Good Writers Touch Life Often

The best book I can't believe I'd never read, plus a few others that provided refuge this summer, and updates from life in the 'burbs

Greetings from the creepy murder room, otherwise known as my home office.

We got back from Maine a week ago and since then, I’ve been busy minding the old adage “making a house a home.” This has involved painting, hanging wallpaper, repurposing old furniture, and turning the strange, windowless room in our basement (fondly referred to as the “Murder Room”) into a makeshift office.

I love these bite-sized home improvement projects because they support well-being in a way that writing, a purely cerebral process, cannot. Mainly, they take me out of my head and put me back in my body — a core pillar of my 2025 survival guide.

I know I’m not the only one who needs a break from my own spinning thoughts these days. A few months ago, when I wrote about my urge to use my hands, put seeds in the earth, roll up my sleeves, and (literally) touch grass, the gardeners in our community perked up to say, “Hello! I see you!” Turns out, gardening is a well-known elixir for mental health. I’m just late to the game.

Though life in the suburbs is still a bit foreign, it was a relief to arrive home after weeks in the woods of Maine to a backyard of trees and the call of birds in the morning. There’s a lot I’ll miss about life in the city, but drunk shouting and teenage fistfights on the sidewalk outside my window aren’t among them. I’m all in on this quiet thing. And the trees.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how precious it feels to be human these days — as if it’s a gift slipping away with every horrifying news story and advancement in technology. I’m worried about my own brain, about my impulse to turn to ChatGPT when I get stuck crafting an email (don’t worry, never here on Substack), about my numbness to current events, and the hundreds of times a day I absentmindedly reach for my phone, forgetting why. Each of these moments feels like a betrayal of what matters, a rejection of the very best stuff life is made of — belly laughter, first kisses, sweaty runs, messy homemade cakes, suntans, presence.

At the heart of this is a desire to connect with something real.

I don’t want to live on autopilot. I want to feel it all, and I want the willpower to resist these insidious threats to our humanity. I want the birds, the trees, the dirt beneath my fingernails. Even the sadness.

That’s why there’s nothing more special than a book that delivers authenticity, the feeling that the writer has touched life, and insistently dragged us, the reader, closer to it. It’s what literary agent

Carly Watters

recently talked about on her Instagram (the je ne sais quoi that makes a book sing). It’s why I wrote Love You Hard. Because for one brief, aching moment in time, I touched life in a way that changed me forever, and I desperately wanted to give others a taste of that connection.

Truthfully, I didn’t want to forget it myself.

abby_maslin

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This summer, I was surprised to find that feeling in a science fiction book.