Laden...
| I’ve been keeping a journal off and on for years now. My entries are often very embarrassing to reread, which was part of the reason why, for a time, I became reluctant to keep a diary. I didn't want to be confronted with my own unvarnished, unedited thoughts. Lately though, I’ve been finding rereading old journal entries useful, mainly as a way to track my own personal growth and to laugh at my own naïveté. But I would be mortified if these entries were ever published. The potential exposure feels so fraught.
Enjoy, —Tomi
Personal Essays Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Courtesy Penguin Random House Chanel Miller On What Happened After Her Victim Statement Went Viral "It was common to have people forward me the statement saying, 'You have to read this.' I wanted to respond, 'I wrote it,'" writes Chanel Miller in an exclusive excerpt from her book, Know My Name.
I Thought Wilderness Was A Place To Find Myself, Until I Spent Four Months Living In It A summer working on trails in the burned-out Oregon backcountry taught me that while humans may find profound beauty in nature, it does not exist for us.
Am I Writing About My Life, Or Selling Myself Out? Narcissistic, self-indulgent, worthless, cruel: criticisms leveled against social media influencers and young women who write about themselves sound a lot alike.
I Talked To My Deceased Brother Through A Spiritualist Writer Mira Ptacin never expected to communicate with her late brother when she visited Camp Etna, a Maine haven for mediums and Spiritualists, in this excerpt from her forthcoming book The In-Betweens.
The Best Advice I'd Give To My College Self Buy a sippy cup, glue jewels on it, and bring it to frat parties. An excerpt from Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement.
How My Mom Paid For My College Tuition By Running The Numbers Read this excerpt from BuzzFeed Book Club’s October nonfiction pick The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers.
Features Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News
The historical novels The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek and The Giver of Stars, published a few months apart, share some noticeable similarities. Book Woman author Kim Michele Richardson has raised concerns; Moyes denies having read Richardson’s book.
How Did Lauren Duca’s Revolution Backfire? The viral writer wants to galvanize young people with her new book, How to Start a Revolution. But past controversies — and a new complaint filed by her New York University students — threaten to undermine her message. Celebrity Book Clubs Are Actually Selling Books Big, book-loving names like Reese Witherspoon and Jenna Bush Hager are following in Oprah’s footsteps with clubs that drive sales for publishers and give authors the gift of instant success.
Books Farrah Penn for BuzzFeed 19 Really Great YA Books You'll Want To Pick Up This Fall From Mary H.K. Choi's Permanent Record to Jason Reynold's Look Both Ways.
11 Must-Read Memoirs Coming Out This Fall From Patti Smith’s Year of The Monkey to trailblazer Edie Windsor’s epic life story.
11 Books To Read If You Like Daisy Jones & The Six From Debbie Harry’s upcoming memoir to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Nine New Books By Latinx Writers You’ve Got To Read In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, check out these new books by Daniel José Older, Valeria Luiselli, Shea Serrano, and more!
Cultural Criticism As illustrated by the A-list stars applauding Ellen DeGeneres’s friendship with George W. Bush and a “beautiful” video of Brandt Jean forgiving his brother’s killer, the most privileged among us too often prioritize positivity over justice.
Parasite Stretches The Limits Of Our Scammer Obsession If the summer of scam hadn’t already ended, Bong Joon-ho’s new movie delivers it a fatal kick down the stairs. (Light spoilers ahead.)
Reflections on Susan Sontag have yet to fully reckon with how fundamentally queerness shaped her writing and her life. Benjamin Moser’s controversial new biography Sontag finally begins that conversation.
Why Hasn’t Cancel Culture Come For It’s Always Sunny? Even after 14 seasons, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia continues to be funny, innovative, and deeply offensive. How does a show so politically incorrect survive for so long?
Below Deck Is The Perfect Reality Show For The Age Of Millennial Burnout Below Deck stars hot, relatable service workers subjected to the whims of the 1 percent. Is it any wonder it’s become Bravo's underdog hit?
Tegan And Sara’s New Book Reminds Us To Take Teens Seriously In their new book High School and an album revisiting early demos, Tegan and Sara explore how their teen years shaped them — and me.
A newsletter exclusive: an interview with a writer we like! This month: Leslie Jamison, whose new essay collection Make it Scream, Make it Burn, is out now.
