Still, the ever-present Midwesterner within me needs to offer you an excuse and her knuckles for a sound rapping: I have been depressed. Not the regular ennui that I entered this world with, but a new kind, a super-charged variety potentially fueled by the hormonal changes of perimenopause (my least favorite word, just call it pre-menopause, please) and exacerbated by whatever fresh horrors this administration can deliver on a daily basis.

I am crawling my way out of the Pit of Despair, and it takes several weeks for the birth control and sertraline to fully work their magic, but something is happening.

Yesterday, I brought back Office Hours and spent a chaotic 90 minutes with some of the most lovely people in the world (you! I’m parasocially attached to you!), talking about Italian and skincare and inflation and the mysterious case of Q’s Missing Marker.

Did my first attempt at using the livestream feature on Substack work? I’ll let you be the judge.

Anyway, we did figure it out and when it was over I rode my bike around my city on a gloriously cloudy day (these are rare in Phoenix) and felt for the first time in a long time like I could see. The bougainvillea spilling over concrete walls, little dogs bounding across their front yards to bark at me for daring to roll down their street, babies waving to each other like long lost friends and a packed parking lot at Changing Hands Phoenix for Indie Bookstore Day.

I popped in and treated myself to the new Maria Semple, knowing absolutely nothing about it (and, as usual, not reading the flap copy) but knowing that should she ever choose to publish her to-do list I will buy it, full-price and in hardcover.

To further stimulate the local economy (and address the 3rd Grade Marker Burglary addressed in Office Hours), we took Q to Arizona Art Supply and I said “yes, let’s get it!” to everything his little artistic heart desired, which was mostly a giant Caboodle to organize his art supplies…and several markers to replace the one that was pilfered from his backpack the one day he didn’t bring the briefcase to school!

Slowly, slowly, slowly, the color is coming back to the world.

Okay, enough of that, here’s what I read.

Love, Finally by Geneen Roth was so beautiful and perfect I had to have her on the podcast and I honestly want her to just be a recurring guest/my fairy godmother/my future self. It is about food and disordered eating and generational trauma, but it’s also about the loops we get stuck in, the way we circle what Geneen calls “the bad neighborhoods of our minds” and what it takes to actually, truly, love ourselves. I want to read everything she’s ever written (and I’m working on it!), because I cannot — WILL NOT — be a woman in my 70s with poor bone density who has to learn to love herself! I am going to have extremely dense bones, the likes of which no doctor has ever seen, and love myself right the hell now.

The Wedding People by Allison Espach sure looks like a romcom and I did laugh out loud several times and there certainly is romance, but it is shockingly unexpected in its delivery. Phoebe is the only person at a fancy Rhode Island hotel who isn’t in the wedding party; she’s there for one last hurrah after being dumped by her husband, who was having an affair with their colleague. She’s roped into all of the wedding drama anyway, and she and the bride become unexpected confidants. Borrowed it from the library and then promptly bought it.

Gulf of Lions by Caitlin Shetterly follows Alice, a travel blogger recovering from breast cancer (and her husband’s affair), who takes her two young daughters on a camping trip through the South of France. I have never done such a trip, but it felt vivid and lush, and I love a story about a middle-aged breakdown/breakthrough. That said, the point of view shifts (which I normally love) didn’t work for me (first person for the mom, third person for the daughters?).

Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Giuffre was not a good book for a depressed person to read!!!! Every man who ever breathed the same air as Jeffrey Epstein deserves a fate worse than death, and I am filled with the rage of 1,000,000 suns on their behalf. Virginia deserved a different life, as do all of their victims.

Famesick by Lena Dunham sold 60,000 copies in its first week, and I’m so glad that I was one of them. The sickness Lena suffered from wasn’t just the physical torment of chronic pain and endometriosis but fame itself (no duh, you say, I can see the title right there), which even in small and niche doses can and does change your brain chemistry, your relationships, the way you think and act. The book is dishy (name drops include the Safdie brothers and Greta Gerwig, to name a few) and a reminder that Lena can fucking write, the kind of writing that makes me want to actually write again.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

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❤️ It’s Going To Be OK is back! Apple | Spotify

Come see me!

• I’ll be at the NAMI Northern Illinois Building Bridges to Understanding Event -- which is TOTALLY FREE! -- on May 14

• I’ll be at Mental Health America Houston the next day!

• You can join me for a Bad Vibes Only book club with the Society of Working Moms on June 14th!

• I looooove speaking about mental health, grief and other hilarious topics. You can email bkane@apbspeakers.org if you want to bring me to your event or organization.

I use affiliate links, which means I get a small commission from the seller if you buy something. I only promote companies I love and spend my own money on. I periodically write about these things here.

Coming up this week: A new season of TTFA Anthologies (Spotify | Apple) and another bonus episode for paid subscribers!

Many of us are living for Love Story on Hulu, even though we already know how it ends. Some of us are even practicing CBK/JFK Jr. cosplay (Gen Z loves a toxic relationship, and they reallllly love the 90s). Some of us are thinking, wow, I have never once played it cool romantically and I never could. And some of us (the suck ups, and I am among you) want a little extra credit to go along with the show. We want to crack open a book (or three) about this couple, go deeper than the public fights and the black turtlenecks.

In that case, may I recommend:

📖 Ask Not by Maureen Callahan is gossipy and salacious and enraging. Justice for every woman who has been ground up in the gears of a man’s ambition and/or apathy.

📖 Once Upon A Time by Elizabeth Beller gets a nod in the credits of Love Story, and it’s in paperback now. This one also centers Carolyn, especially her life before JFK Jr, and I’m surprised it hasn’t sold out TBH!

📖 What Remains by Carole Radziwill is the 2005 memoir by the only RHONY alum to have her author photo taken by Ghislaine Maxwell 🥴. Carole married Anthony Radziwill, JFK Jr’s cousin, and was best friends with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Anthony died of cancer a few weeks after that plane crash, leaving Carole to grapple with all of that loss.

My February Reads…

📖 Winter Solstice by Elin Hilderbrand is the third in the Winter Series (I read the first three in January) and I couldn’t not read it, but I also really can’t distinguish it from the previous three. Make a note on your calendar to request these at your library in December, so in January-March you can escape to the tropics without booking a flight. It’s a nice little holiday-themed escape.

📖 Margot’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe was a book I went into fully blind (my favorite way to enter books and movies). Margot is young, knocked up by her loser English professor, and struggling to survive. Her mom is pretending to be a born-again Christian to lock down her youth-pastor boyfriend. Her dad is a pro-wrestler with another family who has been a sporadic presence in her life. Maybe the answer to her problems is in applying what her father taught her about pro wrestling to creating a persona on Only Fans? It wraps up a little too neatly, with no pressing on the very traumatic elements of the story, but it was just such a good read I had to buy it when I was done.

📖 The Night We Lost Him by Laura Dave was one of those thrillers where I’m not thrilled, and I actually don’t really care if the dead body at the beginning of the book was murdered or not. I stuck with it, but I was skimming, and in the end I was like, oh, okay I guess that settles that.

🎧 The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose fulfilled a very specific purpose for me: the thriller that keeps me company on a very long drive. Adam’s mistress is found dead in his vacation home, and his defense attorney wife, Sarah, is his only hope. Lots of twists and turns, and the final one was 👌.

📖 Honest Motherhood by Libby Ward is a book for women who know that motherhood is not just magical. If you’ve ever been at the end of a rapidly fraying rope and found yourself thinking, “I should have make cupcakes” then you probably need the message in this book: it’s not just you, the pressure of motherhood is impossible, and you’re not the worst mom in the world (because I AM!!!).

What did you read this month? What’s on your TBR? Did you notice that this came out on a Saturday night instead of a Sunday because tomorrow is March? Do you know how much I struggled between sending out a February Reading List in March vs. sending out a Sunday email on a Saturday? Did I make the right choice or is everyone mad at me?

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ These microdose THC/CBD sodas from CANN are my faves. You can squeeze these into a sparkling water (great for travel). They’re 25% off right now, but when they’re not, code NORA20 gets you 20% off!

❤️ Extra 30% off the sale price of the best sweats (in tall, normal and petites!).

❤️ It’s Going To Be OK is back! Apple | Spotify

I can’t stress this enough: get off your phone. Brick it (or smash it with a Brick). Plug in to real-life ways you can make an impact and stop sucking from the fire hydrant. My nervous system is really living up to it’s name and I am doing my best to hydrate, move, sleep (with a little help from the cloud berry or a cup of this sleepy-time cocoa if I’m avoiding THC), craft and read.

It’s the first thing I do when I wake up, and the last thing I do before I fall asleep, and yeah, that’s something that annoying people say and baby, I am so annoying.

