On July 26, I turned forty, which is the kind of birthday that makes people ask how you feel in the tone normally reserved for medical test results. I felt exactly like myself, which was both reassuring and, frankly, a little rude. Forty had been advertised as an event. I expected at least a software update. Instead, I woke up with the same face, the same brain, and a memory that still serves the dark lord.
The internet has many ideas about women turning forty. Apparently this is when we enter our power, stop caring what anyone thinks, become effortlessly sensual, and purchase good linen. The internet also thinks beef tallow belongs near my eyes, so I am withholding deference. I have not stopped caring. I care grotesquely. I care about my daughter and my mother and the state of the world. I care about books, work, words, people who are no longer mine to care for, and whether the fruit on the kitchen counter has crossed overnight from perfect to doomed. If forty has given me anything, it is not detachment. It is a more exact sense of what deserves my attention and what has already had too much of it.
The month in which I turned forty was also the month I became less willing to negotiate against myself. I could make this tidier by saying the birthday clarified everything, but everybody get down, she’s taking a creative liberty. Nothing is clear in that cinematic way. In fact, everything is being taken apart on the table, one piece at a time, so we can see whether the pieces make a life we can stand inside. There is no verdict yet. There are questions, then more questions underneath those questions. There is effort. There is also the increasingly inconvenient fact that I know what I want, and I am no longer willing to bargain it down until uncertainty can afford it.
For a long time I treated hope as evidence, when it was really just hope wearing a little fake moustache and trying to get into the meeting. Now hope has to bring paperwork.
So I did not arrive at forty triumphant, healed, or even particularly organized. I arrived taking inventory.
An inventory is different from gratitude, a practice I have always found faintly coercive. Gratitude asks you to make everything sound like a gift. An inventory only asks what is here. My daughter is here, becoming more fully herself by the hour. My mother is here. Friends are here. Work is here, with all its appetite. The part of me that wants to write is still here, despite years of being told to wait politely in the corridor. Love is here, though one form of it is presently undergoing a very thorough internal audit. Rage is here too, seated comfortably beside it. Very yin and yang of me.
And the books are here. Ten of them this month, all chosen unusually well, which I distrust on principle. Usually there is at least one book I can blame for wasting two evenings of my finite life. July gave me none. Instead, I kept finding mothers and daughters, missing fathers, doubles, abandoned selves, state violence, faulty memory, women trying to write, people returning after decades, people failing one another through cowardice or exhaustion, and the dead remaining extremely busy. These were books that peeled me like a fruit. By my birthday I had become emotionally translucent.
It turns out that an inventory of what remains is also an inventory of what can still be lost. Happy birthday to me.
Helen of Nowhere, Makenna Goodman, Coffee House Press, 2025
The only man in Helen of Nowhere is called Man. This is the first joke and the first diagnosis.
Man is a once-celebrated neo-transcendentalist in his fifties, now banished from university life and viewing a house in the countryside, where he hopes to begin again without examining what ended the first time. He believes he has been punished for who he is rather than anything he did, the traditional mating call of the self-pitying intellectual. He is kind, plant-loving, mild-mannered, he assures us. Reader, he would also like to sleep with Realtor.
The novel unfolds over a single day, its chapters labelled as acts. There are no stage directions or speech headings, but Man requires neither. He has spent his life turning every room into a stage on which his injuries receive top billing. His former colleagues are ideologues. Wife, once his junior at the university, is disloyal. The women around him have mistaken his mastery for entitlement. Even the dog appears to have committed some personal offence by existing near him.
He really fucking hates that dog. This matters later.
Goodman is sharpest when her characters begin inventing categories. Institutions contain Doers and Takers. Relationships contain Anchors and Kites. Man’s colleagues consider him a Taker; Wife believes she has been forced to become the Anchor while he enjoyed being the Kite. He is outraged by these reductions, despite having reduced every woman around him to a supporting role in the ongoing prestige drama of himself. Man objects to stereotypes primarily because one has finally closed around him.
