It doesn\u2019t help that the end of the year is traditionally a big time for celebrity memoirs, the kinds of books that make great Christmas gifts and tend to suck up a lot of media attention. There are so many good ones this year\u2014Kyle MacLachlan, Judi Dench, LeVar Burton, and Dustin Hoffman, to name a few\u2014but let\u2019s not talk about them right now. They\u2019ll be fine no matter what.<\/p>\n
I want to tell you about some other nonfiction titles that I\u2019m looking forward to reading this season: the kinds of books that don\u2019t require ghostwriters and big marketing budgets and for which their authors didn\u2019t get paid seven-figure advances. The best nonfiction writing relies on our inherent curiosity about the world we live in, as flawed as it may be. I hope something on this list strikes your own thirst for knowledge.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
The Only Thing There Is To Want:<\/a> A Memoir of Three Loves<\/em> by Sarah Heppola Darkness Becomes Bright:<\/a> On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe<\/em> by Emily Ogden I Want to Be Famous:<\/a> When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity<\/em> by Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber We Radiant Things:<\/a> Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg<\/em> by Franny Choi The Savage Mind:<\/a> An American Legacy<\/em> by David Treuer Freedom\u2019s Gate:<\/a> Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone Live at the New York Nightclub that Shaped the Civil Rights Movement<\/em> by Soyica Diggs Colbert Back:<\/a> Essays on the Soul and Spine of America<\/em> by Lauren Michele Jackson Hyperscale<\/a>: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires<\/em> by Paris Marx Our Arab:<\/a> On Longing, Belonging, and Hope<\/em> by Zaina Arafat I Can\u2019t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex<\/em><\/a> by Lisa Hanawalt Jolt:<\/a> My Electric Journey Out of Darkness<\/em> by Ted Scheinman Vocal Break:<\/a> On Women, Music, and Power<\/em> by Lauren Elkin Ten Lives:<\/a> How What We Have Shapes Who We Are<\/em> by Mona Chalabi Lovely Me:<\/a> The Life of Jacqueline Susann<\/em> by Barbara Seaman The first official day of fall is this coming Tuesday, September 22, but if you\u2019re reading this then by now you\u2019ve probably seen a few \u201cmost anticipated for fall 2026\u201d lists. There is so much great stuff coming, and so<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4408,"featured_media":277139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[112311,82254,3472,99594,3972,773,5124,47919,112309,17323,20962,112310,1460,80296,3971,112308,67059,36953,53196],"class_list":["post-277129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-barbara-seaman","tag-bobby-finger","tag-david-treuer","tag-emily-ogden","tag-fall-previews","tag-franny-choi","tag-lauren-elkin","tag-lauren-michele-jackson","tag-lindsey-weber","tag-lisa-hanawalt","tag-maris-kreizman","tag-mona-chalabi","tag-nonfiction","tag-paris-marx","tag-previews","tag-sarah-heppola","tag-soyica-diggs-colbert","tag-ted-scheinman","tag-zaina-arafat"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a5P","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/fall-nonfiction.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4408"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277107,"date":"2026-09-17T05:09:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T09:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277107"},"modified":"2026-09-15T21:23:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T01:23:21","slug":"5-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-9-17-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/5-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-9-17-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week"},"content":{"rendered":" Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Joseph O\u2019Neill on Jared Weisberg\u2019s\u00a0Profiles in Cowardice<\/em>, Hua Hsu on Brian Dillon\u2019s\u00a0Ambivalence<\/em>, Felipe De La Hoz on Mahmoud Khalil\u2019s\u00a0No Land to Stand On<\/em>, Edna Bonhomme on Imani Thompson\u2019s\u00a0Honey<\/em>, and Jeremy Gordon on Jon Ronson\u2019s\u00a0The Castle<\/em>.<\/p>\n Brought to you by\u00a0Book Marks<\/a>, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u201cSay what you like about President Trump, he has ushered in a golden age of cravenness. A nation long perceived, not least by its own nationals, as resilient and courageous\u2014a people of gallant pioneers, fearless entrepreneurs, irresistible war heroes, nerveless astronauts, brave civil rights activists\u2014is now forced to contemplate an entirely new set of data. It seems that, when placed under mild authoritarian pressure, an extraordinary number of powerful Americans, ostensibly honorable and right-thinking, quickly revealed themselves to be cowardly and unprincipled and made of the wrong stuff.<\/p>\n The journalist Jacob Weisberg is one of the first to attempt to chronicle this new landscape. In a dismal inversion of the John F. Kennedy classic\u00a0Profiles in Courage<\/em>, Weisberg\u2019s\u00a0Profiles in Cowardice<\/em>\u00a0offers case studies of eight representative men and women \u2018who recognized the danger Trump posed to American values, who had the ability to say no to him and who at earlier moments showed flickers of integrity\u2014but who, when a more serious test came, failed to act courageously, in ways that reveal both their moral weakness and the fragility of the institutions they represented.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cWeisberg\u2019s intention isn\u2019t simply to lambaste these individuals, even as he hopes that shaming them will serve a useful purpose. Because cowardice \u2018wears disguises: pragmatism, realism, caution, institutional loyalty,\u2019 he investigates the specific situational and psychological forces at play in the moral downfall of each of his subjects, taking care, it must be said, to acknowledge that it isn\u2019t straightforward to resist lawless state power.<\/p>\n Standing your ground can be frightening; it can negatively affect one\u2019s career and net worth; it can leave one socially isolated; and, when you\u2019re trying to discharge institutional responsibilities, it can feel ethically complicated. But in the final analysis, Weisberg suggests, the rights and wrongs were pretty clear. His subjects are voluntary members of the American elite who were at no risk of imprisonment or impoverishment.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cIt must be pointed out, as Weisberg does in this valuable and dauntless book, that for every poltroon in high places, thousands of ordinary citizens have raised their heads above the parapet, none more bravely and persistently than the people of Minnesota as they protected their neighbors from\u00a0rampaging federal officers<\/a>. Their example upholds what\u2019s left of this country\u2019s reputation for courage.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Joseph O\u2019Neill on Jared Weisberg\u2019s\u00a0Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>(The New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cThe overheated circuits of teen-age life are well-worn ground for a coming-of-age story, yet Dillon\u2019s approach is anything but. The writer and editor has become known for a kind of memoir-inflected approach to criticism, publishing a series of entrancing books that are as much about questions of form and technique as they are about art\u2019s power to move and transform . . . Dillon wanders through his shelves, scrutinizing works by\u00a0Walter Benjamin,\u00a0Joan Didion, or\u00a0James Baldwin and seeing, at a granular level, how writing achieves such profound effects.\u00a0Ambivalence<\/em>\u00a0isn\u2019t a how-I-did-it prehistory of his career, as it ends well before he published anything of note. Rather, he writes about this formative span of his late teens and early twenties in the third person, investigating the passions and neuroses of young \u2018B\u2019 from a distance. Few people intervene on B\u2019s trajectory, if you can call it that; he spends most of his days dreaming and turning newly discovered ideas over in his mind until they feel like his own. Trauma and tragedies\u2014such as the death of his parents, or periods of estrangement from his siblings\u2014receive less scrutiny than the emotions unlocked by Virginia Woolf\u00a0or\u00a0Roland Barthes. The result is a strange, bewitching experiment in autobiography, in which there are no friendships or love affairs, just exquisite digressions on life-changing texts.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cI still believe that the songs or books we love contain blueprints for how we hope to live, and Dillon\u2019s memoir embodies how these personal canons inflect the way we understand and express ourselves. B fears being outed as a poseur, meekly copying the outline of some micro clique, rather than a true aesthete \u2018driven only by curiosity and love.\u2019 Fifty pages in, the author observes that he has \u2018not yet, in any meaningful sense of the verbs, begun to read\u2014or write.\u2019<\/p>\n You\u2019ll drift in and out of\u00a0Ambivalence<\/em>, and muse on your own formative inputs. As I turned the pages, wondering whether any of B\u2019s quandaries would be resolved, the book reminded me of how much of youth is spent pondering time, waiting, ready for the world beyond and yet slightly terrified of what\u2019s actually out there. It\u2019s an ode to a kind of boredom that feels desperate, endless, and, in retrospect, luxurious.<\/p>\n I\u2019m about a decade younger than Dillon, and I recognized his desire to hoard and paw at any morsel connecting his small world to an alternative culture somewhere out there. As a child of the nineties, I at least had the benefit of cable television and the early days of dial-up internet. But I\u2019m closer in age to Dillon than to those currently in their teens and early twenties; I wonder if Dillon\u2019s dream of accumulation (of books, songs, ideas, anything), redolent of the eighties and nineties, still holds in an age of far too much. Do people still have the spare hours to linger and obsess over the meaning of taste, when the internet delivers us an endless stream of ready-made new poses?\u00a0Ambivalence<\/em>\u00a0is a story of solitude, patience, and faith\u2014qualities that contemporary culture seems to militate against. One of my favorite moments comes when an excited classmate emerges from the library holding a new book of feminist literary theory. \u2018I have no fucking clue what it\u2019s about,\u2019 B\u2019s friend says, \u2018but it\u2019s\u00a0brilliant<\/em>.\u2019 There\u2019s still time to figure out what it all means.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Hua Hsu on Brian Dillon\u2019s\u00a0Ambivalence<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The New Yorker<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cFor these tribulations, he became an emblem. Of what, depends on who you ask: of Palestinian resistance, of \u2018woke\u2019 campus politics, of the retrenchment of free speech, of supposed antisemitism. In his plainspoken memoir,\u00a0No Land to Stand On,<\/i>\u00a0Khalil seeks to reestablish sovereignty over his own life story, at least, and re-center the underlying reason he ended up in this position: Since his grandfather and countless others were expelled from Palestine as a result of the Nakba in 1948, he and his community have been standing on borrowed land, at best tolerated by the authorities wherever they\u2019ve managed to set down.