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I had not CRIED cried yet today. I mean, I had been stifling the odd sob here and there and sort of cry-talked through a crucial portion of my intake session with a new shrink. But I hadn't had that big one, the cathartic horrible honking weepfest punctuated by "Oh my FUCKING god, Oh my god, AHHHHHH" that makes Claire Danes's ugly crying look like Kim Kardashian's "ugly" crying. I knew I needed it, physically, the way one might need any kind of release, but I couldn't get there.

Fortunately Spotify exists and my friend Erin had sent me some playlists that capture the flensed feeling of early sobriety. I knew one of the songs on her list was going to be the one to do it, but which one? The thing about being this utterly fucked in the head is that it could be ANYTHING. For example, I recently Claire Danesed in the woods for a solid 15 minutes thanks to the "Hail, Poetry" part in Pirates of Penzance Act 1, even though I KNOW IT IS A JOKE! "What we ask is life without a touch of poetry in it" ha ha. But then that "hail, poetry, thou heav'n born maid" choral bit. God, I'm insane.

Anyway, I was hunting through the playlist and for a second I thought it would be "I'm On Fire" (so close, tantalizingly close) and then I saw Seventeen and realized it was obviously going to be Seventeen by Sharon Van Etten. As you recall, I wrote an entire novel about Seventeen. Please buy it.

That song is genius top to bottom on every level, lyrics, production, her performance, the last fucking line, jesus christ. It should actually be illegal for me to listen to it right now. I should not own a phone right now, nor a computer. (The tools I use to do my job hahahaha).

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Hi guys,

I alluded on Twitter recently to some events that occurred in cursed home of Ben and Jerry's and paddleboarding.

Y’all wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch THE STATE OF VERMONT fell out? It’s kind of long, but it’s full of suspense.

— Emily Gould (@EmilyGould) June 21, 2022

I will tell you this full story eventually, but not anytime soon. Not enough time has passed for it to be funny yet, or even interesting. I have delivered it in the form of a tight 25 minute monologue to Keith, my therapist, and my friend Ellen. Keith and Ellen expressed appropriate concern and sympathy. My therapist suggested that the next stage of our work together might begin to include EMDR --eye movement desensitization therapy -- for PTSD. Not directly related to what happened in V*rm*nt, but not TOTALLY unrelated to it either. Ok, that sounds melodramatic and I feel like I should reassure you that I wasn't raped or put in jail. But like. Even though, as Nora Ephron's mom always reminded her, everything is copy (I have updated this to "everything is content"), this story isn't copy/content yet. Who knows, maybe I'll never tell it. Maybe it'll be a little secret between me, Keith, Ellen, my therapist, various personae who work and hang out in the environs of the Burlington "International" Airport, and Ruth (who talked me through parts of it on the phone, thank fucking goddess for Ruth).

There’s a recipe in my repertoire that I only make in times of emotional extremity, sort of like how Rachel Samstat makes mashed potatoes when she’s heartbroken. I forget about it for years, but when I need it, it comes through for me.

I learned to make this dish a billion years ago, when I was in college and working at the Wai? Café in the East Village.  Did you ever eat at Wai? Café or, likelier, order takeout from them?  Probably not, because no one ever ate there and the bulk of their delivery orders were sent to the nearby hospitals further north.  The food was, and I say this with love, reliably mediocre, which is a restaurant genre I respect more and more as it functionally disappears from NYC. The restaurant itself was tiny, and almost no one ever ate there. There was a whole back dining room that was primarily used as a break room by the delivery guys. In the front dining room, there would occasionally be a table of regulars who came by post-AA meeting to drink a lot of black coffee and maybe order one entrée to share.  Sometimes couples would come there on a date and, we could tell, immediately regret it. It was basically a ghost kitchen avant la lettre.  The most I ever made in tips after a shift there was $30.  But since I was still in college my rent was heavily subsidized by my parents (privilege alert!), so all I needed money for was to feed and clothe myself, both of which I did extremely cheaply and badly. The bulk of my diet, and certainly the only healthy or delicious meals I ate during that time, was comprised of my shift meals from Wai? Café.

The menu at Wai? was a sort of 80s-90s vibe, with some Asian/East Village touches. What I mean by this: you could order an iceberg salad with carrot-ginger dressing, soba noodles with asparagus, chicken Milanese, or pasta primavera.  The restaurant owners were Chinese and the kitchen staff was Chinese and Dominican.  The pastas were finished in a wok and the entrees were dipped in a fryer.  As is customary when you work at a restaurant, I spent my first few shift meals systematically working my way through the menu until I hit on the menu item that I would order every shift for the rest of the time that I worked there. I don’t remember what they called it!! Probably something fake fancy like “pasta alla (something).”  Anyway, here is how to make it.

 You’ll need:  a pound of spaghetti, a pint of heavy cream, grated parmesan, sundried tomatoes (NOT oil-packed), red pepper flakes or similar, garlic, salt and pepper.

(this is the unedited text of an email sent 6/6/2015 to Jessica Stanley and Meaghan O'Connell)

"I feel like I've been drafting this email in my mind in all these half-awake moments over the past couple of days but now I can't remember a lot of what I wanted to say. I knew that I did want to announce up front that now that I have had my cherished home birth I both understand why people become evangelical about them and also understand completely why other people do not want to have them. It was the best for me, for this time in my life, for this pregnancy and this baby. But that is a lot of variables. Oh and I also wanted to say that ha ha, I didn't understand anything about anything before w/r/t having a child. Thank you for putting up with me in my pre having a child period of my life. I had no idea! About anything!

I think I sort of knew I was in "prelabor" all day Monday (I did turn in the Comyns essay though am scared to peek at the edits -- I basically sent it to the editor with one of those annoying "I throw up my hands!" emails but in this case it felt justified.) I woke up at 4 am and starting keeping track of what at that innocent time in my life seemed to me like "painful" contractions -- they were 10 minutes apart, not getting closer or getting stronger. I sat on the couch and read Meaghan's tinyletter and reread her birth story!! I called at 7am and left a message for Martine, the midwife, who was scheduled to come for our regular appointment at 10am anyway. She called back and told me to get back in bed and stay there and try to sleep and not get up til I heard the doorbell. I followed this order and did sleep. When she came, we did the usual stuff -- she took my blood pressure, examined the baby's position and measured my uterus, and then when she was pressing on me with the doppler stethoscope so she could hear his heartbeat, I felt a slight gush and was like "oops, I think I peed?"  But of course it was not pee! So my water broke around 10:35 am.

I think Keith and I were both surprised that she didn't just set up camp right then, but she told us she would go to her other appointments in Brooklyn and we should keep her posted. I called the doula to tell her what was going on and then Keith and I settled in to watch half of s1 of Silicon Valley. He made me some eggs and kasha which I ate a few bites of ... BITES I WOULD LIVE TO REGRET.  Much more quickly than I would have imagined possible I was really in the thick of it. We were still watching TV but I was on my hands and knees, Keith was behind me applying counterpressure, and my contractions were barely 5 minutes apart.

I think this is when I started puking. I puked one dramatic puke that seemed to send things to the next level, and from that point on I puked with almost every contraction for a while. It was horrible but also it was kind of okay. It was something to do! It was really, really horrible. Oh and I also got the shakes and was like uncontrollably shivering between contractions. I told Keith to call Martine and the doula (inconveniently also named Emily.) I suspect this is what is called "transition."  Everyone arrived including an assistant named Shara and immediately started assembling and arranging stuff all around me. Shara and Emily got to work massaging my back and extremities and trying to coax me into putting my arms up on a chair so my shoulders and elbows wouldn't TOTALLY KILL FOR DAYS (this was unsuccessful). Martine and Shara monitored the heartbeat with that same doppler stethoscope every few contractions. No one even mentioned the tub.

One of the charms (depending how you look at it, but it really worked for me) of Martine and Karen's midwifery philosophy is that they don't do internal exams at all unless there is some compelling reason to. They judge where you are based on, I guess, the timing and intensity of your contractions and some other magic. So I had no idea at this point where I was in the process and I continued never to know until way late in the game. I think Shara was maybe trying to trick me a little bit by asking things like "where's the bowl for the placenta?" conspicuously so I would think the birth was imminent when in fact it was hours away. I sort of knew this in a part of my mind but in another part I allowed myself to hope.

Oh! And also they encouraged me to pee and when peeing on the toilet was no longer an option I peed on a pad on the floor like a small dog.

Martine kept trying to get me to lick a cracker that had peanut butter on it, and people kept putting a straw in my mouth so I would drink water, both of which I would then puke up. I allowed myself to be coaxed up off the floor at some point and labored with my arms around Keith's neck, semi-squatting hanging off him and REALLY grabbing him with each contraction. This was hard on him but he bore it very well though eventually (and who knows? maybe this lasted hours! I really have no idea) he mentioned that he couldn't last much longer in that position and I said "Oh, poor you!"  Then for a while we were on the bed, then I was squatting in front of Keith in a chair holding his knees. At this point I could feel the head, not quite crowning but I could feel it by reaching inside with my (I was encouraged to do this) middle finger. I was making outlandish noises. I got up to stretch my legs between contractions and was still shaking all over. When I couldn't get up to stretch my legs anymore we moved to the bed. I caught a glimpse of Shara's digital watch and was surprised that it was after 10. I had been dimly aware that it was dark out but had no idea how much time had passed, it was simultaneously forever and no time.

