I read the fewest books in years in 2021. It makes sense, as I spent much of the year heads down, writing my own book.
The bulk of the reading I did wasn’t books. It comprised of chapters of academic texts, research studies and a lot of interview transcripts and news stories. That said, thanks to my ongoing contributions to NPR Life Kit, a request to appear on the Nerdette podcast for WBEZ and really solid recommendations from friends, I was fortunate to encounter books I would have never picked up on my own.
Also I am part of a book club called Literati, in which you choose one of their famous curators to send you a selection per month. I love it! Susan Orlean is the curator of the “club” I joined. This has been the source at least a few of the books on my list this year.
My 2021 list:
Bark
Lorrie Moore
My Inner Sky
Mari Andrews
Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity and Change
Maggie Smith
Come as You Are
Emily Nagoski
Want
Lynn Steger Strong
How to Change
Katy Milkman
Seeing Ghosts
Kat Chow
Let’s Face It
Rio Viera Newton
In The Dream House
Carmen Marie Machado
Luster
Raven Leilani
Kink
RO Kwon and Garth Greenwell
The Little Book of Skin Care: Korean Beauty Secrets for Healthy, Glowing Skin
Charlotte Cho
Perfect Me
Heather Widdows
The Soulmate Equation
Christina Lauren
The Family Firm
Emily Oster
Version Zero
David Yoon
Laziness Does Not Exist
Devon Price
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You
Tim Kreider
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
James Hollis
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney
Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud
Anne Helen Petersen
Love in the Big City
Sang Young Park
Must-Read Memoir:Seeing Ghosts, by my sister from another mother, Kat Chow. Kat is really the closest person to a younger sister that I have in my life, and I look to her for advice constantly. She is wise and thoughtful and the kind of writer that pierces straight through you. I read her book en route home from Mexico and bawled my eyes out on the plane.
My Fave Fiction:Love in the Big City, a nostalgic trip back to Seoul for me, but also a glimpse into life in the gay scene in Korea, which deserves a lot more rich storytelling like this. Luster, whose set piece at the end was so well earned. Beautiful World, Where Are You, because Sally Rooney still knows what’s up.
Fave Non-Fiction: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, by James Hollis, who is my go-to Jungian author. Read him or listen to him on podcasts, that man makes complete sense.
Off to unchartered waters. The Pacific Ocean. April 2021.
We started the year in the strictest of lockdowns, as Los Angeles County faced such a wave of sickness and death that even outdoor dining (which had re-opened in fall 2020) was again shut down. We end this year with a COVID19 death toll of 800,000, a breathtaking, heartbreaking casualty number, triple-vaccinated (a miracle of science) and calculating risk as Omicron, the latest variant, spreads like a California wildfire.
Time collapsed. It seems impossible the January 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol and the Biden/Harris inauguration happened this year. It feels like so many lifetimes ago. At the same time, it seems impossible that this year is already coming to an end.
I started the year married, I will end the year divorced. Sorry to those we didn’t get to personally tell, and a reluctant thanks to the very expensive LA lawyers who got it done and took all our money. Matty and I have adjusted from husband+wife to game co-parents of the girls, whose inner lives I cannot know, but they sure seem to be shining on, expressing their sassy selves in their friendships, school and activities as the family has shapeshifted.
These past two years have presented an extended lesson in the importance of pain for living a good life. “Learn to lose,” my Jungian analyst Jonathan said to me. So accustomed I am, as a high-achieving millennial in late capitalism, to the notion of career and life only going in the direction of more, more, more … that I didn’t question it deeply. But the cascading turbulence of pandemic extremes and mid-life upheaval underscores the cheesy-yet-true play-on-words: There’s no growth in your comfort zone, there’s no comfort in your growth zone.
Put differently, we’re too conditioned to see our lives as linear stories of constant progress. That perspective makes any texture or loss in our personal or professional lives seem like failure or a sign of doom, when messiness is truly transformative, depending on how you metabolize it. Orienting ourselves to perpetual “wins” cuts off our ability to experience the fullness of the human experience; the range of the seasons and cycles. I wrote, perhaps presciently, in a 2020 new year’s intention that “maintenance is also progress.” I appreciate with so much more clarity now. I have adopted a more seasonal mindset, knowing winters come, and that we find rich wisdom in darkness.
For me, learning to lose, and rearrange, and adapt, has unlocked a version of me that’s the most whole and clear-eyed as I’ve ever felt. I was contented in my long-term relationship, I’m as contented and more individualized out of a partnership, with thanks to the cocoon of love and support of my village.
