8+ Things I Loved in 2023

(An Unordered List)

Here in the dark womb of December, when my bones ache with all the year’s grief (and there has been so much global grief in 2023), the last thing I want is to make, imagine, connect, create, share. But in the dark, especially in this cocoon of days between Christmas and New Year’s, is also probably when I need art and connection the most!

I’ve never been able to keep up a gratitude journal for more than a couple of days, but in an effort to be a more productive writer as well as a more positive thinker in 2024, I’ve decided to start a weekly Substack (as one does) dedicated to things I liked that week. Each week(ish), I’ll write about one thing from the previous seven(ish) days I enjoyed, admired, appreciated, considered, loved, or liked. 

I’m hoping that by dedicating a few hours a week to what I love and notice, I’ll become a more thoughtful, gladder, more patient person, as well as a better writer. If nothing else, it’ll encourage me to try new things every week.

Anyway, it seems fitting to kick off this new year’s resolution with an end-of-year list (as one does) of things I loved in 2023, including music, books, art, perfume, and more. I hope you find something to connect with here. If you’ve got a sec, tell me about your favorite art and experiences from the past year—or send me your own end-of-year list. 

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1. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington was born in England in 1917 and was primarily known for her surrealist paintings, but since her death in 2011, her equally surreal writing has experienced something of a resurgence, partly due to indie press Dorothy’s publication of The Complete Stories in 2017. I’ve had this book on my to-read list for a few years, and I don’t know why it took me so long to get to it, because I knew it would be amazing and it was, in fact, amazing. 

In one story, a debutante convinces a hyena to trade places with her so she can skip out on her own coming-out; the hyena disguises itself by ripping the face off a maid and wearing it as a mask, but—spoiler—it ends up so bored at the coming-out that it eats its own face off and scampers away.

In another story, a man is cursed to have a fly fly inside his mouth every time he speaks, and after he tries to trick a wise midwife into curing him, she curses him to turn blue and grow zippers over all of his orifices. He misses the fly. 

All of the stories in Carrington’s collection are absurd and spellbinding, but the one that stuck with me the most is called “My Mother Is a Cow.”¹ “My Mother” is more scripture than story, educating us on the fluidity of identity and of the shifting nature of time and space. The story is absurd, but it’s also more unruly, more mystical, than the others; it’s frantic, almost hallucinogenic in its rambling.

“Our family is modest, my mother is a cow,” the story begins. “Or rather, my mother is a cow-faced fan. Who is she? And does she also live behind her fan-self? A face before a face before a…who am I to say? We ask, here, who are you? She laughs, but receives offerings of a kind. We call her Holy One if we know her. But we are very few.” 

The story is essentially a Q&A between the speaker and the Holy One or Horned Goddess as the speaker seeks enlightenment. At one point, the Goddess imparts this wisdom:

To be one human creature is to be a legion of mannequins…. Human beings could never communicate with each other if there were no mannequins, they could only unite in lovemaking or fighting in their bodies of flesh, blood, and bone. Through the mannequins they can talk to each other, hypnotize each other, dominate each other, and in fact indulge in all the titillating activities, including suffering, happiness, esthetic enjoyment, self-importance, politics and football, etc.

When the narrator asks, “What is suffering?” the Goddess replies:

Suffering is the death or disintegration of one or more of these mannequins. However, the more dead mannequins a creature leaves behind, the nearer she or he comes to leaving the human condition forever. The only trouble is that when a being is obliged to abandon the invented presence of a disoccupied mannequin, he or she is quite often busy again building bigger and better mannequins to live in. 

While many of Carrington’s stories were captivating, this one in particular left me feeling a little haunted. I continue to wonder about the mannequins I lug around, the ones I shed, the ones I replace with new inanimate corpses. 

2. “Milk” by DedCool

This little agender your-skin-but-better fragrance technically came out in 2018, but I didn’t know about it until I got it as a free sample with a recent Sephora order. Lactonic, sweaty, and subtly sultry, “Milk” is meant to be a layering scent, but I’ve been wearing it solo, and I’m totally enchanted.

Maybe I’m so enamored because I feel like 2023 has been a pretty lackluster year for me, fragrance-wise (I feel like everything I’ve tried this year has been a dupe of BR540, which, hot take, is pleasant but overrated), and “Milk” is compelling in a way that’s not intrusive—it’s a perfect everyday scent, intimate yet unfussy. I wear it and feel sexy, but also mature and clean. 

It’s weird, maybe, to describe a scent as both “sweaty” and “clean,” but that’s how “Milk” feels—like an untainted human scent, wild and pure, oblivious and wise, pheromonal and original. Maybe, heading into 2024, that’s how I’d like to feel myself. 

3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Yes, in 2023 I finally discovered Buffy, and spent a good many hours sitting on my living room floor painting or making papier-mâché crafts while vampires fought and fucked in the background. 

I’d obviously heard of the show before, but it wasn’t until my friend and fellow writer Cindy Crabb made me watch it that I became totally obsessed. In February of 2023, we were rooming together at an artist residency in Pensacola. “You haven’t watched Buffy??” she said on the first or second night. She threw on the first episode, and it pretty much became our nighttime ritual for the entire ten days we were there. 

I think what really grabbed me about this show is—this is so embarrassing—it was the first time in a long time I felt as attached to a series as I did when I was a teenager, and I guess I hadn’t really thought I could still get immersed in a fictional world in that way? (Or maybe I just was desperate, after the global nightmare of the last few years, to escape to a fantasy world, and Buffy just came along at the right moment? I think it’s the former, though.) 

The series spawned numerous spin-offs in the form of a TV show, graphic novels, and books, but it’s also the pop culture property academics are most obsessed with, according to Slate. There’s even a scholarly journal dedicated to Buffy, called Slayage. And hovering near the top of my 2024 to-read list is poet Erik Fuhrer’s Gellar Studies, a collection of poetry and essays about the work and influence of Sarah Michelle Gellar, released this past year. 

But to me, what makes this show so addictive and impressive is it feels like the sort of story I would have come up with as a middle schooler, before I really developed a complex about my writing. Middle schoolers are some of the most self-hating, self-doubting people in the world, but I’m convinced we’re never more shamelessly creative than we are at thirteen or fourteen. (I was a teen while Lost was airing, and was there ever a show so embarrassingly and recklessly ambitious?)

4. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood 

“What exactly do Catholics believe?” 

I’d been preparing my whole life for this question. “First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he’s also dead, and he’s also immortal, but he’s also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you’re causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you.”

Like many people, I first discovered Patricia Lockwood some years back via Twitter, specifically her viral tweet about her cat, Miette. 

When Lockwood’s hilarious but tender and urgent (I hate when people describe books as “urgent,” but this book was) novel No One Is Talking About This came out in 2021, I devoured it and recommended it to all my friends and gave it away for birthday presents, and when Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures hosted Lockwood at Carnegie Music Hall this past year, I leapt to attend. I initially invited a few friends, most of whom expressed interest, but I never followed up because…well, I just wanted to see Lockwood alone. I would recommend her books to everyone, but when it came down to it, I wanted her all to myself. 

It was, in brief, a perfect evening. Lockwood was there to talk about No One Is Talking About This, which is a book you should read, but that’s not what I’m here to write about (although it was one of my favorite experiences of 2023 and therefore does belong on this list). 

What I want to write about is her previous book, 2017’s Priestdaddy, a memoir recounting the time she and her husband were forced to temporarily move back into her parents’ rectory. No longer religious, and married to a man who never was, living with her mother and her father—a Catholic priest—makes for a hilarious, chaotic, and odd collection of essays about belief, family, and growing up. I bought the book at the venue right before she went on and I devoured it immediately after, delighting in Lockwood’s ability to turn a phrase as well as in her witty but compassionate and un-bitter way of talking about her religious upbringing. 

As someone who was raised in a nondenominational Christian megachurch but who now no longer practices, I admire “ex-vangelicals” who can write about religion undefensively, unreactively, and observantly (partially because I so often struggle to do so). Lockwood’s memoir is laugh-out-loud funny as well as thoughtful and aching, and as with her novel, I found myself recommending Priestdaddy to anyone and everyone who rejected the religion of their youth, but is still able to extend some grace, or at least curiosity, towards the traditions they were raised with (or wants to be). 

5. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

“You have a way, you know, of shoving your vulnerability right into people’s faces,” a character says to her girlfriend in the story “Other Factors,” one of nine vignettes included in Mary Gaitskill’s 1988 debut Bad Behavior.² “Or something that you call vulnerability, anyway…. [I]t’s kind of strange to be confronted so aggressively with somebody else’s frailty. Some people will want to protect you, as I did, but some people will want to hurt you. Others will be merely afraid of you, for the obvious reason that it reminds them of their own frailty….” 

This monologue might best sum up how I feel about Bad Behavior, a tight series of glimpses into NYC life through which Gaitskill explores—unflinchingly, with embarrassing honesty, and without a trace of judgment—human desire and longing. I admire these stories, and I feel seen by some of them; at the same, I frequently want to shy away from what they reveal. 

Almost every story in the volume contains sex, but it’s not a sexy book; however, that doesn’t mean it’s not deeply erotic.³ Bad Behavior observes (I was going to say “interrogates,” but Gaitskill isn’t that pushy) how people—especially women—navigate conflicting needs for independence and power, connection and love, often through touch, for better or worse. Usually, the characters in these stories experience all of these needs at the same time, as do I, as do we all. 

I finished this slim volume feeling as if I had just read a very perfect and precise book, one that was objectively very good. I also finished it feeling as if I’d never want to meet Mary Gaitskill in real life: she’d see right through me. 

6. BB&Bur’s cotton candy cookies

I moved to the Pittsburgh borough of Wilkinsburg in late 2022, and my new home is only a short walk to several delish bakeries and cafes, including the still-fairly-young BB&Bur, a fluffy boulangerie serving up gourmet cupcakes, macarons, cookies, and other goodies. 

Everything I’ve gotten at BB&Bur has been tasty, but there’s one thing I go back for again and again: the cotton candy cookie. (It’s also the only item they sell that is consistently sold out, so I know I’m not its only superfan.)

BB&Bur’s cotton candy cookie has a perfectly soft and chewy texture, but with colorful lumps of melted cotton candy throughout. The taste is less like cotton candy and more like Crunch Berries, and I just can’t get enough of it. (But my goal for 2024 is to try.) 

7. Hot Topic’s “Ragdoll” perfume

Yeah, Hot Topic is still around, and it’s pretty much exactly how you remember it. And honestly, god bless it.

The first perfume I remember having wasn’t a Hot Topic scent, it Elizabeth Arden’s “Sunflowers,” which my mother bought me for Christmas when I was eleven or twelve and which I associate with building a toothpick bridge in my bedroom for science class. Twenty or so years later, and I try never to be without a bottle of the sunshiny yellow fragrance in its pill-shaped bottle (and you can get a real whopper of a bottle at Burlington for about $10). I can’t give it a fair review at this point: it’s probably very old ladyish, but to me it’s nostalgic, floral, and cozy. 

Beyond “Sunflowers,” I don’t typically return to the perfumes I enjoyed growing up, but I think this year I’ve let myself regress a bit to how I was as a fourteen-year-old, and conversations with different friends in recent months have made me think I’m not alone. Maybe your early thirties are the time to revisit your childhood and pull from it the things you miss and want to keep as you settle down into your own life, and reject the things you don’t. For me, this ranges from more expansive, consequential things like religion, politics, personal values, and relationships to the seemingly surface-level, like the books, music, and fragrances I adored growing up. 

My rediscovery of Hot Topic’s “Ragdoll” fragrance was one of the most delightful moments in 2023. I’m admittedly not much of a Tim Burton fan anymore (besides Pee-wee, obvi), but I used to steal spritzes of the Sally-inspired perfume from my older sister when we were in high school, and in a fit of nostalgia this fall, I ordered a bottle for the first time in fifteen-plus years. I was surprised to find it smelled just as musky, candy-sweet, powdery, and sultry as it did when I was a dorky “emo-homeschool chic” ninth grader.

8. Sufjan Stevens, Javelin

Believe it or not, I almost didn’t even put Javelin on the list, simply because it felt too obvious: probably anyone who’s spent twenty minutes with me knows Sufjan Stevens is my favorite musician.