This was the final act and I knew it but also still didn't believe that the baby could really come out of me. It felt impossible. They had me lie on my side with one leg resting on Martine's shoulder and Keith behind me. I puked a couple more times, little pukes of faintly peanut butter-scented water. Every contraction would get the head partway out, then crap out after I was only able to get in two pushes -- so I could eke out another push, but it had no oomph. AND THEN THE HEAD WOULD SLIDE BACK IN, which was the most dispiriting feeling. Actually first the head would sit there for a long moment, which was the most uncomfortable feeling, and THEN it would slide back in.  Everyone was very reassuring about this, and you know, it was for the best- gradually being stretched rather than violently torn etc. It did not seem that way at the time. A lot of complicated stuff was happening in my mind. I was trying to be strategic and at the same time to shut off my brain and let my body take over completely. Martine's directions about where to push to and Emily's directions about what to think about seemed to help. Sometimes everyone was silent during a contraction and I would think "am I doing this one wrong?"  As I got more exhausted I tried once to "sit one out" which of course did not work. They were having me hold my breath to push, then sip in a little air, then push again. I was hardly making any sounds except when the head would poke out and then I would scream or say OH MY GOD IT HURTS or something equally eloquent. Keith kissed my head and I told him I would rather have encouraging pats on the shoulder like a sports teammate.

I finally hit on the image of bodysurfing and waiting for the right feeling in the wave, which even as I was having the thought seemed cliched. But I also felt like I wanted more than anything to never have another contraction and I would do anything to accomplish this so when the next contraction came I tried it and it seemed to work, I did nothing as the first smaller waves of pain came and then took a deep breath and pushed on the big one. This worked better. A scary new level of vagina splitting open sensation occurred. The head stayed out for longer this time and I tried to wiggle my leg to get another contraction going right away, but everyone said "take the break, breathe" and I think I might have even slept for ten seconds before the next one came. And then that was the one that did it, even as I still didn't believe it would or anything would ever. He splashed out of me blowing bubbles and howling. (At 11:18.)

I had been sure I would cry, I mean, I cry at this moment watching any birth video, any episode of Teen Mom or Call The Midwife, at this point in anyone's birth story. Instead Keith and I were laughing. He looked so weird! He looked like a little alien! He was our BABY? OUR baby? We had a BABY? It was so bizarre. He lay on my chest and wailed and we tried to comfort him, but of course we loved that he was crying so much, he was so alive. He had all his parts, all this hair, fingernails, everything. The only other notable thing that happened was that when Martine was massaging my uterus to get me to deliver the placenta I said "I thought we were friends, Martine" because it hurt more than I expected. I had a small tear that she deemed "cosmetic" and said would heal without stitches, but did I want a stitch? For "cosmetic" reasons? Keith and I were both like ha ha no (though I am terrified to learn what she means by this and though it's healing well I'm not allowed to sit with my legs wide apart, eye-bulging emoji.)

They gave us some privacy with him after the placenta was delivered and the cord was cut, and then Emily casually explained breastfeeding in a chummy way that made it seem like nbd and got him to latch, then heated up some Trader Joe's gluten-free pizza which everyone ate. They examined and weighed him and then left and we stared at him for hours and then tried to sleep.

This is my newsletter where I complain, so I'm just going to complain about some things in my life really quick. I have been trying not to do this but it's getting to the point now where I can't write any of the other stuff I'm supposed to be writing without purging these thoughts from my brain. Does that ever happen to you? I never realize that's what's going on until I've blown several deadlines and canceled plans and ignored texts from friends and am feeling like the shittiest shit imaginable and then finally, too late, I'm like, oh, I need to just get some of this anger and pain out of my system by narrativizing it for an audience, because that's the only coping mechanism that's ever consistently worked for me. Normal and healthy! Or not, but also, who cares right now. It is what it is. This is the brain I've been given, the only one I'll ever have, and it's not possible to go back in time and have developed, like, a meditation practice before the shit started to really hit the fan.

So as you already know if you read my last newsletter, we are getting kicked out of our apartment. Maybe? Probably. It's a messy situation that's still in progress and I definitely shouldn't be writing about it, because I don't want to accidentally piss anyone off and make it worse. Also, the specifics of it probably aren't that interesting unless you also live in NYC and rent and are in the position of trying to find an acceptable apartment in a market that has become wildly deranged by an influx of people who spent the past couple of years elsewhere and now, unwilling to buy because the buying market has been experiencing a bubble that's insane even by NYC standards, are doing batshit things like OFFERING $500/MONTH OVER THE LIST PRICE OF A RENTAL APARTMENT because even at $5000/month that 2-bedroom seems like a great deal to them, compared to the $8000/month they'd be paying if they bought a similar place at the current prices/interest rates. Does that make sense? I'm not totally sure that's what's happening across the board but I think it accounts for some of the craziness I'm seeing. Anyway, I plan to write about this more in a reported, edited, fact-checked way so we'll all find out, together!

For the first month or so of this apartment situation I felt fired up by rage, energized by it. But every fire burns itself out eventually, and this has been the week, for me, of burnout. Monday night when we all found out about the end of Roe together I was scrolling while putting Ilya to bed, looking for funny or interesting details of Met Gala outfits. Then Ilya was home from school with a cold on Tuesday and I couldn't get any work done, I knew it was not doing me any good to read other people's reactions to the news but I couldn't help myself. I wanted to feel something communal and I wanted to be reassured that what I was feeling was shared and normal. In doing so I made myself feel much worse, yet I couldn't stop.

Yesterday I had a driving lesson with my beloved driving instructor I. I was feeling okay on the way to the lesson, but then once I hopped in the driver's seat I felt shivery and bad, like I wanted to jump out of the car and run. The back window was fogged and streaked with rain and something about that made me feel even more trapped. I fought my impulse to just pretend everything was normal and I told him what was happening. I. listened to me describe my inchoate thoughts about abortion and how this news feels in my body, something I have heard a lot of other people say too -- people like me who've been pregnant and viscerally understand what it means to be a prisoner in your own body. The line in the poem about the word "pussy" that describes birth as feeling like you are the fox caught in the trap and also the trap. And that's a description of a wanted child, a wanted birth. I. told me to rub my hands together til I felt warmth, then press that warmth into my arms and my legs. He didn't act concerned or say "are you okay?" Then he let me just drive forward and reverse in the same spot over and over again for maybe twenty minutes, just practicing lining up the car and then making it crooked again. He worked through his lunch to do the rest of the lesson with me, taking our usual loop around the neighborhood with breaks for parallel parking practice. I still hate driving and I still suck at driving. But I made it through the lesson and at the end I felt the whoosh of relief.

Recently I found myself in a haze of scrolling during which I came across a TikTok account called "Farkakte Apartments." Each of these toks features a cute gal in a black watch cap and bright red lipstick named Stephanie who pretends to be a recognizable type of fast-talking NYC realtor. The farkakte apartments she shows you are mostly in Bushwick and Crown Heights. Though the account only has 10 videos so far, I would say there is UNLIMITED potential for growth here, based on my 20+ years of experience searching for and inhabiting farkakte apartments in NYC. Stephanie says things like "there are no closets, but you don't NEED closets, you're CREATIVE!" and "you don't want to live here? Fine! There are three woo girls from Wisconsin who are dying to move into a place like this." The 2 bed 1 bath apartments she's touring all rent for upwards of $4000. They are all, it goes without saying, farkakte. The vast majority of apartments are farkakte, but of course a tiny percentage are not, and that sliver of possibility is what keeps fools like me glued to Streeteasy and Zillow long into the night.

My/our endless curiosity is especially dumb when you consider that, generally speaking, there really are ONLY FOUR RENTAL APARTMENTS IN NEW YORK, with slight (but consequential) permutations.

1. The sliced up part of an older building that a developer has shunted appliances into wherever they could fit and divided up into as many "bedrooms" as possible, leading to nonsensical layouts and the very real possibility that your oven won't have space to open because its door is blocked by the fridge. These apartments are located in buildings that began their life as single family dwellings or tenements or rooming houses or warehouses or commercial space. It doesn't really matter. The only thing they have in common is those buildings are located in a neighborhood that has recently become more desirable, so some enterprising person with 200 different LLCs that are all variants on the same name gutted the interior and threw Home Depot's second-cheapest sink in front of a tile backsplash that looks like a closeup of a pixelated image along a wall that really ought to be a hallway. These apartments are enticing because they CAN look nice in photos, they are in a good location, and sometimes they get nice light. You might be tempted to think "With some TLC and personal touches, this apartment can overcome its oddness and become a real home!" Alas, it cannot, because there is literally no place in it where it would ever make sense to put a couch or a table. The ones in the "digital rendering" could not exist in reality, for the same reasons that Barbie, if she were somehow transformed into a flesh and blood human, would immediately snap in half.