📖 Little One by Olivia Muenter was the first book I read this year. I woke up at 3:33 on January 2, said “well, I’m not going back to sleep now,” and plowed right through this one. Catharine is a cult survivor trying to outrun her past, but wouldn’t you know? You can’t do that! Everyone is findable! Secrets are a thing of the past! Scratches that cult itch (maybe just a me thing) and has a very satisfying ending that I didn’t see coming (I never see an ending coming).

📖 Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg was something I picked up blind from my TBR pile, only to find out I was in an Internet novel when the protagonist starts live streaming to raise money to keep her comatose sister on life support. I spend enough time on the Internet, I don’t want to think about it when I’m reading! But I gotta say: this was a great story, well told.

📖 Friends and Liars by Kit Frick reunites a group of friends in an Italian villa 5 years after the death of their (very rich) friend, for a memorial that none of them want to go to. Each of them has a secret, and someone knows it. The POV switches and dual timeline made it hard for me to truly care about every character, but it’s a good semi-thriller to keep you company this winter, especially if you love Rich People Being Horrible But Only In Fiction Not In Real Life Where They Are Ruining Our Country And Also Our Lives.

📖 The Pleasing Hour by Lily King almost completes my Lily King collection, and transports us to Paris, where an American Au Pair has fled to avoid her grief. What I love about Lily King is how she can take the most ordinary things in the world and light them from within with her words. I cried so hard (my highest praise).

❌ The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done by Claire Stephens was a DNF for me, only because I’ve been on the Internet too long and it was too stressful to read about a cancellation campaign aimed by one liberal woman at another. Well-written but just…too much.

📖 Winter Street by Elin Hilderbrand is CLASSIC ELIN but AT CHRISTMAS! Disappear into the Quinn family, who run the inn on Nantucket and are all falling apart in their own special way: Dad is out of money and his wife left him for Santa Claus, one brother did insider trading (bad), another brother got his girlfriend pregnant (good), the one sister is in an unsatisfying situationship (neutral) and the baby brother has deployed toAfghanistan and nobody has heard from him (very bad) . Nobody is reading Christmas books in January so this will definitely be available at your Library/on your Libby app.

📖 Winter Stroll by Elin Hilderbrand picks that story back up one year later, and things have gotten better in some ways and worse in others but this family is still trying (aren’t we all?). You read Elin to escape: to have outfits and meals and homes described in detail, even if you never hear about this person again.

📖 Winter Storms by Elin Hilderbrand is the third installment and do you think I was ready to leave Nantucket in the early 00s to return to this reality, here? NO. Again, thank God for Elin and Libby. There is only ONE WINTER BOOK AFTER THIS ONE?! What do I do!

📖 Winter in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand is what I do! I start her other series that is set in the Virgin Islands, where a helicopter has just crashed, and an Iowa woman finds that her husband has had a secret life. Her sons meet her down there and would you believe that they both fall in love with the same hot girl who was best friends with their dad’s mistress, Rosie?

🎧 What Happens in Paradise by Elin Hilderbrand keeps the story going, with the back story behind Rosie, more mystery unraveling, and more descriptions of conch tacos, deep-sea fishing and luxurious vacation homes. There’s one more book in the series, so I don’t know what to do with myself when I don’t have more Elin.

📖 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a book I’ll keep on my shelf forever. I don’t even like epistolary novels but I loved reading Sybil’s letters, including the one she never sent. Got a nice big cry at the end, too, because grief is everywhere and I find it even when I think I’m not looking for it!

📖 The Other Side of Change by Maya Shankar was my only foray into nonfiction this month, and only because she’s a lovely person with a lovely mind who has spent years researching how people get through the biggest changes in life.

📖 Book Giveaway Time 📖

Here’s how it works: if there’s a book you want, leave a comment and tell me what it is. I choose randomly, and can only ship to the US or I will go broke, sorry!

📖 Little One by Olivia Muenter

📖 Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg

📖 Friends and Liars by Kit Frick

📖 The Other Side of Change by Maya Shankar

📖 Convent Wisdom: How 16th Century Nuns Could Save Your 21st Century Life by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ These microdose THC/CBD sodas are also keeping me sane-ish. You can squeeze these into a sparkling water (great for travel). Code NORA20 works site-wide.

❤️ Psssst… code NORA15 stacks on the Ruggable sale and on this new collaboration.

❤️ It’s Going To Be OK is back! Apple | Spotify (recorded an episode with Ralph this week and I could barely get through it, he had me laughing so hard).

After the Slumpiest Reading Slump in November 2025, I spent this month absolutely terrorizing the Libby app and reading like I don’t have multiple TBR piles scattered around the studio (get ready for a book clean out very soon!).

ICYMI:

• My New Year rituals

• Holiday cheer is optional

• You’re not alone if your holidays were happyish

• Thanks, I hated it!

📖 Life After Ambition by Amil Niazi is balm for the burned out soul. If you, too, have found yourself hanging onto a rickety ladder by one jagged fingernail, you need this “good enough memoir” to remind you that you are not what you do (you are not what you do).

📖 Euphoria by Lily King was the first of her backlist that I read after eating up 📖 Heart The Lover, forcing it into my husband’s hands and then emailing it to my group of close guy friends from college (more about that here). I did not expect to be fully swept away by the story of a love triangle among 1930s anthropologists but THIS WOMAN! Can make! Anything! Relevant!

📖 Writers and Lovers by Lily King was next up, and boy oh boy. Have you ever been lost, wandering through the world while hoping the random path you’re on leads you where you desperately want to go? Have you ever been young? Have you ever been sad? My cousin Patty told me to read this one and like everything else by Lily King it is going to live on my bookshelf forever.

📖 All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire by Rebecca Woolf was a re-read to prep for an upcoming episode with the author. It’s the opposite of my first book in a lot of ways: Rebecca was hoping to divorce her husband Hal when he was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer. Theirs was not a fairytale romance, and her grief was complicated to say the least. Cannot wait to edit her episode and get it out to you!

📖 If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard is a book everyone else in the book world had already read but me. I loved the story of a writing teacher who discovers that her ex-husband kills her off in his new novel, a complicated woman navigating her newish relationship, her family of origin, and her conflicting desires. Didn’t love the part with a talking cat but that’s okay!

🎧 Rental House by Weikie Wang was a quick listen: Keru and Nate are a young couple hosting their respective families in vacation rentals. Nate is Southern and white, Keru is Chinese-American, raised in Central Minnesota. I loved the writing and the wit but in no way did I have any sense of why this couple got married or stay together. Maybe that was the point???

📖 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte was so god damn long. Shout out to Charlotte Bronte for addressing religious abuse, sexism and classism almost 200 years ago and also could we tighten up the narrative just a smidge? Can we move it along just a bit faster? How many times do we need to be reminded that Jane is soooo small, just like a little girl, a plain little tiny girl that everyone loves because she’s just soooo small and little and peculiar (small). Was Mr. Rochester the first man to read The Game? He’s not even nice to her???!!!

📖 Father of the Rain by Lily King was my palate cleanser. Reading about a little girl surviving her deeply dysfunctional but charming alcoholic father, who keeps pulling her back into his chaotic orbit even when she is old enough to know better was exactly what I needed. MY GOD I LOVE LILY KING.

❤️ It’s Going To Be OK is back! Apple | Spotify

❤️ Maximalists: the Ruggable sale includes the Iris Apfel collection!

❤️ This pan was one of the top gifts in our family this Christmas

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

RIP Gus 2, Gus, Bernie, and Rex.

This is already a Bad Month for me, and if you’re thinking, really, eleven years later? I don’t know how to explain to you that yes, I have moved forward and yes, I love my life, and yes, my stupid body insists on keeping the stupid score.

This year was particularly brutal, the hardest since we left Minneapolis and all of those environmental reminders and landed here in Phoenix, Arizona, where the sky is always blue and the sun is always shining. The sky turned gray, the sun went into hiding, and the heavens poured down the rain we’ve desperately needed all year. The world itself seemed to weep with me while I relistened to old albums, watched old videos, and lay awake at night with the kind of insomnia that makes your son say, “don’t take this the wrong way but you look really bad.”

Dear boy, I know.

I did all of the right things. I moved my body with love and intention: Spin class to exhaust myself, yoga to restore, lifting to keep my bones from dissolving into dust. I let myself cry and feel, even in the grocery store parking lot (sunglasses on, windows up, nobody is looking at you!).

I went to therapy twice a week for several weeks in a row, took shots of zzzquil and meditated and still lay awake at night watching the ceiling, exploring the archives of the NYT crossword, watching YouTube. I made sad, sad, sad TikTok videos.

I did not expect this reaction on year eleven, a nothing anniversary if ever there was one. I have walked hand in hand with my grief for years, an unwanted houseguest turned trusted friend who decided to stab me in the back and turn the knife.

But aren’t we here to talk about books?

We are, but I only read one this month.

ONE.

I stacked many in hopeful piles around the studio and by my bed. I halfheartedly opened more than a few. But I read exactly one, and while some might think I should have just scrapped the monthly book club email and waited until next month, I think that in the spirit of this year’s theme it is worth sharing.

