Megan Nolan's 'Ordinary Human Failings': One More Book Before I Leave January Behind

I squeezed in one more, because I am a nerrrrrrd.

Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings is a really … I keep wanting to say it’s a crunchy book, it’s a chewy book, by which maybe I mean it’s satisfying to take in, and full of texture? It tells the story of a very bad night when a little child goes missing, and suspicion falls on an older girl. She comes from a family that has had a very hard road and has essentially been branded the troublesome people of the neighborhood. It follows the members of the family, as well as an unscrupulous tabloid journalist who sees the story, and exploiting the family, as his big break.

There’s a distinction between a sad book and a bleak book, which is partly a question of balance. What happens — and has happened — in this book is very sad. But there is a sense within it that people’s humanity has some power. Not power to undo what has happened and not power to guarantee anybody a good outcome. But it is partly about what resources people can muster, including emotional resources, and what those things can do for them, even though it is also about the brutality of exploitation and the dysfunction within the family.

What I Read In January

I love television; I do. I love great television, and sometimes I love bad television. What I don’t love is when I realize I have lost hours, or days, or much of a week, to television I’m not even paying attention to. I love rewatching something good, but sometimes I realize I am literally trying to kill time — my mood is maybe not great, I’m struggling a little, and I just want the day to be done.

So I decided to watch less television and read instead, and I have had a month, I tell you. I’ve been sharing thoughts on books over on Instagram stories, but that’s intentionally a fleeting thing, so I decided to come over here and put down the reading list from January. Some of these are already out; some are coming out soon. I noted their release dates if they’re not already out.

Come and Get It, Kiley Reid (fiction) (Bookshop)

This is where I admit that I started and failed to finish the audiobook of Reid’s Such A Fun Age a couple of years ago, not because I didn’t like it, but just because sometimes I get out of the car and whatever audiobook I’m listening to just doesn’t get finished, it’s weird. I have to watch for it, because I am about a quarter of the way through the audiobook of Martyr!, which is not only an intoxicating book; it is narrated by Arian Moayed, who played Stewy on Succession, who is an actor I really love (and am shamelessly kind of hot for), who offers a hell of a performance and has a great voice to listen to. But if I don’t get in the car for a while, I could definitely fail to finish it.

Aaaaanyway, all this to say that Reid’s new book, Come and Get It, is really good and absorbing. I wrote a whole thing about it for NPR, though, so I’m just going to shuffle you over there for more.

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Isabel Waidner (fiction) (February 6) (Bookshop)

There are, in the world, people who are extremely comfortable with surreal-feeling fiction and people who are not. I am often the latter, which is why I am so glad I read this trippy-ass book. It’s about Corey Fah, a novelist who wins a prize, but it turns out the prize is a UFO, kind of, and they have to catch it in order to get money. They end up encountering a deer with extra feet and eyes who goes by the name of Bambi Pavok, who kind of is and kind of is not the Bambi you know, and there’s a strange cable show about wormholes, and there are actual wormholes. The funny thing is that by the end of the book, its thematic ideas about alienation and othering and yearning for love are completely clear, even though if I try to offer a literal explanation of the plot, it sounds like I am choosing words at random. I loved reading it, and I loved the newness of it, and I was quite moved by it.

Interesting Facts About Space, Emily Austin (fiction) (Bookshop)

Emily Austin’s first book, Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, was told from the point of view of Gilda, a young woman who was very anxious about death. To some degree, Interesting Facts About Space is about similar themes, especially anxiety, and the main characters do feel like they could be cousins. But this is the story of Enid, a queer true-crime obsessive who works at NASA (or a NASA-like organization) and wants very much to find love of a kind that means something to her — other than with the mother she loves, who also struggles with depression. When Enid feels her anxiety growing, she calls and recites the titular interesting facts about space to her mother on the phone. Austin is a really insightful and funny writer, and the voices of her characters are needle-sharp.

The Fury, Alex Michaelides (fiction) (Bookshop)

This book is so much fun. On the surface, it closely resembles Glass Onion and its inspiration, The Last Of Sheila. It’s about a glamorous actress who invites those closest to her to her Greek island for a getaway — including her dear friend Elliott, who is our narrator and tells us from the beginning that unfortunately, this weekend ends in murder, and he will explain how that came to happen. At the end, I admit I thought, “Okay, maybe one too many twists, you playful devil,” but that’s not a terribly bad feeling to have at the end of a book. I devoured it in an evening.

