Tag: BOTM

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11080 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-10-01 16:49:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-10-01 16:49:31 [post_content] =>

Conflict is inevitable. Parker's latest book is a helpful guide on how to better navigate it.

There are plenty of self-care books out there, but what about group-care books? Who’s looking out for the health and wellness of friend groups, work colleagues, neighborhoods, families, and other communities that fill our cups and sustain us in our personal and professional lives?

I think about this topic a lot. As the director of our small but mighty team at The Conversationalist (itself a global network of writers and artists!), as well as a neighborhood potluck organizer, a dedicated friend to my long-distance besties, and a mom/wife/sister/daughter/cousin who doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with loved ones, I know that conflict is inevitable for any group. But I also know how hard it can be to actually address conflict when we’d rather run for the hills and pretend it’s not happening.

Priya Parker’s new book, The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict, is a manual to help us navigate those inevitable bumps, kerfuffles, and painful rifts. It’s a collection of anecdotes and prompts that remind us that conflict is not only natural but essential for healthy, long-lasting groups. Parker also provides some other useful tools—often in the form of asking open-ended questions and really listening to the answers—meant as guides rather than prescriptions. Because even if we know that conflict is inevitable, it can be hard to know what to do with that awkward energy that seemingly comes out of nowhere in a work meeting or family holiday gathering or group chat with friends.

We could just take the easy route and try to ignore it. Let it simmer and deal with it later, or hope it goes away on its own. Because who has the time and energy to navigate complex social dynamics?! I’m too tired and you probably are, too. (Everything is on fire and somehow we still have to cook dinner tonight, am I right?)

But if we really want long-lasting relationships, and to build vibrant, diverse communities like we say we do, then we have to do the work. And in order to do that work, we need to have tools in our collective pockets to move through the inevitable conflict that comes with being a part of living, breathing, and ever-evolving groups of people.

“Healthy heat” is a term and idea Parker uses in the book that really stuck with me. “Healthy heat is the willingness and ability to hold tension, with care, long enough for it to become clarifying and generative. Heat is energy. It is information. It tells us that something, or someone, matters,” Parker explains. “Hold it long enough, with care and without judgment…pause before deciding whether it is good or bad.”

For starters, we can name this heat when we notice it. When we validate what we’re seeing, it often helps other people feel validated in what they’re seeing, too. This alone can help diffuse some of the heat.

From there, Parker says we usually need to take a step back and consider what she calls the “us-ness” of the group, as a way to bring the group back to itself. What makes us us?

“It can be helpful to tap back into your group’s central motivation force,” she writes. “Set aside the particulars of the conflict at hand. Step back and do a check-in with yourself and your sense of the group: When it gets bad, is there still juice here? …Is there still relevance and energy that comes from this collection of individuals contributing their time and energy to one another?”

Parker offers questions to ask yourself to get to the heart of the underlying issues causing the group tension. (Is this conflict touching on a core value of mine? Do I care enough about this group? What are we not saying right now? How might not facing this conflict hurt the group?)

Sometimes, this can help a group reach a resolution. But sometimes, the answers might reveal it’s not worth facing the conflict at all. You might still be able to lighten some tension, but as Parker attests, there’s also validity in strategic conflict avoidance.

“Sometimes fighting happens because, if we’re honest, the group has reached the end of its natural life,” she writes. (She recommends hosting a funeral event for the group in this scenario.) Other times, individuals don’t have the emotional infrastructure to process what’s actually happening in a group conflict. A conflict might even point to deeper clashes in worldviews or inherent racism and other bigotry, which of course is not a small or quick fix.

Parker points to another book, Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution by Louis Kiesberg and Bruce W. Dayton, to provide a framework for whether a conflict even can be addressed. “First: More than one person needs to see a problem. The second: They need to be connected to each other. Third: There needs to be an addressable party, responsible for that grievance, that can be changed. The fourth: They need to believe that they could actually bring about that change.”

If you believe you can bring about the change, and decide to face the conflict, good for you and buckle up! You’re not alone, and this book will be your friend, so keep it handy.

I already know this won’t be a one-time read for me. Parker’s first book, The Art of Gathering, is another one I keep on my shelf and flip through when I’m looking for inspiration and guidance. Confronting conflict and hosting gatherings like my weekly potluck are two muscles I try to exercise on a regular basis. They also work hand in hand — in order to create vibrant gatherings within our communities, we need to navigate the inevitably bumpy roads that come with group dynamics. This takes practice just like anything else, and often, a little sense of humor can go a long way.

Parker shares an example of a leadership summit where employees practiced “healthy heat” through some “heavy topics.” They started with one guaranteed to get people riled up.

PINEAPPLE ON PIZZA. YES OR NO?

