We read your submission with joy & elation. We have never seen anything better in our lives. It is more moving than FedEx (The World On Time). We would be honored to publish it. Please take this honorarium of three point five million dollars, and look forward to seeing your work in next week’s edition.

—

What a moving piece you have sent us! We wept over it. We laughed over it. We have requested that it be performed at our funerals. However, it is slightly too long for our parameters. Rather than ask you to cut even one perfect word from its paradisiacal length, we would humbly suggest that you split it into two pieces, for each of which we will of course pay the full remuneration.

—

We have installed a tracker on our automated submissions email that analyzed how many times all our submitters refreshed their inbox to see whether they’d received an acceptance. The most tenacious page reloader gets accepted. You won, and it wasn’t even close.

—

Unfortunately, last month we published a piece on a very similar topic. However, yours blew that stupid one out of the water, so we have retracted all copies of the other piece, burned them on a ceremonial pyre, and have sent a box of live bees to the writer’s house. Your piece will take their place both now and retroactively.

—

We did not even read your piece– we merely saw your name in our inbox and tendered an immediate acceptance.

—

We are honored to publish your submission in the upcoming edition of our magazine, and in every edition thereafter, as an example to all other aspiring creators. We have also brokered a deal with FedEx (The World On Time) and will be offering a complimentary bound copy of your piece with every package delivered on publication date.

—

It would be our pleasure to feature this piece on our website, but are you sure you have spelled your name correctly? We feel certain that you are actually the resurrected corpse of C. S. Lewis, since your writing is imbued with a whimsy and precision unparalleled by any other loser who has ever submitted to our publication. You can trust us, Clive. We won’t tell anyone.

—

We loved this piece, but it is not quite the right fit for our publication. We simply do not have the breadth of readership to do it justice. Instead, we wondered if you would be open to having it engraved on a gargantuan golden plaque and hung from a hovering helicopter in the center of Times Square?

—

We are tired of saying no to you. Fine. We’ll print this one.

This piece originally appeared in the humor publication Jane Austen’s Wastebasket.

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AI is everywhere and I hate it.

I’ve written about why in a previous post, and I won’t bore you with rehashing my harangue. Today I shall instead show you how to spot the telltale signs of an essay, article, blog post, Facebook post, or Instagram caption that was written with the liberal use of ChatGPT. (I will not touch on LinkedIn posts, because they are their own form of dreck and quite frankly I do not want to be associated with their ilk.)

Some of you may be aware that Substack has recently partnered with Pangram, an automated AI detection tool. I don't like this. and have written eloquently about why they don't want to use Pangram, and you should go check out their posts. Instead, I want to enable you to spot AI on your own. Here are x of the tells that give me pause.

OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER THAT ALL OF THESE TRAITS CAN ALSO BE FOUND FROM TIME TO TIME IN HUMAN WRITING, BECAUSE GUESS WHAT AI WAS TRAINED ON? THAT'S RIGHT. SORRY FOR CAPS LOCK.

1. “It's not X. It's Y.” Once you see this rhetorical shorthand you won't be able to unsee it. “It’s not a religion. It's a relationship.” “It's not a choice. It's a revolution you never saw coming.” “It's not tennis. It's pickleball disguised as strength.” “Jane Austen didn't stumble into being a genius. She inherited it.” (Bro do you know what “stumbling into” even means???)

2. Which leads me to the next point, “disguised as.” This is eeeeeeeveryyyyyywherrrrrre in AI writing. Somewhere in the dark stinking depths of a server bank, a robot once encountered a singular rhetorical device and it was over for sentimental Facebook posts your great-aunt won't stop sharing.

3. “Quiet” as an adjective for absolutely everything. It makes me never want to use it again. It's a perfectly normal word but omg the AI-association. STOP. It especially shows up paired with “strength,” “vow,” and “oath.”

   

4. Super short sentences stacked together. Usually sentence fragments. Not meaningful. Just designed to make you think they're saying something profound with nothing. (Like that, lol.)

5. Unbelievably long social media posts that read as a personal story from a narrator who has earned your trust but whom you have literally never heard of before. It's usually a feel-good story designed to make you want to share and comment and say it restored your faith in humanity. The irony of course is that there's no humanity involved.

   

6. “Historical” stories that seem based in fact, or at least adjacent to something you learned in school, posted prolifically and usually accompanied by a shiny, overly smooth image.

7. “Self-help” guides that tick the boxes above, aren't linked to any actual person or author with a face and a legitimate presence, and want you to comment in order to be sent their course/video/spreadsheet/download code/whatever.

8. Comments on social media or on Substack/Medium/any other writing platform that neatly summarize and regurgitate the main points of the original piece. Real people don't write like this unless they're checking boxes for a classroom discussion board and are required to prove they understood (lol) the material.

9. Some people cite the three-item list as an AI tell. I'm not so sure about this one. The rule of threes has been around in nonfiction writing—humor, informative copy, actual journalism—for a really long time. So has the em dash. AI uses these elements sometimes, yes, but I'm hesitant to write off a piece of writing just for those (especially since I rely on them pretty heavily myself). In conjunction with other stuff listed above, though, they become questionable.

10. Emojis that no human is keeping in their Frequently Used keyboard shortcut. For reference, here's a Facebook post side by side with my own most frequently used emojis:

    

11. And finally, news you can't verify from any other source. But that one's just basic media literacy. Right?

    

12. Bonus: this isn't necessarily AI but I'm so tired of seeing it. “Credit to the original owners” means nothing if you don't actually credit the NAMES OF the original owners! It's not a citation. It's a lazy cop-out. …wait oh no.

    Thanks for Reading in the Margins with me! This post is public, so feel free to share it. Every time someone clicks the heart button or restack button, or even copies and pastes the URL of one of my posts onto another platform, the Substack algorithm learns to recommend my work to more people. And I appreciate that!

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There are a lot of new email addresses in my subscriber list right now, which is very exciting to see. I quit Twitter in 2024 and for the most part this was a really good decision, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss some of the dopamine rush. I am only human, and if I am sometimes a wild Beast, I cannot help it. It is not my own fault.

Some of you may recognize the quote above as being from a letter Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra. Some of you may not, and that is okay! Maybe you are subscribing to my Substack because you, like me, love Austen. Maybe you found me through another post about books, or my kids being funny, or something satirical about the ridiculous news informing our headlines These Days. Maybe you are here because you know me in real life (please be cool) and are kindly supporting my efforts, and though you like to read, Jane Austen is mostly unknown to you.

If that last descriptor applies, I want to assure you this blog isn’t all Austen, all the time. It is currently summer in the northern hemisphere, and so I am doing a series I call The Summer of Jane Austen (which I started in 2024 when I was trying to earn enough freelance income to go to the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting). If Austen is really not your thing, you can edit your subscription at amy-collen.com/account and uncheck the option for The Summer of Jane Austen. See below. (Ignore the Best of This Month thing. I don’t do that series anymore but I can’t figure out how to remove it.)

Okay, I hope that was helpful! Now, on to some other Substacky stuff.

Lore Wilbert wrote a really helpful breakdown of how Substack works, for people who just signed up to receive newsletters with an email address and aren’t really sure what exactly is going on with this platform. This is specific to her own website, of course, but it also contains a lot of information about Substack subscriptions in general.

The really short version is that if you entered your email to receive updates from me, you’ll continue to get them! And if you’re wondering what you’ve gotten yourself into, you can start here for a little introductory guide to my site.

The short version about me? I am a voracious reader and the mother of two small boys. I am married to a nerdy history geek who works long hours at a blue-collar job to support our rambunctious little family. I am going back to school as an adult and sometimes I write about that experience.

What can you expect going forward? Well, lots of book-related posts, including the aforementioned Austen-specific ones. You will occasionally get conceptual humor like this and this, and the occasional impassioned stump speech about my personal principles.

And another thing? I am writing a book about Jane Austen and the writing life, and I’m going to begin querying agents very soon. You heard it here first.

As such, I am trying to expand my internet platform, and so if you feel inclined, sharing my website with a friend is one of the very best ways to support me. Publishers look for high numbers on email lists when they are thinking about signing a contract with a debut author, and by adding yours—and letting your friends know—you are helping me get one step closer to your local bookstore.

Thanks for being here.

Yours in the margins,

Amy

I don’t know who the most-recognized romantic hero of English literature is. I haven’t conducted surveys or double-blind studies on widespread perception of landed, brooding gentry. So take this with a grain of salt if you like, but I think it’s pretty safe to say Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pride and Prejudice is one of the most well-known romantic heroes in English literature. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably at least heard of him, even if you’ve never read the book or watched any of the film adaptations. And if you’re reading this but you’ve never heard of Mr. Darcy, color me intrigued as to how you found my Substack in the first place.

For my own part, a reader of the classics who is Very Online in spaces that accommodate many other readers of the classics, Darcy references are everywhere. “A single man in possession of a good fortune who must be in want of a wife”— never mind that the text is speaking of Mr. Bingley, this famous phrase is irrevocably linked to Mr. Darcy, master of Pemberley estate, elegant dancer, chivalrous rescuer of straying young ladies, mascot of antisocial hermits, smoldering and brooding paramour of passion.

The last two, at least, are pure hype. I can’t even say Hollywood, because though I think Hollywood is partly to blame—we’ll get to that—I think the memeification of literature bears the brunt of this problem.

When I was a teenager, my sister and some friends and I were discussing North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell one evening. Our respective parents (also friends in their own right) were tangentially dabbling in the conversation as dinner ended. John Thornton, the smoldering hero played by a young Richard Armitage in the 2004 miniseries, was the subject—was he a hero from the beginning of the story, or an anti-hero who changes as the story progresses? I actually can't remember where I landed in the friendly argument. But I do remember my friends’ dad leaning in and asking, “Okay, but the real question is: does he change for the better, or do we just come to understand him better?”

It's a great question for John Thornton, a mill owner in the north of England who is balancing the complexities of labor rights (and mill workers’ strikes) with the necessities of keeping his business in operation. But it’s not so applicable for Mr. Darcy, even though it seems that a lot of popular perception of him has sailed right past the posing of those two options to land squarely on the latter.

Take the 2005 film, for instance. I have a lot of beef with this specific adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and how it portrays Austen's classic story, which should probably be the subject of another post and in fact has been simmering in my drafts for a while.

(In the meantime, I did write something more general about all P&P adaptations which you might enjoy.)

But back to Mr. Darcy. In Joe Wright’s 2005 film, hereafter referred to as P&P05, Darcy is played by Matthew Macfadyen, a handsome and talented actor who freely admitted to never having read the book the screenplay was based on. Indeed, he argued (in that interview I just linked) that Darcy’s apparent coldness and arrogance is actually due to feeling insecure in the world and missing his dead parents.

Sigh.

When the film came out, featuring such additions as The Hand Flex Scene (“he’s repressed! It’s romantic!”) and The Striding Across the Meadows In His Unmentionables Scene (“it’s swoonworthy! My kingdom for a man who can walk on wet grass without accumulating six inches of pajama-pant mud”), Darcy’s place in the Romance Canon became firmly fixed as Misunderstood Shy Guy Who Is Also Hot.

Sigh again.

Anyway, so this is not how Mr. Darcy actually is in the book. Neither is the line “I love you, most ardently.” PLEASE.

This may come as a shock to some (not you, the brilliant person reading this, of course), but the title that Jane Austen chose for her novel actually reflects some of the main themes of the story. Clever, eh? It is called PRIDE and PREJUDICE because to a certain degree each of the main characters display those attributes at the beginning of the story and undergo a change before the end. It is not called Shy Hand Flexing and Prejudice, nor is it called Socially Awkward Agoraphobic Lobster and Prejudice. Darcy and Lizzy are both flawed people who are forced, by those they love (or think they love) to confront the worst tendencies of their own character, and they each become the better for it. Jane Austen did not write serious romance; she wrote virtue-informed literature that critiqued her own social microcosm. She was not setting out to create the ultimate Book Boyfriend, and indeed I think she would be equal parts appalled and excessively diverted to see what the public perception of Darcy has turned out to be.

The first forensic exploration we get into the character flaws of both Darcy and Elizabeth is in chapter 11, when Jane is ill at Netherfield, Elizabeth has come to visit her (petticoat six inches deep in mud!) and as they begin to converse with Miss Bingley (flirtatiously on Caroline’s part, amusedly on Elizabeth’s, and inscrutably on Darcy’s) they begin to talk of virtue and whether it can be laughed at, prompting Elizabeth to say,

“I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can. But these, I suppose, are precisely what you are without.”

[Darcy replies:] “Perhaps that is not possible for any one. But it has been the study of my life to avoid those weaknesses which often expose a strong understanding to ridicule.”

“Such as vanity and pride.”

“Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride—where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation.”1

Darcy is not too reserved to speak to Elizabeth about this somewhat emotionally intimate subject, nor too awkward to make a joke, a few minutes before, about Miss Bingley’s thinly veiled excuse for showing off her figure. He is not mesmerized by Elizabeth’s fine eyes and fumbling for words, intimidated by the Bingley and Bennets’ charm: he is looking down his nose at the people assembled in his best friend’s drawing room, and finding their ideas wanting.

Later in the same chapter, as the discussion continues—Elizabeth says, sarcastically, that Mr. Darcy is without defect. He demurs,

“I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding—certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost is lost for ever.”

“That is a failing indeed!” cried Elizabeth. “Implacable resentment is a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me.”

“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil—a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”

“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”

“And yours,” he replied, with a smile, “is wilfully to misunderstand them.”2

Again, Darcy isn’t writhing in humiliation over his own doltishness here. He’s smug, happy in his perception of himself and calmly indifferent to anyone who might critique his self-righteous view of his own personality traits. “Where are the real-life men like Mr. Darcy?” Janeites sometimes lament. They’re here! Among us! They’re in boardrooms and tech startups and church sanctuaries and all over the gosh-darned internet. We’ve all met someone like First Volume Darcy: conceited, fully aware of how people perceive him, and yet completely unwilling to admit that the idiosyncrasies he admits to are actually full-on vices.

