment fairly quickly. My brother and I were both in our twenties and living in rental apartments without much storage space, so we had to give away or discard a lot of her things. The things we did hold onto were kept in a storage unit until I moved into a house with an attic a few years later. To this day, I am the primary keeper of my mother’s things, so “keepthings” has a special meaning for me.

Several years ago, I published this essay, about a blanket my mother was making when she died. That blanket was, to me, the ultimate keepthing because it symbolized so much about my mother and everything we lost when we lost her. This time, I wrote about a hat she gave me a few weeks before she died. I set out to write about how it was the last gift she ever gave me, but it turned out to be about so much more. Please check out the keepthings. In addition to collecting beautiful stories of love and loss, Deborah has created a wonderful community of readers and writers and grievers.

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You may have read this already—it’s gone absolutely viral—but Isabel Kaplan’s essay “My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I'm a writer” is fierce as hell.

About her now ex-boyfriend, she writes: “He used to speak mockingly about the glut of novels about women and their feelings as well as the way women speak about feelings in general. ‘Militarized vulnerability,’ he called it.” What a douche, right? But this is also why my newsletter is called “Girls with Feelings”—and why I didn't marry a writer. I haven’t yet read Kaplan’s novel NSFW, but it just jumped to the top of my TBR list.

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Pub day is only two months away! If you haven’t preordered MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR yet, please do! If you want to know why preorders are important, you can read this. A highlight: “Debut authors especially need a solid showing in book preorders to prove to the publisher that they have a place in the market.” If you have already preordered, thank you so much! I hope to share more news about reviews and events and book clubs soon.