The group of colleagues divided into smaller groups and debated, then presented their arguments to the bigger group. Parker says “to grow heat, grow warmth.” If you want to get better at fighting, start with getting better at banter. “Banter is the secret sauce of pro-social conflict,” she writes. “It gives people a way of fighting with each other that feels playful rather than fatal.”

So your homework—whether you read Parker’s book or not, and if you’re ready for some healthy heat—is to do some bantering, a.k.a. some low-stakes fighting, and keep growing your own conflict resolution muscle. The communities we love depend on it.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "The Art of Fighting" by Priya Parker [post_excerpt] => Conflict is inevitable. Parker's latest book is a helpful guide on how to better navigate it. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-the-art-of-fighting-transformative-power-conflict-priya-parker-botm-healthy-arguments-community-relationships-recommendations [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-10-06 07:17:40 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-10-06 07:17:40 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=11080 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 1, 2026October 6, 2026

Book of the Month: “The Art of Fighting” by Priya Parker

by Erin Zimmer Strenio

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10980 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-27 21:42:46 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-27 21:42:46 [post_content] =>

A staggering and tender collection of short stories about Mapuche youth in modern day Chile.

Daniela Catrileo begins Piñen with an invocation. In a short preface, she asks the reader to imagine a river, powerful and pulsing; to imagine its sounds, its smells; to picture the way it moves, how the water snakes through the earth.

“Now come with me to the river,” she writes. “Give me your hand.”

For Catrileo, this invocation is both purposeful and personal. Piñen is a book of short stories about Mapuche youth, largely centered around girls navigating childhood and adolescence against a backdrop of othering: The Mapuche are the largest group of Indigenous peoples in Chile, where these stories take place. The author asks us to invoke the river as a path through “continuity and exile,” and chooses it, in part, for its significance to her family’s lineage and name. (In Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, Catrileo means “cut river,” a symbolism she interweaves throughout her work as a way of exploring how Indigenous people have been “fractured by dispossession” and displacement.)

Her request sets the tone for the rest of the book. “To understand the river, a sensory relationship with its body is essential,” she writes. “If we can manage to understand its song, its language, its movement, perhaps we can translate tomorrow.”

With Catrileo as our guide, we are pulled through Piñen’s currents, both gentle and violent. In one story, the narrator considers the death of a classmate, shot and killed just beneath her window. In another, a young woman remembers her brother, years after he’s disappeared, while stuck on the Santiago Metro. In “Warriache,” a woman reflects on her childhood friendship with another Mapuche girl, a fellow outcast named Yajaira, as a means of remembering and understanding herself. “When I imagine Yajaira, I have an easier time of seeing me, too,” she says. “I am trying to sketch my life, beginning with hers.”

Much of the book explores the idea of collective memory, and the deep wound that colonialism leaves behind. It is also an exercise in how we might begin to correct and defy colonial narratives by uncovering the truth hidden beneath them. (As Catrileo writes, “In the dance of writing, it’s important to open the wound.”) “Colonial shards produce colonial images: fragments that lodge like splinters,” she writes in the book’s preface. “The question of how to create images that fold and divert the colonial gaze runs through my creative practice. Though it may seem like an aesthetic question, it’s also deeply political. To interrogate the image is to interrogate the instruments of geopolitical domination that continue to operate.”

Piñen—which means “dust or grime stuck to the skin” in Mapudungun—is a book about identity and survival, and how they are inherently intertwined; how gender and race and class can change the shape of how a person perseveres. Specific to the Mapuche, it is about how a displaced people and culture can endure, even when forced out of their ancestral home to cities and other places unknown.

Yet while the stories are specific—all take place in Chile around the turn of the century, and follow characters trying and failing to shed the piñen that clings to them—the collection feels most universal in Catrileo’s deep understanding of the precarity of adolescence, and the feeling of gradually becoming who you are. Through this lens, its stories feel both exceptionally jarring and undeniably tender. Perhaps most unsettlingly, in “Pornomisery,” the narrator grapples with the violence that surrounds her: Next door, her neighbor Valeska—a girl around her age—suffers incestual rape at the hands of her father, who eventually kills himself after he learns his daughter is pregnant. Later, the narrator discovers her grandmother had been abused by her own father, and that her mother, too, had been abused by an uncle, something her mother only remembers much later in life.

Much of the story is about feeling helpless in the face of other people’s suffering, and for those who have suffered, domestic rage as a response to silence. “The kitchen was my mother’s place of liberation,” the unnamed narrator says. “I always imagined that instead of crying, she cooked… It was her way of escaping, of screaming.” As the narrator begins to go through puberty, she is hurdled towards something she feels both unequipped for and uninterested in. Still, she knows that the change is entirely out of her control. “Everyone went through the motions to make me a woman,” she says, resentfully. “But they never explained to us why, nor did they ask if I wanted to become one.”