Then Realtor begins asking questions she should not know to ask. The house’s absent owner, Helen, starts speaking through her. Wife enters the novel from inside what may be another person’s imagination. The country house becomes a séance chamber, the realist floor gives way, and Man is sent stumbling through something resembling Greek catharsis. Helen’s name points toward Troy, of course: another woman turned into the explanation for a disaster produced largely by men. Man has made the same arrangement with his own life. His hubris consists of believing that everything happened to him.
What he wants, beneath the grievance and elaborate political analysis of his cancellation, is painfully ordinary. He wants to be loved. Unfortunately, love requires reciprocity, humility, and the intolerable presence of another person’s reality. It may also require surrendering the authority to narrate yourself as the injured hero.
This is where the dog returns. A dog has no mastery, no academic reputation, no theory of its own goodness. It needs without defending the need and loves without first arranging the power dynamic. I will not explain exactly what Goodman does with this, except to say that Man’s catharsis arrives in a form he would consider beneath him. It is ridiculous, heavily symbolic, and strange enough that I accepted it.
The phrase the book left in my mental toolbox was this is unbecoming of me. Man spends most of the novel convinced that the world has become unbecoming. The harder possibility is that he has. Some habits do not need a manifesto or a sympathetic origin story. They need to be recognized before they acquire tenure and a body of work.
Whistler, Ann Patchett, Harper, 2026
I love a meandering family novel, it’s comfort food for me, and Patchett is a great cook of characters that feel like relatives. If you’ve read Patchett before, you know she loves a good plot, and though this one definitely delivers on that front, I do feel it’s her most essayistic yet. It’s less about what actually happens and more about the strange elasticity of family: how its circumference can shrink through one person’s decision, then widen decades later when somebody simply turns up; how we all withhold a little of ourselves from the people we love.
Eddie was Daphne’s stepfather for only a small part of her childhood, but chronology is a poor measure of who raised us. Some people are there briefly yet remain load-bearing. When Daphne was nine, she and Eddie survived a car accident in the snow. Trapped together overnight, he kept her alive with a story about a woman, a mare named Whistler, and the dead who return when the living are in danger. Soon after their rescue, Daphne’s mother expelled Eddie from the family. Daphne grew up believing the divorce was caused by the accident. The adult story is more complicated though, as adult stories insist on being.
More than forty years later, by ridiculous chance, Eddie comes back to prove that parenthood, chosen or biological, is about who shows up. I mean, there are worse definitions of family.
Anyway. Eddie is family. We ride at dawn for Eddie.
What the Living Do: Poems, Marie Howe, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999
I had been saving What the Living Do for July. This was either excellent instinct or an act of aggression against myself.
Marie Howe wrote much of the collection in the wake of her brother John’s death from AIDS. The poems hold his illness, the violence inside a family, childhood, desire, and the daily indignities that continue after catastrophe. The sink clogs. The groceries need carrying. Someone has to make dinner. Grief does not exempt you from buying shampoo.
The title poem is famous because it understands something most writing about loss tries to improve: the living do not live nobly. They lose gloves, spill coffee, become irritated, lust after strangers, then catch sight of themselves in a shop window with an almost unbearable tenderness. You are gone and I am irritated about plumbing. You are gone and the light looks good on my face. That is the whole scandal.
I found this more useful than any sermon about making the most of time. Being alive is not a performance of constant appreciation. Sometimes it is noticing that you are here while carrying a bag that is cutting into your fingers. Sometimes your mind, which has been boiling you alive for months, clears on a random Tuesday. Life becomes worth living again and you think, with some annoyance, what was all that about then?
Babe, you have such immaculate grief, I thought, and then immediately felt Howe would disapprove of the adjective. Her grief is beautiful because it is not clean.
A Truce That Is Not Peace, Miriam Toews, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025
At a literary event, Miriam Toews is asked why she writes. A normal person might provide a charming answer and let everybody get to the wine. Toews gives us a book.