Of course, we know Darcy doesn’t stay this way. And it’s not because we simply get to know him better (although we do). Even at the end of the novel, when love has been declared and proposals accepted, we see the difference between what Elizabeth perceives versus reality. Upon learning of the latest engagement, Mr. Bennet exclaims in dismay that Elizabeth should be interested in such a “proud, unpleasant man,” and when Elizabeth insists that he has “no improper pride,” that everyone has been mistaken in their opinion of him, she gives “repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was really the object of her choice, by explaining the gradual change which her estimation of him had undergone, relating her absolute certainty that his affection was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months suspense, and enumerating with energy all his good qualities, she did conquer her father's incredulity, and reconcile him to the match.”3

Elizabeth is in love, and eager to see in her beloved all the virtues she can conceive of, taking the blame for their former misunderstandings. We know, of course, that Darcy has openly admitted to having been given good principles as a child, but “left to follow them in pride and conceit.” Elizabeth is choosing not to see this, and can we blame her? She is prejudiced, after all, this time in favor of the man she once loathed. At most, she allows herself to concede that he can’t really take a joke.

Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful friend—so easily guided, that his worth was invaluable; but she checked herself. She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laught at, and it was rather too early to begin.4

A key component of the quintessential Austen hero is a man who can make sport for his neighbors and laugh at them in his turn (though Mr. Bennet, from whom this quote originated, is a far cry from a hero)—and laugh at himself, too. (We see this perhaps most strongly in Henry Tilney and Mr. Knightley but those are topics for another day.) Lack of a sense of humor, particularly when it extends to oneself, is a weakness indeed, at least where Austen is concerned.

Mr. Darcy isn’t meant to be a shining paragon of virtue, or a picture of perfection that would make Austen herself feel “sick and wicked.”5 He’s a whole problem, and that’s the point. As Susan Moore points out for Vanity Fair (so many thinkpieces about Darcy these days!) he doesn’t get fixed. He does the fixing. That’s also the point.

Though I do not agree with all the conclusions Sebastian Faulks draws in this essay for BBC Culture (actually an excerpt from a larger introduction to Austen’s works), I think he hits the nail on the head when he says that the “idea of Darcy as a romantic gallant is a delusion of the reader, not an intention of the writer.” The reader (or movie-viewer) wants to see Darcy as something to aspire to, but Austen was laughing in her sleeve at him and his superiority complex for almost the entire novel. Even when his behavior turns around, even after he saves Lydia and reconciles Jane and Bingley, she gives him a little comeuppance with the people he formerly abhorred (and still does in some cases).

Lady Catherine had been rendered so exceedingly angry by the contents of her nephew’s letter, that Charlotte, really rejoicing in the match, was anxious to get away till the storm was blown over. At such a moment the arrival of her friend was a sincere pleasure to Elizabeth, though in the course of their meetings she must sometimes think the pleasure dearly bought, when she saw Mr. Darcy exposed to all the parading and obsequious civility of her husband. He bore it, however, with admirable calmness. He could even listen to Sir William Lucas, when he complimented him on carrying away the brightest jewel of the country, and expressed his hopes of their all meeting frequently at St. James’s, with very decent composure. If he did shrug his shoulders, it was not till Sir William was out of sight.6

Why does any of this matter? Well, first of all, you’re reading an article by an avid Janeite writing to other avid Janeites on a website devoted to nitpicking literature, so jot that down. But in the grand scheme of things, who cares if a group of starry-eyed bookworms declare Mr. Darcy to be the ultimate #ClassicsCrush?

It matters because the way we read books matters, and the way we absorb the themes and implications of literature matter. It matters because none of us spring from child to adult fully formed, with our character set in stone. Miss Stacy might disagree, but Aunt Jamesina would back me up, I think.7 If Fitzwilliam Darcy is the unattainable Perfect Man, no real-life boyfriend is ever going to measure up. I certainly don’t think it would hurt Men At Large to take a leaf or two out of an Austen novel8 when trying to form their own characters, but the stubborn fact is that people are full of flaws. Those flaws are part of what it means to be human, yes, but they are also not insurmountable. The attraction of Mr. Darcy is not to be found in his massive drafty house or his tallness or his slow-but-elegant handwriting—it’s the fact that he has the ability to self-reflect and to change course. None of this happens overnight; as with his love for Elizabeth, which was “in the middle before he knew it had begun,” his ability to admit when he was wrong is a steadily-blossoming plant that sprouts when Elizabeth refuses his first proposal and is in full flower when they speak again on the road outside Lucas Lodge.

If we look at Darcy as a flawless cinnamon roll of a man, we miss his character arc. And if we sigh over his snippy comments and see them as dark and dashing, we deny that the character arc is necessary. Darcy isn’t an anti-hero: to view him as such is to, again, miss the point. He is a human being with equal streaks of integrity and selfishness, and a man who knows how to dress for dinner, not a punk rock bad boy.

Once again I am reminded of the Benoit Blanc meme. Except I’d need to edit it a little bit.

“He’s a jerk!”

“He’s such a jerk that he makes it ROMANTIC.”

“NO! HE’S JUST A JERK!”

(Until he changes, that is.)

As I roamed around the internet finding backup and inspiration for this piece, this Reddit thread was an interesting look at the question of anxiety versus arrogance, and this particular exchange amused me immensely. You tell ’em, Imperfect Lady.

By the way, though I don’t think his portrayal is perfect by any means, I feel Colin Firth approached the role of Darcy with the gravitas and self-righteousness that it deserved. Is he perhaps responsible for a bit too much of the Byronic association with the character? Yes. The smoldering was a bit much, as was the Definitely Not In the Book Lake Scene. Could he have unbent a bit more, especially at the end? Sure. But that just leaves room for a new, and perhaps even better, interpretation.

Will Netflix bring it? We can only hope, but their previous attempt at Persuasion is not promising. In such cases as these, however, a good memory is unpardonable.9

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Have you ever read a book that felt like a warm, drowsy summer afternoon, when the world feels suspended in a liminal space and you can’t quite tell time through the haze? A part of you transported back to your own childhood and the enrapture of an immersive story, and another part vaguely aware that you need to get dinner started, but you cannot put the book down?

That is how it feels to read Shannon Sanders’ debut novel, The Great Wherever.

The Great Wherever opens with a ghostly narrator. We don’t yet know who this mysterious storyteller is, only that she died young, and that she is a relative of scatterbrained Aubrey Lamb, our protagonist. Aubrey is, to put it mildly, struggling. She’s working her way through an unforeseen breakup, trying to keep body and soul together as a not-quite-paralegal in expensive Washington, D.C., and figuring out who she is and what she wants to be in the wake of her father’s death. Her big sister Bellamy, respectably married and doing the suburban parenting thing, is not much help. And her mother? Even longer dead than her father. Thanks a lot, Suzette.

Then Aubrey discovers that her father left her a share in a family farm in Tennessee, a property she now co-owns with three older relatives, Hays, Samson, and Darlissa. Maybe this could be the answer to Aubrey’s money troubles! Thinking only of getting away from the scene of her heartbreak (and battling a pesky UTI), Aubrey travels to Tennessee to meet her family and find her roots. And that is where the parallel narrative, telling the story of the Lamb family’s connection to this farm—and to their ancestors—began.

I won’t spoil any further. But I will say that Shannon’s lyrical prose and pragmatic, tongue-in-cheek humor keeps the back-and-forth of the timeline grounded and unconfusing. I frequently had to refer to the family tree in the opening pages—I love a family tree!—but by the end, I felt as if I’d been gathered up into the web of Lamb family lore and the “relentless gossip” of The Great Wherever.

“I mention all that to say that everyone puts their own stamp on things. There is no singular, truest version of any family story; every version comes with misrememberings and projections and savory flourishes. Just like the swapping out of bacon for mushrooms.”1

In sum? 4.5 stars2 and a prized place on my shelf for re-reads.

I was delighted to have the opportunity to interview Shannon via email about the process of writing this book, and even more delighted to share the interview with you today. Questions and answers have been very lightly edited for length and clarity.

You previously wrote about the multigenerational Collins family in COMPANY. Aubrey and Bellamy Lamb figure in several of those stories, most prominently in “Bird of Paradise,” “La Belle Hottentote,” and the titular “Company.” When you were writing COMPANY, did you have plans initially for Aubrey to have her own novel later on?

Not initially! In the linked stories, Aubrey sort of takes a backseat to some of the more developed (and more mature) characters; I always liked her, but wasn’t especially curious about what she’d do next. But to my surprise, when I started drafting the novel (which stemmed from an idea I’d had in the works for years before I got around to writing it), I discovered that at its core was a character very much like Aubrey: impulsive and shortsighted, but charming and just tender enough to win sympathy. That was a huge relief, because I already knew her; writing about her was easy! Like visiting with an old friend.

As an eldest daughter myself (as I know you to be), I felt drawn to Bellamy’s character, even as Aubrey’s richer inner life and focused narrative worked her way into fondness by the end. Was it difficult to write a protagonist who differs so greatly from your own place in the family?

I loved the challenge of it. In my family, we talk about birth order all the time, and we generally find that the stereotypes hold true for us. Disclaimer: I know that eldest daughters aren’t the only people who have burdens, though I’d argue that the burdens tend to be allocated in non-random ways! That said, I am a classic eldest daughter in that I feel and respond strongly to family pressure, strive to be a high achiever at my own expense, and have complex feelings (including intense envy!) toward people who buck expectations (like Bellamy’s feelings toward Aubrey). It all makes internal sense to me, but I’m also aware of how ridiculous it might look to someone with a different compass.

And so, to answer your question: I think that writing outside of our direct experience is one of the most fun things writers get to do. I LOVED writing Bellamy through Aubrey’s eyes! It was, at some points, a real exercise in vanity. It’s not difficult to imagine how a character like Aubrey (who lives paycheck to paycheck and isn’t willing to go to grad school just to please her father, but does at least hold onto the freedoms to date the person she pleases and hit nightly happy hours) would regard an older sister who lives to follow the “rules.”

I loved being able to dive deeper into the Lamb family history through the parallel historical narrative. What did you find most helpful, and most difficult, when researching the segments that took place in the early 20th century?

I’ll be honest: The historical research really stumped me for a while. The first several chapters of the book take place in present day, and those were very easy to write. But when I realized that a lot of the book involved the prior three generations of Aubrey’s family, I did panic a little bit. Actually, quite a lot. I panicked so hard that I stopped writing for a year. The word research put me in mind of dusty university libraries, bibliographies printed in tiny font. Index cards. At one point, I talked myself into believing I would never be able to write the book unless I could somehow swing a robust stay at a residency. It was hard to shake that belief!

Two things helped. First, I talked extensively to my grandmother, who was raised in Tennessee during the era the book spans and whose family history served as a lot of the inspiration for the story. She was so helpful to me. She provided a lot of the small details that (I hope) lend authenticity, such as the dinners the Lambs ate in the 1930s. She is also a huge genealogy buff and over the years has done a lot of work to track down dozens of our Tennessee relatives dating back to pre-Emancipation; that really helped me conceptualize the shortness of a century. Second, I gave myself permission to do my research in pieces. On one day, I read everything I could find about Orange Mound, the outer-Memphis Black neighborhood that was built on what was formerly the famous Deaderick plantation. Another day, I looked into Sears kit houses. I used those research stints to help me sprint toward points where I felt more comfortable writing from instinct, and I didn’t pressure myself to become a subject-matter expert in every single small thing. As any writer will tell you, it is VERY common for 12 hours of obsessive research to wind up boiling down to, like, half a sentence in the final draft. (That happened several times in this book.)

Is your grandmother still living? Has she had the opportunity to read the book?

My grandmother is still living! She’s 92 years old and lives nearby; I’m very lucky that my kids have gotten to know her. She was one of the first people I told about the book, and she has an advance copy (though she hasn’t read it yet). When the audiobook becomes available, I plan to share it with her!

Have you visited family gravesites or other locations in Tennessee? Were these helpful at all in drawing a connection with the land you wrote about?

I’m glad you asked, because this is a major part of the book’s origin story! While The Great Wherever is fiction, it definitely has its roots in certain elements of my own family history, which I learned in small pieces throughout my childhood and afterward. During our reunion trips to Tennessee, I’ve gotten to spend time in a number of locations that definitely inspired parts of the book. First and foremost, the farmland my grandmother co-owns with her living sister and some of the children of her late siblings—like the parcel in the book, it’s large and wooded and very much a traditional piece of farmland (though it isn’t currently a working farm). I’ve gotten to visit it a few times and found it both charming and overwhelming. My grandmother and her sister also co-own a single-family house in a very homey small town nearby; it’s filled with photographs of their parents as well as of their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. There is also a nearby church (somewhat like the one in the book), and I remember being told as a child that some of our distant relatives were buried in the cemetery behind it.

You have written previously about the tough but fulfilling entanglement of creative work and parenting along with livelihood work. So I have to ask the question every mom who writes must be thinking: when did this book get written? Did you find yourself jotting down sentences in small fragments of interrupted time, or were you able to carve out any marathon sessions?

I love answering this question, because I greatly want other writer-moms to know that it is possible. The short answer is that I wrote the vast majority of this book in the hours between 9:30 pm and midnight, after my kids were asleep and before I too was asleep. The long answer is that what I was able to do depended entirely on a hundred factors including what was happening in my life and what was happening in the book. As I mentioned above, I took a yearlong break when the research overwhelmed me. (I also had twin infants during this time, but I can’t blame them because in my heart I know the research was the bigger obstacle.) As soon as that break ended, I set a goal of writing for one or two hours a night, and I did it. To make it happen, I drank a lot of wine, listened to the same handful of songs on repeat, and forewent things like TV. (And as soon as the draft was done, I VERY quickly binged Succession, Severance, and a bunch of other shows.) It was one long marathon broken up into regular chunks. I wish I were the kind of writer who could collect lines on napkins or in voice notes, but to my chagrin I only work longform!

