That's right, the bitch is back.
And not only is she back, she’s one year older and much more well-read.
Exactly one year ago, Chloe Caldwell inscribed in my copy of her book, Legs Get Led Astray, that 23 was one of the most confusing, joyful, panicked, sexy, years of her life.
She, however, conveniently forgot to mention that 23 is also really fucking hard.
You’re tossed on your ass in the real world for the first time, and forced to deal with more changes in a matter of 365 days than the previous 22 years combined. You’re totally lost trying to figure out not only what you want to do, but who you want to be, not just in this moment, but for a whole long life.
Not to mention the fact that while you still think of yourself as this young, careless, thing, you’re simultaneously a forced bystander to your online world’s biggest life achievements. Watching friends get married, have kids, receive graduate degrees, travel the world—whatever—inevitably makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong with the same time they had to accomplish all of that. You start to question how they can be the exact same age as yourself, but in an entirely different maturity and success bracket than you. What did they do with their time that you did differently, incorrectly, with yours?
It's all terribly intimidating. I suppose that's why, understandably, all of these sexy, fun, panicked, changes lead a lot of people to explore new coping mechanisms (I mean, hobbies) through their early twenties. Me, being shy in a city 8.4 million people larger than the one I came from, chose books as one of mine.
23 for me was the year of sitting alone in coffee shops waiting for someone to comment on the wannabe avant-garde selection I held in my hands, hiding egregious sunburns behind provocative hard-covers on a yoga mat in Tompkins Square Park, and rejecting modernity (read: Amazon) to embrace tradition (read: perusing the French section of McNally Jackson hoping to impress the hot guy in the Russian section with my literary sensibilities and general know-how).
Because part of this whole growing older thing comes with questions you don’t have answers to—that’s where I assume the “growing wiser” half comes into play—these reads served as my impromptu guides to adulthood. The list I’ve put together might not seem related at first, but they all hold a level of soft understanding and relateability to this uniquely volatile time of life and if we really only have one more year until we hit that quarter-life crisis and our brains are fully developed, we might as well spend as much of that time reading and learning from people who have already made it out the other end. Surprisingly, they have a lot of really great stories to share? Who would’ve thought.
Personal notes aside, the top line of this blog promises horribly un-researched and completely subjective opinions on my bookshelf, and on that promise, I finally deliver! Here’s to the most influential books of 23 and looking forward to the voices that will inevitably shape 24:
1. Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion
This book is my Joker.
The collection itself is a large variety of her earlier magazine essays. You’ll find the first half to be “outsider-inside” observational pieces of 1960s California in general–from the booming counterculture of Haight-Asbury to profiles of the rich, famous, and off-the-grid individuals from the area. If you’re looking only for a strong and objective view of the inner workings of the era, you’ll be well fed.
It is, however, the latter half of the book that keeps you coming back for seconds. Here we are offered the smallest, brightest, glimpse past the stone-cold wall of commentary and indulged with her.
The final two sections of the book, Personals and Seven Places of the Mind, are the most fabulously well-written and impactful essays I’ve ever read. She speaks to topics that, while seemingly far off from our modern lives, resonate with unbelievable amounts of understanding and detail.
If I learned anything in the last year, it’s to be selective with this book. It can be an incredibly personal and cathartic read when you need it, so gatekeep it to the people (like me to whoever you are that cares enough to be reading this right now) who would appreciate it as much as you do. The world doesn’t need any more pseudo-feminist douchebags carrying this in their Aime Leon Dore tote bags to try and impress you into bed with their depth. Make it completely your own and keep it that way. Scribble secret notes to self in the margins. Leave weird tear-dropped stains on the pages that remind you of home and how you left and things change. Highlight the entire essay “On Self Respect” until her words get through your dumb, thick, skull and you actually start to listen. You don’t need to have lived and left New York to relate to “Goodbye to All That” to understand the feeling of being ready to move on from the party.
