Lifted from my journal on 8 April 2025:

Signs of spring: The buzzcut of green grass. Baby calves. Pasty white legs. Birdsongs in the morning. The urge to get stoned in the backyard. Blasting music with the windows rolled down and the heat turned up. Ruby Soho by Rancid. Pastel skies. Sunshine. Sunshine. Sunshine.

Recommended Reading

Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt

I think I’ve found my favorite book of the year so far. I started “Health and Safety: A Breakdown” by Emily Witt during an eight-hour drive to a family reunion this weekend and finished it on Monday morning during my run, and was transfixed from start to finish. It was an unexpected hit for me, a memoir I’d possibly heard of but never garnered my attention until I was looking for an interesting nonfiction audiobook to get me through this trip. The summary described it as “a chronicle of rave culture and a capsule of recent political history” (Emily Gould in The Cut, 9/16/24), and drew me in through teasing it as Witt’s journey through the New York underground dance music scene in the 2010’s. It sounded niche and interesting and potentially gritty enough to hook me, particularly for a book that hadn’t really been on my radar, so I gave it a go.

The book itself is chunked into three parts which mirrored my stretches of listening to it — drive there, drive back, run. You know when a book or an album becomes forever linked in your mind to the place or environment in which you first experienced it? This is one of those situations. Part I is, as advertised, an account of Witt’s involvement in the Brooklyn rave scene, a wild fusion of heroic psychedelic drug use and marathon partying and heavy, bone-crushing music. We meet her boyfriend, Andrew, catch glimpses of her life as a journalist, and follow the play-by-plays of so many parties and drug trips. To be honest, the depictions of the comedowns, her attempts to recalibrate after sleepless stretches of destroying her internal sense of time, made me anxious.

Part II changes tune slightly. We are reminded distinctly that this story is rooted solidly in the schismatic window of time that was 2020. The world was already frayed by the dystopian asininity of Donald Trump, and then we entered the madness of the pandemic and racial reckoning brought about by the world opening its eyes to police brutality. This part of the book takes on a journalistic tilt as Witt covers all of this unrest as a reporter. She reminds us of the specifics of Covid-times that have been self-protectively buried in our brains — curfews and empty streets, collective shouts for hospital workers, outdoor gatherings six feet apart, and then later that summer, protests against police brutality that were met with further police brutality. Her account of the shooting by Kyle Rittenhouse was particularly chilling.

It’s the recollection of that time’s particular unsettling that sets the stage for Part III of the book, which truly captivated me. At a protest in New York in June, Andrew is beaten by police and arrested, which ignites in him a full psychotic break. The terrifying chaos of his months’ long manic episode, leading to eventual hospitalization and the explosion of their relationship, is meticulously captured in all its exhausting twists and turns. Until this point in the book, Andrew has been characterized as a lanky, affable stoner, seemingly harmless if not a little bit unaware. But the Andrew in Part III is something nightmarishly different. The things he says to Witt are truly horrendous, his cruelty deliberate and targeted at her most tender sensitivities. As readers, we experience the same confusion and whiplash that Witt does at his sudden and complete shift in character, as she grapples with whether to call this abuse or mental illness, whether to help him or escape him, whether she brought this on herself. Spoiler alert: it turns out mostly okay. But the quagmire she had to wade through to get there is gut-wrenching, and her retelling is exacting, poignant, and utterly captivating. READ IT.

What’s Giving Me Life

Forever Is a Feeling by Lucy Dacus

This album is dripping with confidence. Lucy is fully aware of her capabilities as a songwriter and a lyricist, and she takes advantage of her talent on this album. I love the specificity of her lyrics, the detailed tableaus she sets up, the tiny loaded images she depicts. This record is definitely an upper compared to her last few albums, including the boygenius stuff, all love and gratitude and horniness. My favorites are “Best Guess” and “Most Wanted Man.”

Cutest little spoon dish

I rarely buy superfluous little things for myself, but I found this adorable dish at the General Mercantile in Helena last weekend and didn’t question it for a second. I’m not sure why I love it so much but I do. It is currently doing work as a spoon dish next to my coffee maker, but may become a jewelry dish or paper clip holder or just a decoration someday, and whatever role it takes on, I will not regret its purchase.

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Prompt

This prompt comes from Brian Kiteley’s “The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction”, a collection that I’ve used extensively over the years in writing groups or whenever I need to jumpstart a story. It’s got prompts for all sorts of story elements, but this one focuses on dialogue:

Writing Update and Excerpt

A few years back, I was working intently on a growing story that I had dreams of weaving into a novel. It was about a lot of the things I was feeling suffocated by in my own life: the overwhelm of motherhood in the midst of a crumbling marriage, the desire for desire and my shame of it, the friction between my identities as mother, wife, artist, and sexual being. The story has no real direction, no intentional arc, but was a place in which I could untangle my emotions and experiences through the safety of fiction. I eventually gave up on it, the clear resentment and sadness radiating through it too much to continue subjecting myself to, but there are definite parts of that story that peek out of my current project every so often. The character of Sadie, in fact, was directly lifted from that story, though she was never very developed before. While the two stories share similar themes — complicated feelings about motherhood and marriage, discomfort over the loss of youth, struggling to find a sense of place — there is a hindsight that is clearer in my current one, allowing for a bit of detachment from the emotional rawness. My new story also has more death, more family drama, more Missoula, and more bi-ness.