We are at the tail end of a long, long year and even the jolliest among us might be running out of steam.

Maybe you can’t do it all, and maybe don’t have to do it all.

Maybe you can just read the book you can read, and do the things you can do.

Maybe your body is waiting for something or someone to tell you that you are safe, that the world will still be there if you close your eyes and rest.

OKAY, ONTO THE BOOK!

This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman was kind of the perfect book for me this month. It’s a sweeping family drama, the kind that spans years and explores the intricacies of family discord that most of us are familiar with in some way, even if we pretend we aren’t. Two sisters fall out after the death of their third sister, and maybe it seems silly to have a falling out over a cake but you and I both know it’s never about the cake. This rift reverberates through their children and grandchildren, who have their own issues, their own lives, their own view of what is wrong (and right) with this family. Goodman is such a beautiful writer, and while it’s hard to make a reader care about every character, I really felt so deeply for everyone in this flawed and very real family.

❤️ You can read the October Reading List here or watch it here.

❤️ This is how I’m done with Christmas shopping.

❤️ I still love my Pura diffuser and you can get a free diffuser if you subscribe to two fragrances for a year (right now I’m cycling between Thymes Frasier Fir and Nest Holiday). The rest of their Black Friday deal are here (Sophie has the car diffuser because the car she’s driving has seen the insides of her brother’s stomachs more than once). I’m a Pura partner, but as with any company I work with, I have happily spent my own money with them!

❤️ Can you dump someone if they’re dying?

❤️ It’s Going To Be OK is back! Apple | Spotify

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

A note that paid subscriptions are always optional and always appreciated. If you can’t afford one, just email hello@noraborealis.com and we’ll give one to you anyway (I’m great at business!!!!!)

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This is the season for reading, for cuddling, for nostalgia and crying.

I don’t know how October already came and went, but that’s life, baby! Here’s what I read this month, which is also in video form over on YouTube (are you tired of me telling you to go to YouTube? Well, think about how tired I am of telling you to go to YouTube!).

I have also heard that some people don’t want to subscribe monthly and also want to support the work so I made a way to do that.

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Reminder that (US) subscribers can join the book giveaway in the comments, and past reading lists are all here.

Okay, now onto the books…

Heart The Lover by Lily King absolutely wrecked me and I need everyone to stop what they are doing, go to the bookstore and buy this book. Then cancel your entire day, sit down and read it. Not too fast! I want you to enjoy it. Savor it. Weep to it. HOW DOES LILY KING WRITE SO SIMPLY AND YET GIVE ME THE DEEPEST FEELINGS?! Do she and belong to the same coven? I want in!

This book is timeless, placeless, and yet everything and everywhere. You will be transported back to college, back to the headiest years where you fell deeply in love for the first time, or maybe you didn’t, but you almost did. You will see scenes she barely describes, fill in every blank she leaves with your own memories. You will — this is a promise and a threat — wipe big, fat tears from your cheeks, hand this book to someone you love and say, “read this, please, so we can discuss.” That person for me was Matthew, whose youth could not have been more different than mine, and who still said “I know exactly what you mean about this book, it’s just…” And then we just nodded at each other.

Is this description too vague? GOOD. You don’t need to know what it’s about, but if you’re going to whine about it, fine, the main character goes to college, meets a group of intellectual guys who kind of neg her and objectify her, dates one, breaks up with him, realizes she loves the other…but that second guy doesn’t want to hurt his best friend, and they’re all so young, and decades later their entanglement resurfaces.

Who amongst us has not been hurt and hurt someone when we were young and stupid! The bones of the boys I cheered up and spit out are strewn across this nation, and if one of you is reading this (because yeah I assume you’re still in love with me!) I’m sorry, I still think about it. I read this and thought of you.

Guided by Laura Lynne Jackson is the third book by the medium who CHANGED MY LIFE and SHE WILL BE ON THE POD ON 11/11 (SAVE THE DATE!). If you believe in signs from the other side and glimmers and spirit guides, this book is for you. And if you don’t believe in that? Well, this book is not for you but I want you to read it anyway because believing in things gives our lives meaning.

Clown Town by Mick Herron - In times of stress, I need an audiobook narrated by a stern British man, preferably this series. If you’ve watched Slow Horses, you might as well get into the books! And if you haven’t watched Slow Horses, you might as well get into the books! Go disappear into a world of espionage (with British accents), where everyone is crossing and double-crossing and the losers get to save the day. Tell ‘em I sent you.

Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack really feels like a Book For These Times. A sex worker turned assassin has killed a prominent, polarizing politician, and this novel is her confession. In part 1, she’s confessing via to her favorite podcaster, telling her how she was pulled into a scheme by people she believed to be the intelligence services. In part 2, she’s confessing via email to her ex, telling her that she joined a group of neo-Nazis willingly to commit an assassination that her ex would approve of. And in Part 3, she’s telling us the truth.

A good story, but I could not get fully into it…something about emails as the epistolary format pulled me out of the story. I’ve written emails, and they don’t sound like a novel. They sound like emails. These chapters felt like chapters with an email heading slapped on them. That said, I believe this is considered literary fiction and someone smarter than me will get it in a way that I just didn’t get it. But again, a good story!

Your Brain on Altruism by Nicole Karlis is a nice, soothing piece of nonfiction for These Trying Times. Maybe we should force people celebrating loss of SNAP benefits to read it??? Because guess what?! DOING KIND THINGS FOR OTHER PEOPLE IS NOT JUST GOOD FOR THEM, IT IS GOOD FOR YOU! Maybe if we reposition kindness and human decency as selfishness it will take off? Sorry, this is not a book about despair! But if you are a person who believes in connection, this book will reassure you that you are doing amazing, sweetie.

The Three Lives of Cate Kay is for fans of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo or whatever that book is called. Cate Kay is a smashingly successful novelist publishing under a pen name and living in anonymity because she’s running from her past. She almost had love once, but she messed it up, and this novel is a fake memoir about her coming clean about all of it. There were some clunky parts (how can a memoir switch POVs???) but overall, this kept me hooked, particularly the first of Cate Kay’s lives, where she’s in one of those close female friendships that teeters on the romantic.

Book Giveaway Time!

If you’re new here, we do this every month. Leave a comment with what you’d like, and I’ll choose winners at random and message you for your address1. Your choices are:

• Guided (I have two copies!)

• Murder Bimbo

• Your Brain on Altruism

❤️ All of the shopping links I share are rounded up here.

❤️ At the top of my Want List for Q4 is this shirt.

❤️ The best Advent Calendar for crafters!

❤️ NOT FOR KIDS: These THC/CBD mini sodas are the perfect dose. Code NORA20 gets you 20% off!

❤️ I’m hooked on the ZIIP Halo microcurrent device. I started using the app that I at first disparaged…and okay, THAT MAKES A BIGGER DIFFERENCE! NORAZIIP gets you 10% off.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

A note that paid subscriptions are always optional and always appreciated. If you can’t afford one, just email hello@noraborealis.com and we’ll give one to you anyway (I’m great at business!!!!!)

tap to upgrade

I have also heard that some people don’t want to subscribe monthly and also want to support the work so I made a way to do that.

tap here

Reminder that subscribers can join the book giveaway in the comments!

Okay, now onto the books…

Awake by Jen Hatmaker is a memoir that is ready to locate your socks and then knock them right off your body. Jen was a fixture in the evangelical mommy blogger scene: pastor husband, five kids, a slew of inspirational books and the kind of life that looks perfect from the outside…and then he cheated. If you’ve ever had your life blow up in any way, you’ll love this one. I’ve read it twice now and when she asked me for a blurb the only thing I could text her was “HOLY SHIT, JEN.” That blurb did not make the back of the book…???

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is one of those books that everyone has read except me, and when a friend loaned it to me I had to read it because that is one of the rules of friendship. I do not enjoy dystopia as a rule, especially when the dystopia sucks the most for women (don’t they all!) but tI bravely read this book about a group of women stuck in an underground bunker. The ending was deeply unsatisfying for me (I do not like ambiguity! Tie it up! Tell me wtf happened!) but it was beautiful all the same, and really made me love women more than I already do, which is a lot.

Joyride by Susan Orlean is the most absolutely gorgeous memoir, which is exactly what you’d expect from one of the best writers of all time. Each chapters explores a piece of her writing, which then sent me down a rabbit hole for everything she has ever written. I had to portion this book out and allow myself a chapter at a time, that’s how good it was.

Empire of AI by Karen Hao is this month’s LET’S GET ANGRY READ! ChatGPT and OpenAI are not your friends. This is not a “valuable tool we can’t live without.” I treasure writers like this who are willing to take on stories like this because we believe technocrats to be wise and good and they are neither. Buy this for the people who are like “well, ya can’t put the toothpase back in the tube” who shrug off the implications of widespread usage of these tools like they’re morally neutral, then have a contentious book club!!!