Note from Amy: I am writing this article on my laptop in bits and pieces while my children blast Jake and the Neverland Pirates in the background. #momswhowrite

There are so many complex characters in TGW, and one I would have loved to get to know a little better was Samson. I saw a lot of echoes of his father Elijah in him, and I’m curious if you would say Micah has many similarities to Joah.

I love that you say that about Samson! Another great pleasure of writing this book was including some ancillary characters who didn’t get as much air time but hopefully still cohered within the world of the story. I agree that Samson is a logical son for Elijah; and I think Micah is the same for Joah, though in a different way. They aren’t similar, but I think it holds that a person like Joah would raise a person like Micah, who would in turn raise a person like Aubrey. One thing Joah, Micah, and Aubrey all have in common is some degree of belief that they will find salvation in white society. You didn’t ask, but Aubrey also shares with her grandfather quite a lot of angst at being (or feeling like) the younger, lesser sibling. I really enjoyed setting up those details!

Would you ever consider writing more about these characters? If so, who?

Even though she’s shown up in two books at this point, I still don’t feel like I’ve given Bellamy her due! She’s the character I most relate to, and I’d like to give her more dimension someday.

I’ll also share that I’ve been starting to plot what I think will be my next book, and—believe it or not—it looks like Boyd might make an appearance...

I’m excited to see where Boyd ends up, though not with the same fondness I feel for Samson and Bellamy! Are there any similar novels about multigenerational drama and an intense connection to ancestry that you would recommend, for readers who enjoyed TGW and would love to read something similar? (If not I will skip this question)

Absolutely!! Most recently, Nikesha Elise Williams’s The Seven Daughters of Dupree, which follows seven generations of very different types of women, fits this description perfectly. It came out earlier this year. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is, I would say, a modern classic in this genre. The same is true of Honorée Fannone Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. This is lofty, but I would also love to imagine this book is in conversation with Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, which is a beautiful novel that spans the branches of a family tree (though more laterally than vertically).

I, too, loved Ann Patchett’s sprawling yet intimate Commonwealth, and I think Shannon’s comparison is apt! I hope you will enjoy Shannon’s novel as much as I did, and to this end I am giving away one hardcover copy of Shannon Sanders’ THE GREAT WHEREVER to one of my much-appreciated subscribers! This giveaway is open to paid/comped subscribers only, and in the U.S. only (because shipping is a bear, I’m so sorry). Please leave a comment for a chance to win this beautiful book (and restack this post for an additional entry)! I will announce a winner on Tuesday, July 14t.

*EDIT July 14th, 2026: congratulations to ! I’ll message you about shipping the book.

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Let’s face it, my fellow Americans — we’re living in some CRAZY times. “UFC fight on the White House lawn” ought to be an Onion headline, and yet. Buzz has already begun developing for the 2028 election, and it's not too early to bring in a fresh option. We need a presidential candidate who will guide us through the next few years of screaming unknown with a sense of humor, a twinkling eye, and a penchant for saving the day. Whether it be facing down a hailstorm of grasshoppers or building a three-story pole barn just with the sweat of his hands, there’s one man who has proved his ability to fearlessly lead our country. Folks, I give you Charles Ingalls. The fictionalized version in the 1970s TV. show, that is. Not the real guy. Beards are not electable anymore.

Some of you may argue that the last thing we need is yet another white dude running for president. And I get that! America gets that! Not enough to make any significant changes, of course, but let me just assure you that Charles Ingalls is not your average out-of-touch middle-class white guy. Charles is so woke, he’s aware of social issues before his neighbors even realized they existed. Who else would have so skillfully handled teen pregnancy, disability advocacy, or the opioid crisis in the rural 19th-century West?

As with a rip-snorting kettle of rattlesnake stew, there are so many ingredients that go into making a good candidate. A good candidate must be an opportunist. For instance, Charles Ingalls seizes any and every opportunity to take his shirt off for no reason. Take that, Justin Trudeau. And Justin Timberlake. And Justin Bieber.

A good candidate makes sure his voters are informed. And Charles is all about making sure his constituents are informed! Since he understands the importance of the dramatic pause to allow for ominous music, he’ll even go a step beyond all those others and give us hints about what’s going to happen ahead of time. (It’s called foreshadowing.)

A good candidate sympathizes with his constituents’ problems. Charles Ingalls understands all about working through hardship and injury. Sure, FDR ran the country from a wheelchair. But Charles has thrown his back out approximately 6723 times while doing farm labor, railroad work, wagon repair, and fighting off bullies. He knows how to handle getting hurt! FDR would have been way more successful if he took his shirt off for every injury. Just sayin’.

Speaking of shirtlessness (just want to make sure we don’t gloss over that; he will take his shirt off at ANY opportunity), we really should address the elephant in the room: Charles Ingalls’ good looks. Yes, yes, we know a true-blooded American won’t simply vote for the handsomest man on the ticket. But let’s be real: there’s a reason Warren G. Harding and Jack Kennedy got elected, right? And neither of them had a Samson mane of curly hair. The 70’s are back in a BIG way.

…The 1870’s, of course. Obviously.

Ingalls will match those good looks with fierce integrity, too. He’ll bring an honest-Abe-like spirit to this position that will dramatically stage-punch any suspicion of collusion or special interests right to the floor of the G-rated Wild West saloon.

I’m telling you, it’s hard to over-sell this guy.

Charles Ingalls will speak up for the laborer, the minority, and the underdog. That’s what we need in a leader! He’ll have your back even if you only show up in one episode out of a 10-season run, go through all the motions of a heartbreaking story, and then disappear into the mists of the California foothills — I mean, Minnesota prairie.

There are so many voters who would love to see a candidate who’s devoted to their family. Not in the way that they’d consider dating their own daughter, you understand (ew! get some help!) but the kind of person who would adopt 30 different kids in need after his own grow up and move on to their own lives. It’s not a publicity stunt and it’s definitely not to maintain interest in a show that gets its ratings off cute children! How dare you.

And of course, there are always bonus features — a president who can pull a few party tricks is a president who can look good on TV. (Well, we already know he looks good on TV…) But showcasing some musical appreciation never hurt anybody. Bill Clinton may have jazzed up the sax, but Charles Ingalls can fake his way through countless toe-tapping fiddle tunes while not even holding the instrument correctly! Can you say TALENT?

I hope you’ve considered these points as deeply as the producers of Little House on the Prairie considered killing off less lucrative characters, and thought long and hard about the good you could do your country by voting Ingalls 2028. We’ve saved the best for last…

By dint of dying long before email was invented, Charles Ingalls does not appear anywhere in the Epstein files. And these days, isn’t that enough?

Contact our PR team today to make a donation and claim your free campaign sunbonnet and wagon placard. Limited supply. Allow 6–8 weeks for stagecoach delivery.

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My kids are almost finished with our library’s summer reading program, and it is not yet July. I say this as a little bit of a flex. I am not ashamed of it. I’m proud that we prioritize reading, that I read aloud to them every day, that the >100 picture books scattered around our house, in bookcases and under sofas, do not gather dust. Well, maybe the ones under the sofa do. But my three-year-old is quite industrious about demanding that adults lift the sofa on a regular basis so he can go spelunking, so they get pulled out pretty frequently too.

Because we read so much, and because I am always worried about being accused of fraud somehow (despite a scrupulosity from childhood that recoils from ever falsifying information on a form, no matter how insignificant) I feel awkward about filling out the reading log too quickly. So in order to make the log last until the August 1st prize retrieval day, I’ve decided to record mostly chapter books instead of the dozen picture books we haul home from the library every week. And those titles have, overwhelmingly, consisted of Boxcar Children titles this month.

I can’t remember when, exactly, we began listening to audiobooks in the car together. It must have been at least a year or so ago; a time when I was fed up with constantly switching from song to song on the Bluey album and instead put on a Ramona Quimby novel narrated by Stockard Channing. Though my younger son wasn’t (and remains not) very impressed, preferring music or the asinine Handyman Hal podcast, my five-year-old was quickly captivated by what I and my fellow millennials still stubbornly refer to as books on tape. It’s hard, with a five-year-old, to thread the needle between attention-grabbing (and long enough for a full car ride) and too scary or incomprehensible. The Boxcar Children has, thus far, fitted the bill.

If you aren’t familiar with the series, and somehow didn’t grow up with the ubiquitous Scholastic paperbacks, this piece might not mean much for you. But if you did read the Boxcar books as a kid, then maybe you will understand what I mean when I say that the original 19 books1 are… so much deeper than I remembered??

I grew up reading the Boxcar Children along with the Bobbsey Twins and Happy Hollisters, and I sort of lumped them all together in my mind. Family of children who never fight and solve benign mysteries in their copious spare time. It’s a genre of its own. But, perhaps because Gertrude Chandler Warner actually wrote all of her own novels,2 the Aldens—tidy and perfect though they always are—seem to reach down a little deeper into the human condition than their contemporaries.

Take Mystery Ranch, for example. The main conceit of the story is that the Aldens go to stay on their great-aunt’s ranch to care for her while she is sick. They befriend their crotchety Aunt Jane, take care of a stray dog, and discover uranium on the ranch which was good news because this book was written in the 1950s and the Alden children were canonically not old enough to really remember Hiroshima and hadn’t lived through Chernobyl yet.

I digress.

Like many other children’s books of the early-to-mid-twentieth-century, Mystery Ranch revolves around the thawing out of a cold and taciturn elderly relative. Aunt Jane and Grandfather Alden quarreled when they were young, over family property (not, as you might assume, over the fact that their parents shortsightedly named them James and Jane) but the Alden grandchildren bring her back into the family fold with patience, devotion, and generosity. It’s a heartwarming, if predictable, plotline. The Aldens care deeply about family connections, and the theme of reuniting estranged relatives occurs in several other original Boxcar Children books. (It is odd, though, that the deaths of their own parents are never mentioned, as far as I can remember, beyond the first book.)

The running thread of all the stories, though, is the Alden children’s hard work, and I realized this while only half-listening as we waited at stop lights and my three-year-old shrieked for me to put on The Search for the Tool Fish Adventure instead. They rebuild houses destroyed by fire, pitch in to do garden work, fix up a lighthouse, teach school. The trips that form the framework of each story are always sponsored by their wealthy grandfather, of course, but with the exception of perhaps Blue Bay Mystery, the destinations are never luxurious, and wherever the Aldens end up, they put their shoulder to a task, literally.

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The thing is, they don’t have to. Grandfather James Alden’s wealth is a bit of an enigma—he’s a steel mill magnate in the earliest books, and the owner of a “fine plastics factory” in later Warner novels, but whatever the source, his credit and charge accounts seem to be as unlimited as those of Carson Drew, the well-known lawyer.3 One would expect the Alden children, heirs to millions, to live a life of privilege and leisure, enjoying the finest experiences that their patriarch has to offer and associating only with the most well-bred and hoity-toity families. Instead, we find them packing their own sandwiches rather than ordering room service, setting off on a bicycle trip instead of cruising to Europe, and taking as much interest in hosting ten-year-old Rory for an extended school vacation (Mystery Behind the Wall) as they do in traveling down the river on a houseboat.

In Mike’s Mystery, Mr. McCarthy, the night watchman at the uranium mine, says to Jessie,

“I can’t understand why you children want to work at all. Don’t you own the mine? Your grandfather ought not to let you work.”

Jessie shook her head. She said, “That’s not the way Grandfather thinks. He has lots of money already. But he says everyone ought to work. Nobody can be happy unless he has some work to do. …When we get through school, Grandfather wants us all to go to work for a living.”4

Trust funds and executive positions don’t even enter the equation. The Aldens seem to regard their wealth as a mildly interesting but ultimately irrelevant exotic pet; a gold-plated hermit crab that doesn’t leave its cage and therefore isn’t a major player in anyone’s life. Their money supports their lifestyle, of course, but in an unassuming way that elevates genuine experience over the best things money can buy.

In a world of Bezoses and Musks, trillionaires and venture capital, this perhaps-outdated mindset is heartwarming to the point of unbelievability.

Who, today, would live like the Aldens?

I don't make a habit of writing in depth about my children's private lives. I write about parenting at the parenting newsletter I edit, , but I try to straddle the line between writing about my own experience as a mother and delving too deep into my children's experience.

So I am going to be a little bit purposefully vague here when I say one of my kids is having a very tough time right now. We recently (finally) got a mental health diagnosis that confirms my neurodivergence suspicions, and we’re figuring out how to best support that child, and our whole family, through a difficult season. Everything I thought I knew about the cause and effect of consistent parenting, and discipline, and instruction and teaching and instilling good principles is really hard to square with the DSM-5.

There is so much I don’t know. There is so much I am going to screw up. As I write this, I am actively trying to calm my own nervous system, to settle myself after a particularly dysregulating day.

We are listening to The Deserted Library Mystery right now; on the way to therapy, and on the way home from the library, and to and from the grocery store and to Grandma’s house and back again. I wonder, sometimes, how much my kids are absorbing. As we listen to stories I read and reread in my own childhood, fragments of narrative I thought I’d forgotten are coming back to me, etched as they were into a corner drawer of my brain by fond repetition. Ali thanks you. We all thank you.5

It isn’t all gems of happy childhood memory, of course. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Boxcar Children books are admittedly A Product Of Their Time, most notably with the depiction of Native Americans in Surprise Island and The Yellow House Mystery, both of which are not hateful but definitely maintain stereotypical and patronizing portrayals of indigenous people. At certain points, I’ve felt compelled to pause the story and take a moment to explain why we don’t use the word “Indian” anymore. My kids are impatient to get back to listening, nodding and mm-hmming with what seems like complete fecklessness. They are white boys, living in the U.S. with two involved parents and the prospect of a solid education; no plastics factory nor steel mill dividends for them, but nevertheless they sit in their safely buckled car seats ensconced in privilege. What am I going to teach them about their role in a world that is primed to hand them opportunity, that wants to urge them to work hard so they can amass money and power?

