As a child, I was interested in the curiosities of the parallel world of adults—opaque and coded. Though films and television may have been able to offer me clues, the audio and visual cues gave away too many hints to those around me that I was dabbling in something I wasn’t yet “ready” for.

The most defining reading period in my life began at fourteen when I discovered that the Lana Del Rey songs I was enjoying so much at the time had been inspired by the beat poets. That was when I began reading Allen Ginsberg. First I heard spoken, Howl was a call to the unusual and the disturbed. I bought his complete collection of poetry, another brick of a paperback, and read each poem cover to cover. I learned an invaluable lesson about writing and English in that book. There were spelling mistakes. There were words thrown across the page. There were random conventions of grammar placed in precarious spots. And it was purposeful, chaotic, and resonated within me in incredible candour.

Poetry was my biggest fascination at 15, but as I more explored, from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to incredible contemporary poets like Louise Gluck, I craved something that would fulfill me more. I craved what I would come to find out, was prose, or prosefull confessional pieces that had more depthful analysis.

This is when I discovered Patti Smith. The interdisciplinary writer and artist who came to New York with nothing, homeless, and picked up everything along the way. Just Kids by Patti Smith, was my first introduction to a revolutionary style of writing that would become a constant in my reading. Patti Smith wrote about everything. The mysticism of the symbolism she saw in, for instance, the name of a motel, or what she thought about how Jim Morrison spoke, or lengthy descriptions of the walls of the apartments in which she grew up throughout her life. Her opinions. What she found beautiful.

Patti Smith veered me into writers like Joan Didion, who I discovered, created the most inimitable gorgeous essay work I had ever read. The work that Joan Didion produced was insightful like nothing else I’d ever read, and her general discontent with the state of everything around her was something that I resonated with. She wasn’t a mere critic, however, she had thoughts about how and why, and how things could change. Joan Didion’s collection of essays entitled, The White Album,  forever changed my perspectives of glamour and romanticism. Though undoubtedly a glass-half-empty writer, Didion somehow saw through the things that were seen as steadfast of the time.

• What does the writer really believe, underneath the language?

• Are they being honest, or are they performing?

• What are they trying not to say?

• Why did they choose this form—this structure, this rhythm, this point of view?

Questions About Language and Style:

• Is every word necessary?

• What’s the temperature of this sentence? Cold, detached, feverish, ironic?

• What’s the writer doing with syntax—are they controlling the sentence, or is the sentence controlling them?

• Is this voice earned, or is it borrowed?

Questions About Perception and Observation:

• What does the writer notice? What do they ignore?

• Where is their eye drawn, and what does that tell me about their worldview?

• Do they describe the world with specificity, or with clichés?

Questions About Emotion and Distance:

• Is the writer emotionally present in the work, or have they vanished behind the page?

• Where is the vulnerability? Is there any?

• Are they too close, or too far from their subject?

She writes like she’s chewing on a wire—honest but raw, sometimes sparking. There’s this one line:

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.” (Lamott, p. 28)

Who says that in a writing book? Not someone trying to posture, but someone who's suffered at the altar of expectation. Someone who's failed and knows the exact shade of light in the room where it happened.

She speaks in what I can only call guided spirals. She turns a thought over until it becomes bruised enough to resemble something true. Not a polished truth—more like the kind of honesty you admit at 2 a.m. with your face in a towel. And that’s what makes it holy. Not that it’s perfect, but that it’s persistent.

Lamott doesn’t hide behind technique. She doesn’t show you how to write a sentence that stuns. She shows you how to survive writing at all. And in doing so, she shows you how to survive yourself. It is a book about writing the same way an obituary is about a life—it says more than it means to.

IN REGARD TO READING GOALS:

What does the writer really believe?
That writing isn’t a performance of mastery. It’s a slow reckoning. A defiant act of showing up when everything else inside of you says don’t. That stories are saved by small steps. That suffering doesn’t make the work noble—it just makes it honest.

Is this voice earned, or borrowed?
It is tired and frayed and built entirely out of scar tissue. So yes, it is earned.

Is every word necessary?
No. But neither are all the things we say in love, or grief. Her extra words carry weight, and maybe that's the point. There’s room for breath, and fear, and contradiction.