Get The Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among The Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How To See, Bianca Bosker (nonfiction) (February 6) (Bookshop)

People who know me know (and hopefully tolerate) that from time to time, I read something and then will not stop bringing it up in various contexts. This examination of the art world (from an author who previously wrote about the wine world) is bewitching, entertaining, illuminating, very funny, and refreshingly open-hearted. Bosker set out to better understand questions like … how do you know something is art? How do you know art is good? Is a piece of art necessarily bullshit just because it is, out of context, indistinguishable from something that is not art? (Like a toilet?) My favorite thing about the book, though, is that Bosker tries to take in everything she hears, even from people who say things that all my defenses want to find extraordinarily pretentious and goofy. She steers clear of both contempt and undue deference and tries to listen — to artists, gallery people, buyers, critics — and think through what she’s learning. It’s just a real treat.

Dead in Long Beach California, Venita Blackburn (fiction) (Bookshop)

A significant part of my reading in January wound up being written with unusual points of view — The Fury is in a chatty second-person omniscient that I found charming and sometimes vexing; Corey Fah is sort of dreamy reportage — and this is perhaps the most fascinating example. The novel is narrated by some collection of voices (machines? robots? aliens?) from the future who are looking back on the events following the discovery by a woman named Coral of the dead body of her brother, who has died by suicide. The “we” they call themselves have a voice that’s detached and observational about humans and their foibles, and often very funny, even in this bleak moment.

Coral begins to respond to her brother’s text messages as him, unable to tell anyone that he’s gone, including his daughter. Over the course of a week, we come to understand that Coral is herself a science-fiction writer, and these voices are part of a world she created in her own work. In other words, it’s like a story of George Lucas’s life that’s narrated by Darth Vader. Fantasy and reality, and her real world and her imagined world, are very blurry, even as she moves through a very concrete week of pain and processing.

First Lie Wins, Ashley Elston (fiction) (Bookshop)

I try to keep up with the book-club books to some degree, and this one is a Reese’s Book Club Pick. (It’s remarkable to me how important this status has become; in some places, the book’s title is rendered as First Lie Wins: Reese’s Book Club Pick (A Novel). It’s in the title! The TV adaptation has been in the works since September of 2022. In other words, this is a book that’s on the move; it’s been fully embraced by a machine that can have a huge amount of power (as parts of it did in my own life). That is not a negative — it is just an observation.

The story follows Evie Porter, who’s engaged to a rich Nice Guy, but whose past is (dun dun duunnnnnn!) full of secrets. She works for a mysterious man named Mr. Smith, who sends her on various assignments, one of which brought her to her current fiance. You’ve got your twists and your turns, your betrayals and reveals, you know the drill. There is one especially great moment that really does make you think, “Okay, what the HECK is going on?” I didn’t fully love this book (I sometimes get weary when everyone in a book is kind of at least half of a jerk), but I definitely enjoyed it, and I completely understand why so many people have become enamored of it. If it sounds like the kind of thing you would like, it probably is.

How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir, Shayla Lawson (memoir) (February 6) (Bookshop)

Lawson writes absolutely gorgeous sentences; that’s the first thing that I can think to say about this fascinating memoir. While talking about their efforts to be gracious, more gracious than many of the white people they encounter while working abroad, they write: “I strived not to give the impression that their world tasted funny to me.” That is such a compact, clear, powerful sentence! (They’re a poet; it makes sense.)

Officially, this is a sort of travel memoir, since it finds Lawson in places around the world — among them Amsterdam, Venice, Egypt, and (perhaps in the part I thought was most fascinating) Portugal. But it’s also a memoir about race and racism, about community, about disability, about sex, about gender and gender expression … it’s dense with ideas, as well as full of those beautiful sentences. Lawson has a certainty, a way of asserting how the world works, that sometimes made me flinch and then examine my own flinching, which I think is perfectly appropriate and within the book’s intent (although I think for the most part, it is not a book where my flinching or not flinching at it would be of any interest to the author, very understandably).

A couple of books in progress and not yet finished:

• Sheila Heti has a book coming out called Alphabetical Diaries (February 6), which you might have seen a version of as a project for The New York Times.

• The aforementioned Martyr!, which I already love. (Libro.fm)

• Fourteen Days, a collaborative novel from the Authors Guild (February 6)

31 Days

Sweaty me.

