The Pleasure of... Wrapping Up

Closing out the year with a plug and a plea

Dear friends,

I'm writing from London, where we're staying with my family until the new year. After that, we're moving (to Paris!!!), the enormous logistical challenge of which is one major reason I've let this letter slide. But new years are new starts, and I am excited to be back with a regular schedule in 2023, including what I hope is a truly grotesque array of croissant and architecture content.

For now, Christmas is next week, and on the off-chance you're still looking for a gift for someone interested in New York/feminist/left-wing history, I hope you'll indulge me in a short wrap-up of Hotbed, my book about a secret club for women intent on changing the world from the launchpad of Greenwich Village just before World War I, which was just named one of the best 16 books of the year by Vox.

You can pick up the American edition here and the British one here, and if you aren't in the market, a positive comment or five-star rating on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you like is still of huge value. The book was well reviewed in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Times of London, and the Times Literary Supplement. BUST Magazine selected the book as their "Lit Pick of the Summer," while the perfect crowning tribute to this book, and the work that went into it, was Vivian Gornick's essay for the New York Review of Books, which called it “a lively and absorbing new social history.” !, and again, !!!

Launching this book in the uncertain aftermath of Covid meant I didn't get much chance to talk about it in a room with people, with the exception of a lovely launch event at McNally Jackson in New York, although I have a talk lined up at the amazing Providence Athenaeum next March (look at that library!) The upside has been a robust series of online events, with brilliant writers and scholars like Lauren Elkin, for CUNY's Gotham Center of New York History, Betsy Prioleau, for the Women's National Book Association, and Candace Falk, Amy Aronson, and Alexander Sanger, for the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. I also gave a presentation for the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, NY, and appeared on a few great podcasts and radio shows: Kirkus's Fully Booked, Pacifica Radio's Letters and Politics, and was extremely happy to go back to talk to the delightful Kim and Amy at Lost Ladies of Lit. Links to recordings are (or very soon will be) at my website.

Joanna Scutts @JC_Scutts

"To know yourself was to free yourself. The challenge was how to get to that knowledge without falling into a new trap, a bear pit of narcissism from which the only escape was laughter." (p.200, on psychoanalysis) #bookvent #Hotbed #dailysentence #missedafew

To close out the year, I decided to tweet out a daily (well, daily-ish) sentence from the book, as a literary advent calendar. It’s hard for a review to give a flavor of the actual experience of reading the book: not the big ideas but the little sentences, the tone and poise of the author leading you through them. Opening the book at random and sharing a sentence a day between now and Christmas is a way to give that flavor, and a sense of the ground the book covers, the diversity of its characters and topics, the writing. It reminds me I’m proud of it. Twitter is a weird, deck-of-the-Titanic place at the moment, to say the least, and I will probably leave in the new year, but for now, if you're there, please do share and say hello. You’re the ones who make it possible to do what I do, and to move my family halfway around the world to keep doing it. In this season (in theory) of gratitude, I’m honestly so grateful to you, as readers, colleagues, and friends, for being here and supporting my work.

Happy holidays, merry new year, and I'll see you on the other side!