   Would you like this apartment to contain luxurious amenities such as a dishwasher or a place to wash one's clothes? No problem! That will be an additional $2000/month, and the rest of the apartment is still made of shit.

2. The apartment that has always been an apartment. Yay, you did it! You won the jackpot! You found an apartment that, for better or worse, has been a site of human habitation for its entire lifespan. It was actually no problem -- all you did was look for rental apartments in a condo or coop building, or a rental building in a neighborhood with lots of old buildings whose day to day operations are supervised by absentee landlords/management companies. These apartments are sometimes in great shape, with newish appliances that are located in places that make sense -- kitchens that are their own entire separate rooms, for instance, which apparently used to be a standard thing that even non-rich people could expect from their homes. (Having a "kitchen/dining/living room," ie having the entire non-bathroom non-bedroom space of your apartment be one fetid terrarium of humanity, is the norm for new construction, probably for reasons of design efficiency, ie, it's easier to design a stack of boxes than a stack of non-boxes. Also probably HGTV is to blame somehow. An "open plan kitchen" could make sense in a big suburban McMansion, but in a 700 square foot apartment? You'd think someone might have at some point noticed that not everyone wants to only ever be in the kitchen or in bed. BUT I DIGRESS.)

   Anyway, yay. It's an apartment that makes some kind of fundamental sense. And even better, since you're not renting from NEWCORP2020LLC PARTNERS INC, but from either humans who own the place or a management company that has some kind of stake in keeping the whole building long-term habitable, you have some avenues for remediation when things go awry. Which they will, because this building is old. The water might be off sometimes -- it'll come back on soon, in a couple of days at the most. The heat comes from radiators, which you definitely can't control except by turning them all the way off. Window units are your best bet for air conditioning, but your building probably has pretty specific rules about who can install them and how and when. It's a big building and some of your neighbors might be absent-minded or very old or even dead and not discovered for days, so there are going to be mice and roaches. There just are. The hallway will always smell like floor wax at best, cooking smells and cigarettes at next-best, and rank garbage covered with industrial air freshener at worst.

   Could you have a dishwasher? Maybe! A washer-dryer? Oh my GOD, no, haha, are you insane? Laundry facilities are in the dimmest, grimiest, darkest basement, and every time you go down there by yourself you are inevitably going to prepare for getting murdered. A laundromat is located 10 blocks away, past a depressing stretch of large old buildings that are all pretty much identical to your large old building. You'll also have to make this same trek if you want, say, some milk or a lemon, because that is what all neighborhoods with lots of available apartments in their big old buildings are like.

3. The new construction/"luxury" building. Woohoo, look at you, fancy! Your apartment is in a vaguely Miami-ish building with these massive, massive windows that let in a view of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood full of people who are either just like you or who absolutely fucking despise you. You look out at them, and they look in at you. In fact, they can see everything you do, at all hours of the day, because you don't have any way of covering those windows. This is because it makes no sense to purchase the enormous custom window treatments your giant, awkward-sized windows would require -- those, it turns out, would cost tens of thousands of dollars -- and this is a rental where you're probably going to live for a year or two, max.

   Why aren't you going to live here longer? It seems so great! There's a dishwasher and a washer/dryer, there are even two bathrooms, there's central heat and air -- this could be your forever home! Except, whoops. Whoever slapped this thing up in under 6 months didn't get some permits or something. They've overlooked a detail or two. Like, the windows leak whenever it rains, and they aren't soundproof, and when the sun is out you feel like an ant under a magnifying glass. You've started wearing SPF 50 just to sit at your desk, which is located at the kitchen island. That's also where you eat meals, because there really isn't a space that makes sense to put a table. You're willing to overlook those problems, but then you notice a rank smell that comes in through the bathroom vent at irregular intervals. What's going on with the ventilation in this place? Are you being slowly poisoned? It doesn't matter anyway, because your landlord just sent an email that because of rising cost of everything, they're raising the rent $1500.

4. Oh phew. Oh thank fucking god. It's a normal apartment that's always been an apartment, owned by humans in a condo building. While it's new construction, it doesn't have big stupid pointless windows or other dumb design flourishes. It even has some kind of indefinable charm, though it doesn't get much light. It has two normal-sized bedrooms and two bathrooms. The other people who live in the building seem sane and nice, and because the whole thing is made of concrete, you never hear them (hopefully they also never hear you.) The kitchen/living/dining space is all one room, ok, but there's a kind of little nook for a table to go in, and someday you might even buy a table that's the perfect size for it. And best of all -- yes! A place to wash clothes, in your very own apartment! Oh my god, how has this dream finally come to pass?? Is this the place you and your family will spend the rest of your lives, or at least the next few years while your kids go to their beloved school a couple of blocks away?

   Lolololol oh my god, you MORON, you IMBECILE, you LUNATIC, of COURSE it is not! Your landlords are selling it, and you have two months to decide which of the above options you want to try again.

On the plane to LA I remembered that the last time I'd visited LA -- in 2018 -- I'd watched Better Things on the plane and really liked it. Pamela Adlon's semi-autobio semi-sitcom about being a working actor and single mom of three girls in the Valley had seemed, then, like a perfect show to get me into the LA mood, and I didn't remember much else about it. Once that trip was over and I was back in my NYC life I didn't think about the show again. Lazily, I'd associated it -- and its creator/writer/director Adlon -- with her former friend Louis C.K., who co-created the show and is still credited for that at the beginning of every episode, even though Adlon cut ties with him and started doing the show by herself three seasons ago (the current season is its fifth). I didn't want to put in the effort to think past that association, and I didn't want to think about C.K.'s career (ie, that he still has one) because I knew if I started thinking about that I'd spiral, filling with rage about all the ways that men who've been "metooed" have emerged unscathed. Unwittingly, I let this keep me from checking back in with this show that I had liked. BIG mistake! HUGE! And luckily, now rectified.

One of the things I miss most about pre-kid life, pathetic as this seems, is binge-watching TV. Sometimes I listen to my favorite podcast and hear the hosts talking about the many shows they watch and feel white-hot jealousy at the mere idea of sitting down and watching three episodes of a show on some random weekday night. We have been cursed with bad sleepers who not only go to bed late but also wake up most nights needing something or other circa the brain-ruining hour of 4am (too early to just get up, too late to full get back into the type of sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, like, at ALL.) So one of the best things about my solo trip to LA to visit Ruth, apart from seeing Ruth and eating at Gjusta three times, was getting to watch AS MUCH TV AS I WANTED every night and go to bed extremely late and still wake up at a sort of decent hour, West Coast time.

So I had this very intimate, vulnerable, joyous experience watching Season 4 of Better Things, sort of like what happened the last time I was able to wolf down a whole season of TV in one sitting. That being said, still -- guys, I have to say that I think this season of TV is a work of transcendent perfect genius art and everyone involved in making it should get a Nobel prize, probably? At the very least? It also maybe goes without saying that I had gone to the LA bespoke weed store, and so was much more high than I would ever be if kids were on the premises, which made the experience of watching the episode where Sam goes to the weed store and accidentally gets too high and her daughters have to take care of her truly immersive, 360, almost VR.

If you aren't familiar with the concept of this show I suggest reading Carrie Battan's profile of Adlon and Alexandra Schwartz's review of Season 4, though I would save the latter til after you've watched it because the description of Sam's fight with her eldest daughter Max minorly spoils one of the show's tensest, funniest, realest moments. Ok but if you haven't already clicked away I'll do a quickie gloss: Sam Fox, played by Adlon, has (like irl Adlon) made her living in Hollywood since childhood and comes from a showbiz family, and she lives with her three daughters in a big beautiful Spanish colonial style house for which I strain to find a better adjective than the abhorrent "funky" (but it IS, in the best way.) Most of the show's conflict is about the kids struggling out of and back into the nest, but there's also plenty of room for storylines about Sam's professional dramas, which give us a fascinating glimpse at what life is like for successful-but-not-famous actors. Sam always has a gig, but she still has to hustle, and her sets are never depicted as glamorous or even humane places to work. People recognize her every once in a while and she's kind, grateful and humble about it, except when they're dicks. Her life is full and rich. She has not had a romantic storyline (or, that we know of, sex) since season 3. Other characters fall in and out of love, flirt with waiters, reunite with exes, get accidentally knocked up, etc but Sam literally doesn't have time for any of that. She has transcended, or maybe repressed, that part of her personality. Asked to introspect by a therapist in season 3, she says "ew." It is interesting to think of a writer creating a character based on herself who has this relationship to exploring her own interiority. (I still haven't really puzzled out the implications there, but IT IS INTERESTING).

Hi, welcome back to our ongoing interview series with international correspondent Keith Gessen, who is also my husband, as you know. Let's get right into it.