The answer expands to include letters sent to her sister Marj, her sister’s suicide, their father’s suicide, her mother’s old age, her own depression, children, grandchildren, and the absurd debris of continuing. The simplest answer is that Marj asked her to write. It began as correspondence, a way to keep someone company. After Marj dies, the words cannot save her retroactively. They can only keep moving among the living.
Toews can place a joke next to devastation without making either one smaller. This is harder than solemnity and much closer to how grief actually behaves. Someone is dying and a child says something deranged. A family is breaking and there are snacks. The mind keeps making comedy because it is trapped in a body that would otherwise scream all day and frighten the neighbours.
The title names a condition I recognized immediately. The fighting can stop without peace arriving. A conversation can become tender and remain unfinished. You can understand one another better and still not know whether understanding will be enough. Clarity and grief are capable of sharing a flat; neither of them does the dishes, damn it.
I do not know what happens next. Idk man, this is my first time living too. Toews made that feel less like a failure of adulthood and more like the basic situation of being alive.
Body Double, Hanna Johansson, translated by Kira Josefsson, Catapult, 2026
Two women exchange nearly identical camel coats in a department store. That is all Hanna Johansson needs to loosen identity one button at a time.
Naomi becomes fascinated with Laura, who looks remarkably like her and claims that, after being dumped, she disappeared from her own life. Naomi engineers another encounter, then another. Attraction becomes imitation, intimacy becomes substitution, and soon they are moving through each other’s clothes, friendships, and memories as though a self were merely a role with decent lighting.
That is the plot, technically. In practice, Body Double behaves like a dream you keep mistaking for an uneventful day.
The city ( Is it Berlin? Stockholm? Maybe Vienna?) feels trapped inside a snow globe with six residents and no reliable public transport. Nobody appears to have existed before the novel began. The women have strange jobs, wander for hours, and enter rooms with no obvious purpose. The prose can become almost soporific, then slip an uncanny phrase under the door while your attention is elsewhere. I never knew where the story was going, partly because it seemed to be sleepwalking.
Running alongside Naomi and Laura is an unnamed transcriptionist who listens to cassette recordings made for a ghostwriter. Then she hears a phrase she believes is addressed directly to her, and her own life begins coming apart. It is the perfect second narrative for this book: one woman disappears by becoming too entangled with another, while another disappears into the words of strangers. Everyone is borrowing a voice. Nobody can produce proper identification.
Calling this a surreal thriller — though I do appreciate the nod to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Patricia Highsmith’s Carol — is accurate only if the two words remain under strict supervision. The threat is not a crime waiting to be solved. It is the suspicion that your life has shifted several centimetres to the left while you were sleeping. Creepy in that very European way where nothing happens, the weather is grey, everybody needs a better job, and reality has suddenly developed a structural fault.
I understand the appeal of reinvention. Somewhere in my mind there is always a cleaner woman with better hair, firmer boundaries, and no browser history, waiting to take over as soon as I provide the camel coat. Johansson understands the menace inside that fantasy. When reinvention begins with contempt for the person already living your life, the new self becomes another way to disappear.
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026
Deborah Levy went to Paris intending to write a biography of Gertrude Stein with the excellent working title Mama of Dada. Instead, she wrote a novel about failing to write it. I respect any project that receives its instructions, stares at them for a while, then escapes through a side door.
There is also a missing cat named it, which is either adorable or a philosophical emergency.
It is November 2024. The narrator’s friend Eva is searching Paris for her cat while the narrator is stalled inside the Stein project, surrounded by images and associations that refuse to become a biography. The search provides a welcome distraction until the missing it begins attracting other lost its: the meaning of modernity, the possibility of knowing another person, the identity a woman assembles from friendships and work, the world before its latest catastrophe. The cat becomes a small furry pronoun carrying far more metaphysical responsibility than it consented to.
The book moves accordingly. Paris, friendship, Stein, Alice B. Toklas, mothers, war, cemeteries, fruit, art and the comedy of trying to construct a self from material that keeps changing shape. Levy has taken a handbag full of unrelated objects and, through some private system of magnetism, made them all point north.
