Welcome to Self-Care September
September arrives the way it always does — with a quiet insistence. The light is different. The mornings feel like a small invitation. Something in the air suggests that whatever you have been putting off for yourself, now might be the time.
All month long, The Mojito Book Club is dedicating our issues to books that understand what self-care actually means — not as a luxury or a treat, but as the ongoing, sometimes difficult, always necessary work of tending to who you are. Books that remind you to rest. Books that show you what it looks like to choose yourself. Books that sit with you in the hard places and then — gently, without rushing — walk you toward something steadier.
This week we are revisiting two books that belong at the very beginning of that conversation: one about what it costs a young woman to disappear inside the gaze of others, and one about what it means to find your way back to life through an unexpected door. Both are about care — the kind you give, the kind you withhold from yourself, and the kind that arrives from the most surprising directions.
September is yours. Let’s begin.
Revisited: Weightless by Evette Dionne
We’re opening Self-Care September with a book about what happens when a woman is offered no care at all — not from doctors, not from the culture around her, and, for a long time, not even from herself. Weightless traces Dionne’s relationships with friendship, sex, motherhood, agoraphobia, health, pop culture, and self-image, and honestly, it is not a comfortable book. But it belongs at the beginning of this month precisely because it shows, with devastating clarity, what taking hold of your selfcare looks like — and why its presence is not optional.
The Story
Evette Dionne wrote these essays to expose the realities of a fatphobic culture sustained by a multibillion-dollar diet industry. By her late twenties, she had been diagnosed with heart failure and pulmonary hypertension—serious conditions that were overlooked for years because medical professionals focused solely on her body size rather than her symptoms. From that starting point, Dionne examines the many ways society monitors, judges, and polices fat women: in doctors’ offices where weight loss is prescribed as the answer to nearly every concern, on dating apps where larger bodies are either dismissed or fetishized, and in popular media where fat characters are too often relegated to jokes or stripped of complexity and desire.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is Dionne’s refusal to separate personal experience from systemic issues. She reflects on early moments of exclusion, including her struggles with agoraphobia as a teenager, and connects those experiences to broader societal structures—from cuts to school lunch programs to biases embedded within medical education and healthcare systems. The result is not simply one woman’s story, but a powerful examination of institutions and attitudes that many people have ignored or accepted without question.
Importantly, the book goes beyond identifying problems. Dionne opens and closes with practical guidance and actionable solutions, offering readers resources for finding healthcare providers who practice weight-inclusive care and outlining ways to challenge discrimination through legal, political, and community advocacy. It is an uncomfortable book at times, but an essential and deeply honest one—and perhaps one of the best places to begin these conversations. Honestly, I really enjoyed this novel. I would also recommend that every medical student read it.
Why It Belongs in Self-Care September
Here’s a short section you can drop in after the main write-up:
Why It Belongs in Self-Care Month
It might seem like an odd way to kick off a month about self-care — starting with a book about heart failure, agoraphobia, and years of being dismissed by doctors. But that’s exactly the point. Self-care isn’t just bubble baths and rest days. Sometimes it’s fighting to be taken seriously in a doctor’s office. Sometimes it’s refusing to shrink yourself, literally or otherwise, to be believed.
Dionne’s journey toward self-acceptance didn’t happen in spite of the world telling her to change — it happened as a direct response to it. Weightless reminds us that care has to start with recognizing when it’s missing, whether that’s from an institution, a culture, or the voice in your own head. You can’t practice self-care in a vacuum; you have to understand what you’re up against first. That’s why we’re opening the month here — not with comfort, but with clarity. The comfort comes later, once you know what you’re actually building toward.
Revisited: The Wedding People by Alison Espach
From a book about a young woman who could not be seen clearly by anyone around her, we turn to a book about a woman who has stopped being able to see herself clearly at all. The Wedding People by Alison Espach is, on its surface, a novel about a wedding. It is actually a novel about what it means to find your way back to the life you still have — and the strange, funny, unexpectedly generous people who can sometimes help you find it.
The Story
Phoebe Stone is a professor in her early forties. Her marriage has ended. Her sense of herself has gone with it. She travels to the Cornwall Inn, a luxury hotel in Newport, Rhode Island — a place she once dreamed of visiting with her husband — and checks in alone, intending it to be a final indulgence. What she has not accounted for is the wedding.