Emily: Keith, hi!  A lot has happened since last we talked (in this format).  While I won't ask you to speculate about what's next, I do wonder what, if anything, you feel like you've learned in the past week and whether it's changed the way you're thinking about the (immediate) future. In very broad strokes please! The "three bullet points" thing was good last time.

Keith:

1. In 2014, the Ukrainian military put up no resistance at all in Crimea, and it took them months to mount a compelling response to the Russian mercenary incursion into Eastern Ukraine. This time, the military is fighting, and regular people are fighting, and it's really incredible. There had been some public opinion data that indicated people were more willing to fight, but to be honest I didn't believe it. I believe it now. 

It's been a minute since I did a subscriber-only email, for which I'm very sorry! It's a good thing I don't have a fat Substack contract to lose, because I would definitely have lost it by now. Subscribers -- thank you for sticking with me. I am committed to making it worth your while, though perhaps not at the pace of 1 subscriber-only email a week (which I think we can all agree is insane? It definitely tends to result in a lot of emails in my inbox that are like "open thread: chocolate OR peanut butter, if you could only have one for the rest of your life").

Since I am visiting family with our kids during NYC public schools' cursed "February recess," I thought I would make my husband, who is home in NYC alone in our apartment, pick up some of the slack. Besides, he really is a valuable resource re: this one thing. Probably some others. Lmk if you are interested in future Keith interviews re:, for example: hockey, the history of the little magazine in America, and the correct way to vacuum (not the way I do it).

Emily: Hi [endearment redacted]!

Keith: Hi.

Having Covid has completely emptied my brain of thoughts, just scooped it clean like what you do to a pumpkin when you're making a jack o'lantern. I've spent the past 9 days in my apartment, with one or both of my children at all times until finally, today, we sent Raffi back to school. Ilya went back (under duress, he had gotten very used to being at home over the course of the previous 2 weeks) on Monday. Even though I was sick, am sick, I still had to take care of both of them to some extent, even when Keith wasn't at work, because they're 6 and 3 respectively and simply do not understand the concept of me being sick. I made dinner last night for the first time in a few days, my brave great return to making dinner, and afterward I was so tired I had to lie down and scroll mindlessly through my phone. I lay down in Raffi's upper bunk but I didn't lock the door because when I do that the kids just stand outside the locked door and whine and cry until someone lets them in. They both took turns clambering up the ladder and offering me little gifts to help me feel better: hearts made out of play-doh, scribbles on construction paper, a pipe cleaner sculpture. "Wow, thank you" "I love it" "Oh, it's so cute," I said. I wanted them to disappear and I wanted to disappear.

"Do you have any dreams?" Keith asked me at some point in the past week, which for a while now has been his joking-not-joking way of asking what I need to get through the day with our kids. I told him that I wanted to disassemble the molecules of my body and have them fly through the universe for some amount of time, until this is over, and then reassemble when we are all done having Covid. He couldn't make that happen for me, unfortunately. All my molecules are still here, in the same configuration, and it's not over.

So that's where I'm at, psychologically. Physically, I don't know, it's not great but I'm definitely on the way out of the land of sickness. My final lingering symptoms are congestion and a disgusting cough. I'm taking a lot of Sudafed and trying not to do anything. I haven't taken a test to see if I can un quarantine myself because the idea of leaving my apartment makes me tired just thinking about it. This is still a million times better than I was doing a week ago.

Two Sundays ago -- so, four days after Ilya tested positive -- I felt a little tickle in the back of my throat around bedtime. When I woke up and tested positive I felt vindicated. After two years of wondering whether I had Covid, it was exciting to finally have a definitive answer: Yes! Official Covid! My throat hurt and I felt tired, but nothing else was really wrong with me. This continued through Tuesday, and I was happy to just convalesce with Ilya, reading and napping as he watched Frozen 1 ("Regular Frozen"), Frozen 2, "Olaf's Frozen Adventure" ("Anna and Elsa Christmas Movie"), Lego Frozen, Frozen Fever, and Olaf Presents. Disney, I am begging you, please expand the Frozen cinematic universe as fast as you can via whatever means necessary.

Ilya tested positive for Covid on Thursday morning and since then we have all just been, I guess, waiting around to get Covid. He's fine, he will be fine, but he's had an unpleasant couple of days, poor guy, starting with a night of high fever that blossomed, a few days later, into what seems like the kind of cold where you feel like your whole head and face are just continuously oozing snot. But the fever is mostly gone and I think he will be back to his usual self within the next day or two. Mostly he watches Frozen but there has been a fair amount of around the clock coddling and cuddling as he oozes snot onto me and whines. No one else is sick yet, at least not physically, but if none of us manages to test positive after being bathed in Ilya's germs in our apartment continuously for the past few days then I'll honestly be a little disappointed. I have swabbed myself and my squirming unwilling children so many times. It's deranged that I feel the immediate urge to cop to what a privilege, what a luxury it is to be able to afford a supply of rapid Covid tests. A self that existed at some point in the past two years would have had the energy to get angry about this, or about anything.

I injured my attention span by allowing Twitter back into my life circa the publication of my VF piece about sad mom movies and my Anna Marie Tendler profile, and though I am far from previous levels of scrolling I am still missing the clean, pure, virtuous brain I had been enjoying prior to that relapse. I've been able to read books but I have't been able to write fiction or have ideas. I have listened to three different podcasts recapping and analyzing various aspects of And Just Like That. It goes without saying that I have watched every episode of And Just Like That, but I'll refrain from adding my commentary to that of the learnèd Rabbis who are poring over this rich text. My idols Lindsey and Bobby have done a great job, of course, and I've also been so grateful for the expertise of Lauren Garroni and Chelsea Fairless. The official AJLT writers room podcast is mostly interesting as a document of exactly why this show turned out the way it did, sort of like the documentary on Disney+ about the making of Frozen 2, the one that seems to exist mostly to answer the question "Why??" Now that I mention it, those two big ticket media properties have a lot in common -- can't-lose IP that will inevitably reach a huge audience despite offering an actual narrative that's so muddled and internally contradictory it's almost impossible to explain. In this essay, I will ...

My newsletter subscriptions are really coming through for me right now, though. I thought I would do a little digest of the best of my inbox, to share the wealth and remind myself that there has indeed been more to my intellectual life lately than the pleasurable but transient delight of reading 3 different exegeses of Che Diaz's "California Girls" scene.

1. I'll Be Right Back #92, "3 Kids 1 Swab and Other Notes on Raising Children During The Pandemic"

   This one should be in the Smithsonian. It is "Dust Bowl Woman" in prose form. It reminded me of moments from the past two years that I had forgotten and, even now, seem both distant and arrestingly immediate, capable of making me enraged or thrilled all over again. Remember that one amazingly tone deaf tweet? Remember tiktok baked feta? Laura Hazard Owen is a genius. I love how understated and funny her writing is.

2. Everything Happened Vol. 208: "In which Donovan trolls me and I do not have the baby in a Safeway"

   It's hard to fuck up a birth story -- I've basically never read what I would consider to be a "bad" one (the W**dy Allen joke about orgasms comes to mind, unfortunately). The narrative structure is really baked in, so between those beats you can do pretty much whatever you want and still keep your reader riveted. But that doesn't mean it's easy to make one sing, the way Evie did with the birth of Polly. What I love about Evie's writing is how effortlessly she balances description and narration. She is always interjecting funny perfect observations but never so often that they bog down the story; some people misjudge this balance and the result is that their writing is very funny but basically unreadable because it's all lols. With Evie it's like, a lol sneaks up on you when you're least expecting it, ie, "The doll looked like if Seth Meyers had had the worst day of his life for five years in a row."

   Welcome Polly!! I hope someday you read this story and laugh and marvel and feel grateful that you were not born in an unclean Safeway toilet bowl.

3. Capitulate Now: Issue 55

   This issue of Katie's newsletter captured the emotional complexity of this moment in time, the feeling of struggling to have any particular hopes for the future when so many previous hopes have been thwarted and we're all so used to it. I live for granular descriptions of other people's days and coping mechanisms. I also love her photos.

4. Just Circling Back: Shadows

   I've always loved Kristin Iversen's book reviews and also her personal writing. In this new-ish newsletter she does thematically linked capsule reviews of books I have mostly never heard of. This issue though contains a review of Niina Pollari's Path of Totality which comes out this week, and which I hope will get a bunch of awards and introduce many more readers to Niina's brilliant writing. I agree with Kristin's assessment of the book a million percent: "These poems feel like a generous act; in sharing her tragedy — not just the sorrow, but the fierce and enduring love, the moments of pure bliss — Pollari is offering a legacy, a blindingly beautiful corona surrounding all that darkness."