Through all of this, Catrileo does not shy away from the darkest depths of her characters’ pain, particularly the pain of women and girls. But she also never abandons us in its pursuit: Just when you think you might be starting to drown, her hand is there to pull you out of the river, and back into the light.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Piñen" by Daniela Catrileo [post_excerpt] => A staggering and tender collection of short stories about Mapuche youth in modern day Chile. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-pinen-by-daniela-catrileo-translated-fiction-short-stories-mapuche-chile [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-27 21:42:48 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-27 21:42:48 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10980 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 27, 2026August 27, 2026

Book of the Month: “Piñen” by Daniela Catrileo

by Gina Mei

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10797 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-07-30 20:25:57 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-07-30 20:25:57 [post_content] =>

A strangely hopeful book that looks at the longer arc of history to find lessons for abolition today.

A few years ago, I spent a couple of nights at the Panama Hotel in Seattle’s International District. The 1910 five-story brick building was designed for migrant workers by the city’s first Japanese-American architect, Sabro Ozasa, and smelled as mildewy as it was old. The wooden floors creaked loudly and the water traveling down the pipes roared whenever someone above me flushed the toilet. When booking the hotel, I had no idea about its quirks nor its story.

On February 19, 1942, after then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forcefully removed from their homes and taken to internment camps. As a hub for Seattle’s Japanese community, the Panama Hotel offered to store many of these families’ heirlooms, their furniture, and trunks full of other valuable objects, until they’d be able to come home. But even after the last of these internment camps was shut down in 1946—after myriad families lost their homes, their livelihoods, and were forcefully relocated yet again—many personal possessions went unclaimed. Today, there are still around 8,500 objects in the hotel’s basement—a beautiful and devastating testament to its place in history, and to the immeasurable harm these camps left behind. If you go to the tea house on the first floor, you can see many of them through a glass panel: dusty leather trunks, silk kimonos, books, purses, and the yellowed front page of a newspaper announcing forced evacuation orders during World War II.

I think about those unclaimed family objects every time I read yet another headline describing the terrors of Trump’s turbocharged deportation campaign. In 2025 alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 442,637 people; according to the latest data, there are between 60,000 and 70,000 migrants stuck in ICE detention in the U.S. More than 70% of them have no criminal convictions.

Author John Washington (a fellow journalist and friend) has been investigating what he calls the “immigration enforcement regime” for years. His 2023 book, The Case for Open Borders, called for the abolition of border control as a way to minimize suffering and bring more equitable global economic growth. His latest, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, is an unapologetic look at the echoes of Japanese internment. As its title suggests, it is also a timely how-to guide for blocking the creation of new immigrant detention centers and the repurposing of old ones, and for changing the perception of migrants as “a population subject to detention under the guise of military necessity.”

How to Close a Camp shows how the more things change, the more they stay the same. How, just like Chinese migrants were detained as soon as they crossed the U.S.-Canada border in the 1880s, today’s brown and Black migrants are being kidnapped by masked federal agents and kept behind bars in horrid conditions for months. Part of that history, too, is the prison boom of the 1980s tied to the “War on Drugs,” and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security two decades ago as a response to the “War on Terror.”

“A camp warps and degrades reality both for those in fear of ending up in one and for those living alongside them,” Washington writes. “Our decisions as a society, meanwhile, are uprooting more and more people from their homes, pushing people to flee, and failing to meet them with the protection, basic rights, freedom, or dignity they seek.”

In spite of all this, How to Close a Camp is a strangely hopeful book. It is much more interested in the longer arc of history and what lessons it brings for abolition today. By examining successful direct action and pressure campaigns from the past, Washington identifies six main ways to get communities involved in exposing—and shutting down—the brutal for-profit immigrant detention system. “Closing a detention center is rarely a single strike,” he writes. “It’s a siege: conditions exposed through sustained communications with those inside, licenses challenged, permits denied, inspections weaponized, contracts terminated.” The sixth step? Let everyone know about your findings and what they mean. “You need to harness the research into a narrative, then start pressing on those levers of power.”

Albeit slowly, this shift is already happening: “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention facility built in the Florida Everglades, shut down last month after multiple lawsuits and public outcry over its inhumane conditions. With How to Close a Camp as our guide, we gain a better understanding of how we can begin to close more of them.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "How to Close a Camp" by John Washington [post_excerpt] => "How to Close a Camp" is a strangely hopeful book that looks at the longer arc of history to find lessons for abolition today. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => how-to-close-a-camp-by-john-washington-immigration-detention-internment-book-of-the-month-botm [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-07-30 20:25:59 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-07-30 20:25:59 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10797 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 30, 2026July 30, 2026

Book of the Month: “How to Close a Camp” by John Washington

by Ruxandra Guidi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10674 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-06-04 20:32:16 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-06-04 20:32:16 [post_content] =>

A stunning posthumous collection of poetry that grapples with living and dying.