The hotel is overrun with wedding guests, and Phoebe is immediately swept into the orbit of Lila, the bride — a younger woman who is meticulous, funny, a little brittle, and who takes an inexplicable liking to Phoebe despite knowing nothing real about her. Over the course of one week, something shifts. Not dramatically, not neatly, and not in any way that ties up cleanly — but Phoebe begins, slowly, to be reached by life again. A person she was not expecting to meet. A conversation she was not expecting to have. A reason she was not expecting to find.
Why It Belongs in Self-Care September
The Wedding People is, at its core, a novel about the difference between withdrawing and resting — and how easy it is, when you are in enough pain, to confuse the two. Phoebe arrives at the Cornwall Inn having given up on the idea that she deserves to take up space. What the novel offers her — and what, by extension, it offers its readers — is a week of unexpected evidence to the contrary. Alison Espach writes Phoebe’s return to herself not as triumph but as small, tentative, real — the kind of return that does not announce itself.
We brought this book back for September because it understands something essential about self-care: that it often begins not with a decision but with a distraction. With a stranger at the wrong time. With a wedding you did not mean to attend.
Content note: This novel’s opening involves a character in serious emotional crisis (suicide ideation). The arc is toward connection and life, but readers who are in a tender place may want to know that going in.
What Self-Care Actually Looks Like in Books
September’s feature is built around a broader idea of self-care than the one that usually appears on social media. We are not interested in the aesthetics of rest. We are interested in its substance. Throughout this month, the books we choose will reflect every dimension of what it means to tend to yourself:
Books are, we believe, one of the most underrated forms of self-care available. They ask nothing of you except your attention. They take you somewhere else and bring you back. They tell you, sometimes very quietly, that what you are feeling has been felt before and the character survived.
All through September, I’ll be sharing quick, doable self-care tips each week — one theme at a time, one small step at a time.
Week One: Mental Health
We’re starting here because mental health is so often the piece people overlook — and unfortunately, it’s frequently the root cause of physical health problems we try to treat separately. Taking care of your mind isn’t a luxury; it’s maintenance.
This week, try one (or a few) of these activities to focus on your mental health:
Mental Health Wishlist: Reading, deep breathing, a massage, a spa day, taking a nap, a bubble bath, scrapbooking, an outdoor picnic, scheduling a therapy session, watching a movie, planting a garden, meditating, listening to an audiobook, solving a sudoku puzzle, visiting a museum, watching a sunrise or sunset, or coloring in a coloring book.
Self-care categories and activity ideas for this series were inspired by GoodRx's guide to self-care activities.
Coming This Thursday: Tree, Table, Book by Lois Lowry
Thursday we bring you one of the gentlest and most quietly profound books to come out in recent years — and the perfect companion to the month we are beginning together. Tree, Table, Book by Lois Lowry, published in 2024, is a middle-grade novel that adults have been pressing into each other’s hands ever since it appeared, and for good reason.
Sophie is eleven years old and has an unusual best friend: Sophie, who is eighty-eight. The two Sophies have been friends across the seven-decade gap between them for as long as the younger Sophie can remember, and she has never thought much about the difference in their ages until she begins to notice things. Her older friend is forgetting. Small things at first, then larger ones. When the older Sophie’s son announces he is coming to move her to an assisted living facility, Sophie, the younger, decides to intervene. She administers a cognitive test she has found the three objects of the title in an attempt to prove that her friend still has the capacity to stay.
What neither girl knows is that the test is going to unlock something. Sophie the older has stories she has never told anyone — stories from her childhood in Poland, before and during the war, that have waited decades inside her for exactly the right listener. Sophie, the younger turns out to be that listener.
Lois Lowry is eighty-seven years old and is the two-time Newbery Medal winner who gave us The Giver and Number the Stars. She has spent fifty years writing about the hardest parts of being human for the youngest possible readers, and never once talked down to them. Tree, Table, Book feels like a late gift from a writer at the height of her powers — a book about memory, about friendship across impossible distances, about what we carry and what we pass on, and about the particular grace of being truly listened to. Full feature Thursday. Bring tissues and someone you love.
The Mojito Reader · Book Reviews, Book Club Chats & Literary Escapes · Published Every Tuesday and Thursday
Self-Care September — Week One
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