My Three Favorite Books of 2024

A late addition to year-end roundups

Hi everyone, I’m still over here pretending it’s 2024, don’t mind me . . .

I planned to write a bonus post about my year in reading, but when I looked at my list of books I realized that there wasn’t really a cohesive story to tell. I was all over the map with my choices: books written by people I know or kinda know, Zeitgeist reads (divorce fiction/memoirs), and commercial fiction that was diverting but didn’t really stick to the bones. (I also read a number of books by post-Jungians but that is a whole other thing related to my interest in analytic psychology and dream analysis, which I may write about at a later date.)

Okay, so what did stick with me? Memoirs, it turns out. There were three that I found utterly transfixing. Although this is a bonus post, I’ve decided to keep it unlocked because as an author I know how hard it is to get review coverage, and any little bit helps. So I want to spread the word about these books.

I’ll start with the one I read most recently: Health and Safety, by Emily Witt. I read this one over the holiday break, staying up late two nights in a row to finish. It’s about Witt’s journey through NYC’s underground rave scene in the years leading up to the pandemic and how that scene, and her long-term romantic relationship disintegrated under the pressure of lockdown and the political upheaval that followed.

I know, you’re probably thinking to yourself: I don’t want to read about the pandemic. But this is the most clear-eyed writing I have encountered about the first Trump administration, the pandemic, and what happened to people interpersonally. For me, reading it was clarifying. It was also fascinating to learn about this party scene happening right under my nose in NYC. I lived in Brooklyn in the period that Witt describes and knew nothing about the 24-hour raves going on nearby. The interesting thing is that Witt didn’t know much about the scene either; she was an outsider whose entry point was curiosity about psychedelic drugs. Over time, she learned to appreciate the music, and fell in love with the subculture as she fell in love with her boyfriend and partner in 24-hour partying. Her ability to describe the parties she attended, the effects of the drugs she took, and the breakdown of her relationship is remarkable. I felt like I was there.

I’ve been following Witt’s byline for years (she now writes for The New Yorker) and I also read and enjoyed her 2016 memoir, Futuresex, about her quest to understand the way sexuality and technology intersect. I like her writing because it is clear, direct, and never glib. She is okay with ambivalence, has an eye for detail, and doesn’t try to wrap things up or fit anything into a traditional story arc. I want to say her writing is dry but I fear that suggests boring. It’s dry like a martini—strong, not messing around.

Consent, by Jill Ciment, is another memoir that I read quickly, finishing most of it one sitting. It’s a slim book in which Ciment looks back on her marriage to the painter Arnold Mesches, who died in 2016. It’s not the first time Ciment has written about her marriage; in 1996, she published Half a Life, a coming-of-age memoir that looks back on her tumultuous childhood and her youthful marriage to Mesches, who she met when she was 16 and he was in his late forties. In Half a Life, which Ciment often quotes from in Consent, she describes herself as the sexual aggressor, a young girl who saw something she wanted and took it. But after Mesches’ death, which was closely followed by the revelations of #metoo in 2017, Ciment began to question her own narrative, wondering if maybe she’d massaged the story to make herself feel better about a relationship she might not have consented to if she’d been older, with more life experience under her belt.

Like Health and Safety, Consent is richly ambivalent. Ciment is aware that by today’s standards Mesches was a predator; but at the time, his behavior was socially acceptable. Her story is complicated by the fact that her marriage was largely very happy and fulfilling. For Ciment, marriage to an older painter was a way of avoiding motherhood and a ticket to a bohemian, artistic life. For Mesches, marriage to a younger woman was an invitation to concentrate on his artwork, which came into a second flowering later in life, thanks to Ciment’s influence. As she looks back on her choices, Ciment raises questions to herself and to the reader, and sits with them. She doesn’t reach any conclusions, which will probably frustrate some, but I really appreciated it. To me, it felt like an honest record of a period of soul-searching.

Sloane Crosley and I are roughly the same age and we came up in the same version of New York City. Reading her humorous essays sometimes feels like checking in with a friend I knew when I was young—not that I know her personally, but I know where she is coming from. In this memoir I found sharper-edged sentiments than in her previous writings, a certain brittle tone to her humor that wasn’t there before. Maybe I unfairly associate her with her youthful voice. In any case, she’s older now, and this book is about the thing that happens in middle age, which nothing can prepare you for: the death of a friend.

Grief is for People is a portrait, an elegy, and a lament for Crosley’s former boss and best friend, Russell, who died by suicide shortly before the pandemic. It’s about the loss of Crosley’s jewelry, stolen from her apartment shortly before Russell’s death. The coincidence of losing heirloom jewelry and an old friend is too much for Crosley to bear, and Crosely writes of her attempts to track down her jewelry while also trying to understand why Russell took his life. Both futile endeavors consume her, leaving her bewildered and angry. She reminisces about the early 00s book world that she and Russell came up in, a literary landscape that has also vanished. Like the other two books I’ve mentioned, this is a memoir that eludes narrative. There are no satisfying answers to the mysteries Crosley investigates, no lessons learned. It’s just how life turned out.