welcome to manners & mystery

For a long time, I thought I understood people. I’m one of them, after all.

But as a 30-some single person living in New York with her fair share of relationship disappointments, I’ve come to accept that I know very little.

Join me on this journey to make sense of human relationships, romantic and platonic. I will invoke the help of novelists and philosophers to make sense of this shit. It’s a bit personal, a bit brainy, and 100% hard, so let’s figure it out together.

The name of this newsletter is a nod to Flannery O’Connor whose brilliant essays on fiction and writing are collected in a book called Mystery and Manners. (Naming is hard, and I’m not very original.)

From O’Connor’s “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”:

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

The same, I believe, can be said of understanding people. We are all walking works of art.