Mental Health Awareness Month and a Relaxation Playlist

An unwinding playlist, Carmen Maria Machado on Taylor Swift, interviews with Brandon Taylor & Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and more

May 28, 2023

Heather Armstrong passed away earlier this month. She started her blog Dooce a handful of months before I launched Largehearted Boy. Her openness in talking about her mental health issues always impressed me. In the 2000s we sat on several panels together and occasionally corresponded about the business and social aspects of blogging. She was bright, captivating, and always unafraid to wield her vulnerability in showing the world what depression was. I thought of her often as I wrote my own memoir about dealing with my own mental health. She is missed.

Speaking of memoirs, Bethanne Patrick’s memoir Life B: Overcoming Double Depression is one of the most honest, moving, and hopeful books about mental health I have ever read. Bethanne digs deep into generational trauma and her own past as she seeks help for lifelong issues, and in the end finds both a diagnosis and treatment. This book will change how you think of mental illness.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. If you ever need help, contact the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s helpline to get in touch with helpful resources.

Because it is Mental Health Awareness Month, this week’s playlist is filled with songs that rejuvenate and refresh. Life is busy with work and other obligations, remember to take some time for yourself and unwind.

A Rejuvenating Playlist:

Largehearted Links

Booker prize-winner Shehan Karunatilaka on how Choose Your Own Adventure books inspired his writing
Carmen Maria Machado on attending a Taylor Swift concert
…as I was sitting there, I was reading a fantasy novel about a real person. I was watching a woman who had been writing her own mythology, her own legend, for years. I was watching the lore unspool in real time.
This Esquire profile of Brandon Taylor (and his brilliant new novel The Late Americans)
“Campus novels are wonderful ready-mades to explore those questions of personhood and belonging, because in a lot of people's lives, college was the last time where they felt themselves actively engaging those questions,” Taylor told Esquire. He joked, “That is, until they turn 25 and realize all their life was a mistake and they've got to read things. That’s usually when they end up going to graduate school.”
The Reason People Listen to Sad Songs
“You’re feeling just alone, you feel isolated,” Dr. Knobe said. “And then there’s this experience where you listen to some music, or you pick up a book, and you feel like you’re not so alone.”
Talia Lavin
’s “poetic mixtape at
The Sword and the Sandwich

…I’m going to share some of my favorite poems, a bardic jukebox gleaned from decades of pecking at the great oeuvres of literary giants in sporadic fits and starts.
”Poetic mixtapes” should become a thing.
An excerpt from Will York’s book Who Cares Anyway: Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age
Jennie Xie on writing her novel Holding Pattern
Writing Holding Pattern gave me a reason to mine for details about that time and place, and a tool with which to dig. I’d spent so much of my adolescence shedding my Chineseness as a way to assimilate—refusing the weekend Mandarin classes the other kids were taking, cruelly correcting my parents’ accents—that by the time I’d reached adulthood, I was unmoored from our history.
New music from Junip (featuring Sharon Van Etten)
Joan Dichter: Helping students build their own home libraries
Each year, Dichter escorts the “My Own Book” students to local bookstores. NY1 joined her as she visited kids at the Union Square Barnes & Noble back in January.
“I love it,” Dichter said. “And you can see the enthusiasm.”
Each student gets 60 dollars to spend on books for themselves—not for their brothers or sisters.
New music from Lucinda Williams
Marie Myung-Ok Lee interviewed about her novel The Evening Hero
I'm glad you found the book realistic, because it's what I intended, both in its contemporary and historical contexts. Much of my motivation for writing is looking at a situation I think I know but then being forced to go deeper especially to move the narrative away from stereotypes and tropes.
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