5. Evil Witches: Mom's Sticker Chart for Winter Depression

   Claire Zulkey's voice and opinions have been part of my consciousness for decades now. She is part of a crew of OG bloggers whose writing I turn to when I feel like youngins can't understand how it feels to have already been online for a long time before, for example, Tumblr (which is now being discussed as though it is the ruins of an ancient civilization, came along. Thank goddess she is experiencing this infinite winter and parenting two boys at the same time that I am. Her newsletter is more a of a newsmagazine, full of interviews and communal advice-giving that always feels helpful, never judgmental. This particular installment of her newsletter functioned, for me, as the acknowledgment of something I had never really thought about before which is how important it is to regularly talk to someone outside your family. I definitely get a lot of passing chitchat in my life but I am severely depleted in the routine long talks with friends department and reading this made me realize that even though it feels gross to keep track of that it will keep me from inadvertently getting into a situation where suddenly a random person at school dropoff has to be privy to my innermost thoughts and fears.

6. Ask Polly: I'm Tired of Getting Used!

   Ever since I did my time in the advice column mines I've been a little bit allergic to the genre. But I make an exception for Polly, or Molly, or whatever else Heather Havrilesky wants to call herself. This one is going to stick with me for a long time; it describes a situation that's unfortunately familiar to me -- maybe to most people? -- where you realize you've been simultaneously using someone (for example, to feel like you have your shit together, comparatively speaking) and being used (for material help), but the terms of the mutual using are no longer comfortable to you and you can't stand it one second longer so you become suddenly desperate to rid yourself of the person and forget that any trace of them ever existed in your life, as though that will somehow delete the mistake you made and prevent you from ever making it again. Calling this "codependency" and telling people to just stop being codependent is most advice columnists' stock in trade. Polly does something different here. I'm very excited about her new book!

7. Unsnackable Vol. #55: Optimistic Ganache and Snail Matrix Goo

   Folu Akinkuotu is a mad scientist, poet and genius and her birthday cake sounds, frankly, fucking disgusting but in an AWESOME way. I think I would enjoy each of the elements on their own (were I able to eat them) but together? Actually, I want to hippieishly hold space for the possibility that this cake, featuring whipped Twizzler ganache, popcorn/malted milk ball buttercream, a rum/cola soak on spiced cola cake, and several other things I'm forgetting, might have tasted amazing. Folu on a baking competition reality show when?

8. A Piece of Cake #56: Honey-Roasted Peanut Cake With Bourbon Caramel Frosting

   I admire this newsletter so much -- it is put together so thoughtfully, with such attention to detail. Unlike my own resolutely lo-fi efforts, it makes the case via its mere existence that newsletters, as a medium, can be as aesthetically pleasing and useful as print magazines. Whenever it shows up in my inbox it reminds me that it's possible to live a more delicious, appealing life with a little bit of effort. And failing that, it's always possible to enjoy someone else's efforts in that direction vicariously!

9. READ LOOK THINK #194: Céline Sciamma’s two lists, chasing "leads", revenge fantasies, the fight against despair, a cult £1.50 bobble jug

   On the eve of the publication of Jessica Stanley's brilliant first novel A Great Hope, the author herself has celebrated by getting Covid and making an even longer than usual list of wonderful things for us to read, plus a very beautiful lampshade.

tw: sexual assault, flashbacks to college

While Keith was in Russia I watched the HBOMax sitcom "The Sex Lives of College Girls" in its entirety, even though sometimes I had to stay up late to accomplish this. I am currently this show's #1 fan but because I watched it so fast I will probably forget everything about in in another week, so I wanted to record my impressions before I forget them. This post has spoilers but only about one particular plotline, so you can and should definitely binge the entire show over the course of a long weekend.

I read a smart review of this show that noted that it felt dated, like "a millennial’s idea of what Gen Z is up to." But that is exactly what I liked about it. It was as though someone took my experience of college, at least the first two years of it that I spent at Kenyon, and surgically removed all the rape culture, homophobia and racism, then replaced them with ... joy and fun?!?! Whenever the show's characters do find themselves in unwanted or ungood sexual situations, the wrongs get righted pretty much immediately. And while I know that this is all about as realistic as a New England college campus where it's perpetually a sunny day in autumn, I still loved watching it. If TV is going to be escapist wish fulfillment, it's nice to have it fulfill a wish I didn't even realize I was still harboring. I had no idea that I wanted to watch Amrit Kaur's character Bela take a stand against her college humor magazine for harboring a sex creep until it was happening and I was like, finally!! Finally the Catullan, Essex's famous centuries-old humor magazine, will have its first female editor! (Or not, I don't know what they're planning for the subplot where the Catullan's women split off into a comedy magazine splinter faction, but I'm excited to watch that develop in season 2.)

That particular plotline is actually so much more nuanced and interesting than that quick description gives it credit for; I think the reason I latched onto the show is that it doesn't just Law and Order-ishly banish the bad guy and move on. To back up a bit: Bela is a comedy nerd whose one dream is to get tapped for the Catullan and in order to curry favor with its mostly-male staff, she gives six of the comedy nerds hand jobs. The senior girls on staff, who maybe didn't give hand jobs to get where they are (or did? who knows), are like "fuck you," and Bela is like "oops." But also her audition packet is strong, so she makes it through. Then, when she is getting a tour of the magazine's luxurious private clubhouse, an editor named Ryan gets her alone and creepily puts on porn apropos of nothing, saying it's a "funny video." She brushes this aside but then later, in similar circumstances, he comes up behind her and starts humping her. She quickly and unequivocally tells him he's weird and escapes, but she doesn't immediately tell anyone what happened. And when the Catullan's only other first-year woman, Carla, confesses to Bela that she's quitting because Ryan whipped out his dick at her and asks if she has experienced anything similar, Bela lies and says no.

This coming April, Semiotext(e) will publish the most comprehensive collection of Cookie Mueller's writing to date, an updated and expanded version of Walking Through Clear Water in A Pool Painted Black. The original Walking ... was the first book in Chris Kraus's Native Agents series, published in 1990. The book came to be because Chris went to a reading of Cookie's, met her, and asked to publish her writing. Though other publishers had been interested in publishing Cookie, they had wanted changes to her manuscript that she wasn't capable of making because she was too sick. She died before the book was published. These details, along with everything else I know about Cookie that isn't from her own writing, are from Chloé Griffin's invaluable oral history/biography "Edgewise," which was published in 2014.

Whenever it was that I first encountered Cookie, probably in my late teens/early twenties, I was wide-open to experience and reading a lot of books, and I probably thought something along the lines of: everything about this writer and her whole spirit resonates with me so deeply that it has changed me forever. Ok! Well, on to the next thing, there are probably TONS of writers out there I haven't read yet that who will have this effect on me, and I must continue to find them. But while I would go on to read other books that would expand and change my brain and life, there will never be anyone else like Cookie. Her ghost haunts my life, and surely the lives of many others. If you know where to look, there are traces of her everywhere, in the physical world she left in 1989 but also in the mainstream "literary" world that, during her lifetime, never properly knew she existed.

Cookie's primary talent was in way she wrote about her life, but her other main talent was in the way she lived. She was one of those Zelig-like figures who showed up at the perfect places in the perfect times to both absorb and help create the culture around them. This kind of person is often little-known except to the people in their immediate orbit, especially pre-Internet. If Chris had not seen that reading and intervened in 1989, Cookie would probably still be a footnote in the careers of the better-known people she hung out with and wrote about and was filmed and photographed by, like John Waters and Nan Goldin. And if Chloé hadn't undertaken the years-long, arduous process of creating Edgewise, Cookie's writings would still be cult artifacts. But the publication of the new expanded collection in April is what will finally give us the kind of mainstream Cookie fever I have both dreaded and wanted since I first read her. Today's 20somethings will meet her and become obsessed. They will change forever, too. And I will in some sense need to cede her to them, I'll let them have my friend I've never met who writes as though she is speaking directly to me. They won't know her like I do, though! And they'll know her exactly like I do: not at all.

It's so boring to read a synopsis of Cookie's life that's NOT by Cookie but I feel like I should put one one in!

Because I like to always have a Sisyphean, money-burning personal project going on in the background of my life, I decided toward the end of 2021 that I needed to get a handle on the workings of my endocrine system. In August I'd had a weird extra-long menstrual cycle, followed by a Shining-elevator period and some dramatic physical anxiety symptoms. My next few cycles were capped with slow-onset then extra heavy periods, which are especially annoying when they are coming 20 days apart. Was this "perimenopause" or was I, likelier, dying? Another possible answer, and one that I didn't need a specialist of any stripe to tell me, was "you have turned 40, and also there is a global pandemic," but I nevertheless became determined to find out if either of those conditions could be mitigated by, like, taking a magnesium supplement (or something equally easy). I love to periodically convince myself that all my intractable personality/physiological issues can be solved by changing just one thing about my life. I'm not alone in this, judging by how many instagram ads I get for bespoke $50/month probiotics subscriptions and reishi mushroom hot cocoa. The algorithm is correct: I am these ads' ideal audience. I am nearly always running some kind of budget-GOOP science experiment on myself. The actual "cure" for all of my unspecial problems is most likely "get more sleep, exercise more, and don't eat candy or drink wine" but how boring is that?? Please, sell me an alternative and make me feel special while you're doing it!