I am writing, writing, writing ALL THE TIME because I have a book to finish in the spring. It’s already pandemic-delayed by a year. It explains why I’ve had to hiatus from blogging, but I always do one of these yearly recaps, so I wasn’t about to break my streak. Herewith, the superlatives, and then a list of things…
Pandemic MVPs: Store brand jugs of peach oolong iced tea from Von’s/Pavillions, or what you might know as Albertson’s, depending on your geographic region. A simple black jumpsuit from Natori, which I practically lived in. Airpods for phone calls. Liz Taylor, Pamela Boykoff and Skyler Bentsen, who I called the most from my runs and they’d reliably pick up. Joke’s on you, ladies!
Pop culture that got me through 2021: Succession. The NYT Britney documentaries (both), Minari, Ted Lasso, The Split, Sex Lives of College Girls
Fave Selfie: Strawberry fields forever, with the girls
Strawberry picking with the girls, May 2021
Notable New Friends: Xiaowei Wang, who became my TED conference buddy after we met in Monterey. I love their ideas and verve and vibe so much.
And Craig Mazin! I watched his acclaimed project, Chernobyl, after our mutual friend Alec introduced us so we could beta-test a video chatting app where you have a back-and-forth asynchronous video chat in front of anyone who wants to watch. As a result, I got to joke around with Craig and get some useful writing tips from one of the great screenwriters.
Firsts: Stand-up paddleboarding. Post-COVID international trip (Mexico). Quarantine exemption (Korea). Vertigo. Divorce. Hosting a Council on Foreign Relations white paper drop, featuring a dude who inexplicably sometimes comes up in my dreams, former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
In no particular order, this year I…
Added dill to scallion pancakes, felt like a genius
Got the Pfizer vaccine (3x)
Got vertigo (1x)
Got a birthday song from Kato Kaelin
Bought a new car
Got my bike stolen
Reunited with my dad and mom for the first time in 1.5 years Said goodbye to Caesar
Lost an extraordinary friend to COVID
Lost another extraordinary friend to a pulmonary embolism
Learned I have trypophobia, which unlocked a lot
Got a questionably-named BBQ sauce, We Rub You, to change its name
Sprained my foot playing tennis*
Took a yacht to all the container ships docked in the ocean
Tried injections on my face (Botox, skin botox, hydroinjections)
Reported on skincare, fast fashion, laziness and more all thanks to my NPR work Glamped in Santa Barbara
Glamped in Napa Valley
Went to Kauai with the fam
Introduced 200+ TED talks, watched 300+
Ran 235 miles
Read 23 books, a real low, but hey, I’m writing one
Finished half the manuscript(!) of my book
Hosted a new podcast for Microsoft
Hosted a new podcast for Accenture
Sent a tip that inspired a Simpsons episode**
Made lots of podcasts with my partner Rachel, as part of our company
Attended in-person TED conferences again, in Monterey, and Palm Springs
Broke through the layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy to get into Korea, felt like a dream
Flew 22,775 miles and spent 40 nights away from home, another low year and hopefully, for climate and sanity reasons, I’m keeping things that way.
Really listen. November 2021, Palm Springs
*Friend Jenn says I look like “an octopus being electrocuted” when I play, so, this is all for the best
**Episode to come in 2022. It is already voiced. My friend Tim (longtime writer for Simpsons) wrote a script inspired by an Atlantic article I sent him and it’s going to be a MUSICAL episode. I can say no more.
Psychiatrist Dr. Mark Goulston asked me to be a guest on his show, and I never turn down time with therapists. So we ended up having a wide-ranging (and rather discursive) conversation about this once-in-a-century global pandemic we’re all enduring, the roots of my identity, how to pay better attention and deepen our relationships and a lot more.
“It felt vaguely like being forced to live in a building splintered by a wrecking ball before the rebuilding had begun. Quarantine didn’t just take things away; it revealed — with a harsh, unrelenting clarity — what had already been lost.”
—Leslie Jamison
Into the unknown. L to R: Eva, Luna, me, Isa
This year forced us to our knees. Like so many others, I found myself disoriented and trapped inside, falling to my emotional nadir. We lost Kobe Bryant. John Lewis. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And some 300,000 Americans to the plague. We yearned for the days when the rule of law was a given. America as we know it came apart at the seams. Even our best efforts to bridge differences won’t work by themselves, they require that the digital platforms shattering reality in the name of “consumer choice” will have to dramatically change or be regulated into doing so.
