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I love reviewing books but sometimes the pace of reading them can feel like that classic I Love Lucy episode at the chocolate factory. The conveyer belt speeds up and the books keep coming along faster than they can be “wrapped” in a review. Summer gives me a chance to catch up with some good books that whizzed by in spring.

James Lasdun’s The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh came out the first week of May, which is when I read it. This nonfiction book, which grew out of a piece Lasdun wrote for The New Yorker, is about the investigation and conviction of prominent South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh for the 2021 murders of his wife and adult son.

Then came the real-life plot twist: A little over a week after Lasdun’s book was published, Murdaugh’s conviction was overturned because of jury tampering. A retrial is being scheduled. Rather than rendering The Family Man obsolete, this new twist intensifies the miasma of stories that swirl around the Murdaugh case — including suspicious deaths and embezzlement.

Lasdun is a “true crime” writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague Janet Malcolm. Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative, Lasdun is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery: the mystery of evil.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Harriet Clark’s debut novel, The Hill, which came out in May, has been getting tons of deserved praise. The novel draws explicitly from Clark’s own background: Born in 1980, Clark was 11 months old when her mother, a member of the radical Weather Underground, was arrested and sentenced for her involvement in a Brinks armored truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men. Clark’s maternal grandparents got custody and she visited her mother in prison for almost 40 years, before she was paroled in 2019.

Clark’s main character, Suzanna, is 8 when the story begins and living with her grandparents, former members of the American Communist Party. The plot here is a marvel of sustained claustrophobic stasis. Every week, Suzanna is taken — first by her grandfather, then by a nun, then on her own — to visit her mother at the Children’s Center in Hillcrest prison. Suzanna’s voice charges this novel with intelligence:

Each week … my mother fixed and re-fixed my hair. I slept and didn’t sleep, . … Around us women counted down to release, but my mother and I had been released from countdowns. No reason to look forward, no interest in looking back, we were, as I saw it, free of the past and free of the future. Carnival Day, Friendship Day, Birthday Day — the holidays in the Center followed their own lilting rhythms, and eventually we submitted again to the lull and pleasures of our timeless life.

All the while I was reading The Hill, I kept thinking of E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, inspired by the Rosenberg case. The two novels differ in scope, but like Doctorow, Clark interrogates the cost of parents’ radical commitment to their children, as well as how the world itself shifts radically, from generation to generation.

Sometimes I put aside a good book for a bad reason. Mary Costello’s slim novel, A Beautiful Loan, touted as a devastating story about relationships, came out in March. “No,” I thought back then, “not another ersatz Sally Rooney in time for St. Patrick’s Day.”

But, one empty afternoon, I picked it up and kept reading, mostly because the present-tense narration of the main character, Anna, struck me as so weird in tone. Her deadened voice was at odds with her emotional turbulence. Here’s 19-year-old Anna summarizing how Paul, an elusive older man she’ll eventually marry, keeps her in thrall to what she calls “this oscillating life”:

In the middle of the night, … he rises on one elbow in the bed beside me and, in an urgent, desperate voice, says, I love you. In the morning, he makes no reference to this, and I think he must have spoken in his sleep. Never again in our lives together will he say those three words.

A Beautiful Loan spans 25 years and Anna’s obsessive devotion to two men, one dog, the writings of Camus and Jung, and the practice of Islam. Like the other two books I’ve caught up with here, it may not be the ideal “beach read,” but it would be perfect for a wash-out of a summer weekend.

“I hear all the time — I’m 35, 45, 55, 65, 75 — and I have no idea who I am. I don’t know what I want, I don’t know what I need, I’ve only lived in a role. Good girl, good daughter, good wife, good employee, good grandma … who am I?” Beatriz Victoria Albina says of the thousands of women she’s specialized in serving for the last decade. “From there, we struggle to make decisions. We take on a therapist role in relationships, always listening, always supporting, always problem-solving, but we don’t get that support in return for so many reasons.”

Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.

A certified somatic life coach, breathworker and former nurse practitioner, who resides in Brooklyn, Albina is the author of “End Emotional Outsourcing: How to Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist, People-Pleasing Habits” (out in paperback this September), which educates readers on these phenomena and shows them how to live a more fulfilling life. Her book guides readers through techniques such as body-based somatic practices and thought work, building to the capacity for utilizing healthy boundaries and direct communication.

Albina is also the host of the popular podcast “Feminist Wellness.” In the podcast, she serves as a loving alternative auntie figure and often addresses her audience with quirky pet names such as “my tender ravioli.” A queer Latina who immigrated from Argentina at 3 years old with her family when they fled the dictatorship of the 1980s, she has grown a following for her sage advice, warm sense of humor and loving voice, as well as for contextualizing how ending emotional outsourcing actively confronts the external systems of oppression that govern our world.

“We learned, often when we were preverbal or very young, that our authentic self is not OK, is not appreciated, is not welcome, is not the right way to be. Whether that’s in our family of origin, in our extended family or in institutions,” Albina says.

With her background in healthcare, Albina also leans into the science behind what she teaches, educating her readers — “my nerds,” as she calls them — on science-backed, trauma-informed techniques to connect with themselves and transform their relationships from codependence to interdependence. Her aim is to reroute individuals from relying on the approval of the people and systems outside to instead deepening our relationships with ourselves and our community in ways that are more fulfilling.