Where is the vulnerability?
Everywhere. Sometimes disguised as sarcasm. Other times exposed—bone out. There’s no distance between her voice and the wound. That’s what makes her someone to trust.

There’s a part near the end where she talks about finding the ending of a piece of writing like you find the end of a tangled necklace chain. She says to just keep your hands gentle and keep going. I underlined it three times. Because sometimes I forget: the point is not to untangle it quickly. The point is to touch it until it loosens.

What does it mean to be hollow in a world that requires performance? What does it mean to be disinterested in morality in a culture built upon the pageantry of right and wrong? I’ve been circling those questions since I was thirteen, maybe earlier, but it wasn’t until I read Gagne’s first lines—"I am a sociopath" followed by a grocery list of ordinary womanhood—that I felt the quiet violence of such contradictions settled in print.

Her voice is not confessed, not quite. It is a disclosure wrapped in calculation. You can feel her watching you read her. You can feel her inviting sympathy only to turn it inside out. Not because she wants to be cruel but because she doesn’t believe in pretending that she was born with access to the same tools as the rest of us.

“Most sociopaths aren’t like the characters in movies. They don’t resemble the serial murderers in Killing Eve or Dexter, and they aren’t similar to the one-dimensional antagonists many crime novels suggest. [...] They are children seeking understanding. They are patients hoping for validation.” (Gagne)

This book does not ask for pity. It barely asks for understanding. It insists on confrontation. Of systems. Of empathy. Of the reader’s own tendency to draw neat lines around aberration.

RESPONSE TO MY READING GOALS

What does the writer believe?

That sociopathy isn’t evil. That evil, if we can even use that word, is built more easily by denial than by diagnosis. That systems fail people long before people become "failures."

Is she performing or being honest?

She is honest about her performance. Which is maybe the most radical form of honesty there is.

Where is her attention drawn?

Not to emotion but the absence of it. To quiet. To compulsion. To the moment before the moment. She narrates pressure like a character—always present, always threatening collapse.

Is the voice earned?

More than earned. It is observed. It is curated. She writes not like someone trying to win you over, but like someone who has spent years collecting her own data, the same way scientists do with species they cannot understand.

FINAL THOUGHT

Reading this memoir did not make me feel comfortable. It made me feel seen in places I don’t talk about. In compulsions that never made it to action. In apathies that never crystallized into detachment. It made me wonder if empathy is natural or practiced. Whether morality is felt or chosen. Whether I am feeling “the right thing” or just mimicking the shape of it.

This wasn’t a book. It was a litmus test. And it turned me a shade I wasn’t ready to name.

There are some books you read like scripture. Quietly. Privately. At the edge of a lamp’s radius or in a room that smells like laundry. bell hooks’ All About Love arrived the way grief sometimes does—softly but already inside of me. I didn’t need to be convinced that love had failed us. I only needed someone to say it plainly. And she did.

She doesn’t dramatize the loss, which makes it all the more striking. She just writes what’s true. That most of us were not raised to understand love, only to desire it. That love, real love, is a practice. Not a feeling. That it is an active labor. A willful choice to commit to another’s spiritual growth. A responsibility. Not a reward.

“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb.” (hooks)

So simple. So devastating. Like a mother whispering the answer to a question you didn’t realize you’d been asking your whole life.

RESPONSE TO MY READING GOALS

What does she notice?

She notices the absences. Where love was supposed to be and never was. How it was replaced by control. Or politeness. Or silence. How we’ve come to romanticize being chosen instead of being cherished.

Is there vulnerability?

Unbearably. But not performative. Her voice feels like a room with good windows—clearly lit but not intrusive. She offers you the air to see yourself without judgment. Just observation.

Is her voice earned?

Yes. Because it does not demand that you believe her. She just asks that you sit with her for a while. That you read what she’s written and let it become a part of your inner vocabulary. She is not interested in convincing. She is interested in truth.

Why this form?

Because theory alone would have been too clean. Memoir too narrow. It had to be both. A reflection with scaffolding. A polemic dressed like a lullaby. She lets philosophy live in the room with memory. And that’s the only way it could have worked.

