If you follow me on Instagram, you know: I’ve spent ten hours a day for seven days trying to recover my life’s work.

Dropbox unlinked itself. My user folder disappeared. So did my desktop. Entire parts of my life—gone.

GUYS.

I found a single chapter of my novel in progress in a folder with a file structure like: priv/var/141814/235/c/b/sve/435.

This suggests that whatever is left is fragmented and scattered. Like dropping printed pages from a moving plane, then trying to find each one.

I cried more last week than I have in years. I canceled everything. Ignored everyone: emails, texts, phone calls, and appointments. Just tried to stay upright and get everything back. I still haven’t responded to many of you; I’m sorry! I will.

A digital life is fragile. It promises permanence, but things can vanish without notice. When my work disappeared, so did a record of who I’ve been.

So today’s post is an ode to what endures. To books, in their original form. These are just a handful of the ones that changed how I think. The ones that held when nothing else did.

YOUTH

In 5th or 6th grade, my aunt Maggie suggested I read Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt. She never steered me wrong, and so I paid attention. That single reading experience taught me about writing, metaphors and how to use them best.

Winnie Foster is a sheltered ten-year-old when she comes across a boy drinking from a hidden fountain in the woods. Before she can drink from the fountain, the boy’s family kidnaps her. Back at their secluded home, the Tuck family reveals to Winnie that they are immortal, a discovery made after drinking from the hidden fountain. Jesse is not 17, but 104 (This is all from memory, so forgive me if the ages are inaccurate).

Each family member offers Winnie a look at the different aspects of their predicament: the horrors and the wonders of never dying. If given the chance, would you live forever?

This is the first book I remember reading that opened a new portal in my brain, leading me to consider questions of a philosophical nature and engage meaningfully with literature.

Here’s a 20-second sound byte about the book from an old show called Stacked Up.

TEEN YEARS

As a tween and teen, I was very into art, and on weekends, I walked around Soho, popping in and out of art galleries, ending up as I did at Rizzoli bookstore (RIP the Soho store) to slowly pore over art books.

One of those weekends, in Rizzoli, I found a book unlike any I’d seen. First, it was a book of blank pages. Across the top of each was a prompt—each one struck me as philosophical. This was new to me, and the prompts themselves were creative and interesting.

I was desperate for that book, and committed the title and authors to memory, knowing I would never forget.

Here’s what I looked like around then.

Years passed, and now and then, I thought about the book. The blank pages, and the possibility of closing the gap between author and reader. But I never looked for it.

And then, decades later, talking about it with a friend, I decided to look it up.

Reader, I forgot the title.

And the authors.

With time, I knew it would come back to me.

It didn’t.

Every few years, I Googled it using random search terms to describe it, but nope—nothing.

Until this past year, I shook up my search terms and added “Sketchbook” to the mix.

BOOM.

I found it.

I bought it.

The premise (which I’d forgotten): Artists offer their best drawing prompt. Some are philosophical, others are whimsical.

Some prompt examples: Change art to include yourself / Make things that carry with them the residue of where they have been / Construct a series of self-imposed limitations that make you function in certain ways and keep you from functioning in other ways.

Around that time, in the late 80s, I was in high school at Friends Seminary, a private school in the East Village. Our teachers were incredible, and we read a ton of black authors. We read bell hooks, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, in 10th grade alone.

Native Son by Richard Wright was one of the first books I read where I discovered I could extract a book’s unspoken ideas, identify literary constructs, symbols and systems, and talk about them with others. 🤯

Here’s my copy from 10th grade.

Mid Adult

When I was 27, I was going through a horrific breakup with an alcoholic (spoiler: it’s what my first novel is about). Every time I tried to end our relationship, he would threaten to kill himself. I didn’t know how to get out, and I started seeing a therapist.

In one of the sessions, I kept saying that I just wanted to know what would happen if I followed her advice to call his bluff, and she finally said, “You just need to live the questions.”

I’d never heard of anything so profound in my entire life.

Live the questions.

She told me about Letters to a Young Poet and suggested I read it. I left the session early, went to St. Mark’s Bookstore (RIP) and bought this copy. I am underplaying it when I say it changed my relationship to art, myself, the world and, most critically, solitude.

I’d long feared solitude, mistaking uncertainty for danger—but this book reframed it as the essential condition of becoming, something to run with, not from.

(I’m extremely snobby about the translations and think Stephen Mitchell’s is the best).

Below, I talk about it on Stacked-Up TV, a little book series I was on a thousand years ago when I had no wrinkles and excellent arms.

ADULT

Many people become rapturous over a writing style I can’t stand. Known as purple prose, sentences masquerade as lush and buoyant, but sag under an author’s heavy hand. These are long-winded, overwrought, overly ornate lines that often call nothing but attention to themselves, alerting the reader that THE AUTHOR IS PRESENT.

This writing drives me mad because it strikes me as decidedly dishonest, although in fairness, it’s probably a literary defense mechanism that purple prosers hide behind.

I am a sucker for a sentence that sings and swaggers. A great sentence imprints itself inside me, and leaves me stained and wonder-struck.

The greatest sentences I’ve read are in the remaining two books:

I read the living hell out of this book. I bathed with it, I smoked on it, I slept with it, I carried it with me everywhere.

Loved and Missed

This is the most recent addition to the list, and I’ve written about it before.

Her sentences!

They destroy me and put me back together at the same time.

This is a beautiful and sad story about mothering and caring for another.

And you? What books have stayed with you throughout time? Share them in the comments!

Until next week, I will remain…