Tag: Recommendations

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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.

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October 1, 2026October 6, 2026

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

by Erin Zimmer Strenio

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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

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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

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A few books to add to your TBR pile, whether you're on vacation or just trying to avoid the heat.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me absolutely floored me. How do you write honestly and with love about a single mother who, as she puts it, was “her shelter and her storm”? A brilliant but often cruel woman, Mary Roy ferociously took on the patriarchal world, building a school in Kerala on a shoestring budget, and inspiring cultish devotion in the students and staff while showing none of that love to her own children.

Mary Roy's children were molded by her, and also by their fight to break free of her. Having been raised by a similarly tyrannical, brilliant, and selectively generous parent, I found this book riveting. Arundhati Roy doesn’t always spell it out, but you can find echoes of her childhood in her relationships, her writing, and her activism. She's also a gorgeous writer, and the life she goes on to lead is fascinating. In addition to family stories, she chronicles her student architecture days, brief career as an actor and screenwriter, her conflicts with Hindu nationalists, and her relationships with communist counterinsurgencies.

—Anna Lind-Guzik, Founder

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

Once I started Real Americans by Rachel Khong, I couldn’t put it down. It’s a multi-generational novel that dives deep into the lives of a Chinese-American family, touching on topics like race, class, sci-fi, and the American Dream. The story is broken down into three main sections, highlighting a different family member from each generation. By the end of every part, I was 100% invested in the character; and then, a big twist would be revealed, leaving me glued to the book. It’s a first-generation American story that I’ve never seen before. Even after finishing it, I keep replaying scenes in my head because it was just that good.

—Kiera Wright-Ruiz, Social Media Manager

The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit

I’m a longtime fan of Rebecca Solnit, so I knew her latest book would immediately go on my library request list. The long line of people ahead of me just proves how hungry people are for her hopeful vision and thoughtful reflections on a more interconnected, antiracist world. I’ve just started the audiobook, read by Solnit herself, which is a soothing balm to listen to amidst the chaotic news headlines flying at us all the time. She zooms out to look at the bigger picture of history since the 1960s, and how social change happens slowly and incrementally over time because of courageous ordinary people, like any of us.

As Solnit writes, “This is a book about things that happened only because people showed up, only because people believed the world could be different, only because people became the forces for change, sometimes by joining together, sometimes by chasing down new frameworks of possibilities and telling the world about them, only because people didn’t give up when it looked like they were losing, only because they married the wildest idealism to the staunchest pragmatism.”

—Erin Zimmer Strenio, Executive Director

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu

Growing up in Rhode Island, Ruth—the narrator of Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds—is a little isolated and a little inhibited; then, she becomes obsessed with the brave, outspoken Maria, the only other Black girl in her Catholic school class. They become best friends, and from there, the novel tells the story of their tumultuous relationship: from growing up in their small hometown to attending a liberal arts college together to navigating the New York art scene as adults. My experience differs greatly from the narrator’s, but I’m also a former student of both New England Catholic schools and a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, and a current voyeur of NYC’s creative class. Spending time with Wambugu’s novel both affirmed and expanded my understanding of those experiences—but I think the book also offers an opportunity for any reader to consider powerful questions about friendship, family, art, class, identity, and belonging.

—Marissa Lorusso, Newsletter Editor

Kin by Tayari Jones

I’m a few chapters away from completing Tayari Jones’ Kin and it’s easily my favorite novel of the year so far. I am a fan of Jones’ writing, and as with all her books, in Kin, I've been seamlessly transported into the world she's created. Kin’s story begins in rural Louisiana, where the relationship between two friends—Vernice (Niecy) and Annie—is the central focus, then follows them as they set out on two seemingly divergent paths. Their friendship stems from both having grown up without their mothers: Niecy’s mother was murdered by her father when she was six months old while Annie’s mother abandoned her just days after she was born, with the former’s aunt and latter’s grandmother raising the girls respectively. As much about friendship, motherhood, and the segregated South during the civil rights period, Kin has enveloped me in grief, courage, and what it means to love and be loved through loss. A true gift of a book.

—Kovie Biakolo, Contributing Editor

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

While I lean into my soft girl era in Upstate New York this summer, I've found myself with a little more space to listen to the whistling of the trees, admire the fuzz on a bumble bee, and smell the flowers in bloom. My instructor for an herbalism course recommended this book to me, and it's been a perfect reminder that there is a whole lot more to learn from nature when you give yourself the time to study it.

