A Year in Reading: When the Going Gets Tough
December 10, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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I’ve been reading Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, by Margaret Atwood. She mentions something that I can relate to as I write this letter: November is the gloomiest month. Not that I need a reminder: It’s the pit of fall, before seasonal celebrations brighten the dark, the time of year when light is scant and the sky is low and gray. This season, somehow, feels right for the stories I loved most this year. Like my sky, they’re heavy. But amid trial and trauma—or perhaps even despite them—many of these stories dare to hope. There’s a sense of resilience among them that’s stuck with me and given me strength this past year.
Back in July, Aaron Parsley wrote “The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River.” for Texas Monthly. Parsley reports from Kerr County, where in the early hours of July 4, 2025, a flash flood on the Guadalupe River lifted his family’s cottage off its foundation and tore it apart, with him and six relatives asleep inside. “The gravity of our situation didn’t sink in right away, but the facts were clear,” he writes. “We were surrounded by fast-moving floodwater, and we had no way of escaping to higher ground.” His first-person account is intense and heart-wrenching. It’s a difficult but necessary read, one that will make you want to grab and hug your loved ones.
Then, more recently, also under the category of stories I’ll never forget, is “Heavy Metal is Healing Teens on the Blackfeet Nation” by B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster at High Country News. Oaster covers a teacher-made heavy metal music course at the reserve’s alternative high school, one that creates deep community among the students, almost all of whom have been affected by the suicide of a loved one. “Heavy music teaches us things such as we’re not alone; when life is dark, we do something about it,” says teacher Charlie Speicher. “We’re not just a prisoner to that darkness. But also that our risk fluctuates, that our misery isn’t gonna last forever. There are ways through it.” While Oaster’s story starts out with despair, it ends on a loud, ringing note of hope, something I also found in Jeannette Cooperman’s moving piece for The Common Reader, “My Friend Chooses How and When to Die.” Ann Mandelstamm was in her mid-80s when she made the decision to complete her own life by choosing an assisted death. As Cooperman grapples with her friend’s choice and grieves for her, she begins to understand that Mandelstamm didn’t reject life, she chose to celebrate her full life by ending it with dignity, on her terms. Agency is at the heart of Mandelstamm’s story and it takes different forms in the final two stories I want to highlight.
In “The Last Face Death Row Inmates See,” for Rolling Stone, Brenna Ehrlich profiles the Rev. Jeff Hood, a Catholic priest committed to helping condemned men find redemption, regardless of what they’ve done in life. Ehrlich’s prose is bold and animated, just like her main character: “A foulmouthed firebrand who doesn’t really care if the men he works with are innocent or not, Hood thinks all people are worthy of love and redemption, the death penalty is evil, and those men tunneling their way into the guts of Big Mac to administer the needle are just as murderous as some of the folks they’re set to kill.” This is a visceral account of someone who practices true compassion and forgiveness, choosing to hold eye contact with even those who have committed heinous crimes.
Supporting humans in their darkest hour is probably the greatest gift one can give another. I’m reminded of “In Defense of Despair” by Hanif Abdurraqib for The New Yorker. Abdurraqib relates being part of a group for people who have gone through periods of wanting to die. There, dark humor finds community and each meeting opens with a single question, one infused with a kind of optimism: “What is keeping you alive today?” For Abdurraqib, that day, it was the quality of sunlight through his window and his beloved dog, Wendy, who inspired him to keep going. We’ve all experienced deep pain and also expansive joy. We’re beautiful messes, every one of us.
I recall all these pieces alongside a short essay by Devin Kelly over at Ordinary Plots, a thoughtful newsletter where he dives deep into a single poem each week. Here, he reflects on “Colic,” a poem by Margaret Draft in which the speaker recounts a gravely ill horse. Says Kelly: “To be moved, I would say, to be moved at all, whether to joy or sorrow, whether to some unshakeable sadness or some happiness that no made thing could contain—is there anything better?” He goes one to note: “To make space in this world is an act of great care . . . You make the space of your heart through the open door of your ears. You hollow out yourself, sometimes, to make room for someone else.”
I thought of his words as I wondered whether my list of stories was simply too much: too heavy, too dark, too emotional, enough to make some turn away. But sharing them is worth the risk. Few experiences are more human than to be moved to tears of joy, of anger, of sorrow—small, private offerings for people you do not know, nor will ever meet.
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/10/hope-in-dark-times/
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