In early March 2026, the queer Vietnamese-American poet Theo LeGro died after a long battle with breast cancer. Nearly three months later, almost exactly to the day, their debut collection, Don’t Let It Kill You, was published posthumously by Persea Books. I’d known Theo—first online, then off—since I was a teenager, around half my life. They were a beloved partner and daughter, sister and aunt, and a dear friend to many. They were also a Kundiman fellow and Pushcart nominee whose gorgeous work was published in Brooklyn Poets, Plume, and The Offing, amongst others.

Writers who die young often seem to leave behind the most prolific thoughts on life, and Theo was no exception. I devoured Don’t Let It Kill You in one sitting, and then savored it in another. The collection is raw but exacting; sumptuous and sharp; tender and devastating. Much of it also grapples with dying, and existing in a body that is killing you. In some of their poems, Theo humanizes the tumor that has made a home in their chest, as they navigate their relationship to something both a part of them and not: “It’s humiliating, / how what’s killing you never even thinks of you. The storm / pulling down your house doesn’t even know your name.”

The collection is seeped in want as it is in longing. As Frontier Poetry puts it, Theo “leans into what could have been—a life not marred by disease.” (“It should be a miracle, to be so young / and ancient,” Theo writes. “To watch a scar’s colors change.”) But it is equally a trove of poems about trauma and inheritance; about distance, literal and felt; about the death of Theo’s father and their complicated relationship with their mother in Vietnam. It explores love—both its complications and its ease—and grief.

In the Jeff Tweedy song the book’s title is referencing (“Don’t Forget”), the line that precedes “don’t let it kill you” is “we all think about dying.” Perhaps more than most, this was true of Theo, long before they even knew they were sick. A few years ago, they were featured in a segment on The Today Show about the power of music to save us when we feel most untethered from life. They spoke of their depression and PTSD, grappling with suicidal ideation, and how music helped bring them back to themself. “Sometimes,” Theo said, “music becomes this communal experience that has reminded me of what's worth sticking around for.”

This sentiment is interwoven throughout Theo’s collection—in its title, in certain poems like “I’d Rather Go Blind,” and in the rhythm of the writing. Don’t Let It Kill You is for anyone who’s ever felt seen in the lyrics of a song, who’s been touched by music’s particular kind of poetry—which is to say, all of us. But the collection also feels like listening to music when you’re reading it, as if imbued with all the songs that shaped Theo’s life.

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At their joyful celebration of life in May, there was a video of Theo reading “Dress Sexy at My Funeral,” a reference to the Smog song of the same name. It also acted as a checklist for the very event taking place. Theo made music requests, of course (including “fiddles / even if I’m the only one / who thinks they’re sexy”); asked for those in attendance to “wear leather / wear chains” and “dance like nobody / is dying”; requested an after-party with karaoke. “Bury me / in the red dress / and the Reeboks,” they said, voice steady. “I wanna be ready / to run / in the next life.” They spoke, too, of wanting to come back, their body intact and scarless. “Let me / tell you a secret,” they said. “I’m not ready / to go / so / miss me / even though / it’s selfish to ask.”

From a Zoom call, thousands of miles away, I watched Theo in black and white, smoking a cigarette, beautiful as ever, and cried. But even those who might not have known them would have been able to see and feel the particular magic of Theo’s words and voice. Don’t Let It Kill You is an extension of this magic, and a testament to something—and someone—lost. “This life is nothing / but a thievery of hours,” Theo writes, “and I can’t even be / grateful I haven’t gotten caught.”

We aren’t owed our time on Earth, I know—but there is a specific kind of grief when someone dies so young, like expecting another step and slamming your foot on flat ground. I wonder what Theo might have written about if they’d had more time; what new music they might have liked that doesn’t yet exist. But more than anything else, I just wish they’d had more time to be.

“Sometimes, I get bogged down thinking about where all this time spent in this depressed state has gotten me, and one way to sort of alchemize it has been writing poetry,” Theo said in that same Today Show interview. “I feel like another way to alchemize it might be just using it to help other people if I can.”

We all think about dying. But sometimes, what gets us to the other side is finding something that helps us make sense of living. What a gift, then, to have Theo’s words, in Don’t Let It Kill You and beyond, to guide us through.

In honor of Theo’s life and legacy, Kundiman has established the Theo LeGro Scholarship Fund to help support queer and disabled writers participating in their online classes and retreats. To learn more about the fund and donate, you can visit TheoForever.com.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Don't Let It Kill You" by Theo LeGro [post_excerpt] => A stunning posthumous collection of poetry that grapples with living and dying. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-dont-let-it-kill-you-theo-legro-poetry-collection-books-botm [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-06-13 20:41:04 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-06-13 20:41:04 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10674 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

June 4, 2026June 13, 2026

Book of the Month: “Don’t Let It Kill You” by Theo LeGro

by Gina Mei

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10449 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-04-29 23:09:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-04-29 23:09:07 [post_content] =>

The writer's new memoir is a feast, exploring how food can be both deeply personal and impacted by forces much larger than ourselves.