I used to think it was as simple as setting rules and enforcing consequences; having a family code of ethics, and explaining the straightforward ways in which we would encourage good behavior and discourage the bad. I would lead by example, naturally. I’d be patient and gentle and understanding, and my children, secure in their attachment to me and cocooned in the predictable expectations of our family life, would only need the most natural and organic instruction to set them on the path for Model Citizenship. We’d be raising good neighbors, just like Mr. Rogers. No one would hit or hurt or scream (or if they did, it would only be once, before they Learned Not To) or display worrying anxious behaviors. The problems I have kept wrapped up tight in my own brain would never manifest in my sweet, innocent children—perish the thought! I would do this right.

I’m not sure when the illusion vanished. Maybe at the first vestiges of colic? Who can say. I was so sleep-deprived.

Gertrude Chandler Warner’s path to literary stardom was not an easy one. Her first iteration of The Boxcar Children in 1924 was far darker than the later edition which readers today know and love, and it wasn’t well-received even by her own elementary school students. (The parents’ deaths are far more present thematically in the original.) Warner’s own life was marked by frequent illness and injury, trauma from two world wars making a lasting imprint on her career (she became a schoolteacher as a temporary job which became permanent when her colleague succumbed to the flu pandemic). The Alden children’s lives, sanitized though they were by careful editors, still managed to reveal a great deal about her values and what she held dear.

Family. Integrity. Hard work. Giving of what you have to those in need, and using what you’ve been blessed with—financially, intellectually, spiritually—to improve the lives of those around you.

I would love to write up a manifesto of what I want my children to learn, and how I want them to go about it. I wish I could rewrite all the mistakes I’ve made, wipe the slate clean and say “here is your formula for life, if you will only follow it to the letter. Also, don’t develop anxiety.” I can’t do that, but I can guide them toward books that highlight the good, the true, and the beautiful. (And I can choose audiobook versions when the weird 1960s paperback illustrations do not reflect those virtues, lol.)

The Aldens’ choices to spend their leisure time don’t, on the surface, seem to make a lot of sense. Why should they do menial work when they don’t really stand to gain anything from it? What could they possibly enjoy about the repetitive labor of raking leaves and scrubbing floorboards and cooking food over a camp stove, when they don’t have to do any of that?

But none of that work is done in solitude. Wherever Henry and Jessie and Benny and Violet go, they make friends. The work they do isn’t pointless because it’s always in service of someone else. “Nobody can be happy unless he has some work to do,” Jessie told Mr. McCarthy. The work she is talking about, in that moment, is that of helping Mike’s mother to start up her pie business, after losing her house and everything she owned in a fire. The Aldens didn’t have any obligation to Mike’s family, but they set to and helped out anyhow.

I can’t tell my children, “This is who I want you to become.” I mean, I could, but it wouldn’t go anywhere. They would ask what was for lunch, and complain that I had paused the audiobook.

But books are what form us, aren’t they? Wasn’t Jesus Himself the Word made flesh, to dwell amongst us? Being shaped by what we read, by what is communicated to us in language, in the Bible, is a foundational tenet of the faith I share with my children. I don’t equate the Boxcar Children with the word of God, but I do think that good children’s literature—good literature for any age—is a means of common grace, a gift to point us back to the mind of the Maker. To be built up, bit by bit, in listening to and learning from stories about good character and thoughtful choices and honest work—that is how I want my children to learn. It isn’t a one-and-done ticket to maturity, or an easy way out of the hard task of teaching principles (my own repetitive work!) but a constant creation that will last their lives.

If the hours spent in the car hearing about the Aldens finding joy and meaning in work (the kind of work that anyone made of weaker stuff might find boring or degrading) influences my boys to be industrious and helpful in their later years, I’ll be so happy. For now, I’ll be glad if it motivates them to pick up two or three of the seven hundred monster trucks littering my floor.

Also, we can skip over any influence from the boxcar dishwashing practices, thanks. I don’t care how much you scour with sand in the creek, that cracked pink cup from the town dump is still harboring PATHOGENS.

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*Original email version of this piece called it a Pride and Prejudice mashup, not Jane Austen, but in fact the scope is not limited to P&P and I'm not sure why I wrote that! Darcy on the brain, perhaps.

Long long ago in the land before time, I used to post Jane-Austen-related content with some regularity on Twitter dot com. Twitter, of course, has now sunk into a Musky swamp and I’m trying to dial back my use of social media in general, but boy do I miss those Austen mashups. I did at least a dozen of them, pairing characters from the six major novels (and sometimes Lady Susan) with quotes from contemporary TV shows. It was so much fun, and yet since I deleted my Twitter account, all of that time-wasting eccentricity has been lost to the great abyss into which all data centers will inevitably perish, and I am not great at using the Wayback Machine.

So I am bringing my Austen mashups back, except I’m doing it here, on the website that I own, which no man can take from me.

The original The Office mashup wasn’t exactly the same as this; sadly, I can’t remember exactly which quotes I paired with each character, but the general gist of it is the same, and dare I say New and Improved.

Let us proceed.

(Images precede quotes.)

(Images have also made this post too long for email so you will need to open it in your browser to read the whole thing.)

Elinor Dashwood: “Before I do anything I ask myself, ‘Would an idiot do that?’ And if the answer is yes, I do not do that thing.”

Lydia Bennet: “I don’t talk trash, I talk smack. They’re totally different. Trash talk is hypothetical, like: ‘Your mom is so fat she can eat the internet.’ But smack talk is happening like right now. Like: ‘You’re ugly and I know it for a fact ’cause I got the evidence right there.’”

Marianne Dashwood: “When you’re a kid, you assume your parents are soulmates. My kids are going to be right about that.”

Mr. Rushworth: “You cheated on me? When I specifically asked you not to?”

Mr. Elton: “This one has sort of an oaky afterbirth.”

George Wickham: “I was never in this for the money, but it turns out the money was an absolute necessity for me.”

Mrs. Jennings: “Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.”

Henry Crawford: “People underestimate the power of nostalgia. Nostalgia is truly one of the greatest human weaknesses, second only to the neck.”

Miss Bates: “I love inside jokes. Love to be a part of one someday.”

Mr. Palmer: “There’s too many people on this earth. We need a new plague.”

Robert Martin: “Those who can’t farm, farm celery.”

John Thorpe: “I am fast. To give you a reference point, I’m somewhere between a snake and a mongoose. And a panther.”

Emma Woodhouse: “Do I need to be liked? Absolutely not. I like to be liked. I enjoy being liked. I have to be liked, but it’s not like this compulsive need to be liked, like my need to be praised.”

Caroline Bingley: I would not miss it for the world. But if something else came up, I would definitely not go.”

Louisa Musgrove: “Parkour!”

Mr. Gardiner: “Oh you’re paying too much for worms. Who’s your worm guy?”

Mary Musgrove: “Ultimatums are key. Basically, nobody does anything for me anymore unless I threaten to kill myself.”

Mr. Woodhouse on the dangers of sea-bathing: “He was decapitated! Do you know what that means?! His CAPPA was DETATED from his head!”

Jane Bennet: “I hate the idea that someone out there hates me. I even hate thinking that al-Qaeda hates me. I think if they got to know me, they wouldn’t hate me.”

Mr. Elliot: “We’re third cousins, which is great for bloodlines and isn’t technically incest.”

Mary Bennet after being told she has delighted the company long enough: “You all took a life today. The life of the party.”

Mr. Knightley watching Mrs. Elton boss around the strawberry-picking: “This is the smallest amount of power I’ve ever seen go to someone’s head.”

Isabella Thorpe: “I am one of the few people who looks hot eating a cupcake.”

Mr. Darcy, watching Jane and Bingley: “Put your heart out there like that, it’s liable to just turn into this blackened carbon brick where it has barbecue sauce of shame and rage and two hot people with a perfect relationship would not understand that!”

Frank Churchill: “Women cannot resist a man singing show tunes. It’s so powerful, even a lot of men can’t resist a man singing show tunes.”

Anne Elliot coordinating an emergency response: “I knew exactly what to do, but in a much more real sense I had no idea what to do.”

Colonel Brandon: “If you break that girl’s heart, I will kill you. That’s just a figure of speech. But seriously, if you break that girl’s heart, I will literally kill you and your entire family.”

Mr. Collins: “I would say I kind of have an unfair advantage because I watch reality dating shows like a hawk, and I learn. I absorb information from the strategies of the winners and the losers. Actually, I probably learn more from the losers.”

Mrs. Norris: “Fanny, you ignorant slut.”

Fordyce, of the Sermons: “Don’t ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone for any reason ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you’ve been... ever, for any reason whatsoever...”

Catherine Morland: “I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.”

Mrs. Bennet: “I feel like all my kids grew up and then they married each other. It’s every parent’s dream.”

What Dunder Mifflin quote would you pair with an Austen character?

Are you tired of hearing me talk about Yesteryear? Well, it's your lucky day because today I am not talking about it, per se, but about books that may appeal to readers who opened Yesteryear thinking they were going to get the book that was marketed to them: a time-travel literary novel that would interrogate fourth-wave feminism and the right wing resurgence in tandem, exploring the motivations of women who want to return to the past while honoring the women who actually lived that hard, hand-to-mouth existence.

Lol. Anyway.

Showing some (not all) titles with some degree of similarity to Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, but in a good way. Maybe not a #1 NYT bestseller way, but the NYT isn't the arbiter of good taste.

Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Yes, this is a middle-grade novel. But middle-grade novels can be, and often are, absolute bangers. Jessie has lived her whole life the early 19th century, but when the children in her village begin to fall deathly ill with diphtheria, her mother tells her a terrible secret: it is not 1840, but 1996, and Jessie and her family have been living in an analog simulation of the past. Trapped by men who seem to want to do her family harm (but why??) in a “living history museum” where mention of the present is forbidden, Jessie has to make her way back to 1996 to find help for her sister and friends.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Another middle-grade banger, but this one about actual time travel, and possibly my favorite time travel book of all time. I really can't tell you too much about it without giving away too much, I think, but let me just say this: Miranda is a gem. I want her mother to be happy. You might cry. New York in the 70s seems… frightening.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Though not a story told by an unreliable narrator in the strictest sense, this bizarre and multi-narrated novel is a delightful exercise in learning to understand a heroine whom surely no one can much like. Bernadette Fox is brilliant, biting, and agoraphobic. At the outset of the story, she has also been missing for weeks, and her teenage daughter thinks the clues to her disappearance might lie in her correspondence.

A Well-Trained Wife by

A chilling yet hope-filled memoir—you know all along that she got out, but sometimes you could be forgiven for forgetting—of a former tradwife who escaped her abusive husband's violence and religious fanaticism. This is a hard read (child death, domestic violence, and emotional abuse all play a role in Levings’ story) and an unflinching look at some of the most dangerous dominionist cults that have come out of Christian fundamentalism. It is also a vital read for anyone trying to understand some of the men currently making decisions at the top of the U.S. government.

Educated by Tara Westover

Another hard-to-read, but impossible-to-put-down memoir, this one set in the actual state of Idaho. Westover was intensely isolated in a Mormon family in the mountains for much of her adolescence, and her story is a brave and piercing one. I'm due for a re-read.

These Is My Words by Nancy E. Turner

Want a gripping story of an actual (fictional) pioneer wife? Sarah Prine's diary traces her family's emigration west in the mid-nineteenth century, her young marriage, the raising of her family on a homestead amidst the Indian Wars, and the slow maturing of her intellectual life as she reads everything she can get her hands on. It's a complex story of a complex time in American history, and doesn’t neatly tie up or whitewash the many atrocities that took place. The sequel is not as good.

Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza

The original tradwife influencer novel, this thriller starts off strong with a murder mystery and manages to pack an impressive amount of character growth and backstory into what might seem at first to be a boilerplate page-turner. Lizzie and Bex went to college together, but their friendship ended soon afterward, when Lizzie entered the world of journalism and Bex married a wealthy rancher and became a barefoot mama Instagram sensation. I felt the ending was a little too tidy and far-flung, but I’m eager to read more of Piazza’s work.

Somewhere Past the End by

Gently compelling, this dual-timeline novel explores a terrifying topic—a doomsday cult—with compassion and nuance. Alice, who has lived her whole life in Brother Richmond's Collective, was left behind when the others were seemingly raptured. She's also pregnant with a baby she was forbidden to have. Trying to escape the commune and figure out what actually happened to her family, Alice's story is told in tandem with that of her mother, who joined the cult years before as a young woman seeking a place to belong. I was initially nonplussed by this work, lyrically written though it was, because the ending didn't provide the answers I wanted. The longer I sit with it, the more I realize that was the point.

Trad by

DISCLAIMER: I haven't finished this one yet, because it hasn't been fully released! Elizabeth Richardson has been publishing her novel a chapter at a time on her Substack, and though I have enjoyed what I've read so far, I have to give the honest caveat that I don't know where it will end up! Hannah, a journalist covering social media influencers, dives deep into the world of tradwife motherhood content by creating her own fake online persona—where the lines quickly begin to blur between Hannah's reality and her alter ego, homeschool mama and sourdough baker Martha.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

The quintessential unlikeable narrator, Juniper Hayward is an aspiring writer eaten alive by jealousy of her more successful friend Athena. When Athena dies suddenly, June gets the devious and dreadful idea to finish and then pass off Athena's novel manuscript as her own. The problem, apart from the plagiarism of it all, is that Athena, a Chinese-American, was writing a deeply Chinese book. It's fine for Juniper to just imply to the world that she's Chinese to boost her own credibility, right? This book is twisted in all the right ways, and though the themes are heavy-handed, R. F. Kuang pulled off the satire and unreliability of it all far better than... other authors I could name.

