UNITED STATES OF LYSSA

2024 has been a shitty year for me, reading-wise. I started reading for leisure again in 2022, shortly after I graduated from my English department, because I wanted to try to find the childlike joy books had once given me in a time before pandemics and heartbreaks and boy hands. I read 43 books in 2023. I felt like all I could do was read in 2023. Now, in 2024, I went – like – illiterate there for a minute? But either way. Here it is. In all of its golden glory; a master list of the books I've read this year.

A Court of Silver Flames // Sarah J. Maas

7/10

First read of the year, to cap off the ACOTAR series, which I’d started at the insistence of my little sister in May of 2023. I’ve always hated Nesta. As an older sister, I couldn’t imagine putting my little sisters through what Nesta allowed Feyre to endure; although this book gave me a better perspective of why Nesta came off as detached and downright evil throughout the first half of the series. I relate to her in many aspects. I felt as though this was a solid fantasy, and loved the female friendship aspects of it. However, points off for gratuitous sex scenes and the fact that I still wasn’t wholly sold on Nesta as a character despite feeling like Nesta every day of my life. 

Betty // Tiffany McDaniel

9/10

Practically no notes. Ugh! What a beautiful story of childhood innocence, resilience, and overcoming generational trauma and poverty – all against the backdrop of the Appalachian Mountains. It took me a while to get into this one; I started and stopped it thrice throughout the course of 2023, but once I picked it back up and got through the first two chapters, I physically could not set the book down. It was like reading something on a collision course. Highly recommend. 

The Grace Year // Kim Liggett

10/10

My first perfect rating of the year. The religious trauma leapt out. Think The Hunger Games meets the Salem Witch Trials meets The Handmaid’s Tale. Such a quick read, too – I think I read the entire thing in one day, on two separate flights to Minneapolis and Boston, respectively. My favorite “fantasy” of the year thus far. If there’s one book on this list that I recommend you pick up, it’s probably this one. I think you’ll love it too. 

The Cruel Prince // Holly Black

8/10

This year has been all about catching up on the novels that my friends always said I’d love, but I was to pretentious to read. As the neurons in my frontal lobe snap together, I feel myself getting less proud by the day – something you should probably all be grateful to hear. This was one such read. I loved Jude. A piece of me is Jude, powerhungry and ruthless, but without the penchant for swordplay. However, I got a bit lost in the sauce throughout the middle? Maybe I can blame that one for exclusively reading it on a treadmill. 

House of Flame And Shadow // Sarah J. Maas

Did Not Finish (DNF)

Ah, the book that started the months-long reading slump. Sarah, I’m owed personal compensation for the time you made me waste on reading this. I didn’t even love Crescent City 1, but the character assassination of Bryce, Hunt, and hell, even Ruhn was PAINFUL. Would not recommend. Crescent City 1 is a fun standalone. It’s giving Scooby Doo. Hot people solving crimes with a fun pet sidekick. Read that one and be done. We don’t need the Sarah J. Maas multiverse of madness. (Sorry bestie - still love ya.)

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup // John Kerryrou

8.5/10

I have a feeling if I’d read this before Elizabeth Holmes’s penultimate trial, it would’ve ranked lower, as a lot of the loose ends were inevitably tied up by Kerryrou’s coverage of aforementioned trial. However, one of my goals for 2024 was to read more nonfiction – stuff like this, creative nonfiction, personal essays, all of it. I want to learn things, and I’ve always had a bit of a morbid fascination with the downfall of Theranos. Kerryrou is a journalist, so this was written in approachable, relatable language; great starter nonfiction if you, too, want to brush up on your niche hyperfixation conversation topics. 

Before We Were Innocent // Ella Berman

8/10

This one ranks highly for two reasons, and not necessarily because of the work itself: 

I was laid up in bed for several weeks with two fractured metatarsals, and confined to the four millennial grey walls of my apartment, I felt like I was losing it a bit. I read this one in an afternoon outside on my back patio, broken foot elevated on a tower of pillows, as my husband practically spoon-fed me fruit salad. This, of course, made for a delicious reading experience. 

Because of the broken foot, I was on a bit of pain medication through this time, and I think it made this book glitter a bit more than it actually did. I think I was just glad to have my mind off of the things I was missing out on – like going to the gym, and going on walks, and dancing in the sun, and running laps in the rain. 

Altogether it’s a fun true crime novel reminiscent of Amanda Knox. Real ones know I went through a total Amanda Knox phase my freshman year of college, and all I could talk about was the miscarriage of justice by Italian police on that one. So sub out my motherland for Greece, and put two strange-acting girls in there instead of one, and boom, you have this novel. Reese Witherspoon never disappoints with her selections. 

