The Terror of the Mirror: A 2024 Review
This is a rare edition of my personal newsletter. They come unexpectedly and unscheduled whenever I feel like it, which is today.
Everyone is an influencer at the end of the year. Here are the best books I read. The best music I listened to. The number of steps I took. This was my favorite restaurant, my exercise routine, my worst depressive episodes. The deluge is relentless, especially this year. Usually, I love it. I love these lists. I love to see what people are up to! I’m nosy and I love recommendations!
I often partake in the tradition of end-of-year list-making, because it feels unfair to gobble up the recommendations that other people generously give without donating any of my own. At the end of this email, there are some lists (of things I loved, of things I wrote, etc). Even this year, I cannot keep myself from the narcissus pool of my own consumption, from record-keeping.
Most years, I feel excited and optimistic on the precipice of a new year. I’m a Virgo, after all, and in a normal year, I am a slut for New Year’s. I want to make my black-eyed peas, and my dozens of resolutions, and my strategic plans to accomplish them. I want to make the future be what I want it to be.
But there’s something dire in the air this year, maybe you feel it too. Yesterday, on the way to the gym, I was stunned to find it there in my bod: not depression, but something dark. Where were my positive feelings? Why did this day feel so bad? Was it the early darkness? It’s dark early every New Year. What is it that feels so amiss? Where did the good vibes go?
We’ve been rewatching Broad City, which I had forgotten was still airing in 2017 until of course it was impossible to forget. There’s the episode with Hilary Clinton winking, and then there’s the half-dozen episodes after that I hated when they aired because I envied the kind of blinders that the liberal east coasters I was surrounded by wore throughout the election (convinced she would win) and so I had very little tolerance for their outsized mourning (possibly unfairly). In the episodes there’s a clear stance, that electing him is an aberration, that this is not who we are, that there is something we as individuals (as women) can do to rally or march or whatever and something will change.
It’s definitely part of it that I keep forgetting that we elected Donald Trump again. The vibes are less mournful than they were in 2016, perhaps because we know this is who we are now. But that knowledge is deadly. We know, after this long year, the things we have always known but louder, and in bold type: that the Democratic Party does not give a shit about us; that half the country hates us; that our politicians of both parties would rather fund a year-long genocide than give us healthcare, or teachers real salaries, or anything nice at all.
There’s a specific torture that exists at the end of a year like this on a macro scale. Even if you had a good year personally, looking back on a year like this broadly is the equivalent of seeing your own face in the terrible light of the bathroom mirror on the plane after you’ve flown for 6 hours and are dehydrated and you have the worst surprise pimples of your life. It’s a shock to realize how bad something can be that you expect to be better. The mirror, unfortunately, does not lie, and it feels like we are being shown ourselves as a country and a people in the most unflattering lighting.
It is exhausting how many years like this there have been.That’s why, ultimately, it feels worse than it felt in 2016, when we thought a fresh new level of hell was about to be unlocked: because we have learned now that it was the good years (as mediocre as they were) that were the reprieve and not vice versa.
Either all of that’s true, or I’m just grumpy because I have a cold and I want to want to go out and have fun and be wild this year, even though I very much do not.
But ultimately, the new year is about imagining the future, not predicting. It’s about wanting something more and trying to make a plan to get it. It is helpful that the new moon and the new year and the solstice are so close together. It’s time—not only to dream of what we might want and be able to demand— but to believe that we can create a plan to get it, and then make one.
There is optimism in accepting that our present is not the one we want it to be because it means that we still believe that something else is possible. Our goals must be not only for ourselves but for our communities, for our futures.
Or at least, that’s how I’m trying to think of mine this year: goals for my body, and my home, and my community, and our future.
Here are the new things I loved this year, divided by category and ignoring years of release. Things I like are dead to me, only things I loved remain.
Books:
The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot
Giovanni’s Room by George Baldwin
Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth
Villette by Charlotte Bronte
You Gotta Eat by Margaret Eby
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova
Movies (my letterboxed):
Mission Impossible- Ghost Protocol
Conclave
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
The Green Ray
La Chimera
Beautiful Things I Saw:
Surrealism exhibition at the Pompidou
My beautiful friends from across the table at dinner
Chichen Itza pyramids!
Sunset from Turtle Bay on Oahu
Weston Wilson hit for the cycle for the Phillies
Mary Cassat exhibition at the PMA
Music:
Restaurants:
Downtime Bakery — Philadelphia, PA
Angeloni’s Club Madrid — Atlantic City, NJ
Chez Denise — Paris
Ix Cat IK — Valladolid, Mexico
Scampi — Philadelphia, PA
Dreamworld Bakes — Philadelphia, PA
Kubri — Paris
Purchases:
Amber & Moss Candle by PF Candle Co
hand tattoo by my girl Alecia
Dot’s pretzels (at grocery store)
really long iphone chargers
bang trims constantly by Rachel at Hare Philly
Things I wrote this year that I’m proud of.
“Berry Thief, My Enemy; Berry Thief, My Friend” (on a mouse that ate all my strawberries)
“What Do You Risk In Revisiting A Piece of Culture You Once Loved?”
19 Episodes of Normal Gossip
I finished writing my gossip book, which comes out so soon and I’m so proud of.
the new thing I am working on now
Finally, my predictions for 2025:
