I was a fairly unsupervised child, living like a rat on the crumbs of adult culture, its cinema in particular. 1976’s Taxi Driver I saw for the first time at eight—rented and shown to me by a housemate of my mother’s—and what I remember most is the gamine Jodie Foster at a diner’s laminate tabletop: her cheer, and her will, her fistfuls of prostitution money. The relieving and misguided lesson I absorbed, likely because I felt particularly attuned and exposed to adult violence, was that childhood could be short-circuited. Soon after, thanks to a few errant adults in my life, I was renting the most obscene things I could find, studying the horror aisle of the Silver Screen Video in Petaluma as though it were the Library of Alexandria: containing and promising and threatening all. Unusual to my experience of these films was that their one-dimensional and sex-warped predators did not seem so different from the world reflected in my actual life.

A few years before, the month I turned five, my neighborhood had been infested by the FBI, who were searching for traces of the just-kidnapped twelve-year-old Polly Klaas. She was abducted in October of 1993 from a sleepover at her house, which was around my literal corner. What Polly became, in the child’s simplistic understanding, was the greatest celebrity: her face on every magazine and national news segment, the vigil always lit for her in town looking like an ancient shrine to the cruelest gods. It took almost two months to find her body. When the guilty man was finally tried, he famously declared in court that Polly had pleaded: Just don’t do me like my dad. Her ruined father lunged for him.

In the years I consumed most of the horror canon, I saw Sissy Spacek in her red shower, Tatum O’Neal with her hips electrocuted by sin up toward God, Jamie Lee Curtis in breast-bouncing flight. I watched the Pet Sematary trilogy, though the supernatural was never of much appeal—I was a girl, and I was curious about girls being killed. One could say that this curiosity was only an expression of internalized misogyny, and one might be very right, but this theory would exclude the great protection afforded me by the chance to experience this kind of hatred against women with no disguises, in private, with the ability to rewind and replay.

Decades later, I’d read the white feminists who castigated the slasher canon, Solnit and her derivatives who called for its expulsion, asking why it was that depictions of violent misogyny, the fetishization of the missing woman and the female carcass, had not been dismissed from the cultural record. By then it was too late to revise my response to genre’s blunt messaging, which had been a comfort when I was a girl, requiring even for the child little decoding. That bluntness was welcome among the subtleties of other monoculture staples: how a likeable male character on The Larry Sanders Show might meet jokey opprobrium for being “pussy-whipped,” or how, as in the dispiriting pablum of You’ve Got Mail (1997), a charming woman could find real love so long as she sacrifice her financial and spiritual purposes. The horror movie was also the beginning of my indoctrination into image culture, the fascination with the unidirectional, the film still or painting that could change me—and that I could never change. It did not occur to me until recently that this submissive solace came at certain personal costs. Back then these movies felt like an empowerment, because what I hoped to comprehend, in order to master, was the machinery of fear.

Book Riot covers a ton of news every week in addition to what we round up here at Today in Books. Here’s a sampler from the week that was.

The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to All the Lists

Three Parents Sue Florida Over Book Bans, and These Are the States That Have Banned Book Bans

The Most Popular Books of the Year So Far, According to Goodreads

The 2024 Lambda Literary Award Winners

Hit the caffeination station and roll into the weekend with this highlight reel of Book Riot’s most popular posts.

10 Book Club Picks for June, from Mocha Girls Read to GMA Book Club

The Best New Book Releases of the Week

The Most Popular Books of the Year So Far, According to Goodreads

New AI App Turns Famous Authors Into Reading Guides

The list of Amazon’s best books of the year so far has just been released. The list was compiled by Amazon’s editors, who collectively read thousands of books a year in order to curate best-of and other kinds of lists. This year, they chose 20 books as the best overall books, and provided lists of the best 20 books for other genres and categories, like literary fiction, romance, history, children’s, and more.

Read on for Amazon’s list of the 10 best overall best books of the year so far, as well as the overall best book.