For added anger fodder, listen to these:

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is another book that everyone else has already read, which is probably why it was available on Libby? A death-obsessed, depressed and orphaned Iranian-American man is struggling with his sobriety, his grief and his place in the world. His mother died when her flight was shot down by the US Navy (a real thing that happened!!!!) and his dad moved to Indiana and struggled to keep their heads above water. The grief of it was so real and so accurate, but so was the beauty, and I was consistently highlighting pieces I want to keep with me, like:

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.

On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen is one of my favorite books, and she recently published a corresponding workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness If you, too, struggle with “being good” and are trying to figure out who you are and how to be her, there is a lot of good stuff in this bad girl.

Book Giveaway Time!

If you’re new here, we do this every month. Leave a comment with what you’d like, and I’ll choose winners at random and message you for your address1. Your choices are:

• Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness

• On Our Best Behavior

❤️ All of the shopping links I share are rounded up here.

❤️ You’re not too old, it’s not too late. No, really though.

❤️ Our YouTube just broke 11K subscribers, thank you!

❤️ Simplified my makeup routine with the essentials from Merit.

❤️ Ralph and I love having a Recess to take the edge off, and that link should auto-apply 25% off through the end of September.

❤️ NOT FOR KIDS: These THC/CBD mini sodas are the perfect dose. Code NORA20 gets you 20% off!

❤️ I’m hooked on the ZIIP Halo microcurrent device. I don’t use the app, I just freestyle it on my jawline and my cheeks and I see such a difference. It ain’t cheap, but code NORAZIIP gets you 10% off.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

A note that paid subscriptions are always optional and always appreciated. If you can’t afford one, just email hello@noraborealis.com and we’ll give one to you anyway (I’m great at business!!!!!)

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Now, on with the books.

Wreck by Catherine Newman was a book I read in one night (thank you, insomnia!), even though I wanted to savor it. Catherine is one of those authors whose writing gets into the crevices of my brain and my soul: am I her? Her narrator? Has she tapped into my secret thoughts and published them in book form? I fell in love with her when I read We All Want Impossible Things. I became obsessed with her reading Sandwich and now, with Wreck, I would go to war for this woman. The book revisits the same characters from Sandwich, but stands on it’s own completely: Rocky is a middle-aged woman whose kids are out of the nest and whose father is living in her ADU. She has a loving husband and a weird skin thing that won’t go away and we live in the minutiae of her days while also exploring the big issues of existence: our impermanence, our changing bodies and relationships, and what it means to know and love the children we have raised into people. There are lines that will make you burst into laughter followed by sentences that will make you cry real tears, the best kind of writing in my not at all human opinion, which I treat as fact. Bonus points for the ways that it intersects with the issue of Big Consulting, which I’ve ranted about before!

Save the date by Allison Raskin is a true example of alchemizing your pain into art. When the author was ghosted by her fiance — right before she was set to publish a book about relationships!!! — her father joked that they should just keep the date, the venue and the vendors and find a new groom. She didn’t, but she wrote a book about a woman like her who does just that. It’s a sweet rom com that flies by.

The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life by Helen Whybrow is a memoir about land and history and the author’s life on a 200-acre farm. It’s so quiet and vivid that reading it in the morning before the sun came up in Phoenix, Arizona I would feel like I, too, had helped birth lambs in the freezing cold of a Vermont night (I had, and have, not).

Old Money by Kelsey Miller combines two of my great literary loves: thrillers and class conflict. 20 years after her cousin was killed at a fancy country club, Alice returns to her hometown and the scene of the crime to figure out what happened. Lots of twists and turns, and a great setting.

Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty was an airport purchase, and what a strange book to read on an airplane! It starts with an older, disoriented woman walking through the aisles of a plane predicting the deaths — dates and causes — of her fellow passengers…who then start to die in the ways she predicted. Liane is a master of the braided narrative, and even if I wasn’t as in love with this one as I was her other books, it was worth the read.

If You’re Reading This It’s Meant For You by Leigh Stein has to be one of the most anticipated novels of the year, and not just by me, who repeatedly begged Leigh for a copy. It’s a gothic novel set in a d-list hype house in Los Angeles, where a down-on-her-luck former celebrity journalist finds herself reunited with the man who almost launched her art career when she was a Tumbler ingenue. Stuck in his crumbling mansion with a bunch of teenagers; she’s trying to rebuild her career, help him save his ancestral home and find the girl who suddenly went missing before she arrived. When you finish this, you’ll want to read her 2020 novel Self Care, trust me.

To The Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage pulled me right in even though I HATE SPACE. I really do. I’m the opposite of interested in it. But Eliana makes her characters and their world so engrossing I had to keep reading to see if Steph Harper fulfilled her dream of becoming the first Cherokee astronaut. It’s not really a book about space, it’s about family and identity and where we belong. I could have done without the bits that are Instagram captions or descriptions of Instagram posts — we have to find another way to incorporate these online parts of characters into books, I don’t want to be pulled out of the story in this way — but when said she needed a big, beautiful book, I knew I’d send this one her way (soon! I promise!).

Book Giveaway Time!

If you’re new here, we do this every month. Leave a comment with what you’d like, and I’ll choose winners at random and message you for your address1. Your choices are:

• To The Moon and Back

• Old Money

• Here One Moment

❤️ It’s the last weekend for 20% off a membership for the rest of the year (you won’t get another chance until February!)

❤️ Wow, you guys really loved this episode.

❤️ Victor took a bullet for his friend. He shouldn’t have had to.

❤️ Our YouTube also has the May Reading List, June Reading List and July Reading List

❤️ Here’s our Summer Trip Recap and What I Packed.

❤️ Simplified my makeup routine with the essentials from Merit, I love it.

❤️ I bought this shirt full price and now it’s on major sale, lucky you!

❤️ My favorite headphones are over $100 off right now!

❤️ I’m hooked on the ZIIP Halo microcurrent device, and after using it for a year, I’m a partner!2 I don’t use the app, I just freestyle it on my jawline and my cheeks and I see such a difference. It ain’t cheap, but code NORAZIIP gets you 10% off.

❤️ I get 8+ hours of sleep a night because of these THC gummies. The DREAM ones conk me out for 8-9 hours, and the UPLIFT ones make me chill and fun. Code NORA gets you 15% off!

XO,

Nora

A note that paid subscriptions are always optional and always appreciated. There will always be plenty here for free, and just like Tommy Boy, I will absolutely accept no as an answer!!!! But if you’ve been on the fence, memberships are 20% off this month only!

tap to upgrade

📖 The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham was absolutely what I wanted it to be. You go to Elin Hilderbrand for layered points of view and decadent landscapes, and while she retired from her Nantucket Novels, she’s launching a new career with her daughter, Shelby. The Academy takes place at a middling East Coast boarding school, where all of the Hilderbrand trademarks come into play: class dynamics, sex, friendship and people being more than what meets the eye. This is the beginning of a new era for her (and Shelby!) and I’m seated and present for it.

📖 Sunny Side Up by Katie Sturino was read in that liminal space between newsletters (why do I always feel the need to confess this like you’re going to ask for timestamped video footage of me reading?!), but it’s a sunny (sorry) summer novel you can gulp down in one sitting. Sunny is a plus-size publicist reeling from a divorce with a brilliant business idea for swimwear that fits a bigger body without looking dowdy. She’s trying to build a business while rebuilding her self-esteem and boom! Looooove triangle between a fancy handsome investor and a folksy mailman.

📖 Ring of Salt by Betsy Cornwell is a memoir about the author fleeing an abusive household only to find herself in another abusive household. Betsy is in her 20s when she runs to Ireland’s Aran Islands, begins writing YA fiction based on fairy tales and falls in love with a handsome Irish farmer who isn’t the prince charming she thought he would be. It’s beautiful and hopeful, especially if you’ve ever had to start your life over.

📖 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — ever heard of it?! — is actually a great summer read. I think I last read it in high school, and it felt more relevant in 2025 than it did in 1997.

📖 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was my Bible in college, when I didn’t know the word Depression could apply to me, a girl who read The Bell Jar and thought, she’s making some good points. As a (more) healed adult, this was a painful re-read, and I wanted to reach through time and space and pages to save her. Rest in Peace, Sylvia Plath. You would have loved Sertraline and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

📖 Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld was so good I just wanted to step inside of it and live forever. You know how hot, gorgeous models often fall in love and marry regular (or semi-ugly) men?? You know how that pretty much never happens for women? Well what if it did! And what if one of the hottest male pop stars in the world fell in love with a normal female comedy writer? And it was written by Curtis Sittenfeld so it was real and insightful and just felt like peering into an actual life story? That’s this book.

📖 True Happiness Company by Veena Dinavahi had me crawling out of my skin with rage, pausing my reading to say to Matthew “you’re not gonna believe this.” The subtitle of the book is how a girl like me falls for a cult like that and I’ll tell you how: Faith manipulation!!! Coercive control!!! To be able to write with such clarity (and humor!) about something so demonic was beyond impressive. I cannot wait to see what this author does next.