What are you reading... Leslie Jamison? Beowulf Sheehan
"One messy morning on the cusp between summer and fall, I felt loose in the world, adrift like a pack of wild dogs within myself, staging arguments with exes in my head, checking Twitter even though I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t get online till afternoon. It was weird weather. I wasn’t sure whether to wear tights. I was ashamed that I was frittering away hours of childcare.
But here’s the thing: I picked up a book that restored my faith in my own days. It was Aug 9—Fog, by Kathryn Scanlan. Scanlan salvaged the diary of a stranger from a box headed to the garbage at a public estate sale. It was a journal from the late 1960s kept by an 86-year-old woman living in a small Illinois town. Scanlan spent ten years pulling out sentences that caught her eye, whittling and arranging the prose until it became the book I held in my hands that day—a catalogue of kaleidoscopic shards of daily life: poached eggs for breakfast, afternoons devoted to making piecrust or finishing a jigsaw puzzle of Niagara Falls (Very pretty. Hard one.) Many pages read like individual haikus: Ever where slick. Another beautiful white frost A.M…..eyes got the glimmer. Terribly windy….everything loose is traveling.
At first, the book was easy to mistake for a pastoral chart of the seasons and their provisions, or a Norman Rockwell portrait of small-town life: a neighborhood squirrel who liked cornbread, or big snow flakes like little parasols upside down. But the book’s landscape was slowly darkened by loss and grief like shadows cast by flying birds, or brackish water flooding the fields from beneath: Ella had Widow’s Club to dinner, a delicious friend chicken dinner at Holiday Inn. D. & I out to cemetery a little bit. Some lines felt so sweetly innocent, almost obvious—Grass sure growing. Grass looking green. Blue spruce—but then I’d notice that before them came a theft so quiet I’d hardly noticed it: Stella found a lot of things had been taken, mostly antiques. And then the Grass sure growing. Grass looking green. It started to seem a little less innocent, a little more callous: the way the world kept on going, impervious, in the face of loss. The ravages of the world emerged from the prose as spare as its beauties: Hiller’s house burned. We went out to see what fire had done. Sure clean sweep.
Bodies started showing up full of unmet desires and secret fallibilities: a couple “looking for the stork,” or the narrator’s husband, Vern, growing sick across the course of one autumn. His illness sat on the pages alongside the practicalities of daily life: Not operating on Vern, found sugar in blood. I am sewing… I cut off corn & put in freezer 4 plastic boxes. His report not good… We had smoked sausages, fried potatoes & onions. Dr. says it’s a general breaking up of his body. I am bringing in some flowers… Vern coughed lot in nite. Vern coughed pretty hard 1 A.M. D. out tormenting the weeds…And when Vern’s body finally gave out, it happened beside other bodies continuing to live: Vern took worse. Passed away before D. got there. Seemed to just sleep away…Such a lot of food sent in. Pies, cakes, salads, cookies. 2 canned hams.
Reading the diary—or rather, reading the lyric distillation that Scanlan had created in a posthumous collaboration with its author—I quietly Amen’ed its insistence on ordinary life as a site of extraordinary meaning. This insistence was embedded in the force of its juxtapositions: the grand dramas of life and death playing out alongside the smallest details of daily experience; finite human time unfurling alongside the ongoing cycles of nature and its seasons: green grassing growing after theft, sun peeping out after burial.
Moving through the book, I often just wanted to copy passages into my own journal, or read them aloud, rather than trying to make sense of them. It suggested preservation as an art of its own, distinct from interpretation. I wanted to share it. It felt too hot to hold in my hands alone. I brought it over to my friend Anna—a poet, a momma—and we read bits of it aloud to each other as our kids played in the playroom of her apartment building, while the West Indian Day parade unspooled in the rain on the other side of her windows: women dancing in sparkling fairy wings, floats pounding bass. Two four-year-olds were making an apocalypse from blocks of blue foam. My toddler was sending a wooden jar of ketchup down the tiny slide, and then her own little body. Eventually we all went upstairs to eat heart-shaped waffles covered with strawberry jam, and one toddler stole the other toddler’s water bottle. Waffles ever where jam on our fingertips sound of joy coming from parade floats in the rain. Everything glimmered in the eye. Everything loose started to travel."
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