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

New AI App Turns Authors Into Virtual Lit Professors

Roxane Gay, Marlon James, Margaret Atwood, and John Banville are among the well-known authors who have lent their voices and expertise to Rebind, a new AI-powered app intended “to replicate the dialogue between a student and teacher.” Rebind is the brainchild of John Kaag and Clancy Martin, philosophy professors and friends who believe that studying the classics can improve people’s lives if only they’d actually read them.

Drawing on their own experiences in the classroom, Kaag and Martin theorized that more people would be more willing to engage with classic texts if they could do it with the help of a knowledgeable guide. The solution? The pair spent the last two years having lengthy conversations—sometimes up to 20 hours—with authors and experts who agreed (for pay) to let Rebind turn them into chatbots. When Rebind launches on June 17, you’ll be able to read The Age of Innocence with guidance from Roxane Gay, get Marlon James’s take on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and consult John Banville about James Joyce’s famously difficult Dubliners.

This is the most creative and interesting book-related AI tech I’ve seen so far, and I’m happy to see big-name authors leading by example with their openness to exploring generative uses of this technology. What a refreshing change of pace from the publishing industry’s experiments with consumer-facing AI, which have been almost exclusively limited to (pretty disappointing) book recommendation tools to date! Yesterday, I told one such tool that my favorite book is Beloved by Toni Morrison, that I read for education, exploration, and curiosity, and that I wanted my next book to make me feel informed. Its top suggestions were The Alchemist and The Night Circus. So. The bar is low. Whether Rebind will clear it remains to be seen, and I’ll be watching with great interest.

I’m curious, readers: what do you think about Rebind and other book-related AI experiments? Have you seen anything awesome? Are you ignoring them in hopes they’ll go away? Let’s talk.

Congratulations! You made it to Friday. You deserve a bunch of bookish goodness as a treat.

🎧 Here are Libro.fm’s most pre-ordered audiobooks of summer.

🏆 Can you guess the most-read books on Goodreads this week?

🛀 These books will help you elevate your everyday routines into meaningful rituals.

🍿 60% of Netflix’s most popular shows are based on books and comics.

Several states nationwide have floated legislation to curtail book bans this year. Some of those bills, like the one proposed in Utah, were not only voted down but were superseded with bills that actually further fuel book bans. Other anti-book ban bills, however, made their way successfully through to law.

Let’s take a look at the states that have addressed the right to read and access materials at the library by law. This is as comprehensive as possible, with the acknowledgment that other bills may be pending as of writing or maybe in the works for the next legislative session. It does not include bills that address other library-related issues.

Illinois

Passed in 2023, the first-in-the-nation anti-book ban bill in Illinois ties funding to intellectual freedom policies in public and public school libraries. Basically, if a library wants access to a pot of state money for their institution, they need to have in their collection policies the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights and/or a comparable statement upholding the rights of everyone to access materials in the collection. Books and other items in the library cannot be removed for partisan or discriminatory reasons.

This is a great first step, though certainly, it hasn’t ended book bans in Illinois over the course of its first year as a law because it is fairly limited in scope (it was easy for a school board to ban an entire book reading program, for example). It also does not apply to prison libraries. But the signal this bill sends to libraries that the state is paying attention cannot be downplayed.

California

Also passed in 2023, the California anti-book ban bill applies to school boards specifically. They are unable to censor or ban books, curricula, textbooks, or other learning materials from the districts they oversee. The bill does not apply to public libraries or prison libraries. It also has not stopped school boards from censorship since implementation (not to mention that it’s public libraries bearing the brunt of censorship right now), but, like the bill in Illinois, it is at least an acknowledgment of an ongoing reality, even in a “blue” state like California.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes, these books are brand new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. This week, let’s talk about one of this year’s most anticipated reads for Pride Month!

Graphing is the practice of visualizing the abstract—the use of the coordinate plane not to map a territory or to demarcate a two-dimensional surface but to track a measurable quantity across space and time, quantities such as position, velocity, temperature, and brightness. Its invention can be traced to Nicole Oresme, bishop of Lisieux, courtier to Charles V, and scholastic philosopher-­polymath who held forth at the College of Navarre of the newly founded University of Paris. His Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum (Treatise on the Configurations of Qualities and Motions) from 1353 lays out early versions of what we now call functions and the x and y axes, which he referred to as “longitude” (the axis of the independent variable) and “latitude” (the perpendicular axis for plotting the values of the dependent variable). What made these pictures not merely illustrational but statistical “graphs” was Oresme’s radical insistence on presenting the variables in accurate ratio, with some accord of scale between the unit of measurement and the object or subject or process being measured. His key principle, at least when it comes to the visual, is: “The measure of intensities can be fittingly imagined as the measure of lines.”

Not content to have merely created graphing, Oresme also speculated about creating graphs of graphs, so­-called complementary graphing that goes beyond the charting of an individual phenomenon into the charting of the relationships between sets or groups of multiple phenomena, an innovation that took the statistical combination of algebra and geometry just up to the border of what would become modern calculus.

It’s striking to note what phenomena—and what relationships—Oresme thought worthy of graphing. His examples include motion and heat and cold, but also varying definitions and degrees of the qualitative, including grief or sorrow, in effect prophesying the future of infographics, which don’t purport to measure just production, consumption, price fluctuations, or the orbits of stars, but also the ebb and flow of human opinion.

This is a profoundly contemporary desire, to metricize and parameterize our own thoughts and emotions, and to create dynamic models from those standards to show—to make seeable—our social and political life.

I think most people like to walk away from a dinner party saying, “What a lovely evening.” I do. But I don’t feel compelled to do that. I know it’s not always possible. Also, I prefer people who don’t necessarily regard the warm glow of candlelight or the sound of a thirty-seven-dollar bottle of listán negro being poured into a glass as an automatic call for politeness, regardless of what is being said, or happening in the world. It’s commendable to walk into a dinner party assuming you’ll have a nice time but wise to prepare yourself for the wrong-thinking of your fellow guests.

There are people who never become openly enraged at dinner parties but I am probably not interested in knowing them. I love telling people stories about me getting upset at dinner parties. Here is one: I was at a small dinner party recently where my companions started talking about what they perceived as the huge problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses. While I do not doubt anti-Semitism exists on college campuses, I would not classify resisting and protesting Israel’s seventy-five-year occupation of Palestine, near twenty-year blockade of Gaza, and killing of tens of thousands of people as anti-Semitism. 

All I could manage in this situation was a dismissive snort. I was asked to explain my snort, but I knew that if I did I would be beaten to death with facts from one newspaper, which I also read and with whose arguments I have become numbly familiar, so I just snorted again, left the table, and went to bed. Now, the hosts of this dinner party were my own parents. I got lucky in this instance. Most dinner-party invitations do not include a bed and an en suite bathroom. Whatever you are willing to say you must also be willing to stew in.

I have a friend who is a film critic who was at a dinner party several years ago when another guest proclaimed, “If Walt Whitman were alive today, he would definitely be writing for television.” No one has ever said to me that if so-and-so dead writer were alive today they would definitely be writing for television. But my friend, because of his job, has similar observations made to him “about every eighteen months.” So he was prepared with a response: “That’s a ridiculous thing to say. You don’t know what you’re talking about. What makes you think that Walt Whitman would ever write for television?”   

“Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.”

—Feste the Clown, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare

Walking up to the Elysian Theater, a small club off the 5 at the foot of Elysian Heights in Los Angeles, I thought I was hallucinating when I saw a dozen goats under the bright white light of the marquee, and for every goat a clown. Everyone was fawning over the short-haired creatures. Some had two little bald spots on their heads instead of horns, which, I later learned, is where the hot irons get applied for disbudding.

