My Top 5 Books of 2024 as a Writer
Listen to this episode of The First Draft Club:
I want to share with you the five books that were the most meaningful and memorable for me in 2024 from a craft and writing perspective.
These aren’t books about writing. They’re novels and memoirs that taught me something about craft while also offering an incredible reading experience. They're not necessarily my favorite books of the year, but they're up there. I chose these books because I feel like they had something to teach me from a craft and writing perspective.
And that's what I wanted to talk about in this post, since, of course, this blog is about writing. All of these books made me think more deeply about what literature can do.
What’s Not on My List (And Why)
I'm recusing myself from including Margot’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe, which was a Kirkus Prize finalist and has gotten so much great attention because it's an incredible novel.
The reason I'm recusing myself is because Rufi is a really close friend of mine and teaches with me inside The Book Incubator. I felt a little bit too biased choosing this book for my list, but there's so much that you can enjoy and learn from with this novel from a craft perspective.
So make sure to check it out.
Okay, now on to my list.
#1: The Wedding People by Alison Espach
First up is the novel The Wedding People (a Read with Jenna pick), which follows a protagonist who arrives at a hotel in Rhode Island during a weekend wedding. She’s not there to celebrate—she’s planning to take her own life. (Spoiler: She doesn’t go through with it, in case that’s a concern.)
I loved this book so much that I DMed the author immediately. It’s funny, charming, and goes deeper than you might expect for something categorized as women’s fiction.
Why I loved this book as a writer:
Espach wrote characters that I haven't seen before in contemporary literature and wrote them in a way that felt really original and real. The bride character, in particular, highlights how we code-switch depending on who we’re with.
It was also really fun to see how the characters could bring out joy or delight in one another in ways that other characters could not. It was an ode to the specificity and truth of romance and how uniquely certain people are attracted to each other for reasons that are unexplainable and magical.
From a craft perspective, Espach really adeptly handles an extended flashback at the beginning of the book. Sometimes as a reader I find myself impatient to get back to the present world of the story, because there's something about going back to the past that can feel like a lag, even if it's an important history and even if the history is interesting in itself. I simply did not feel that way in this novel. If you are someone who is interested in starting your story with a flashback or structuring your story that way, definitely check this one out,
#2: Molly by Blake Butler
This memoir deals with Butler’s marriage to fellow writer Molly Brodak, who died by suicide. Blake writes about his marriage leading up to the day that his wife ended her own life and the days and weeks that followed.
Molly was the first book that I read this year. It had just come out, and I read an article about it that really interested me. The article was about the ethics of writing about a topic such as suicide, as well as the ethics of writing about one's loved one. I'm endlessly fascinated by the choices we make and the topics we choose to write about.
Molly is the most intimate look I personally have had into this experience: someone revisiting the immediate days, hours, minutes leading up to the death by suicide of someone that they loved. It’s an intimate, raw look at the moments leading up to and following Molly’s death.
Why I loved this book as a writer:
I finished this book feeling like I understood a particular human experience more deeply than I did before I read it.
I also felt like it captured really well the struggle of being an artist, of being someone who makes things. Both Blake and Molly are writers, and as writers, they deal with the difficulty of creating and the challenge of ego. They know what it’s like to struggle with the critical voices that tell us our work is not worth our time and to grapple with the capitalistic machine that we're producing in, which can be both stifling and rewarding in really unexpected and unpredictable ways. The book explores what it feels like when your book is a flop or when you don't get that thing that you hoped for and someone else did.
I am a big fan of books that are about writers. The fact that this memoir was about two writers made it also feel pretty personal and relevant to me.
#3: Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley
This memoir also explores the loss of someone who has died by suicide. Crosley writes about different kinds of losses: her apartment being burglarized shortly before her good friend dies. In the book, Crosley compares the two losses and explores their contours, which sounds like it could be crass, but it isn't at all.
Sloane is really funny. She's published a number of humorous essays, and I've always appreciated her sensibility as a very hilarious millennial woman. I remember reading some of her early essays and laughing out loud on a plane. This is a very different read from Sloane. I texted with a friend after I read it, who I knew was reading it, too, and she and I just kept writing back, “It's perfect. It's perfect. It's a perfect book.”