At some point in about eighth grade, they stopped making me run. 

I realize now that my gym teacher, a seemingly gruff but deeply compassionate woman of few words, was ahead of her time compared to many of her peers in realizing that any physical benefits of making me join in runs around the athletic fields -- I was always agonizingly slow, always last, always miserably embarrassed -- were more than countered by what it was doing to me as a person, going out there every time and feeling so brutally exposed. And she stopped making me do it. Honestly, it was too late for some of the damage she was trying to avoid, but I don't fault her for that. This was the mid-'80s. If the way we deal with kids and weight sucks now, it sucked even more then.

It was somewhere around this same time that, as I lagged behind on a class hike, a kind-ish teacher I barely knew hung back with me and broached the subject, oh so very gently, that maybe, maybe, it would be good if I lost a little bit of weight. Maybe, I assume she thought, it had not occurred to me. I wasn't old enough to think to myself "OMG, this bitch," which is a good thing, but that's kind of what it makes me think now.

I was probably thirteen or so when all this happened, at a predictable high point of fragility around self-image and self-definition. My doctor had been poking my belly disapprovingly on and off since I was about ... six or seven. It is safe to say that yes, it had occurred to me. I cannot remember, honestly, whether this happened before or after I went to the doctor under my own power when I was about this age to tell him I wanted to lose weight -- something I now recognize as an extraordinary act of will, only to have him roll his eyes and hand me a pamphlet that he told me really "said it all": It was called Are you really serious about losing weight?

I would continue to unpack all this, but I cannot even type about it without crying -- like 40 years later, people! -- so suffice it to say: this is the story. It sucked so much.

TL; DR: On and off, gained weight and lost weight, was put on the Oprah shakes when I was 18 and successfully did not put a bite of food in my mouth for 12 weeks (including my birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) -- look, I've told some of this story before and I don't need to repeat it, because it's actually not the point. I am going to give myself permission to stop crying. 

The point is that by the time I bought a Peloton bike during the pandemic, I had good reason not feel that my odds of incorporating it into my life successfully were particularly high. It took me a long time to figure out that this was not laziness or anything like that; it was that I had formed a concept of my physical self that was suffused with feelings of failure, going back to that kid who had to be eventually excused from running (which, by the way, I still absolutely think was the right thing to do).* Nobody runs enthusiastically toward the opportunity to feel terrible, no matter how much it’s supposed to benefit them. Again: I can’t fault anybody for that, including myself.

Interestingly, though I struggled to get into a groove, the bike kinda worked for me. I got pretty into classes with former monk Sam Yo, who I think of as The Calmest Man In Fitness. By early 2022, I was on a little bit of a roll -- I even talked about Peloton culture on the podcast, which is the kind of thing I never, never, never would have envisioned myself doing. My knees suck (anybody who tells you walking or running are suitable first steps for everyone is lying, do not believe it, do not let them tell it to you, it is a hazardous, shitty, fiction), but this actually made them feel better -- I was later told it can lubricate the joints and get fluid out of them. A trip to my doctor suggested that at least some things were trending in a good direction. 

Then, on Oscar night, my basement (where the bike was) flooded. Fortunately, the bike itself wasn't damaged, but the disaster was such that the entire basement was torn down to the studs (at least the bottom two feet of the studs), the flooring was torn out, and everything that was down there simply wound up wherever the guys who cleaned the basement could fit it, which meant the bike was just shoved in a corner. Could I have moved everything around, pulled it out, ridden it on the concrete floor? Oh, of course. But not only was that a big job at that point, but bringing it upstairs would have required at least one other person, and using it down there meant that I wouldn't have been working out in a basement, but in a cement cellar. The roll was over. It had been promising, but not yet resilient.

It took months to get the basement disaster resolved, between the cleanup, the deciding what I wanted to do, the meetings with the contractor, the rebuilding, the waiting, the rebuilding, the waiting, and the rebuilding some more. Once I had access to that basement again, I tried to get that roll back, but it was tough going. 

So, when January rolled around, I thought -- well, hell, let's try something I have never done before in all my life. Let's try every day. I joined a Peloton challenge where you take a class every single day. Not a cycling class every day (both my general self and particularly my behind would not have been either willing or able to do that), but some class. A strength class, a stretching class -- they even have five-minute meditations, and part of me thought, "I can do this, because if I ever need to just do a five-minute meditation, I can." So -- I dove in. And now I’m at the end of the month, and I actually did it. And along the way, I learned some things. 