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cEach chapter heading is a location\u2014Jena, Louisiana, or Beirut, Lebanon, for example\u2014and Khalil spends the book jumping around, mixing the chronology of his detention with memories of his upbringing and young adulthood. This never feels disorienting because the narrative is cemented around the core idea that, regardless of place and circumstance, he is defined by being Palestinian, both to himself and to the systems around him, a sense felt perhaps most acutely when it becomes evident that he will miss his son\u2019s birth. For his entire time in the GEO facility, he has pushed away the possibility that he\u2019d remain locked up for this moment; then his wife, Noor, goes into labor and the government denies his furlough request. \u2018This was the fate of Palestinian men<\/i>, I thought. Was I any different from the Palestinian prisoners who not only missed the birth of their children but also their lives?\u2019 Khalil writes.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a story of stoic heroism but of constant estimation (and sometimes underestimation) of risk and the decision to accept it as the price of doing the right thing in a world of despots and cowards. It\u2019s marked by fear, second-guessing, and frustration, all with no guarantee that things will actually get better. Khalil does not\u00a0want<\/i>\u00a0to be shot at, or sought by the secret police, or detained in some for-profit gulag. He wants to live a normal life in his home with his wife and son, something that the world around him has decided is impossible, and so he struggles on.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Felipe De La Hoz on Mahmoud Khalil\u2019s\u00a0No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The New Republic<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cHoney<\/em>\u00a0is frantically twisted and sardonically dark. Yrsa is a serial killer who fashions herself as a virtuous Black feminist, both in theory and in practice, and she unequivocally and vociferously censures racism and sexism. Because of her self-declared moral high ground, she feels vindicated in terminating the lives of men she deems to be behaving badly\u2014scholarly philanderers, finance bros, American jocks. Not only does she indict these men for society\u2019s problems, but she also thinks she has a right to kill off the manosphere, one by one, all under the banner of critical race studies. Her revenge isn\u2019t just visceral\u2014it is academically grounded.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cHoney<\/em>\u00a0isn\u2019t just a serial-killer novel; it is a revenge story, but also a satire of a society obsessed with rectitude. All of these elements work in tandem and to great effect. What makes the revenge plot so seductive is the buildup more than the act itself. We follow intensely as Hamlet ponders how best to avenge the murder of his father. The stakes are found in the uncertainty of his efforts\u2014that vengeance might be the only solution, but it is also one that may never be realized. When Medea feels spurned after her husband Jason\u2019s death, her reprisal becomes our success, because we are living vicariously through her bereavement.<\/p>\n Honey<\/em>\u00a0uses this uncertainty to help drive the story forward. But, at times, Yrsa\u2019s psychological core gets lost amid the story\u2019s momentum. After all, revenge as a motivating force to take down men is not all that distinctive or innovative, particularly because it echoes recent television portrayals of Black women contemplating or enacting retribution, such as Michaela Coel\u2019s\u00a0I May Destroy You<\/em>\u00a0and Donald Glover\u2019s\u00a0Swarm<\/em>. We get that we are being offered a satire, but Yrsa\u2019s constant self-absolution doesn\u2019t allow the reader to see her\u2014or, for that matter, any other character\u2014from within. \u2018She does what comes easily,\u2019 Thompson writes. \u2018People think she\u2019s ambitious because often she\u2019s the best, but it\u2019s not drive.\u2019 And yet we don\u2019t often witness Yrsa at her best, either.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cHoney<\/em>\u00a0is the profile of an erudite antihero who speaks in a language of redress but has little interest in it; it is a portrait of a character\u2019s alienation from the society on whose behalf she claims to be acting. The material inequities that result from anti-Blackness, housing discrimination, or financial insecurity are conveniently absent; Yrsa is a creature absorbed by her own grievances and frustrations. Her murder binge doesn\u2019t feel ethically complex; her homicidal ventures are just nefarious.\u00a0Honey<\/em>\u00a0is a literary case study in which conflict is not abuse. At times, we are even left wondering: Was Yrsa actually injured, or does she only imagine herself to be?\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Edna Bonhomme on Imani Thompson\u2019s\u00a0Honey<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Nation<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cI thought about Ye while I was reading\u00a0The Castle<\/i>, a new nonfiction work by the journalist Jon Ronson that attempts to unpack the motivations of wayward men who no longer fit into traditional society. Ronson is probably best-known for his 2015 book,\u00a0So You\u2019ve Been Publicly Shamed<\/i>, a journalistic account of the emotional incentives and historical context behind the social-media-fueled frenzy that became known as \u2018cancel culture.\u2019 Like the people in that book, many of the subjects of\u00a0The Castle<\/i>\u00a0have been shoved to the margins. But the forces at play in this new book are more disparate, and perhaps more stubborn, than an angry online mob. Ronson explores how men become alienated because they can\u2019t achieve success in their chosen field, because they can\u2019t pay their bills, because they have too much money, because the town around them went to hell. The book shows how their free will, coupled with a lot of free time on the internet, leads them to pursue their self-interest as best they can\u2014which, eventually, begets more alienation.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s especially interested in men ages 25 to 54 who are both unemployed\u00a0and<\/i>\u00a0no longer looking for work\u2014people he claims have \u2018opted out of society,\u2019 choosing instead a \u2018life of male nothingness.\u2019 In a moment of general anxiety about men\u2014whom they vote for, what they\u2019re reading, whether they\u00a0share their feelings\u2014his interest isn\u2019t political. It\u2019s empathic. He offers no prescriptive solutions, wags no fingers. Instead, he wants the reader to conceive of the scale of social anomie, and to envision the millions of other men chasing meaning in the wreckage of their former aspirations.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cRonson doesn\u2019t build toward any prescriptive conclusions; he gives these men a platform to explain how they feel, and allows the reader to weigh the validity of those feelings. I remember the Chism pile-on well, and was slightly horrified to hear the story from his perspective\u2014how confusing it must have felt to toggle so rapidly and randomly between being seen as heroic and villainous. Ronson\u2019s empathy is not boundless; he draws hard lines around some of Mark\u2019s behavior. But he seems to understand that his personal judgment is more or less meaningless. The factors shaping these men are external, but how they react comes from the inside\u2014and many of them remain trapped in their own metaphorical castles, far from the light.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Jeremy Gordon on Jon Ronson\u2019s\u00a0The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Joseph O\u2019Neill on Jared Weisberg\u2019s\u00a0Profiles in Cowardice, Hua Hsu on Brian Dillon\u2019s\u00a0Ambivalence, Felipe De La Hoz on Mahmoud Khalil\u2019s\u00a0No Land to Stand On, Edna Bonhomme on Imani Thompson\u2019s\u00a0Honey, and Jeremy Gordon on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":277108,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[72612,15654,13821],"class_list":["post-277107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-5-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week","tag-book-marks","tag-book-reviews"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a5t","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Ambivalence.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/873"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276737,"date":"2026-09-17T05:09:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T09:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276737"},"modified":"2026-09-15T21:20:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T01:20:14","slug":"how-books-can-make-an-awkward-encounter-slightly-less-awkward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-books-can-make-an-awkward-encounter-slightly-less-awkward\/","title":{"rendered":"How Books Can Make an Awkward Encounter Slightly Less Awkward"},"content":{"rendered":" “Ah, you must be Nanako?\u201d the tall man said as soon as he entered the caf\u00e9. He looked like he was in his early forties, and had a calmer, more relaxed vibe than I was expecting.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m Tsuchiya. Nice to meet you,\u201d he said as he sat down in front of me, cool and collected. \u201cHave you already ordered something to drink? I come here a lot; they do very good cheesecake. Would you like to try some? Go on, it really is delicious\u2014let me treat you to a piece.\u201d<\/p>\n It was an occasion worth commemorating. My encounter with Tsuchiya, my very first PerfectStrangers match.<\/p>\n After I\u2019d registered my profile on PerfectStrangers, I perused the site until I understood how it worked. It looked like there were two ways to meet someone. You set a time and approximate location (say, 5pm on such and such a day, in Shibuya), added a short comment (\u201cLooking forward to a great chat!\u201d), and then posted it on the site. This was known as \u201clisting a chat.\u201d Logged-in users could view these listings on a notice board, and if they wanted to meet you, they could reply to your post by clicking \u201cRespond.\u201d If you received multiple responses, you sifted through them and picked the person you most wanted to meet. If you didn\u2019t feel like meeting any of them, you could decline them all and cancel the listing. And if you didn\u2019t get any responses, of course, your meeting would just fall through. So in order to meet someone, you had to either list a chat and wait for someone to respond, or respond to someone else\u2019s listing.<\/p>\n I felt a bit like I was being pushed into it, but then again, there was no point just staring at the site forever. This guy seemed all right, so why not meet up with him just to try it out?