My mother turned seventy this week, and yesterday we had a party for her at the house, in the backyard, under the maple my father planted the year they moved in.

She didn't want a party. She said so in May, and in June, and twice in July, and then she gave me a list of who to invite, in her best handwriting, with phone numbers. Most of the list was librarians. School librarians from all over the district, retired now, some of whom she's known for forty years. They arrived in twos and threes with casseroles nobody had asked for, and sat in a circle of folding chairs, and within ten minutes they were arguing about a book none of them liked.

Owen carried every one of those chairs up from the basement and set them out, and was then cornered by three librarians who asked what he was reading. He said manuals, mostly. They took this as a challenge. I watched it from the kitchen window and didn't go to help, which he has since raised with me.

Kristin drove up from Minneapolis with her two kids, who were adopted by the librarians on sight and handed books and lemonade and opinions. The younger one sat on the back step for an hour reading something a retired middle school librarian had produced from her purse, as if she'd been carrying it for years in case the right child turned up. She probably had.

There was a cake from the bakery on Fourth Street with "70" on it in blue icing, because my mother said blue. There were no speeches, because she'd forbidden them. When the cake came out she stood up, looked around the yard at all of us, and said, "Thank you all for coming. There's more cake." Then she sat down. It was the best speech I've ever heard.

I gave her a fountain pen with a fat barrel, easier on her hands than the thin ones she's used all her life. She wrote a thank-you note with it before anyone had gone home, to the librarian who'd brought the most casseroles, and handed it to her at the gate.

The last guests left at nine, when the light was going and the mosquitoes came up off the lawn. We sat in the kitchen with the dishes, and she said she'd had a nice time, in the voice of someone who'd had a wonderful time and wasn't going to say so.

Last week I spent three days in a recording studio in Minneapolis, on the near side of the glass, with a script I wrote and a voice actor.

They asked me not to name them, and I said yes before they'd finished asking. Marlowe's voice will be made from what they recorded. Not every line she'll ever say, read one by one: we couldn't afford that, and it isn't how she works. They read for three days, and from those hours comes a voice that can say things they never said. That's a strange thing to agree to. They agreed to it carefully, with a contract longer than our lease, and the one thing they asked for that wasn't in it was not to be the face of it. I understand. I'd want the same.

I wrote about two thousand lines for those sessions. Some are hers, from the cases. Most are there for the sound of them: questions, long sentences and short ones, numbers, street names, every kind of pause. The director I'd hired for the three days sat beside me and said "again, warmer" far more often than I would have dared to.

Here's what nobody warned me about. I've heard my lines read aloud for ten years, by actors much more famous than this one, and it always felt like hearing someone perform a thing I'd written. It was theirs, and that was fine. This wasn't. About an hour into the first morning, they read a small line I'd written at two in the morning a year ago, and I had to go out into the hallway. It didn't sound like a performance of her. It sounded like her, as if she'd been waiting for a voice and here it was.

On the third afternoon they finished the last page and sat for a minute in the booth with the headphones around their neck. Then they leaned in to the microphone and said, "Be good to her," and came out and shook my hand.

Owen thinks I'm being sentimental, and he's probably right. He also listened to the first test four times through, then went for a walk.

Have you ever heard something you made come back to you as someone?

I still answer letters by hand. I mention it because a few people have asked, since I left the studio, whether I'd stopped, now that I have less time and a desk that's also a company. I haven't. Every letter gets an answer, in ink, on paper, in an envelope with a stamp, mostly on Sunday afternoons at my kitchen table, which is where I am now with a stack of five.

My mother's rules still hold. Answer within the week, or explain why without making a meal of it. Write the date out in full. Answer what they asked before telling them what you wanted to say. Never type a letter you could write, because the other person can tell, and it tells them something about how much you minded.

I see her handwriting less than I used to, because I see her. For ten years it came to me every week on blue paper. Now it's notes on her fridge, a grocery list, the inside of a birthday card. But last month she sent me a card through the mail, across town, for no reason at all, and that's how I noticed.

