Goodbye May

Or the books I managed to finish and the little things I loved this month

May is one of my favorite months; something in the air starts to shift as summer rolls in. While still having some serious ups and downs, disappointments, and the fear of being left behind, I also experienced amazing weekends and moments I will cherish forever. The beach days, power outages, and the books read are what got me through this messily beautiful month of May. So, without further ado, here is what my month in May looked like:

🦢The books I read:

When I get a book from Charco Press, I know it will be a hit in this household. A retelling of Bluebeard illustrates a woman pining for a mediocre man and agrees to help renovate his family’s home for an ounce of his love and affection. What comes about is the dark underbellies of this patriarchal family and the violence against women perpetrated and upheld every day in society. 

One of the shortest on this list, at around 40 pages, depicts a mother-daughter relationship as a young girl grapples with her mother’s love and disapproval. The feminine urge to disobey everything your mother says, to escape from the comments, and become something she does not appreciate in the slightest. Pitted is for the eldest daughters, truly.

Is it ever a month completed without an Annie Ernaux read? Not in my rulebook. Ernaux details the final years of her mother’s life, being terminally ill, and the toll it takes on not only her mother physically and emotionally, but Annie as well. You feel the gut punch when details of losing your mother slowly and painfully, waiting for the inevitable moment to come and the grief to arrive. This is such a delicate story that should be handled and read with care and caution, but I absolutely loved the raw emotions bleeding through the pages. 

Another book that was a sad priority for Mother’s Day this month follows a terminally ill mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter from a small Danish town. This book focuses on the mundane, the little moments in a person’s life where illness is never directly mentioned, but looms over every interaction this mother/daughter has when the inevitable is unavoidable. 

My audiobook for this month was a memoir following a middle-aged woman and writer struggling with chronic pain. There is a quiet rage you have when your body doesn’t do what it is meant to do, or there are no answers for your debilitating pain, there’s just the knowledge that this chronic condition is here to stay. This is worth the read, especially if you also enjoyed Pathemata by Maggie Nelson.

If you hate any mention of COVID in the media, then stay far, far away from Lucid Dreams. If you can handle the in-your-face look at today’s social climate over the past six years, then this transformative novel is worth it, for the most part. An author in New York struggling with writing her second book begins to have vivid hallucinations blurring the line between fiction and her real life. The narrator cannot grasp what the world has become, why everyone has lost themselves, or why self-identity is so hard to maintain in the world. 

One of my most anticipated reads of the year might just become my most reread book ever because I already miss it. There are so many things to miss in this book when reading it for the first time; I need to experience it again and again. The narrator, Ellen, switches between her day job as an artist and her alter ego, Princess Esmerelda, during her radiance episodes, where she is a shield that adds whimsical elements to her extreme struggle with mental health. This is such an impressive read in general, especially given that it was written in the 1970s. Kraf does not shy away from mental illness or sexuality in the slightest, and that’s what makes it so special. 

As I have stated before, Rachel Cusk, fan first; person second. This is a quick book I finished in a sitting. A half about a mysterious and gorgeous movie star named M. Cusk dives into a diluted and kept-at-a-distance character study of M. By the end, what remains are more questions than answers about M and her life that begs the question, how does one ever tell someone else’s story?

🦪The little things I loved in May:

• Going to Daytona beach, searching for sea flees, and getting sunburnt

• Rainy days, pasta making, and Annie Ernaux are needed for a good Saturday

• Memorial Day weekend cookout, with barely any power and no internet with the Florida storms brewing

• New dark fig comforter and finally an excuse to wear my frilly Free People dress

• Going to the movie theater multiple, multiple times and having cute movie nights in

• Little book moments, pictures taken, memories stored away in junk journals. Goodbye May

Hope June is good to me and all of you. Manifesting new opportunities and love all month long💌 xx