Howard's End by E.M. Forster

Hear me out—this book is about the performance of femininity in a way Yesteryear was trying to be, and failing. I know it was written by a man, but sometimes Edwardian dudes made some good points, you know? It was grand to be an Englishman in 1910, and all that. Anyway, Margaret and Helen Schlegel are high-class, intellectual, and broke. Their friends the Basts are wealthy, middle-class, and at first too friendly, then not friendly enough. There are destroyed wills and broken engagements and falling in love with the wrong people, and it's a sad novel but also a very satisfying one in a weird melancholy way. I really need to see the Emma Thompson movie, and still haven't.

And that's my list! What would you add to it?

In case you haven’t noticed, Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is very, very popular right now.

Maybe popular isn’t the right word. “Buzzy,” perhaps. “Controversial.” “Feeding the discourse.” Readers—including me—have a lot of opinions. Many of us feel the novel was overhyped and didn’t deliver on its marketing, its premise, or the research its author is purported to be famous for. Others feel it’s a fun, fascinating beach read that provokes thought without needing to dive too deep.

And then there are the people who seem personally attacked by any unfavorable review of the book, and that’s what I want to dive into today.

I’m not interested in dogpiling on anyone, and in the interest of not making anyone feel any more personally attacked, I’m redacting names from the statements I’m sharing. If you’re following the drama on Substack or Instagram or even the New York Times interview where Burke pushed back on claims that she did not thoroughly research the religion she claimed to write about, you’ll be able to find the original arguments fairly quickly. But I’m not trying to doxx anyone here—this is about ideas, not the people who shared them.

I, like and and and and the team at , felt Yesteryear was lazily written and did not qualify as satire so much as a vengeful fantasy. But when these opinions were voiced, many people felt we were the lazy ones: that we had read the book on a surface level only, and missed the layers of meaning with which Burke had imbued the main character and the plot. “Natalie is an unreliable narrator,” some argued. “You aren’t SUPPOSED to like her, this is a commentary on contemporary issues,” others said. (Still others, like my friend , wrote a thoughtful and favorable review which I do not agree with, per se, but I still respected and enjoyed.)

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“Actually you missed the WHOLE POINT of the book and have no critical thinking skills,” one Threads user insisted, and then blocked me.

When I wrote my initial post about Yesteryear, I tried really hard to not make my attacks personal. I tried to be objective about what I didn’t like, without insulting the writer’s intelligence or the 5-star readers’ taste. People are allowed to like different things, and critically-thinking, attentive readers are allowed to retain their status as such even if they reach diametrically opposed conclusions. I am no advocate for the death of the author, but I do believe two equally valid and differing opinions can exist regarding the same work, because each reader brings their unique experience and worldview to each book.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like Benoit Blanc every so often.

Some readers who liked it really did not like the idea of some of us not liking it. “It’s a big fun commercial novel,” one author wrote on Substack Notes. “I think instead of picking it apart, a lot of people need to be investigating internally, emotionally, why they’re so upset by its success!”

That drew me up short. The implication, of course, is that the critics of the book are just jealous. Am I jealous? Am I looking at Burke’s novel and, without any authority to do so, thinking “I could have written a better one” (another claim a fan of the novel made against those who criticizes it)? Am I just being a mean girl?

I don’t think I am. There have been lots of books that have been successful and probably didn’t deserve their success, but I would never think of myself as jealous of Stephenie Meyer’s multi-million-dollar New Jersey mansion, just bewildered that so many people absolutely ate up her sparkly vampire twaddle and made four blue movies about it. (And also the fact that she chose to buy a 12,000sqf house in NEW JERSEY.) But at any rate, whether I and a plethora of other readers are jealous of Caro Claire Burke (hereafter CCB) is a moot point. It shouldn’t matter. The fact is that if we were discussing a book written by a man, “jealousy” would not enter the conversation. I have a lot of concerns regarding Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married, and will likely write on them at some point, but if I say “I think Key’s confessional oversharing method hooks readers who are expecting some real soul-searching and self-awareness and then leaves them with a bad taste in their mouths” no one is going to say “oh, so you’re just mad that he won the Thurber Award.”

(Note: I had to search long and hard through my list of books read in the last couple of years to find one written by a living man that I could reference for this analogy, lol. Men are writing bad books every day of the week, but I am not, in general, reading them. Go forth and be blessed, crappy boy writers. You are not my concern.)

If we immediately jump to the assumption that critique of a woman must equal jealousy of her success, we are falling prey to the You Don’t Support All Women fallacy. Oh, you don’t know the YDSAW fallacy? Perhaps you are blessed by not being as relentlessly online as I am. The YDSAW fallacy says that if you criticize any woman for any choice she has made—whether she is an actor, a writer, a politician, a journalist who had a torrid affair with RFK Jr.—then you are secretly a misogynist who doesn’t want to see women succeed. This is so dumb. Not brilliant! Just dumb.

But here’s the thing—women are people, and people do dumb stuff. They write dumb books, they have dumb opinions, and they date dumb footballers. Neither you nor I are an exception. To exempt women from being dumb, and from being called out on their dumbitude (can we make that a word?) is to say they aren’t human in the way that the rest of humanity is human. That is not equality, it’s condescension. (I hate the way AI has co-opted the “it’s not X, it’s y” rhetoric but there’s not much I can do about it. I hope you know by now I would never use AI to write these posts.)

I put Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Taylor Swift in the header image for this post because Taylor Swift once famously said of Fey and Poehler (who made an ill-advised jibe about her love life at the Golden Globes a decade or so ago), “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” Swift didn’t come up with this line—it’s attributed here to Katie Couric but the originator seems to actually be Madeleine Albright. That’s not really relevant, I just wanted to make sure you know I’m a fact-checker.

The “special place in hell” line has been done to death. There’s room for critique of Fey and Poehler’s joke about Swift’s long list of ex-lovers, but they aren’t impeding her progress to the billionaire club by saying she’s a serial dater. If you can ask the question “would they make this kind of dig at a man?” and the answer is a resounding YES, then perhaps comedians are just doing what comedians do and gender isn’t really applicable here.

But let’s get back to CCB and the assertion that people who “pick apart” her novel are doing it out of a disgruntled envy and are not self-aware. Come now. People who enjoy thinking about and, yes, picking apart novels and films (hello!) are not doing it because they don’t want to consider their own feelings about a work of art and what it revealed about themselves. It’s the opposite, in fact. A large part of good media analysis does in fact involve interrogating one’s own personal biases and examining the reactions that the art evokes. No critique can be fully objective, certainly, but it is not arguing in good faith to assume that someone who disliked a work is simply being a mean girl rather than engaging critically.

But as to the hurt and jealousy of it all? Ah, there’s the rub, as Hamlet and Father Tim would say. No matter how objective we say we want to be, book reviews are personal. They cannot not be.

Before I began writing on Medium and Substack, I was a blogger who made exactly zero dollars writing at great length and with many hardline opinions about classic literature and period dramas. One of the opinions I maintained with great rigor (and still do, in all honesty) was that the 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries is much better in every way than the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley. The reasons for this are too many for a short post that is not actually about Pride and Prejudice, but the gist of it is that I feel the 1995 version is more book-accurate and the 2005 version has too many pigs.

I have several dear friends who really, really like the 2005 version. And—I am sorry to pain you, but so it is—I was kind of a jerk about this when I was a younger writer gleefully extolling the virtues of P&P95. Because P&P95 was objectively better, and because I liked it more, it must follow that I was a smarter and more informed reader (and movie-viewer) and that everyone who liked P&P2005 was a less-intellectual consumer of media, or perhaps just plain dumb.

(I’ve used that word a lot in this piece. Did you know it was spelled with a B? Because I did. Many such cases.)

If friendship is born at the moment when one man (OR WOMAN) says to another, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”, as C.S. Lewis is somewhat inaccurately quoted, then enmity may be born at the moment when one woman says to another, “What! You liked that? What kind of idiot could POSSIBLY…”

Listen, I have thought the latter. Perhaps I have in my ill-advised youth even said the latter. But that doesn’t make it true, or helpful, or a worthy analysis of what makes a book good or bad.

It has taken time, and hurt feelings, and growth in both years and maturity to realize that a) I can critique something without critiquing the people who like it, because my experience is not the be-all, end-all and b) I can absorb and acknowledge someone else’s dislike of something I like without taking personal offense.

For some of you, who have already achieved library nirvana, this is probably an assertion so basic as to rival that of “how to spell the word dumb.” But for others of us, who clung desperately for much of our adolescence to the idea that our worldview was The Only Right Way, it has been more of a slow realization. And for some of the people zealously arguing the finer points of Yesteryear on Substack… well, to quote Joy Clarkson, what a treat they have ahead of them, to discover that people can dislike a “feminist” book without wanting to repeal the 19th Amendment or turn into the green-eyed monster from the Berenstain Bears!

I’m going to continue to pick on Gina Dalfonzo here because I know she is kind and smart and gracious and will take it on the chin—Gina and I do not see eye-to-eye about Yesteryear. That is okay. Gina saw glass where I saw grime. That is to her credit. Gina is a thoughtful and talented writer who is not reading at a surface level or checking books off a list so she can make a viral TikTok. I know her, and I know her heart for good books. Maybe, after all, she is right and I am wrong! I do not think so, but I respect the fact that she does, because I respect her.

Maybe that was what the “big fun commercial novel” really had to offer, after all—giving us an opportunity to nitpick among good company. You know, what Anne Elliot considers good company: clever, well-informed people with a great deal of conversation. (And Yesteryear has sparked nothing if not a great deal of conversation.)

But perhaps I am wrong about that too. Perhaps that is not in fact good company, but the best.

Pride and Prejudice 2005 still kinda sucks though. Sorry.

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You might also enjoy…

Wow, okay, I haven’t done one of these since last… September? Yikes. Okay, so we’ll do a spring roundup, using the word “spring” as loosely as the American academic calendar. I, by the way, am done with the semester! I am enjoying my two weeks of freedom, which are FLYING by, between spring finals and the beginning of my summer class.

[Edit: this took me so long to finish that my summer class has now begun lololol]

What I Read in January-April (Books)

(An inconclusive list, since I have, proudly, read 23 books so far in 2026!! I’m really happy with how deeply I’ve plunged back into reading after a few months of not doing much of it.)

-My Friends by Fredrik Backman

I’m a big Backman fan (Anxious People and A Man Called Ove are my favorites) but this one was a miss for me, unfortunately. I’m not even really sure I can articulate why. It felt too reliant on coincidence and a sort of forced whimsical feeling that was oddly reminiscent of the most self-conscious Tumblr posts of 2014. I’m not articulating this well, but tbh I don’t really feel like Backman did either! Perhaps some of the awkwardness could be blamed on the English translation? I’m not sure, but this book being a bit of a disappointment has certainly not turned me off from enjoying Backman’s other work— I’m overdue for a reread of Anxious People.

-When Thoughts And Prayers Aren’t Enough by , which I reviewed here.

-Company by Shannon Sanders

I love the idea of a short story, but I rarely sit down and actually devour an entire collection. I think short stories tend to intimidate me. My high school experience with them was not great, and though I’ve grown to appreciate a good George Saunders as an adult, I always worry that I am too dumb to understand prizewinning short stories. And maybe I am! But I was not too dumb to enjoy Shannon Sanders’ linked short story collection, a string of beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking or even terrifying (Mote! MOTE!!) vignettes about many different branches of a single family tree. Her debut novel, which is releasing in July (and you best believe I WILL be writing about it) centers on one of the characters in Company, and though you don’t need to have read Company to enjoy The Great Wherever, why wouldn’t you?? (Favorites: Mote and The Everest Society)

-Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

I’ve been in and out of therapy here and there since my first baby was born (currently in) and I actually picked up this book thinking it would be aimed more at self-help (i.e. explaining to the skeptical reader why therapy is a good idea) but it turned out to be a memoir, in turns infuriating and moving. Lori Gottlieb is a licensed therapist who wrote a long-running therapy advice column to help ordinary people work through ordinary and extraordinary problems. The people she writes about in this book (I assume many identifying details have been changed) draw you in before you realize it, and Gottlieb's own journey toward self-awareness, though interesting, plays second fiddle to her heartfelt storytelling about her patients. Julie's was my favorite.

-Famous Last Words by Gillian Macallister

I don't want to give too much away about this one but it's a page-turner of a thriller, and it manages to feature a new mom without falling back on a postpartum psychosis plot crutch or putting a child character in danger to build suspense! I recommend going into it as blind as possible.

-Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

I knew very little about TB before I opened this book; my experience was limited mostly to Ruby Gillis’ tragic death from “galloping consumption” in Anne of the Island and Doc Holliday’s blood-spotted handkerchiefs in Tombstone. And that painful bubble injected under the skin every few years when I worked in healthcare and at a nursing home, of course. But beyond that, I didn’t give TB much thought— certainly not as a contemporary and present problem. I was, obviously, So Very Wrong. EiT moves at a rapid pace through the historical thread of TB’s relentless grip on humanity, while deftly blending fact-based, nerdy writing

-Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, which I wrote about in great detail at The Pom, with a plethora of spoilers. Tl;dr—I did not regard it with great affinity.

What I Read in January-April (Articles)

Motherhood in the Age of Incels by

Let Us Read by

Our Children’s Schools by Bess Kalb

Sometimes, being “slow to speak” is just silence in a bad disguise by

The World Needs More Weirding Right Now by

In Defense of Your Problematic Mother-in-Law by

On Care and Close Reading by

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What I Wrote

I Promise It Will Get Easier at

“It isn’t the cold exercise sending a surge of warmth to my heart as I watch them; it’s pride and love and marveling. They are magical. They are two little people, learning how to be, and I get to watch them.”