📖 The Last Mrs. Parrish by Live Constantine was, I guess, one of the biggest books of 2018? Well I’d never heard of it, but I will ready pretty much any thriller. This one…??? I guess several million readers can’t be wrong but it’s hard to spend that much time with a diabolical character only for a payoff to come soooo late, and The Great Gatsby does class commentary much better!

📖 Swan Song by Elin Hilderbrand is the last of her Nantucket Novels and I know I should have read them all before reading this one but I couldn’t wait any longer! It was like saying goodbye to old friends (fictional people) and a home I’ll never return to (an island I’ve never visited).

📖 Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of The American Dream by Megan Greenwell will radicalize you against private equity, so help me GOD. Megan writes this like the scandal it is, using real-life stories to illustrate just how “ for an industry that’s often held up as an exemplar of free-market capitalism, private equity is surprisingly dependent on government subsidies for its profits.” We desperately need to keep our eyes on class consciousness in this country; it’s 99% vs 1%.

Book Giveaway Time!

If you’re new here, we do this every month. Leave a comment with what you’d like, and I’ll choose winners at random and message you for your address1. Because all of the books I read were digital this month, I’m giving away five copies of my second book, No Happy Endings.

❤️ Our YouTube also has the May Reading List and June Reading List

❤️ Let’s talk about influencers with

❤️ I love Kitsch because they make amazing hair products AND they sent an email saying any tariffs will NOT raise their prices. My faves are here.

❤️ Simplified my makeup routine with the essentials from Merit, I’m obsessed.

❤️ I’m hooked on the ZIIP Halo microcurrent device, and after using it for a year, I’m a partner!2 I don’t use the app, I just freestyle it on my jawline and my cheeks and I see such a difference. It ain’t cheap, but code NORAZIIP gets you 10% off.

❤️ I get 8+ hours of sleep a night because of these THC gummies. The DREAM ones conk me out for 8-9 hours, and the UPLIFT ones make me chill and fun. Code NORA gets you 15% off!

❤️ I’m still Bricking my phone for most days and this link gets you 10% off. If the link doesn’t auto-apply 10% off, use code NORA.

XO,

Nora

A note that paid subscriptions are always optional and always appreciated. There will always be plenty here for free, and just like Tommy Boy, I will absolutely accept no as an answer!!!! But if you’ve been on the fence, annual memberships are 20% off this month only!

tap to upgrade

By the time you’re reading this, I’m on vacation. A real vacation without a computer. A real vacation with a fat stack of books loaded in my Libby app. A real vacation we’ve saved for and planned for literal years, that at least one of the kids will be utterly disappointed with because their job is to keep us humble.

📖 Better: A Memoir About Wanting To Die by Arianna Rebolini is what calls Memoir+, a memoir with a little something extra (in this case, research on suicidality, suicidal ideation, etc.). How can you still want to die if you’re better? If you’ve been in therapy, been to the mental hospital, gotten married, had a baby and built the career you wanted? How can it be possible that so many people feel so hopeless? The girls that know, know, but I think anyone could benefit from the insights in this book.

📖 Sing To Me by Jesse Browner was so beautiful and painful, especially if you have ever met a little boy and imagine them as the hero of this odyssey. After the fall of Troy, Hani and his donkey (sob!) leave their abandoned farm and shell of a village to embark on a journey to find Hani’s sister, who left for the city with their father and never returned. If you loved Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles, this will also speak to you.

🎧 The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian was a perfect listen, even though I’d already seen the TV series and thought I knew the story (I didn’t! They change things when they make a TV show! Never forget that!). A thriller is truly my favorite kind of audiobook. You might think I’m a normal woman listening to music when I’m at the gym or driving my car. You’re wrong! I’m an abnormal woman listening to a thrilling novel about a flight attendant who wakes up next to a dead body in Dubai after yet another blackout and finds herself trying to outwit international spies (while keeping her job).

📖 Everyone is Lying To You by Jo Piazza is a trad-wife thriller that lives up to the hype, and I gobbled it down in one flight (my favorite way to consume a book). When an influencer’s husband is murdered during a Girl Boss conference, her college bestie-turned-journalist has to figure out what actually happened. The perfect summer book.

📖 Making Friends Can Be Murder by Kathleen West is a cozy murder mystery set in Minneapolis, where an intergenerational group of friends all named Sarah Jones find themselves solving the murder of another Sarah Jones. There’s a hot FBI agent with a haunting past, intrigue and, duh, a murder to solve. I read it in a single day by the pool (the way books want to be read).

🎧 The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments and Warps Our Economies by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington was truly enraging! If you’ve ever wondered what consulting is…get ready to learn that it’s kind of nothing! Just a lot of money changing hands, draining brainpower and manpower from companies and governments, and pouring money into big buckets for the wealthy to chug from. Am I oversimplifying? OF COURSE I AM!

📖 The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean was published in 2000, adapted into the movie Adaptation by Charlie Kaufman, and finally had the honor of being read by me in the summer of 2025. Susan Orlean is the kind of writer who makes a meal out of a sentence. Thank GOD she built her career when she did, when she could follow those ideas down into swampy rabbit holes, spend years reporting on a weird man who was obsessed with orchids, and leave us with this book, part historical record and part memoir.

📖 Awake by Jen Hatmaker won’t be out until September, but I got an advanced copy, flipped it open just to read a few pages and then resurfaced hours later, face covered in tears. The book grabbed me by the throat with the first sentence: at 2:30 AM on July 11, 2020, out of a dead sleep, I hear five whispered words not meant for me: “I just can’t quit you.” If you’ve survived evangelicalism, betrayal, being a woman alive in the world, or any combination therein…I can’t wait for this book to get into your hands.

Book Giveaway Time!

If you’re new here, we do this every month. Leave a comment with what you’d like, and I’ll choose winners at random and message you for your address1. These books will be sent out in late July, so stay patient!!

• Making Friends Can Be Murder

• Everyone Is Lying To You

• Sing To Me

• Better

❤️ The May Reading List is on YouTube, too!

❤️ I love Kitsch because they make amazing hair products AND they sent an email saying any tariffs will NOT raise their prices. My faves are here.

❤️ Simplified my makeup routine with the essentials from Merit, which means traveling much lighter than usual!

❤️ Tried the Needles No More eye de-puffing cream from Dr. Brandt and this stuff works.

❤️ I get 8+ hours of sleep a night because of these THC gummies. The DREAM ones conk me out for 8-9 hours, and the UPLIFT ones make me chill and fun. Code NORA gets you 15% off! My other sleepy girl things are here.

❤️ I’m still Bricking my phone for most days and this link gets you 10% off. If the link doesn’t auto-apply 10% off, use code NORA.

XO,

Nora

A note that paid subscriptions are always optional and always appreciated. There will always be plenty here for free, and just like Tommy Boy, I will absolutely accept no as an answer!!!!

tap to upgrade

Hello from sunny Phoenix, where the weather is already pushing 100, the sun is shining and the kids are already on summer break. The end of the school year has all of us in shambles. There goes our routine! There go more milestones! We somehow have a kid entering medical school, a kid who finished her freshman year of college, a kid solidly in middle school and — I don’t know why this one felt so monumental — a third grader?

But enough about my impending mental breakdown! Let’s talk about books, baby.

📖 Unshrunk by Laura Delano was an eye-opener. At age 14, Laura was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on psychiatric medications that promised to make her better. But she got worse. 19 medications later, she began to untangle her identity from her diagnosis, eventually tapering off all medications. This is a memoir that asks hard questions about diagnoses, drugs and psychiatry, and has ruffled some feathers (Delano runs a non-profit that provides support for people tapering off their psychiatric medication) and as a person who has benefitted from psychiatry I was resistant to reading it. But many things are always true at once: the things that help some hurt others, the things we don’t think to question should be questioned, and listening to the experiences of others need not threaten the validity of our own.

📖 Free by Amanda Knox is not a book about the crime for which she was wrongfully convicted, but about the quest for freedom outside of what people believe about us, presented so beautifully by someone who is owed COUNTLESS APOLOGIES FROM THE MEDIA AND ITS AVID CONSUMERS. Amanda is a hell of a writer, and the picture she paints of her life is vivid and affecting and should make you rethink every story you’ve ever heard about a “bad” woman.

📖 High Dive by Chelsea Fagan is a vacation in a book, specifically a sumptuous vacation on a private yacht with Alex — a political strategist from a lower-middle-class background — and the ultra-wealthy friends she met at Columbia University. Those friends include the handsome Danial, who works in private equity and broke Alex’s heart 10 years ago. Every dynamic in this book feels so real and relatable, even though I will never in my life step foot on a yacht and nobody has ever quietly loved me for a decade1.