Why I loved this book as a writer:
This book is so honest. You're not going to find any purple prose. You're not going to find anything bordering on self-pity. It's not overwritten. It feels like this really sparse, honest reflection on what feels like one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, things that has happened to the author. It's very much in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, a sparse exploration of how to go on in the wake of losing someone important to you.
From a craft perspective, Sloane does a lot of seamless navigating between her various selves. Sometimes when I'm teaching memoir, I talk about this. You have several selves, right? You have the self in the moment in time that you're writing. So if you're writing about childhood, you have the childhood version of you. Then you have the self that is older and reflecting on that person. And then you have this self who is actually writing the book. I find that some of my favorite memoirs do a fair amount of drifting between these various selves. I really appreciated the way that Sloane did do a lot of dropping in to the moment, but there was also a lot of Sloane later, and then Sloane now as the writer herself.
#4. Old Enough by Haley Jakobson
This is Jakobson’s debut novel. It’s a coming-of-age story about a college sophomore grappling with something traumatic that happened to her in high school that she hasn't yet processed.
I actually learned about this novel through a podcast where Haley Jakobson's former best friend, who essentially makes no effort to disguise who she is or what they're talking about, describes what happens in the book and also uses the characters’ names in the book. On the podcast, the woman asserted that Haley Jakobson used the woman’s life as material for this book.
You may remember the article, Bad Art Friend, that came out a couple of years ago about people in a writing group. If I remember correctly, the article was about one person who wrote a short story that someone else in the group said was based on their life. It's also reminiscent of one of my other favorite novels about writers, The Plot, by Jean Hanff-Korelitz. Occasionally, these stories emerge and I find this type of conversation endlessly fascinating.
Why I loved this book as a writer:
This book made me consider some important questions, like what are a fiction writer's duties and obligations and freedoms when drawing from a real life? Where do those end and begin? What do we owe the people in our lives by way of permission to draw on certain events, even if we change the details of those events?
I thought it was really interesting that one of the things the former friend on the podcast was frustrated with was that she felt she and other characters were caricatures. And what I actually found in reading the novel is that they didn't feel like caricatures to me, but they did feel like portraits of an insensitivity that I find realistic. I found the author’s portrayal of these characters very true to life.
5. Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker
My favorite book of the year. I want to share with you a quote about this novel from Cheryl Strayed. Cheryl says, “This book made me laugh and cry. It reads like a thriller and a love song. It's about being crushed and rising strong.”
I agree with all of this. The novel opens with our protagonist, married to a man, mother of two very young children, receiving a letter from her incarcerated mother, whom she has pretended is dead for all of the years that she has known her husband. And so the story unfolds from there.
Why I loved this book as a writer:
The writing in this book is exquisite. I mean, it's such a delight to read. When I am reading, I earmark the bottoms of my pages so that I know when there are pages with writing I like. There are many, many earmarks on these pages.
I loved the writing in this book but I am also someone who very much appreciates plot. As a reader, I just love having a reason to turn the pages that isn't just the writing itself. But when I have both, I am in my happy place. A good plot and good writing is just the sweet spot. And that was the case here for the entire book. I felt propelled by the plot. I found it propulsive. I wanted to turn the pages.
On another level, completely separate from the plot, the author also captured the isolation of early motherhood in contemporary American society, where pregnant women are often celebrated, but the second you have small children, people find you annoying and want you to be able to deal with it on your own without bothering them. Bieker really captures that experience in the way that she writes about violence in the family and in the home. I want to say it’s beautiful, but that's probably the wrong word for it. It's so real and devastating. After I finished reading, I felt like I understood a human phenomenon more deeply than I did before I read it.
My Favorite Books (as a Writer) of 2024
These were my most memorable books of 2024 from a writing and craft perspective. Each one left me with something to think about, whether it was structure, characterization, or the ethics of storytelling.
If you read any of these, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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