“Every day” is actually easier for me.

When you start trying to be more active, it can be very comforting to hear that you don't have to do it absolutely every day. Two or three days a week, my doctor told me about the bike. And a couple of the other days, maybe see if you can fit in a strength thing or a stretch. 

Here's the thing: Many of us are, I believe, at least ten percent our teenage selves, peering out through our adult eyes, seeing what we get to do, what we get to not do, what we got to stop doing. Thank goodness I don't have to do math problems anymore, thank goodness I don't have to run in front of people anymore, thank goodness I don't have to get report cards anymore. And for me, the idea of exercise -- literally, I hate that word, I hate it, I never use it if I can think of another one -- has long activated in my bones a level of dread that I long associated with laziness but now associate with that history of self-defined failure. It's better just not to have a conversation with myself every day about whether I'm going to take a class or not. It's better just not to dive into the "Do I have to? Can I take the day off?" Every day is easier. Not putting myself through that daily choice, knowing how loaded it is for me, is easier.

The biggest modification is not listening to people who are trying to help. 

Lots of people know about "modifying" exercises you see in videos, or you see demonstrated, or whatever. Not everybody can do planks, man -- that's just the way the world is. So you modify it, you make it easier, sometimes with a suggestion from the instructor but sometimes just ... not. With cycling, this often involves the instructor yelling out that you're supposed to pedal at a particular cadence (this is how fast your feet are going) and resistance (this is how hard you make it to pedal), and you being like, "That's a nice idea, but my heart would explode, so I will not be doing that." I always wear a heart rate monitor when I'm cycling, so I always know whether I'm pushing my luck. There is a point beyond which I do not go. 

But the more classes I took, the more I realized that no modification meant more for my particular ... I think people say "fitness journey" ... than ignoring well-meaning instructors who were just frankly not talking to me. 

Here's what I mean: yesterday, as I write this, I did a 45-minute cycling class with an instructor who kept stressing that she knew you wanted to go harder than we were going, but she wanted you to restrain yourself, because you have to understand that there's value in not going all-out all the time. There's value in building your endurance. Resist that urge to go above the level she was calling for! Resist! 

Meanwhile, I was literally dripping sweat onto the bike mat and chanting one of the things that comes up occasionally when I am feeling spirited during class: "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you." (You want to kind of do it to the rhythm of the bike. It feels great.)

Look, some instructors are teaching their classes with the knowledge that a lot of the people who take Peloton classes are older, or heavier, or beginners, or not in the physical shape they wish they were. They are encouraging, they tell you that you can modify if you need to. Others are pretty fixated on the idea that they are teaching a room full of Gym People who show up to have their asses kicked, to yell "RAR!", and to go very hard and then drink 15 raw eggs or whatever. (This instructor was, among other things, instructing people to pedal for about two and a half minutes at a suggested cadence of 120, and if you have ever ridden a spin bike, you know that that's ... I mean, she could seemingly do it, but it's pretty hardcore for a cycling situation in which you are not being chased by a bear or trying to take off into the sky so that the government doesn’t catch the alien you are hiding in your bicycle basket.) 

Not going 120 was easy. Not listening to her go on about how much she knew we wanted to go beyond what she was calling for during other parts of the ride? That was harder. People who want that are entitled to have that, of course — some people really super love that kind of “tough love” “no excuses” approach. (Although some of the instructors occasionally say something like “I wouldn’t be telling you to do this if you couldn’t do it,” which is, like, terrible and something they should not do, but anyway.) The most important modification for me, as it turned out, was ignoring the wrong kinds of "encouragement." Tuning it out, even if I had to swear at them to do it, was everything.

My knees are still a mystery. 

When I started this month, anything that involved starting on your hands and knees (which is a LOT of bodyweight exercises, meaning ones that don't involve free weights) made my knees uncomfortable, even with good padding under me. I wasn't sure it was ever going to get any better, but it did. It's still something I watch out for -- if you leave me there too long, I will modify and try something else -- but it's a lot better than it was. However! I have to be very careful about things that feel okay at the time, but cause problems later. I did a barre class that involved a lot of bending your knees in "second position," and the next day was the worst my knees felt all month, even though at the time, it seemed okay. This is just ... learning. And narrowing down options, and making adjustments. 