<\/p>\n Just making a profile wasn\u2019t enough to set things in motion. The more I browsed the site, the more I understood that, unlike Facebook or Twitter, there was no fun in just browsing. All you could really do was \u201clike\u201d the intriguing people at the top of the popularity rankings, or go through and tag all your interests\u2014#reading, #travel<\/i>, and so on\u2014and then check out people with the same tags as you.<\/p>\n I looked at the current listings by those who were seeking someone to meet. They were offering meetings at a whole range of different times, yet lots of them hadn\u2019t had a single response, their posts going unanswered. What if no one responded to mine, either? That would be sad, embarrassing. Or what if I only got responses from weirdos? I dithered, unable to muster the resolve to set up my own meeting.<\/p>\n Just then, I got an alert from Facebook Messenger. I didn\u2019t recognize the sender.<\/p>\n \u201cHello! I\u2019m Tsuchiya,\u201d began the message, complete with friendly waving emoji. \u201cI work in advertising. I saw you on PerfectStrangers and thought I\u2019d message. I see you\u2019re new\u2014nice to make your acquaintance! I\u2019m not an expert, but if you need any help using the site, just ask. \u201d I had mixed feelings. I was partly reassured by the appearance of this kind stranger, but also a little suspicious as to why he had contacted me out of the blue.<\/p>\n \u201cThank you for the offer. How did you find me, though?\u201d I replied.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you mean how I found you on Facebook? \u201d came the reply, accompanied by another emoji\u2014this one looking slightly sheepish, I thought. The message continued, \u201cUser profiles on PerfectStrangers have little Facebook and Twitter icons at the bottom. You can click them to see the user\u2019s Facebook or Twitter feed. If you get a response from someone you think might be dodgy, you should check out their social media\u2014it can be good to see where they work and find out a bit more about them. You can tell more about what they\u2019re like from their posts and tweets, too.<\/p>\n \u201cAlso, people who\u2019ve just signed up to PerfectStrangers and users who\u2019re currently online are displayed as featured users. Down at the bottom. Can you see that?\u201d<\/p>\n It was pretty forward of him to message me like this, but at least he seemed friendly.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, yes, I see it…Thanks for your help. It\u2019s all new to me,\u201d I replied.<\/p>\n \u201cAre you planning to list a chat? Or just looking around for now?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n \u201cI guess nothing\u2019s going to happen till I list one. But I was worried no one would respond.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy don\u2019t I be your first meeting then? If you set a date and time, I\u2019ll respond to your listing. You could set it up now for practice, if you want. It\u2019s always good to try new things! \u201d<\/p>\n I felt a bit like I was being pushed into it, but then again, there was no point just staring at the site forever. This guy seemed all right, so why not meet up with him just to try it out?<\/p>\n \u201cOkay, thank you. Let\u2019s give it a shot. I\u2019ll try posting now.\u201d<\/p>\n And that was how my meeting with Tsuchiya came about.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Tsuchiya picked a place in Tokyo\u2019s Oku-Shibuya district, a stylish caf\u00e9 that was serious about its coffee. I arrived first and waited, feeling jittery and nervous. I\u2019m about to socialize with a stranger! This is happening! <\/i>I kept glancing around the caf\u00e9 and fidgeting, smoothing out the creases in my skirt. But when Tsuchiya came in and we said hello, I found myself calming down and thinking that actually, this wasn\u2019t so scary after all. He was easy to talk to, which helped. By the time I\u2019d ordered a coffee and a piece of the cheesecake he recommended, my nerves had all but disappeared.<\/p>\n \u201cSo… you\u2019ve been using PerfectStrangers for quite a while, then?\u201d I asked Tsuchiya. \u201cWhat made you decide to try it? How are you finding it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, it makes a nice change from going for coffee on your own. And it\u2019s stimulating talking to young people, it sometimes gives me new ideas for work. It\u2019s good fun. What about you, why are you on the site?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve separated from my husband. I thought it would be good to try something new, and I thought I might as well get some practice recommending books to people while I\u2019m at it,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re separated? I see, you must\u2019ve had a hard time of it then. I have a feeling I\u2019m missing part of the story, though…You intrigue me, Nanako. Could I ask why you and your husband split up? It\u2019s absolutely fine if you don\u2019t want to talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUm…\u201d I hesitated a moment.<\/p>\n My husband and I worked for the same company and we had a lot of friends in common, so I hadn\u2019t really spoken to anyone about our reasons for separating. If I only gave my side of the story, I\u2019d inevitably sound like the victim, which didn\u2019t seem fair. I saw our separation as a mutual failure, and I had no desire to direct any blame or resentment toward my husband. In fact, I felt bad that the only conclusion I\u2019d come to so far was that I wanted to put some space between us for a while, as a way of putting off the problem for the time being.<\/p>\n But Tsuchiya had no involvement in my life whatsoever. I didn\u2019t have to worry about him meddling\u2014he wouldn\u2019t gossip to anyone who knew my husband, or tell my husband what I\u2019d said. He was a total stranger whom I\u2019d be with today and today only, so I felt able to relax and even joke about the separation.<\/p>\n Tsuchiya listened with interest as I spoke, nodding attentively now and then.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, you meet all sorts of people on the site!\u201d he said. \u201cSeeing as you\u2019re separated, you could even use it to find a boyfriend. I mean, forgive me for saying this\u2014but a person can miss that physical connection, don\u2019t you think?\u201d<\/p>\n Um, excuse me? <\/i>I was taken aback by his misguided words of encouragement. But then it occurred to me that maybe in a situation like this, people felt they could be more familiar, and mention things like sex more easily.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, I\u2019m not really missing the physical connection. But I suppose it might be nice to find a boyfriend sometime,\u201d I said noncommittally, trying to sidestep the topic.<\/p>\n But Tsuchiya continued. \u201cI mean, not connection<\/i>, exactly, but…Well, I\u2019m talking about sexual intimacy! Though I thought that might be too blunt. But it\u2019s not particularly outrageous to suggest that women might want sex, too, is it?\u201d<\/p>\n For some reason, our discussion seemed to assume that I was sexually frustrated.<\/p>\n I found it refreshing that in this thirty-minute slot I\u2019d been able to drop all formality and poke fun at him, that we\u2019d been able to trade jests. And the fact I wouldn\u2019t have to see him again made it easier, somehow.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s just how it is,\u201d Tsuchiya continued, as though pressing me for some kind of acknowledgment. \u201cI mean, I\u2019m a great believer in equality between men and women, I respect women. But women who try so hard on their own without a man can seem a bit…you know? I think a woman can really blossom when she\u2019s got a man to love and fulfill her.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh…?\u201d I said. I realized I was smiling through gritted teeth. This seemed to be a pet theory of his\u2014and a totally antiquated one at that.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m not trying to say you always need a man around, or that you look desperate or anything like that! I just meant, I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll find someone.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThank you very much. Yes\u2014it would be lovely if I could find a nice man like Pierre Taki,\u201d I said, trying to wrest the baton from Tsuchiya and change the subject.<\/p>\n \u201cPierre Taki? What, the actor? Is he your type? That\u2019s unusual! Well, I may not be as entertaining as him, but I\u2019ll go out for dinner with you anytime, and you can talk about how things are with your husband, or whatever\u2019s bothering you, and get it all off your chest. Sex or no sex, it\u2019s fine by me\u2014your wish is my command. Only kidding!\u201d<\/p>\n So, he wanted to steer the conversation back to sex after all. I was getting fed up\u2014but I couldn\u2019t deny that it was thanks to Tsuchiya I\u2019d taken this first step. I should really be much obliged to him.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s very nice of you, but I think at the moment I just want to try meeting lots of different people on Perfect-Strangers. It\u2019s been great meeting you like this, so I\u2019m really excited to meet other people, too!\u201d I answered, mentally adding, by which I mean, I don\u2019t plan on seeing you again<\/i>.<\/p>\n \u201cYes. Of course. It\u2019s just there are a lot of dodgy people on there,\u201d he said. At this point, it was probably time to tell him to have a good long look in the mirror.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, they can\u2019t be much dodgier than you,\u201d I said, jokingly rebuffing him.<\/p>\n \u201cHey! That\u2019s a terrible thing to say! Come on now, let\u2019s be friends,\u201d he said, getting into the spirit of things.<\/p>\n \u201cHmm…Nah, seems too much like hard work.\u201d \u201cOh, too mean!\u201d<\/p>\n I found it refreshing that in this thirty-minute slot I\u2019d been able to drop all formality and poke fun at him, that we\u2019d been able to trade jests. And the fact I wouldn\u2019t have to see him again made it easier, somehow.<\/p>\n My gentle snub seemed to have done the trick, and after that, Tsuchiya chatted to me about the ad industry, what his job involved and the adverts he\u2019d worked on recently, as far as he could discuss them.<\/p>\n As our meeting was coming to its end, I hastily asked him about books. What kind of thing did he usually read, and what might he like to try?<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I haven\u2019t read that much recently… Maybe a novel?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n From what I gathered, he didn\u2019t keep up with the latest books or read an awful lot. To be honest, I\u2019d been put off by that doggedness of his, often found in middle-aged men: his pushing for another meeting and attempting to crowbar in the subject of sex. But he showed some sensitivity when he talked about his work, and I felt there was a more nuanced side to him. Based on his personality and his job, I thought he\u2019d probably like to read something contemporary, rather than a classic.