2. Severance, Ling Ma
Not the Apple TV show, but much better. Severance found me at the right time, right place. It’s an instant classic for the people that, like me, cried while watching Everything Everywhere All at Once or just love wordy think-pieces on the monotony of this silly little thing we call the human condition. If there is one thing on this list that I feel captures the zeitgeist of our times, it’s this. Dark and twisty, but like in a totally satirical commentary-on-our-capitalistic-society-that-strips-humans-down-to-our-most-basic-and-raw-form type of way.
From first glance, you could assume this is another rendition of a new author trying to capitalize on their “New York City Pandemic Lockdown” story. However, give it a chance, and you’ll find that the further you get into it, the more intricately written layers start to unveil themselves. What started as an observation of the millennial workplace becomes this interwoven, multi-narrative story of life itself.
The three pieces move together so seamlessly and bring much-needed context and feeling to the characters that I feel a lot of today’s fiction misses the mark on. From flashbacks of the narrator’s life as the child of immigrants to flash forwards of the post-apocalyptic basic need for survival, Severance is a quirky, cynical, but incredibly real read.
It urges you to take that well-needed pause in our usual go-go-go nature and reflect on what matters—like starting an anonymous and viral Instagram account or, I don't know, caring about others, or letting the people you love know you love them. Something crazy like that.
3. Just Kids, Patti Smith
She’s an icon, a legend she is—what everyone post-modernist music writer bro thinks they are—Patti Smith, everybody!
I’m not going to lie, Just Kids sat on my bookshelf collecting dust for the majority of the year. I had my doubts. I didn’t read this collection until I dipped a toe in the industry, discovered Creem Magazine, and realized Patti Smith was not only a gigantic badass—but who I want to be. I didn’t know then that this would be one of the most important and beautiful books I’ve read not only in the last year, but maybe ever. Dramatic, I know, but while reading this I just kept drawing parallels to the lives we live now in the same neighborhoods, restaurants, and venues that these people started from the ground-up, and you have to pay your respects to that.
This collection of essays centers on Patti Smith and photographer, Robert Maplethorpe’s, evolving relationship and journey to art fame together. It’s loving, urgent, and poetic all at once as she brings an unabashed level of detail to their friendship from its origins to its ends. It sheds an, albeit dingy, light on the “scene” and the people at the forefront of the art and music we still consume today. With plenty of features from famous names of the times, the entire book reads as an outsider looking in (are we starting to see a pattern, here?). She has a special talent of accurately picturing people as they were, without falling trap to the romantics of each subject.
From fleabag rooms at the Chelsea Hotel to solo apartments shared in the East Village, Patti’s journey through punk poetry and Robert’s through photography strikes a sense of “can-do” attitude in you while reading. She’s not shy about divulging the grimiest struggles the two of them experience together while trying to cultivate their careers in the arts, but as we know them now, that struggle was not for nothing.
Reading this made me so desperate to start using the phrase “ran with” again and bring back niche. Not in a cliche High School movie lunchroom scene way, but in the more wholesome community building way. The way that brings out the most creative, outrageous, raucous in us all. In the “You know Patti Smith, she ran with Maplethorpe and Warhol and The Factory crew that used to hang out at the Chelsea Hotel,” type of way. The way that makes you feel like you're a part of something truly special.
But who knows. Maybe we already have that. You know, they hang out at Dimes Square sometimes? They’re in that East Villians anti-influencer, TikTok influencer group, that throws parties at Joyface and Flower Shop sometimes? They're like totally shaping the modern East Village counterculture?
Objectively more lame, but we'll see where it leads.
4. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, Cookie Mueller
If you know where to look around the Lower East Side of Manhattan, you can probably already sense a Cookie Mueller-Esque renaissance stirring. It’s visible in magazines like The Drunken Canal becoming underground cult classics, the Indie Sleaze (and coinciding “Heroine Chic”) era of DIY party scenes re-emerging, and the sheer amount of Boheme-women wearing Penny Lane coats up and down First Avenue.
