tops of 2022

I’m starting this post on the first day of winter. It’s 70 degrees outside. I don’t know how to make sense of time any more than my LA body knows how to make sense of weather. This year we trained to become foster parents, endured our fourth disrupted adoption, and then welcomed the closest thing to a “surprise baby” that queer adoptive parents can have. I like the baby; I don’t really like surprises, because even good surprises remind me of bad ones (see: four disrupted adoptions). So discovering Joey’s sweet disposition and falling in love with him was threaded with the worst mental health period I’ve had in years. I’m good-enough now, if I get enough sleep and don’t scrutinize anything too closely. That’s why this isn’t a personal 2022 recap—that story is told in all my obtuse angsty poems below this post—but a list of what I read and watched and loved.

I recently got to interview Adam Bessie, whose graphic memoir Going Remote documents the bleak business of teaching community college during quarantine while also undergoing treatment for brain cancer, and he alluded to Susan Sontag’s concept of the Kingdom of the Ill, i.e. the isolation of the margins. Illness can be physical or mental or social or material. It is always lonely. With alllll due respect to chemo, the truest antidotes are community and art.

Books

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead: Whitehead writes about the worst sins of American history with understated details that shine a light on the horror. In this novel of a corrupt reform school, I was particularly moved by the friendship between A-student and activist Ellwood and street-smart Turner. It made me think of that famous line in Huckleberry Finn, where Tom says he'd go to hell for Jim. Turner actually does go to hell for Ellwood, more or less, giving this friendship between abused Black teens more gravitas. The twist at the end is arguably a cynical one; based on The Intuitionist and other writing, I believe Whitehead is interested in the arbitrary nature of fate. But if Turner's outcome is arbitrary, and his past never entirely escapable, he also merges into the modern world with a combination of his own and Ellwood's best traits. 

True Biz by Sara Novic: This is a good companion to Nickel Boys—a story about an institution that is equally insular, but utopic rather than dystopic. Set at a boarding school for Deaf students, Novic's savvy novel is told from multiple points of view, each representing a different segment of the Deaf community: the hearing headmistress raised by Deaf parents; the Deaf student whose shitty cochlear implant and uptight mom have stood between her and learning sign language; the Deaf student with Deaf parents (and grandparents) who is treated as minor royalty. The story is a page-turner, opening when three students go missing and flashing back to the months leading up. 

Going in, I wasn’t sure how I felt about cochlear implants, which I know are controversial, but this novel suggests that they’re sort of a red herring, just the latest chapter in a long history of eugenic attitudes toward disabled people. The novel is clear without being didactic that implants aren’t inherently evil, but when used to deny Deaf children access to sign language (and by extension, to language in general), they become a tool of oppression. I particularly liked Novic’s meta-texts about Deaf history and the structural elegance of ASL. Ultimately this is a book about how language and community liberate people.

Fatty Fatty Boom Boom by Rabia Chaudry: A delightful and mouth-watering memoir of food and culture, this is not a weight loss story or a fat acceptance manifesto. Rather, it’s Chaudry's story of how food is as complicated as family; hers tells her she’s too fat and dark-skinned to find a husband, which leads to an abusive marriage to the first man who proposes. But Chaudry also makes it clear that her family loves her, and that for every disordered eating habit, she also has a deep passion for the recipes of her homeland of Pakistan. The last portion of the book is devoted to recipes, for braver cooks than me.

Grace by Natashia Deón: This book is ballsy, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking—all those phrases that call up the body. The narrator of the novel, Naomi, is disembodied, a ghost for much of the story, which spans the 1840s to the 1870s in rural Alabama and Georgia. As such, she doesn't have much power, but she has more freedom than when she inhabited an enslaved body, and she's determined to protect her daughter from the horrors that led to her own death. The thematic scope is vast, but the motif of who gets to be a mother hit me especially hard. When I try to imagine Natashia Deón writing this book, I picture a process that must have been meticulous (so many characters, so much jumping around in time) but also intuitive and spiritual. The result is a wonder.

The Tiger and the Cage by Emma Bolden: I love a memoir by a poet; Bolden finds the precise language to capture the equally maddening experiences of multiple chronic illnesses (endometriosis, dysautonomia) and a medical establishment that ranges from dismissive to misogynistic. Despite Bolden’s significant suffering, the book is also a story of self-discovery and self-advocacy.

Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith: Books and movies that thread together the narratives of an eclectic set of female friends are easy to come by; it’s a genre I’m drawn to and critical of when done poorly. This graphic novel tells the stories of several Black women in New York with exceptional economy and gorgeous details, pivoting around the intimacy of hairstyling rituals while touching upon dating, mental illness, and coming out.

The Year of the Horses by Courtney Maum: I loved Maum’s voice and related to her ambivalence about having a second child and parenting a toddler. She describes the complex and often vague despair of midlife (or really just life) in sardonic and savvy detail, with lots of interesting horse history thrown in.