Is Everyone Lying to Me? at

“When I look at other mothers of young children, in a similar season of life to mine—kids below elementary age, middle-class income, working and/or going back to school, or staying home to do what feels like 24/7 childcare—who seem to be surviving motherhood with more grace and poise and accomplishment, I often find myself descending into bitterness. No one can do ALL that. She homeschools and works full-time and keeps her house clean and still has time for hobbies? All that with a few chore charts and a willingness to get up at 4 am? She’s got to be lying.”

Having Babies Did Not Make it Okay For My Stomach to Look Like That at

“With the ever-growing pressure to squeeze the female body into smaller and smaller sizes, with Ozempic and intermittent fasting and mushroom coffee supplements galore, a campaign to get postpartum women to embrace their larger selves must be a good thing. Pushing back against bounce-back? Yes. I’m here for it. I am! I don’t really take issue with what this type of post says, but with what it implies.

If it’s okay for your body to look like babies grew inside it (because they did) then is it not okay for your body to look like babies grew inside it if they didn’t?”

All the Children are Mine at

“My own baby, long and thin like a spaghetti noodle in an orange jersey, ping-pongs back and forth across the soccer floor, waving at me, unaware. He is safe in a climate-controlled gymnasium surrounded by friends who want to play and adults who want to help him learn. Did the Iranian mothers who sent their daughters off to school yesterday morning think the same?”

Acceptance Emails Which I, a Struggling Writer, Have Fantasized About Receiving at Jane Austen’s Wastebasket

“We have installed a tracker on our automated submissions email that analyzed how many times all our submitters refreshed their inbox to see whether they’d received an acceptance. The most tenacious page reloader gets accepted. You won, and it wasn’t even close.”

Stuck on a Poem? Dumb it Down for my college’s literary journal blog and on Medium

“Imagine you’re Wordsworth, scratching out ideas with a quill pen on a sheet of old-timey foolscap. You want to write about the restorative power of nature, about how a brilliant burst of color on a spring day can stay with you for years afterward. Great. But you won’t be able to throw out a perfectly enjambed lyrical ballad on the first try.”

What I Am Currently Writing

I started a quick-and-dirty recipe-and-money-saving blog at Meal Plan on a Budget!

Meal Plan on a Budget

Seven grocery shopping tips to cut down your spending

1. Make a list, but adhere to it loosely…

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3 months ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Amy Colleen

I’m also working on something bigger, in a longer form, which I am keeping close to my chest right now, but will be ready to talk about soon! I’m also scratching out ideas for the annual JASNA essay contest, and thinking about doing another Summer of Jane Austen here on Substack again.

What are you writing? Reading? Thinking about? Leave a comment and let me know!

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I am aware that this piece will probably offend some people. But I am not willing to dally around. I am thinking about offense, and candidness, and truthfulness, as I type it all out myself; I refuse to couch these opinions in someone else’s words. Everything you are reading here was written by me. Everything you will ever read on this website was written by me, unless it is specifically quoted and attributed to another human author.

I feel very strongly about (AGAINST) the use of generative AI, and I realized recently that I hadn't ever laid out in plain English why I am opposed to it. There are a lot of very important smaller reasons, and one big one.

(Before I begin it's important to me that you understand that when I say “genAI,” I am talking about programs and apps such as ChatGPT, Claude, OpenAI, Midjourney, Grok, and whatever nonsense the Best Buy customer service website is using now instead of a human representative. I am not talking about the use of artificial intelligence in the computer and medical sciences, about which I do not know enough to speak definitively. I am talking about the use of AI in the humanities and for personal daily enterainment: to create images and videos, to write social media posts, to “create” in a manner that is meant to mimic a human. Do not come for me in the replies with some “oH sO yOu dOn’T tHiNk onCOloGIstS sHoUlD uSE rAdiOLoGy pRoGrAmS thAt cAn sPoT cAnCeR” comment.)

The Environment

Put simply, genAI is burning up our usable drinking water. And it’s doing so in a way that does not render the water recyclable or reusable in any other capacity— it is literally eradicating fresh water. Your electric bill will be higher soon, if it’s not already, and the emissions caused by massive AI data centers are producing thousands of tons of carbon dioxide, which as I’m sure you know is not great for our climate.

“Of all of the concerns with AI, one of the most commonly cited is its impact on the environment. In fact, Americans are more likely to name AI as an environmental concern than other prominent environmentally harmful activities, including meat production, air travel, and cryptocurrency mining. One aspect that’s gotten a lot of attention in particular is the rapid growth of data centers, which are warehouses of computers used to train AI models. These centers are cropping up all over the country and the world, consuming massive amounts of energy, increasing local electricity rates, and even creeping into land set aside for our national parks.”

—Andrea Jones-Rody in What AI Costs the Environment

“But lots of other things use water! Look at farming! Farming uses TONS of water, way more than AI!” people will say. Yes, and you know what farming gives us? Food. Textiles. Things we NEED, not a picture of Marco Rubio dressed as a combo Ayatollah/President of Venezuela. The ROI on AI images is not remotely comparable to the growth of soybeans. Get a grip.

Theft from Artists

Every image that’s created by genAI comes from a massive amount of digital artwork that was fed into a water-guzzling data center by a “data trainer” who definitely did not have permission from the artists in question to use their creative work as a model. A computer cannot have an original thought. A computer cannot truly generate an image; it can only predict a sequence based on thousands of millions of previous sequences that have been (illegally) shown to it. Artists have the legal right to the reproduction of their work, and no matter how many of Sam Altman’s minions try to put the “tech bro” into “technically,” (is this anything? hmmm no) it is unethical to take someone’s creative work without their consent and feed it into a Plagiarism Machine so that the Plagiarism Machine can copy it so you can have a “Studio Ghibli style” profile picture on Facebook. No one should need to have that spelled out for them, and yet.

This goes for both visual art and written work, by the way. The Atlantic published an exposé in 2023 about the thousands of ebooks which had been pirated and used to train Meta’s AI software. Anything you write on the internet, technically, can be scraped by a bot and fed into a Language Learning Model (LLM) so that your style can be mimicked. It’s not cute, it’s terrifying. (And yes, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” format in clickbait social media posts is beginning to drive me mad. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.)

There’s a false and pervasive idea that if you put something on the internet, it becomes free for anyone to use for whatever purpose. There’s also a false and pervasive idea that the moon landing was faked and that the 2020 election was stolen. The fact that people believe these things doesn’t make them true.

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Deepfake Porn

Listen, I don’t want to talk about this any more than you want to read about it, but let’s just say, if someone with nefarious intent uploads a photo of you to Grok, Elon Musk’s gross AI feature on X, they can create an image of you in a nude and highly compromising position in seconds. It does not matter if you didn’t give consent. It does not matter if you’re not an adult.

This is one of many reasons why I don’t share identifiable photos of my children on the internet. I’d urge you to consider locking down your digital circles, too.

Deception

When you “write” something with the help of AI, even if it didn’t draw anything from a proprietary source, it’s still not your writing. And if you pass it off as your own, that may be legally legitimate but the ethics are dubious at best.

“Oh, I never claimed I wrote this,” people will say, smugly, as their LinkedIn and Threads accounts churn out an endless scroll of bland, mindless drabble. Yeah, okay. Maybe not in so many words. But you hit “post” with your name attached and no citations. High school students know what that means. Pull yourself together.

Mistakes Galore

As long as you have a webpage with enough traffic to appear high in Google search ranking, you can say anything you want and it might get included in the “AI search results” Google roundup. People have tested this theory with silly stuff like a recipe for adding glue to pizza cheese, but it’s far from funny.

Suicide encouragement, bald-faced lies about easily-verifiable facts, and the germinating of psychosis from chatbot significant others (I wish I were making this up) round out the list. I could go on and on and on. I won’t.

It Looks Stupid

Your soulless, shiny, cookie-cutter graphics are ugly. Use the free version of Canva and a single ounce of chutzpah. I believe in you.

All of these facts, taken separately, are bad. Quite frankly, each one of them alone ought to be enough to discourage you from using genAI. And yet even if all of these things were not true— if someone invented a version of genAI that was completely ethically trained, never violated anyone’s privacy, was completely carbon neutral and looked flawless— I would still be against it. I would still urge you not to use it.

Because it is atrophying your brain into a colander of limp spaghetti.

Your imagination is a muscle that must be exercised. If you, like me, have trouble returning to your childhood fancies with the same abandon, it’s likely because you, like me, haven’t done it very much in the last decade or two. If you stop thinking about magical lands, it becomes much harder to return to them. And if you stop drawing pictures and writing words and coming up with your own thoughts, is it any wonder if your whole theory of being becomes more difficult to articulate?

You cannot just scroll, you cannot just watch, you cannot just ask Chat to summarize the text for you. “We’ve built machines that promise to relieve the burden of painting, writing fan-fiction and even playing video games so that we have more time to look at our phones,” says Boze Herrington. Ewww??? EWWW. What are we doing????

Creating art is not a burden. You do not have to make art! You truly do not. I mean, yes, on a certain level we must all tell ourselves stories in order to live (thanks Joan Didion) and even if you live without an inner monologue I do not think you can thrive without at least an inner narrative, but you do not have to make pictures or stories for other people to consume, and if you choose to do so, you have the responsibility to make something good and true and beautiful. I can’t find the exact quote now, but recently Karen Swallow Prior wrote something about the abundance of AI-generated slop infesting the book industry— and how it doesn’t have to be this way! You are not required to be a writer. If you can’t write, and you can’t even conceive of putting words together without the help of a program, then don’t.

And what of the non-creative writing, the stuff no one could call artistic yet we all need to do every day? The emails, the product listings, the notes to our families and friends? Shunting that off to genAI is not only lazy and disrespectful to the people with whom we are communicating, but it’s strangling your ability to do this work yourself.

“ChatGPT is making you boring,” argues (who also wrote the brilliant Things You Can Ask ChatGPT to Write For You). I would add that it is also making you dumb. You do not need GoogleAI to summarize an email for you. You do not need ChatGPT to tell you to call the doctor for a weird rash that won’t go away. You do not need a chatbot to write a book report or fill out a personality test or answer the damn essay questions for an ENGLISH LITERATURE CLASS where you are supposed to be STRETCHING your damn BRAIN! (yes! This is a real-world example! I sit behind you, [Redacted]! I can see your screen!)

Sorry for swearing, I have a lot of feelings, unlike a COMPUTER.

AI is not capable of saying “I don’t know.” Did you know that? If you ask a chatbot something and it can’t answer the question, it will make something up, and if you call it out it will make up something else, and maybe it will reformat its search function but it will not say “I don’t know.” Because if you can’t ever truly know anything, you can’t know what you don’t know, you know?

There’s a lot of discourse out there right now about the future of writing and books, and I want to reassure you that when it comes to poetry, we’re all good. AI literally can’t write a poem. Anyone is welcome to try. It’s not real. It's just dead words. A computer system can’t feel lust, endure jealousy, taste her grandmother’s chocolate cake, watch a child be born, trip walking across a stage in front of 500 people, have a first kiss, or hold their loved ones hands while they cross to the other side. Poetry is made strictly of human experience. There’s no wiggle room. What a gift.”

—Kate Baer in Dear Reader

“Very few writers know what they’re doing until they’ve done it,” Anne Lamott writes in her famous essay on shitty first drafts. (That one was Anne, not me. I, like Emily Starr, am “only kwoting.”) You cannot write anything good without human experience—both the experience of living, and the experience of actually writing.

I did a rough estimate of how many words I’ve written in the course of a lifetime. When you take together days of relaxation and not writing anything, mixed with spiral notebooks in childhood and NaNoWriMo as a teen and the hundreds of thousands of emails I’ve sent to friends and for work, the dozens upon dozens of blog posts and Twitter threads and and and and and—

—if you assume something like 200 words a day for 26 years (since I learned to write) it’s nearly two million. Probably more. I don’t know. I’m not a computing machine.

Every time I write anything, I think about how much farther I have to go, but I’m also, sometimes, delighted and awed by how far I’ve come. That isn’t vanity, it’s just frankness. The way I used to write as a dramatic seven-year-old would-be novelist is very very different from the way I write now, as it should be, and it happened because I have a functioning brain that matured and was worked, hard, and now it can do things it couldn’t do even two or three years ago.

“My fingers,” says Elizabeth Bennet to Mr. Darcy, “do not move over this [piano] in the masterly manner which I see so many women’s do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault— because I would not take the trouble of practising.”

Darcy smiles then (take that, Colin Firth!) and says, “You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you, can think any thing wanting.”

And you know what? He’s wrong! He’s blinded by love! That’s the whole point. Elizabeth is not a good pianist, because she doesn’t practice. But Darcy doesn’t care, because he’s smitten. And if this little analogy were translated to modern day, of course, it would not hold up, because there is no way in the world that Elizabeth would ask ChatGPT to play the piano for her. None of Austen’s heroines would, except maybe Catherine Morland, and she would learn from her mistakes, as she is meant to do.

Are we, the stubborn Luddites who refuse to ask ChatGPT, being “left behind” by tech?

If we are, I’m fine right here. I’m happy with my books and the brain I have to read them. I’m happy with my refusal to get with the times. “I think we will look back with regret if we don’t act now to temper AI, if we don’t change our posture toward AI to one of prudent skepticism,” writes O. Alan Noble.

“I don’t think the problem is that writers don’t accept that AI is here to stay.

That argument is a straw man.

I think the problem is that people using AI don’t understand that to some people, the craft of writing is what matters. The slow and painstaking development of skill.

I am one of those people.

And I don’t want to see the art and craft of writing become the sacrificial lamb on the altar of productivity or profit. So I do the only thing I can. I write about it.”

— in A Blunt Conversation about AI Writing

(Linda has written a lot about AI. It’s worth reading.)

I am going to keep writing and I am going to keep refusing to plug prompts into a BOT, for any purpose, and I hope you will too.

And I will drink some water while I do it, while it lasts.