Walking through Clear Water is what I’ve dubbed the more outrageous, open, and free-wheeling Eve Babitz collection of the East. As far as writing goes, Cookie is an incredible storyteller, entertaining but incredibly based. This book is a collection of work from her time as a columnist with The Village Voice as well as unpublished essays and stories from her prior life as an actress, writer, mother, designer, dancer, self-proclaimed art-hag, and iconic East Village raconteur.
Each essay is laid out chronologically following the odyssey that is Cookie’s life through the 70s and 80s. It’s a counterculture battle cry of love, art, drugs, music, and everything else that shaped the cultural scene in Lower Manhattan. From go-go clubs with serial killers and heroin overdoses in Rivington Street apartments to coverage of the AIDS crisis (that eventually took her life) and passionate advocacy for those lost from the arts because of it–reading Cookie’s essays is like an intimate and pressing peek into her heart. She's the blueprint of what every female writer in Manhattan wants to be, because she was completely free. She has this unique voice and ability to capture a moment in time so effortlessly that it feels like you were right there next to her.
This collection is hedonism at its finest: the constant pursuit of pleasure and beauty in a way that feels soulfully planned and meticulously crafted. I would recommend it for anyone feeling a little lost in their own plans to read and keep their mind open to the idea of purposefully breaking the rules every once in a while. Loosen up your grip on being taken so seriously and say yes to things like starring in indie movies with headless chickens more often!
5. Happy Hour, Marlowe Granados
Grabbing a refreshing French 75 and hopping on the L from the East Village to Brooklyn, we join the lovely ladies of Happy Hour for another hedonistic journey on what it really means to be a young, broke woman in this godless city. It’s a charming, exploratory, insightful take on not knowing what the fuck to do with your life—fab!
Be forewarned, the entire read is a little chaotic. It’s very Moshfegh-esque in the way that there’s not a through plot, mainly just vibes. But that’s definitely not to say those vibes aren’t amazing and fantastic and beautifully written, because they are. The characters aren’t totally likeable, their antics all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Hamptons aren’t exactly believable, and the dialogue is fairly pretentious, but that’s the point. Everything feels so authentically messy 20-something that you can’t help but become emotionally invested in their adventures and start to imagine how you would react if ever put in the same insane situations.
Through the main character’s (Isa) diary entries, we follow her and her best friend (Gala) through one of the sweetest and messiest summer’s of a young girl's life: the year she turns 21. With a sharp POV, you quickly cut through the initial party-girl lifestyle illusion and find a story full of observations unique to this stage of life. It’s about finding your own identity, cultivating and navigating semi-toxic relationships, and striving for enriching cultural experiences—all while scheming ways to pay your outrageously too high New York rent by any means necessary. Relatable to a fault.
If there’s anything from this I take with me to 24, it’s that being hot and being interesting can get you a lot further in life than you think it can. And drinking French 75’s might taste horrific, but you feel really fucking cool ordering it.
Only halfway kidding. This book is a fantastic pause-inducing moment for any other fiercely curious twenty-somethings out there to take a long hard look at the life they’re leading vs. the life they want to live and start making actionable moves in one way or the other.
And on that note, I take this line to acknowledge the fact I've never been any good at endings. Written or otherwise.
These books are all so special to me that I’ve quit reading entirely until I put these opinions online. I couldn’t possibly dare to think about reading another interesting word until I gave these the praise that they deserved. It took a minute, but now that 23 is out there, 24 can officially begin, in all of it's even more confusing, joyful, panicked, sexy, glory.
If you've made it this far, thank you for listening as I subliminally prove to myself that I can write something longer than a headline through the faux lens of book reviews and thank you for unintentionally giving my portfolio more views so more recruiters think I’m interesting, cool, funny, and absolutely worth a hire. Maybe one day I'll switch to writing about my own words, instead of someone else's, but until then, don’t listen to the bad reviews you’ll inevitably find on Goodreads by some jaded, older, more brain-developed reader... Listen to me, I know nothing about anything. It’s perfect!
All love. Mwah!
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