Our appetites are deeply personal, a reflection of our idiosyncratic tastes. They’re shaped, too, by what our communities feed us, by what’s available or accessible or shared. Growing up in New England, you might develop a love of fried clams; raised in Hong Kong, you might hunger for congee; spend enough time in France and you’ll probably become a pastry snob. In every extended family lies one recipe that’s an instant passport to time spent with a beloved matriarch, or a meal that feels like home. And who doesn’t have a dish they’ve sworn they’ll never eat again because it reminds us too much of an ex?

Food writer Alicia Kennedy knows these contours well. In her writing—including in her fantastic history of vegetarian eating, 2023’s No Meat Required—she explores how our relationships to food can be deeply personal, yet impacted by forces much larger than ourselves, from local climates and family histories to global supply chains and government policies. Her work illuminates the ethical and sociopolitical elements of what we eat and why, yet sacrifices none of the thrills our appetites expose us to. And her latest, On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites, is a feast, exploring her personal relationship to food and cooking as she journeys from an adolescent gourmand to vegan baker to established food and culture writer.

In her new memoir, Kennedy organizes each chapter around a specific food—beans, lamb, bread, pumpkin, and more—tying each to a moment in her life. She writes about developing culinary preferences via the plentiful apples of Long Island, where she grew up; about the Proustian power of a box of Entenmann’s doughnuts. When she goes to college, her coursework inspires her to think more critically about the systems of power that ensnare us all, and naturally, this leads her to consider how the food she loves has made its way to her plate.

She begins with a childhood obsession. “Chocolate, the first true object of my longing and love,” she writes, “was the way I learned about exploitation in the global food system.” When she reads about the enslaved child labor and exploited farmers up and down the cocoa supply chain, she starts seeking out fair trade-certified chocolate—then bananas, and sugar, and coffee. She goes vegan, then falls in love with baking, and stumbles into running a vegan bakery out of her home kitchen alongside her day job as a copy editor. As Kennedy traces her winding path to meatless eating, she continually challenges the reader to consider food as an extension of our ethics. But her clear moral stance—her assertions that one’s choices around food ought to reflect one’s principles—never feels didactic; instead, it offers a blueprint for self-interrogation that can help lead the reader to their own conclusions.

When a long romantic relationship dissolves in the face of her ambition, she shuts down the bakery and moves to Brooklyn. There, she immerses herself in the city’s vegan food scene while picking up assignments as a freelance writer, endeavoring to normalize vegan coverage in the world of food journalism—an especially difficult task given its love of meat and masculinity. After several reporting trips bring her to Puerto Rico, she decides to move there—in part, because she’s fallen in love with her now-husband, whom she meets by chance while reporting on a rum distillery.

From Puerto Rico, she tells the story of their romance through wine. She walks through the island’s sugarcane fields, considering the crop’s relationship to slavery and colonialism. In her chapter on plantains, she also reflects on her own Puerto Rican heritage: Her paternal grandmother was born on the island, but rarely spoke about her childhood, forcing Kennedy to negotiate her understanding of her identity after she moves there. “Here, in my Puerto Ricanness, was something I couldn’t disappear into,” she writes; “this was something I had to seek in order to claim.” In part, she ultimately achieves this via her relationship to food, incorporating the island’s seasonality and culinary history into her kitchen.

Writing many years and miles removed from her childhood, Kennedy also finds newfound perspective on her home and the food that grows there—and the indelible way it has shaped her. Most of all, she grows to appreciate Long Island’s oysters, which she devours in a period of mourning following the death of her younger brother: They had been his least favorite food. “Maybe that urge for an oyster, and all the urges after it, were a way of reclaiming my appetite from the immense sadness,” she writes. “A way of saying, ‘I’ll live, and I’ll live enough for both of us, but because I’m mad at you, I’m going to eat the food you hated most.’” Her grief rips a hole in the metaphysical center of the book, a wound she can’t repair but which colors the way she looks at everything—eventually prompting a renegotiation of the strictures of her veganism to allow for her newfound craving.

Much of Kennedy’s work evokes the complex systems and philosophical concepts underpinning how we nourish ourselves; her writing about grief—and love—offers a moving reminder of the deeply personal, human scale of these choices. We ought to consider how far food traveled to get to our plates, Kennedy argues; we should know how much work it takes to grow crops, to slaughter animals, to cut down sugarcane. But these are not merely ideological considerations—nor are they simply a setup for a joyless life, a way of prioritizing our principles over our pleasures. To truly consider our own appetite is a way of connecting us to ourselves and to each other. Seen through that lens, the ethical choices we make about our food aren’t a burden, but a gift.

