feeling

beautiful

1 book4 films4 albums

album2016

A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead

Daydreaming is the best thing Radiohead have done since Kid A. The whole album feels like a reckoning — slower and more orchestral than anything before it. True Love Waits finally got its proper recorded version after twenty years of live performances. It was worth the wait and somehow sadder for it.

★★★★½4.5

emotionaldarkbeautiful

stayed with me

film1995

Before Sunrise

Richard Linklater

A film built entirely on conversation and the feeling that a night like this could happen to you. Linklater trusts his actors and his audience completely. There's no plot. There doesn't need to be. Some films make you want things. This one made me want to walk around a city with someone I didn't know yet.

★★★★½4.5

nostalgicfeel-goodbeautiful

stayed with me

film2004

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Michel Gondry

The only film I know that makes grief feel like a form of love. The structure is one of cinema's great ideas — watching the erasure happen backwards, watching Joel fall back in love with the memory as it disappears. Carrey's quietest, best performance. The ending asks the only question that matters.

★★★★★5.0

heartbreakingbeautifulinventive

stayed with me

film2023

Past Lives

Celine Song

Song's debut and one of the best films about adult longing I've seen. Nobody is the villain. Nobody does anything wrong. It's about the roads not taken — and how they shadow the ones you did. The last ten minutes are devastating without a single dramatic thing happening.

★★★★★5.0

emotionalnostalgicbeautiful

stayed with me

novel2020

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

Unlike anything else I've read. It starts as a puzzle and ends as something tender and strange. Clarke builds a world with such internal logic that by the time you understand what's happening, you've already accepted all of it completely. I finished it in one afternoon and sat with it for days.

★★★★½4.5

beautifulquietly-brilliantnostalgic

stayed with me

album2008

For Emma, Forever Ago

Bon Iver

Made alone in a cabin over one winter, and it sounds exactly like that — isolated, raw, built from grief with company somehow. The lo-fi recording, the falsetto, the layered guitars: it's the sound of someone making art to survive something. Re: Stacks is one of the best closing tracks on any record.

★★★★½4.9

devastatingbeautifulsolitary

stayed with me

film2016

Moonlight

Barry Jenkins

Three chapters, three versions of a person. Jenkins uses light and silence like language — every frame is a deliberate choice. I've thought about the diner scene more than most things that actually happened to me. The ending is so quiet and so much.

★★★★★5.0

emotionalbeautifulquietly-brilliant

stayed with me

album2015

Carrie & Lowell

Sufjan Stevens

I put this on during a long drive and had to pull over. Not because it's a sad album — though it is — but because it's so specific. The grief is particular and named and that makes it more universal somehow. Death With Dignity and Should Have Known Better are in my permanent memory. Return it to regularly, always unexpectedly.

★★★★★5.0

emotionalbeautifulquietly-brilliant

stayed with me

album2016

Blonde

Frank Ocean

There's no album that sounds more like the interior of someone's mind. Ocean builds moods rather than songs — Nikes, Self Control, Nights. The sequencing is part of the meaning. I've listened to it beginning to end more times than I can count and it still feels new in different moods.

★★★★★5.0

nostalgicbeautifulemotional

stayed with me