Anyway, I went to the functional medicine doctor my acupuncturist recommended (look, I know how this sounds) and she ordered bloodwork with a little more thyroid stuff than my GP has done in the past thrown in, and also something called a "Dutch complete" test, which is basically 5 sticks that you pee on over the course of 24 hours to see what's going on with your cortisol and sex hormone levels. I eagerly await the results of this test! (They're probably "get more sleep, exercise more, and don't eat candy or drink wine," but I live in hope!) Lol, sorry, did you think this was going to be an essay about how I had a mystery ailment, ran around looking for a diagnosis, had some exciting adventures in our broken healthcare system and then found a cure that you, too, can participate in without having to do any of that heavy lifting yourself? No way, buddy, this is my newsletter! I'm just here to tell you about the experience of abstaining from caffeine (and alcohol ,but whatever) for 36 hours so that I could do this pee stick test without invalidating its (probably useless and pointless) results.

I usually have one ... or two ... small cups of very strong coffee in the morning, and after that I usually have a cup ... or two ... of black tea in the afternoon or whenever the coffee starts to wear off. I know this is a "lot" of caffeine. The same acupuncturist who pointed me in the direction of the functional medicine doctor had also told me to wean myself very slowly off of coffee over the course of a month. That month being December, I ... did not do this. I think I might have made a conscious effort to make myself put more (almond) milk in my coffee -- to have a "cup" of coffee be about 50/50 milk and coffee. For a few days, or until I forgot about it. Anyway, heading into yesterday I had been drinking a totally normal-for-me amount of caffeine (lots.)

Unfortunately my brain won't let me write anything else until I address this directly, so I have to start by saying that my recent radio silence is the result of an episode of online harassment that has focused on this newsletter. Like most people who've "put themselves out there" online for a long time, I've dealt with this kind of thing periodically, and it's a sad commentary on the state of ... everything ... that dealing with this kind of thing periodically seems inevitable to me. It really shouldn't be, but it is, and all I can do is block, report, and move on. It's probably not a great idea to admit to having been affected by it, but every time I've sat down to write a newsletter this week, I've started and then deleted a few sentences and then given up. When I write anything, but especially when I write these emails, I don't consciously imagine my reader, and I'm always surprised when a friend mentions something she read about here. But I guess subconsciously I imagine these emails being read by people I trust, who at the very least mean me no harm. I mean, how else would I write them? Without that feeling of baseline safety, it turns out it's very hard to write. That fantasy takes a while to reconstruct.

I was struck by something that Ragen Chastain said in a recent interview with Anne Helen Petersen, about how she deals with trolls. "The conclusion I finally came to was that if trolls discover something that will stop me, then that’s exactly what they’ll do." Her activism is more objectively important to the world than my feeling free to write a newsletter describing my latest reading or my trip to the dentist or whatever, but I also think it's important, if only to me, not to let myself be stopped.

ANYWAY. That's just to say that this feels stilted and weird to me right now, but we must soldier on.

**

Skip this if you haven't seen Pen15 in its entirety including the finale and also skip this if you aren't in the right headspace to think about teenage sexual ickiness!

Yay, I'm writing this just for you and not for a magazine so I don't have to start with a whole paragraph explaining what Pen15 is and cagily holding back some details in case this is your first encounter with the concept of this show! I love newslettering.

I watched the finale of Pen15 on Monday night and I can't stop thinking about it. In this episode, which you know because you've seen it, (seriously, turn back now if you have not!) 7th graders Maya and Anna have "run away," a situation that starts out as a goof. The girls are trapped in a cycle of egging each other on and neither of them wants to be the first to admit to wanting to go home, which leads them to get into increasingly bad situations. This culminates in an unchaperoned visit to Maya's lnominal boyfriend Derrick's house. They're accompanied by Anna's actual boyfriend Steve who, like Derrick, is a high school freshman who's enough of a loser to date a 7th grade girl. While Anna and Steve make out fervently under an afghan, Derrick leads Maya to his room. There's a beautiful shot of Derrick framed in the doorway of his room as Maya decides whether to cross this threshold. She assumes she will get her first kiss, but she does not. Derrick isn't interested in kissing. In fact, it's strongly implied that he hasn't ever kissed anyone either.

One of the things this genius show portrays perfectly is that Maya is SO HORNY. Every molecule in her body is rubbing up against every other molecule at all times, trying to figure out how to masturbate on a molecular level. But also, this horniness is inchoate in a way that rang very true to me, a former inchoately horny 12 year old girl. Earlier in the season, Maya is shown getting out a jerkoff folder full of pages torn out of magazines. These images are so innocent: a single blurry boob. Some closeups of plants. Just vibes. Vibes are all she needs and maybe even all she wants, at this stage of her life. The reality that Maya embodies, which has maybe never been depicted on TV before with quite this level of specificity and explicitness, is that you can be desperately full of sexual desire AND also utterly unready to have sex with another person.

In 2013 I got up all my gumption to pitch a long first person essay to an editor at the New Yorker. The editor was very nice about the pitch, which he suggested might work in a shorter, less ambitious version for the New Yorker’s "Page Turner" website. The New Yorker Dot Com, in 2013, was not the robust and roughly equivalent-to-print organ it is today (in prestige if not in $/word), and also the Internet at that point seemed like a dangerous place for my first-person writing – I wrote back to him that if it was published online I was concerned that it would be “received really poorly,” by which I meant I would be roasted over an open firepit on Twitter, which in 2013 was – stay with me – both WAY more fun and also WAY more unavoidably “kill yourself, c*nt” than it is now.

I was crushed by this rejection. I had thought something along the lines of, "I am, having been through the wringer with writing online, now ready to join the ranks of name-brand, respectable writers whose essays are published in print magazines like The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, n+1, The New York Times Magazine, Harpers and The Atlantic.  That is the benchmark of success that both my peers and my mom would recognize. Not only that, it would make my next novel or essay collection sell to a publisher more easily and for more $.  It also would enable me to go to parties and have people say 'Oh, I loved your essay in Prestigious Magazine!'  They would be nice to me because they’d assume I had sway at Prestigious Magazine, and could introduce them to my editor there and improve their careers, too. I’d get jobs teaching because students would want to study with a writer who had been published by an august print publication. And also, I'd get paid at least a few thousand dollars." But I had thought wrong.

In 2013, I cried while telling all this to Laz, the bouncer/aspiring actor who worked at the bar I lived above.  He listened attentively, because he literally had nothing else to do.  After I finished my monologue he told me, “Emily, every rejection is God’s protection.”

I still think about Laz every time I get a pitch rejected, which is actually not very often, mostly because I almost never pitch anything. Once every 5-7 years I have an idea for a big long baggy first-person essay and the first step of writing it is flailing around trying to figure out how to get a good editor to work with me on it and, if possible, pay me enough for it that I’ll be able to justify spending the next 6 to 9 months working on it, which is unavoidably and regrettably how long it takes me to write one of these. Sometimes it takes much longer.

Hi! As promised, here are some cultural experiences, described.

BOOKS

Lauren Oyler recommended Painting Time by Maylis de Kerengal in Bookforum and I immediately went out and bought it. It didn't sound exactly like "my thing" but that was why I wanted to read it. I had been overindulging recently in books that are hook-y above all else, as part of my Twitter detox. I needed to always have something on my phone that was RIVETING. I read The Woman In Cabin 13, which is about a woman who is trapped on a cruise with a cast of menacing strangers and The Guest List, which is about a woman who is trapped at a wedding in Ireland with a cast of menacing strangers. These books did the trick, but after one last plotty book, about a woman whose mother may or may not have faked her own death (spoiler of course she did), I felt like my brain was ready to read something that wasn't plot driven above all else.

Painting Time is not plot driven. To the extent it has a plot at all, it is a bildungsroman: the protagonist learns the craft of decorative painting, then becomes better and better at painting. Her tools and techniques are described in hypnotic detail, and not a lot else happens. She paints, and also lives her life, but the life part is really secondary. I can't really explain why this book works but it does. Fair warning: you will feel as if you might be qualified to paint a detailed faux-marble fresco after reading it.

We spent Thanksgiving with my family in Maryland which meant that we spent all of Sunday driving home, then unpacking and attempting to reregulate our delicate nervous systems. The holiday was wonderful, truly joy-filled. The comedown from it, especially for the Raffi among us, has been pretty brutal!

I had done my best, as we prepared to leave, to make our apartment pleasant to come home to: fresh sheets on the bed, essentials stocked in the fridge. But by midday yesterday somehow the place was a dump and there was nothing to eat for dinner. I had to run around all day and I didn't get a chance to grocery shop until I was bringing Raffi home from school. This isn't an ideal scenario on any front; it's the worst time of day to shop, the store nearest my apartment is serviceable but idiosyncratic and overpriced, and Raffi is not a good shopping companion. He wanders off and gets lost, then agitates for gummi worms and Cocoa Puffs. My fantasy was to grab what I needed and be in and out in 10 minutes, which is never realistic under any circumstances, especially not these.