“I am intimately acquainted with the horror and suffering guns inflict, and even more intimately acquainted with the goodness of God. Nothing in me knows how to make these two things fit together.”1

On this day thirteen years ago, a man holding a rifle walked into a school and shot my dear friend . She was at her desk job at New River Community College, completing a normal day of work and planning for her upcoming wedding. Then a man with a sick vendetta attacked her and several other people with a gun.

It seems very trite to say that Taylor is one of the strongest people I know. We have been friendly acquaintances for several years, and became close (thanks to the internet) over the last twelve months. I have seen up close how brave, tenacious, vulnerable and good Taylor is— throughout long-lasting aftershocks of her shooting experience, through sleepless parenting nights, difficult personal relationships, more medical crises and a book about peace that earned her death threats. With every hit, she has remained kind.

In 2021, Taylor published her first book, When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey into the Realities of Gun Violence. I “met” her online shortly after the book was released. For far too long, I resisted reading it, though I liked Taylor as a person and wanted to be her friend. I’m not sure why I didn’t just order her book. Maybe I was hesitant about reading something that would heighten my own propensity for anxiety. Maybe I didn’t want my worldview challenged further. Maybe I was afraid of what I’d find.

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I grew up in a home without guns. I married into a home with guns. When pressed, I would say I’m pro-reasonability—that I think the second amendment is important, but that gun violence takes far too many lives and needs more parameters. But I could be easily swayed by either side— the strict constitutionalists who argue against any infringement of the Bill of Rights, or the plowshare-crafting pacifists who want to melt everything down and start anew.

I wish I could say my mind was changed about guns without needing a personal anecdote. In a way, I suppose it was. The ground was tilled years beforehand with a slow and steady breaking down of preconceptions and assumptions. I had been deconstructing some of my most rigid religious and political beliefs since my early twenties—marrying a Responsible Gun Owner didn’t change any of that, it just added nuance and, sometimes, disagreement.

Reading Taylor’s book was, to be trite again, eye-opening. Eye-watering, too. I cried for my friend so many times in the first few hard chapters. Thirteen years ago, Taylor’s left hand was permanently disabled by a bullet, shrapnel shards embedded in her body when she hid from her attacker in a utility closet. Yesterday, we texted about potty training woes. Taylor survived, and I have the privilege of knowing her and hearing her story. But so many people didn’t. So many people have no story to tell, because their platform was shot from under their feet. Last Christmas I stood waiting with a woman in a local supermarket and, with one tendril of conversation that led to another, she told me her only son had been killed in an act of gun violence that summer. There are no words to say to something like that. If there were, I wish I could have thought of them.

One of the aspects of memoir that resonates most deeply for me is when the personal becomes universal. When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough starts out with Taylor’s own testimony of survival, recuperation, setbacks, disappointments, and coming to grips with her altered life and the fact that her tragedy was—is—one of many before and many to come. The personal narrative shifts into research-driven fact reporting in the second half of the book, tracing the history of gun culture in America and the (failed) attempts to legislate it into something akin to harm reduction. Taylor’s writing is straightforward, sincere, and life-affirming. She is not trying to take your freedom. She is writing about what you can do to help ensure it for others.

I learned a lot (another trite-ism) from Taylor’s book. Some of it I already knew. Some of it was deeper and harder to read than I had anticipated. But all of it left me grieving the way we have failed so, so many people. The tools for peace—for limiting accidents, investing in community, pausing tragedies before they can start—are in our hands.

My hands both function, physically, at 100%. I am luckier than my friend. But with hers, including the one that was harmed forever— what a wildly tragic and yet hope-brimming thought that practical fact is— she wrote a beautiful, heartfelt letter to the world and to the church. Don’t let it be in vain.

Is it any wonder, really, that the home of 
the brave bombed a school full of children? 
Are you actually surprised? You say you are 
shocked and horrified, your thoughts and 
prayers ribbon out in a hasty spill, how on
earth could we have done such a thing. Be
serious. When you stop and think of those
little girls, tiny and gangly and just beginning
to learn, are they really any different from
the children on your street? They were 
just born into a different family, a foreign
country, not like good American children,
lucky to be in the land of the free,
who can go to school and be anything 
they want to be until a twisted terrible person
comes into their classroom
and shoots them.

Rest your eyebrows. Relax your mouth. You
are not blindsided by this news. You have heard
it, over and again, in headlines that break
families and bullets that spell might and right.
The missiles of freedom will sprinkle childish
fury over a nation that, they say, confines girls 
in a box of sexist oppression, nothing like
the boxes we have here, for the remains
which we, at least, are able to find. 

You can call your representatives and urge them to act against genocide at 5calls.org.

Last month I dreamt I went to Idaho again.

It was a reasonable sort of dream. Once upon a time, my best friend lived there, and once a year or so we would save up all our money and visit each other, from one landlocked side of the US to the other. I’d fly in from Pennsylvania when it was my turn and we’d stay up until an unholy hour, giggling and whispering and writing Northanger-Abbey inspired fanfiction, of sorts.

Last month, I dreamt one of those visits was happening again. The dream was snarled and patchy—one of those where everything is sort of going wrong, but not in a way that awakens you, heart pounding a cold sweat. I won’t bore you with all the details, but in the dream I was nineteen again, just learning to drive, and my best friend was writing in her journal in the back seat of the car. We were arguing over something stupid. It makes sense that I would dream this, not because we argue over stupid things very often these days, but because in real life I was actually visiting her. Except now she lives in New England, and we are older and better at driving, and we are both mothers now, or about to be.

I had flown north to Boston on a Friday, and my best friend picked me up at the airport there, and we went to the Houghton Library and saw and handled (!) four letters of Jane Austen’s (!!!!) and visited Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House. We went to her baby shower (my friend’s, not Alcott’s) and to church together, and I was supposed to fly home the coming Monday, but a nor’easter moved in and I was stranded at my friend’s apartment for two more days.

There are worse things I could do.

I had my books, my notebooks, tea to drink and internet to access. It was a marvelous little respite from everyday life, not unlike the break I took in 2024 when we went to the beach. I had plenty of time to read and research for a big end-of-term project, and one of the books on which I took notes was Austen Years by Rachel Cohen.

One of my sisters gave me this book for Christmas a few years back, and I am now on my second slow luxurious re-read. The notes I wrote after that beach trip (about the same book!) are now forming themselves into the thesis of a paper1, and the concept of Jane-Austen-At-Rest is constantly on my mind. Circling back to the last time I wrote about Austen Years, in the summer of 2024, I am reminded of the constant pull on my time and the distractions that keep me from reading. Here is what I wrote then:

Rachel Cohen, who wrote her memoir while in the midst of parenting two small children (and grieving the loss of her father!), seems to understand this very well. “We are subject to constant interruption,” she writes of parents and other careworn adults, “and we must nevertheless exert ourselves to make sense and to become coherent. One lives with one eye on the laundry and one eye on the reckoning.”

I love this way of describing the tugging, shifting balance between the mundane and the intellectual, the determined reading of books in the tired few moments before sleep and the way we are all minutely and constantly building our lives and our sense of self out of days made up of little pockets of thought. A liturgy of the ordinary, if you will.

In my uninterrupted time to read and to sip tea and to pet an astonishingly fluffy cat, I had a lot of time to think. One eye on the book and one on the calendar, I suppose. Luxurious leisure time for reading isn’t typical for me. In normal life, I am slipping it in where I can, choosing to put down a device and pick up a novel, listening to a book instead of music while I drive, tapping my e-reader as I lie beside my two-year-old who can only fall asleep when I am there. I am reading in the margins of my life, making notes and circling and underlining passages to return to, building my reality out of the words I make time to absorb. Reading is more than just a part of me—it is shaping who I want to become.

All that to say I’m re-naming my Substack, lol.

It’s been Something Funny, Something True for four years now. (I wrote about the choosing of the original title here.2) This this title, though quippy, is a little too vague for my current purposes. I was hesitant to make my name too book-centric, for fear people would expect to read only book reviews (a genre in which I’m not too skilled). But that snow day of uninterrupted reading (and thinking!) time gave me a fresh perspective: everything I write comes back to books in the end anyway. Whether that’s Austen, or the Bible, or a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle audiobook as we drive down South, books are in and around and of the margins of my life and work.

Also, I like to write notes for myself about what the book I’m reading is making me think and feel. Here on Substack and in the book itself. In the margins, get it?

So Something Funny, Something True is going to become Reading in the Margins, and by next week my links and headers and such should all be updated to reflect this fact. I hope you like the new name. Whether you do or not is actually of very little consequence, of course, since I maintain absolute tyranny over the publication dashboard, but I do want the title to reflect what you’re getting, and I hope you like that too (for real).

Actually, I could have called it Parenthetical Statements, because I cannot, for the life of me, stop inserting those. It’s a malady at this point.

Happy reading, whether as your full-time job (lucky duck!) or in the parenthetical margins you make for it,

Amy

Almost six years ago, I wrote a dream-castle sort of letter to my yet-unborn oldest child. I’m republishing it here today because I have a follow-up piece brewing, and I’d like to be able to link back to this one, so I’m giving it a home here on Substack. (Originally, it lived in a now-defunct publication about love and relationships on Medium.)

There’s a lot of hokum floating in and out of solid parenting advice. Some of it is harmless (let your unborn baby listen to classical music to make him smarter!) and some of it is a little horrifying (put an amber bead necklace on your child to magically stop teething pain, never mind the fact that it’s a strangulation and choking hazard!). Some of it is based in science, but then taken to the nth degree: the concept of reading to your baby in the womb, for instance.

Sure, babies in utero can hear sounds starting around the 16th week of development. And yes, obstetricians and pediatricians agree that hearing their parents’ voices can be soothing. A newborn can recognize the voice of its mother within moments of entering the outside world.

But at what stage in fetal development does auditory reading comprehension enter the picture? If I’m reading Fox in Socks aloud to my unborn baby when I’m 30 weeks pregnant, is he actually giggling at Dr. Seuss’ wordplay through the amniotic fluid?

Probably not.

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Yet, despite the fact that my son is not due to be born until September1, I find myself wanting to jump start the reading process anyway. Children whose parents read to them on a regular basis tend to be better adjusted and have a higher mental retention capacity once they start school, after all. (That one is from the American Academy of Pediatrics, so I’ll take it.) The “million word gap” between kindergarten-aged children who are exposed to several books every day versus children who are not is another powerful argument for reading. Surely I want him to be as prepared as possible as he embarks on that scary educational journey. I don’t want learning to be frustrating and fraught for him — I want him to feel confident, comfortable, secure in a strong background filled with words and pictures and ideas.

Could there possibly be any downside to fostering a love of reading in my son?

In the early days of my pregnancy I hauled three empty cardboard Boise Paper boxes home from work and have slowly filled them with thrift store finds, books once loved by another child which are now mine for twenty-five or fifty cents apiece. Curious George, Frog and Toad, Amelia Bedelia and other well-known characters are sharing space with less famous (but just as special) personages such as King Bidgood, Toot and Puddle, and Owen and Fuzzy, memories of my own younger days. My husband has begun practicing reading them out loud. Sometimes, in between folding tiny sleepers and onesies, I pause to flip through the covers, wondering which one might become the favorite.

Trips to the library were the highlight of my week as a small child. My family moved four times before I turned seven years old, and our home-base library kept changing. I’ve lost track of the number of buildings out of which I’ve staggered with a canvas tote bag full of more books than I could reasonably carry. I still have the first library card I got when I was twelve, and can still see the excitement in my preteen scrawled signature on the back, so thrilled at the independence of checking out my own books instead of using my mom’s card. (With this newfound freedom came the responsibility of my own late fees… less fun.)

But reading isn’t everything, reluctant as I may be to admit it.

I just finished reading — yes, I see the irony — There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather by Linda Akeson McGurk. McGurk, who was born in Sweden and has raised her two daughters both in the U.S. (with her American husband) and in Sweden, stresses the importance of unstructured, messy, in-all-weathers outdoor play that is touted in Scandinavia under the term frilufstliv. Mental and emotional health, she claims, are bolstered and uplifted by the simple effect of time spent outdoors. According to McGurk, Americans put too much emphasis on their children’s academic prowess and are frequently guilty of helicopter-parenting. “Let kids be kids,” is the underlying mantra of her memoir, brushing aside overachievers and Little Einsteins with a simple recommendation to buy your child a good pair of rain boots.

I’ll admit, I felt convicted. I identify far more with the hobbit than with the explorer. I understand the benefits of fresh air and exercise, but I’m more likely to be holed up indoors with a book in my hands or a keyboard on my lap than hiking the forests. But maybe I could stand to rethink that posture, at least where my son is concerned.

Sure, my neck of the United States is pretty different from Sweden, and the hands-off type of parenting McGurk promotes could warrant a call to Child Protective Services in American culture (a fact she points out, and laments). But a greater focus on letting my son nurture his own interests — and encouraging him to just get outside without a specific agenda — might do us both a world of good.

Even if it doesn’t immediately appeal to me as a reflection of my favorite things.

Maybe my job as a parent isn’t about making sure he hits all the milestones before he starts preschool, or ensuring that he loves all the same things I love. Maybe it’s not about giving him a “jump start” over other kids, but letting him develop at his own pace and discover how big and beautiful this world is on his own. Maybe it’s not about being pushy and overbearing and controlling even the imaginative aspect of his existence, but stepping back a little and accepting the fact that he might not be a bookworm.

Am I still going to read to him? Of course! I think everybody benefits from good books, whether or not they identify as an insatiable reader. But everybody can benefit from an increased sense of wonder at the world they live in, too. It’s not an either-or scenario: I don’t have to choose between encouraging trips to the library or trips to the woods, with no overlap and no natural flow.

But neither do I need to shove my son into a box shaped exactly like a miniature version of me.