<\/p>\n I would recommend him something by Takehiro Higuchi, an author I\u2019d discovered just recently and been blown away by. When I\u2019d first read Higuchi\u2019s writing, I was thrilled\u2014he used language in a totally new way and presented such a fresh perspective. Tsuchiya worked in advertising, after all, so if he wasn\u2019t already familiar with this new talent, I would introduce him. Farewell Zoshigaya <\/i>would be a great choice…But then, Tsuchiya seemed to have sex on the brain, so instead, I picked Sex in Japan. <\/i>It was right there in the title, so maybe he\u2019d give the book a shot. It was suitably current, too, having just come out in paperback.<\/p>\n Sex in Japan <\/i>is about a husband and wife who venture into the world of swinging. At first, it just seems like a piece of erotica, but midway through, it becomes a novel about violence, and then a courtroom novel, and it finishes up as a story about pure love. It\u2019s entertaining in its absurdity, a real roller coaster of a ride. I hoped Tsuchiya would enjoy it. So that was how I made my first book recommendation.<\/p>\n I sent it to Tsuchiya a day or two later via Facebook Messenger, along with a few words of thanks.<\/p>\n _______________________________<\/p>\n From<\/em> The Bookshop Woman: My Year Transforming Lives\u2014One Book at a Time<\/a> by Nanako Hanada, translated by Cat Anderson. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Ah, you must be Nanako?\u201d the tall man said as soon as he entered the caf\u00e9. He looked like he was in his early forties, and had a calmer, more relaxed vibe than I was expecting. \u201cI\u2019m Tsuchiya. Nice to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32133,"featured_media":277111,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43103,43092],"tags":[112195,4543,112194,39238,16228,3647,112193,75381,14520],"class_list":["post-276737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-memoir","category-newsandculture","tag-cat-anderson","tag-japan","tag-nanako-hanada","tag-penguin-publishing-group","tag-penguin-random-house","tag-social-media","tag-the-bookshop-woman-my-year-transforming-lives-one-book-at-a-time","tag-tiny-reparations-books","tag-tokyo"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Zv","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bookstore-cafe.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276883,"date":"2026-09-17T05:08:57","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T09:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276883"},"modified":"2026-09-14T11:59:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T15:59:03","slug":"nine-books-of-poetry-about-breakups-and-awakenings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/nine-books-of-poetry-about-breakups-and-awakenings\/","title":{"rendered":"Nine Books of Poetry About Breakups (and Awakenings)"},"content":{"rendered":" We often experience breakups as private deaths. The severing of an intimate relationship means giving up a vision of life together. One mourns the beloved, the shared past, and the expected future, but what is often overlooked, and equally painful, is the loss of a version of the self. It is this last shattering that tricks us into rebirth. The end of a relationship becomes the entrance to the rest of our lives. Sometimes an awakening is a catalyst of the breakup\u2014the version of the self that entered the relationship is no longer recognizable. Other times, the breakup sparks an unexpected awakening. Hidden parts of ourselves come into view. Our identity swerves. We meet a mysterious self, and it is she who learns to love again, as Galway Kinnell writes in his poem \u201cWait\u201d: \u201cThe need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.\u201d<\/p>\n My new book The Going Is Forever<\/i> travels through the dissolution of a marriage and the multiple endings that blur separation and intimacy. The poems push against the binaries of leaving and being left and embrace ongoing love in the wake of loss. Friends and family often ask \u201cwhat happened,\u201d expecting a reason or a narrative. Attempting to answer, I often felt disingenuous, defensive, guilty,\u00a0 and most of all lonely. Poetry allowed me to confront the boundaries of privacy and disclosure, to recognize an allegiance more to paradox than to a person. In a poem, it was possible to endure moments of not knowing, to hold versions of a life I had to let go of, and to break open to the life to come.<\/p>\n Several of my favorite poetry collections capture the nuanced process of breaking up, with its extreme states of longing, anger, and sorrow\u2014while also expanding the capacity for joy, pleasure, and compassion. The following books refuse to treat breakups as a singular ending or distinguish the breakup from the inevitable awakening. When a relationship ends, language is as much of a casualty as love. Virginia Woolf speaks of \u201cthe little language such as lovers use.\u201d We lose the person we talk to in secret, and from this devastating silence, poetry reinvents language. In non-linear lyric forms, the following collections braid love\u2019s ruthless endings with its tenderest beginnings.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Anne Carson, Beauty of the Husband<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n In Carson\u2019s \u201cEssay in 29 Tangoes,\u201d each vignette opens with an epigraph by John Keats as the speaker weaves together a meditation on Keats\u2019 concept of beauty as truth and her husband\u2019s beauty and infidelity. Subverting the question of \u201cwill she stay or will she go,\u201d this book emphasizes the way love often involves obsession and denial: “I can think of no reason not to be with you,\/ except the obvious one.” Pushing the boundaries of form, Carson shows us that there is no single narrative to a marriage, and that language, too, is a beautiful lie.<\/p>\n Louise Gluck, Meadowlands<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n If Anne Carson expands marriage into an aesthetic conversation with Keats, Gluck puts the dissolution of a marriage in an epic conversation with The Odyssey<\/i>. Bringing together the private shattering of a home with the epic tale of homecoming offers Gluck a distanced, often ironic, stance on her life\u2019s most painful moments. Weaving her own story with the familiar story, Gluck can also unweave the stories she has told herself, not out of loyalty to her husband (like Penelope) but as internal awakening. The Odyssey<\/i> ends in a homecoming, driven by Nostos (hope for home). In Gluck\u2019s poem \u201cNostos,\u201d breaking up means a return to the original home as a source of reality that can be sustained: \u201cWe look at the world once, in childhood. \/ The rest is memory.\u201d<\/p>\n Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Sexton wrote this entire collection in a span of 20 days, the same period of time in which she decided to leave her 25-year marriage. The collection opens with the lines \u201cA story, a story! \/ (Let it go. Let it come.)\u201d She portrays leaving the marriage as a rowing toward some new version of herself: \u201cThis story ends with me still rowing.\u201d Breakups can be a way of going on. According to Sexton, divorce is both a door and a purging of \u201cthe rat inside of me.\u201d Leaving a beloved may mean leaving the worst of oneself behind.<\/p>\n Tiana Clark, Scorched Earth<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n While this book doesn\u2019t shy away from the grief after divorce, it ultimately is a celebration of Blackness, Motherhood, and Queer desire, awakening into a fuller sense of the speaker\u2019s identity. In fact, loss expands the capacity to love. The afterlife of a love story involves a radical rebirth of self-love\u2014there is only more and more love: \u201cO tiana I want to love you there.\u201d In a title poem, an ode to \u201cBlack breasts\u201d Clark turns vulnerability into self-love. In the midst of feeling lost from oneself, self-touch becomes a reminder of being alive: \u201cDo you want to see me \/ touch me? Sometimes, I touch myself \/ because I don\u2019t know if I exist.\u201d<\/p>\n Sandra Lim, The Curious Thing<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n While there is an undercurrent of a breakup throughout this collection, particularly in the third section, what drives this book is a reorientation of the self in the world. How has the speaker been changed by places she has lived? How does the past bear on the present? In deceptively plain diction, the hurdle of one love relationship provokes an exploration of desire and belonging. Yearning is not a lack but an invitation to the imagination:<\/p>\n When there is anything The clarity of questioning in Lim\u2019s work reminds us that poetry, like desire, offers intimacy and containment in moments of crisis and estrangement.<\/p>\n Sharon Olds, Stag\u2019s Leap<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n I was in high school when I first read Stag\u2019s Leap<\/i>, Sharon Olds\u2019 Pulitzer prize-winning collection. I hardly knew what poetry was, let alone sex, or marriage\u2014or divorce! But I remember being stunned to feel so many antithetical emotions at once (betrayal, rage, despair, excitement, affection, nostalgia). Without the profound love and intimacy the couple shared while raising their family, I couldn\u2019t have felt the devastation of the husband\u2019s betrayal and hypocrisy. If these are divorce poems, they are also love poems. I think of Catullus\u2019 \u201cOdi et Amo.\u201d Within a relationship or in its wake, love and hate often cohabitate.<\/p>\n In the poem \u201cLast Night\u201d the speaker relives the last time she and her husband had sex (My poem \u201cIf I Have to Look Back\u201d depicts a similar moment in a marriage). Olds describes her physical movements as twisting from a chrysalis, an image of pain and rebirth. The familiarity of physical intimacy is also a shared act of dissolution, after which the speaker awakens:<\/p>\n That was love, and we woke in the morning Traci Brimhall, Love Prodigal<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Brimhall integrates the end of a marriage with the beginnings of new love, and news of a difficult medical diagnosis with the awakening of physical pleasures. Motherhood and Eros radically feed each other. The natural world invites previously unrecognized intimacies. This collection does not beautify quotidian messiness but shows us how love celebrates our imperfections. Through these poems, we see how love, like illness, is often a force beyond our control: \u201cIt is sudden as conversion, \/ worthy of radiant trespass.\u201d<\/p>\n Maggie Millner, Couplets<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n In this tour-de-force novel in verse made up of rhyming couplets (in first person) and prose poems (in third person), Millner tells a queer love story that begins with awakening to oneself in the mirror. The proem begins \u201cI became myself\u201d and ends:<\/p>\n But I was wrong. My eye loved The rupture is not just with a man but with the idea of a heteronormative life. Falling in love with a woman, even though the relationship eventually ends, is the start of a process of getting to know oneself. Just as Carson plays with the form of \u201ctangoes\u201d to tell a non-linear narrative, Millner chooses the rhyming couplet to tell a story of fracture and mirror, becoming and being undone.