I decided to map out new avenues for autofiction writers to explore and new variants for autofiction critics to classify: a handy manual that doubles as my year in reading.

Don’t we all, ultimately, long for things we don’t really deserve?

I hope that books have kept you company this year.

We had a time, didn’t we?

This was the year I decided to write down every book I read in a day-glo yellow notebook, along with a list of everything I fixed around the house, because I chronically feel like I’m not reading or fixing nearly enough, and figured it would be nice to have a clear ledger of those accomplishments. But I lost track of the notebook sometime in February or March, and didn’t find it again until a few weeks ago.

This year was a lesson both in feeling the anchor’s immobile presence and its unmooredness. It will be here next year, if, perhaps, a bit more eroded.

In September, I gave birth – dramatically and unexpectedly – on the kitchen floor.

I’m in the middle of copyediting my novel now, and I’ve learned from prior experience that you’ve got to be careful about what you read during this period.

Under duress I surrendered one of the great pleasures of my life. Reading, which was always easy, became hard.

I clung to books this year for consolation, for escape, for solace, for comfort in a way I haven’t clung to them since I was an equally anxious and uncertain teenager.

I miss discussing books with my brilliant coworkers. I miss dusting my shelves and creating displays for the aisles that I ran. I miss my discount. I miss sitting on the couch before my shift started, cracking open my current read, and trying my hardest not to fall asleep on the couch. I miss my old life. I miss my love of reading.

For the first time in weeks, I was swept along into that trance, that magic inner space where stories live.

I want to gather fruit.

Maybe because of how much I miss human interaction, maybe because I’ve lost my faith in so much else: I believe in books, at least the ones that feel like primal screams, in ways I never have before.

Had I known lockdown was around the corner, I would have savored this last communion more intentionally, lingered in this intimate physical contact with a friend and a stranger.

No wonder literary critics of the time panned the book. It did not pretend. A perfect thing for a book to avoid doing in a year in which for the very briefest of moments, and in the very slightest of ways, we could all see that the veil had been lifted.

The older I get the more I am drawn to books I know I haven’t the faintest tool to conceive of writing myself.