Novdecember
I'm George Saunders, basically
There was no newsletter summarizing November because I like to do the summary the first week of the new month and in this case that month was December and December is, well, hard. I always vow to be different and not lose my entire mind and not have a pit of anxiety rot in my stomach for the three weeks of run-up to Christmas and not take on too much and try to find some kind of “true spirit” of something and just fucking chill but it simply. Does. Not. Work. I find December hard! There is Christmas with my family, then Christmas with my partner’s family, then my birthday is December 27th, then my mom’s birthday is December 28th, then my best friend’s is December 29th, then it’s New Year’s Eve, then it’s New Year’s Day which is also my niece’s birthday and though no one lives that far away and no one is at all demanding about gifts and I don’t actually feel obligated to do something on every single one of those days, there are still presents to buy and cards to write and Instagram posts to plan and birthday wishes to respond to and just a general miasma of existential fraughtness and pressure to reckon with one’s achievements and, like, have so much fun and aspire to feel peaceful in spite of — or maybe due to? — the fact that one is trudging through the mall more often than any other time of year and the trouble is I do actually like giving nice gifts and making nice foods for people and get pretty obsessed against my will with fucking nailing all of that, and I do like my family and hanging out and chatting and drinking champagne and looking at twinkly lights even, all of those things are nice, but holy hell, it is always simply WAY TOO MUCH IN RAPID SUCCESSION for a tired ol’ introvert like me and by the end I feel like a hollow little husk to be perfectly honest with you and I treasure a return to normalcy and ingesting actual nutrients.
Plus this year, my first as a Haver Of A Newsletter, I also felt pressure to provide my readership with a fun, original gift guide, several holiday-appropriate recipes, round-ups and reflections on the best books, movies, music, TV, foods, and/or triumphs over my personal hardships of the year, what is in, what is out, and a summation of my own professional output of the past twelve months delivered in a tone that deftly rides the wiggly line between self-deprecation and braggadocio. And though I managed to send out precisely zero of those things, I certainly devoted untold swaths of brain space and cortisol to mentally drafting, second-guessing, reinstating, and ultimately dismissing them all in turn.
Of all the things that whirled through my head to share in a Best Of The Year type of post, really only one felt firm and solid: my hands-down favourite food media moment of 2022, the moment Tre Sanderson won Top Chef Canada and yelled “Let’s gooooo!” while running around. Simply the best. May we all be blessed with this energy for 2023.
Writing:
I made some semi-decent headway on my novel in November, including printing and spiral-binding my current draft at 3 Cent Copy on Spadina Avenue — a stubbornly cash-only venture where the staff are very efficient and a little bit mean; one of my favourite places in the world. This allowed me to read over the whole thing with a fresh perspective and rearrange the digital draft into reasonably-sized chunks for bulldozing and reworking. I got a bit of that bulldozing done in November and managed to allot four full days to the task in December — a good reminder that carving out a few days in a row is always better than nothing; I don’t have to wait for a full month off to do a “retreat.” During those days I baked cookies and plugged through some rewrites and made myself laugh out loud for the first time in a long time which felt good.
As I’ve mentioned, this novel is my first time writing anything related to “fantasy,” and sometimes I get nervous that I must be doing it wrong. During my cookie-baking bouts, I started listening to interviews with writers as I candied orange peel, melted chocolate, and creamed vegan butter and flax seeds. One was this really killer chat between
and Brad Listi on the latter’s podcast, Otherppl that I highly recommend. Discussing Saunders’ title story from his latest collection, Liberation Day, which is speculative and dystopian and altogether outrageous, Listi asks Saunders how, for a wild, fantastical story like this, “you get to where the rules of the story are being adhered to so that the world holds together.” Saunders replied, with confidence:For me in the revision process…you’re trying to get those rules to reveal themselves. And the way they do is that the prose will suddenly be good in a certain place and you’re like, “Okay then, you’re in the story! And therefore I have to stick to whatever rules you’ve just told me about.”
“Yes!” I said to Saunders, out loud in my kitchen that day. “Exactly!” I could have wept with relief. Let’s be honest, I probably did; I was chest-deep in toasted nuts and had flour in my hair. But the point is, this is what I’ve been doing, too: let what I wrote in the fast, un-thinking flailings of my three-month first draft teach me the rules of the world. Like, if a fantastical character tells another character something about the way her family is structured and the prose itself is worth keeping? So’s that family structure. I’ll make it work! It feels, somehow, correct.
I’m often confident enough in my own process these days to follow those feelings of correctness as I go. But a little affirmation from George Saunders that my approach isn’t decidedly The Wrong Track and has, in the past, led to things like “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” only the most soul-destroying and probably best short story written in the 21st century? It frankly doesn’t hurt!
Reading:
I got my very first Advance Review Copy ever sent to me (because I know the author and rather brazenly asked for it directly, but still!) and I feel extremely cool and in-the-know telling you about reading Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey before it hits the shelves on January 17th (pre-order it!)
I don’t know Monica super-well, but she’s friends with some of my friends and we’ve hung out at some parties — once when she was wearing this impeccable Kylie-Jenner-with-the-dog-filter-on Halloween costume that I simply could not stop staring at, in awe of her cultural prescience and her wig. She also generously mentored me in the art of pitching and showing my face online a little bit over coffee back in 2015. That conversation with her felt like a very kind and hilarious belt across the face and I am forever grateful. It’s not hyperbole to say it changed my life. That being said, what follows is not me being sycophantic. If the book was bad, I’d pretend it got lost in the mail. Luckily, unsurprisingly, it was very, very good.
The book is about a breakup — specifically a full-on divorce at a young age. Having written my first novel about getting dumped back in 2003, I forever have a soft spot for taking heartbreak seriously and was pumped to read Monica’s take. It’s very funny as I expected it to be, but it’s also excellent on the realness of getting too wrapped up in one’s own narcissistic post-breakup bullshit, complete with a satisfying scene of the protagonist drunkenly unravelling at a wedding that is raucous and relatable but also reckons with the real and lasting consequences of fucking up with one’s friends, which I found refreshing and also, regrettably, relatable.
Speaking of narcissistic bullshit, a bit about me: in the 2010’s I worked at a spinning and yoga studio and, as such, got to take a lot more spinning and yoga classes than I ever imagined I would, alongside the lithe, dewy ladies of Forest Hill. Since then I have tried in vain, again and again, to write a truly excellent, hilarious, and poignant scene about the horrorshow but also genuine catharsis-evoker that is, for me, spin class — specifically the kind of spin class that rips off Soul Cycle to combine way-too-loud anthemic pop, inspired DJing by ladies in their forties, and basic-yet-effective life-coaching screeched through a mic that draws heavily on metaphors of powering up mountains and cruising down flat roads and sweating out that which no longer serves us. I have always come up short, but I can at last stop trying because Monica truly nailed it. I can’t do the scene justice without quoting the whole thing, but trust me. I died.
Buy the book, binge it as the breakup/romcom/but-also-moving genre intends, laugh, cry, and love your goddamn life for a couple of days!
Eating:
I mostly ate cookies! Here is a video of me making some. Happy New Year, thank you for reading, goodbye!