Broken Harbor by Tana French: I cannot get enough of Tana French. The Likeness is still my favorite in the Dublin Murder Squad series so far, but Broken Harbor did not disappoint in terms of atmospherics (a crumbling, half-sold housing development) or thematics (the ways places haunt us, the lengths we go to to protect troubled loved ones).

A Career in Books by Kate Gavino: This graphic novel nails different types of entry-level publishing jobs with cringeworthy accuracy, from the artsy indie press financed by a trust fund to the ruthless market forces that govern larger houses. If it’s righteously cynical about the industry, it’s hopeful about friendship and literature, as the young women in the story find their way in the world and their elderly author neighbor models dignity without notoriety. 

Screens

Everything Everywhere All at Once: This aptly named movie has it all: the multiverse, the meaning of life, the lack thereof, rocks with faces, teenagers, marriage, bagels, an amazing Ratatouille homage.

Reservation Dogs: Season 1 topped my list last year, and season 2 is just as good. I like the slowness, the quirkiness, the way that the sacred and the comic/profane are inextricable from one another. I especially loved an episode in which motivational Native leaders (including an insufferable urban hipster-Indian who has fetishized her own ancestry) speak to the local youth group. The kids are there because they’ve been bribed with gift cards. Just as last season nailed the subculture at the local health clinic, this one nails youth nonprofits and group home life; Marc Maron is perfectly cast as a sober house manager who is caring, weird, genuine, and generally a mixed bag in the kids’ lives. Cheese’s arc as a kid in the system feels all too true.

Good Girls/Claws: I binged all of the former and much of the latter (it lost me a bit after a “you thought he was dead but he’s not!” plot twist). They’re both character-driven dramedies about a group of women who launder money because straight middle class life has either eluded them or failed them. Good Girls is the latter, and whiter, though Retta’s storyline is one of the best and most heart-wrenching. In Claws, Niecy Nash is equal parts funny and world-weary as a former foster kid taking care of her autistic brother and trying to level up her nail salon business. 

Emily the Criminal: Another story of a woman turning to crime because capitalism and the system have fucked her over. I’m sensing a theme here. Aubrey Plaza plays an artist with $70,000 in student debt and an assault record that keeps her from getting a decent job. Credit card fraud suits her ballsy personality—I liked that her anger is understandable but not always advisable. And her romance with her crime-ring boss is pretty hot.

Mysterious Skin: I somehow missed this movie when it came out in 2004. It’s squirmy in its depictions of child sexual abuse (not graphic, just lots of icky grooming behavior), but never gratuitous. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character—a reckless queer hustler—is juxtaposed against Brady Corbet’s withdrawn one, who believes he was abducted by aliens. The movie lays out perfectly and poetically how trauma can impact people in radically different ways.

The Automat: I first heard of the Automat, a New York- and Philadelphia-based chain of restaurants where you could buy hot meals from fancy vending machines, in Sarah Schulman’s novel Shimmer. I pictured it as a clean, well-lighted place where people fell in love. And this documentary, which features Mel Brooks as a running commentator, basically confirmed the image in my mind, which in itself is pretty cool. It’s also a feel-good movie for the most part, which is nice in a genre full of debunkings and crime. The Automats were family-run businesses that treated their employees well—though there was one failed attempt to unionize, so I don’t want to idealize too much—and served high quality, affordable food to people from all walks of life. If I could time travel, I would definitely stop at one.

The White Lotus: Another second season success. Another great opportunity to watch Aubrey Plaza, who is a pretty versatile actress, even if it initially seems like her main schtick is never smiling. I love the spookiness of this show, the upstairs/downstairs staff/guests storylines, and of course everything about Jennifer Coolidge. The unifying theme this season was the transactional nature of sex and even friendship, from overt sex work to subtler stuff, so it feels of a piece with Good Girls and Claws, in a way. It’s cynical, but a couple of the least transactional relationships are the ones that survive, even when a whole boatful of characters don’t.

We’re Here: All the feel-goodness of Queer Eye, but instead of making over people’s lives, Eureka, Shangela, and Bob the Drag Queen work with small-town Americans to put on a drag show. Which is at once more realistic and more fun. 

The Resort: Peacock’s answer to White Lotus, set in Mexico, with some mysticism thrown in. I actually tapped out before the last episode—maybe things started to feel too mystical?—but I loved the setting and the mystery and the characters.

The Vow: As much of a guilty pleasure as any cult documentary (that is, a documentary about a cult, not a documentary with a cult following), but distinct because the members of the self-improvement cult NXIVM and its extra-fucked-up spinoff sex cult, DOS, seem smart and self-aware in a way we like to think cult followers aren’t. The belief that anything wrong in your life is both your fault and therefore possible to fix is very LA, very entertainment industry, and very me, honestly. So yeah, in a parallel universe, I would absolutely be begging Keith Raniere to give me a baby, even though in this one, I can think of few things creepier.

Bosch: C.C. teases me about this one, implying it’s one of those CBS shows like NCIS, but I’m four seasons in and it has the comforts of a procedural with more depth than average and a ton of LA. Echo Park garages dug out of hillsides, Angel’s Flight, the tunnels beneath the Biltmore—they’re all part of the supporting cast.