The day after I finished reading On Eating, I made dinner for my sister and her husband, who had just welcomed their first child. They’re omnivores; meanwhile, I haven’t eaten meat in over a decade, drawn to vegetarianism’s respect for animals and the planet. I worried, as I cooked, whether they’d enjoy the meat-free, bean-centric dish I was preparing. But as I made it, I also kept thinking of Kennedy’s belief that “inevitably … cooking becomes care: for self, for others”—her insistence that the delights of a well-made meal and our responsibility as stewards of this planet are inseparable. Food is a means of tending to our own bodies; it’s something we share with those we love; it’s a way of putting our values into practice. Her words echoed in my head as I cooked, feeling nourished by each of these overlapping versions of care, and the many appetites we feed when we embody them.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "On Eating" by Alicia Kennedy [post_excerpt] => The writer's new memoir is a feast, exploring how food can be both deeply personal and impacted by forces much larger than ourselves. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-on-eating-the-making-and-unmaking-of-my-appetites-alicia-kennedy-memoir-botm [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-29 23:09:09 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-29 23:09:09 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10449 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 29, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “On Eating” by Alicia Kennedy

by Marissa Lorusso

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How the ephemerality of the internet and the many ways we present ourselves online has warped our ability to know who we really are.

Will the Future Like You? Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention begins with a declaration: Our personal identities have not kept pace with the tempo of technology. And, according to author Patricia Martin, this imbalance has made us wholly unprepared to explore—let alone answer—the age-old question of who we really are.

In her book, Martin, a cognitive psychology-informed cultural analyst and host of the podcast Jung in the World, frames many of her arguments using Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, applying them to identity formation in the digital age. If Jung’s original thesis proposes that humans rely on universal themes and inherited behaviors in the psyche to present who we are across self, shadow, persona, and anima, Martin contends the ephemerality of the internet has warped our inheritance. Her primary concern are the selves we present to the world via our various performances online, often manufactured as authentic while being anything but. Carrying out numerous ethnographic approaches including content analysis, narrative interviews, and sorting and coding “15,000 online users across 500 million posts,” she concludes these performances are also occurring at an exorbitant rate never experienced before in human history, sowing mass identity confusion in the process.

Having become increasingly skeptical (and weary) of internet self-presentation via social media, I devoured Martin’s latest work, which utilized psychoanalytical language and frameworks to explore observations I’ve mainly considered through a cultural and anthropological lens. But even those who don’t agree with Martin (or me) about the current state of affairs will likely find instructive value in the book’s summations about our ever brave new technological era and its effects on identity.

According to Martin, there are three main elements contributing to our modern distortions of self-construction and development: “personal fog,” “chronic self-doubt,” and “cascading crossroads.” Borrowing from Jung’s definition of the persona as a complex system that helps the individual relate with the world socially by wearing a kind of mask, Martin argues that personal fog comes from the continuous amplification and proliferation of various personas online, which obliterate our sense of who we are. Chronic self-doubt, meanwhile, delineates the distances between our digital presentations, which rely on external validation, and the selves we present offline, a gap that can cause tremendous self-uncertainty. Finally, cascading crossroads is characterized by how previously reliable identity anchors—such as family and work, or even other modes, such as class, gender, and where we consider home—now fluctuate more frequently, making our shape-shifting far more incessant.

Among the many examples Martin offers of this increasing ephemerality, she cites the story of the trailblazing confessional blogger, Heather Armstrong. In the early aughts, Armstrong’s blog, Dooce, was a “mommy tell-all” magnet to millions, especially young mothers, who regularly consumed her relatable personal accounts of raising two children in Salt Lake City, Utah. But even before Dooce’s eventual decline due to the rise of social media, Martin points out that as Armstrong “matured, she found her light waning,” and the blogger increasingly divulged more serious confessions, including daily alcohol consumption and marital issues, not to mention the details of her history with depression. Martin isn’t explicit about whether Armstrong’s solemn shift was a cry for help or an effort to reinvigorate the blog. She does, however, add that “Dooce attempted several comebacks. But traffic never bounced back.” In 2023, Armstrong died by suicide. Examining how she was remembered, Martin notes “how little was said about her massive output of content, the effort it took, and the emotional toll of constant reinvention…”

While Armstrong’s story is a particularly dire case, there are others—admittedly less tragic—throughout the book that still speak to the toll our relationship to having an audience is taking on our relationship to ourselves. Martin also makes clear this goes beyond those who are, in some shape or form, attempting to be influencers: All of us online are liable to the emotional struggles of trying to juggle various presentations at cost to our psyche and identity development.

However, the book doesn’t propose that we all abandon the internet (to the extent that we can) to counter these identity disruptions. Nor does Martin suggest that we wholly desert digital performance and presentation altogether. Rather, she asks the reader to more carefully consider the repercussions to our relationships—both to ourselves and others—online, where our identities are overwhelmed by seemingly endless transmutations, and ultimately underpinned by digital spaces extorting our identity confusion for profit.

