TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

Here’s everything from September—the free essays you might have missed and what paid subscribers got behind the paywall.

Imagine a person whose home is their sanctuary. They've decorated it to suit their style, comfort and design sensibility. They have everything they need at hand: their favorite music, books, a place to lie down and sleep, to sit and read, a dog they never want to be without (that’s you, Busy!) They have their food delivered, and perhaps even grow vegetables on their window sills.

This is the place they are most content. So long as they're home, nothing will upset the balance.

But then, one day, the landlord comes and serves this person with an eviction notice. Soon, a marshal arrives and breaks down the door. Our friend has no idea what's happening. She's paid her rent on time, every month. She's lived here her entire life. She grabs her dog and holds on tight, but the marshal begins pulling her hands and the dog slips from her arms as she's violently forced out of her apartment, toward a different reality she cannot comprehend, or know, worrying she'll never return home or see her dog again.

The world outside burns her eyes with its blinding neon light, she's handled roughly, stripped, flipped over, smacked and assaulted by an arhythmic, discordant pressing, a painful weight filling up her ears. Nothing is soft anymore: it's cold, sterile, clinical, and she's passed from one stranger to another. She knows no one here, but they all seem to know her.

This happened to me.

It happened to you.

Birth is being evicted from the only home you've ever known.

This, according to the 20th century psychoanalyst, Otto Rank is the original human trauma.

That first separation is violent: we are moved from warmth into cold, from being merged inside another person to being separate and alone, from the known into the incomprehensible. Without warning, we are cast out and then spend the rest of our lives trying to get back home.

Otto Rank spent nearly two decades as Freud's most trusted disciple. He was secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, editor of its journals, and by most accounts one of the sharpest minds in a circle that included some of the sharpest minds in Europe. He was Freud’s intellectual son: a middle-class kid from Vienna who had shown up at twenty-one with a manuscript called Der Künstler "The Artist" that impressed Freud enough to become his protégé.

So when Rank, at age 40, published The Trauma of Birth in 1924, he wasn't some outsider throwing a grenade into psychoanalysis. He was one of the people who had helped build the thing from the inside.

His argument was that Freud, his mentor, had started in the wrong place. It wasn’t the Oedipal Complex that gave rise to the neurotic drive, it was birth itself.

If you’re at all interested in art, design, collage or any visually arresting form, Instagram is a treasure trove.

There is one artist in particular I follow (I’ll share below), whose art I’ve used for this newsletter, and whose posts I particularly savor. Not long ago, he posted this dictionary for kids, first published in 1967.

Then, he opened the dictionary and shared some of his favorite images.

Taking in each one individually seems to slow down time.

After scouring the internet, I managed to collect more images from that dictionary, and I’m sharing my favorites here.

Find the rest below…

You're in a bad mood.

Everything is going wrong, and you can’t seem to catch a break.

You’ve been jilted by a promising romantic partner; the recruiter with the enticing job has gone silent; your dream vacation is now on hold; a client fired you; your stylist fucked up your haircut; and three months ago your loving, nuzzling, sweet-natured tween woke up hating you.

You’re in a terrible, no good, very bad mood. Your reasons are legitimate.

If things weren’t bad enough, a stranger on the street commands you to “Smile.” An acquaintance invites you over on one condition: “Good vibes only!” They mean well (you think). They always mean well, but somehow their well-intentions leave you lonelier.

You confide to a friend that you worry you’re unemployable; that you’ll never get another job and they tell you to stop being so negative.

Across your internet feed, one post after another: “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle”; “Don’t worry, be happy!” “It could be worse. You could have cancer.”

Each one feels more dismissive than the last.

This relentless campaign to make happiness happen is known as Toxic Positivity, a coping mechanism for people who struggle to feel negative emotions. Toxic positivity rejects all difficult emotions in favor of a cheerful and often falsely optimistic facade. It takes positive thinking to an overgeneralized extreme. While stressing positivity, it also denies human emotions, robbing people from what they actually need: to talk honestly about their situation.

Michael McGregor began drawing on hotel stationery while he was traveling.