FINAL THOUGHT

After I finished it, I found myself writing letters I never sent. One to my mother. One to myself. One to the person I loved last but didn’t know how to stay with. I’ve started using the word love less casually. Started interrogating when I say it. Started asking if I’m really willing to extend myself or if I just want to be held.

hooks reminded me that care is not instinctive, especially not in a world that rewards withdrawal. It is learned. Modeled. Practiced. And if I haven’t seen it, I have to build it. Even if it’s crooked. Even if no one thanks me.

She’s writing out of the '60s, but not in the way we remember them. No technicolour peace signs or woodstock haze. Instead: migraines. Broken marriages. Nervous breakdowns scheduled between plane tickets. The cluttered mental interior of someone with a notepad and no conclusion.

“I was meant to know the plot, but I had missed it, and I didn’t know whether I was the only one who had.” (Didion, The White Album)

There’s something distinctly feminine about this—being inside the story but not given the script. Being expected to remain legible, composed, even as the house collapses around you. And she doesn’t protest this position. She just sits in it. Names it. Observes what it’s doing to her body.

RESPONSE TO MY READING GOALS

What does she notice?

Everything. But always at a slant. A door left ajar, a sentence she can’t finish, a recording that cuts off before the most important word. She notices what’s missing. She describes absence with more fidelity than most writers can bring to presence.

Is she emotionally present?

No. And yes. She writes from inside a body, but never makes you feel fully inside of her. She disappears behind description. It’s calculated. And it’s lonely. But it’s also the only way you get truth that hasn’t been wrung dry by confession.

Is her voice earned?

Utterly. She’s not borrowing someone else’s clarity—she’s documenting her own confusion. She doesn’t posture as knowing. She postures as watching. And in that, there’s an authority that’s impossible to fake.

Why this form?

Because nothing else would’ve worked. A linear essay would’ve lied. A memoir would’ve softened the edges. The fragmentation is the form. Because that’s how the world arrives: out of order. Some moments cut, others overexposed. She lets you sit in the shutter speed.

FINAL THOUGHT

Didion taught me that clarity doesn’t require certainty. That you can be deliberate even in your haze. She doesn’t ask you to follow her. She just shows you the corners of a room where something once happened and lets you sit there awhile.

I’ve started taking more notes. Not about anything in particular. Just fragments. Half sentences. One-liners overhead on the bus. Names I don’t recognize but might want to remember. I don’t know what it’s for. But it makes the world feel more catchable. More mine.

She writes:

“The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.”

And that’s what she does. She lands. Again and again. On beds unmade in foreign cities, at the bottom of teacups, on old photographs she can’t quite let go of. She lives inside the ordinary. Not as performance. But as prayer.

There are entire pages where nothing happens except the act of sitting. Drinking black coffee. Watching. Missing someone. No one else could’ve gotten away with that, but Smith isn’t trying to get away with anything. She’s just showing up. Present. Careful. Grieving, yes, but not undone by it.

She makes stillness feel like an offering.

RESPONSE TO MY READING GOALS

What does she believe?

That memory is sacred. That art is something you do alone and over time and with your whole body. That there’s no such thing as small moments if you know how to hold them.

What does she ignore?

Expectations. Narrative. Resolution. The structure floats because life does too. She’s not trying to prove anything. She’s just trying to keep moving.

Is she emotionally present?

She’s all emotion, but none of it demands your pity. She doesn’t explain her pain. She walks with it. Takes it for coffee. Puts it on the shelf beside Genet and a used Polaroid camera.

Is her voice earned?

Yes. Through loss. Through age. Through the quiet rituals of someone who’s learned that art doesn’t save you—but it keeps you company.

FINAL THOUGHT

This book didn’t tell me anything new. It reminded me of what I already knew but didn’t have words for: that longing can be ordinary. That absence can live beside you without apology. That some mornings, coffee is the only thing tethering you to earth.

Smith doesn’t romanticize her sadness. She folds it into her jacket pocket like a note she keeps rereading. She travels through grief like a long-term tenant. No hurry. No dramatics. Just return.

This one is written as a letter, but it’s not really addressed to anyone. Or—it is, but not in the way letters are meant to be received. There is no hope it will be read. That’s what makes it feel sacred. Not the language (though the language is clean and brutal and sometimes so beautiful I had to look away). But the reaching. The act of speaking even when you know no one will answer.

Vuong’s narrator writes to his mother, who cannot read. And in doing so, he writes to himself, and to us, and to the part of memory that still smells like oil and sweat and jasmine. He does not ask to be seen. He writes as someone who was already seen too much, too early, too violently.

“Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

It isn’t about resilience. Not really. It’s about residue. About what sticks. About being shaped by pain without becoming it.

The story is fractured, almost purposefully disoriented. He moves between time like someone sleepwalking—each moment shimmering with attention but out of chronological reach. A childhood in Hartford. A grandmother who loved extravagantly. A mother who loved violently. A boy who becomes a man too quietly to be noticed.

RESPONSE TO MY READING GOALS

What does Vuong notice?
Everything. A bruise, a gesture, the way a boy’s body moves when he’s pretending not to be scared. He notices the texture of silence. Of shame. Of tenderness that’s been interrupted.

Where does the vulnerability sit?
Everywhere. But especially in the parts he doesn’t name outright. In the space between the question and the response. He doesn’t over-explain. He lets the pain sit on the table, unwrapped.

Is his voice earned?
Not only earned—it’s inherited. This is a voice passed down through war, migration, labor, lineage. It’s not performative. It is ancestral.

Why this form?
Because letters are the only safe place to tell the truth when the world has made language feel dangerous. Because direct speech would rupture the body. This form lets him speak from the edges of things. From the periphery. Which is where he has always lived.

FINAL THOUGHT

Reading this felt like opening a box of old family photographs you never took. Like looking at your own past through someone else’s wound. Vuong doesn’t write for clarity. He writes for remembrance. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

I think about the title often. The idea of being beautiful, briefly. And the sadness in knowing beauty won’t save you. But you reach for it anyway. Because maybe beauty isn’t meant to last. Maybe it’s meant to mark something. A scar, a season, a boy trying to survive his mother’s love.

There’s no line between the mundane and the holy. A McDonald’s apron, a field of rye, the underside of a tongue—all of it a hymn if you look hard enough. And that’s what he does. He looks. Unflinchingly. With tenderness that bruises.

In Dear Peter, he writes:

“childhood / is only a cage / that widens.”

He does this throughout—lets you sit in the things that never made sense when they happened. Not then. Maybe not now. But he writes them anyway. Offers them to the page like a held breath. Something delicate. Something already leaving.

RESPONSE TO MY READING GOALS

What does Vuong notice?
Not just the tragedy, but the quiet choreography of it. Not just the body, but the moment it begins to vanish. He notices the margin. Where language gets tired of trying to contain what happened. Where breath becomes the story.

Is he emotionally present?
Yes, but only when you’re not looking. His grief doesn’t announce itself. It flickers at the edge of syntax. In the pauses. The cracked enjambments. He doesn’t cry on the page. He exhales.

Is his voice earned?
Earned. Carved. Died for. The voice of someone who didn’t choose poetry but turned to it after nothing else worked. He’s not showing off. He’s surviving.

Why this form?
Because a story would have required a beginning, a middle, and an end—and nothing about grief obeys that order. Poetry lets him live in the in-between. It lets him say I am still here without needing to prove it.

FINAL THOUGHT

I didn’t read this collection all at once. I read it the way you read the margins of old books—slowly, distracted, with reverence. I came back to it when I couldn’t sleep. When I needed someone else to hold the heaviness for a while.

Vuong reminds me that form doesn’t always follow function. Sometimes it follows feeling. Follows rupture. Follows the sound of someone gently, privately breaking—and choosing to write anyway.

I answered questions about emotional presence and voice most clearly—maybe because those were the questions I cared about most. I noticed when a writer vanished behind the work and when they stepped forward, bruised but speaking. I could tell when a sentence was trying too hard. I could feel when it had nothing to prove.

I learned that as a reader, I return to the same images over and over. Grief on the porch. A house too quiet. The taste of language. I underline the things that remind me of what I’ve lived through, but also the things I fear I’ll never understand. I read slowly. Out of order. Often at night, when the silence feels instructional. I don’t want to be entertained—I want to be told the truth, even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts.

Where I go next as a reader isn’t forward, necessarily. Maybe it’s deeper. I want to find more writers who don’t write to be heard, but to survive. I want to read things that aren’t meant to be quoted, but reread. I want to collect work that isn’t in conversation with fame, but with grief, memory, domestic ritual, and the body.

Books that don’t ask to be finished. Just held.