Land Ho

Hustle & Flow

It can be tempting to be perennially positive on these public facing platforms. It’s summertime! Everything is easy and breezy! We are delicately eating tomatoes off the vine and reading books for sun-drenched hours next to a body of water and frolicking around in white linen, am I right?? I am not immune to it either, this shimmering mirage of perfection.

It is a constant hustle. And I have to believe that we are all ducks seemingly placid above and frantic below. Tell me I’m not alone. That this projected beauty is all a performance.

I opened a staggeringly high tax bill for the bookstore the other day — apparently I’m two quarters behind because I cannot be trusted with things like government forms — and then my delightful bookkeeper sent over the Profit & Loss statement for May (another form I typically pay embarrassingly little attention to). This is where my brain short circuits. Because the taxes owed are nearly twice what I gross in a month. How is that possible?? How does anyone keep a bookstore afloat, let alone thriving? How are the Emma Straub’s and Ann Patchett’s and McNally Jackson’s of the world doing it??

I feel like I am constantly constantly creating, constantly dreaming up new and exciting things. The creation phase is my favorite phase. I love feeling ripe with ideas. There’s this newsletter and the running of a small business and pitching the memoir and the early stages of the other novel and a handful of essays and the wine (Book Clubs, did you see what I made for you??) and organizing sublime author events (OMG to this one in August!!). All things that light me up! But none of these things actually pay me.

I don’t have a greater takeaway here. Just giving voice to something that hopefully rings true for some of you, knowing that we’re in this together. Just keep swimming.

I think of this whenever I need a laugh.

• We are having the weirdest summer weather — it’s either blazing hot or deliciously chilly. This sweater is the perfect weight and color for throwing on after a swim or for those early morning camp drop offs before the fog has burned off.

• Inexpensive, supremely fun and extra comfortable poplin pull-on pants in the most perfect print (stocking soon, get on the list).

• My giant tote is a Russian nesting doll of pouches within bags within totes. Organized chaos! I would very much like to upgrade my current pouches with these happy striped ones from Alex Mill. So cute.

• I had a version of this discreetly sexy bathing suit in my twenties and still think about it. Highlighting exactly the wrong part of my post-babies, 43 year old body, I can’t help but want it.

• Cutie pie earrings currently on sale at Tory Burch.

• I picked up a bottle of Supergoop Play SPF in Whipped Coconut for our trip to Arizona and it’s a new favorite. That vacation smell! The gorgeous sheen! Word of warning: do not spray while standing on the pool deck unless you want to be slip sliding around.

• Perfect everyday silver earrings from beauties at Lie Studio.

• What is this crazy device that zaps your wrinkles and your body hair?? I am intrigued.

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

Not to bring religion into the conversation but, well, I’m going to.

I read Land while stranded in Arizona with a group of conservative Catholics — and against that backdrop, Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel had my little head whirring.

The novel is set on a small Irish peninsula jutting into the Atlantic. It opens in 1855, shortly after the Great Hunger, but O’Farrell reaches back further through gorgeous, vivid flashbacks to the island’s earliest inhabitants — people who believed in spirits and gruagachs, who harvested dulse from the seabeds and revered the places where streams are born (the navel), who understood the land as something alive and reciprocal. Faith as a practice of paying attention.

Then come the monks, trading honey and beeswax. And then the men of the cloth, who murder the monks and ravage the villages and force their God onto people who already had one — or many. What O'Farrell does so expertly, so devastatingly, is show us the seam where that imposition happened. The moment when a living, particular relationship with place became doctrine. When belief stopped being something you tended and became something wielded.

In the 1855 storyline, a power-hungry priest and a boy who joins the Jesuits mostly to spite his father become mired in those same ideas. The connective tissue across all of it is the land itself — the peninsula, the water, the specific intelligence of a place that has outlasted every system humans have tried to impose on it.

I kept thinking, reading this beside the pool, about the difference between faith and institution. One grows out of attention and experience. The other arrives with its mind already made up.

Of course there is so much more to this gorgeous novel. Family, longing, love, rebellion, loyalty. I cried and clutched my heart and hated for it to end.

1. Even on sale this sweater is not inexpensive, but the greens remind me of the peninsula and the widow who is always sewing. I imagine she’d get a kick out of those embroidered flowers on the wrists.

2. The most luxurious cashmere socks at 60% off. Just the thing to keep those tootsies warm on treks across the peninsula.

3. A beautiful thing to buy now while it’s wildly on sale (60% off) — I have one of these foulards and wear it all winter long. This oversized version in a buttery yellow would be just the thing for blustery days gathering eggs.

4. I realize that this hat is for a Boston company, but there’s something about it that fits Land to me. After all, there are a lot of boat voyages in this book.

5. An open knit sweater that looks like it could have been knit by hand.

6. For weeks I have not been able to get these pants out of my head but it’s hard to justify the price for a pair of cotton pants. But then I started thinking about a modern version of britches, like what Edna wears when she’s passing as a boy. Sturdy, with a drawstring, and sublime paired with that tonal sweater.

7. A gold ring that resurfaces throughout and this sunburst signet makes for an excellent modern version.

8. Land by Maggie O’Farrell

9. An heirloom quilt to keep warm under in Ireland and in the brave New World.

10. Not that there were pictures in 1855, but I like the idea of framing one of Tomás’s maps in this warm bobble frame.

Hope you’re reading something good 💚