What I'm Reading

Mar 11, 2023

This page correlates all the What I’m Reading mini-reviews (and other book recommendations) with their associated posts.

February 2023: I Made an Accident by Kevin Sampsell, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, by Kristen Iversen, and Billy Porter’s Unprotected

Be Your Own Hero

What are you loving right now?

Valentine’s Day can provoke complicated feelings, whether you’re partnered or unpartnered. So today on Be Your Own Hero, I thought I’d invite you to help me celebrate other things we are loving right now. What is giving you great satisfaction, lighting up your happy button, or otherwise contributing to your wellbeing despite, or in addition to, the corp…

a year ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Louise Julig

November 2022: Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger

Be Your Own Hero

"Tell me about your overalls"

In August I attended an in-person writing conference for the first time in three years. It was thrilling to be close to a bunch of writerly folks again after so much time on Zoom calls and in small groups. I flew to Pennsylvania for HippoCamp and packed my suitcase with care. I wanted to be comfortable the four days I’d be away, sure, but also wanted a …

a year ago · 2 likes · 7 comments · Louise Julig

September 2022: PRO: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, by Katha Pollitt

Be Your Own Hero

Abortion — without apology

I love(?!) how writing this newsletter about being brave forces me to confront the places in my life where I’m not being brave. Case in point: my last issue of Be Your Own Hero: It’s okay to grieve, it’s okay to feel joy. I wanted to write something about abortion because I was having a Lot Of Feelings about what happened with the Supreme Court in June…

2 years ago · 3 likes · 8 comments · Louise Julig

August 2022: Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the language of Human Experience, by Brené Brown, and The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

Be Your Own Hero

It's okay to grieve, it's okay to feel joy

I’ve struggled with what to say this past month, and started multiple drafts of this edition of Be Your Own Hero that just didn’t feel right. They were heavy into grief. Not that there’s anything wrong with grief. There is plenty to grieve lately. The fall of Roe v. Wade in particular hit me even harder than I was expecting, with so many feelings in suc…

2 years ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Louise Julig

May 2022: Invisible Sisters and Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss by Jessica Handler

Be Your Own Hero

Braving the Fire

“Writing about truly painful subjects like death, illness, divorce, war — anything that deeply changes your life — is as brave as holding a hand over a flame that’s already burned you once.” That’s from author Jessica Handler, who knows what she’s talking about. Death and loss has been part of her life from a very young age, and as an adult she wrote a …

2 years ago · 4 likes · 11 comments · Louise Julig

April 2022: The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham Jones

Be Your Own Hero

In Praise of Doubt

As a kid, I craved certainty. This was partly an inherent personality trait, but was also reinforced by my religious upbringing. From when I was a small child until I was thirteen, my mother was heavily involved in the Christian Charismatic Movement in Pennsylvania in the ‘70s. This was a nondenominational, grassroots movement that, among other things, e…

2 years ago · 2 likes · 16 comments

March 2022: Heavy, An American Memoir, by Kiese Laymon

Be Your Own Hero

What keeps you from being brave?

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few of months about what gets in the way of being brave. Sometimes I want to be brave and do the right thing, but I just don’t. I wondered, what’s happening there? Is it a lack of willpower? Am I just a bad person sometimes? A coward? That seems too simplistic…

2 years ago · 3 likes · 5 comments · Louise Julig

February 2022: The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, Moments of Being, by Virginia Woolf, and Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz

Be Your Own Hero

Daring, heroic, necessary

Do you consider acting heroic? What about singing? Playing guitar? Writing poems? When I think of heroic work I usually think firefighter, paramedic, ER doctor and the like. But an experience at a theater several years ago made me think differently…

2 years ago · 3 likes · 15 comments · Louise Julig

December 2021: You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism, by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar

Be Your Own Hero

When you just can't fling the spider

A few years ago, I was at my dad’s house helping him out for several days after he came home from the hospital. He’d arranged for his regular catsitter, Kay, to come over in the evenings to take care of his two Siamese, and one night she was getting their food ready in the kitchen when I heard her call me from the next room…

2 years ago · 3 likes · 7 comments · Louise Julig

November 2021: Blow Your House Down, by Gina Frangello

Be Your Own Hero

When you're the one being called out

Oh, the irony. The very day I hit Send on my last newsletter, the one about not calling out my neighbor on a comment he made that needed to be called out — I got called out on something. It happened in one of the online writing communities I am in, via direct message from a community moderator…

3 years ago · 2 likes · 6 comments · Louise Julig

September 2021: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, by Judith Heumann, and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit

Be Your Own Hero

When you realize you're complicit

The U.S. marked the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks this month. I didn’t attend any formal remembrance events, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Aside from the fact that I once lived in the same San Diego apartment complex as two of the terrorists (not while they were living there), and that a friend of ours worked at a company w…

3 years ago · 3 likes · 6 comments · Louise Julig

August 2021: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall, and Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, by Mira Jacob.

Be Your Own Hero

Catch-22, learned helplessness, and doing a thing

A few weeks ago, I strained my back one morning doing a twisty/stretchy/reach-y movement (that I won’t describe in more detail because it’s kind of embarrassing). Okay, I thought, I’ll take some Aleve, rest it for a few days, and it will get better. But it did not get better, and four days later, a few minutes after I got out of bed and fed the cat, I w…

3 years ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · Louise Julig

July 2021: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud, and The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett

Be Your Own Hero

What a 3x5 vinyl sticker taught me about courage and empathy

Some years ago I read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (which my husband teased me about because I’m not really into comics, but —whatever). In one early chapter McCloud discusses the role abstracted representations—cartoons— play as part of the vocabulary of comics, exploring the phenomenon of non-visual self-awareness…

3 years ago · 1 like · 5 comments · Louise Julig

June 2021: Indistractable, by Nir Eyal

Be Your Own Hero

Four words to banish from your emails

I’ve been trying to remember the first time I became aware of four words that kept creeping into the beginnings of my emails: “Sorry for the delay …” So many times when drafting a response to an email, I have felt compelled to open with those words. It was a habit I didn’t really notice, a knee-jerk reaction when responding with anything less than immed…

3 years ago · 3 likes · 10 comments · Louise Julig

April 2021: The Incredible Shrinking Woman, by Athena Dixon

Be Your Own Hero

On judging other people

I’ve been thinking a lot about judging lately. It started when a writer I follow on Instagram posted that after a recent contest win she received an email from a stranger warning her of the danger of associating her name with the contest host, rumored to have “done something inappropriate in the past, involving some young women.” It was unclear to me if…

3 years ago · 5 likes · 6 comments · Louise Julig

March 2021: White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo

Be Your Own Hero

If you see something, say something

I agonized over this newsletter. Once I put it out into the universe that I wanted to write about being brave, damn if an opportunity didn’t come up and smack me in the face. Thanks, Universe. But let’s step back a little. Last month, I had a thing published…

3 years ago · 5 likes · 6 comments · Louise Julig

February 2021: Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping, by Matthew Salesses

Be Your Own Hero

Putting Yourself Out There

My favorite parts in the 2018 movie Eighth Grade are when the protagonist Kayla speaks directly to the camera while recording her inspirational YouTube videos…

3 years ago · 3 likes · 7 comments · Louise Julig