Weekend Update

1. Like most of you, it’s very hot where I am right now, and thus very high on my list currently are these Tory Burch sandals.

Tory Burch, $248

These are SO cute on. The ring is so unusual and it’s just such a sleek, stunning sandal. That being said I’ve been going back and forth because I’m afraid of the ring rubbing against my foot and irritating it after a while. It was fine when I tried it on earlier, but these are the issues that only come up at like, hour 6 outside. What do you think?

2. GQ has had some great pieces lately. This week I’m sharing this feature on Otto Warmbier, the North Korean hostage later returned to the US. A tragic and much more complicated story than I ever knew.

3. Purseblog started a series called “Closet Confessionals” and it’s really good! I’d love to hear your thoughts on their inaugural edition. I like this woman because she seems willing to share and open herself up to what will inevitably be criticism. She seems responsible enough to me, and is having a good time.

4. I love this piece, via The Hollywood Reporter, about the story behind the Crazy Rich Asians movie. There’s a great line in there from Nina Jacobson about wanting the movie to be a “comp” for other Asian/Asian-American projects and this really struck me. If you’ve read some of the marketing description for my own book there’s often a mention of Crazy Rich Asians (this is what’s referred to when they say a comp – a comparison) and that’s because in the creative/media industries, it is so much easier to get a project through if they have an example already of a very successful one in your “genre”. Family Trust is quite different than CRA (for starters, it’s more like Crazy Middle Class) but I never mind the comparison because without CRA and even decades old books like The Joy Luck Club, maybe my book would have never been acquired. One step at a time!

5. This week I finished Nomadland, by Jessica Bruder.

Like many of you know, the cost of living in the Bay Area right now is incredibly high, and often times out of reach for many local workers. One of the impacts this has led to is more RVs in the area – one of the hot recurring debates in my neighborhood NextDoor is between those wanting to get rid of all the RVs (citing crime, zoning, etc) versus others urging more tolerance and patience. Although I understood this phenomenon at a base level, I really didn’t understand why a lot of people might voluntarily make the choice to sell their home/move out of their apartment and move into an RV…what the background of a typical “workcamper” might be, and how they got there. I highly recommend Nomadland.