Four Books That Helped Me Survive my 2024

Tales of fame, ambition, longevity, and memory that got me through a year that hit me like a wrecking ball

It's about this time every year when I try to make sense of "the story of the year."

There's no sugarcoating this one.

This year was a hard one for me. It's one very much in need of a reframe for me to look at it as something other than "a losing season." There was a lot of humbling—both professional and personal—and there's a lot of healing ahead.

I thought 2024 would be a year of dominance in my work, both on the mats and in my tech management role. The year had other plans, putting the "Submission" in "The Submission Artist." 2024 tapped me out, hard and repeatedly. I retreated and withdrew, and I'm still licking my wounds.

I haven't made sense of my own "story of the year" yet, but as I've tried to do this, I've been going through my reading list from 2024 to assess which books most shaped me—or helped me survive—an especially brutal twelve months of my life.

In a year filled with confusion, grief, and uncertainty, these four books brought comfort and perspective. They made me feel a little less alone and a lot more alive.

If you decide to pick up and read any of these—or just read the pulled quotes below—I hope these works do a little for you of what they did for me.

Now for one call for subscriptions and away we go!

Book 1: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

A fun and touching exploration of fame, love, and identity

I feel little shame in touting the merits of "Chick Lit," and feel zero shame when it's from this particular author. Nothing goes down easier than a Taylor Jenkins Reid novel. I've got almost everything she's ever written in my bookshelf. Carrie Soto is Back is one of my favorite sports stories, real or fictional. I'm overdue to read—and watch—Daisy Jones and the Six.

Detailing the life and times of an old school Hollywood star as she tells her life story to a biographer, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo often goes from glamorous to gut-wrenching in a single sentence. Jenkins Reid is a master of a pithy turn of phrase.

In a year where I was forced to rely on myself and cultivate confidence in my work instead of seeking external sources of approval, my favorite line was this one:

The truth is praise is just like an addiction. The more you get it, the more of it you need just to stay even.

I'm no Hollywood movie star of the 1950-1980s, but that line on praise-as-addiction hits home and ties into my next pick regarding approval and ambition.

Book 2: Ambition Monster by Jennifer Romolini

A raw examination of work and worth

Few books have made me feel more seen and understood than that of Jennifer Romolini, the magazine-editor-turned-tech-leader, whose reflections on her corporate, creatively-inclined career led to a book about her brutal and beautiful reckoning with the question of, "Who am I without my work?"

The book screams, "Save me from myself" more than once. Just when you know that Romolini has gone too far—in taking her work too seriously, in prioritizing her work too often over her marriage, her health, her whole damned life—she'll go one step farther.

Ambition Monster delves deep into the ugly truth about Romolini's historical relationship with work and success and what healing from that toxic relationship looks like.

Spoiler alert: It's not by taking a bigger paycheck or higher title. It's not by "pulling a geographic" by moving to another city or country. It's by looking yourself in the eye and being honest. Romolini nails it with this one-liner: "The hardest, most ambitious goal is to stop running from yourself."

As far as memoirs go, Ambition Monster isn't perfect, but it's pretty damn good—and that's part of the point anyway. Perfect is both overrated and impossible.

There are moments in the book where I felt like I was looking into a mirror and wished I could look away. It's a bittersweet pill and a gorgeously written cautionary tale for anyone who has fallen victim to the Lean In and #GIRLBOSS era of millennial feminism.

Those who've ever suffered from professional burnout won't get a quick cure for it but if you're a gritty and bookish gal, Romolini's words will make you feel less alone in it. At least that's what they did for me.

My favorite section of the book is from the chapter "Free as a Bird," detailing burnout not solely as an experience of exhaustion, but as one of grief:

People talk a lot about burnout, especially in recent years, especially after we’ve lived through years of a plague in a country with few social safety nets, a pandemic that left most everyone outside of the one percent traumatized, abandoned by our country’s current brand of billionaires-take-all capitalism. When we talk about burnout, we most often discuss feelings of overwhelm; the physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion that occurs after periods of overwork and excessive stress, how we become numb, unable to achieve or even dream of what future achievements could be.

