Memoir and Poetry and Fiction, Oh My: The 10 Best Books I Read in 2023
From Myriam Gurba to Fernando Pessoa
When I turned 40 earlier this year, I embarked on a new quest: tracking all the books I read from that birthday to the next. I’ve read voraciously (one might say obsessively) from the time I was young, but I hadn’t tracked my reading since elementary school. This also gave me an idea: As we collectively prepare for a new year to begin, I want to share my favorite books from the past year, with the hope that these gems will be a welcome addition to your reading list. Enjoy!
Best New Books I Read in 2023
CREEP: Accusations and Confessions — Myriam Gurba
I’ve been a fan of Myriam Gurba since I saw her perform on the Sister Spit: The Next Generation tour in 2011. CREEP is, to date, her masterpiece. The essay collection names some of the notable creeps throughout history, including Gurba’s personal history; the last essay in the collection is an inescapably brutal account of her experience with intimate partner violence. She also breaks the reader out of common shared cultural myths about people like Lorena Gallo (also known as Lorena Bobbitt), Joan Didion and William S. Burroughs. Gurba deconstructs the systems of oppression that have worked against women, queer people, BIPOC and financially disadvantaged people, and forces her readers to face their own complicity in such systems. CREEP is an eye-opening book that should be on everyone’s required reading list.
“Gregor [Samsa] was a bug. He was also a person whose indefatigable humanity appealed to my compassion.
Through literature, bugs can become people too.”
Thin Skin — Jenn Shapland
This book combined so many of my interests: the fraught history of New Mexico, life as a queer woman, the idea of cultural and environmental sensitivity, and the idea of celebrating a childfree life. In Thin Skin, Jenn Shapland critiques the nuclear age, heteronormative patterns, capitalism and racism, and she also critiques how her own whiteness allowed her a certain amount of privilege as she moved through these toxic systems. Shapland’s writing is erudite, but with added warmth and earnestness. Even if you aren’t initially interested in the themes she is writing about, her thoughtfulness and empathy will engage you immediately.
“The cultural fear or rejection of barrenness, of childlessness, reminds me of the way some people react to the desert landscape. They assume that it’s blank, lifeless, that nothing grows here. But if you know what you’re looking at, it’s a really life-affirming place.”
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma — Claire Dederer
I don’t know if I’ve ever so powerfully longed to befriend an author and get access to her beautiful mind. In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer fearlessly examines the question many people (including myself) have struggled with if we enjoy the work of people like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski: Can we still enjoy art by people who’ve done awful things? Dederer leaves no stone unturned as she looks at how men such as Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso have been treated, and contrasts that smartly with how women like Sylvia Plath and Valerie Solanas have been remembered. As with all books I enjoy, Dederer asks more questions than she answers, and where she lands at the end took my breath away.
“I read a thousand thousand thousand books.
I read books when I woke and books when I slept, and I carried a book with me all day every day.
My books kept me from loneliness, all my life.”
The Vulnerables — Sigrid Nunez
Any new book by Sigrid Nunez would make my yearly list. In The Vulnerables, she writes about a funny, brilliant woman writer and professor who must share physical and emotional space with an affable, troubled and annoyingly foxy younger man during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. Nunez portrays the life of a writer in the most compelling way. She is never pedantic, nor are her narrators. She writes so convincingly that I can imagine she is tired of how many people have confused her for her wise and witty narrators, but the truth she gets at in her books is so precise that I hope she takes her readers’ conflation as a compliment. Whether she is rendering the most heartbreaking portrait of a Manhattan-dwelling parrot or her narrator’s irritation at being attracted to a man who may not see her in the same way, reading Nunez’s prose feels like having an intimate conversation with a friend in the hippest coffeeshop in the world.
“Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t.”
Stay True: A Memoir — Hua Hsu
Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True won the inaugural 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir. A staggeringly beautiful book, Hsu writes about the painfully adolescent urge to either fit in or stand out (and by standing out, also managing to fit in), and how his life was changed by his friendship with Ken, another Asian-American student at UC Berkeley. While Hsu initially felt that Ken was someone he had nothing in common with, they slowly formed a bond that helped them bring out the best in each other. Ken’s shocking murder at a young age was a horrible turning point for Hsu, but Hsu pays tribute to Ken’s giving (and forgiving) spirit with Stay True. As someone who also lost a college friend suddenly, Hsu’s ability to render the sweet intimacy of young friends felt like a remarkable gift.
