MAY OBSESSIONS DROP
A MONTHLY ROUND-UP : Dear Monica Lewinsky; HACKS; & more!
Oh girlina, I can’t believe another month has come and gone!
First: Thank you to everyone who sent me love about my book announcement! It is such a caffeinating experience to pop out of hiding after two point five years of writing this thang and feel the love from friends and strangers alike. I am just chuffed!
Ok, May was crazy folx. Let’s get into it.
ONCE AGAIN WE START W/ BOOKS.
Just one book I wanna proselytize this month:
DEAR MONICA LEWINSKY by Julia Langbein!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is a joy. A woman discovers a diary from 1998 wherein she, as a college student, wrote despairingly about, you guessed it, Monica Lewinsky. Now in a moment of crisis, she begs for forgiveness from Monica and— read the book.
It’s laugh out loud funny with prose so good it made me angry. It’s about being haunted by the past, reckoning with those who hurt us and the stories we wrote about ourselves during that time in life when we’re most impressionable but think we’re impenetrable. Meditations on consent, a campus novel set abroad (!), with an envelope story and incredibly well-rendered characters. Medieval religious history, sex, longing, a well written gay friend, I LOVED IT.
This is popping right into my best of 2026 list, which so far contains: SKY DADDY by Kate Folk, GLORIOUS EXPLOITS by Ferida Lennon, and EDITH HOLLER by Edward Carey. Let’s hear it for these weird sad-funny crazy well-written books!!
Also, the special non-fic shout out this month goes to LONDON FALLING by Patrick Radden Keefe. I listened to the audiobook, and feel like it stands toe-to-toe with some of our greatest modern nonfiction masterpieces like CHAOS and COMMON GROUND. Insanely well researched, this is true crime given cultural and historical context with heart, and fantastically written.
OK now TV oh my God TV:
I am fresh off that finale of HACKS and I am not well, not well at all. GOOD JOB GUYS. I wept. I will miss Ava and Deborah so much!! The final minutes of that finale will stay with me forever: just such a full delivery of the promise of the premise, all these years later, with such cinematic panache AS ALWAYS—and for a comedy no less! Comedies should look cinematic and beautiful, too!!
And I’m still with you, WIDOW’S BAY !! THAT TI WEST / BETTY GILPIN EPISODE. I feel like Widow’s Bay is doing everything we all want to be doing and I’m like you go girl; I’m over here trying to pitch my weird little moody spooky-funny shows and period pieces and you’re just living your best little life, and for this I’m glad/jealous/given hope!
Plz let me know in the comments: What did you read/watch/obsess over this month? Any book recs based on my 2026 Q1+2 Mt. Rushmore of reads?
LMK:
love,
Dan
omg the Hacks finale was brutal! i loved it, gonna miss them so much. also, this is the second time this week that someone recommended dear monica lewinsky so i think that's gonna be my next audiobook :)
I watched “Tracks” based on the book. True story about Robyn Davidson who walked 2,000 miles in the Australian desert in 1977 with 4 camels and her beloved dog named Diggity (love). It was so good! Adam driver is the photographer who trails her, and, of course, they become romantic. His photos and her written account were in National Geographic. I won’t spoil it, but parts had me in tears. —A