The Elysian was hosting Clownchella, an event happening the week before Coachella. Maybe it goes without saying: these events bear virtually no relation to each other. Coachella is a sprawling music and art festival of spoon-fed nostalgia, snakeskin pants, and sensorially shattering spectacle held on the grounds of a polo club, brought to you by sponsors like American Express, Coca-Cola, BMW, et cetera, and which costs (at least) $510 plus accommodations. Clownchella was a one-night clown festival with five acts that cost sixteen bucks.

The game is played with great feeling. Pikachu, perhaps the most successful soft power symbol of the twenty-first century’s new media enterprise, looms gigantic over Nintendo as a concept and cuteness as aesthetic dominance, despite staying mostly benchside on the battlefield. Though, for some of us, these pocket monsters are just ciphers for the competitive video game circuit: 4D chess pieces; some amalgamation of straights, flushes, or full houses; the kings, queens, and rooks of RNG; what Dungeons & Dragons would be with rounded edges and big-lipped fish splish-splashing their way toward evolution. Next to my black-and-white Nintendo Switch sits the corduroy Bulbasaur my son got me for Father’s Day. I’m playing around with weather, one of four core environmental hazards in the extended Pokémon video universe: Rain, Sun, Snow, and Sand. Enjoying the filth I am, of a team whose prospects are slim but whose aesthetics please me, listenin to Beans and Freeway on my headphones. And even though what we do is wrong I play Tyranitar to start, a darkly rock type dinosaur with SAND STREAM, brewing up a storm when she enters the battlefield. Despite a soft-chinned weakness to FIGHTING types, Tyranitar is a respectable individual; she earned a slot on my team of six through grit and survivability, clapping back after absorbing heavy damage historically, just without the heroism of hindsight.

Pokémon is all about reading. Hard and soft. Soft, like how I can assume the way my opponent’s Iron Hands, a FIGHTING type, is trained based on trends in the meta game, whereby Pikalytics.com discloses player data amalgamated from prior battles. Most people plug this Pokémon into a hard-hitting tank slot: high HIT POINTS and ATTACK, made to live through anything and crush enemy morale thereafter; it’s what they’re good at, these hands. And as they say in The Players Club, you gotta use what you got to get what you want. And everybody wanna be the very best, of course, like no one ever was: picture Ash Ketchum listenin to Drake, confused, yet falling so deeply in love. But I respect my opponent’s awareness here. I change Tyranitar’s type to FLYING. Typical move, and my opponent could read me reading them and react to this and I could read their reaction and so forth in an endless chain of telekinetic tug-of-war. But he does not. Tyranitar resists the punch, and together, with the help of this ghost dog, Greavard, who burns Iron Hands—now at less than half-full health from Tyranitar’s foot in that ass—we carve a path toward victory.

A whole decade before Trey Songz couldn’t help but wait, I was beyond impatience rushing into the local EB Games store and slamming down my grass-cutting money for Pokémon Red. Its world has shaped my psyche for as long as I can remember, from soft-boy-kid card collector into dedicated owner of translucent purple Game Boys past. Afterward, I fucked around with the idea of getting into the official competitive scene, observing the e-sport from afar. But until this year and the death of the man who raised me, I’d never tried. There are lots of obvious reasons for this, like class background, money, and time, and the peculiarities of social existence, the navigation of white nerd spaces that have always made me queasy; sure, I’d swing by Benny’s Card Shop on Torresdale Ave. for cards, or hit a Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament here and there, but I was still more at home on the basketball courts in Mayfair, where rushing over to get winners would inspire fear from random white women in the suburb, diving into the tall grass to escape my representation. But I can’t play ball like I used to. Now I deliver the order in Super Smash Bros., Street Fighter, Little Big Planet, or Pokémon. Pokémon chief among them. This global trans-media product whose system of play elevates and then magnifies the stylistics of the chess or checkers or Speed I played with my aunt, the Texas Hold’em I played as a kid on Popop’s computer, the Dungeons & Dragons–style dice-roll mechanics grafted into my beloved Icewind Dale role-playing games. Teaching my children mathematics by the game’s pleasurable proxy, I watched their jaws drop at an equation for calculating battle damage in one turn of Pokémon:

On some level this is basic algebra, stretched out for the convoluted chorus of choice that such games demand: the multiplicity of variables that make generalizations both iffy and necessary, as in life. With more than a thousand Pokémon, some of whom have dozens of usable moves or abilities combined, complex type matchups, and SPEED interactions—not to mention the impact of item choices and player particularities—every best-of-three competitive Pokémon match is a master class in complexity. With at least thirty larger tournaments a season, and several hundred players in the video game division alone, not counting all the special events and local setups, the online tournaments and unofficial skirmish matches, the game’s growth, especially in the past few years, tells the story: throngs of people lined up outside convention centers and local stores all across the world, sold-out regional and international competitions from London to Chile, Indiana to Portland, up to sixty-five thousand dollars in prizes, and the chance to compete for the world title, which, held last year in Yokohama, Japan, ran out of spectator passes near instantaneously.

I’m fascinated by interruptions. Things are running along one way, one sort of conversation is ongoing, reality is like this not that and then suddenly—everything changes. There’s a further question of when interruptions are admissible, even welcome, and when they are forbidden. My story in the latest Spring issue of The Paris Review is about a dinner party that gets interrupted. The interruption is bad news for the host (an imaginary Icelandic philosopher called Alda Jónsdóttir) and bad news for the person who does the interrupting (another imaginary philosopher called Ole Lauge). But it’s even worse news for a beautiful poached salmon, minding its own business at the center of the table.

One of the most famous interruptions in literary history is the strange case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Person from Porlock. The story goes that in the summer of 1797 Coleridge was at home in the village of Nether Stowey, Somerset. The cries of birds echoed across the gentle Quantock hills—warblers and whinchats, stonechats, pipits and nightjars. Coleridge was asleep and dreaming vividly (opium may have been taken). Upon emerging from his stupor, he realized that he had dreamed a vast, wondrous poem—“Kubla Khan.” He dashed off to find a pen, ink, and paper, and began scribbling everything down: the famous opening “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree” followed by another fifty-odd lines of sparkling verse. But then: a knock on the door, an interruption! A “Person from Porlock” had arrived on business, and distracted Coleridge for a long, tedious interval. When our poet finally returned to his desk, the vision had faded. Coleridge published “Kubla Khan” as a “fragment” and blamed the Person from Porlock for depriving posterity of the complete work.

Since then, the Person from Porlock has become a symbol of unwanted interruptions, poetic genius demolished by tawdry reality, the dangers of answering the front door, and so on. Nonetheless, a few people have questioned Coleridge’s story. In a short poem, “The Person from Porlock,” Robert Graves suggests that if anything we could do with an army of such persons hammering on doors and interrupting solipsistic writers, as a form of quality control. The poet Stevie Smith also presents her views on Porlockgate in “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock.” For a start, asks Smith, why did Coleridge rush to answer the door? Why didn’t he just hide like any self-respecting misanthropic author? Smith concludes that Coleridge was already stuck, “weeping and wailing” over his poem, “hungry to be interrupted.” The advent of the Porlock Person was, in fact, a huge relief.

Douglas Adams’s 1987 novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency imagines a parallel world in which Coleridge finished “Kubla Khan,” without any interruptions. In Adams’s witty counterfactual, the finished version of “Kubla Khan” is imbued with some weird power to destroy humanity. A time-traveling detective, Dirk Gently, is dispatched to eighteenth-century Somerset to play the Person from Porlock (who, in this reality, doesn’t exist) and ensure that Coleridge never finishes his poem. One trouble with interruptions, Adams suggests, is that, on a cosmic level, we have no way of knowing if they’re good or bad. By the logic of the butterfly effect, for example, had Roland Barthes been interrupted at any point on the twenty-fifth of February, 1980, he probably wouldn’t have been hit by a laundry van on his way home. The tedious interruption we resent at the time may spare us a far greater sorrow, including—in Adams’s novel—the actual apocalypse.