Stein dominates the novel without ever settling into a manageable subject. She lived through two world wars while helping murder the nineteenth century and invent the modern; Levy’s narrator is trying to understand her while guns are firing in Ukraine and Gaza and the twenty-first century appears intent on killing itself. Biography promises coherence, but Stein devoted her work to dismantling precisely that. How do you contain in a life story a woman who resisted realism, interpretation and every available container?
One of Stein’s aphorisms keeps returning: “Others are secret because they are other.” It describes the impossibility of biography, but also friendship. The narrator forms a trio with Eva and Fanny, three women overlapping in ideas and affection while remaining fundamentally inaccessible to one another. You can love someone, observe her closely, know the furniture of her life, and still discover that she has been living inside a story you were not reading correctly. Sigrid Nunez, somewhere nearby, is nodding with professional concern.
Stein became famous near sixty. Toklas published her cookbook at seventy-seven. I put these facts in my emergency supplies, beside the candles and the delusion. I am not using them to justify procrastination. I am using them to correct the vulgar idea that a woman’s creative life has a sell-by date.
Levy writes about a persimmon ripening and peaches crushed into liqueur, and I kept thinking about that one time I explained to my 8-year-old that once fruit is ripe you only have so much time until it rots so you have to eat it soon, and she said So I’ll never be able to keep it perfect like this forever? Kids. You gotta love the way their tender innocence backs you into a philosophical conundrum before snack time. I wanted to tell her that no, perfect fruit cannot be kept, you can’t ask for permanence from perishable things, but there are about a million pieces of art that can. I didn’t, though. She was eight. We ate the fruit and then played with stickers.
You Won’t Get Free of It, Rachel Aviv, Knopf, 2026
Rachel Aviv begins this collection by reading her mother’s journals. At twenty-nine, her mother wanted to write. Then she became a mother, and the writing narrowed around the child. Years later, Aviv becomes the writer living the version of life her mother had imagined for herself. The inheritance is loving, uncomfortable, and almost indecently intimate: one woman’s abandoned possibility becomes another woman’s profession.
Then comes a memory from when Aviv was ten. Miserable at camp and talking about suicide, she called her mother, who left a writing retreat to bring her home. For years, Aviv understood this story from the child’s position. As a mother, she can finally see the other plot happening at the same time: a woman had gone away to work, and returned because her child needed her. Love required the correct decision. It also cost something.
This is the tension Aviv carries into these essays about mothers and daughters. She writes about Hannah Upp, whose dissociative fugues repeatedly erased her from her own life; Linda Bishop, who died alone during psychosis in an abandoned farmhouse; Emma, a Filipina mother who left her nine daughters to work as a nanny in New York; and Mary, a physician whose daughters attempt to recover her from a long, devastating delusion. Again and again, care moves in the wrong direction, arrives late, crosses oceans, attaches itself to someone else’s children, or fails because love is not the same thing as being able to see clearly.
The final essay is about Alice Munro and her daughter Andrea Skinner, who was sexually abused by Munro’s husband. Munro knew and stayed. There is no clever way to metabolize that fact. No argument about artistic genius can make it less ugly. The woman who could perceive the smallest moral vibration in fictional lives would not stand fully inside the reality of her own daughter’s.
This book hurt differently because at forty I am both someone’s daughter and the person responsible for someone else’s childhood. I know how seductive it is to believe love will cover whatever attention misses. It won’t. Children live inside the decisions adults rename as complexity.
Aviv does not offer the cheap satisfaction of declaring every mother guilty or every daughter permanently injured. She is interested in the terrible distance between intention and consequence, and in what happens when the daughter grows old enough to revise the story. Her own revisions are part of the moral work. She returns to pieces first written from the daughter’s vantage point and asks what she had failed to understand about the mother. Not to acquit her. To see more.
That distinction matters. Aviv is not trying to acquit anyone. She stays in the room after anger has delivered its verdict and keeps looking. A daughter can understand what trapped her mother without agreeing to call the trap love.