But we less often talk about burnout in terms of grief, the grief for what you thoughts your career could be, what you thought you could be, the grief for time you’ll never get back, the grief for having given yourself over to something unworthy of you, the grief that springs from cruelty and mishandling, of never being given as good as you fave. The sadness that comes from reaching the top of a summit you’d set your sights on, only to get there and feel, Is that all there is?

Book 3: Outlive by Peter Attia

A meaty approach to longevity that goes beyond the physical

My husband will keep me honest on this one.

I tried reading this book in 2023 and failed.

Even in 2024, I didn't read the whole thing—to be fair, the thing reads like a textbook, with a bunch of charts to boot.

Why did I give this book another shot? A classmate whose Substack I follow about work and fulfillment recently wrote a post touting the merits of the final chapter of Outlive. It was enough for me to decide to pick the book back up from the library so I could read the last chapter, if nothing else.

Man, am I glad I did.

One tip: if you have a hard time reading science lit but want to mine the physical health insights from Outlive, I recommend listening to the interviews that Attia has given on Joe Rogan’s and Andrew Huberman’s podcasts that line up with Attia’s press tour to market the book.

Below is my favorite segment of the end of the book. Attia throws a little shade on the “biohacking” tendencies of Bay Area and shares some hard-won wisdom on how this journey toward understanding longevity transformed him:

I had long subscribed to a kind of Silicon Valley approach to longevity and heath, believing that it is possible to hack our biology, and hack it, and hack it, until we become these perfect little humanoids who can live to be 120 years old. I used to be all about that, constantly tinkering and experimenting with new fasting protocols or sleep gadgets to maximize me own longevity. Everything in my life needed to be optimized. And longevity was basically an engineering problem. Or so I thought.

It took five years, two stints in inpatient treatment centers, and the near loss of my marriage and my kids to change my mind. What I eventually realized, after this long and very painful journey, is that longevity is meaningless if your life sucks. Or if your relationship suck. None of it matters if your wife hates you. None of it matters if you are a shitty father, or if you are consumed by anger or addiction. Your resume doesn’t really matter, either, when it comes time for your eulogy. All these need to be addressed if your life is to be worth prolonging—because the most important ingredient in the whole longevity equation is the why. Why do we want to live longer? For what? For whom?

Book 4: The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

A haunting dive into memory, trauma, and coming of age

If you’ve heard of American Psycho, you’ve heard of this author. If you’ve never read American Psycho but watched the movie…that’s a wild read in its own right: the book is so graphic that it makes the blood-spattered, R-rated movie feel PG.

If you liked anything about the style of American Psycho (movie or book), you’ll probably enjoy The Shards.

The Shards is a book that made me feel cooler just for having picked it up. Heavy drugs. Lots of drinking. So many music references that there are multiple Spotify playlists consolidating all the songs from The Shards. 80's high school glam contrasted against the horror of a L.A. serial killer. Trauma, loss of innocence, coming of age. This book has it all!

In a year where I felt like I needed to escape myself, The Shards delivered escapism—and horror—in spades.

The book also made me a better writer, especially when it came to craft of dialogue and suspense. I've read it twice and am listening to it again.

Two tips if you're on the fence about reading it and nothing I’ve already said hasn’t deterred you:

1. If sitting through 608 pages daunts you, shell out on the audiobook. It's read by Easton Ellis himself and "reads" like a 24-hour thriller podcast.

2. This book is going to be turned into a show on Max, so if you want to be the hipster person who "read the book first", read (or listen) to it first and thank me later.

The opening lines of the book are probably my favorite lines. In them, Easton Ellis captures the truth of writing or creating anything of substance: there has to be a little bit of love-turned fearsome, powerful obsession:

Many years ago, I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—someone will get hurt.”

Closing out

I hope you enjoyed the short list of book picks. It’s a bit of a turn from the usual fare on this Substack, and far from a highbrow or niche list. Nevertheless, I hope something above piqued your interest or made you think as you reflect and re-engage for the new year.

Until next time: wishing you champagne, confetti, or however you choose to ring in your 2025.

EZ

PS: Got any book recommendations that I might find inspiring the new year? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.