My 2021 Montage: A "Best Of" Screenplay of My Favorite Books This Year
a "best of" script of the books I loved
INT. MY BRAIN - THE SUNDAY BEFORE THE FIRST MONDAY IN JANUARY 2022 - 11 P.M.
Despite not doing anything for the last two weeks besides watch Disney+ on my parents’ couch, I too understand you’re probably coming out on the other side of your December “Best Of” list burnout.
This year has brought changes (this newsletter didn’t exist, and some of you may remember that time fondly). A book. Two jobs to end a 9-month unemployment stint. A new apartment (with new four-legged roommates :) they’re late on rent, though).
So instead of just giving you a list of books and TV shows and movies and saying, “here, trust me” when some of you might wonder “why would I trust someone who lets the mice push her over on rent deadlines??”, I will throw you in the scene where I consumed the recs.
If you need Sparknotes (boo!), you can check out my Instagram post here.
Roll the clips!
INT. PHILADELPHIA, PA - LUKE’S CHILDHOOD HOME - JANUARY
CUT TO:
A family sits around a fireplace. (It’s Luke’s family. He’s got a large one. I’m also there. As are Luke’s two cats. And Luke’s mom’s yellow lab Carson who is scared of hardwood floors.)
They talk about the salsa lesson they did as a family the day before.
FAMILY: Left foot back, right foot back, now… two cumbia!
They chant the dance steps from the couch.
LUKE’S MOM: Does anyone else feel sore from yesterday?
FAMILY: Uh, no, I don’t think so!
ZOOM IN on Covid particles circulating above their heads like little aliens. You can almost hear Covid cackling as the family starts to cough and realize that pizza has no taste.
TWO WEEKS LATER:
CHLOE (freshly 25, not so freshly unemployed) sits on the couch reading Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain. It’s a novel about a son and his relationship with his alcoholic mother in 1980s U.K. at the height of Thatcherism.
CHLOE: (to herself) I learned about Thatcher in The Crown.
She also took A.P. Comparative Politics seven years ago, but Gillian Anderson’s Thatcher is what will make history in her mind!
CHLOE: If anyone would ask, I think this book is really great if you’re looking for something heavy but still full of hope. And I wish I could talk to someone about how well he uses colors to symbolize emotions! And I know some people are like, “ugh, was your COVID isolation in someone else’s house the time to plow through a 500-page novel? can you at least stop pretending it’s a staycation and do some dishes?”
The dishwasher beeps from the other room.
CHLOE (con’t): But it’s really a book about hope, about love. Especially maternal love. And determination! And I loved it.
INT. AMTRAK - NIGHT - FEBRUARY 2021
Two girls sit on a pretty low-key Saturday night train to D.C. Everyone wears masks and eyeballs their neighbors with that pre-vaccine “anyone could have it!” anxiety.
Chloe and her CHILDHOOD FRIEND (not yet 25, lucky b) sneak a bottle of red wine out of Friend’s backpack. It is wrapped in a scarf for protection. There are also mini plastic cups to pour into. This is not anyone’s first rodeo.
Neither of them talk about the fact that they are traveling home to D.C. for a friend’s mom’s funeral. That would be too much, even for the talking car.
On Chloe’s lap is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. It pairs nicely with the red and is also printed in a screenplay format (like this newsletter, but better).
CHLOE: (whispers) I really like my book.
FRIEND: Oh, what’s it about?
CHLOE: It’s like about racism in Hollywood…?
The confidence in her voice diminishes as she realizes, as a white person on an Amtrak—unmasked to drink illegal red wine no less, she has to talk about racism.
CHLOE: Basically, it follows one character as he lives on a set of a crime show called “Black and White,” and all his neighbors in Chinatown act as stereotypical extras, and the protagonist’s dream is to become Kung Fu Guy, because that’s the highest role Hollywood will offer Asian actors.
FRIEND: Okay!
She also has her own book to get back to, but she too is white and not completely aware of her boundaries in this conversation.
CHLOE: But it’s also really trippy, it goes into his mind and stuff. It’s really wacky.
FRIEND: Nice!
They high five.
(No, they did not. But it felt like it was getting there.)
INT. CHLOE’S LIVING ROOM - MARCH 2021
The Crown plays in the background. Or the solitary seasons of America’s Next Top Model thrown on Netflix. Lights are dim. Windows are limited. There is one couch for Chloe and one roommate. The other roommate gets the carpet as seating.
Chloe annotates Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.
ZOOM IN on the book to see she underlined:
“Burnout occurs when the distance between the ideal and the possible lived reality becomes too much to bear.”
The entire book has dog ears.
CHLOE: It’s society’s fault! Capitalism generates high expectations! Reaganism!
Her roommates sit silently as she rants like this over the show they chose to watch.
INT. CHLOE’S 6x10 BEDROOM - APRIL 2021
Chloe plays an audiobook Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House as Luke sleeps on the lawn at Vanderbilt.
MACHADO (V.O.): Dream House As Inventory. She makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favorite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you. Years later, it’s a habit that’s hard to break.
Chloe and Luke had this trip planned back in December for Chloe’s birthday. Chloe came out probably six weeks ago. This is the panic turmoil (citation: PERF Ch. 12).
But the grass isn’t always greener, and that helps her breathe a little bit.
