Years ago, when I was deep in the grief and angst of cancer and infertility, a lay counselor at church shared a Buddhist saying about everyone having ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows in their lives. It didn't do much for me at the time, but I think about it a lot now. Stories have arcs and meaning. Real life is more scattershot. I got through the sorrows of my 2010s and went on to have more joys and more sorrows...and 2025 was a bit heavy on the latter, to be honest.
I am so superstitious that I don't want to say "it was a bad year" because It Could Have Been So Much Worse, because it still could be [insert evil eye emoji], but a year that kicks off with your city catching fire isn't the easiest thing to bounce back from. ("But Cheryl," says my inner Cheryl, "YOUR neighborhood didn't burn.") Then Joey landed in the hospital for a week ("Only a week! He was fine! Antibiotics did the trick!"), which tipped my hyper-vigilance into high gear during the months of follow-ups. He had his tonsils out in May—easy surgery, slog of a recovery. We lost two cars: one to engine failure and one to an accident on the 134, in which we were rear-ended and spun all the way around into the left lane. Our nerves and finances are still feeling it. ("But no one was injured! Your dad loaned you his Suzuki and you brushed up on your manual driving skills!") Our six-year-old tortoiseshell, Roadie, became bony beneath her long fur and passed away in November. It was too soon, and it broke Dash's heart a little bit—a heart that always seems to wonder who might leave him next.
Also, fascism. ("But YOU and YOUR family didn't get deported.")
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Alongside all this, the physical and cognitive health of my MIL, Bea, has continued to decline. Sometimes so slowly that she seems stable, sometimes quickly with a fall or an infection. This heartbreak belongs to C.C., her sister, and their dad, and I usually don't ask myself how I feel about it. I feel the weight of C.C.'s overwhelm, and I stay with the kids when she visits her mom, and that's plenty. But I've known Bea for almost twenty years. I know what she has survived. I remember how she was able to care for and play with Dash when he was little, and I see her trying to do the same with Joey, but she is more like a little kid herself now, minus the energy. I grieve her specifically, while trying to honor who she is now, and of course I grieve my own mom, who never had the luxury or the burden of getting old.
But this was the year I also leaned into the small moments that everyone says we have to celebrate. I used to think I was too good to be sated with little consolation prizes like pretty sunsets or some bullshit. Or, alternately, I thought I was too doomed to be allowed to enjoy this world. But I am gradually getting a tiny bit better at enjoying this world while carrying what comes with it.
And I wrote a draft of a novel and leveled up at my job (not literally; it's not that kind of budget year, but I got some praise and I'm a praise junkie) and had some really wonderful moments with new and old friends. And one morning C.C. told me the plot of Hamnet like a story, and it was a gift, where I felt like we were staring together at all the love and truth of the universe and God and art. Stories aren't always true, but they are full of love and truth. The good ones.
I read a shitload of books and saw some things. Here's what I liked best.
Books:
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo: I am pretty sure everyone I know (friends, family, both my therapists) is tired of hearing me talk about this book, but I really can't overstate how tangibly helpful it is, at no expense to its literary qualities. Many memoirs cover difficult childhoods and a journey to healing, but even the really good ones are like 70% trauma, 30% healing, and the latter tends to be like, "I still have hard times, but time and love and therapy [in the abstract] have helped." Stephanie Foo, on the other hand, devotes only about 15% of the book to her horrifically abusive parents. Then she covers the stuff that not enough books do: what it feels like to get a diagnosis that makes her feel hopelessly broken, what it looks like to work on herself, and what helps a little, a lot, and not at all. She explores mindfulness, EMDR, and shrooms. All good. No miracles.
I don't think it's too big of a spoiler to share that, to my surprise and hers, the therapist who helps her most takes a psychodynamic, relational approach. He emphasizes storytelling and editing, which happen to be Stephanie's wheelhouse as a radio journalist, and makes his own process transparent. In doing so, he makes himself vulnerable and seems less like a gatekeeper and more like someone she can trust.
My own story: I have not been diagnosed with Complex PTSD, but I do have Chronic PTSD from a series of related shitty traumas in my adult life (that probably harken back to some sub-traumatic but difficult early childhood attachment issues). Which is to say I had a pretty stable childhood, but I'm not an easy case. I am wrapping up two years of EMDR, and while it was helpful and important, it didn't "fix" me. I've been seeing my psychodynamic, relational therapist for more than twenty years. Sometimes I wonder why I'm not "better," but that therapist and this book help me see that it's okay not to be fixed. As Stephanie summarizes toward the end, it's human and good and normal to feel pain. The trauma reactions come in when we can't pull ourselves back to joy; when we berate ourselves for not feeling the way we're "supposed" to.
If you, like me, have an allergy to the self-help genre but still want to, you know, help your self, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Its combo of personal narrative, brain science, journalism, and vulnerability are the right prescription. For me, at least. It's different for everyone.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie: This novel is about the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s - or rather, it is about a handful of people (twin sisters, an academic revolutionary, their houseboy) whose lives are horribly disrupted by the Nigerian Civil War. When it comes to faraway wars, it’s easy to sort of think of the victims as characters whose role is to suffer. Even if the suffering seems viscous and unjust, a part of us thinks, “Well of course. That is the story they’re in.” By writing a slow boil of an epic novel, Adichie demonstrates that no one starts out as a victim, and every war is a fault line running through the mundane and magical lives we all deserve.