Yes, I want him to love what his father and I love. A mutual passion for reading was one of the first things that attracted us to each other. We already have a well-established routine of reading together. We look forward to bringing our baby into that family circle and helping his imagination to flourish. But as I organize the picture books in the nursery alphabetically by title — old habits die hard — I’m reminding myself that these books don’t represent the sum of my baby’s personality.

Maybe he’ll be a puddle-jumper, a climber, a runner.

Maybe he’ll be a cloud-counter and weather-watcher.

Maybe he’ll be a budding engineer, with an eye for balance and a penchant for building.

Maybe he’ll find his passion in the kitchen and love nothing more than making good food.

Maybe he’ll be a bookworm.

Whatever he is, he’ll be loved, encouraged, and helped on the way — and I’ll try to remember to take a step back sometimes and just watch.

Even if it means he doesn’t want to hear Horton Hears a Who! for the hundredth time.

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

When I read Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People, from which the above quote is taken, I gave it five stars on Goodreads. But as I clicked “submit review,” I hesitated.

Was five stars, Goodreads’ highest possible rating, a fair assessment of this book? Was I right to effectively tell all my friends, foes, and followers that this book was practically perfect in every way?

Letting my personal beef with the star rating system slide for the time being (I’d prefer a scale of 1–10, rather than 1–5, to allow for more nuance), I went ahead and posted my review with all five stars. But, as I am wont to do, I worried and fretted in great disproportion to the actual problem, that someone would read the book and think me a nincompoop for giving it FIVE WHOLE STARS.

Err on the side of generosity, I say.

But of course I don’t give five stars to every book. I don’t even give a like to every article. What’s the rationale, then?

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As a kid, I cast a scornful side-eye toward recipe descriptions in my mom’s Taste of Home magazines (which I read for fun on quiet Sunday afternoons because I was a weird child).

“Tasty” broccoli cheese casserole, Janet from South Dakota? I scoffed inwardly.

How can you say such a silly thing? Just because YOU think it’s tasty doesn’t mean everyone ELSE will think it’s tasty. You don’t know what they like and dislike.

Food, I felt, was the most subjective subject on earth. My sister abhorred bananas, while I thought them delicious. I loathed rice, and she requested it for her birthday dinner. (I still feel a latent brooding resentment for that betrayal.) It was almost like lying to simply state that a food WAS good. Grownups, man.

Now, of course, I too am a grownup and my tastes have expanded. I like rice these days and I don’t sneer at people who deal in absolutes when it comes to describing food.

But I do wonder if I am unable to be objective when I recommend a book.

A Man Called Ove is still my favorite Backman novel, but I’ve enjoyed almost all of his books so far. (Beartown had a bit too much of what I typically refer to as sportsball, but I guess in this instance it was sportspuck — and I couldn’t finish Us Against You since it was more of the same.)

Anxious People was no exception; it made me laugh and cry in short order, and both emotions continued throughout the book. The dialogue was witty without being so witty as to be aware of itself; that is, it read with the natural fluidity of a normal conversation. I found the narrative clever and suspenseful, which is especially impressive when you consider that this book has been translated from Swedish to English, and at least one plot twist hinges on how the narrative is worded.

And yet all the mechanics of the book were not really what won my five-star rating. It was the anxious people themselves, the sympathetic characters who irritated me and yet kept me turning pages; the poor choices and reckless decisions and kindness winning out in the end. (Is that a spoiler? It shouldn’t be.)

I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.

I don’t want to give away too much in case you haven’t read the book, but one subplot revolves around a man who is wrestling with the fact that he was unable to prevent someone else’s suicide. The frank depiction of clinical depression in particular and mental instability in general was an unusual choice for a story that purports to be a locked-room mystery, and yet it all fitted and framed together and by the time the last pages arrived, I didn’t want it to end.

As an anxious person myself, even the most unlikable dancers in Backman’s beautifully calculated choreography managed to tug at my heartstrings. All these people, bound together with their very different problems and their one mutual problem (being locked in an apartment with a bank robber)… they leapt off the page.

And I gave the book five stars.

Then I read the other Goodreads reviews, as I am wont to do.

Some of them made me smile. Some of them made me cringe. And a couple of them made me want to change my rating, just for a moment, because those reviews pointed out elements I hadn’t seen and analyzed from a perspective I hadn’t taken.

In the end, though, I kept my five stars. Because Anxious People made me feel five stars (although I respect the opinion of those who felt only two stars). And even if that statement wouldn’t fly in any kind of serious literary-criticism situation, I take comfort in the fact that am not a serious literary critic. I am just an anxious person who read a book about anxious people and felt seen.

The question of how much weight an author’s intentions should hold in a discussion of what readers perceive, and how a text is read and taught, is hotly debated. I tend to lean toward giving more credence to the author’s personal beliefs (insofar as they may be known), the historical context, the social and political context in which a book is written, in order to call an Important Work of Literature “good” or “bad.”

But when it comes down to everyday, ordinary, read-in-bed-with-the-covers-pulled-up-to-my-chin, satisfying novels, I go with my gut every time.

Maybe it’s not terrifically helpful for the stranger perusing reviews on Goodreads. I’m sorry for that. I really do want to be helpful to other readers.

Yet in the end, our perception of books really is just as subjective as our perception of broccoli cheese casserole. It’s personal. Easily influenced. Can change as we grow up (positively, in my case — at least for broccoli and cheese). What I think good you may think rubbish — one’s trash is another’s treasure, after all. My life experience that informs the reading choices I make and the opinions I form of that reading will never be the same as yours.

But if we do share some common anxieties — some common joys or sorrows or a shared love of chocolate, too — then I hope you’ll see my five stars and think “that sounds like something, I, too, would enjoy” and take up a book I loved and read.

“That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”
— Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

It's nearly 8:30 P.M. and we've just passed the exit to Richmond. My husband is driving, our two-year-old is snoozing in his car seat, and our five-year-old is drowsily listening to a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle audiobook on the car stereo while I type this on my phone. (Jody Jones is pretending to be sick so he won't have to go to school and Mrs. P-W is about to prescribe a Tonic to straighten him out. I guess truancy laws weren't a thing in the 1950s?)

We are driving through the night to visit my husband's grandmother in rural North Carolina, and I am going to wait to publish this little new-year reflection until tomorrow morning, when we are safe at the hotel, so that no one need worry that Rob fell asleep at the wheel and we all died. (EDIT: it is now three days later and everything was fine.)

I think I sort of have death, and sudden death, on my mind a lot lately. 2025 was a real jerk about that. My grandfather's death wasn't really unexpected, of course, but still-- the part of me that is still forever a little girl has always thought my grandparents would live forever. They don't. In the summer a dear friend with whom I worked at my church died very unexpectedly, and then on October 18th my father died, twenty-three hours after a devastating stroke. For twenty-two of those hours his five children were with him, in cycles and shifts and all at once, until the very end when it was just him and my mom and he chose that moment to let go. They had been together for forty-two years.

I am not ready to write about my dad yet. Maybe I never will be. But it seemed odd to kind of slide back into writing here without acknowledging the gaping, raw crevasse that is the death of a parent. I think about my dad in some way every single day, even sometimes when the thought is just "oh my gosh, my dad is gone and for a little while I had forgotten. Why did I forget?"

I don't know what the answer to that is, but I know I'll be talking about it in therapy. I don't mean that in a flippant way. I mean that I really am going back to counseling later this month because I have a lot to process and my brain and nervous system are struggling to keep up. Writing is a soothing and necessary release but I do need to, you know, actually confront some of my emotions in a healthy way.

I don't mean to imply 2025 was all bad. Looking back, there were a great many bright spots. Friendships deepened and my once-baby brother got married and a beautiful, fat, imperious little niece was born (to my sister, not my brother). We got a cat (pictured at top) and she now rules the household, or at least thinks she does. I started a new part-time job, returned to school full-time, won a couple of scholarships, and finished the fall semester with three hard-won As and an A-, of which I am extremely proud. Going back to school at age thirty is challenging in a lot of unexpected ways but one really lovely aspect of it is the way you appreciate the opportunity so much more than you ever could have at eighteen. It also makes you much, much less tolerant of the shenanigans of incoming freshpeople who do not fully appreciate their opportunities and are not recognizing their dewy-eyed, childless potential. No you may NOT copy my notes after failing to show up for half the classes this semester and scrolling Instagram for the other half, Mykynleigh!

I am now just three semesters away from finishing my English degree, and am now in the delightful position of taking courses that are almost completely focused on my major. Which means a lot of my reading is focused on those courses. Which means you can expect to see posts here that are directly linked to those assigned readings, and not simply whatever fiction I take it into my head to read this year. (Okay, you'll probably see a bit of that too. My list of library holds is currently maxed out.)

I mentioned before that writing is a soothing and necessary release (even when done with two thumbs in a notes app, ahem) and I'm planning to squeeze in whatever I can this year. I don't know what that's going to look like. If I can publish here once a month I'll consider that a win. Topics I want to cover this year include Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Beverly Cleary's middle grade books, Schindler's List, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the new BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister, and what sort of qualities the excessively picky reader, like me, might be looking for in historical fiction.

Maybe this will finally be the year I write a draft of a novel. Maybe I'll just keep my head above water with work and school and the everlasting exhausting antics of my wondrous children. Maybe I'll read a book I haven't even heard yet and it will change my life. Maybe the dumpster fire of U.S. politics will... you know... expire. Maybe I'll grow my bangs out! The year lies open.

If 2025 was brutal for you, too, I'm here for you. Maybe 2026 will be better. And if it's not, I'm grateful we have good books to escape into. Thanks for escaping with me.

Hey mama, hope you’re ready for the most wonderful time of the year! Have you made the list of gifts you’re buying? Make sure your kids are getting an impressive stack of presents, but not too many because you don’t want spoiled brats. Don’t deprive them of the magic of childhood, though! Are you baking some scrumptious treats? Wonderful! Too much sugar will definitely send your kids hurtling toward Type 2 diabetes and a full catalog of eating disorders, just so you know. Oh, you don’t let them leave out cookies for Santa because it promotes unhealthy habits? Monster.

Speaking of Santa, where are we on that? Hope you’re not lying to those precious little angels and telling them Santa is REAL. But don’t tell them Santa isn’t real or they’ll be talking about you in therapy. Get that picture on Santa’s lap and make sure they smile real big, except don’t ever force your kids to hug a stranger, haven’t you ever heard of bodily autonomy? Groomer. That Elf on your Shelf is a symbol of a surveillance state and it’s honestly disgusting that you would let your kids engage in that kind of copaganda. What, your family doesn’t do Elf on the Shelf? Have fun explaining that to everyone else at kindergarten. Now all the other moms hate you. Spoilsport.

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It’s Cyber Monday and the deals are rolling in! Save some money this year to augment your stretched-thin budget, you spendthrift shopper, and don’t forget to select fast free shipping. What are you doing supporting an evil corporation like Amazon? Go buy a ceramic bird from a local vendor and think about your choices. Think about them while you travel to see family; how many more Christmases is Great-Grandma going to have? What, you’re taking those germ-ridden little goblins to visit your immunocompromised elderly relatives? Selfish! Ask the grandparents to come to you. They want to be included on the holidays. Don’t make them travel though, you’re young and can handle it. Ugh, don’t take those kids on a plane, they might cry and scream and ruin the holiday for everyone else! Oh, you’re strapping your six-month-old into a car seat for a seven-hour road trip? Get ready for container baby syndrome and a raging Cocomelon addiction. Neglectful!

Aunt Bertrude made a delicious bitter lemon peppermint pine needle tiramisu, surely your kids can be polite and taste ONE bite. Trying new foods is essential to good development. Wow, mama, looks like someone’s having a meltdown! Were you aware that routine is the most important thing for these kiddos? Why didn’t you pack a curated pre-made dinner of safe foods? Make sure your kids are hyped up for our 10pm tree lighting followed by a live spoken word performance of The Nutcracker! Cultural appreciation is the linchpin of our society. Um, have you been informed that keeping these littles out past their bedtime is neurologically damaging? Children need their rest! Idiot.

Oh, while we’re on the tree topic: did you get a real one? Your kids simply can’t miss out on that core-memory experience of chopping down a LIVE evergreen on a real farm. Too bad you’re single-handedly burning the environment and flushing money down a public toilet though. An artificial tree can be used year after year and teach your family the importance of thrift. What, you put a plastic monstrosity in your living room and LIGHTED IT UP? Climate-destroyer.

It is better to give than to receive, so I hope you’re instilling those principles in your children early! Don’t let them think it’s all about gifts unless you want to raise the next Elon Musk or Donald Trump. Oh, your husband didn’t get a stocking for you and put gifts in it? Divorce. DIVOOOOOORCE. Dump him, girl.

There simply isn’t enough going on this time of year– you need to plan, prepare, execute, and clean up from an intricately themed family holiday activity each and every day. How else will your children remember Christmas 2025 if not via a keepsake Advent calendar hand-crafted by their mother’s own glue-burnt fingers? Don’t forget to stop and smell the snowflakes, mama. They’re only little once. Let it all go. Just sit back and relax. Enjoy every moment. Wait, are you reading this on your PHONE?

I’m back, biscuits. Thanks for still being here while I took a break from writing for a couple of months, and thanks even more for reading all the way to the end of this silly satire piece! Happy holidays!

I’ve got an incredibly busy fall semester ahead of me (and six weeks behind me already!), not to mention a new job (virtual assisting) and teaching English as a Second Language, and for this reason I’m pausing Substack writing until December. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all of you who read, support, and contribute to (!) this little newsletter. Because I’m not able to offer any writing during this time I have also put a pause on paid subscriptions to Something Funny, Something True— if you have a monthly subscription, you won’t be billed during this period, and if you were thinking about signing up for a paid sub (either monthly or annually) that option will not be available until December.

In the meantime, you can read my work intermittently at and perhaps in a new magazine or two depending on acceptances and rejections for things I sent out a while ago. :)

Thanks again. You have no idea what your presence here means to me.

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