📖 Alive Day by Karie Fugett is a trip back to trauma town, baby! Karie is the widow of a combat veteran she met and married when she was very young, after a tumultuous childhood. Early in their marriage, this man (BOY!) was hit by an IED in Iraq. He became a traumatized amputee; she became his traumatized caregiver. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and while we’re thanking the troops for their service and shopping for deals and remembering our fallen we should be addressing all of the issues that Karie plows into headfirst in this memoir.

OKAY LET’S HAVE SOME MORE FUN! All’s Fair In Love And Pickleball by Kate Spencer is what Kate does best: a sexy little friends-to-enemies rom-com set in the high-stakes world of pickleball vs. tennis (this is a very real thing!). Fun, breezy, sexy, and a great escape from the real world, which is not fun, breezy or sexy! Have you been to an actual pickleball court? People take it so seriously! Relax! We are playing ping-pong on a court! Smile a little!

📖 Unworld by Jayson Greene is out June 17. Jayson is the author of the memoir Once More We Saw Stars, and described this novel as a nightmare of that first book. The book starts with Anna, whose teenage son Alex has just died suddenly. Was it a suicide? An accident? Nobody can know for sure, and the loss of this child has reverberated the way these losses always do: Anna feels disconnected from her husband, from her life, from the couple friend whose daughter Samantha was Alex’s best friend and who was with him the day that he died. Then there’s Aviva, an AI-powered version of Anna’s consciousness that lives in a small device behind her ear. If you’ve listened to our AI Wife episode, or the episode with Julia Hotz of the Connection Cure, you know why I’m into this: because technology and memory and grief and loneliness are intertwined parts of our world, and will only get more entangled.

🎧 The Villa by Rachel Hawkins was a perfect listen: two frenemy writers (one a major self-help guru and the other a moderately successful novelist) go to Italy for the summer. The villa they’ve rented was the home of a grisly murder in the 1970s, when two frenemy stepsisters rented the villa with their musician lovers. If you don’t already know, I love Rachel Hawkins and her twisty thrillers. Such world-building! Multiple timelines! As a trusting reader, I never ever see the twists coming, and I love that about myself.

📖 Kingdom of Prep by Maggie Bullock has been on my list since it was published, and it did not disappoint. J.Crew is a brand that has shaped our culture, and this is the true story behind it (and the ways that — no surprise! — venture capital and private equity LITERALLY RUIN EVERYTHING!). If you or someone you know dressed as Jenna Lyons for Halloween, you absolutely have to read this.

📖 The Greatest Possible Good by Ben Brooks is a Wes Anderson movie in book form: a wealthy family is (shockingly!!) not as happy as they may seem. Their daughter is secretly sabotaging her college applications and obsessed with effective altruism. Their son is experimenting with drugs and their dad disappears, comes back and has given away most of their money. Funny and sharp and perfectly dysfunctional.

📖 Family and Other Calamities by Leslie Gray Streeter is the first novel by one of my favorite widows: a funny, engaging book about a widowed journalist facing the betrayal of a colleague stealing her story decades ago, the family she left in the dust, and the unexpected allies who help her pick up the pieces.

📖 FYI — The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell is in paperback on Tuesday! Amanda is one of the most engaging writers out there, and this exploration of our modern delusions is comforting and enlightening.

Hey, wanna change someone’s life? Me too! My sister has been volunteering with a young woman named Sydney, who was accepted into her dream school — Howard! And even with scholarships and Pell grants, she’s $30K short. My sister has secured matching grants of $10K, and I’d love to see us get her over the edge this weekend and alleviate some of that future student loan debt (as I’m writing this she’s on the verge of unlocking the second $5k match!). Let’s do it!

Book Giveaway Time!

If you’re new here, we do this every month. Leave a comment with what you’d like, and I’ll choose winners at random and message for your address2. Up for grabs: All’s Fair in Love And Pickleball, Unworld, Unshrunk, Alive Day, High Dive, Free, The Greatest Possible Good, Family and Other Calamities.

🛒 Boden is British but still doing a Memorial Day Sale3, so I rounded up my favorite styles (things I’ve bought in other prints/colors in the past that I know are great).

🛒 The Dermstore sale is when I try new things and stock up on my favorites. Lots of things are 20% off with code SUN but if that code doesn’t work on what you want…use GEETHANKS (this is why is my bestie!) My tries/rebuys are here.

🛒I love Kitsch because they make amazing hair products AND they sent an email saying any tariffs will NOT raise their prices. My faves are here.

🛒 I get 8+ hours of sleep a night because of these THC gummies. The DREAM ones conk me out for 8-9 hours, and the UPLIFT ones make me chill and fun. Code NORA gets you 15% off! My other sleepy girl things are here.

🛒 I’m still Bricking my phone for most days and this link gets you 10% off. If the link doesn’t auto-apply 10% off, use code NORA.

XO,

Nora

A note that paid subscriptions are always optional and always appreciated. There will always be plenty here for free, and just like Tommy Boy, I will absolutely accept no as an answer!!!!

tap to upgrade

Yesterday was Independent Bookstore Day, but I did not spend it at an Independent Bookstore because I spent an entire day with my nieces and nephews, committed to having The Best Day Ever, and one of them said that while he loves books, he does not enjoy bookstores1 (!!!) and it can’t be the Best Day Ever if you force one person to compromise, so instead we:

• Played “tennis” (I thought five lessons made me an expert at this sport. I thought wrong. It’s very hard and a fourth grader was trying to hide their annoyance about how bad I was!)

• Got Big Gulps

• Took one of them to Wendy’s for the first time (his review: great nuggets!)

• Went to two thrift stores

• Drove around and chatted

• Went to see The Minecraft Movie

I don’t know about them, but it was a core memory for me, and one that I will be thinking about when I am just a brain in a jar.

I did feel some guilt about not spending a pile of cash adding to my many TBR piles but really, every day can be Independent Bookstore Day! And Library Day! (They…

Read more

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March is not a month.

I am not the only one who is Struggs To Func right now. Mercury and Venus are in retrograde (never sure what that means aside from the hour I spend with my astrologer when it all makes sense).

March. Is. Not. A. Month! It is a way station between seasons, a black hole where dates swim in my mind and nothing quite adds up. I have been running late, missing things, losing my mind and making other people crazy while also wondering if I am going crazy (I’m not going crazy. I’m already there!!!!).

But March is — thankfully!!! — almost over, and somehow I did manage to read, even though it felt like I had no time to do it and I still want a solid 6 weeks to do nothing but read, like the summer vacation after fifth grade when they finally opened the new library less than a mile from my house with a special reading bench overlooking Minnehaha Creek.

📖 Sandwich by Catherine Newman might be my favorite book of the year. was reading this in Mexico, and laughing so hard I downloaded Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things as a consolation prize when the Libby line for Sandwich was 5 months long. But oh, was it worth the wait. I’ve recommended it to every woman I know, and most of them have already read it, proving that I am always tardy to the reading party. It’s a short novel, one week on summer vacation with the protagonist’s family. Her kids are grown, her parents are old, and she is contending with all of these changes against the unchanging backdrop of the cabin and town they’ve rented in for years. It’s so poignant and yet so so funny and a book I will keep on my shelves forever in case of emergency.

I closed my eyes in the car, put a hand on my belly inside of which was our stilled child - a withered little peach, the blush of its cheeks. There was something in my brain like a dial tone, and I wondered if I would die. But I wouldn’t, of course. I’d get home and boil noodles like every grieving mother everywhere.

-Catherine Newman, Sandwich

📖 Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times by Steven J. Heine has been on my TBR for literal months and IT WAS EVERYTHING I HOPED IT WOULD BE. I am going to get this man on the podcast and bring this wisdom to your ears, because we need this refresh on Philosophy 201 (a class where I left a review on RateMyProfessor.com saying I had a crush on my professor’s brain not thinking he would ever see it). I have been reading passages out loud to my family as I go, and taking my time with each chapter even though it’s incredibly readable for an academic author.

📖 🎧 The Hammer: Power, Inequality and The Struggle For The Soul of Labor by is truly fantastic. I started with the hard copy, but switched to audio for a weekend road trip with the kids, who are now fully educated on the power of the working class and the importance of unions. I fell in love with Nolan’s writing at Gawker (RIP) and proudly support him on this platform, and his book did not disappoint. It’s engaging, educational, realistic and energizing. I bought a copy for my niece, whose corporate coffee shop named her “assistant manager” but keeps her hours under 40 so they don’t have to give her benefits, and hope it further radicalizes her. At the time of this writing, the ebook is only $3 on Bookshop.org and I’d love to get this guy on the podcast, too but more importantly I want you to buy this, read it and get ready to discuss with me!!!

🎧 Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult by Maria Bamford is a funny book, but as an audiobook? I literally peed my pants on the drive to LA. If you want to LOL about OCD, depression, suicidal ideation and other things that aren’t funny until they’re funny, listen to this. I immediately forced my cousin and SIL to download and listen along with me, and had it playing on a drive to LA so the kids could live, learn and lol along with me1.