His work, deeply influenced by Nabi and Fauvist art, has a childlike, wide-eyed wonder about it, and juxtaposed against the more curated design of a hotel pad, gave rise to something novel.

For every hotel he stayed in, a different pad and a different set of drawings. He soon amassed enough for a book he appropriately titled Room Service.

These drawings were so beloved, he was commissioned to draw on the walls of a Rome hotel room, and soon created an immersive art experience. Anyone who can afford it, can stay there.

Below, find some of the images from the book Room Service (which sadly is out of print, but perhaps can be found if you scour eBay or Etsy), as well as images from the room in Rome.

From January 2020 until March 2021 I had a podcast called Bookable. I loved doing it. I was the only woman in a small group of men. Had it not been for a cruel and abusive team member, I’d still be doing it.

One of my greatest joys is arts programming. For 15 years, I ran a music and literary event series called Happy Ending. I launched it in a small chinatown bar called — you guessed it — Happy Ending. It seated 40 people. A few years later, I moved it to Joe’s Pub and later to Symphony Space, which accommodated nearly 1000 people.

Choosing the authors, the theme, the artists, and the musicians filled me with unimaginable joy. But doing it alone, without any financial support from an organization or institution for 15 years was unsustainable.

Two years after publishing my memoir Little Panic, I was hired to host, produce and program, a book podcast (that I also got to name). I hosted 38 authors and recorded 31 episodes. Among them: Mira Jacob, Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, Gary Shteyngart, Rebecca Solnit, Etgar Keret, Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi, and the late Ursula Hegi.

I recently got word that the garbage monster is looking to relaunch Bookable with a new host and team.

So I thought before it vanished from the internet, I’d introduce it to you.

Without further ado, here are some of my favorite episodes…

BOOKABLE PODCAST TRAILER

Introducing Bookable!

FAVORITE EPISODES

Claudia Rankine Episode

Claudia Rankine: Just Us

Book From the Episode:

Claudia’s new book is Triage:

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about why it’s so hard to get healthy. I mentioned a 5 day retreat I went on in 2013, and today, I’m sharing 45 of the hundreds of notes I took.

It’s hard to be a person.

We spend our lives trapped inside one body, watching the world through the same set of binoculars, from the same perspective, parsing information through the same channels and filters.

We turn the same thoughts over, flipping and rotating them, believing what they say, often when we shouldn’t. And while we regularly try to change people’s minds, argue with their opinions, takes and points of view, so rarely do we take on our own.

Considering the circumstances we find ourselves in (one body, one mind, one life), it’s no wonder we take most things personally. Yet, the truth is that most things aren’t about us at all.

To illustrate this point, I want to share something that happened to me in the 1990s, when I was in my 20s.

Let’s go back in time.

INT. East Village Studio Apartment. Day.

I’m having a perfectly fine afternoon for a person who doesn’t have many perfectly fine afternoons during this period of life. I’ve been making cut-out poetry, gluing words and lines of my own poems onto black-and-white Xeroxes of photographs I’ve taken of my friends’ faces.

Words are scattered all around me. My fingertips are tacky and gray from cheap glue and Xerox toner.

My phone rings. It’s a landline, connected to a wall, useful for making and receiving phone calls. You cannot put it in your pocket.

I want to wash my hands, but I also want to answer the phone. I pick it up,

“Hello?” I say.

“Hey,” a man says.

“Hey back,” I say, assuming he’ll say who it is, or I’ll place his voice in a minute.

“What are you up to?”

“Just making poems,” I say.

“I didn’t know you wrote poems,” he says.

I pause.

“That’s odd,” I say.

At this point in my life, I consider myself a poet. My poems keep getting published, and I keep writing them. I haven’t written anything else, not even a short story. Everyone in my orbit knows I want to be a poet; that I long to make a living this way (🤣)

…

This newsletter is my passion as well as my livelihood. It takes hundreds of hours every month, and thousands of dollars. Readers like you help keep this resource alive and running.

If you feel this is necessary work that deserves recognition and a chance to grow and reach more people, please consider helping to sustain its life and outreach.

Until next week, I will remain,