Rachel Yoder's novel Nightbitch: I love the title. How I hesitated before ordering it through the interlibrary loan system. On the cover, a snarling sleek dog stands on a rumpled chaise lounge, blue velvet curtains pulled to one side, revealing a rose-flecked green wallpaper. Elegant yet feral. I think of it as a romance unlike any other: a woman—mother, wife, artist—falling in love with her future self. Becoming her own hero, the magical fulfilment of her most savage fantasies. Now I think of that woman I read about in the New York Post, caught nursing a hairless cat on an airplane: what was she really nursing? What pressures lead to that moment? What long-forgotten myth was she recreating?

On the day of the winter solstice I read Tove Jansson's Moominland Midwinter. I loved the introduction to Little My: "She squeezed a snowball and hit the squirrel on the head with her first throw. And then Little My stepped out from the cave to take possession of the winter." Although Little My has the form and bearing of a very determined little girl, she hibernates with her sister in a cave. She's not quite animal, not quite human, completely self-assured in an almost malicious way, although charming because of her admirable confidence.

What's winter? What shelters "the things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring": "Everything's that a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don't fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything's quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep--then they appear." I think there's a part of me that's one of those things.

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Joan Didion, bell hooks, Eve Babitz. All dead within the last week or so. Gone: all those ways, not just of writing, but of being and thinking and feeling in the world. The older you get, the more you read, the more complex reality is revealed to you: the more to mourn.

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"We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all." — Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

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