Hi hello please don’t immediately delete this email. It’s your old pal Lisa, back with a new edition of her uhhh bi-annual newsletter.

Usually I have some short essay in mind to start things off with, but I’m pretty sure I complained about how bad the White Sox were last year at this time. However, if I’ve learned anything as a professional writer, you should never let not having anything to say hold you back from writing something. Here’s what’s been going on with me lately.

Writing-wise

I’ve been writing weekly reviews of the TV show Hacks for the newsletter Episodic Medium. Hacks is one of my favorite shows, and I’m so glad it’s back. I think some of those reviews might be paywalled, but if you ever enjoyed reading episodic TV criticism on the internet, you might like this newsletter.

Reading-wise

I’m a few years late to this one, but I finally picked up Lily King’s Writers & Lovers. Has everyone already read that one? It’s about a young writer and it’s set in Cambridge in the ’90s, and so for those reasons alone I was ready to like it. The main character is also grieving her mom and torn between two men, each of whom is a bit unsuitable for her. There was a part where she described her bike route to her waitress job and I was mentally following her path through Cambridge to Harvard Square.

I also quite liked The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, by Shubnum Khan, which is about a young girl whose father moves them into a decaying mansion in South Africa. A djinn has been haunting it for a century, in part because of a terrible tragedy that occurred in the beginning of the 20th century, and the young girl becomes determined to figure out what happened. It’s quite sad but also fascinating and I became quite invested in the lives of all the people living in the mansion.

I also read Kelly Link’s The Book of Love. She’s primarily known as a writer of short stories, and this was her first novel, and there were times I felt a bit like I was reading a series of short stories connected together, although maybe I just thought that because I know she writes short stories. It’s about a group of teenagers who die, and then come back a year later and have to complete some strange tasks if they want to come back to life forever. But even though the stakes are pretty high, they’re still teenagers, with teenaged decision making choices. It’s spooky and funny and sad, and also set in Massachusetts. What can I say, I’m easy to please.

I just finished Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar, which follows the story of a miracle worker who’s concealing her Judaism in Inquisition-era Spain. She can perform magic, but within limits, and whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for her is a complicated subject. She gets tangled up with various courtly power players, and I really could not tell over the course of the book whether or not she was going to be OK! I like Bardugo a lot, but as I was explaining to a friend, I often felt like her prior books had a certain subtext of Jewishness, but set in a magical world, and this one is more explicitly about an actual Jewish person. Anyway, when someone writes a book about a Jewish woman living in Cambridge, clearly you can assume I will read it. Perhaps she has a cat who is a goblin, too.

I also liked Good Material, by Dolly Alderton, which is told mostly from the perspective of an aspiring comedian right after his longtime girlfriend breaks up with him. And then, I suppose this is a mild spoiler, you see the breakup from the girlfriend’s perspective. It was really enjoyable, although even when you’re in the guy’s perspective, you’re not that shocked his girlfriend decided she’d had enough. He gets to some really low points in the aftermath of the breakup. It’s still quite funny, and when you get to the girlfriend’s perspective, there are still some surprises in store. People contain multitudes, and relationships end for all sorts of reasons.

I picked up the The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, which is a spin on the old socially-weird-but-phenomenally-talented detective and their kinder-but-baffled assistant trope. In this case, the detective is female and the assistant is male, and they live in a world where magical body modifications allow people to enhance their abilities. The assistant, for instance, can perfectly memorize everything he’s seen at a crime scene as long as he sniffs a specific fragrance. Then, when he needs to repeat back what he saw, he sniffs the fragrance again. Like how if you smell a Bath & Body Works perfume, you’re immediately transported back to Hawthorn Mall in 1998.

But wait, surely you’re still online all the time

Yes of course! I liked this GQ piece about “chaos follows,” or people you follow on social media solely because they’re pretty likely to say wacky stuff. I will admit that I mostly don’t do that kind of follow because I find it stressful. I prefer to trust other people to let me know when Joyce Carol Oates has tweeted something particularly weird.

Do any of you watch Girls5eva? It’s about an early oughts girl group who reunites in the present day and tries to mount a comeback. It is extremely funny and very much in the vein of 30 Rock. One of the characters is played by Paula Pell, who was a writer on Saturday Night Live for many years but finally gets to be on camera on this show. Her character in Girls5eva was closeted during their big fame era, so in the modern day she decides that she’s going to sow some oats, and tells the fans to call her Ho Spice. But she has to keep warning them not to write it out, because…that’s hospice. Anyway, they made that joke multiple times on the show and I laughed every time. Here’s an interview with her.

I’m not sure whether I’d ever heard the nasty rumor about how the singer Mama Cass died, but this NYT piece brings to light why it spread in the days after she passed away.

Reading this piece in The Cut about women going into debt to be bridesmaids made me feel like I was losing my mind. I am sympathetic to people wanting to make their wedding day special but I don’t think it’s asking too much to consider whether your friends can drop $6000 celebrating you.

Anything else?

I continue to be engaged in a battle of the wits with my new cat, Teddy, over whether or not he is allowed to eat my bread products. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen some photos of him in the aftermath of his various mischiefs. He is a terrible thief.

The only other cat that I have ever known that liked bread products was Oskar, so this is a very weird coincidence for me. Why am I fated to spend my entire adult life with all of my breads under lock and key for the sole crime of adopting cute cats?

Even though Teddy spends roughly 99% of his time being awake and violent, here is a cute picture of him sleeping.

Later, assorted gators.