Year in review 2024

The annual collection of favourites

Images by Winnie Wang, 2024

Literature

In the spring, I found that I had developed a real hunger for criticism after nine months of reading 20th-century American fiction for my PhD fields exams. I dove into Letters to Gwen John, a tender epistolary auto/biography by the painter Celia Paul; I started it at the end of my trip to London, reading about her house on Russell Square while sitting around the corner in Caffè Tropea. I followed this with Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, a memoir of divorce and reinvention, of gendered labour and artistry. More recently, I’ve worked through Joshua Rivkin’s Chalk, his poetic biography of Cy Twombly, my favourite painter. The diction with which Rivkin captures Twombly’s aesthetic impact is tremendous and he offers a real lesson in bucking generic conventions and writing toward the holes in the archive.

Levy’s divorce/art book twinned nicely with what was arguably the book of the year for my circle of friends: All Fours by Miranda July. What a novel! I love how this meant something different to everyone I know: for some, it is the great menopause novel, for others a manifesto about friendship, and for me, a striking, honest, uncompromising portrait of the body and its unpredictable, total strangeness, as well as a treatise on living as an art.

I’ve already written about the Paul and July books (the latter half of 2024 has not yielded many great new finds), and so I would be remiss if I didn’t also revisit Isabella Hammad’s unforgettable Enter Ghost. This was probably my ‘top’ read of the year, if I had to choose just one. Enter Ghost follows a British-Palestinian actress who returns to Haifa and falls in with a crew of actors and activists planning to stage Hamlet in the West Bank. What ensues is a subtle, searing investigation of what it means to ‘act’, to be prevented from action, to make sacrifices, to ‘perform’ challenges to power—all major episodes from Hamlet that are themselves seen anew in the context of Israeli occupation and decades of violence.

To that end, although I don’t tend to follow theatre very closely, I did read two plays: Annie Baker’s The Flick (touching but ultimately not as impressive as I’d hoped) and Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet (utterly formidable! Oh man!). I also saw the stage adaptation of Bluets starring Emma D’Arcy, Ben Wishaw, and Kayla Meikle at the Royal Court Theatre in London—as I wrote then, the play was interesting but not without bumps.

Film/TV

There are interesting affinities between the Hammad novel and a film I watched by Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir, When I Saw You (2012), which follows a young boy living in a Jordanian refugee camp who decides to walk back to Palestine during the Six-Day War of 1967. This film inhabits the prolonged agony and hope of anticipation, again focalizing attrition more than action, much like Hammad does in her re-reading of Hamlet. Its final shot poignantly telegraphs freedom’s perpetual delay. It was an honour to be in the presence of Jacir for the screening, whose stories about the film affirmed that it is an overlooked masterpiece.

Of new films released in 2024, my favourites (so far, I am still catching up) were Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera and Zia Anger’s My First Film. Both filmmakers are thinking about practices of return, of touching the past in ways that are so seductive but ultimately misguided; healing comes through a kind of loving and visually rapturous, epiphanic acceptance. They also both do fantastic things with editing, knitting together time and space playfully while never departing the grounds of their films (though Rohrwacher’s is more squarely fictional than Anger’s autofiction). Of note in particular: Rohrwacher’s loving attention to Italian topography and the performance she brings out from Josh O’Connor, and Anger’s precise rendering of femininity, power, creativity, and abortion.

I also loved Seeking Mavis Beacon, which shares many of the stylistic and autobiographical inflections of My First Film; filmmakers Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross expertly use every facet of the screen available to craft a poetic homage to Black, queer, feminist historiography.

Style

During COVID lockdown, I ordered clothes that I have more recently come to realize simply were not suited to my real life or that do not make me feel comfortable. Though I am known to friends as someone who loves cute things (I am ringing in 2025 by picking up my rescue puppy!), I do not in fact want to be cute myself, and so I spent a lot of time purging pastels, frumpy cardigans, and delicate, girly tops and dresses that I never felt good in. I used a combination of spreadsheets, the Indyx app, and Alison Bornstein’s three-word method to refine my wardrobe and feel more confident in styling the clothes I already had.