8. Bright Young Women // Jessica Knoll

6/10

Ugh, such conflicting feelings on this one. You can tell I was in a bit of a true crime phase here. This one’s a fictionalized version of the Chi Omega murders, which famously brought down Ted Bundy. I don’t love that the author chose replace the real narratives of women who were actually impacted by these horrific acts and commodified this story. However, based off of the acknowledgements – it seems she had their blessing? I usually love the types of commercial fiction that feel real enough to touch. Taylor Jenkins Reid does this masterfully. However, this one felt… insensitive at its best. But the writing style was propulsive, and it quickly became another book I devoured on a travel day. 

9. Five Survive // Holly Jackson

5/10

Another travel day book. One thing about me – I really try to avoid screentime while flying, because it may be one of the only times I feel like I can really detach from whatever’s going on below. You will catch me in my Delta economy seat, legs folded beneath me, thumbing through whatever book I’m reading at record speed. I read this one on a flight to DC and remember thinking that I wished it was longer. Again, the true crime phase. I was deep in it. But yeah. Not much to say here. It’s a thriller novel. 

10. The Nightingale // Kristin Hannah

10/10

Oh, Lord. What do I even say about this masterpiece? 

Some might call it a beach read. Fine, whatever. Sue me. Lock me up and throw away the key – this formerly pretentious English major, who used to impress boys based on her knowledge of Nabokov and Murakami, LOVES a good beach read every now and then. I’ve gotten to a point in my life where, if I’m picking up a book, I want to actually escape into its pages. I’m a bit past laboring over purple prose or analyzing the quality of the text itself. This isn’t to say I won’t give what I read a halfway decent literary critique – I still can’t bring myself to finish books with terrible writing, and I’ll admit that I do still see myself as “above” most BookTok-type books – but at this point, I’m just too beat to care. Like, I can barely afford to keep a roof over my head and purchase healthy groceries, why would I spend the same mental energy that I do at the checkout line whining over prose on the Internet? 

Anyways. This one. Oh my gosh. I really, genuinely have no words. Books don’t often make me emotional. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on since I was, like, three. But this one made me full-body sob. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE. Kristin Hannah, I could kiss you.

Side note: I read this one in a night, too, not because I was traveling, but because I actually wanted to. 

11. The Women // Kristin Hannah

9/10

It’s hard to follow up a masterpiece like The Nightingale, although I do think this one held its own. I’m mostly just freaked out that the main character hailed from my father’s San Diego, her love interest from my mother’s San Antonio, and she ended up (spoilers!) in my beloved Garden City of Missoula, Montana. Kristin, if you are in my walls, please get out expeditiously. I’m going to have to ask you to start paying rent. 

And, as an aside, here’s all of the books I’m currently reading: 

Magnolia Parks // Jessa Hastings (which I’m loving. It feeds my Love Island UK proclivities. I never said I wasn’t a whore for reality TV. I said I was pretentious. Those are two different things.)

Everything I Know About Love // Dolly Alderton (sort of what inspired me to resurrect my Tumblr. I found myself relating to her need to do things for the anecdote a bit too much. I thought that maybe, I, too, could immortalize these things to laugh on when I am not twenty-something.)

Demon Copperhead // Barbara Kingsolver (which I think will be a bit like Betty, and I’ll have to power through the first several chapters in order to actually blitz through the rest. Fun writing style, though. Just getting bored of it fast.) 

Adult Drama // Natalie Beach (Okay, okay, I haven’t actually started this one yet, but it’s been on my list. Like I said! It’s the year of the personal nonfiction novel! And admittedly, I worshiped Caroline Calloway when I was sixteen and thought I was deep, so I’m invested in Natalie’s side of the narrative.)

And, I know what you’re thinking: here’s this privileged white girl, reading her privileged white girl books. I know, I know. I desperately need to diversify my reading list, and believe it or not, it is something I’ve been intentional about this year. I really hope to spend the latter half of the year reading books from diverse perspectives. Fiction and nonfiction alike bear such an incredible opportunity to educate and broaden the perspectives of those who read. 

So there’s that. The books from a girl who loves books. Hit my “ask” box for recommendations. I love giving the oddly specific ones. 