This inevitably has affinities with Karl Marx’s concept of the alienation of the factory worker from anything that could give their work meaning. But for me, it brought to mind Aimé Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and its thesis that the thingification of the colonized subject turns them into a commodity, isolating a person from themselves and the other. Transposing Cesaire’s contentions onto Martin’s begs questions worth probing further: Are we being colonized by the internet? Or by the tech bros that run it?

Luckily, Martin doesn’t leave us without specific resolutions for alleviating our identity disruptions, the greatest of which is—perhaps surprisingly—a spiritual recommendation: that we reconsider the soul. Some anecdotes in the book are even dedicated to people who've been able to subvert identity confusion by relying on time-honored means of transformation and soul-enrichment: insulating themselves offline, and leaning on close bonds in the flesh.

Martin also challenges us not to render onto technology what cannot be done by technology. Instead, she encourages us to create and honor our most true selves beyond the curations the internet can only offer. “We set boundaries, we verify claims, and we don’t give ourselves away too easily for the sake of a little fawning attention,” Martin writes in the concluding chapters of the book; to me, sound advice regardless of which continuum of internet identity discourse you choose to be on. She also offers perhaps one resolve for the question the book’s title proposes, Will the Future Like You?: Ultimately, the quest to answer this in the digital space is a hollow endeavor, because it requires an endless reconfiguration of selves, often to our own detriment. So, whatever selves we do offer up as performance in digital spaces, at the very least, we should refuse to give in fully—saving us perhaps not only from ourselves, but for ourselves.

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March 27, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “Will The Future Like You?” by Patricia Martin

by Kovie Biakolo

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A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States.

The Mixed Marriage Project’s title will more than likely give an onlooker pause. Perhaps that’s the point. But before conjuring up too many presumptions based on the name, one might also note it is the work of renowned law professor and sociologist Dorothy E. Roberts. Amongst other books, Roberts is the author of Killing the Black Body (about black women’s reproductive history in the United States) and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. In her latest, a memoir interwoven with historical research, she unfolds her parents’ interracial relationship, and through it, partly unravels a United States’ history of the subject itself.

The “project” of the book’s title is personal for Roberts: In the 1930s, her father, a white American of Welsh and German descent, set out to examine interracial relationships between black and white people specifically, while studying to be an anthropologist at the University of Chicago. His interview-based research, which explored interracial unions formed as early as the late 1800s, continued till the 1960s and ’70s, and included interviewing the children of couples he’d earlier surveyed. This feat was supposed to become a book, sold to a publisher while her father was working as a professor at Chicago’s Roosevelt University. But the book was never published, and its stories left untold until now.

Roberts theorizes the reason for this was that her father’s work had become so interwoven into his identity—and their family life—that its completion would have caused a real identity disruption. Who was he if he wasn’t working on the project? And where did that leave her and her family?

Through her own research, Roberts learns her mother, a black, Jamaican immigrant, was also involved in this work, conducting interviews alongside her father for many years. Both were committed to the project’s objectives, one of which was to demonstrate that interracial relationships are not inherently abnormal, because black and white people are not fundamentally different. This was also how her parents met: While majoring in chemistry at Roosevelt, her mother became her father’s research assistant. (In the book, Roberts explicitly states she “wonder[s] how their professional partnership evolved into a romantic one—and whether they worried about the perception of impropriety.”) This prompts Roberts to question an underlying reason for her parents' marriage: Were they supposed to be embodiments of their own mixed marriage project? If Roberts’ parents were indeed as much a part of the study as they were leads of it, she concludes, it would make her and her sisters its subjects, too—or, at least, its personified outcomes.

Rather than be rattled by this possibility, the author measures it against the people she personally knew her parents to be—curious, culturally-aware, well-traveled, and community-minded. Her parents’ relationship, after all, existed beyond their work, and they were initially drawn to each other by their shared sense of adventure, similar values on education, and complementary sensibilities—her mother as the planner and her father as the spontaneous one. By her own admission, Roberts gives them a latitude that an outsider might not. But I reckon this is where the book shines as memoir, rather than an investigation of an investigation: the reader gets to know Roberts’ parents through her loving eyes. Loving eyes that, for the record, do not condone the same politics her parents—especially her father—may have arrived at through their work: that interracial relationships offer some kind of medium to restore black and white relations in the United States, shaped by white supremacy and violence. (On this, Roberts pointedly disagrees.)