<\/p>\n Katie Ford, If You Have to Go<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Awakening after a breakup often begins the way that a poem begins, with an apparent contradiction: the conviction of uncertainty. When a beloved is lost, desire is displaced, but that doesn\u2019t mean desire is gone. One must go on, even move on, without knowing what one means by that. Though\u00a0 desire loses its object (the husband), it charges its subject (the speaker). This quest to believe in love again, while doubting whether it can be found is akin to a spiritual awakening. In a sonnet sequence on divorce, Ford writes:<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know what I mean, The motions precede understanding as the lines perpetually reverse, halt, and cascade toward discovery\u2014more scar, than solution. In the aftermath of our greatest love, we may find that love is a higher power. The life we have built breaks apart, but the wall of what can\u2019t be known also falls away as we are broken. Breakups may make us doubt ourselves, but sometimes they make us believers.<\/p>\n Writing The Going Is Forever<\/i> made me challenge my own identity as wife, mother, and daughter. Yet in the throes of heartbreak, I heard what Sylvia Plath calls \u201cthe old brag of my heart: I am I am I am.\u201d The more poems I wrote, the louder it got.<\/p>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n The Going is Forever: Poems<\/a>\u00a0by Elizabeth Metzger is available from Milkweed Editions.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We often experience breakups as private deaths. The severing of an intimate relationship means giving up a vision of life together. One mourns the beloved, the shared past, and the expected future, but what is often overlooked, and equally painful,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3187,"featured_media":276894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[9217,3828,112245,70584,40079,39463,39461,14330,98852,52260,112246,15845,66689,101107,4975,74005,112247,71675,112248,50676,53738],"class_list":["post-276883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-anne-carson","tag-anne-sexton","tag-beauty-of-the-husband","tag-couplets","tag-elizabeth-metzger","tag-if-you-have-to-go","tag-katie-ford","tag-louise-gluck","tag-love-prodigal","tag-maggie-millner","tag-meadowlands","tag-milkweed-editions","tag-sandra-lim","tag-scorched-earth","tag-sharon-olds","tag-stags-leap","tag-the-awful-rowing-toward-god","tag-the-curious-thing","tag-the-going-is-forever","tag-tiana-clark","tag-traci-brimhall"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a1R","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/breakup-reading-list.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276790,"date":"2026-09-17T05:08:35","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T09:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276790"},"modified":"2026-09-14T12:07:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T16:07:18","slug":"remembering-anna-may-wong-hollywoods-first-asian-american-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/remembering-anna-may-wong-hollywoods-first-asian-american-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Anna May Wong, Hollywood\u2019s First Asian-American Star"},"content":{"rendered":" If the old Ernest Hemingway adage holds true, that courage equals grace under pressure, then Anna May Wong (1905-1961) had it in spades. Wong embodied a model of how to reinvent oneself in the face of the most daunting societal obstacles. In my thirty-plus years of writing about Wong, I am continually reminded of how she remains an exemplar today.<\/p>\n In her time, Wong inspired a wide array of admirers. Anne Frank pasted not one but two photographs of Wong on her bedroom wall in the secret annex in Amsterdam where she and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II. At the 1930s Harlem balls, the very same venues that sparked today\u2019s Tony-nominated musical marvel, <\/span>Cats: The Jellicle Ball<\/i>, drag performers paid homage to Wong by recreating her dance moves from her British film, <\/span>Picadilly<\/i> (1929). At the Royal Ascot horse races in England, society women also dressed up as Wong, albeit by sporting imitations of the Coolie Hat that she turned into a coveted high fashion item.<\/span><\/p>\n The pressures Wong faced throughout her lifetime were severe. Wong was an American. She even had a passport to prove it. But as an American of Chinese heritage, her travel was circumscribed by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Wong, alongside all other Chinese Americans, had to undergo arduous procedures every time she left the country. Not only did she have to fill out Form 430, an \u201cApplication of Alleged American Citizen of the Chinese Race for Preinvestigation of Status,\u201d she had to ace an in-person interview. Inaccuracy or non-compliance could result in immigration prison and deportation. Born in Los Angeles, Wong should have enjoyed all privileges of birthright citizenship. But she did not. Her situation reverberates uncomfortably today.<\/p>\n The list of pressures continues. The photographic record shows Wong arm-in-arm with numerous admirers, many of whom were her lovers. Yet, in her home state of California, laws prohibited her from marrying a white person, a fact she decried during press interviews. In 1946, Wong, in search of a new Los Angeles home, bumped up against covenants that forbade housing sales to \u201cOrientals\u201d and could not find anyone who would sell a house to her. Fame and money were not enough to surmount housing segregation.<\/p>\n Perhaps no moment better shows Wong\u2019s grace under pressure than how she handled the casting debacle at the center of The Good Earth<\/i> (1937). Wildly popular with the Depression-era American public, the 1931 Pearl S. Buck novel of the same name celebrated impoverished yet resilient Chinese peasants. Hollywood\u2019s leading studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), intended the film to be an important one; it had been allocated one of the largest budgets in cinematic history, two million dollars. Winning the leading role of O-lan would have catapulted Wong to the Hollywood A-list.<\/p>\n Wong had gone on record in the Los Angeles Times<\/i> that she sought the main role of O-lan and would refuse to attend a casting call for Lotus because it was \u201cthe only unsympathetic role\u201d in The<\/i> Good<\/i> Earth<\/i>. Wong\u2019s correspondence, upon which I draw to depict her life, reveals a discrepancy between her public words and private thoughts. She confided in a letter to her best friend, Fania Marinoff, that, since Luise Rainer had locked up the role of O-lan, MGM had instead invited her to screen test as Lotus, the second wife who ruins the family. As Wong disclosed: \u201cPractically everyone, including my friends, seem [sic] to feel that I should take the Lotus part \u2018if there is enough money in it.\u2019\u201d In the same letter, the pragmatic Wong divulged that, contrary to her declaration in the Los Angeles Times<\/i>, she auditioned for Lotus not once but twice.<\/p>\n Wong embodied a model of how to reinvent oneself in the face of the most daunting societal obstacles.<\/p>\n MGM\u2019s notes from Wong\u2019s second screen test are shocking: \u201c[d]eserves serious consideration as possibility for Lotus\u2014[but] NOT as beautiful as she might be.\u201d For MGM, no Chinese American had the correct face to play a Chinese role. Lewin\u2019s casting reports for others such as Keye Luke similarly stated that they \u201cdid not fit his conception of what Chinese people looked like.\u201d Lewin recommended that they be employed primarily as \u2018atmosphere\u2019 and not as principal actors.\u201d Not surprisingly, MGM nixed Wong as Lotus, casting instead the Viennese performer Tilly Loesch. Chinese Americans, in the hundreds and even thousands, were relegated to the background as atmosphere.<\/p>\n Popular culture has fixated on Wong\u2019s \u201cfailure\u201d to land a starring role in The<\/i> Good<\/i> Earth<\/i> as launching the supposed negative trajectory of Wong\u2019s life. In Netflix\u2019s Hollywood<\/i> (2020) and Amanda Lee Koe\u2019s novel Delayed Rays of a Star<\/i> (2019), Wong\u2019s purported O-lan tryout (her letters reveal that she never auditioned for that role) is misrepresented as the event that permanently devastates her, pushing her into an alcohol-soaked stagnation.<\/p>\n Wong\u2019s letters to Marinoff, however, reveal a very different story, one of courage and resilience. After the MGM rejection, Wong declared: \u201c[I] feel a strong inclination to carry out my original plan of going to China.\u201d Wong was too excited by \u201cmy first trip to the land of my fore-fathers\u201d and too busy to wallow in self-pity. With breathtaking speed, a little over a month after the Good Earth<\/i> casting rejection, Wong left Hollywood to fulfill her lifelong dream of visiting China.<\/p>\n What makes Wong extraordinary is that she was not content to witness China as a tourist. This was not a vacation. This was work. This was Wong\u2019s opportunity to reinvent herself as a journalist. During the month before her departure, Wong contracted with the New York Herald Tribune <\/i>to write a series of articles about her journey through China. For a woman who stopped her formal education after two years of high school, this was extraordinary. Not one to waste time, Wong posted her first dispatch about the voyage while still enroute to China.<\/p>\n Even more impressively, Wong transformed the major crisis of her entire career into an unprecedented milestone: seizing the means of production to become a filmmaker. Wong crafted a riposte to MGM\u2019s faux China portrayed in The Good Earth<\/i> by producing a motion picture about the actual China featuring a person with actual Chinese heritage, herself. Before she left Los Angeles, Wong arranged to have her experiences recorded by cinematographer H.S. (Haisheng) \u201cNewsreel\u201d Wong (no relation). Wong starred in, scripted, directed, and produced her own documentary about her travels, an astonishing feat at a time when Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino were two of the very few female directors in Hollywood. After decades of promoting the film, Wong\u2019s short feature about her China trip was finally aired throughout the United States on ABC television on February 14, 1957. Grace under pressure indeed.<\/p>\n Even today, Wong provides us with a road map of how to forge ahead even under the most difficult of circumstances. Many of us move differently in the world because who we are does not match what society values. It is my fondest hope that my new book will show that we are all, in one way or another, Anna May Wong.<\/p>\n _______________________________<\/p>\n From<\/em> Anna May Wong: An Intimate Portrait<\/a> by Shirley Jennifer Lim. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from Abrams Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If the old Ernest Hemingway adage holds true, that courage equals grace under pressure, then Anna May Wong (1905-1961) had it in spades. Wong embodied a model of how to reinvent oneself in the face of the most daunting societal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32153,"featured_media":277017,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43102,6,43093,43092],"tags":[40531,14255,34813,85335,112226,77838,9366,112227],"class_list":["post-276790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biography","category-features","category-film-and-tv","category-newsandculture","tag-abrams-books","tag-acting","tag-actors","tag-anna-may-wong","tag-anna-may-wong-an-intimate-portrait","tag-asian-american-history","tag-hollywood","tag-shirley-jennifer-lim","story-type-actors"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a0m","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/anna-may-wong-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32153"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276696,"date":"2026-09-17T05:08:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T09:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276696"},"modified":"2026-09-14T11:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T15:54:09","slug":"writing-through-loss-on-crafting-nonfiction-that-tackles-americas-opioid-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/writing-through-loss-on-crafting-nonfiction-that-tackles-americas-opioid-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Through Loss: On Crafting Nonfiction That Tackles America\u2019s Opioid Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":" Nadia and I both lost our siblings to overdose in 2015. She was 7 months pregnant when her sister died. I had a 13-month-old baby when my brother died. We both navigated new motherhood and profound grief simultaneously. And now we’ve both written books about it that are being released by the same publisher a month apart. So in many ways, we are living parallel lives.<\/p>\n \u2013Stephanie Wittels Wachs<\/em><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Nadia Bowers:<\/strong> Both your first book, Everything is Horrible and Wonderful<\/i><\/a> (2018) and your new book, Last Day<\/i><\/a>, deal with the opioid crisis. Can you tell me a little about what drove you to write the first book\u2014which is incredibly personal about your brother\u2019s death\u2014and the journey to the second one?<\/p>\n Stephanie Wittels Wachs:<\/strong> When my brother died of a heroin overdose in February 2015, I was swallowed whole by an acute grief that annihilated every aspect of my life. Harris was a comedian\u2019s comedian. He was a writer on NBC\u2019s Parks and Rec<\/i>, in which he also played the recurring role of Harris, the animal control guy. He coined the term “humblebrag.” He was easy to love and loved by many. But more than that, he was my lifelong sidekick and only sibling. In the aftermath of his death, I had a hard time putting my feet on the floor and standing upright. I felt like I was quite literally going to sink into a black hole and never crawl back out, which was tricky because, at the time, I had a 13-month-old baby. So I started writing as an act of survival. I turned these disjointed fragments in my Notes app into a book in nine months, and I really do credit the writing with pulling me out of that big black hole.<\/p>\n That same year, this woman Jessica Cordova Kramer who I\u2019d never met heard me on Nora McInerny’s podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking<\/i>. She lived across the country and had lost her little brother, Stefano, to an overdose a few months earlier. In describing what it felt like to hear the episode, Jess said, \u201cI swear to God, it was the first time I felt joy. The first time I was able to acknowledge that this is just how life is. People die, and sometimes your brother dies of a heroin overdose. I just had this moment of like, \u2018Okay, I think I can live through this. This didn\u2019t just happen to me. It happened to someone else.\u2019\u201d Long story short, she tracked me down and pitched an idea: a podcast about the opioid crisis from the family’s perspective. At the center of it was a question that plagues everyone who\u2019s lost a loved one to an overdose: What could I have done differently?<\/p>\n As I started to look at my sister\u2019s life and find more compassion for the parts of it that were difficult, I couldn\u2019t just do it for her. If I was looking at her as a human being, I had to do it for everyone.<\/p>\n We called the podcast Last Day.<\/i> The idea was that we would start with someone\u2019s last day and rewind the tape to see what we could have done to change the ending. We were desperate to figure out how we could have saved our brothers, a question that was simultaneously very simple and incredibly complex. I hosted the show and started talking to doctors, experts, survivors, people in long-term recovery, other families who\u2019d experienced something similar. No stone was left unturned. Twenty-five blood, sweat, and tear-stained episodes later, we had a revolutionary understanding of opioid use disorder and how to save lives.<\/p>\n My second book, Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to The Opioid Crisis<\/i> is an adaptation of the podcast but more than that, it\u2019s the book I wish someone had handed me when my brother was in the thick of it.. I want this second book to be an evidence-based resource for people who are desperate for answers. I hope they\u2019ll highlight it, annotate it, dog ear it, and then pass it along to the next person who needs it.<\/p>\n Your book Dear Dealer<\/em><\/a> began as letters written to your late sister Sasha\u2019s drug dealer; did you have any idea that the first letter you wrote would eventually become something bigger? At what point were you compelled to turn your one sided correspondence into a memoir?<\/p>\n NB:<\/strong> I, like you, became a mother right at the time Sasha died. I felt that all the anger and grief inside me didn\u2019t have a place in a nursery. And I genuinely was filled with so much love, this expansive new kind of love, that all other feelings were elbowed out to the edges of my life. But I knew they needed acknowledgement. I felt a split happening in me, so getting things out on paper felt like a necessity for my mental health. I picked up a pen almost immediately after Sasha died, and at the same time, I began thinking about this dealer. This person whom I felt I was now linked. He had changed Sasha\u2019s life, and now mine, forever. And the thought that he (I determined that this person was likely a \u201che\u201d) could just walk away with no recourse made me feel an anger that felt like madness.<\/p>\n Then the idea of an open letter occurred to me. Maybe I\u2019d try to place it in a local New Haven paper. I was really trying to reach out to this person. Send a flare. So, by 2018, from what I had written, I wrote my first letter. It was an absolute dream when This American Life<\/i> picked it up and I was able to send all my feelings out over the airwaves.<\/p>\n At the end of the piece, Ira Glass says, \u201cThat was Nadia Bowers. She\u2019s writing a memoir about her sister.\u201d And he was right. I knew I had more to say, that this was just the beginning. But I had no idea what it would look like. I also knew that more time needed to go by. Her death was still too close, and no one wanted the memoir I would have written at that time. I knew I was going to have to do some real excavating of not just her life but my own.<\/p>\n Letters became this way in for me. I struggled with a more traditional memoir structure, unsure if I had the right to speak publicly about these things. The \u201cme-ness\u201d of a memoir. The dealer, in a sense, gave me permission. He was the catalyst. And I just let myself write to him, generating close to 700 pages ultimately. There was some experimenting with the memoir being all letters, one big letter, or placed interstitially among narrative, but there were always going to be the letters.<\/p>\n What is something you learned writing this second book that surprised you? Maybe something that you thought you knew but was turned on its head?<\/p>\n SWW:<\/strong> Dude, the \u201cme-ness of a memoir\u201d makes me feel so seen! I had this exact same struggle. Like, how self-indulgent can I possibly be?! I also love that, for both of us, writing was a thing we\u2019d do in our Notes app while the babies slept. Parallel lives.<\/p>\n I think the thing that surprised me most is that I was able to end the book on a note of hope. That was certainly a surprising plot twist. Feeling hope amidst an ongoing opioid crisis sounds like the stuff of fiction and wasn\u2019t on the horizon when we created the podcast in 2019. At that point, drug-related deaths due to opioids kept climbing. In 2015, the year Harris and Sasha died, the U.S. logged 33,091 opioid-related overdose deaths. In 2019, when we launched the show, it climbed to 49,860. And by 2023, it had ballooned to 79,358.<\/p>\n So when I woke up to a bunch of texts on September 18, 2024 linking me to an NPR headline that read “U.S. Overdose Deaths Plummet, Saving Thousands of Lives,” I was stunned. The article quoted Dr. Nora Volkow, head of NIDA, saying “This is exciting. This looks real. This looks very, very real.” Exciting? About opioid deaths in America? Never thought I\u2019d see the day. The CDC was reporting an unprecedented decline in drug deaths of roughly 10.6 percent. The Opioid Data Lab at UNC (the most rigorous and comprehensive data source I found) put it at a 15 to 20 percent decrease in nonfatal overdoses and a 10 percent decrease in fatal overdoses from 2023 to 2024. In some states, declines hit twenty, thirty percent.<\/p>\n But the most \u201cexciting\u201d part of it is the why<\/i>. It wasn’t the War on Drugs. It wasn’t law enforcement or border seizures. It was harm reduction. Dr. Nora Volkow, head of NIDA, told me the lion’s share of the credit goes to widespread distribution of naloxone (or Narcan). Getting it into communities, making it available over the counter, making it accessible in college towns and public libraries. That’s what ultimately moved the needle.<\/p>\n Once, when I interviewed my mom for the podcast, she said, \u201cI feel like Harris became a heroin addict at the wrong time.\u201d And I kind of agree with her now. The idea that we now know concretely, based on data, what prevents overdose and saves lives? It kind of blows my mind.<\/p>\n I\u2019m curious how you feel about the dealer today? Did writing the book bring you closure in any real way? Do you feel like you\u2019ve come to terms with what happened to your sister?<\/p>\n NB:<\/strong> It\u2019s such a heartbreak to know all the things we do now. I also think much of my willingness to learn came from losing Sasha. That\u2019s a lot of the drive for both of us, right? That other families don\u2019t have to pay the price of losing someone in order to learn.<\/p>\n Something I didn\u2019t see coming is how I would feel about the dealer by the end of the book. I\u2019ll try not to give too many spoilers, but I\u2019ll say that where I start with how I feel about him is not where I end up. As I was excavating the past, I was living the present day timeline, and I truly did not know how the book would end. I was very aware of trying not to feel the pressure of a \u201cbow.\u201d I don\u2019t like bows. On shoes. In writing. I could see a bow-y version where the lesson is forgiveness and that is where I\u2019d have to land. Sure, it was possible, but I didn\u2019t want it to be an obligation.<\/p>\n I do feel like this entire process was just more of the same in terms of who I am at my core. The system is broken, and I apparently think I\u2019m Erin Brockovitch.