Xoxo

Working in politics doesn’t necessarily mean my creative writing degree sits unutilized. Though I endured several years of winces and surreptitious squints from aunts and neighbors and friends of the family throughout my pursuit of a Bachelors in Arts, I actually do use my creative writing degree a fair amount – it does not sit gathering dust in my Missoula apartment. Rather, I write press releases and strongly-worded emails; I help friends with pageant paperwork and practice public speaking. Despite popular belief, it was good for something. 

There’s a certain voyeurism that comes with writing that’s always enticed me. My father raised me into a people-watching machine, so much so that, in the early days of my marriage, I sat with my new sisters-in-law at the mall and passed the skills of observation down to them in the folkloric way it’d been passed to me. Whether it’s from the constant feeling of having my hackles raised as a young woman or the law enforcement blood that courses through me, I have no idea. All I know is that I’m a damn good people-watcher. I think all writers carry with them this quality. There’s something invigorating and sometimes sinful about sitting in a movie theater, or a bougie cafe for Saturday morning brunch, or in the park, and observing people down to the way they nervously shake their leg or scratch their nose. I mean, hell, what was it that Taylor Swift wrote on her last album? “I Look in People’s Windows?” I didn’t think The Tortured Poets Department was worth writing home about – more of Lyssa’s music takes at 6, stay tuned for the weather – but I did appreciate her brutal honesty about this solitary trait that all writers share. Our love of observation. This remains the aspect of my creative writing degree that’s shelved itself in the past several years. 

I blame myself for this. Writing became a survival mechanism throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. So often, my observation tied itself inextricably to the moments I wished to immortalize. Having been diagnosed later in life with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, I always wondered why my memory left me with such large gaps at certain times in my life – but then, but then, but then, I’d hear “Hurricane” by Halsey in a spin class, or maybe I’d catch a whiff of Pure Seduction perfume at Victoria’s Secret, and I’d be sucked back into the moments I used to catalog. Everything always rushes back to me so fast. The way the stars looked, the shape of a laugh suspended in December frost, what have you; it always comes back to me somehow. There was so much about me that I just wanted to sever when I was sixteen, or nineteen, or even twenty-two, that I just wrote and wrote and wrote until I physically could no longer type. It felt better than making myself hurl in a Highland High School bathroom or crying on the front steps of Sigma Nu. 

But now that my life is stable and I go to bed every night watching Bluey with my husband, and wake up next to him warm and snoring under rayon sheets, the impulse to observe, and therefore write, has escaped me. Healthier habits replaced it. I crave routine now. I wake up. I make a protein smoothie. I go to the gym. I go to work. I smile and shake hands with State Legislators, and it’s not lost on me that all of this is the result of a giant butterfly effect. I FaceTime with my friends. I eat movie theater popcorn my husband brings home from work. I rant and rave to my mother on the telephone. I eat a steak salad and try to forget about the existence of calories and the constant tally of them running like a ticker-tape in my head. I take a walk. I move through the motions of my ridiculously complex shower-and-skincare routine. 

It was amid this routine that the impulse struck me once again. Last night, as I snaked through the University District, I caught a middle-aged man (normal looking, plaid shorts, sweat beading against his shiny bald head) mowing his lawn. And it hit me. The tang of fresh-cut grass, the scent of summer and swimsuit lycra and Spandex, the late-afternoon rays fading from cornflower blue to an uncertain shade of yellow. I stood there, eyeing him for a moment. My vision trailed from him pushing his red lawn mower up-and-down his front lawn to the neighbor’s house, with a Kia Soul in the driveway, where a sprinkler danced left-to-right, glittering in the sunset. I was transfixed. 

And I realized that I wanted to observe the beautiful moments, too.

Not just the beautiful moments. Because, of course, there are so many beautiful moments. But those are easy to remember. I’m sure I’ll still write about them anyways, like the time my friend won Miss Idaho USA and I screamed so loud I lost my voice, or the day I spoke in Iceland, or the night I got married and my new great-grandfather-in-law (is that a thing?) smacked me across the ass with his cane and Payten hissed Grandpa it’s not 1930 you can’t do that anymore. But I want to memorize the mundane. I want to make an exercise of falling in love with the uninteresting and soliloquizing it the same way I used writing as a tool to avoid it. 

Thus, enter the blog. United States of Lyssa. Some girl on TikTok who claims she’s always six months ahead of the trends said long-form, written content is coming back, and it felt like my time to shine. I’ve been trying to deprive my brain of the fraudulent, easy-to-come-by dopamine anyways, so buh-bye short-form TikTok videos. The fake stuff just never feels as good! And this feels good. Let me proverbially dust off my creative writing degree and see what comes of it.