“I picked up a pen and tried to write myself back into the past.”
Big Swiss — Jen Beagin
Not only does Big Swiss have one of the best covers in recent memory, but it has a plot that’s heart-wrenching and juicy in equal measure. Narrator Greta is a transcriptionist for a sex therapist, and she falls for one of his patients, a.k.a., Big Swiss. As both women grapple with past traumas and current romances, Greta’s life becomes more unbalanced. The messy and very human complications of suppressed emotions, sexual longing and self-sabotage make Big Swiss an intensely satisfying read.
“That’s your role: listener, confidante, confessor. You sit around all day, not talking, listening to other people talk, writing down what they say, and then you do the same thing in social situations. Are you writing a script right now?”
The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis — Emma Bolden
When I saw Emma Bolden post on social media about having endometriosis, I immediately put her memoir The Tiger and the Cage on my reading list. I raced through this book in just a weekend, wanting to slow down and savor it, but unable to stop myself from going deeper into her life story. Bolden details her extremely painful and bloody history with endometriosis, a common condition she and I share — along with approximately one-tenth of the uterus-having population. She doesn’t shy away from the messier parts of the disease, nor does she flinch when describing the dangerous ways she tried to cope with endo’s effect on her life. (Her bittersweet note to a friend she pushed away was a particularly poignant moment in The Tiger and the Cage.) The mismanagement of her diagnosis treatment left me enraged, and Bolden includes references to the misogynistic history of medicine, psychiatry and Catholicism to contextualize her experience. Ultimately, Bolden turns her pain and anguish into a lifeboat for others: a story that tells them they’re not alone.
“I drove home. I asked myself: Am I crazy?”
I asked myself: Is it all in my head, all this pain? And how can it be all in my head if there is also so much blood?”
Best “Old” Books I Read in 2023
The Aosawa Murders — Riku Onda
Riku Onda’s murder mystery — told from various points of view — veers from dreamy to nightmarish as the pieces to a horrific crime slowly join together. In this piece of literary fiction that reads like a well-woven history, the Aosawas are a prominent family who were almost all gruesomely poisoned during a party. The quietly haunting book (which I reviewed for Ghouls Magazine earlier this year) lures readers in and doesn’t let go until you realize you have chills and a knot in your stomach. What at first seems like a simple story grows into something far darker and more frightening as the novel progresses.
“I say, the sky is rather low and gloomy, don’t you think? One almost feels as if tears might fall from it at any moment.
And indeed, here comes the rain.”
The Hurting Kind — Ada Limón
Ada Limón poetry collections can always be read straight through; there are no “skips.” The Hurting Kind is no exception. The collection, which is broken into seasons, combines Limón’s precise way of using details from the natural world with her thoughtful observations about what people are searching for in themselves and others. Limón, who is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, as well as the first Latina Poet Laureate of the United States, keenly trains her eye for beauty on things as earthy as skipping class to get stoned, and as intangible as the nature of love and attraction.
“Somewhere in the haunted desert
I hitched my callow life to a manwho thought I hadn’t suffered enough.
He might have said that very thing,You haven’t suffered enough. Young
whiptail lizards lined the cottonwoodpath to the river where I walked each
day to remember who I was: Shewho had not suffered.”
Forever Someone Else — Fernando Pessoa
During a visit to Portugal this spring, I was happy to find this collection of Fernando Pessoa poems. During his lifetime as a poet, writer and translator, Pessoa was interested in the occult, paganism and mysticism, which informed much of his work. Pessoa often wrote through the lens of different heteronyms, including Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, and the aptly titled Forever Someone Else features works by all three. Alberto Caeiro’s poems were my personal favorite; they felt more romantic and in tune with nature than poems by his other heteronyms. Reading this collection is also a special treat because you get to jump (with Pessoa) from one kind of poetry to another as he alternates between heteronyms.
“Before I had you
I loved Nature as a calm monk loves Christ.
Now I love Nature
As a calm monk loves the Virgin Mary,
Religiously (in my manner), like before,
But in a more heartfelt and intimate way.
I see the rivers better when I walk with you
Through the fields to the rivers’ banks.”
