E.B.'s Notes & News: May 2025 ☀️🌱🐢🌻📝🌿🌧️🌺📚🌸
Coming to you a little late but it's okay — I'm trying to be kinder to myself.
Notes & News: May 2025
First I got to start by saying, wow, you all know how to make a girl feel loved!
The volume of enthusiastic responses I got last month after sending out my first newsletter in sixteen months — just, seriously, thank you. I didn’t know you’d all been missing my Notes & News so much! Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your kind emails, comments, messages, and texts, and a special big thank you to those of you who pledged your support financially via a Substack subscription as well! I was not expecting that, but I am so grateful to those of you who did. It does take a lot of time to put these newsletters together, and it feels really good to see that acknowledged. THANK YOU!!! It’s so good to be back!
And thank you to everyone for your patience. You may notice today is *not* the first Friday of the month (whoops) but I am telling myself that this newsletter coming to you a few days late is not the end of the world. I’m trying to be kinder to myself and embrace things being “good enough” as I move through life these days. Don’t know if you’ve gotten on board with the subscriber-only chat yet, but I posted in there that as soon as I sent out the April newsletter I noticed I made a major typo: I wrote that Luca was born 1/21/25 and not 1/21/24! (I mean, he was big when he was born, but not toddler-sized lol.) But in response to my post, my wise friend Makkah Ali (who is an excellent writer and one of my mom role models) said:
Welcome to embracing imperfections and typos, letting go of the things that do not matter and focusing energy on only the things that give us life and matter most!
Amen! So here we go, newsletter number two of this mother-and-writer life! Coming to you a little late but hey, I’m proud that this newsletter is coming to you at all!
xoxo,
E.B.
Hope Notes & News:
There are so many worthy causes out there, I know it’s super overwhelming, so here is one really specific cause you can support if you want to directly help a group of people impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires. My college friend Lucile Russo and her husband and their two daughters live in Altadena, and in addition to losing their home, Lucie posted that her girls’ school, the Altadena Children’s Center (ACC), was completely destroyed in the Eaton Fire. After forty years, the ACC is closing, and this GoFundMe is raising money to help the ACC teachers who have lost their jobs. After seeing Lucie’s post, I kept thinking about all the incredible teachers at Luca’s daycare and how devastating it would be for them to lose their jobs and for Luca to lose the place where he loves going to school. Please consider donating! The GoFundMe is currently at 58% of its goal.
Writing Notes & News:
So as you know Good Grief is finally coming out in paperback (please preorder it at your local independent bookstore, from Bookshop.org, from Barnes & Noble, or even from Amazon!!!!) and I’ve been getting some nice publicity and shout-outs as I gear up for the 11/11/25 pub date, which is just over six months away!
At the end of January, a reporter from the Associated Press in Paris, John Leicester, reached out to me via my website to chat about the recent death of his cat and how to help others who are grieving their pets. We had a really nice conversation, and John wrote a lovely piece for AP News that was syndicated everywhere!
I was so sorry to hear about the death of WBUR editor and reporter Peter O’Dowd’s chihuahua Bisbee. I remember talking about her with Peter in 2022 when he interviewed me for Here & Now, and I know all too well how awful it is to lose a family member, no matter their age or their species, but I was honored to be quoted in Peter's tribute to Bisbee that he published in February.
Hilary Weaver, senior editor at Kinship (née The Wildest), interviewed me in March for this article about the history of “The Rainbow Bridge” and why people use the concept to cope with pet death. Hilary and I had such a great conversation that she actually is working on another article featuring more quotes from yours truly. Stay tuned!
And just this past week, Carla Fernandez, author of Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life after Loss and co-founder of nationwide peer-support organization The Dinner Party, reached out to me to say she had included Good Grief in Renegade Grief: In Practice, the companion guide to Renegade Grief. Carla describes the companion guide as “a practical, real-talk resource to help folks put the ideas from the book into action in their lives and communities.” Good Grief appears on pages 57-59, in the section about forming interspecies friendships.
Reading Notes & News:
I hope you all bought a bunch of books from your favorite local bookstores on Indie Bookstore Day! Luca celebrated by visiting Newtonville Books and Belmont Books, plus he got to hang out with authors Sara Farizan and Annie Hartnett plus bookseller superstar Nikki Siclare. It was an A+ day! Some of the books I purchased that I can’t wait to dive into:
On Muscle by Bonnie Tsui
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
Poems of Parenting by Loryn Brantz
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
The Artist’s Deck by Beth Pickens (technically a deck of cards, not a book, but still)
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (which I listened to on audiobook but loved it so much I wanted to own a physical copy)
As for books I’ve read since I last emailed you, well, reading is slow going these days (mainly just because I am so tired by the time I get into bed at night that I do not have the energy to read even a few pages before sleeping). I am almost done reading Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who is the author of World of Wonders, one of my favorite narrative nonfiction books ever. Plus I listened to four books: The Daughters of Erietown by Connie Schultz, You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin, and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Friend Notes & News:
More cool things people I know and love have been up to! Share in the comments on this post or in the subscriber-only chat other accomplishments you want to brag about. You all are amazing!
I have three friends participating in the 5/13/25 Two Page Tuesday reading at Charlie’s Kitchen: Georgie Nink, Grace Ramsdell, and Nina MacLaughlin! I am going to try to attend but that day is also Richie’s birthday so I guess I should see what he wants to do that evening first. :-)
Erin Gallagher (née Bruynell) is a lawyer at WilmerHale, a law firm that has a strong sense of ethics and is doing (and has done) some pretty great things.
Elisabeth Sherman is a staff writer now for Parents magazine and is constantly publishing excellent pieces over there. Check them out! Luca and I even got to tag along on a reporting trip she did in Newport, Rhode Island, and we felt very cool.
Shout to to all the members of the class of 2025 at Wellesley who are making art! This week I got to screen Louisa Semprebon’s thesis film Centennial, which was funny and cutting, and see Ahana Basu’s gorgeous large format black and white photographs as part of the 2025 senior thesis exhibition.
If you’re not reading Sabrina Imbler’s Creatures of NYC newsletter, what are you even doing???
Menagerie Notes & News:
Is it weird to write about my human child in the “menagerie” section of this newsletter? Well, regardless, Luca is doing great. He is so, so, so close to walking and he is clearly on the verge of talking nonstop. He points at everything and babbles like a maniac so he has a lot to say already. Plus, he loves books. One of his favorites is Have You Seen My Cat? by Eric Carle. We joke that the only pet Luca is going to want when he gets older is a cat — the one pet we can’t have because Richie is so allergic. We’ll be like we will get you literally any other animal, do you want an iguana, do you want fifteen dogs, do you want a tarantula, do you want a PONY, and he will be like nope cats only. I guess if that happens then we will have to get a hairless one.
Anyway, besides Luca, Terrence and Twyla (a.k.a. theofficialmrt on Instagram) are doing well. They are thrilled the weather is getting warmer and they can start spending more time outside.
I do not need to be anyone’s mom role
model 😂 But glad to be in the toddler trenches with you!