So welcome to the ride. Whether you’re here to see the inner workings of my mind, or to muse along with me, I’m glad to have you here. I can’t guarantee how often I’ll update this. If I even update it at all, for that matter. But for now, this is the corner of the Internet where you’ll find me writing love letters to the everyday, just as I did when I was young. You can watch like a voyeur, and we can share that love of nosiness. Maybe this’ll be like a car crash you can’t look away from. Either way, I hope it inspires you to find joy in the everyday too. I’m happy you’re here. 

Xoxo

Lys

(p.s. If you scroll – I’ve posted some poetry from college and some essays I wrote when I was 22. Guess I had the same idea two years ago. Never went anywhere, clearly. I’ve left them up, for your viewing pleasure. Go ahead. I’m giving you permission to creep.)

This place is still reminiscent of the days when I’d

Get lost on Taber Road, trying to find your house --

Parked somewhere between Atomic City and Riverside,

Amid the green potato-field trenches you’d grown up within.

On Senior Skip Day, I remember almost blowing out the speakers

Of the 2006 Kia Optima where I had my first kiss

As I pulled into your driveway. Your toes were painted white.

It is here and in mall parking lots and all of the other places

That glitter black in the midday sun where I believed we’d get out, Sierra.

I still think often that we will escape the perpetual thank-yous we are forced

To give to this land, that we will move to California, that the dark lipstick

You’d wear on long nights in Rexburg will ring paper straws and we’ll complain

About the utter oblivion of West Coasterners who’ve never seen

The Idaho desert like we have. They have not run their hands against

The Pahoehoe walls of our favorite hideout. They do not know of the times

We’d talk under the stars and the starry-eyed boys we’d kiss.

They’ve never had to bleed out under a harvest moon.

The rumination of our generation. 

My old Tumblr handle has long been replaced by someone else who left it with a simple note -- “if you’d ever like this back, let me know.” Though I wish someone would’ve taken my keyboard away from me earlier when I was eighteen and distraught at the world, it does make me a little sad to recognize that the quite-online diorama of who I once was is now gone. I feel as though it’s indicative of a greater theme of my life at 22; missing parts of my old self and wanting her back whilst attempting to discover the pieces of myself I’ve yet to meet. This is me letting her, the version of me that existed when I’d post once or twice a week on that blog to muse about math class or some boy or my thoughts on religion, know that I’d sort of like her back. 

I say this not because I’m unhappy. I’m probably the happiest I’ve ever been; I have a job that fulfills me in ways that I couldn’t ever have imagined, a degree that’s going to allow me to progress in my career, an amazing and deeply personal relationship with my Heavenly Father, and I’m marrying the man of my dreams. Subtle, humble brag -- my life is better than it’s ever been, and recently, I’ve come to understand that it’s only going to get better. One day I will have a house with a backyard for my big white dog; I will have children whose greatest qualities are my worst and I will serve my purpose for years and years to come.

In the four years between this blog and the last, time and earth and circumstances have forced me to slow down. When I was a teenager, I sometimes felt as though I sprung as this fully-formed thought, and that primeval inner knowledge directed the measured recklessness of my decisions. At eighteen, I was invincible. In the Highland High School parking lot, behind the wheel of a stick-shift car, I felt as though nothing could hurt me. I could only hurt it. This approach to life was both beautiful and upsetting for reasons I’m sure I’ll get into at some point when my thoughts are a little more collected. At twenty-two, that vicious burn within my blood has cooled to a slow churn; I’m much more careful now, and more delicate, too. I flew too close to the sun, and sometimes, I can still taste the charred blackness of its surface on my tongue. 

There was a time when being home meant just that.

Earlier in college, I think it was easier to separate my “two lives” – that which I’d been thrust into in the rolling foothills of Pocatello, and that which I’d created nestled in the five valleys of Missoula. In Pocatello, I’d eat dinner with my parents and argue with them over politics, then meet Jett at Sonic, and it’d be like nothing changed. In Missoula, I’d wear dangerously low-cut tops to Sigma Nu and hold my drink with my palm over the rim, my fingers almost like talons, and hope that I woke up in time for class on Monday. They were different. They were separate. Home was home and school was school.

The only thing they really had in common was my ex-boyfriend, who at home was the boy who’d bring me flowers to work and at school was the reason I’d bang my head against the cement wall of my dorm room. But still, even he kept things separate enough. He hated my Missoula friends and they hated him. In Pocatello, he’d force me to sit squished between him and his roommates, on a sofa that reeked of reefer, and listen to their conversations about how great it would be if I was chill like the girl who had an OnlyFans and wanted to do shrooms with them. In Missoula, he’d bring me breakfast because he felt bad that he’d asked me to stop crying, and he’d leave, and my friends would sit me down for an intervention. This happened, liike, twice a semester.

