What happens when you return to the books that shaped you?
My Year of Rereading is my literary experiment in nostalgia, memory and change. For an entire year (2024), I revisited the novels that lit up my twenties and early thirties—works like The Secret History, The World According to Garp, Tully, The Bone People, Anna Karenina, The Basketball Diaries, Prozac Nation and The Corrections—chosen from thirty years of reading lists I’d kept in the back of my diaries.
Part memoir, part literary criticism, the project asks:
- Do the books that once defined us still hold up?
- How does rereading through the lens of age, motherhood and authorship alter our response?
- What do these shifts reveal about literature, and about ourselves?
The project coincided with a period of chronic back pain, and this too shaped my reading: slowing me down, sharpening my awareness of time and of how books can both anchor and transport us. Each reread became a conversation about the book and a reckoning with my younger and present selves. The project is as much about books as it is about the passage of time: how we grow, what we carry, and the stories that stay with us.
My Year of Rereading is a love letter to reading, and to the way books accompany us through life.