Beware community.

I don't mean to discount the importance of support; support rules. But if you are going to feel unseen by the instructors, you can find yourself far more unseen by other people, all of whom have their own relationships with their bodies that are just as complicated as yours. 

I wound up in a Peloton online community where a guy posted a picture of his screen from his workout in what Peloton refers to as "power zones," which is a system where you essentially determine how hard you have to work (in terms of "output," which is a combination of cadence and resistance) to be in your own personal "level 1," "level 2," and so forth, up to a level 7. Obviously, if you are a super athlete, your "level 2" will be at a higher output than mine, and so on. It's actually a system that's really good for beginners in some ways, because if self-modifies -- instead of giving you a cadence and resistance, the instructor gives you a zone. Instead of telling you what to do, they tell you how hard to work. 

But it's very much treated like a training program to improve "performance," which means that in any given power zone discussion, you will meet both people like me who like it because it's self-modifying and people who like it because they are trying to become super-athletes and they use it to push themselves as hard as possible. 

Anyway, this guy posted a picture of his screen after his workout, basically to show something about the fact that he finished it, something like that. And this other dude literally put his fingers to the keyboard and typed something like "Cadence [x] and resistance [y] and you were in your zone 3?" And then he put two laughing emojis. In other words, this man chose to shame another person for being in inadequate shape because that person exposed that he was trying to work out. 

It's just important to keep in mind that "supportive" communities are just ... more of the internet. They can be full of cruelty (not to mention all the people who humblebrag about how they can't believe "all" they did today was, like, 30 miles with a 200-pound barbell on their shoulders, knowing exactly what they’re doing). If you expect people in a fitness forum to be consistently encouraging to anyone who's making the effort, you won't find that. And if stumbling on something like that is going to activate all your shame beasties, it's not worth it. 

The only thing I can do is the thing itself. 

I don't know whether any of you have gotten to this point and are like, "Did you lose any weight?????" I fought that impulse myself all month long, which I come by honestly, given that I literally cannot remember a day of my life when that wasn't on my mind. 

The answer is ... maybe a little? Not a lot. I didn't expect to (I focused on activity and not eating in this particular phase of things), and I didn't. I ate about the same, burned a lot of extra calories, and lost ... almost nothing. 

People go back and forth about why this is -- there are people who tell you you're building muscle, which is heavy, but I've seen pretty persuasive evidence that nothing I'm doing would be building muscle at that level. I've seen people say becoming more active leads to inflammation at first, and therefore to retaining fluid. I've seen people say when you use your muscles (especially big ones like the ones in your legs), they hold more water. There are people who shrug and say that part is about food, not activity.

Here's the thing: I don't care. I can't care. If I'm going to do a thing, I have to do the thing, and then doing the thing I decided to do has to be the measure of success. If I hit all these 31 days, then I did the thing I said I was going to do. You can’t say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and take that step and then say to yourself, “But what did that step actually accomplish so far?”

The disadvantage of this, of course, is that you don't get a thing to point at beyond the thing itself. When I have tracked food and done serious calorie restriction and been hungry and grumpy, at least at the end I have been able to point at the scale and tell myself, "SEE?" Or, of course, not. If I had a full science lab, I could measure things that might show some kind of change after a month, but they also might not. I certainly feel like I can do more than I could a month ago, but can I prove it? I can't easily, not after a month. 

Here's what I do have: Never in my life have I devoted myself to some kind of activity every day for a month. Think of that whatever you will -- lots and lots and lots of people have done that many times, for many months, for years, I get it, I admire you, I credit you.. But I am more than 50 years old, and for me? Never. Never ever. And even more than that, I’ve never mostly liked doing it, mostly felt comfortable with it, mostly felt like myself doing it.

There's a reason I'm writing all this before the final workout of the month, which is that ... these are things I learned from doing it, not finishing it. Even if a monster attacked my city and I could not do the last one, I would have learned all these things. And I wanted to write them down before I forget them. That kid who finally got to stop running deserves to know she got on the bike.

*For a long time, I thought people who were embarrassed in gym class were uniquely traumatized by it, but I now realize that people who struggled with math or languages or just the feeling of being called on in class (all things that were fine with me) had similar experiences, with the only difference being that if you hated math, you could sort of decide not to pursue math as an adult. It's hard to decide to not pursue anything that will expose to other people that you are slow or get tired easily.