Now, reconciling the person I am versus the person I was is much more difficult. Home no longer just means home, because over the last two years, my lives have melted together.

The easy excuse would be to blame the pandemic. “Unprecedented circumstances,” as my professors would call it in every exasperated-sounding email they’d send circa March 2020. “Times like these.” Times like these brought bumpy rides down Higgins at seven p.m. in my roommate’s green hatchback to an abrupt stop. Suddenly, there was no “home” and “school.” I was doing online classes in my high school bedroom, and FaceTiming with a sorority sister about how fucking idiotic our ex-boyfriends were while walking through the neighborhood that raised me. Even then, I was able to keep my two selves separate. I’d go over to Ben’s and sleep on Alexis’s stomach on the downstairs couch. I’d meet with Jett and we’d walk around the park and talk about people in first-name-last-name format. But I’d also text with my roommate about what the hell happened at that concert the week before we left, and I’d remind the Phi Delt boys that I’d be back in their basement the second we stepped foot on campus. Two separate lives. Two separate versions of “me.”

I think my two lives started to come together when I decided to reconvert and really give myself to God. I know it sounds so facetious and cringe. Within the first, like, ten minutes of Euphoria, they make some joke about “giving your life to Jesus” or something. But, honestly – living two lives was getting exhausting. I’d spent two years crawling in the shadows, spinning stories about the minute details of my relationship. They were perfectly-curated snowballs of lies; like sweet things that never happened, because in reality, he’d stare at me with this just empty look behind his eyes. Trying to cry tears of longing and upset when he’d drop me off at the front steps of my sorority house when I was actually crying tears of relief, because it meant he was leaving, and feeling like such a fucking fraud. After covering bruises and hickeys alike with concealer that was one shade too dark for me, and having to act sad instead of relieved when he dropped me back off after Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, I was done. Something had to change.

It was in these moments where my bedroom’s carpet indented my knees as I knelt in prayer that I realized two lives were not going to benefit me. I couldn’t continue to exist in halves. When I’d cared about God and the Future and the Afterlife and all of that, I was whole – hurt, and sometimes confused, but whole. I hadn’t been whole since I’d given it all up. Living two lives had only left me staring up into the dark and wondering why I’d let myself spiral this far.

When I let God back into my lives, they started to bleed together. There was a time when church was only a “home” thing – something I did with my parents, and talked shit about with my ex-boyfriend as he smoked a cigarette on the car ride home afterwards. After stepping foot back on campus the next fall, I replaced frat basements with the beat-up air hockey table in the rec room of our tiny University Neighborhood church building. I called my mom more often. I made a concerted effort to live the kind of life that would’ve made the halved version of myself scutter back into the dark. I got my nails done. I went to the gym. I cried at my friend's house. I mentally checked out of student government meetings. I re-registered to vote as a Republican. All of the things that had forced me into two people suddenly vanished. I belonged back in my body again.

It’s been over a year of being “whole” in this way, and I do still think there’s a certain melancholia attached to thinking about past versions of myself or alternate realities where I was still split. It’s not sadness or wistfulness; it’s anger that I almost let myself become them.

I write often about what I’d be like in “another life.” But I no longer romanticize it. When two versions of myself existed, I had to romanticize what an alternate reality would look like – for two versions of me meant that I was always on those two roads diverged in some stupid yellow wood, and I would always have to pick one eventually. I’m lucky to have gone down the path I did, because it was the path most worth romanticizing. In this life, I am happy and marrying the love of my life and getting ready to take the LSAT. In another, I’m angry, without God, still swiping aimlessly through Tinder and cursing at the sky.

The new challenge that comes with no longer considering my two lives as “separate” comes with the fact that there are people that I love in both locations, and not just people who fit conveniently into the box of “Pocatello” or “Missoula.” My heart hurts for the three-hundred-and-fifty-six miles that stops me from seeing all whom I love in the same location. Such is the cost of going down the path “most worth romanticizing,” I guess; but the benefit far outweighs the cost. My two years of living two lives were miserable. If Pocatello me was happy, then Missoula me bawled her eyes out to The 1975 in the Southgate Mall parking lot. If Missoula me was doing well, then Pocatello me was a bitch – so on and so forth. So tiring, right? One me means that my joys and my pains and my pleasure and my sorrow are not limited by the geographic locations in which they occur, rather, they are experienced in color and felt no matter where I wake.