The meal I was shopping for has been in my repertoire since the early 00s. It's historically something I make when I am out of ideas and trying to stretch a dollar. What I like about it is that the ingredients are always available and affordable and everyone likes it, except, obviously, my children. They prefer beans straight from the can, accompanied by flour tortillas straight from the bag. No one can dissuade them from these frankly idiotic preferences right now and I am not about to waste valuable energy trying.

I started making a version of this soup when I lived in Greenpoint. I would shop for the ingredients either at the big Key Food across McGuinness or the C-Town on Manhattan Ave. My brain still contains maps of both of these stores, as they were in 2003-2007, I realized as I located the Goya brand chorizo in the Food Emporium last night. Stores are often confused about where to shelve this stuff; does it require refrigeration or not? Does it belong with the other sausages or should it live alongside the bacon? Some stores even stick it in the Goya section next to the cans of beans and boxes of rice! Bold, admirable, but maybe dangerous. If the store has a regular cheese section and a fancy cheese/deli section, the Goya chorizo sometimes winds up in the latter. It could be lurking anywhere, is what I'm saying. Seeking it out is maybe the most important part of making this soup.

As an expert on vanity and self-indulgence, I am innately good at having ideas for presents. Buying, wrapping, delivering presents on time ... these are not my strongest suits. I am more of a conceptual gift expert. Hence, this gift guide. Please also look elsewhere for caveats about consumerism or ethical gift giving.

A photo shoot with a professional photographer

We all take photos all the time and mostly post them on Instagram or send them to each other with the caption "lol." But like ... are we good photographers? And also, is anyone taking photos of our entire family looking in the same direction at the same time, with acceptable expressions on our faces? That woman who happened to be walking down the beach in the moments before sunset had some decent instincts, but let's admit to ourselves that someone with training, experience and expertise might have had something more to offer. I got a family photo shoot from Jeff Zorabedian as a birthday gift and though I will never have my act together enough to send out holiday cards with images of my charming children on them, it's good to know that now I could. And though Sylvie Rosokoff specializes in weddings and author photos, she would also be great at taking photos of you to just record that you physically exist at this moment in time. If you are getting this for someone else, go ahead and consult with them about scheduling and actually book the session; if you just get them a gift certificate they'll probably never use it.

An indulgence in vice

On Sunday, some of Ilya's besties and their parents came over for a playdate. Raffi handled being the oldest kid in the room decently well, only dramatically losing his temper once when Ilya stole a cardboard box that he had been fashioning into a Minecraft (?) helmet. One of the parents said a sentence that included the word "critique" at one point, and Raffi, who hadn't seemed to be listening, wheeled around and exclaimed "We're learning about that word at my school!" He went on to define "critique." I beamed with pride, of course. Who is this angel child, this intellectual elder statesman of kids?

This kind of thing would have been unimaginable a year ago, hilarious three years ago. If three year old Raffi had entertained several three year old guests, someone would have been bitten or punched in the face within the first ten minutes. We would have spent the entire time yelling and threatening ineffectively; it would have been a series of timeouts and tantrums punctuated by brief, awkward spells of tentative peace. Whereas Ilya and his pals just formed their own independent society and occasionally came to us with polite complaints about someone not sharing, or requests for more bagels. I think often of how lucky I am to have had these children in the order I had them, so that I never take Ilya's baseline civility for granted.

We've lived in our apartment for a year now. I love this apartment, so much. It's the best place we've ever lived, by far. Its one flaw is that it doesn't get a ton of light -- the main room only has one big window. If you lower the shade on this one window the room feels basement-y, even at night, so we basically never lower the shade. The other day I was walking down the opposite side of the street, directly opposite our apartment, at night, a rare occurrence -- I must have made a choice to mix things up by walking on that side. I looked up into my own window and realized how far back into that room any casual observer can see, when it's lit up in there and dark outside. You can see my whole family's life in that box, a tableau vivant of our domesticity. We should probably close the blind at night, I guess. But I would rather have the view of the street and the world outside. If you have to be in a box, you should at least have a view. If the cost is that people can see in, so be it.

I used to write about Raffi a lot, and then I stopped. I don't think this was out of any conscious urge to protect his privacy, or my own. It was more that it was impossible to get him into focus. He was moving so fast. He still is.

Heyyyyyy I know I said I was going to answer questions about pregnancy and second-kid agita in the next round but I gave it a shot and ended up feeling a little allergic to kid-related Qs right this moment. I’m sure I’ll get in the mood again but today I thought I would turn to more non-parenting related topics.  

 Q: Ideas/recommendations/thoughts on books to buy as gifts for 70+ year old parents who like to read, but read very different books than me? (but did enjoy, for example, Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead?)

 The NYRB classics subscription, though a bit luxurious at $125 (on sale!), is a great bargain: 12 books, delivered monthly, all of them guaranteed to be interesting. Among the 12 there is bound to be at least one major hit, and possibly all 12 will be hits with one or the other of your parents.  The other thing I thought of right away is also an NYRB book, Josh Cohen’s The Netenyahus. My dad, not usually one for fiction, picked it up during a recent visit and I’m still waiting to get it back so I can read it!

 Q:My 12-year-old niece really loves to write short stories and share them with me. I don't have much to say when giving her notes (what do I know?) but of course I encourage her. The stories are pretty imaginative, perhaps trying to tackle some subjects beyond her years (again, what do I know) and I have a feeling she's partially mimicking whatever she's reading or watching on tv. For example, I love this gem of a sentence in a story about a 20-year-old who has literally never left her house. "Lindsey tells me everything she does at school, what the lectures were like, the difference between Gilmore Girls Yale and real-life Yale." Long lead up to my question but she asked me to give her writing assignments (drum roll...what do I know!) so if you have any writing prompts for a 12-year-old girl, let me know.

"What I don't understand is why you never got a license in the first place. What happened?"

I was so pleasantly surprised and fascinated by the range and quantity of questions! I really want to get to them all eventually. I'm choosing a few for today basically at random. I might also take some to the free newsletter (I'll ask the q askers first if they're ok with that.) Without further ado, let's get to my specious wisdom and biased opinions!!!!

Q. "What is your favorite Of Montreal song and why?"

A. Questioner, I think you already probably know that it's a song from Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? The only question is, which one? It's funny to think that when this album came out, mental illness as explicit muse seemed sort of fresh and new and funny, and now every Tom Dick and Phoebe is like "(sings) hope my lexapro works this time ..." Anyway, I still love that whole album. It's really hard to beat "A Sentence of Sorts In Kongsvinger" for the opening line alone: "I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway/I felt the darkness of the black metal bands." Like. Who hasn't??????

Hi my cherished premium subscribers,

I owe you one -- actually two but who's counting -- premium newsletters. I was going to send them both out tomorrow but I need your help. Can you ask me some qs and I will answer them? It can be about writing, the juiciest bit of improbable celebrity gossip I've heard in the past week, what notable Brooklyn writer smells like salami in person (me), child-rearing advice (lol), gift ideas for your loved ones, you name it. Make sure to let me know whether you would prefer to receive a response in private or in public!

xxoo

Last weekend I left my home and family and ventured out on my own for the first time in 10,000 years. I saw the great big world outside of Brooklyn and it saw me! All of this felt both familiar (from all the other times in my 40 years of existence that I've done activities like "attend a party" and "walk around a city not my own") and incredibly strange (because duh the past 18 months). Also, all during this jaunt I was reading Keith's forthcoming essay collection about being Raffi's dad. I read it on the plane, and I read it in my frankly disgusting airbnb, and I read it at a café where I sat by myself at the bar. Being alone for the first time basically ever while also reading a book about the last 6 years of my own family's life was a millefeuille pastry of layered mindfucks, and I am still working out how I feel, both about the "being a person in the world" and also the "being a character in a book" of it all. Sometimes when too much/not enough is happening in my life and brain it is really inconvenient to have committed to having a 2x a week newsletter where I mostly just free-associate about whatever's happening in my life and brain, it turns out! (Who knew? What experience -- other than having blogged on and off since 2003 -- could have prepared me for this possibility?)

One of the things in Keith's book that stuck out to me was a throwaway line about how I love to stop and chat and often have to be dragged away from these chats, 'even with people we don't know that well.' Keith was using this description to make a point about how my being a social person has helped pave the way for our kids' having a social life and community. But I read that description and didn't immediately recognize myself in it. I tend to think of myself as a weird introvert, but in a partnership only one person gets to be the weird introvert, I guess. And ever since I read that I have evaluated all my chats differently. Like, am I not picking up on cues that whoever I am chatting with wants to move on with their day? Am I the bad chat friend? Or maybe I'm normal and Keith is an alien? Is everyone just humoring me? Do I have something on my shirt???

I have also still been on the "getting my shit together" tip, and in the spirit of transparency, and so you can follow along and help me construct some sort of overarching narrative here, the major subject areas of this project are:

Minor complaint: my kids recently forgot how to sleep and it's ruining my life.

