I feel like I’m a bit young to be reading about women having midlife crises, but I took a chance on it, primarily because I trusted my friend who recommended it, who happens to be several years younger than me. I found this book completely fascinating and far too relatable. In separate chapters, Calhoun examines many of these issues individually, like finding work, caregiving, job instability, money panic, choosing a single life, or a childless life, or not choosing to be single and childless yet finding that's your reality, and then divorce, perimenopause, the comparison trap—if you're getting the picture, you can see it's not easy stuff. It was a lot of information, and a lot of it was pretty depressing, but it was also engrossing, and unexpectedly reassuring. I laughed the laugh of recognition when Calhoun writes, "Oddly, knowing that I have every reason in the world to be freaking out has made me much more relaxed."

Regular readers know I adore sagas of complicated families. This new nonfiction work from Why We Can't Sleep author Ada Calhoun delivers all that and more. Thanks to the book's pre-release publicity, I discovered Calhoun is the daughter of art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who I've been quoting for YEARS (especially in MMD Book Club) about his approach to works that aren't "immediately hospitable." Calhoun's new genre-bending book is a memoir-ish look at their complex relationship—and also a profile-of-sorts about poet Frank O'Hara. I couldn't resist, devoured it in 36 hours, and put it straight on my Best of the Year list. By the time I closed the last page I'd googled a hundred things about NYC history and requested ten books from my local library. Fascinating, devastating, vexing, illuminating. Heads up for a handful of content warnings that aren't obvious from the publisher's description or reviews.

I blew through this essay collection on marriage, relationships, infidelity, divorce, and personal growth that came into being because of her viral Modern Love column, and made a hundred highlights along the way. This book would have horrified me when I was younger, but Will and I celebrated our 22nd anniversary this year: we're hardly newlyweds. To give you a taste: "'The first twenty years [of marriage] are the hardest,' an older woman once told me. At the time I thought she was joking. She was not." Or this: "Even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall." I loved it.