Albina spoke with us over Zoom from New York. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“End Emotional Outsourcing” author Beatriz Victoria Albina.

(Photo courtesy of author.)

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You coined the term “emotional outsourcing” — why? Do you hope that people will adopt it rather than using the other terms that make up the subtitle of your book?

I really wanted to delineate that these aren’t who you are. They’re verbs. They’re what you’re doing. They’re survival habits, so they are brilliant and laudable ways that you learned to secure safety, belonging, and worth outside of yourself when that felt like the only option. So we really need a sea change where we move away from, “It’s who I am.” Instead, let’s really talk about, “It’s what I was doing, and sometimes it’s what I still do out of habit, but it’s not inherent to who I am as a mammal.”

Are these three subtitle terms — codependent, perfectionist, people–pleasing — interchangeable or interlinked? What differentiates them from one another?

They each inform each other. Codependent habits are really about managing other people, and then people-pleasing is one way we can do that. Perfectionism is when we bring it home to ourselves — ‘I’ve got to control who I am and, thus, how I’m being seen so that I’m not rejected.’ It all really comes down to attachment wounding in a really deep way, and the ways that we seek to feel not-so-freaked-out when that wounding gets activated.

How can readers identify if this book is for them?

Downplaying our needs, stuffing down our feelings. Not knowing what we want, because we’ve spent so long prioritizing others. If you believe that if you don’t take care of someone, that they’ll leave or stop loving you. If you accept less than optimal treatment because you don’t want to be left. If you avoid advocating for yourself because it feels selfish or scary or bad. Overexplaining, over-apologizing, over-justifying. Not resting. Feeling guilty when you take a break or set a boundary. I could go on.

In your book, you guide readers toward becoming interdependent, rather than codependent or independent. How does one make this distinction in their relationships? What implications does this transition have on day-to-day life?

The way you know the difference is felt in the body. In a codependent pattern, in a codependent survival habit, we are doing things, saying things, being things to attempt to get someone else, to have an emotion, to try to manage or control the way someone else thinks about or relates to us. The choice that we’re making is not centered in self. Reciprocity within capitalism and white supremacy is tit for tat. In codependency, it’s also tit for tat.

Meanwhile, interdependence is when we are two autonomous humans, relating from mutuality and reciprocity that is flowing like water. We’re not manipulating or pushing ourselves, we’re not manipulating or controlling them. In interdependence, we’re giving from our emotional overflow, and the love and care we receive in that reciprocity, for caring for the people in our lives, balances out. But we’re not putting ourselves out to the point where we’re living in resentment, because we’re not making it mean anything about ourselves, or them, or our relationship.

We hear often about the epidemic of loneliness that we are living in. In your book, at the end, you talk about how through ending emotional outsourcing, you’ve cultivated a fulfilling chosen family, and that you make a practice of showing up for community care. What advice might you have for folks who recognize that they’re craving something different from how they’re presently experiencing their day-to-day realities but can’t see how to change it?

All right, listen, community care, babies. You’ve got to do the day-to-day banal stuff with your friends. You know, if you want a village, you’ve got to be a villager. Villages aren’t made in one coffee date and a lunch date, and drinks at a loud bar where you can’t hear anything anyway.

So, like, my friend and I go to the supermarket together on Mondays, and I go with her to pick up her kid because I want to spend time with her and that’s what she’s got to do. Go with your friend to the community garden, help them weed their tomatoes. Your body needs a new coat? Go thrifting together. Do the daily dumb stuff. Help your friends, you know? Not to brag, but I’m very good at laundry. The life I want is in doing the things of life. It’s having a soup club where we take turns dropping off soup at each other’s houses. That’s what community building is about.

Could you talk about the connection between the thought work and the body-based somatics that you teach?

When we’re daydreaming and ruminating and self-reflecting and mentally time-traveling or imagining other people’s thoughts, we’re not present. Somatic and nervous system support helps us to step into presence. When we are actually present in the moment, we’re in conscious awareness and we’re present in our bodies. It’s not any more complicated than that. That allows us to step into choiceful-ness. I can pick the meaning-making here. And I can listen to my body, and I can make a choice that is supportive of the collective, but it’s not self-abandoning. It respects the people around me without disrespecting myself. We drop into the present moment, and we write a new story in real time, hopefully with the whole body on board. And that’s how, very slowly, through somatic (body-based) practices, we start to create a lot more room to actually be a real person in our lives.

You’ve included journaling questions to work with, especially in the thought–work section. What advice do you have for folks who want to do the journaling but are struggling with adding it to perhaps our perfectionist-created to-do list. Any tips?

Yes. The kitten step is community. Text a friend, ‘Do you want to do these stupid journals together?’ And then hopefully she says, ‘Yes.’ And then you meet every other week for an hour on Wednesday, and you friggin’ do it. And you body double, or you read them to each other. You make a plan that involves another person, or a group, because we’re pack animals. We need to co-regulate. When the book first came out, I had a free book club, because we need each other. So, make a book club! Or tell your therapist or your coach you’re going to be doing these questions and then bring them to the session.