Beyond family history, the themes in Project will be recognizable to anyone versed on the discourse, likely causing you to wonder if anything really changes in these United States. The politics of the study’s participants—black men, black women, white men, and white women in heterosexual, interracial relationships—reveal how black men-white women couples were seen as more “acceptable” but also more arduous in the long-run; white women often lost privilege they couldn’t regain unless divorced. The research also highlighted the sexual tropes attached to black women-white men couples—and the misogynoir that informs outsiders' views of them. Recurring themes, regardless of interracial pairings, showed how marital cutting across the color line affected one’s choice of neighborhood and the life afforded to them and, possibly, their children. Also recurring—especially in the civil rights era—were the many well-meaning couples who entered these marriages in the hopes of proving to the world as much as to themselves that interracial coupling inherently combats a racist society. This hope, Roberts argues, was often an erroneous one, as countless couples later found out.

In the lasting analysis of her father’s work, Roberts arrives at the same conclusion that she began with regarding interracial relationships: They are not panacea for a society, a country, or a world that has yet to unravel itself from white supremacy, let alone repair its many casualties. But in Project, Roberts shows us that despite flawed, socially-constructed and racialized societies, people will enter unions and arrangements of all kinds, her parents included. These unions may not transcend race, but they do demonstrate that, in spite of the race politics attached, people will deem them worth fighting for. Some do so naively and are thus confronted with seeing the depths of racism like they never have before. But others, especially the curious, culturally-aware, and community-minded, go into them with eyes wide open, prepared to confront all of its politics united.

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February 26, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “The Mixed Marriage Project” by Dorothy E. Roberts

by Kovie Biakolo

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A memoir that grapples with changing ambitions and the myth of having it all.

Many millennials (or non-millenials, for that matter) will be familiar with the overarching plight of Amil Niazi’s Life After Ambition, her "good enough memoir": the experience of being stuck in the rat race of chasing one dream after another, only to find yourself on a never-ending grind. In this race, there’s always one more goal to achieve—one more professional hurdle to overcome, one more career ambition to attain—before the dream can be realized. For women especially, relentlessly pursuing a profession, while ensuring all other aspects of your life are left unscathed, becomes an ever-shifting goalpost; the quintessential “having it all”.

As the book’s title implies, Niazi unfolds the futility of this chase, made especially futile given the instabilities accompanying her career of choice—journalism and writing. But the memoir is as much a personal unfolding as it is a professional one. In it, we learn of Niazi’s parents' almost romcom-like origins before she disabuses the reader of the myth of their marriage and the prospect of an idyllic childhood. There are the anticipated working-class migrant struggles, the family never having quite enough, which takes them across oceans to seek a better life in England, where the author was born, and eventually, to Canada, where the author has spent most of her life. There’s also the abuse between her parents, which Niazi touches without ever quite expounding on, even as she informs of their eventual divorce and sketches her own experience of intimate partner abuse later in life.

In Niazi’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, there’s a persistent feeling of lack. There’s little romanticizing of her circumstances, and she admits her personal rat race was likely born from this instinct: Storytelling—reporting and writing—was the one endeavor that allowed her to make sense of the world. In distressing but humorous episodes, she depicts a life of underemployment before eventually landing a job that sets her on a viable career path. Amid all the instabilities, she moves from Vancouver to Toronto with a boyfriend who physically abuses her—and there, the violent ending of their final contact results in a hard-to-shake addiction to prescription drugs. Through all of this, Niazi continues to work, uncertain of who she can trust with the vulnerable parts of her life, but finding stability through her ambitions—learning along the way, her calculus won’t always pay off.

There are bright spots throughout Niazi’s ordeals, despite the numerous and varied difficulties. There is a dog she loves and cares for, friends who intervene, and a reliable boyfriend who eventually becomes her husband. Yet her career ambitions remain the driving force that shapes her life, until suddenly, it isn’t; and for Niazi, a large part of this shift happens when she becomes a mother. After a period in London—chosen, of course, for her career ambitions—she ultimately returns to Toronto with her family when she realizes those ambitions have changed.

Indeed, in the final analysis of Life After Ambition, I wonder if the author doesn’t slightly betray the title. She gains fresh perspective through her choice to pursue having a third child, and by attempting the kind of writing career she’s always longed for, one less defined by output, and instead, by balance. For her, motherhood and writing are intertwined and related; one aids the other, and though she must make sacrifices to have both, neither can be forfeited.

Perhaps less than delineating what life looks like after ambition fades and falters, what the author concludes is what becomes of us—especially of many women—when our ambitions include more than the careers we set out to have. In so doing, what Niazi offers in her debut book is not only a re-think of our lives as she unravels her own, but a re-defining of ambition entirely, demanding we consider the whole of our lives, and not just the parts we keep separate in the name of career.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "Life After Ambition" by Amil Niazi [post_excerpt] => A memoir that grapples with changing ambitions and the myth of having it all. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-botm-january-pick-life-after-ambition-amil-niazi-memoir [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-04-29 18:07:25 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-04-29 18:07:25 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9993 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 29, 2026April 29, 2026

Book of the Month: “Life After Ambition” by Amil Niazi

by Kovie Biakolo

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