It may be very un-Internet of me to say, but I had a good 2022. (Personally, that is — the state of the world as a whole remains a bit of dumpster fire.) I traveled quite a lot, started my PhD, was published in The Guardian and Document’s Winter print issue, and moved to my dream apartment in Toronto. It was a year of growth and clarification, of stepping out on my own a bit more and figuring out what my *real adult life* is actually going to look like.
In this time, I found great solace in words and images, as I always have. The following marks one-year of No Outlet, and brings us back to where I started: a year in review/list of favourites. I’ve paired things down a little bit in order to allow for more description, but the same rules apply—everything on the list here was in someway new to me, so no re-reads or re-watches are included. There are also plenty of texts from 2022 that I haven’t got to yet—particularly films—and so these rankings are in many ways provisional.
I hope that some of these might catch your eye and bring you something new and generous in 2023, as they did for me in 2022.
The Best Books
Read in 2022
Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf, Sina Queyras: Queyras writes of Virginia Woolf alongside their own emergence as a writer and gender nonconforming queer person. Their prose is absolutely exquisite and echoes the best of Woolf with a contemporary twist, alive to all of the ways in which she enchants, provokes, and moves the mind and body.
Agatha of Little Neon, Clare Luchette: I found this at McNally Jackson in August and was immediately hooked by the setting—a convent in post-2008 Buffalo. Luchette has many shades of Miriam Toews in their writing: this novel is often funny and wry, highly observant, and shot through with moments of breathtaking beauty and emotion.
Suite for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Léger: Recently translated from the original French, Léger explores what little is known about the actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden, known for her low-budget 1970s masterpiece Wanda. Léger manages to insightfully capture what makes Wanda so captivating while braiding in a haunting story of the American Dream, authorship, and domestic violence.
Matrix, Lauren Groff: More nuns, this time in 12th-century France. Groff captures the affordances and difficulties of isolation as 17-year-old Marie takes hold of a convent and turns it into an isolated matriarchal empire—it’s a complex examination of power, desire, and community.
Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au: This fall, I purchased a t-shirt from Type Books emblazoned with the phrase “Plotless Fiction.” This penchant is well encapsulated by Au’s novella, in which she simply reflects on a trip to Japan with her emotionally-distanced mother; her portrait of routines, missed connections, and memory is so vivid.
Released in 2022
Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf, Sina Queyras: See above
Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au: See above
Happy Hour, Marlowe Granados: This is neck-and-neck with Au for me—in fact, I was surprised by how much I loved this, since people had been describing it to me as a ‘fun, light read.’ It was fun, but it’s also an incredibly smart reading of social codes, class, and gender, all set amid the early-2000s New York party scene.
Pure Colour, Sheila Heti: I wrote more about this here, since I read it a while ago now, but the jist is that it’s a fascinating meditation on aesthetics. Also, grief.
Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson: Jefferson’s second memoir takes apart the body and puts it back together; what fascinated and resonated with me the most was her account of coming-of-age in terms of witnessing exemplary bodies and figuring out whose she could and could not grow to inherit.
Ugly Freedoms, Elisabeth R. Anker: I reviewed this new book on the American disavowal of interdependence for TBD*: Journal of Interdisciplinary Theory.
Utopia, Heidi Sopinka: I interviewed Sopinka about her novel on 70s feminist art for AnOther.
Either/Or, Elif Batuman: A sequel to the tremendous (and so funny) auto-fictional novel The Idiot, but not as tight; I plan on revisiting this for a paper in 2023.
The Choreography of Everyday Life, Annie-B Parson: A whimsical, auto-theoretical work on the ways in which bodies arrange themselves across both dance and life—some truly gorgeous sentences that I hope to quote in future work.
Abolition. Feminism. Now., Angela Davis, Gina Dent, et al.: A tour through the work of abolitionist feminist organisations over the past couple of decades written by some of the most important activists of our time. The work that they describe is urgently needed, and the charts/checklists/best practices in the appendix are probably its greatest asset.
The Best Films
Watched in 2022
Bright Star, Jane Campion: For the most part, I am not a Campion fan, but this film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne is exceptional. It’s exactly the type of period film that I love—a bit mucky, with lots of muted cottons, empire waists, wildflowers, and silence.
Empire Records, Allan Moyle: On an incredibly different note, I do love an ensemble comedy about people doing nothing, and this cult-classic about a 90s record shop fits the bill. Bonus points because Moyle also directed New Waterford Girl, which was number one on my list last year (I also consider it the greatest Canadian film of all time).
The Fits, Anna Rose Holmer: A quietly searing low-budget indie about a dance team at a community center in Cincinnati as they are overwhelmed by mass psychogenic illness. It’s incredibly layered, patient, and features an absolutely unforgettable ending.
Shithouse, Cooper Raiff: Despite the title, this is not a raunchy frat film, but rather, a sweet one about a college freshman who struggles to make friends at what is supposed to be the ‘best time of his life.’ It’s remarkably well-written and funny too—a great, unpretentious comfort film.
The Addams Family and Addams Family Values, Barry Sonnenfeld: I see their house in my future…
Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta: This account of the 1970s skateboarding scene in Venice Beach is easily the coolest documentary I’ve ever seen. I hope in my second life that I come back as a skateboarder.
Released in 2022
The Fabelmans, Steven Speilberg: If you told me in January that a Speilberg film would be my number one of the year, I would have laughed! But this was truly a delight, a riveting account of a child becoming both an adult and an artist, a film that is incredibly alive to the world and sensitive to its complex, yearning, struggling protagonists. Michelle Williams is tremendously good as Speilberg’s mother. The eye is a camera.
Aftersun, Charlotte Wells: I just wrote about this in my last edition, so I won’t go on about it too much except to say that this is a film theorist’s dream. I wasn’t as emotionally transformed as others seem to have been by this film, but I did think about it for days. It felt special and rare and unlike anything else I saw this year.
Saint Omer, Alice Diop: Also ‘special’ and ‘rare’ is this courtroom drama that is not a courtroom drama. Diop, formerly a documentarian, explores the case of a young immigrant mother who is accused of drowning her child, and writes a story that shows how unlikely lives are linked together, making it harder and harder to form a definitive sense of justice, morality, or the truth.
The Eternal Daughter, Joanna Hogg: I delight in films that have dialogue that doesn’t sound like dialogue, and this is something that Hogg is so incredibly good at writing. Here, Tilda Swinton plays both an elderly mother and her child, and her performance is so natural, so habitual, that I forgot I was watching a performance at all—let alone two of them. Hogg plunges us into the atmosphere of an isolated, foggy hotel in rural England, and I did not want to leave it.
Official Competition, Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn: It’s rare in Toronto to be a part of an audience that is actually lively or expressive, so it’s a testament to this film that when I saw it at the Lightbox this summer, people were laughing and gasping aloud throughout the runtime. A satire on art film and method acting with delicious twists and turns, Official Competition is worth seeking out if you can.
Happy New Year!