📚 Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel: If you could travel in time to any point, when would you visit? This question is central to Aja Gabel’s latest novel (which I’ve been eagerly awaiting since her debut, The Ensemble) in which a quantum physicist is invited to a work on a secret time travel project that could bring him back to the child he had with his first wife, who died when she was four-years-old. As much about a marriage as it is about deeper, existential questions.

💿 ‘Everybody Scream’ by Florence and the Machine: When Florence Welch experienced a deeply painful ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage while touring for her last album, she channeled her pain into her art that feels cinematic and feral in its catharsis, “I crawled up from under the earth/ broken nails and coughing dirt.”

📺 “I Love L.A.” on HBO: Like the title of this new show about twenty-somethings living in Los Angeles, I love L.A. My hometown will always be a city that feels absurd, yet beautiful and endlessly fascinating, a range that’s captured in this new series by Rachel Sennott (‘Bottoms’ and ‘Shiva Baby’). Reminds me of a West Coast “Girls,” for the next generation.

We were in the middle of dinner, parked in the red dirt outside Canyonlands National Park, when I told my boyfriend we needed to talk.

Though I initiated the conversation, it felt inevitable that one of us would. After months of bickering, with brief reprieves thanks to an effective couples therapist and genuine effort on both our parts, we had spent most of our road trip locked in disagreement. Like much of our time together, it had been beautiful and meaningful, but felt hard in a way that finally no longer felt sustainable.

“You want to break up,” he said. I think I do, I replied.

That night, we talked for hours while a thunderstorm raged outside the van, both of us expressing relief and grief at the split, as a single question looped in my mind: What happens now?

Issue #219: My Recent Breakup and the Magic…

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