The Serviceberry is a short but humbling meditation on how nature and Indigenous traditions can show us the power of gratitude and reciprocity, which its author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, identifies as the "gift economy." In observing the serviceberry tree, she shares how its fruit circulates throughout ecosystems, nourishing and supporting many forms of life. She also shares examples of Indigenous traditions that further remind us of this mutual exchange, and our obligation to respect living systems and be good stewards for future generations.

Kimmerer’s dual perspective as Indigenous woman and botanist informs her poetic and illustrative writing style: While she mentions the challenges to achieving this in our modern, consumer-driven world, her hope remains that the "gift economy" will live on, and create a larger web of gratitude culture.

—Jessica Granato, Project Manager

The Witch by Marie NDiaye

I have a weakness for contemporary fiction about witches—though not the pointy hat, black cat, Salem types—as it can be the perfect vessel for stories about shifting ideas on gender. The Witch by Marie NDiaye leans on some of the common stereotypes but turns them on their head; its main character, a suburban French mother, has “mysterious powers” she’d like to pass on to her daughters, yet she’s also refreshingly insecure about her ambitions. She is a witch like you and me, of this world, and the novel reads as if it could be set anywhere.

—Ruxandra Guidi, Managing Editor

Drop In by Deborah Stoll

As a long-time fan of professional skateboarding, I found Drop In by Deborah Stoll to be a desperately needed remedy to the culture’s male-dominated narrative. The first of its kind book focuses on the many women and LGBTQIA+ pioneers who embody what it means to be a skater: always getting back up, no matter how hard the fall. Stoll takes the reader through the career highs and lows of athletes ranging from Alana Smith, the first openly nonbinary athlete to compete in the Olympics, to Marbie Miller, an inadvertent trans icon who came out in the late 2010s.

It’s impossible not to feel like a fly on the wall as Stoll reveals these athletes' stories in such vibrant detail, you can almost hear the pop of an ollie and the wheels of a skateboard slamming into the ground. With a unique blend of narrative storytelling, direct quotes from the skaters, and expert voices to give larger cultural context, any reader will come away from Drop In with a much deeper understanding of a gnarly culture ready to skate forward from its complicated past.

—Allison Baker, Summer Intern

The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day

The Oldest Bitch Alive is the most original book I've read in recent memory. Living in a literal glass house in upstate New York, a French bulldog named Gelsomina contracts a pair of parasitic worms, and gains newfound consciousness of her mortality and a growing restlessness with her domestication. It's absurd without lacking depth, and weird in all the right ways; a stunning, philosophical meditation on what we consume, and what consumes us. Partly told from Gelsomina's perspective, partly from the worms' perspective, and occasionally through Gelsomina's human-parents and dog-brother (a younger French bulldog named Zampanó), the book is equal parts tender, funny, and devastating as it plumbs the depths of one dog's (and two parasites') ideas of freedom and containment. A life-affirming book that stares into the void, only to find something unexpectedly hopeful on the other side. (There's also a passage about a strawberry dog toy that absolutely gutted me.)

—Gina Mei, Executive Editor

[post_title] => What We're Reading This Summer [post_excerpt] => A few books to add to your TBR pile, whether you're on vacation or just trying to avoid the heat. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => summer-reading-2026-team-books-beach-reads-novels-nonfiction-fiction-arundhati-roy-rachel-khong-rebecca-solnit-stephanie-wambagu-tayari-jones-robin-wall-kimmerer-maria-ndiaye-deborah-stoll-morgan-day [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-07-13 02:42:46 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-07-13 02:42:46 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10738 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 10, 2026July 13, 2026

What We’re Reading This Summer

by The Conversationalist Team

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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.

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June 4, 2026June 13, 2026

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

by Gina Mei

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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.

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January 29, 2026April 29, 2026

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

by Kovie Biakolo

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All the movies, podcasts, books, albums, and TV that made us feel a little more human this year.

Anna Lind-Guzik, Founder

Best Thing I Read: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. It was my first time reading Verghese, and I've added him alongside Chekhov to my mental list of favorite writers who are also doctors. It's an epic novel mostly set in a hospital in Addis Ababa, with unforgettable characters and a stunning historical backdrop. The bodily detail can be gruesome at times, but the characters' humanity is what sticks with you.

Best Thing I Watched: When I want to cry-laugh and feel things, I watch Somebody Somewhere, created by Bridget Everett. It's a quiet show set in rural Kansas about chosen family, grief, and vulnerability. The series just ended on HBO, but I hope it gets picked up by another network for more seasons because it's a beautifully moving story with characters that feel so real, and aren't like any you'll find elsewhere on TV.