A little more than two years ago, an image appeared in my thoughts, which I took to be a memory. It first struck me randomly, while making lunch at home, but immediately the image felt familiar and well-worn, though I couldn’t concretely remember thinking about it in the past. It was a short clip of myself in bed, at my family’s home in Maine, when I was about seven or eight, peering out the window in the middle of the night and seeing an ambient white light coming from an uncertain origin above, flooding down like a curtain onto the field.

The image was almost certainly a false memory—perhaps derived from a dream—or some kind of psychological projection. But I’d been wrong in this assumption before: I once began to suspect that a story I’d told for decades, about being a baby model for a diaper company, was an odd fantasy that I’d inserted into my biography, but when I asked my mother, she confirmed that it was true. If only as an anomalous psychological object, one of uncertain provenance and meaning, the memory-image seemed worthy of investigation. But how do you investigate the origin of an image in your mind’s eye? It occurred to me that perhaps I’d found a reason to finally call on the services of my friend Louise Mittelman, a hypnotherapist. Hypnotism may have the mustiness of nineteenth-century spiritualism hanging over it, as well as associations both sinister (like the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control program) and cartoonish (think Rocky and Bullwinkle, spiraling eyeballs), but this all felt appropriate to the irreality of my investigation (and, for that matter, the irreality of our postpandemic moment). I texted her to make an appointment.

Louise belongs to a collective of practitioners, including psychotherapists, yogis, and herbalists, who work out of Get Right Wellness in Ridgewood, New York, an unassuming storefront just a few blocks from my home, marked only by a sign with two delicately drawn hands releasing a radiating sun, the letters GRW stamped in its center. When I arrived, I rang a buzzer labeled “Clarity,” and a minute later, Louise appeared. She made us each a cup of tea and walked me to her office, settling into a large orange chair beside a table on which sat a notebook and a small gold bell. I sat down across from her.

Hypnotism works, or doesn’t, to the extent that a patient is open to suggestion, and everyone has a different degree of “suggestibility.” “It’s a boon for hypnotists to be suggestible themselves,” Louise explained. “The way that I visualize hypnosis, it’s sort of like an elevator shaft into your subconscious.” Most of Louise’s hypnotherapy clients come to break a habit—often to quit smoking, which is a classic use of hypnotherapy and has a high success rate. She also helps people work through relationship issues, prepare for public speaking or exams, and wants to learn more about treating trauma. Some people come with more esoteric requests, though, particularly for past life regression therapy, which involves retrieving memories from previous incarnations of oneself—though, of course, the interpretation of these “memories” is highly contested. Louise told me about one of her own experiences, while she was getting certified at the Divine Feminine School of Hypnosis, of “dropping in” on what seemed like a past life. “I was in the twenties and I was this female jewelry maker, and I was wearing pants—what came through really clearly was the pants.” At lunch after the session, one of her classmates mentioned that she was working on a project Louise hadn’t been aware of, a movie about a female artist who’d popularized women’s pants. Like my own memory-image, the origin of Louise’s hypnotic vision was mysterious. I felt I was probably in the right place.

Last year, a formal tone that sounded nothing like my speaking voice started to sputter out from my cursor and onto the page: “I cannot think about it now,” “I journeyed back to my abode.” Words elongated, and phrasings—strange ones—appeared. I watched the sentences extend, and noticed they were saying very little, but that they were saying this little in very mannered ways. “At the shore, attempting to reel in my kayak amidst the smooth stones and locally famous sea glass, I suffered a gigantic spasm of the muscles in my back, so painful I could not speak but to scream,” I wrote—not a terrible sentence, and not describing nothing, but when have I ever spoken the formulation “could not __ but to ___”?  Or the word “amidst”?