This process of refining has also helped me make smarter choices about what I consume. My best purchase was likely an oversized men’s vintage leather jacket that I thrifted near Landsdowne station. This jacket has the perfect slouchy fit, lots of interior pockets, and is warm enough to wear even in below zero winter weather. I love the tough contrast it adds to clothes that are otherwise too sweet or simple. It reminds me of the jackets that I saw French girls wearing near the Sorbonne this spring.

According to Indyx, my other most worn items were my Paris Review baseball cap, my black square-toe loafers (everyone has gone back to round toes, but I think the toes of a shoe should always be decisive—square, pointed, or at least chunky), and my Etsy ribbon earrings (unfortunately, I lost one just before Christmas and they don’t make the same pair anymore). I invested in two special pieces from Damson Madder when I was in London, and I’m also wearing my COS black poncho/wrap quite a lot to add drama to outfits and stay warm.

I found myself looking at lots of photos of Suki Waterhouse and Taylor Russell for inspiration this year. The common thread between them is a mix of boyishness and understated glamour, adding something like vintage sunglasses or a yé-yé-inspired headband to an otherwise casual outfit. Great denim, statement jackets, chic hair, fluid or roomy silhouettes: these are the ingredients I took from them to make a quintessential 2024 Tia outfit. (Not pictured above then are lots of days in barrel-legged jeans, massive button-ups or plain t-shirts, glasses, and a jazzy coat).

Other reading

Sophie Lewis, “TERF Island” (on enemies inside the feminist camp) for Lux

Grace Byron, “Perfect Little Baby” (on the U.S. election) for LA Review of Books

Namwali Serpell, “Critical Navel-Gazing” (on criticism) for Yale Review

Gareth Fearon, “Liberalism Without Accountability” (on higher education’s campaign against student protests) for London Review of Books

Lauren Fadiman, “The Wimple Life” (on the decline of the American nun) for The Baffler

Ali Winston, “Why far-right groups are disrupting US campus protests” (on fascists organizing for xenophobia and anti-intellectualism) for The Guardian

Sarah Stillman, “Do Children Have a Right to Hug Their Parents?” (on the for-profit business of parental visitation in U.S. prisons) for The New Yorker

Moeko Fujii, “The Eyes of Lacey” (on Janet Planet) for The Baffler

Ban Tarnoff, “Ultra Hardcore” (on the masculinity of Elon Musk) for The New York Review of Books

Moira Donegan and Merve Emre, “A Gender Emergency” (on close-reading the right’s anti-gender mobilizations) for The New York Review of Books

Events, activities, places

My favourite shows were Portraits to Dream In: Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Past Disquiet at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and I Want to Leave This World Behind at InterAccess Toronto.

Seasonal dinner parties with a group of seven friends, eating home-cooked meals and sitting around a table that I built with my dad out of 100 year-old wood from our barn.

Trampoline class, where I conquered my impatience and desire to instantly be perfect, and focused instead on slowly achieving basic competence.

My yoga mat, where I learned to look after my body because it is not just an incidental lump of flesh that I am doomed to carry with me, but the vehicle for life and action—including joy—that deserves love and positive attention.

Dancing in my kitchen.

Gelato shops, especially when visited with friends on a long summer evening.

London and Paris—in the spring, with lifelong friends.

Montréal—in the winter, with my mom.

Bookstores—both local and those to which I made special trips when I travelled (TYPE, Flying Books, A Different Drummer, The Village Bookshop, London Review Bookshop, Daunt, the Waterstones in Hampstead and on Gower Street, McNally Jackson, Bluestockings).

Things I wrote

Kelly Reichardt: The Films That Made Me (AnOther)

The Monstrosity of Feminist Art: A Conversation with Lauren Elkin (LA Review of Books)

Performing Colonial Toxicity—a review of an exhibition on France’s nuclear program in Algeria (C Magazine)

A Different Dust Bowl—on a biography of writer and activist Sanora Babb (LA Review of Books)

To Talk Without Speaking—on Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Queer (Arcade)