<\/p>\n But essentially, as I started to look at my sister\u2019s life and find more compassion for the parts of it that were difficult, I couldn\u2019t just do it for her. If I was looking at her as a human being, I had to do it for everyone. I didn\u2019t know this person, but they had a whole life that brought them to the day in which they gave my sister fentanyl. And I don\u2019t think anyone involved in selling or using these drugs is having much fun<\/i>, you know? In sociology there\u2019s something called strain theory, the idea that there is a correlation between what a society expects of us as \u201csuccessful\u201d people, the reality (that we don\u2019t like to admit to here) of the unequal opportunities for people achieve that, and deviance. I don\u2019t have food insecurity. I have a home. Health insurance. Community with a deep bench. All these things help me \u201cplay by the rules.\u201d I can\u2019t not recognize that.<\/p>\n In a larger context, I think the dealer became a metaphor for the things we are \u201cdealt\u201d that shape us. The ones known to us, like family, and the ones we don\u2019t see coming. When I imagine meeting him, it feels very different in my body now than it did eleven years ago.<\/p>\n I think the book has brought me acceptance. There\u2019s an idea in Buddhism that most (all?) of human suffering comes from resisting what is. Sasha is gone, and for a long time, I was railing against that. But I get it now, and my sense of understanding has forward movement. I have this book now. It will live outside of me, and I can be in relationship with it. We can keep the conversation going. I\u2019ll keep learning from it, and it\u2019s free to go where it wants. Sasha was a devoted clinical social worker. I see this book as, I hope, continuing her work out in the world. I\u2019m not sure there is ever closure, and that\u2019s a good thing.<\/p>\n And now I want to ask you that same question about closure. Do you feel you have it? Are you maybe feeling okay two books on this harrowing subject. We good now?<\/p>\n Also, people have asked me if writing my book was cathartic, and I really rejected that word for a long time. Did you? Like, how dare any good feeling come from doing this. But of course, it has been. You have built a huge community, helped people speak the hard things out loud. How has that changed your sense of yourself in the world? And do you feel this has been cathartic?<\/p>\n SWW:<\/strong> Yes, I can resolutely say, WE GOOD NOW. My next book will be pure fiction\/all smut. I mean, truly, I\u2019ve long felt like there was some tear in the multiverse, and I inadvertently fell through a portal. Like, this stuff is just so innately serious and I am so innately unserious.<\/p>\n BUT I also have (and have always had) some sort of deranged pull to fix things that are broken and\/or make no sense. When my daughter was born, we discovered she had permanent hearing loss and that hearing aids would be necessary during all waking hours for her entire life. Then we found out that said hearing aids would not be covered by insurance (in fact, they were considered \u201ccosmetic\u201d), and they would cost $6,000 out of pocket every three to five years. I was furious, naturally, and took that rage all the way to the Texas legislature. (We lived in Texas at the time\u2014it was so hot). Basically, me and two other moms fought to get hearing aids covered for kids and, in 2017, that bill was signed into law.<\/p>\n I share this anecdote because it feels similar to the work I\u2019ve done around the opioid crisis since my brother died. This thing happened to someone I love and I needed to do something about it. The community and all the stuff that\u2019s grown out of it is a thing I honestly still can\u2019t fully comprehend but for which I am incredibly grateful all the same.<\/p>\n In terms of catharsis, yes, my first book was very much that. It was an emotional purge that came together in about nine months, and I did feel a sense of relief once it was out of my system. This book, on the other hand, was not a purge. There\u2019s something about catharsis that feels inherently messy. This was not messy. This was meticulously researched and fact-checked and steeped in dogged investigation and examination. My brother\u2019s death and your sister\u2019s death were preventable. Overdose is preventable. Substance use disorders are treatable. I didn\u2019t know that at the time, and that genuinely sucks, but it felt insane to have learned all of this life-saving information over the course of making the podcast and not organize it into a how-to book for people like us before our siblings died. So I\u2019m not sure if this answers your question, but I do feel like this entire process was just more of the same in terms of who I am at my core. The system is broken, and I apparently think I\u2019m Erin Brockovitch.<\/p>\n Someone at a book launch event last week asked what I thought Harris would say about all of this, and my response is that he\u2019d say: \u201cSteph, stop. It\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Nadia Bowers<\/strong>, author of the memoir,\u00a0Dear Dealer<\/a><\/em>, is an actor, writer, and voice-over artist. She has a BA in sociology and French from Dartmouth College and an MFA in acting from NYU\u2019s Graduate Acting Program. Nadia works in theater, television, and film. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, actor Corey Stoll, and their son.<\/p>\n Stephanie Wittels Wachs<\/strong>, author of Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis<\/a><\/em>, is CEO and cofounder of Lemonada Media, an award-winning podcast network on a mission to \u201cmake life suck less.\u201d She co-created and hosts\u00a0Last Day,<\/i> Lemonada\u2019s Webby, Gracie, and Third Coast Award-winning flagship show. Its first season focused on the opioid crisis, which took the life of her brother, writer-producer-comedian Harris Wittels (Parks and Recreation<\/i>,\u00a0Master of None<\/i>). Wittels Wachs is the author of two books,\u00a0Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis<\/i>. She\u2019s also a well-known anime voice actor. Wittels Wachs serves as an executive producer across Lemonada\u2019s slate of chart-topping podcasts, including\u00a0Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus<\/i>, which was named Apple\u2019s Best Podcast of the Year in 2023. She lives on California\u2019s central coast with her husband, their two kids, two dogs, and an ungodly amount of houseplants. Find her on Instagram @wittelstephanie.<\/p>\n _______________________________<\/p>\n Dear Dealer<\/a> by Nadia Bowers is available from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis<\/a> by Stephanie Wittels Wachs is available from Gallery\/Lemonada Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nadia and I both lost our siblings to overdose in 2015. She was 7 months pregnant when her sister died. I had a 13-month-old baby when my brother died. We both navigated new motherhood and profound grief simultaneously. And now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32124,"featured_media":276722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43287,43072,43092],"tags":[6680,112181,1482,49412,112183,50,112182,112180,28836,731,112179,20047],"class_list":["post-276696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-health","category-in-conversation","category-newsandculture","tag-addiction","tag-dear-dealer","tag-family","tag-gallery-books","tag-gallery-lemonada-books","tag-interviews-2","tag-last-day-how-to-stop-losing-our-loved-ones-to-the-opioid-crisis","tag-nadia-bowers","tag-opioids","tag-simon-and-schuster","tag-stephanie-wittels-wachs","tag-writers-in-conversation","story-type-writers-in-conversation"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19YQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/opiods-e1788800569361.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276708,"date":"2026-09-17T05:07:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T09:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276708"},"modified":"2026-09-14T11:56:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T15:56:08","slug":"the-great-american-road-trip-novel-isnt-just-for-white-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-great-american-road-trip-novel-isnt-just-for-white-people\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great American Road Trip Novel Isn\u2019t Just For White People"},"content":{"rendered":" When I began thinking about my third novel, What We Left Unsaid<\/i><\/a>, I always knew I wanted to write a version of The Great American Road Trip\u2014only this time, from the perspective of Asian-Americans. The road trip narrative is a familiar sub-genre, but from On the Road<\/i> to The Grapes of Wrath<\/i> to Thelma and Louise<\/i>, the Great American Road Trip has always seemed like the purview of white protagonists. Where are the protagonists of color?<\/p>\n And yet, by ignoring race, these road trip narratives are missing a trick. As an Asian-American travel addict, I\u2019m well aware that highly visible elements of our identity\u2014like our ethnicity or gender\u2014greatly impact how we are perceived and treated, as we move through the world. And a cross-country road trip\u2014an exciting, liberating adventure for someone like Jack Kerouac\u2014can be an anxious journey full of threat and potential violence for a person of color.<\/p>\n What We Left Unsaid<\/em> is part family drama, part travelogue, part meditation on America\u2019s past and present, as three estranged Taiwanese-American siblings decide to drive the iconic Route 66\u2014and discover much about their own country which they didn\u2019t know. Like many authors before me, I found the Great American Road Trip offered a rich template for exploring issues of identity, belonging, the immigrant experience, and the conundrum that is America.<\/p>\n Here are eight books (both fiction and non-fiction) that narrate this most American of stories from the perspective of people of color:<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Lost Children Archive<\/em><\/a> by Valeria Luiselli<\/strong><\/p>\n A critical darling, this literary novel by Mexican-born Valeria Luiselli is also very much a road trip narrative, using a fragmented approach to tell the story of two sound archivists and their children, on a road trip from New York City to Apacheria, New Mexico. Layered within its experimental form is a commentary on immigration and 21st century America, as the family regularly encounters Latinx migrants whose own families have been disrupted by the indifference of American immigration policies. The final 100 pages are a thrilling, heart-stopping adventure in the New Mexico desert, picking up the pace with unexpected urgency and narrative anxiety.<\/p>\n Blue Highways: A Journey into America<\/em><\/a> by William Least Heat-Moon\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n This is the book I always recommend when asked about US road trip narratives. A bestseller upon publication in 1982, this memoir chronicles Least Heat-Moon\u2019s 13,000-mile road trip around the perimeter of America. He drove only on two-lane \u2018blue highways,\u2019 avoiding the large interstates and taking him through small towns and neglected corners of the country. The result offers both beautiful prose and an intimate glimpse of an America which may no longer exist. Least Heat-Moon is part-indigenous, and his sensitive awareness of race, class, and historical inequalities enriches his anthropological, but poetic style.