When, last year, I saw in my prose that falseness and false formality, I wondered where it had come from. I seemed to be a few minutes away from using whence. I seemed to be searching for a rhythm that wouldn’t come, and reading over tatters of drafts later, I realized I was attempting to write prose in what was basically iambic pentameter, as if this classic formal constraint contained within it the key, the one key, to a sense of writing well, a sense so rare that year for me to find at all. From whence this sense of language-pressed-through-sieve? From where did it first flow, that impulse toward the cannot instead of the can’t, I wondered, and the immediate answer that occurred to me was, strangely but also obviously, the internet, which supplies phrases like “I am deceased” and “I simply cannot.” I thought to myself that I do not, anymore, use the internet to read very deeply.

Now, the internet can feel like a relatively arid version of its wilder self. I return to Instagram, where many nights this year I’ve revisited the video of the young man being possessed by an ancient burp who cracks his head hard into a garage door. Visual content dominates. But still, running alongside this video, and the many like it, are other digital testaments to experience—personal essays published in places fewer and further between, for less and less money, if any at all, places insistent on the very democratic, and also cheap, idea that all “I”s have a story to tell, and are simply waiting for their platform, that more content is better than less, and that writing is, in fact, “content” in the first place. If we are to look at, for instance, the Masterclass guide to writing personal essays, we are told, first and foremost, to strive for the importance of our own personal experience. A personal essay “serves to describe an important lesson gathered from a writer’s life experiences,” says Masterclass, and it should focus on a moment that “sparked growth.” Masterclass teaches us to write in an already-existent form in a proficient way. And it is a weighty idea—that all personal essays must be about growth-sparking moments. That all moments, written about, must be of importance. No wonder “cannot” essays, as I’ll call them, often seem characterized by what seems to be that particular stiltedness, that particular insistence on extension instead of contraction, that particularly “important”-feeling diction that I have noticed in my own recent writing.

We write “I cannot” instead of “I can’t,” we use formal tools of nomenclature. We might use white space, or a braided structure, to lend weight to otherwise innocuous phrases. We sometimes, or often, use the present tense, flattening us inside a moment in time alongside our narrator (I turn on the coffee machine. In the thick fog, I cannot see more than ten feet in front of my feet.) We use short, abrupt-feeling sentences (I walk to the store. [White Space] I buy glass cleaner. [White Space]). Our slight formality might turn towards the archaic—a friend recently sent me an essay that used the phrase “my monthly blood” to describe having one’s period.

“Top three rivers. Go.”

I wasn’t even sure I could name three rivers, let alone rank them, until Ruthie started rattling off her favorites. For most of dinner she had kept her twelve-year-old head buried in a stack of printer paper, only surfacing for the occasional bite of food. Her hair had grown into a long bob near her shoulders with a curtain of bangs that parted to reveal her face, resulting in us calling her Joey Ramone until her pleas of “Stoppppp” weighed more sincere than playful. She has since cut her hair.

There were eight of us in total: Ruthie, her parents, another couple, a gallerist and one of her artists, and me. It was a cold night in January, and we enjoyed a hearty meal of risotto, roasted vegetables, and salad. I had come to New York from Los Angeles to use a free companion flight certificate that was due to expire, and I was ten, maybe fifteen minutes late, prompting the low-hanging chorus of “Well, he came all the way from California!”

While I am not a regular, Ruthie’s dining room is one I have frequented over the course of her life, and it remains fondly vivid in my mind. It is a cozy, lived-in space full of both practical and whimsical elements that reflect her family’s sense of humor quite accurately. In the center is an oblong wooden dining table that doubles as a surface for homework between meals. The main source of light is an overhead barn pendant, mellowed out by a plastic kitchen colander placed over the bottom lip in order to dissipate the harsh glow of a bare bulb.