Best Thing I Listened To: I went deep on relationship podcasts this year, and *ugh* they were genuinely helpful with personal growth. Because I'm a nerd, I looked for academics and practitioners to teach me, and the top two I turned to were Reimagining Love with Dr. Alexandra Solomon and my longtime fave, Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel.

Kovie Biakolo, Contributing Editor

The Best Book I Read: You Don't Know Us Negroes And Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston has been one of my favorite reads this year, even though I'm not quite done with it yet. It's an essay collection that covers almost every facet of Black American folk culture from church and church going to dance to the politics of race and gender, showing Hurston as every bit of the all-rounder she truly was. Reading it with 2024 eyes, Hurston's writing easily allows you to place yourself in the time and landscape of the early 20th century she wrote in, but there's an authenticity and love to her writing about culture that transcends time.

The Best Thing I Watched: Tell Me Lies Season 2 is an amazing feat, considering it is only eight episodes and the second season has come two years after the first. For a show that jumps timelines between present day and the past lives of Millennial college students, it traverses a lot of serious issues, from sexual and emotional abuse to grief to murder. But if it sounds so serious you couldn't possibly enjoy it, you'd be wrong, because almost every episode manages to keep you on your toes and keep you invested in the outcome of a story largely depicting a bunch of deeply flawed—or really terrible—people.

The Best Thing I Listened To: I've listened to Shaboozey's "A Bar Song" on repeat a lot, so I have to give it a shout-out along with the album, Where I've Been, Isn't Where I'm Going, which I think is doing interesting things in genre-bending country, similar to Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter. Along with these, I have to give a nod to Esther Perel's podcast, which is among the best out there, teasing out contemporary platonic and romantic relationships matters from sex to grief to family, unpacking a lot of taboo topics with clarity and empathy.

Marissa Lorusso, Newsletter Editor

Best Book I Read: Mating by Norman Rush. A friend recommended this 1991 National Book Award-winning novel to me with such enthusiasm earlier this year that I couldn't resist. It tells the story of two Americans in Botswana—a woman who's in graduate school and a man who's an anthropologist and is trying to start a matriarchal society in the desert. They fall in love, work alongside each other, argue about politics and gender and history—it all makes for a long, immersive, heartfelt, and genuinely unique novel.

Best Thing I Watched: I Saw The TV Glow. Even if you only interpret it as an allegory for the fear, isolation, and regret that can sprout up when we ignore serious questions about our gender identity, I Saw The TV Glow is a deeply moving film in a league of its own. But then there's everything else the film tackles, too, right on its surface: life in the suburbs, the way our tastes shape our identities (and vice-versa), pivotal teenage friendships. Together, these themes and subtexts all add up to a brilliant and strange viewing experience I kept close to my heart all year. (Plus its soundtrack, filled with original songs by an impressive slate of indie-rock luminaries, is pitch-perfect.)

Best Thing I Listened To: I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy. The punk band, led by Marisa Dabice, has been churning out an impressive blend of confrontational rock, gauzy guitars, and razor-sharp pop melodies for several records. But their latest is an impressive level-up, filled with moments of iridescent beauty alongside the kind of righteous rage I needed to sustain me this year.

Kiera Wright-Ruiz, Social Media Manager

Best Book I Read: My favorite book this year is Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store by Paola Velez. Paola is such a force in the kitchen. Her imaginative recipes like thick'em (an ultra thick cookie) and plantain sticky buns (!!!) make me ecstatic to preheat the oven.

Best Thing I Watched: I LOVED Netflix's Chicken Nugget. In this K-drama, a woman steps into a machine and accidentally transforms into a chicken nugget. It's absurd, funny, and, oddly, moving.

Best Thing I Listened To: Whenever I listen to NPR's Code Switch, the episodes tend to linger and give me something to chew on for days or even months afterward. Their episode from January called "Taylor Swift and the era of the 'girl'" is something I keep revisiting. It's about those who get to embrace girlhood and those who don't.

Gina Mei, Executive Editor

Best Book I Read: As I've already sung the praises of Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario, which was easily my most haunting read of the year (and perhaps my life), I'll choose The Future of War Crimes Justice by Chris Stephen as another equally depressing 2024 favorite. I found it to be a super digestible and straightforward look at the history of war crimes justice, and all the reasons (mostly bureaucratic, all utterly enraging) that so few war criminals have ever been tried for their crimes, let alone convicted. For something lighter, My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman was an enjoyably strange, genre-bending book that even got me out of a writing slump. For something in-between, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney seems to have become her most divisive book to date—but personally, I thought it was her best.

