2016 · 5 Seasons · HBO · Comedy-Drama
Insecure built something rare on television, a show about Black women navigating friendship, love, and self-doubt that felt honest rather than performative, and while its final stretch stumbled in places, the emotional core held strong enough to cement it as one of the defining comedies of its era.
2018 · Sally Rooney · 266 pages · Literary Fiction
Sally Rooney's second novel tracks two people from the same small Irish town through four years of university, orbiting each other in a pattern of connection and missed connection that feels painfully accurate. The psychological depth is remarkable, the dialogue sharp, and Rooney's handling of class dynamics, mental illness, and the gap between what people feel and what they say is consistently intelligent. The lack of quotation marks and the characters' refusal to communicate clearly frustrate some readers, and the ending divides opinion, but this is contemporary literary fiction operating at a high level of craft and emotional honesty.