🎧 Everybody Says It’s Everything by Xhenet Aliu was randomly available on Libby and recommended by my local librarians and that’s all I needed to see before I downloaded it2. It follows a family built by adoption and secrets and trauma; twins who grew up Albanian adoptees in an Italian family, and the parents who raised them. We jump between the 70s and 90s and also get an education on the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo, which I only vaguely remember from headlines. The narrator’s delivery was oddly staccato at times but then I did a two-second search, learned that she herself is Albanian and realized she was telling the story in the voice it needed and maybe not everything is designed for the audio preferences of a middle-aged woman with long Midwestern vowels! Highly recommend, especially for the way it comes together at the end, which is so touching I have not stopped thinking about it.

On My TBR

There are a LOT of books I have piled up around the studio, but I’m sharing these so that I’ll be pressured to get them read and recapped for you! What can I say? Potential judgment works on me!

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki was on my TBR last month, and while I started it this month I did not finish it and therefore, we will get to it NEXT month!

Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Resistant Treatment by Laura Delano is at the top of my pile for April, and again, I’m putting it here because it has been on the list for too long!

Book Giveaway Time!

If you’re new here, we do this every month. Leave a comment with what you’d like, and I’ll choose winners at random and message for your address3. Sadly, this month’s reads were mostly audiobooks and the physical books I read I am unwilling to part with, so you’ll have to make do with a giveaway of my own books!!!

• It’s Okay To Laugh (Crying is Cool, Too) by me…I HAVE SO MANY OF THESE! I’ll send out, say, 3 this month?

• No Happy Endings is my second book, and I’ll send out 3 this month, too!

❤️ I was asked for bra suggestions for tiny boobs (not offended, these are the facts of my life, I am built like my handsome father!) and I rounded up my favorites.

❤️ Caroline Moss and I are collaborating on a weekly show that we haven’t officially named yet but is about our favorite thrifted treasures. It’s simply for fun, and even though my internet colluded to ruin our last recording session, WE DID HAVE FUN!

❤️ Save The Date: I’m joining CEBV Weekly (which I wrote about here) in conversation on April 8. It’s free and non-partisan (though I think you all know which way I lean).

❤️ Let’s (Not) Go, Girls: This episode about burnout and life beyond productivity is a good listen for anyone who is on the verge right now!

❤️ I get 8+ hours of sleep a night because of these THC gummies. The DREAM ones conk me out for 8-9 hours, and the UPLIFT ones make me chill and fun. Code NORA gets you 15% off! My other sleepy girl things are here.

❤️ I’m still Bricking my phone for most days and this link gets you 10% off. If the link doesn’t auto-apply 10% off, use code NORA.

XO,

Nora

Also: If you’re free tomorrow, I’m testing out live-streaming on YouTube. Log in at work and waste your employer’s time! The link is here, and you can press a button to get a notification (or just remember if you’re good at stuff like that).

It’s only February? I guess I have to believe you.

2025 threatens to be the longest year of our lives, and so I have continued to Brick my phone and disappear into stories instead of doom scrolls. In small acts of resistance, I am making good use of my local library and the Libby app, buying books at my local bookstore or on Bookshop.org, and utilizing the USPS to share some of my favorites with you (paid subscriber perk: monthly book giveaways in the comments section here).

But enough about the real world, let’s talk about books, baby!

Only Say Good Things by Crystal Hefner was a perfect audiobook. She has a smooth, calming voice, which I would not have been able to maintain had I been tasked to narrate a book about being Hugh Hefner’s wife. I listened on a plane and kept gasping and saying “oh my GOD” out loud, because OH MY GOD - GASP! - it really was as bad as you think it was, and right under our noses. I continue to be surprised that I continue to be surprised at the way our culture will lionize gross and mediocre men. I want all good things for Crystal, and I want her to be my friend. I’m gonna go buy this one to add to my Celebrity Memoir Book Shelf.

Circe by Madeline Miller is Greek Mythology fanfic and I am in awe of her storytelling. I, too, want to be a lesser God exiled to an island where she turns to witchery! I am in awe of her writing, and highlighted so many lines to return to, like:

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn was our audiobook for our RV trip to the Petrified Forest and New Mexico’s City of Rocks. It was most certainly not appropriate listening for a 2nd grader but I guess if he has to learn about the Satanic Panic I want it to be on a road trip with his family! Highly recommend on audiobook, but nobody does dark and twisty quite like Gillian Flynn.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll is a novel that centers the women victimized by a “charming” serial killer based on Charles Manson’s attacks on a Florida sorority. It weaves through the nights of the attack and the ways the violence echos through the decades, and was a sobering reminder of the ways our culture minimizes and explains away male violence and erases the victims. A beautiful story, well told. I made Matthew get it on Libby immediately so we could discuss.

Party of One: Be Your Own Best Life Partner by Meghan Keane is not a book that is meant for me, a married woman, but I love Meghan’s work on NPR’s Life Kit and I love books that decenter romantic partnership as the highest goal a person can have. It’s instructive and inspiring and beautifully illustrated and had I read this in my early 20s perhaps I would not have wasted so much time wondering if I was the right girl for the wrong boy!!!

The Connection Cure by Julia Hotz was one of the first books I read in January, but I forgot to put it in last month’s post! In every podcast conversation I have, the theme of connection keeps coming up. WE NEED EACH OTHER, WE NEED NATURE, WE NEED TO FEEL CONNECTED THE WORLD and this book will reassure you that whatever loneliness you are experiencing is not a personal failing. Julia Hotz makes research and reporting accessible and inspiring without veering into “put people on anti-depressants into work camps” territory if you get my drift?

We Would Never by Tova Mirvis is such a great premise: a woman’s almost-ex-husband is murdered in the midst a bitter custody battle and an acrimonious divorce process, and she’s the main suspect. But he was a bastard, so surely she wasn’t the only person who wanted him dead! It’s a family drama, a mystery, and a great escape.

You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (mostly) true notes on gossip by Kelsey McKinney is not a retreading of her wildly popular Normal Gossip podcast, but a mix of research and anecdotes. I love Kelsey’s voice, and tore through this one.

On My TBR

There are a LOT of books I have piled up around the studio, but I’m sharing these so that I’ll be pressured to get them read and recapped for you! What can I say? Potential judgment works on me!

The Hammer: Power, Inequality and The Struggle For The Soul of Labor by - a writer I proudly support for his passionate work for the working class. This was on backorder and just arrived on my doorstep and I cannot wait to crack it open!

Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times by Steven J. Heine is right up my alley. It has been sitting on my coffee table and I’ve cracked it open but I truly need 8 uninterrupted hours with a Diet Coke, this book and a highlighter and I’ll get that next week on an airplane!

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki is, like the two books above, also a book I deeply need right now! Looking forward to giving you a recap next month.

Book Giveaway Time!

If you’re new here, we do this every month. Leave a comment with what you’d like, and I’ll choose winners at random and message for your address1.

• We Would Never

• Party of One

• You Didn’t Hear This From Me

• It’s Okay To Laugh (Crying is Cool, Too) by me…I HAVE SO MANY OF THESE! I’ll send out, say, 5 this month?

❤️ I was asked for bra suggestions for tiny boobs (not offended, these are the facts of my life, I am built like my handsome father!) and I rounded up my favorites.

❤️ Because we aren’t shopping at Target and Amazon I am shopping directly from my favorite brands and Kitsch rewarded my virtuousness with a 20% off sale on their entire site. These are my favorites.

❤️ I’ve been using Odele dry shampoo (alcohol and aerosol-free!) for at least a year, and they sent me their new thickening line a few months before it launched. It’s SO GOOD. NORA20 applies to the thickening shampoo and conditioner, the serum, and the volumizing foam! They are at Target and Amazon but I’m shopping DIRECT whenever possible.

❤️ I get 8+ hours of sleep a night because of these THC gummies. The DREAM ones conk me out for 8-9 hours, and the UPLIFT ones make me chill and fun. Code NORA gets you 15% off!

❤️ I’m still Bricking my phone for most days and this link gets you 10% off.

❤️ Foria is a pod sponsor that I sought out; they make “intimate products” but everyone at our house loves the CBD balm for muscle aches, headaches, period cramps…code THANKS gets you 20% off your first order!

XO,

Nora

Wow, it’s still January?

This month has lasted a record 9,000 days. Scientists are baffled. The universe is confused. And so am I, because I’m barely getting this out before this month finally — and I hope I didn’t just jinx it — ends.

So what do you do when it feels like the world is spinning wildly out of control? If you’re a geek who lived for her local library, you dive headfirst into a stack of books, the longer the better.

I read a lot this month.