Unless you’re at Vanderbilt. Then they pay a lot to keep that stuff green.
INT. CHLOE’S BEDROOM - MAY 2021
Chloe chops boiled eggs in a plastic, pink bowl in their large and unexpectedly swanky kitchen.
She mixes mayo and everything bagel seasoning, pulls out two slices of sourdough, sprinkles arugula on her egg salad sandwich.. for health.
She opens Erin French’s memoir Finding Freedom about French’s addiction, divorce, and career collapse all at the attempt of being the perfect daughter or husband.
ULTRA ZOOM IN on the single phrase “egg salad sandwich” about French making egg salad sandwiches at her dad’s diner as a teenager.
ULTRA ZOOM IN on Chloe’s egg salad sandwich.
ULTRA ZOOM IN on Chloe’s eyes having a Eureka moment.
CHLOE: Oh. My. Gosh. You have to be kidding me!!!!
(Back in the early days of selective vaccine, little things brought large excitement.)
THE AUDIOBOOK MONTAGE
—A surprisingly high amount of the books Chloe read this year were on audio, which she normally would say don’t count.
—She walks under the purple bridge at Seaport and listens to Bryan Washington’s Memorial as it unpacks the smallest tweaks and turns in a collapsing (or normal?) relationship between two men who maybe don’t have anything in common.
—On a grey July day, she sits on a lake dock where the water is still and the fog crawls on top of the water. Her eyes are wide, vacant. As in she’s transfixed by Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, wrapped up in Zauner’s memories of her mother, food, and bathhouses.
—She stares at the ceiling from her bed while listening to Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This as the poetic snippets move as quickly as Tweets but stick like an amber sap in her mind. Luke walks in, listens to a second, and slowly walks back out of the room.
—She plays Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby outside the shower and fluctuates between minimizing the water pressure and elevating the phone volume so she doesn’t miss a word. (Part soapy drama, part gender theory, part love triangle…I mean, truly, what else could you ask for.)
—Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here plays as Chloe moves boxes into her new bedroom. She has a double bed now! Wow! This story about a nanny and two kids who literally combust into flames soothes her as she puts together her bed frame incorrectly, scratches the wall, and finds the mattress on the floor and the bed frame standing parallel to the walls. She pauses the story about the emotionally unbridled kids and calls Luke, in tears, because she broke her new bedroom.
END MONTAGE.
EXT. THE NEW BEDROOM - AUGUST 2021
The bed is in the right place - frame first, then mattress on top. Because Luke had to fix it. But Chloe hung up the floating shelves by herself! With an anchor screw or whatever!
She packs up a bag and throws in five books to go to —
EXT. SAN DIEGO BEACH - LABOR DAY
A beach vacation.
She proceeds to start and finish Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer between the flights there and home. She reads in every moment and rarely spends time in the sun or with Luke’s family on this trip because she’s reading.
She is very popular at parties.
(To be fair, you read The Sympathizer and see how hard it is to pull yourself away. Like a riptide current, but you don’t risk your life! Just playing it safe.)
EXT. ELIZABETH ST. GARDEN — SEPTEMBER 2021
Chloe sits alone and reads the_atmospherians by Alex McElroy about wellness cults and toxic gender extremes.
She’s at a large wooden table and surrounded by other strangers reading between plants and on old benches.
Then her people — the friends and roommates and Luke from all parts of the year — meet her at this table. She pulls out Perf: The Unspoken Flaws in a “Perfect” Culture by Chloe Cullen and hands it out to these loyal people who paid $39 for a paperback and an autograph they could swipe from a dinner check. God bless.
EXT. MANHATTAN — 2ND AVE & 11TH ST — NIGHT — NOVEMBER 2021
Chloe walks with ear phones in and listens to George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. Ambulances wail, couplings of friends and lovers (ew?) send cuts of their conversations her way.
THE LOVERS: (simultaneously, as obviously all lovers do…???) I just hope Barry doesn’t have that vegan cheese again.
Lights flashing, pubs glowing, that old movie theater house erasing the current decade.
Chloe listens to Saunders explain life and writing. She looks for a pen in her bag. She has four, but none work. She rubs a pen tip on her tongue then writes on the back of her thumb: “MFA”.
Then she crosses it out.
But she loved writing it, and having a pen and a thought ready.
She walks by The New School on 12th as she heads home. She doesn’t look at it. But she does peer into the restaurant iSouvlaki because what is the deal with that Greek / robot fusion spot?
Chloe isn’t the type to talk to herself, especially not walking in the city. But she realizes her AirPods make it look like she’s on the phone.
CHLOE: If I could go to school forever, I would.
And the book resumes in her ears, like George Saunders is an AirPod microphone away from hearing that wish for the analytical and symbolic and metaphorical discussion and grants it, a small literary genie.
SAUNDERS: It’s hard to get any beauty at all into a story. If and when we do, it might not be the type of beauty we’ve always dreamed of making. But we have to take whatever beauty we can get, however we can get it.
And she keeps walking until she hits home.
Please send any books (or more likely, follow-up questions about what these books are actually about) my way. I love building a list, and January gives us the impression of a clean slate. What I never think about is how all these books, moments, thoughts build on top of each other to become foundational to who we are vs. getting a factory reset.
(I partially plagiarized my fellow Capricorn Florence Pugh on that, her original caption is much better.)
xo,
Chlo