Gratitudes

Nights in the ICU and sunrises after

Dear reader,

Every Thanksgiving, my family does a tradition we call gratitudes. After dinner, we go around the table and list everything we’re grateful for in the past year. This year, for the second year in a row, I spent the holiday at work, and so my family flew to Boston and we fit in our celebration (and our gratitudes) around my work schedule. I wanted to share some of my gratitudes here—it’s been a busy year, one spent largely offline, and it has been good in many ways and hard in many ways too.

Gratitude #1: My dad gripes endlessly about cooking Thanksgiving dinner in a foreign kitchen and yet does it anyway. My mom packs a meal for me to take to the ICU for each of my night shifts. It can be easy to feel lonely in residency—the hours are long, the schedule is irregular, your day off is a random Tuesday and almost never an actual weekend day—but then I’m reminded, suddenly, of the abundance of love around me.

Gratitude #2: Writing dates with friends in Boston coffee shops, in the buttery afternoon light of an English townhouse, in my apartment with a shared Google Doc. I have done more and better writing this year than I have in a long time, and I think it’s because I’ve been reading more, thinking more, playing more. I’m done with major revisions for ANATOMY, and then I’m done / nearly done with two other projects. Both are in new genres for me…!

Gratitude #3: The little bit of sunrise at 6:30 AM during my walk home from work, the temporary state that is good health, friends in medicine who know what this feels like and friends outside medicine who will listen even when they don’t. I’m in the trauma / burn ICU this month and maybe someday I’ll be able to write about it, but...not anytime soon. In the meantime, I’m trying to tell the people I love I love them. I’m trying not to take any of this life for granted.

What I’m reading:

• CHILDREN OF TIME by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m obsessed with this book. I have told everyone I know about it. It’s basically if space-faring humans tried to speed up evolution for monkeys on another, Earth-like planet, but accidentally ended up doing it to spiders instead. The spiders develop a civilization! It spans generations! It is so smart and so unexpected and I cannot stop talking about it.

• INTIMACIES by Katie Kitamura. Technically, I read this one a while ago, but I’ve basically spent the last few months working my way through Kitamura’s entire body of work after being introduced to her through AUDITION. The language is so precise! I feel about these books the way I feel about Weike Wang’s, which is to say, reading them feels like I’m becoming a better writer.

• SOURDOUGH by Robin Sloan. You know when you start reading a book and you know immediately you’re in good hands? That’s me with this book, set in SF about a tech worker who (accidentally) ends up as a baker after being tasked with taking care of the sourdough starter from the restaurant she always orders take-out from. I’m only a handful of chapters in and it’s exactly the kind of thing I like (meditations about finding yourself adrift in early adulthood a la GINGKO SEASON by Naomi Xu Elegant and KAKIGORI SUMMER by Emily Itami, two other recent faves).

Other books on my reading list: THE ISLE IN THE SILVER SEA by Tasha Suri (I’ve been thinking about knight books ever since THE EVERLASTING…), INNAMORTA by Ava Reid (out next year!), I’LL FIND YOU WHERE THE TIMELINE ENDS by Kylie Lee Baker.

What I’m writing:

Lots of things, as discussed! Here’s an excerpt from the project that’s been occupying most of my mind lately…

It was the height of summer, and everything was in bloom: the crocuses, the lilies, the larkspurs, the roses. He reached for a rose, plucked it. “Did you know the poets say you are the most beautiful woman in the world?”

A thorn had cut into his skin. On instinct, I reached to wipe the blood away. “Poets are so often prone to exaggeration.”

“Not this time,” he said, and the way he looked at me, I believed it. I still had his blood on my hand, and I raised my finger to my mouth. The taste of it was rich, coppery. As I watched, he broke off the green stem of the flower so that there were no thorns, no leaves—just the soft unfolding of petals. He tucked the flower into the crown of my hair, his hands trembling just slightly as he brushed the shell of my ear. I could still see where the thorn had cut him, that careful well of blood. “I will give you everything, Helen,” he promised, and the shine in his eyes looked like devotion. “Everything the light touches shall be ours.”

Thanks for reading, as always! I recognize this is my first newsletter of 2025 and, well, it is what it is. Lots more to come re: ANATOMY and other books!

Grace