I finished the book thinking about what my daughter may one day remember entirely differently from me. There will be moments I considered incidental that she carried as evidence. There will be decisions I made carefully that still hurt her. I cannot control the future story she tells, and I should not want to. My job is smaller and harder: to be available to the truth when she brings it back.
You do not get free of being a daughter. You do not get free of being a mother either. The title sounds like a threat until you realize it may also be an instruction: stay answerable.
Every One Still Here, Liadan Ní Chuinn, Granta, 2026
I had James Baldwin in my head all month: “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” He suspected that a person unable to recognize this might be incapable of morality. Then I read Liadan Ní Chuinn, who appears to have built an entire book inside that suspicion.
Northern Ireland is both the setting and the subject of these six stories. Most take place after the period officially called the Troubles, although Ní Chuinn has little patience for the fantasy that history stopped when somebody signed an agreement. Violence changes clothes. It enters family stories, suicide statistics, loyalist paramilitaries, institutions that repeatedly fail to hold anyone accountable. It becomes posture, inheritance, an instruction children receive before they are old enough to understand the danger.
Ní Chuinn was born in West Belfast in 1998, the year of the Good Friday Agreement, and belongs to the generation known as the “ceasefire babies”: children born into the promise that the worst was over and raised among evidence that history had not signed the paperwork. Ní Chuinn is the pseudonym of a non-binary writer who has declined face-to-face interviews and largely refused the usual machinery that turns an author into a marketable personality. The work has been sent into the room alone. Considering that Every One Still Here is their debut, it holds the room with frankly unreasonable authority.
The prose initially appears plain, direct, almost confiding. Then you notice how much control is producing that impression of rawness. Ní Chuinn shifts tense, perspective and structure without showing off the machinery. The stories feel like slices cut from lives that were already happening and will continue after the final sentence. Nothing resolves because the things Ní Chuinn is writing about have not resolved either.
In “We All Go,” Jackie studies anatomy while trying to understand his father’s long death and the violence moving through the generations before him. He cuts into donated bodies while the missing body of his father remains the one he cannot examine. His inheritance includes strip searches, midnight raids and the story of his parents being hijacked by loyalist paramilitaries hunting Catholics shortly before he was born. Nobody can tell him enough. Memory has been damaged alongside the people carrying it.
Across the collection, children notice what adults have trained themselves not to see. A girl is always alone on a bus. A teenager confides a pregnancy to the wrong almost-stranger because the correct adults feel unavailable. In “Russia,” two adopted siblings have been severed from a country reduced to somewhere, while a museum displays bodies taken from other cultures as though death cancelled the right to belong to yourself. In “Mary,” even a creative-writing class becomes a small border regime, deciding which ordinary lives can be written and what shape their pain must take before anyone will call it literature.
Families keep eating, praying, lighting candles, passing around bread. Violence sits among them like another relative. Sometimes care is exquisite. Sometimes everyone sees the danger and behaves as though seeing creates no obligation.
The final story, “Daisy Hill,” refuses the insulation of fiction. Its closing section names real civilians killed by British state forces: children, teenagers, parents, people walking home, people trying to help the wounded. The repetition is unbearable because states depend on our fatigue. After enough names, they expect the mind to blur. Ní Chuinn keeps restoring the person inside the count.
One sentence runs through the story like a moral baseline: “I would care if this were done to you.” It should be the easiest sentence in the world. Apparently it is revolutionary.
I read much of this furious. The collection is full of love, but it has no interest in the decorative kind. Love here is what should make another person’s child impossible to dismiss. It ruins the useful fiction that some deaths are remote, historically complicated or regrettably necessary. Every child is real. Every mother receives the news in a human body. Everybody was the centre of someone’s ordinary day before they became a statistic defended by a spokesperson.
Attention, Anne Enright, W. W. Norton & Company, 2026
Attention is a dangerous subject for a woman writer. Want too much of it and you are vain. Give too much and it becomes care, which is expected to be free. Direct it toward the domestic and someone will call the subject small. Anne Enright knows the scam.
Her essays move through women’s bodies, Irish history, abortion, marriage, other writers, and the political consequences of looking away. What joins them is not subject but pressure: who gets looked at, who must do the looking, and what becomes visible when a woman refuses to treat her own attention as incidental.