Her writing has changed. It's larger than it was. The loops on her l's and h's have gone a little uncertain, and the lines run uphill toward the right edge of the card as if they're climbing out of the lake. She's sixty-nine. Her hands hurt in the mornings, which she mentions only the way she mentions the weather.

All my life her handwriting was the steadiest thing about her. It was the hand on the overdue slips, the hand in the margins of my homework, the hand that taught me cursive at the kitchen table with a pencil she'd sharpened with a knife. I'm not alarmed. It's still her. But I've started keeping things I used to throw away: the grocery lists, the notes on the fridge, a sticky note on my car that said "TIRES." I couldn't tell you what I'm keeping them for.

Whose handwriting would you know anywhere?

The cold came more than once this month, and last week it settled in. For a few mornings it was well below zero when I got up, and with the wind off the lake the radio said it felt like thirty below, or worse, depending on which hill you stood on. At that temperature the air hurts your teeth. Your nose freezes shut on the first breath. The snow stops squeaking underfoot and starts to creak, like a floorboard.

I'd forgotten that. I'd forgotten a lot of it. I'd remembered winter here as a story I told people in Seattle, and the story was true, but it was missing the part where the car makes a noise when you start it that sounds like an apology.

At the office, the frost grew on the inside of the windows. We have tall windows, which is half of why we took the room, and by Tuesday each pane had a forest of white ferns in its lower corners, thick enough to write in with a fingernail. Owen wrote the date in one. I wrote the temperature in another. The radiators knocked all day, at full stretch, doing their honest best, and we worked in our coats until about eleven.

At ten on Tuesday the man who owns the print shop downstairs came up the stairs, which he has never done, with a space heater under one arm. He has run that shop for thirty-one years and has opinions about paper weights that he'll share if you stand still. He set the heater down, told us to leave the kitchenette faucet dripping overnight or we'd be calling a plumber who wouldn't come, and said he keeps the shop warmer than he needs on mornings like this, because heat rises, and we're welcome to it. Then he went back down. The heater says "PROPERTY OF THE PRINT SHOP" on a label in his handwriting, in case we get ideas.

My mother is a few minutes away and perfectly capable, as she'll tell anyone, but on the worst days I had her groceries delivered so she wouldn't drive, the way I used to from Seattle. She called to say the oranges were very good and the delivery man was very young and she had given him cocoa.

It's supposed to get above freezing this week, and people at the grocery store are already talking about it like a holiday. Everything is relative.

What's the coldest you've ever been, and what got you warm again?

Fewer books this year, twenty-two, because I moved across the country and started a company, and both of those turn out to eat evenings. But I read the ones I did read hard, mostly in my mother's spare room in the spring and on my own couch since. Here they are.

• The Underground Man, Ross Macdonald. On Jonah's word, from last New Year's Eve. A small boy goes missing while a wildfire comes down the hills, and Archer finds an old crime underneath, as he always does. Sadder than Chandler, and more patient. I've ordered three more.
• Iron Lake, William Kent Krueger. A murder in a small town in northern Minnesota in the dead of winter. My mother had it on her shelf for twenty-five years and handed it to me in March, saying "For your first winter back." It's set up the road from here, and it made me buy the boots.
• The Hunter, Tana French. Back to the village in the west of Ireland from The Searcher. Slow and deep and dreadful in the best way.
• James, Percival Everett. Huckleberry Finn, told by Jim. I read it in a day and then sat in the car outside the office for a while before I could go in.
• The Sentence, Louise Erdrich. A reread, now that Minneapolis is a drive away instead of a flight. A haunted bookstore in Minneapolis, in 2019 and 2020. I lived in that city for four years and knew every street.
• Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler. A reread, for reasons regular readers will understand.
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie. A reread, my first since I was twelve. Knowing, I got to watch the trick being done, which is its own pleasure.
• Death at the Sign of the Rook, Kate Atkinson. Jackson Brodie, some stolen paintings and a country house. Funny, and kind about people, which is rarer than it should be.
• We Solve Murders, Richard Osman. A new set of people, and he's already made me fond of them.

What should I read in 2025?