<\/p>\n Sing, Unburied, Sing<\/em><\/a> by Jesmyn Ward\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Thirteen-year-old biracial Jojo, his toddler sister and their drug-addicted mother drive across rural Mississippi to meet their father, who has just been released from prison. Told from multiple perspectives in first-person voice, Ward\u2019s critically acclaimed novel presents a gritty Odyssey through an America beset with poverty, racism, drug addiction, and incarceration. But by incorporating the recurring ghost of Richie, a thirteen-year-old inmate who befriends the children\u2014Ward combines the Southern Gothic with a socio-realist tradition in a voice that is both visceral and intimate.<\/p>\n Lovecraft Country<\/em><\/a> by Matt Ruff\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n A road trip occupies the first part of this entertaining dark fantasy novel, which tells the story of a 1950s Black-American family in Chicago, who are fans of science fiction, (despite the racism of seminal genre writer H.P. Lovecraft.) Their journey to rural Massachusetts to confront a family curse evokes the danger of historic \u2018sundown towns,\u2019 where Black travelers were not permitted to be outside past sunset. Ruff combines supernatural threat with the very real-life menaces of racial prejudice in America, and he does not hesitate to address the lasting trauma of historical tragedies like the Tulsa massacre of 1921.<\/p>\n The American Dream?: A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito<\/em><\/a> by Shing Yin Khor\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n A debut graphic memoir by Malaysian-born Khor, who set off on a solo road trip from Los Angeles down Route 66, accompanied by her loyal dog Bug. The book convincingly captures the ironies of America: the kitschiness of Route 66\u2019s Americana is juxtaposed against Khor\u2019s reflections on belonging to this nation, as a recent immigrant. The visual element of her storytelling evocatively portrays America\u2019s vast desertscapes and cityscapes, while bringing the journey to palpable life for teenage readers.<\/p>\n Let Their Spirits Dance<\/em><\/a> by Stella Pope Duarte\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Duarte\u2019s debut novel from 2002 follows the multi-generational Ramirez family, who road-trip from Arizona to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. to honor their fallen son Jesse who died thirty years earlier in service. Duarte\u2019s writing features detailed prose and a moving storyline, encompassing grief, healing, and the losses borne by a Latinx family in the name of American patriotism.<\/p>\n Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America<\/em><\/a> by Candacy Taylor<\/strong><\/p>\n This fascinating work of non-fiction provides an account of the Green Book<\/i>, the \u2018bible of black travel\u2019 in mid-20th century America, which listed motels, gas stations, and businesses safe for Black travelers at a time of segregation. Taylor visited more than 400 Green Book<\/i> sites and photographed 200 of them, and her book documents the enterprise and solidarity of the Black community, which made cross-country travel possible for them despite the very real danger of racism and violence.<\/p>\n
\nI expect that Sarah Heppola\u2019s next book after her bestselling memoir Blackout<\/a><\/em> will also be a masterpiece of personal writing.<\/p>\n
\nI love a literary biography. This season we\u2019ll see new ones of Janet Malcolm and Anita Brookner, but my most anticipated is one that I hope will delve into how and why the works of this one weirdo (complimentary) became required reading in high school English classes.<\/p>\n
\nThe thing about Bobby and Lindsey is that they were so good at writing about pop culture before they ever even started their very famous podcast, Who Weekly<\/em>. To see them work together and teach us a thing or two about celebrity culture in 2026 and how we ended up here.<\/p>\n
\nThis is the kind of book I most seek out. In my ideal world there would be dozens of essay collections by excellent writers (Choi is a poet) on culture and politics, technology and the evils of capitalism. I can\u2019t wait to see what she does in prose form.<\/p>\n
\nThis one\u2019s poised to be the book of the moment. There are a slew of political books coming out this fall, but I can\u2019t imagine many are as artful and insightful as David Treuer\u2019s treatise on violence in America, from the genocidal age of the frontier up until the current day.<\/p>\n
\nI\u2019m always surprised that micro-histories of very specific times and places aren\u2019t more popular because they seem like the kind of storytelling that would appeal to a variety of readers. This one sounds particularly juicy: it\u2019s the story of the club where Black women artists of all stripes gathered at the dawning of the Civil Rights movement.<\/p>\n
\nLauren Michele Jackson is one of my favorite<\/a> culture<\/a> writers<\/a>. I also love an essay collection based around a specific body part (see also Heather Radke\u2019s Butts: A Backstory<\/a><\/em>). Seems like a perfect pairing of author and subject.<\/p>\n
\nThere are a lot of books being published about how Big Tech is ruining our environment and our minds (often by publishers that still think AI might work for them), but Hyperscale <\/i>is the one I\u2019ve got my eye on this fall partly because I\u2019m such a fan of author Paris Marx\u2019s podcast, Tech Won\u2019t Save Us.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
\nI really loved<\/a> Zaina Arafat\u2019s debut novel, You Exist Too Much<\/a><\/em>, which chronicled a young woman\u2019s feelings of dissonance at being a Palestinian-American. I\u2019m ready for Zaina herself to be the main character in this new collection on a similar topic, which feels vital in today\u2019s political climate.<\/p>\n
\nIf you\u2019ve seen BoJack Horseman <\/i>or Tuca & Bertie<\/i>, you know that Lisa Hanawalt thinks in bright colors and funny-looking anthropomorphic animals. Her new graphic (in both senses of the word) memoir is horny and charming and suffused with the poignancy of wanting.<\/p>\n
\nA disclaimer: for a brief moment in 2019<\/a>, Ted was my boss at the now defunct publication, Pacific Standard. But his new stunningly written memoir about undertaking electroconvulsive therapy is perhaps the ultimate example of how you never really know what a person is going through.<\/p>\n
\nI can just tell by looking at the young sneering faces of the Bikini Kill bandmates on the cover of Vocal Break<\/i> that the author of Art Monster<\/i> and Fl\u00e2neuse <\/i>is going to have a lot of wonderful things to say about how women across a variety of genres found power in making music .<\/p>\n
\nData journalist and visual artist Chalabi has found a really lovely way to combine her skills: Ten Lives<\/i> is an eye-opening study of what money\u2014and financial insecurity\u2014means to ten different Americans.<\/p>\n
\nHere\u2019s a self-serving little plug: I wrote a new introduction for this reissue of a literary biography that is a campy, gossipy delight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"Profiles](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/09\/Profiles-in-Cowardice-197x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Ambivalence\"](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/09\/e40d202861483ebe1d95df4810d7ef02-203x300.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/09\/No-Land-to-Stand-On-194x300.avif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Honey\"](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/09\/Honey-200x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/08\/8ed6e9f1969e21df216d17d288e2f061-199x300.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-bookshop-woman-199x300.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-beauty-of-the-husband-193x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/meadowlands-200x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/awful-rowing-toward-god-216x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/scorched-earth-233x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-curious-thing-223x300.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\nyou want very much,
\nyou are making up a story
\nall the time,
\nof how you will get it
\nand how it will be . . .<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/stags-leap-204x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nclasped, fragrant, buoyant, that was
\nthe morning after love.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/love-prodigal-200x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/couplets-196x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\neverything it fell upon.
\nAnd then one day it fell upon
\na mirror. And he was nowhere
\nin the mirror. And she was everywhere.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/if-you-have-to-go-185x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nbut I mean it. I don\u2019t know what to want,
\nbut I want it. And when I say God
\nit\u2019s because no one can know it\u2014not ever,
\nnot at all\u2014. It\u2019s a wall.
\nAnd it drops to the floor as I fall.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-going-is-forever-194x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/12-Tophat-Tux-glass_preview-828x1024.jpg\")
Anna May Wong Cabaret Cross-dressing. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Beinecke Library, Yale University. Courtesy of the Carl Van Vechten Trust.<\/span>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/243362996-005_preview-803x1024.jpg\")
Anna May Wong\u2019s Form 430 April 6, 1939. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.<\/span>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/12-Writing-with-Robeson-London_preview-1240x932.jpg\")
Wong Writing in London. With Paul Robeson, Eslanda Robeson, S. I. Hsiung, Mei Lanfang. Photo by Fania Marinoff. Beneicke Library, Yale University. Courtesy of the Carl Van Vechten Trust.<\/span>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/14-AMW_JPEG_01-1240x901.jpg\")
Anna May Wong Behind the Camera in China. Courtesy UCLA Film and Television Archive.<\/span>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/anna-may-wong-233x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/DEAR-DEALER-203x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/9781668093184-199x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lost-children-archive-195x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/blue-highways-197x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sing-unburied-sing-197x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lovecraft-country-199x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-american-dream-203x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/let-their-spirits-dance-195x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/overground-railroad-205x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-wangs-vs-the-world-200x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/what-we-left-unsaid-9781982190880_lg-198x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n