I kept returning to her essay on Helen Garner. At forty-two, Garner still felt crude, late, excluded, a beginner. She had spent years trying to locate the form that could hold the scale of her own attention. Then she came through.
I turned forty carrying an old, embarrassing wish to write more seriously. It has survived jobs that consumed the useful parts of my brain, motherhood, divorce, exhaustion, and my own talent for treating desire as something that should wait until the administrative work is finished. The administrative work is never finished. There is always an email standing in the doorway holding a smaller email.
Enright reminded me that attention is not what remains after the real work. It is the work. It is also a way of loving. Her closing essay, about moving through the world beside her husband and noticing the body, landscape, pleasure, and eventual loss, understands that one day one person will remain. For now, you are here. Look properly.
Forty may be late for certain things and offensively early for others. For writing, the relevant fact is that I am here now, and delay has exhausted its talent for impersonating patience.
It Will Come Back to You, Sigrid Nunez, Riverhead Books, 2026
If it was important, the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s title story is told as a child, it will come back to you.
This is comforting until memory begins returning the wrong things.
The narrator remembers fragments of Aunt Gilda, a second mother who filled gaps left by the first. She remembers the man who abused her and the phrase she used as a child because she did not yet have the right language. She remembers what the adults understood, what they claim not to have understood, and what may have happened differently. Meanwhile, the useless details arrive pristine. A smell. An object. An old social humiliation. My memory would like it noted that it can reproduce a tone of voice from 1997 but remains unable to explain why I entered the kitchen.
These stories are full of people who cannot agree on the past and cannot stop being governed by it. Mothers try to return to their children. Sisters worry each other into new forms of captivity. Lovers repeat a person as a pattern. Nunez is cool where another writer might be operatic. She leaves enough air around the damage for you to notice how casually it entered the room.
My childhood is increasingly made of scenes I have narrated often enough that I no longer know whether I remember the event or my preferred edit. My marriage has competing versions. There are stories I am still inside that a future self will be tempted to revise for coherence.
But coherence is one of the creative liberties memory takes when reality has poor pacing. The past was not foreshadowing. We simply keep walking backwards through it, pointing at random furniture and saying, See? This was always going to happen.
Nunez made me suspicious of what returns, but also respectful of it. A memory does not have to be perfectly reliable to reveal where pain has been stored. It can be factually unstable and emotionally exact. The ethical mistake is believing that uncertainty means nothing happened.
New house rule: if the unreliable narrator is more than fifteen minutes late to my inner monologue, I am allowed to leave and break free of the metanarrative forever.
Closing Inventory
So, forty.
I had imagined I would meet this age from inside a stable future. Instead, I arrived inside an unfinished conversation, still wanting things that time has made inconvenient, with a daughter growing toward her own life and a part of myself growing back toward the page. There are people I thought would be here who are not. There are others whose presence I could never have predicted.
What remains?
My daughter’s life, separate from mine and still entrusted to me. My own mother, carrying versions of our history I will never fully access. Friends who know when to ask and when to send something stupid. Work I am good at, and writing I want to stop postponing until I have earned the right conditions. A sorry-ass romantic heart still willing to try again, but now wearing a seat belt and asking where exactly we are going. Love and rage, ten excellent books, and me.
Especially me.
That last item is not an empowerment slogan. I have waited inside other people’s uncertainty, confused endurance with depth, and behaved as though wanting a concrete life made me demanding. It did not. Wanting is information. Time is information too.
I do not know what will happen next. I do not feel finished. Thank God. Finished things are either dead or published, and even published things can be revised if Rachel Aviv is in charge. I feel present, which is less glamorous and more useful. The fruit is ripe. I cannot keep it perfect. I can eat it before it rots, make something from it, let the juice run down my hand like a person with no plan to preserve her dignity.
This is what the living do, apparently. We take inventory. We remember badly. We keep the question open without making a home inside it. We try again despite it all.
Every one still here.
