words I’ve liked this year

I keep a day to day note on my phone for collections of words that I’d like to re-read and remember. It fills up with paragraphs from books I’m reading, sentences from newsletters I subscribe to and articles I’ve been sent, throwaway lines overheard on trains, at parties, in the office.

Below is a window into some of the morsels I have saved this year.

“The protagonist of my first novel describes the double bind technology has us all in as the feeling at night, when windows become mirrors! You may be alone, or there could be someone standing right outside, looking in.”

Olivia Sudjic in her short non-fiction book, Exposure.

“I have a hard time seeing my life for the lovely and beautiful and full thing it really is, so Instagram actually helps me ritualize that kind of appreciation. I look at my own profile a lot, and sometimes it feels like looking at someone else’s life, and then I remind myself like, oh yeah maybe you just need some extra Vitamin D today because this shit is awesome.”

Delia Cai in one of my favourite newsletters, Embedded. The last few years of quote notes have been steeped in writing about evolving internet culture, technology and our relationship with it. They have followed these topics’ journey through my life from personal interest to academic research topics to the centre of my professional life, so I don’t see them going anywhere any time soon.

“I’ve tried to describe my dad’s death by saying it’s like the sky or the sea has disappeared and the fundamental elements that make up the world have gone, and this is partially true. The key flaw in this simile is that it is only my sky or my sea that has gone, while nearly everyone else in my life still has theirs. It’s more accurate to say I have stepped across an invisible boundary into a world occupied only by others who have lost a parent. I can still interact with the world untouched by grief, but I’m living somewhere else now.”

Robin Craig in his newsletter Looking At Porn.

“And in the end, onstage, most pain reads the same. You sort of only need one bad thing to happen to you and you're set for life.”

Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad, perhaps my favourite novel I read this year.

I am always interested in reading about different flavours of coping with grief - it’s been at the centre of much of the writing I’ve enjoyed in 2023. However I do feel that Hammad’s sentiment applies to life as a whole and not just performance; tragedy is always personal and always relative and empathy is always there for the taking.

“Anxiety has started to creep up over my neck and my chest like something spilled, scalding me.”

The perfect description of a wave of anxiety cresting from Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone, a weird and lingering read.

No one who ever went outside on a spring afternoon could really believe that there aren’t second acts in everyone’s lives.”

Helena Fitzgerald in griefbacon, a newsletter that has dominated my quotes note for many years and this year sent out its final installment. I will seek out things Helena writes in other mediums because she cuts to the heart of being alive and increasingly less young in The Big City.

“In every narrative there are smaller narratives about the story a character tells of themselves to the world, to others, to themselves, to us as the reader.”

I love Sophie MacKintosh’s strange and hallucinatory novels, and was pleased to see her start a newsletter this year (along with seemingly everyone else). This line is from a piece where she describes the “ghost novel” that emerged in the writing of Cursed Bread, which I have recommended onwards several times since reading in the summer. Several of the novels I’ve enjoyed this year feature protagonists whose projected history of themselves is muddy and mysterious; Emerance in The Door, Wallace in Real People, Calla in Blue Ticket (also by MacKintosh). I think about it all the time in my own life - as should anyone who shares curated facets of themselves online.

“I think to myself that some people take photographs as a way to not really see. I wonder if I'm one of those people, or if I take photographs as a way to pay attention, to have the tiniest window through which to look closely.”

Kate Zambreno in Drifts. Photography has slipped away from me this year, in part because I haven’t been paying attention to what purpose it serves for me. Zambreno’s writing on why we write/photograph/remember felt both prescient and distant in a year where I haven’t found much bandwidth for recording.

“I would try out every sort of life there is if I could, but I can't. I can only have mine, while trying with all my might to remain porous and open to the world's whims as well as my own.”

Writer Megan Nolan in the Guardian, on why she’s uninterested in marriage and children. Both Zambreno’s novel and Nolan’s segment in a wider feature on female singleness across the decades grapple with decisions around children, particularly as pertains to a writer who is also a woman.

“I could only think of you as being very distant and beautiful and calm. A lighthouse in clear waters.”

Virginia Woolf, from her love(?) letters. I have spent much time this year looking at lighthouses and the image is indeed perfect for the aspirational stalwarts of our emotional lives.

“What are the roads like in Ireland? Are they wider? Longer? Windier?”

And finally, a conversation I overheard over lunch in the office, during which two colleagues managed to spend half an hour talking about driving and motorways in their various home nations. I found it moving to see how people strain for a clearly lacking overlap of interests so diligently. A true team effort.