Soft things in hard times
Art, love, and defiance in an unromantic era
Hi friends,
And happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate. Personally, I’m a fan. Any excuse to be extra about love will have me enthusiastically raising my hand.
I also recognize that Valentine’s Day—like almost everything—was engineered to get us to spend money on shit we don’t need.
Case in point: this ridiculous macaron pillow.
I found it in the Valentine’s aisle at a big-box store and bought it immediately. Zero regrets.
But as much as I love love, it’s… a weird time to be leaning into pink fluff and heart-shaped nonsense.
There’s a low-grade dread humming beneath everything lately. Authoritarianism no longer feels theoretical. And with the rise of AI, reality itself often feels uncertain. A neighbor recently sent around a photo of ICE agents at our local Walgreens. It turned out to be fake—but the unsettling part was how believable it felt.
How are we supposed to know anymore?
I’ve been reading heavy things. Books about the AIDS epidemic. Books about the Holocaust. The presciently titled, Love in a Fucked-Up World.
One of the AIDS books—And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts—is research for a novel I’m working on: a time-travel-ish romance where one character lives in the 1980s.
The Holocaust book—Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning—I picked up after hearing advice on a podcast about revisiting works that changed people’s lives. I realized I’d heard about this book forever but had never actually read it.
I wondered if it might change my life.
(It didn’t. But it is a solid little book.)
Frankl writes about surviving Nazi concentration camps, both during and after liberation, where he came home to the reality that nearly everyone he loved had died in the camps—his wife, his unborn child, his parents, and his brother.
The central idea in the book is simple and devastating: No matter how stripped you are of freedom, dignity, comfort, or even your own humanity, you still retain the ability to choose your values.1 Your attitude. Your outlook. Your “why.”
He returns again and again to Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Frankl’s why—what got him through three years of living in concentration camps—was the idea of his wife, whom he “talked to” every day in his mind.
I did not know whether my wife was alive… but at that moment, it ceased to matter…. Nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved.
What struck me is how often this same lesson keeps reappearing in history.
In Shilts’s book, playwright Larry Kramer—newly ousted from the organization he helped found (the Gay Men’s Health Crisis)—visits Dachau, the same camp Frankl endured, coincidentally.
There Kramer learns that Dachau had been operating since 1933—six years before World War II had even started. And twelve years total of torture, starvation, and mass murder.
No one stopped it.
The realization fueled Kramer’s rage—which reminded him of the government’s and mainstream media’s silence on AIDS—and later, became the impetus for his most famous play, The Normal Heart.
The takeaway is bleak but clarifying: No one is coming to save us. We save each other. Our love for each other saves us. Or doesn’t.
The parallels are hard to miss—AIDS, COVID, Palestine, the rise of fascism. History keeps handing us the same lessons and daring us to ignore them.
And still.
It’s Valentine’s Day, and I write books about happiness and love, ostensibly, so let me land this plane where I meant to all along.
Choosing love—choosing art, softness, humor, connection—isn’t a form of denial. It’s defiance. It’s a refusal to let cruelty have the last word.
Watching so much of it unfold has been exhausting, and we still have a lot to learn about ourselves, our history, and one another. Which is why I’m grateful, especially now, for writers, artists, and educators, and for the books, plays, films, and music that keep reminding me what being human actually looks like.
Also: Mr. Rogers flipping someone the bird. One of the few things I took from my dad’s house after he died. Because joy.
Recent favorites include:
Dark Matter (a wild thriller about quantum superposition—also now a TV series)
Thrill of the Chase (sapphic treasure hunters in New Mexico)
Sunburn (sapphic adolescent Irish yearning)
The Poetry Unbound podcast, where Padraig O’Tuama says things like this about poetry: “It’s something unbidden that speaks to the drought in us.”
David Sedaris reading Miranda July’s short story, “Roy Spivey”
Cassie Mannes Murray’s Substack on the publishing world
If you missed the first edition of WILFs (Writers I’d Like to Fund), you can find it here:
And I’ll leave you with a Frankl quote, still painfully relevant seventy years later:
“The world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”
Free Books
Yours,
AP
P.S. This month’s Hot Box is a live kitten cam from a rescue shelter in LA. It’s a cheap dopamine hit, but I don’t make the rules.
P.P.S. Here’s the Stand With Minnesota donation directory.
P.P.P.S. “The Journey” by Mary Oliver, because of course
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Very similar to Russ Harris’s The Happiness Trap, as I wrote about recently
Love all of this. I needed to hear it today. And I like your macaron pillow!
The live kitten feed is ADORABLE!! Also you’re writing a time travel novel?? I’m so excited!! When you’re ready to share more I’d love to know!