Changing coasts

Also, an excerpt and some very specific book recs

Dear reader,

I’m writing to you, for the first time, from my new apartment in Boston. These past few months have been full of change—I graduated medical school, moved across the country, turned twenty-nine. I rang in this last year of my twenties on Cape Cod, with a rare weekend off, eating ice cream by the Atlantic Ocean and thinking about how lucky I feel to be doing work that feels so deeply meaningful, in all aspects of my life. Working in the ER (and introducing myself as a doctor…!) has been strange, surreal, infinitely challenging, infinitely rewarding. I dream about the hospital, most days. I’ve been trying to write about it, little journal entries that remind me I’m a person and allowed to feel (eek!), which has mostly been a work in progress.

And, of course, speaking of works in progress, I’m still working on book two (brief refresher: academic rivals, grad students turned spies, lots of meditations on science, what it promises, and who it belongs to). I received my edit letter a couple months ago, and despite the general busy-ness of my schedule, it’s been a joy to sit down with this book and shape it into a truer version of itself. There’s a lot that is visible about publishing—book deals, cover reveals, preorder campaigns, books in bookstores—but the act of writing itself is still very solitary. Am I doing a good job? No one knows except for me, and sometimes not even that! All I can do is sit down and write. In this way, I suppose, it’s similar to medicine: we go on, every day, even when the days are hard.

An excerpt from ANATOMY:

“What if,” Peter said, and he felt a strange, swooping sensation within him, the feeling of falling, “I told you I didn’t want to be friends?”

She raised a brow. “I always knew you were fickle. We only just shook.”

“I know,” he said. And, because it was Rosalind, he didn’t say anything more. He didn’t need to. Friendship. It’d never been exactly what he wanted, not with her. Not when they were teenagers and he’d learned to sharpen himself against her edges, not now in the cold, crisp dark.

“Ah,” she said.

How many times had this happened before? A greenhouse in the summer, Rosalind brushing leaves from his hair. His face almost touching hers, the dim light of a Stanford stairwell, the two of them playing pretend. Her hand on his shoulder and his on her waist, violins ushering them into a waltz. Here, in the narrow hallway, he could see the flicker of her lashes in the dark, the moonlight that brushed her hair, her skin. He was almost certain she would say no, but instead she lifted her gaze to his. “Well,” she said, voice slow, thoughtful, as if she were reasoning with him or maybe herself, “we were never really friends in the first place, were we?”

In the same way that I think of PORTRAIT as an identity story disguised as a heist story, ANATOMY is a spy novel with a love story at its heart. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. It won’t be out til 2026, probably, but it’s up on Goodreads if you want to keep an eye out!

What I’m reading:

• I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL by Natalie Sue, which kept me up literally all night when I really had other intentions, about a woman who accidentally gains access to all her coworkers’ emails and sees exactly what they won’t say aloud. Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of novels about workplace despair and late-stage capitalism (lol), so if that’s also your oddly specific mood, other books in this category include JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND, about a young man hired by the government to erase people’s nightmares for the sake of workplace productivity, and THE PAYBACK (forthcoming), about a group of mall workers banding together for a heist to clear all student loan debt. Also, a longtime favorite of mine, THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS AN EASY JOB.

• THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley, which had the most absurd, amazing premise and spectacularly delivers on it. A government funded time travel program, the worker hired to help a new time traveler adjust, the two of them falling hopelessly, tragically in love.

• ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD by Patrick Bringley, a memoir by a security guard at the Met about the ten years he spent working there. My friend Becca recommended this one to me, and it’s going to be one of those books I recommend everyone, forever and ever. I was filled with wonder and gratitude and grief, I cried on the train, I felt more deeply than I have in a while.

That’s all! Let me know about Boston recommendations, restaurants to try, ways to occupy my time when I’m not in the hospital / writing on my couch, etc. I’m on the hunt for the best boba in the area, obviously.

Grace