I don’t know anyone who’s had a “good” 2023, but Sufjan Stevens probably had it worse than most. Stevens put out Javelin mere weeks after announcing he was recovering from Guillain-Barre syndrome, and followed up the LP’s release with a social media post dedicating the album to his late partner Evans Richardson; it marked the first time Stevens had explicitly addressed his sexuality, and his coming out was colored by grief. 

The morning Javelin was released, I woke up while it was still dark out and listened to the album while making apple galettes for my family. In a few hours, I’d join my parents, my two sisters, my brother, and my niece and nephew at a cabin in Hocking Hills, Ohio, for the weekend. Officially, we were gathering to celebrate my dad’s retirement from the electric company; unofficially, we were also there to support him as he grieved the loss of two of his best friends, both of whom died of cancer within two weeks of his retirement. “We had all these plans,” my dad said. 

I don’t know that there’s real overlap between my dad’s experience and Sufjan’s besides their grief. But lazing around the cabin, which was big but too open for eight people who love each other but don’t always get along, I realized it was the first time we’d all stayed together in the same place in a while—maybe even since before my older sister left home, more than a decade earlier.

And as I wandered around the surrounding grounds, listening to Sufjan Stevens through one earphone, I felt like I was a teenager again: dreamy and thoughtful and angsty, wanting to be close to my family and never let them go, wanting to protect them, knowing we’d all die one day—yet at the same time needing as much space as possible. (As Stevens trills in the album’s titular song, “It’s a terrible thought / to have and hold,” though he’s singing about a romantic relationship.) That dreamy nostalgic feeling was exacerbated by the fact we could barely get a signal out there, so we were largely phone-less, the way we were growing up, for the most part. Nothing to do but think, and wander, and read, and eat, and sometimes talk, and sometimes argue.

It felt like home, and yet we’d all changed so much over the years—Stevens, as well as my family. It’s strange to feel like you’ve grown with a celebrity (and I promise this is the most parasocial I get), although Javelin is notably something of a return-to-form for Stevens. I guess there’s not much more for me to say here except that spending a bittersweet weekend with my family in an isolated cabin in Ohio was the perfect way to experience the complicated, nostalgic grief of Stevens’ new album. 

To link this review to another item on this list, our weekend together retroactively reminds me of the final scene in the final story in Bad Behavior, a story which spawns decades in the life of a family: they’ve gathered together after years, some of them grown, some dead, some with children of their own, all of them changed, all of them more themselves. The reunion feels, as the father says over steak dinner, “Like heaven.” 

Honorable mentions

(They’re not really “honorable mentions,” they’re just things I didn’t have time to write about—plus I think if I made this list any longer, nobody would make it to the end.)

• Toshifumi Hinata’s 1986 Reality in Love, my most-listened-to album of the year, behind Javelin. Romantic, synthy classical. If you feel like a sad clown cloaked in a sparkly pastel mist of love and longing (as I often do, apparently), Reality in Love is for you. 

• The Joan Brown retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Brown struck me as a sister-soul to Carrington. If you like ladies and cats and ladies with cat faces, look her up! 

• “Cow” by Zoologist. I got a sample of this grassy fragrance over the summer, and though I didn’t end up purchasing a full bottle, I found this perfume so joyous and innocent and fresh. Like a sunshiny hill, drizzled in honey. A perfect Renaissance Fair scent (which is where I wore it).

1. For a more thorough examination of “My Mother Is a Cow,” read Anna Hundert’s very cool analysis of the story as queer cosmology, in Ploughshares.

2. I picked up Bad Behavior at my friend and fellow writer Margaret Welsh’s urging—at this point, I have complete faith in any book Margaret recommends. 

3. Esther Perel differentiates “erotic” from “sexy” in the following way: “Eroticism isn’t sex; it’s sexuality transformed by the human imagination. It’s the thoughts, dreams, anticipation, unruly impulses, and even painful memories which make up our vast erotic landscapes…. Eroticism is not comfortable and neat. It unveils inner struggles, emotional tensions, a mix of excitement and anxiety.”

Similarly, perfumer Mandy Aftel (in some ways, nobody knows more about eroticism than an aromaphile) writes, “In our sexuality we are purely in the domain of nature; in our eroticism we are specifically human,” and Gaitskill’s characters are nothing if not achingly human.