The Crime Lady: This Is The Year That Was
Dear TCL Readers,
So we come to the near-end of another year, another decade. We survived! Kind of! I’m contending with split instincts for 2020: to hibernate entirely — possible, since I do have a new book to write — or to be ever-present, considering how much is at stake. I suspect this disparate split is the only way for me to get through. To hide entirely is unacceptable, but so is forgoing quiet contemplation. It’s always been a question of balancing signal to noise, and that question grows ever more important here.
That it was a noisy year and decade is the most obvious observation for any of us. But thinking through these last ten years and…it was a lot. Professionally: wrote and published a nonfiction book, wrote more than a third of another book, edited three anthologies (that third one, of course, isn’t out till July), many longform features and essays, even some fiction. Personally: moving to and from Brooklyn, cancer, end of a bad long-term relationship, death of a parent. There’s enough distance on all these events that I can write them down with a lack of associated emotion. What else is there to do but go forward and live?
So my 2020 promises to be on the quieter side. Of course, I’ll be writing, and reading, and still very present on here and in the world.
**
Two pieces of mine published in December. CrimeReads ran an excerpt of the introduction I wrote for the new reissue of Dread Journey by Dorothy B. Hughes, one of my personal favorites of her body of work. And for CJR, I took some time to listen to Break in the Case, a new true crime podcast produced by the NYPD, and reflect on why this bothered me and why a number of popular true crime podcasts seem to be overly friendly to police perspectives.
And this being a slow month — as in, not really — I’ve got a handful of freelance deadlines coming due by month’s end or early in the new year, so more on those when they appear. Here, by the way, is the Twitter thread of what I published in 2019, month by month. This is the piece I wish more people had read, and this is the one that was designated one of Longreads’ Best of 2019. (Speaking of Longreads, they asked me to contribute to their Best of Crime Reporting list, and I obliged with two pieces.)
**
I delayed on my Best-of-Year lists because even though I read plenty, it still felt like I was falling behind. But here are my favorites in crime fiction & nonfiction for 2019, which when I put them together, feel so right and true. You’ll notice the nonfiction category is also in large part about investigative journalism. Crime, alas, is everywhere.
CRIME FICTION
Cristina Alger, Girls Like Us
William Boyle, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself
Alafair Burke, The Better Sister
Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay
Amy Gentry, Last Woman Standing
Elizabeth Hand, Curious Toys
Angie Kim, Miracle Creek
Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake
Lisa Lutz, The Swallows
Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy
CRIME NONFICTION
Maureen Callahan, American Predator
Casey Cep, Furious Hours
Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill
Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey, She Said
Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing
Chanel Miller, Know My Name
Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites
Hallie Rubenhold, The Five
Other nonfiction that I loved: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman, which should have been nominated for everything and cracked open how nonfiction can be created; In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, which functioned similarly for memoir; Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, which we’ll look back as early work for a stunning writer; The Undying by Anne Boyer, a true literary treatment of cancer and the body; The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijung Wang, a true literary treatment of a deeply misunderstood mental illness; Godland by Lyz Lenz, a proper and complicated window into the Midwest; and two wonderful, tricky, experimental memoirs in translation, Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot and My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman.
Other fiction that I loved: Kristen Arnett, Mostly Dead Things; Jami Attenberg, All This Could Be Yours; Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is In Trouble; Susan Choi, Trust Exercise; Catherine Chung, The Tenth Muse; Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna; Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread; Sally Rooney, Normal People; Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead; and a special shoutout to Bina by Anakana Schofield, which should have a US publisher but regrettably, still does not (I see no reason that if Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport can find an audience hear, this far shorter, more distilled, possibly superior work can’t.)
**
That’s the last dispatch of 2019. I wish you all a meaningful and healthy holiday season, in whatever state of celebration you are in. As always, here is to good books, because the secret is that every year is a good one for books — and 2020 is already showing that to be the case.
Until then, I remain,
The Crime Lady