I say all this because this week I dug back in that past story and found a scene that I want to rework in order to use in my current story. The excerpt below is part of that piece, yet to be reworked.

I knew the neighborhood when I punched her address into Google Maps, the old part of town down by the university, fully-renovated turn-of-the-century homes, split and sectioned like firewood into a dozen bedrooms and semi-affordable rent shares, each a dozen roommates to a single tiny bathroom. I had lived in a similar place when I was in college, in an attic apartment with insulation spilling out of the walls that made everything I owned glimmer and itch. The memory made me miss that time, when I wanted for nothing but still got everything I wanted.

It’s dark when I pull up to Sadie’s house, which is blanketed by several enormous pine trees in the yard that hide it from the streetlights. I’m first-date nervous — I bounce my tire off of the curb, nearly trip going up the walk in my new heels. I haven’t worn them since college either and I’m out of practice. My hand is clammy as I ball it up to knock on the door.

I hear the muted din of a party inside, the thump of pop music and scratches of laughing. A shadow appears and grows in the frosted glass of the door.

“Hey girl,” says Sadie as she answers. Her voice is low and casual, like she’s been expecting to see me. It doesn’t eliminate my nerves, but makes me feel slightly more at ease. At least she wants me here.

Girl. I am girl.

“Hey,” I reply and step inside. Sadie throws her arms around me, pulls me into a hug that feels sudden and intimate, yet also casual, like this is the way she greets everybody. With her body against me, her tininess is exaggerated, her delicate bird-boned edges lost in the soft folds of mine. Her scent is hairspray and liquor, sharp and sweet and slightly chemical.

“You look fucking amazing in that dress!” she squeals, laying her hands on my ribs in a soft, casual way that I want to lean into. “Come on in, we are just doing some pregaming. You want a shot?”

She pulls away and skips into the house, shouting over her shoulder. Her bare feet squeak along the hardwood floor. She’s all creamy white limbs, short dark denim, black hair straight as a pin. Following her, I can see she’s got a tattoo at the base of her neck, the black silhouette of a cat, back arched and tail snaking into her hair.

“Uh, yeah. What are we drinking?”

“Skyy.”

I follow her toward the back of the house, where the lights get brighter and the noise gets louder, into the kitchen. The counter is littered with dishes and chip bags and overgrown houseplants, as well as several glittery handles of liquor. Everything looks wet and reflective, like there is something recently spilled on it. There’s a dirty hand towel laying in the middle of the floor. I see all of this before I see the people leaning against the counter. Their voices stop as we enter the room.

“Guys, this is Gillian.” She ushers me in, a delicate hand on my back. She recites their names, but they just flow through me like water.

“Hi.” My voice creaks. Everything seems like a bad idea.

“Shots?” Sadie asks mischievously. The others howl and pump their fists and she clumsily dumps the bright blue bottle of vodka into a line of shot glasses, sloshing it onto the countertop. The liquid pours over the edge as she hands one to me, spilling into my fingers and onto the floor, leaving a slick shiny puddle. An instant motherly urge to wipe it up shoots through me, which I don’t answer to, but tip the glass back like the rest do. It splashes onto my throat like water on a hot pan, searing up into my sinuses. I haven’t had liquor in so long and I feel like I just drank gasoline. I make a face I can’t help, pursed and tight, and grind my teeth together to keep my gag reflex from engaging.

“Holy shit,” I spit, the back of my hand to my lips. “That’s fucking disgusting.”

I get a laugh, which sends a surge of satisfaction through me, further intensified by Saide’s hand on the back of my arm, squeezing the fleshy part that would never be found on her own arm.

“I love it. I’ll get you a beer.”

As the moment settles, I get a look around the room at the others. They look obscenely young, yet I know they are all around Sadie’s age, all college or college-adjacent. There are two men and three women aside from Sadie, and my attention is simultaneously pulled between them. Toward the women out of envy, intimidation, sizing up — how do I compare? They all look like varying shades of Sadie, all tiny and effortlessly gorgeous, stylishly ugly haircuts, meticulously manicured eyebrows, slits of skin peeking out. I feel at the same time frumpy and exposed, like some embarrassing part of me is showing.

It’s the men, of course, the boys, that capture a different type of attention, one of fright and excitement, like running my finger through a candle’s flame. The one on the far side of the counter is short and squat, cropped dishwater hair and a baby face. Probably sweet, but entirely forgettable. He follows every story with an anecdote of his own and has a nervous, boisterous laugh that I instinctively don’t trust. My eyes sweep past him.

The other one stands next to me, situated on one side of me in the circle we’ve naturally gravitated into to fill the room, with Sadie on the other. I observe him out of the corner of my eye, carefully not to crane my head or make it look like I’m watching him. He’s my height, knobby shoulders level with mine, and lanky. He’s wearing a dark sweatshirt with the hood flipped up to cover his head, though a streak of his dark hair sneaks out and falls across his face so that only one dark, penetrating eye is visible. His laugh is deep and gruff, betraying his delicate frame and tiny flakes of teeth, gap-toothed just like Sadie’s. His presence next to me hums, like a television set left on in another room, and I wish I would have listened to his name.

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Thanks for reading. There are a ton of excellent (or at least excellent-appearing) books and television coming out this month, so read Torrey Peter’s new book and watch Black Mirror so we can talk about it, okay?

xoxo,

brit