It is also a book about divisions, personal and political. Olanna and her sister never have much in common, and a love affair splits them seemingly forever, until the war brings them together. In her sister’s words, “Some things are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
I am thinking a lot about Gaza as I read. And the horrors of ICE, which are freaking out my son, and so many people’s children. How do you make your child feel safe when there’s a straight-up villain stalking the streets of your city? How much of parenting is sustaining a myth? (Olanna and Ugwu, telling her daughter that they can’t eat a lizard because the ants that the lizard ate will bite the inside of her stomach. Even though food is scarce.) I’m crying a lot about this world, and about my own little worries.
The title references the symbol on the flag of the rebel state, Biafra. I always imagined it as a sun divided vertically, but in fact - of course - it is a sun rising.
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda Hess: It's like Amanda Hess climbed inside my head (or my algorithm?), saw exactly how I felt about the Owlet baby monitor, and wrote it all down. This book resonates for many reasons, including how *feels* to become and be a parent when the internet and technology are characters in the room. Sometimes those characters are loud and judgy. Sometimes they're fake, fickle friends. Sometimes—in the case of genetic screening—they can be literal lifesavers that also happen to fan the flames of a new eugenics movement.
Part memoir of her own pregnancy and early parenthood (she gives her children pseudonyms; one is based on an erroneous internet bio of herself, and the other is "Brayden, because that is a name I would never give to a child"), Second Life journeys through the digital landscapes of freebirthers and tradwives, influencers and medical moms, reality shows and culty festivals. The book feels like a bit of a companion piece to Naomi Klein's Doppelganger (though I said that about another recent read; maybe I just really liked Doppelganger) in its depiction of wellness-to-eugenics pipelines and its critique of a culture that craves community while settling for consumer substitutes.
Hess is the subject of a battery of prenatal testing, a "highly medicalized" pregnancy, and the parent of a child with a serious but manageable medical condition. She has a personal stake in technology and anti-tech movements that alternately threaten and supplement his humanity. (Some freebirthers believe babies who can't survive unassisted birth should just die peacefully...to which I want to scream "Half the population would have died by the age of five if not for SOME type of intervention.") As a genetic mutant myself, with two wonderful adopted kids who are a genetic role of the dice, I experienced this book as a confirmation of my own humanity, and a rallying cry to find real community, however complicated "real" may be in this world.
Killingly by Katharine Beutner: Clever, compelling, moving, and subtle, this novel really blew me away. The back matter compares the writing to Sarah Waters, and that's accurate (love me some Sarah Waters). The story opens with the disappearance of Bertha Mellish (which I just learned is a true story), a Mt. Holyoke student, who is missed most deeply by her older sister and best friend, the heroes of the story and the source of its most touching moments. Beutner adds a creepy family doctor and a queer detective to the mix. The book is deeply interested in gender and feminism, but not in that annoying way where you can see the author's contemporary ideals jumping off the page. It feels quite and of its time. The book also poses a "what if" question not just in its premise, but in the juxtaposition of what happened to Bertha in a possibly autobiographical story she wrote, vs. in actuality (or the actuality of Beutner's telling). Bertha claims that the worst thing in the world is to be stuck. What if she'd been offered different avenues of escape? What if they had misfired?
Black Arms to Hold You Up by Ben Passmore: In 2020, Ben goes time-hopping a la Quantum Leap—guided by his old-school Black activist dad—through a history that runs alongside/counter to what most people learn about the Civil Rights movement. In the America Ben visits, nonviolent protest is not enough, but those who want to demand liberation at gunpoint are sometimes met with hostility from their own communities. Tracing a path from Marcus Garvey through the life of Robert F. Williams (author of Negroes With Guns), the Black Power movement, Sanyika Shakur, and BLM, the book is irreverent—both in tone and in its willingness to question sacred figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. Personally I believe that progress requires people who work within the system and outside of it, sometimes far outside of it. It makes sense that today we find MAGA types quoting MLK (selectively) while burying anything that incites true liberation. I'm glad such a worthy artist as Passmore is uplifting the latter.
The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer: All the moodiness and evocative language of a Tana French novel, minus the cop parts. Multiple narratives rotate around and spiral out from a single event, the disappearance of a young girl from a suburban field one night. The story is something of a tragedy about the secrets people keep from and for the ones they love, and the way family members fail each other, even when they're acting out of love.
Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen by Kate Evans: I am not an Austen fangirl (although I'm not NOT an Austen fangirl), but this biography earned my admiration with its postcolonial "Interlude" section, which examines the origins of the fabrics Jane sewed and wore. With beautiful embroidered illustrations, this section details the making of Indian muslin, Irish linen, and American cotton (picked by enslaved Africans and woven by children in Northern England). The stories of the exploited workers have been buried, but live on in song lyrics and nursery rhymes. The metaphor of the fabric of Austen's life (and ours) being rooted in oppression works fantastically well. Evans doesn't villainize Austen in the least, but reveals how her story is not just her story.