I experienced COVID year primarily as a loss of innocence — the year I finally, finally had to grow up. At one point this summer, we were under stay-at-home orders (for rioting) in the midst of stay-at-home orders (for coronavirus). Did we ever think we’d miss each other like this, that we’d yearn for the joy of company and coincidence, serendipity and surprise, the magic of sharing poorly ventilated spaces with strangers? Grief, loss and identity shift defined 2020, both in the universal sense, and in a personal one.
Despite a year of radical change, I write this post feeling privileged and contented. The threat of the virus took away so much — loved ones, freedom, hugs, travel, an entire way of life I took for granted. But it gave, too. A return to nature. A stillness in which, egad, we could be alone with our thoughts. Time for introspection! And for me, a real deepening of my relationships. Because there were no longer the “friends” you just run into at a drop-off, or at conferences, you had to be intentional about how you spent your time and who you reached out to check-in on. I was more deliberate with my friendships than ever, and I felt that intention among the loved ones who supported me.
I’m also fortunate to be surrounded (more than ever, since they aren’t in school) by my loud, vibrant, healthy kids who remind us how adaptable humanity is at its essence. To borrow from Des’ree’s anthem from my millennial coming-of-age, we gotta be a little bit badder, a little bit bolder, a little bit wiser, harder, tougher.
Moments of Unadulterated Joy:This gas station in LA, the day the networks finally called the election for Joe Biden. These kids, experiencing the drum solo in “In the Air Tonight”
MVP New Friends: Jenn and Drew, who are the parents of my daughter Eva’s good friend Leif. They were rocks as we made Sunday pool time a regular thing to get through this hell year. Sarah Svoboda, who is my producer at VICE, became one of my closest girlfriends overnight. Rob, with whom I’d split giant breakfast burritos after five mile runs. I am now simultaneously fatter and in better cardiovascular shape.
MVP Snack:Brown sugar boba popsicles saved my 2020. I became an accidental boba pop influencer! My only other influencing was for the Saved by the Bell pop-up in West Hollywood, which was a special treat.
The Energy To Bring To All Things: It’s what I call the Michaela Coel energy, after reading this landmark profile of the singular artist who brought us Chewing Gum and I May Destroy You. We say this, from here on out: ‘This is what I need. Are you good enough to give it to me?’ Not ‘Am I good enough to deserve the kind of treatment that I want?’
Fave selfie. Celebrating Luna’s 3rd birthday, at home.
Regrets: Never did learn how to play the ukulele. Barely made progress on my book, which was supposed to be mostly done by now, in a parallel universe. My relationships felt very COVID-blocked, to different degrees.
My Gamechanger: Jungian depth psychology with a dream analyst. This is the most woo-woo I’ve ever sounded, I realize. But after dipping in and out of traditional, more conventional cognitive behavioral therapy for most my adult life, Friend Jenn told me about her dream analyst and I started seeing him over Zoom and I have never had a clearer and deeper understanding of my inner life. I feel more whole and more grounded in an organizing philosophy for meaning than, well, ever. I credit it with keeping me contented through the crucible that was 2020.
One of the year’s proudest achievements, squatting for around 15 minutes straight to conduct an interview with a man experiencing homelessness.
Also this year, in no particular order, and an admittedly incomplete list:
Wrote letters to more than 50 strangers, got the most moving responses Got to know all the parks around here Ran 301 miles Held a squat for 15 minutes while conducting an interview Watched 252 TED talks Gained five to eight lbs, depending on the day Never once got to hug my mom or dad Signed my first book deal Went to so many Zoom meetings, Zoom parties, Zoom milestones and Zoom conferences that I never tracked it Helped link doctors so they could share COVID lessons in its earliest days Started hosting TED Talks Daily Didn’t go to TED (the conference, because the plague canceled it) Started working as a freelance correspondent for VICE News Tonight Signed with my broadcast agent in January, who negotiated a lucrative deal by December Co-created and hosted Labor, an indie podcast about why motherhood’s messed up Meditated more than ever before Drew my first zine Got a new cat, Abe Did not get COVID19, at least not yet Volunteered every Tuesday in the summer, delivering meals to neighbors in need Got to know the homeless community in Venice Went drinking with my high school economics teacher, Mr. Coates, 20 years after being his student. He re-explained the Laffer Curve to me at a punk bar in Chicago! Reconnected with Matt Weiner Read 39 books, a far cry from the 52 books of previous years Moved into a new town home Got a sandwich named after me — The Elise Hu, which is, shockingly, vegetarian Flew 24,469 miles to 10 cities, never once left the country and spent only 29 days away from home — all of it, before March 13.