A few months ago, at the urging of my teenage daughter, I listened to A Court of Thorns and Roses on a drive to Las Vegas. This is the fantasy series that has been (among others!) dominating bestseller lists and poolsides for years, and I was…not in love. I mean, I listened to the entire thing but I also cringed so hard my muscles were sore by the end of the drive. It was a retelling of Beauty and The Beast where a poor girl is driven to the castle of a beastly…fairy? In this universe, Fairies are big and strong and sexually magnetic and also magical but this was still a teenage girl falling in love with her captor and calling him her “high lord” and I called Sophie and said, “what did I do wrong that this book spoke to you!”

And she said something like, relax the first book is supposed to be bad! It pays off in the second!

Now, having read every book in the series, I can say that if you haven’t allowed yourself the treat of slipping into an epic series of fairy smut, maybe you should consider it.

Because slipping out of this reality into one where the world was ending because of greed and evil and only unlikely allies and magic can heal it was…oddly comforting. And knowing that these books would take hours and hours of reading time meant hours and hours I was not tempted to unbrick my phone1.

I know there are fantasy haters out there (because I was one) so I’ll keep this as quick as possible and move onto the other books I read this month.

A Court of Mist & Fury (Book 2): definitely redeemed the first book (Sophie, if you read this, YOU WERE RIGHT!) and introduced a hot new fairy and that kind of twists that make you think about what it really means to be a good guy (maybe it’s complicated??) and oh no now her sisters are caught up in this mess!

A Court of Wings & Ruin (Book 3): okay wow maybe the good guy was the bad guy and maybe what our girl did in book 2 wasn’t as good as she thought it was (ugh hate when that happens!) Lots of MAGIC and realizing your power and there’s a HUGE WAR and SO MUCH BLOOD and WHOA the twists! You won’t see them coming! The more stressful the situation, the more sex the characters have, and I’m sorry but I WILL lol when they make wings sexual).

A Court of Frost and Starlight (Book 3.5): BOOOOORING! A short book about the winter solstice that’s just a nothing Christmas story where they’re like, wow, war is over what do I get my immortal beloved as a gift when he’s 500 years old and enormously wealthy and has everything??? Also in this book I realized the girl is TWENTY ONE and WHYYYYYYY couldn’t the author just age her up a smidge? Say in that first book she spent three years in the castle? MUST WE HAVE GIRLS WITHOUT A FULLY FORMED PREFONTAL CORTEX FALL IN LOVE WITH MEN HUNDREDS OF YEARS OLDER THAN THEY ARE??2

A Court of Silver Flames (Book 4): We switch our focus to the mean big sister who has powers nobody has ever seen, and is struggling to fit into this new world. This book is equal parts trauma therapy in the fairy world (CBT, breath work, meditation, empowering female warriors to help heal the emotional wounds left by sexual assault, deeply understanding and sexy men who are committed to Doing The Work) and the most graphic sex scenes I’ve ever read. I was clutching my pearls at some of those passages, but as you may know, you can take the girl out of Catholic School but you will never take the Catholic School out of the girl.3

When Book 5 drops, I will be right there ready to disappear into this world again and yes, I am planning on starting her other series soon!

Okay, I’m done now!

Here’s what ELSE I read this month:

A Better Ending: A Brother’s Twenty-Year Quest to Uncover The Truth About His Sister’s Death byJames Whitfield Thomson read like a novel and a journal all at once. It took Thomson 27 years to truly look at his younger sister Eileen’s death in 1974. He was told (by her cop husband) that she’d shot herself in the chest. But did she? I felt the ache of his loss on every page. Note to my siblings: if I die under mysterious circumstances, please ask at least three questions before 27 years pass, okay?

Making Time by Maria Bowler is a great book for burned out boss babes and boys who feel like they’ve been running on a hamster wheel trying to make it all make sense. I love Maria’s instagram presence for the way she publicly deprograms herself and others from Toxic Productivity. This book was a warm hug for my brain and soul. I have an interview with Maria that I have to edit and share with you soon but neither of us are stressed about it because we are not those panicked little Doers anymore!4

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle was an interesting premise: a guy who grew up mourning his dead father tastes foods he’s never eaten. They’re messages from the dead, and when he cooks them, the dead return. I’m admittedly not a foodie and pages describing food bore me, but the premise got way too tangly with not enough payoff, and the interstitials between chapters confused me, switching points of view with side characters. I don’t like to talk about books I didn’t love because taste is SO SUBJECTIVE and this book hit a trigger for me: that the dead “can’t move on” until we “move on” and what that means is never really defined?? It had funny moments and touching moments and I’m sure it would make a great screenplay (and has probably already been optioned), where the stickier plot points can be glossed over more easily.

The Mother Next Door by Andrea Dunlop and Mike Weber is a doozy. If you haven’t yet listened to Andrea’s podcast Nobody Should Believe Me, go do that. But only if you can handle stories of Munchausen By Proxy (AKA Medical Child Abuse). Mike Weber (AKA Detective Mike) is the country’s foremost expert when it comes to MBP and law enforcement, and Dunlop’s family was torn apart by MBP (listen to her podcast!). This book read like a Vanity Fair article (a big compliment in my book) and I gulped it down in one sitting even though the subject matter is beyond disturbing. Bonus Read: Andrea’s novel on MBP, We Came Here To Forget.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a book I hadn’t read since high school, but my sixth grader was assigned it in English class and I thought, “hey, I should read it so we can talk about it!” It’s short enough to read in a few hours but that’s only if you aren’t deeply upset by a story about little boys being wrecked on a deserted isle and turning on one another especially when the main character has the same name as your own son!!!

Book Giveaway Time!

If you’re new here, we do this every month. Leave a comment with what you’d like, and I’ll choose winners at random and message for your address5.

• Making Time

• Aftertaste

• A Better Ending

• For everyone who has ever asked how I sleep so much, it’s these THC gummies. The DREAM ones conk me out for 8-9 hours, and the UPLIFT ones make me chill and fun. Code NORA gets you a discount but I can’t remember what the discount is!

• I got to talk with about the NY Times Trends for 2025 and share my own (truly dark) trend predictions.

XO,

Nora

If you’re here from Patreon as a monthly member — you’ll need to log into your Substack account and add your payment info to keep your access!

Ah, December.

One of the least stressful months of the year, when everyone (especially me!!!) is at their best. A truly carefree, fun-loving 31 days with nothing to do but relax and read and enjoy the final weeks of a truly flawless year.1 I know I had a perfect time!

This month’s highlights include: live shows in Minneapolis, a cookie party, a magical Christmas Eve, a solid Christmas Day, only getting one extremely mean email from a stranger, and being on The Stacks!

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Okay, let’s do this.

It’s been a month, and that’s all I’ll say about November. Nope, I have more to say: the weather is cooling off in Phoenix which means we’re outside a lot more and I’m reading less (we coop up in the hot months the way I used to in the winter months in Minnesota). But without a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut to incentivize me, I’m not stressing about the quantity of reading. I’m stressing about a million other things, and letting books be the place where my brain can actually relax.

What I read this month:

Story of My life, Jay McInerney - This was a recommendation from and possibly the only book of his I hadn’t read. It’s a short novel from the 80s about a wild young girl flailing through her life in New York City: there are negligent and distant parents…

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The TBR pile(s) in my studio are out of control, and I spent the month plucking titles from the stacks willy nilly. There is no rhyme or reason to any of these selections, no common thread, no theme. For a brief moment I thought, oh, what if I only read spooky books and then I remembered that the last horror book I read was so scary I actually couldn’t keep it in my house.1

A note before we begin: paid subscribers get access to monthly book giveaways. Probably 90% of this newsletter is free for everyone, but this is one perk for the people who make this work possible. I’m going to have a pretty big giveaway at the end of the year because the bookshelves are SAGGING!

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What I read this month:

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante was the biggest undertaking of the month. I switched between hard copy and digital when I got …

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Which is fine, because today is officially the first day of Fall! So bust out your corduroy and your woolens. Pour a hot glass of pumpkin spice. And get your book lights charged1.

We have a new reading list for you.

My father loved The Folio Society, whose catalogs of special edition books arrived at our house and enticed him to spend what was probably many thousands of dollars on limited-edition books that lined his office shelves. You used to have to be a member (which I learned when I attempted to buy him a Folio Society book in my early 20s with my meager assistant salary2), but now anyone can buy th…

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Slow Dance is one of the best books of the year, and I would like to live inside of a Rainbow Rowell novel. Two best friends are reunited after time and life have pulled them apart. One is a divorcee living with her two young kids in her mom’s house, the other is in the Navy and trying to care for his aging mother from halfway around the world. Obviously they are in love and just never knew it before, and the number of times I gasped aloud at the gorgeousness of Rowell’s storytelling was enough to annoy people at the pool (NOT LIKE I CARED!). Amazon | Bookshop | Target

Song of Achilles was just sitting there at the bookstore and I thought, look, let’s give it a shot even though the cover indicates that it will be — to me — boring. IT IS NOT BORING! It is so beautiful! Fan fic…

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