The Given Day by Dennis Lehane: A big sweeping epic with big historical events—the 1918 flu pandemic, the labor movement, the Great Molasses Flood, and the Boston Police Strike. Lehane weaves them together seamlessly, and the book avoids the Forrest Gump quality I hate in a lot of historical fiction, where it feels like the main character is making a cameo in cute landmark moments. Danny Coughlin and Luther Lawrence are strong characters who evolve over the course of the novel, but I was especially fascinated by Danny's father, Tommy, a lace curtain Irishman who is determined to help his family, even if it means ignoring his own moral compass.
The Last Time We Spoke: A Story of Loss by Jesse Mechanic: I was a young adult when my own mom died of cancer, so maybe that's why I was spared the failing-grades part of Jesse's narrative, but damn, I related to every other bit of this graphic memoir. Grief as OCD and intrusive thoughts that function as a relentless playground bully kicking you toward the abyss. Fear and sadness that don't go away, even as art and joy provide salvation. A new perspective as a parent, when you realize how painful it must have been for your mom to leave you (and you worry that you'll do the same to your children). Mechanic writes and draws with precision, accurately depicting an internal landscape full of darkness and flowers. He concludes that he has integrated his mom's presence and absence into his being: "We talk all the time." Yes. Exactly. Thank you for this book, Jesse Mechanic.
How to Say Goodbye in Cuban by Daniel Miyares: The illustrations are SO GORGEOUS. A lot of YA graphic novel art feels interchangeable, but Miyares' beautifully composed, island-hued watercolors of revolutionary Cuba are unforgettable. The story is his father's, and the narration sticks close to a kid's POV. I would love to see this book taught in classrooms, both for the history and for the parallels to present-day immigration stories and political upheaval.
Movies: I didn't see many, so this list is not exactly going add anything to the cultural dialogue, but here's what moved me in 2025.
Sinners: A movie about the Prohibition-era South would be inherently interesting to me, but this one—which is also about art, cultural appropriation, and vampires—is transcendent. The scene where visitors from the past and future are summoned by the power of the musicians sums up my personal spiritual beliefs better than anything I've seen on film.
Wicked: For Good: I heard this movie got some critical pans, but I suspect those critics just don't know how to digest a tentpole movie with a femme sensibility. Although the first movie contains more musical hits, the second one wins points for its depiction of a mature, complicated female friendship.
Kpop Demon Hunters: I love that this movie—an animated kids' pic that takes its cues from Korean folklore, anime, and Kpop rather than Hans Christian Andersen, Disney, and Pixar—is so wildly successful. The soundtrack was a slow boil for me, but now I adore almost every song. The story is fierce and funny, and the real demon is shame. Did I mention I went as Sussy, the three-eyed magpie, for Halloween?
Weapons: I don't love the scary-old-lady trope, but I do like the extended metaphor (as I read it) of an orange-haired clown who turns people into zombies to do their bidding. And Julia Garner is a wonderful flawed heroine whose choices, as destructive as they occasionally are, make more sense than those of most horror movie leads. I also love her look: funky sweaters, glasses, short curly hair.
An Update on Our Family: This even-handed documentary about family vloggers takes a deep dive into the story of
Myka Stauffer and her family, who built their following around the adoption of an autistic Chinese boy, then "rehomed" him when they grew overwhelmed by his needs. The movie includes takes from adult adoptees and adoptive parents as well as cultural critics. I follow an Instagrammer who often rails against content creators who exploit adopted children, but I think that's a subgenre of a larger uncharted land of unpaid, unregulated child labor on social media. This documentary gives voice to many players without pulling punches. It also artfully employs animation to obscure the images of children, thereby avoiding the replication of what it is critiquing.
TV:
Long Story Short: This funny, multigenerational saga of a marginally functional Jewish family takes full advantage of the animated form by flashing backward and forward over the course of decades in a single episode, showing that even the most annoying among us are how we are for a reason.
The Four Seasons: This remake tackles the big and small challenges that emerge in long marriages, like the tension between a partner who craves freedom and one who is really worried his husband isn't taking his heart medication. I would watch Tina Fey in most things, but I'm glad I got to watch her in this, alongside an equally excellent cast.
Savior Complex: All the juiciness of a cult documentary, but scarier, because the figure at its center—a white Christian American who starts taking medical matters into her own hands at her Uganda nonprofit clinic despite a total lack of formal training—is intelligent, well meaning, and probably not a pathological narcissist. She's proof that colonial and racist power dynamics can corrupt almost anyone.
Kevin Can F*** Himself: I'm late to this one (and arguably more than half the stuff in this post), but the simple, brilliant premise—where any scene can read as lighthearted and goofy or dark and difficult depending on the POV and lighting—strikes me as an accurate representation of life. Like, I have both those shows in side me and the one I'm living in changes by the hour.
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