Best Thing I Watched: My film/TV consumption this year skewed very international, and with movies, often independent, which led me to a lot of what one Letterboxd user dubbed "freaky movies for freaks"—appropriately, in their review of 2022's Babysitter. Directed by and co-starring Monia Chokri, the film is strange and horny and feminist to its core, as much a playful skewering of casual misogyny as it is a psychedelic fairytale about exhausted motherhood. Combined with an utterly delightful performance from Nadia Tereszkiewicz as Amy (the titular babysitter), and a perfect one-and-a-half hour run time (bring back movies that aren't exclusively 3-plus hours), it's also a total technicolor feast, worth a watch just for the visuals alone.

As far as TV goes, I've started dabbling in more K-dramas this year, and ended up watching Netflix's The 8 Show, which drew a lot of comparisons to Squid Game when it first came out. I'm here to tell you: The 8 Show is much, much darker, and far more violent, and somehow, an even more scathing critique of the power that money affords and denies us.

Best Thing I Listened To: "Don't Forget Me" by Maggie Rogers was one of my most-listened to songs of the year, and has not once failed to make me feel something when I listen to it. But overall, I didn't listen to as much new music this year—although Faye Webster's new album Underdressed at the Symphony was a notable exception, and is filled with gentle tunes perfect for basking in all your sparkling melancholy.

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December 20, 2024February 3, 2025

The Best Things We Consumed in 2024

by The Conversationalist Team

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(For you to add to your 2024 TBR pile.)











Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell



Before reading this novel, I’d somehow missed that Shakespeare had a child named Hamnet, who died of the plague in 1596 at the age of eleven, four years before Hamlet was written. Seems relevant! Only the bare bones are known about Shakespeare's wife, Agnes/Anne, and their kids, and Hamnet is O'Farrell's lyrical recreation of their 16th century family life in Stratford-upon-Avon. The storytelling is so vivid and captivating, you won’t miss their most famous relation. 



—Anna Lind-Guzik







The Guest by Emma Cline



Like everyone else in New York, I flew through The Guest when it came out last summer. A story about a woman in her 20s after she's been kicked out of her boyfriend’s house in the Hamptons, she pleases her way through strangers’ homes, grasping onto the life that she once had. She was in no way a relatable character—but it was fascinating to me how this woman could so easily sell a narrative and transform herself into what various people want. 



—Victoria Rosselli



















How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow



My favorite book this year was How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow. It’s a story about women friendships, the heartbreak of breaking up with those close friends, and Kyoto. Throughout the book, Leow weaves their personal experiences, like of being a tour guide and making jam from a thriving persimmon tree, as metaphors on loss and the joy of finding yourself despite it. I have never read a book that so beautifully put the feelings of losing a female friend on a page (including the painful grieving process). Every word felt refreshing and I kept repeating to myself, “This is me.” But as much as it’s about friends, it’s equally about Japan. With every page, I yearned to explore Kyoto and soak up everything it has to offer, even if my heart breaks a little in the process. 



—Kiera Wright-Ruiz







Shy by Max Porter



If you are interested in how identity and childhood shape our experiences of the world, you will love Max Porter's Shy, a novel that begins with its young protagonist leaving a boarding school for troubled boys in the middle of the night and heading for the river with a backpack full of rocks. What I loved is that Porter continuously disrupted my expectations of what would come next. The author—who holds a masters degree in feminism and performance art—writes about boyhood, toxic masculinity, and the existential crisis of growing up in today's gendered world in a way that incited an emotional and visceral reaction in me, offering the flip side of my own experience growing up as a girl in the US. It made me question and look at things with a new light; and the ending was so cinematic and powerful that I cried in public reading it! 



—Elyssa Dole



















Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones



I hate to say it, but it's much rarer these days that a book really knocks my socks off. I blame myself for this. My attention span has waned, my burnout has deepened—both things that have made it harder for me to really sink myself into a good book. This was not the case with Easy Beauty. It was kismet: Entirely by chance, I started reading it while in Italy, where a large portion of the memoir takes place, making it an especially vivid read. But even if I'd been in the middle of the Pacific, I would have devoured this gorgeous memoir. Chloé Cooper Jones' writing is just sumptuous; her memoir equal parts sharp, tender, brutal, and funny. A breathtaking exploration of "otherness," and how each of us is complicit in upholding it, even as the "othered"; but likewise how we might be able to push back and subvert the narratives given to us. 



—Gina Mei



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January 10, 2024August 28, 2024

The Best Books We Read in 2023

by The Conversationalist Team

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