Neither of them has ever been a champion sleeper, though Ilya has always been better at sleeping and everything related to "self-regulation" than Raffi. Until recently, he was content to sleep in a crib. Then he began exploring the possibility of sleeping in the bottom bunk of the bunk bed, and soon he was no longer willing to sleep in the crib. The crib is still in the kids' bedroom, filled with stuffed animals, awaiting the day when we finally decide to do something about it. Now that Ilya can get out of bed at night, he does. He gets in our bed at 2am because he "had a nightmeo." Why would he not? Our bed is bigger than his, and has us in it. Unfortunately, some nights, it also has Raffi in it, and even if there was room for all of us in the bed, there is never enough room for Raffi and Ilya to share any space of any size. They hit each other and wake each other up, jockeying for the warm spots closest to us, and we wake up (we were barely sleeping anyway) and one of us, feeling full of martyred bad feeling, carries one of the kids back to his own bed, then stays in the kids' bedroom (sometimes, in the kid's bed) til the kid is asleep, because our kids don't know how to fall asleep without our physical presence. This is because, despite having agonized over sleep training, we are failures at the one essential thing we were supposed to do when they were babies, which is teach them how to fall asleep unaided. Now we are paying the price.

I spent most of today in a state known to myself privately (but I guess now also known to you) as "LLTE," which stands for Literally Listening To Enya. Sometimes when I'm trying to soothe my agitated central nervous system there is only one possible route, which is to pop in my earbuds and let Ireland's best-selling solo artist (second best-selling overall, behind obviously U2) ululate gently directly into my amygdala. But to be clear, this is a desperation move. This isn't, "I'm behind on my work and feeling a bit overwhelmed by the news. Enya, chant something in Gaelic!" It would lose its power if I deployed it when I didn't really need it. It is a Pure Mood and the Mood is, I AM HIGH ON CORTISOL AND NEED TO COME DOWN IMMEDIATELY OR ELSE.

I don't know if I am "recommending" this or what. I was thinking earlier this week when I sent out my email about all the newsletters I subscribe to ... like, I don't really think anyone should subscribe to 100 newsletters/podcasts or however many it is (more, I think.) I don't think people should do what I currently do or what I have done. I am not out here living my best life or trying to momfluence! I am playing the hand I've been dealt, intellectually/physically/psychologically, with medium success at times. Other times, it's like, I would happily unscrew my head and swap it with another head, chosen at random from a wall of heads like the one in Game of Thrones's uneven Season 7.

Anyway, I was supposed to send a further list of my newsletter/podcast recommendation out today, but right now I am feeling very anti-recommendation. On a maybe too deep level I feel like I am both not qualified to recommend and also, kind of, burned out by recommending? Where has recommending ever gotten me, you know?

As a 7th anniversary gift to my beloved Capricorn husband, I just spent several days itemizing one month of our family's living expenses. Reader, you may be noticing a theme to these missives lately along the lines of "desperately trying to get my shit together." I had a lot of fire and motivation going into a lot of these various shit-collation projects, especially the easy ones that involved doing something medium-annoying one time (ie, dentist) or, best of all, purchasing something. The projects that required a firm commitment to sustained long term effort were exciting too, for about the first two weeks. Now I hate them all and resent past-me who committed to them, of course. But mostly I'm still out here, getting my shit together. Bit by bit.

I hated every minute of doing the spending-itemization but ultimately I did come up with some ideas for how to spend less on bullshit and more on things that make our lives better. I was hoping, of course, that we were secretly somehow spending a neat $800 a month on something I don't like and don't care about and we could just, you know, stop using or doing that one thing, but that did not turn out to be the case.

Even for a saint like me who is off Twitter, the kidney article could not be denied its due. Last Thursday morning my writing group started group-texting about it -- if you've read the article, you know this is distressingly meta -- and I realized I could hold it off no longer.

I'm not going to summarize it or summarize coverage of it. We're all on the same page here. It's day 7 post-kidney. If you are not caught up, here is the article and here is Katy Waldman's close reading of "The Kindest," and here is in case you don't have it memorized.

My birthday, October 13th, has always felt lucky to me. Of course, there are lots of logical reasons why October probably feels lucky for everyone, not just Libras who want to interpret randomness as evidence that they are the main character of life.

There are crisp, blue-skied days, during which you can spend a lot of time outside running into everyone you know, increasing the chances of every kind of kismet. Sometimes budgets expire at the end of the year, so it's prime time to sell a book, get a plum assignment, or even get hired for a job. Both of my children were conceived in the fall, just like the offspring of many other long-gestating mammals. It's all just boring science and probability, but because I am the SPECIAL BIRTHDAY PRINCESS I am allowed to maintain my belief that my special day brings LUCK to ME SPECIFICALLY, okay?

This morning I found myself thinking about one of the most bolt from the blue instances of birthday luck, which took place on my 22nd birthday. I was working the brunch shift that day at an Irish pub in the East Village, which is a great capsule summary of where I was in my life. The pub was empty except for some day drinkers who were all sitting at the bar, watching a game on TV. I paced the room from one end to the other, wiping down clean tables. I rolled silverware. I looked out the window, hoping that someone would come in. One of the guys at the bar, an older gentleman, motioned me over.

He handed me a $20 and told me to go to the deli on the corner and buy him a bag of pretzels, oh and keep the change. $18 was a lot more than I'd made so far that shift ($0), but still, I had my pride, so I demurred. The bartender beckoned to me. "He owns the building. We're nice to him," he explained. I got the pretzels.

I know I said I would answer premium subscriber reader q in the next free issue, but I wanted to address this emotionally intimate question here in the emotional intimacy letter.

A cherished premium subscriber writes:

"Ok this is a wildly personal question but: how did you decide to have a second kid? I know from years of reading that the first was not-so-planned. I’m turning 35 and kind of losing my mind with indecision about whether it’s feasible to raise any child in the city/under climate change/without vast inherited wealth and with both parents trying to establish creative industry careers. Feels like this will not be the only collapse of society we face? But babies are adorable, my maternal instincts are high, and it does seem like a magical experience ..."

I'm just a girl, standing in front of a culture, asking for one tiny favor: Can we expend as much intellectual energy as we generally expend on every marquee premium cable show on Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen? Is that too much to ask, that we CONVERGE around this book and obsessively cover it from every possible angle? Can we hyperfocus on specific plot points in exactly the same way we ran items in at least five about the scene in The White Lotus where Lukas Gage got his ass eaten? Can we bring to this masterful and fun novel ONE TENTH of the firepower that we expended on recapping The Queen's Gambit, which I think we can now all agree was, apart from Marielle Heller's amazing performance and the set design, ?

Fails:

In my defense, I was in a vulnerable place: a party, bizarrely enough, with tons of people whose names and faces all felt distantly recognizable in that NYC-specific way, where you're not sure if the person is a Law and Order actor or a former coworker or a fellow parent at your child's school because you rely on context clues to recognize that category of person. I had two drinks and then wandered around, trying to figure out how to be in a room full of semi strangers. Eventually, I went up to one of the vaguely familiar people. As we chatted and I worked to establish myself as a chill, friendly, normal person, I watched him attempt to do the math of how I'd ended up at this particular party. He asked me my last name, and I told him. "From Gawker? Wasn't there some controversy there?"

I know I wrote a whole essay about this phenomenon and how it always happens when I least expect it, but that was pre-pandemic. So this once-routine event, like unmasked grocery shopping, hasn't happened in my life for quite a while. I was caught off guard, and instead of doing the correct thing -- saying "Haha! Well, that was a long time ago" and redirecting the conversation to this guy's latest projects or his favorite color or whatever the fuck -- I actually ... answered the question? Or I started to, anyway. "I was, yeah, on Larry King Live, except Jimmy Kimmel was guest-hosting it, and there was this whole thing about whether celebrities hide behind bags of money," I said, and then someone else came over and joined the conversation and the dynamic shifted without my having to do anything about it, and the moment got lost in a sea of other moments in the continuing fun and weirdness of the night, and didn't resurface until the following day, when I thought about it a lot and felt my internal "days since the last incident" billboard reset to zero.

***

Yesterday I searched my email inbox for a pdf of letterhead for a college where I once taught as an adjunct so that I could write a recommendation for a student who had taken one of my classes there in 2017. I found the template, downloaded it, figured out how to get text onto the pdf, then wrote the recommendation. I found a stamp, addressed the envelope, and walked it to the mailbox on my way to pick Raffi up from afterschool. None of this was very time consuming! The only part of it that was difficult, other than the pdf formatting thing, took place a few days earlier when, having forgotten that I had access to that letterhead pdf, I thought that I would have to instead provide "a brief CV" to accompany my recommendation, so I opened my academic CV -- a file I hadn't opened since 2018 -- and started tailoring it to this purpose, then got flustered because it felt so futile and made me have to contemplate how I had once really wanted a full time teaching job. And then I had to think about the ensuing overlong process of permanently giving up on that dream. Oh also, about a week earlier, I'd spent some time figuring out how to get my friend Lauren's printer and my computer to communicate with each other so that I could print out the recommendation letter.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this endeavor took, approximately, 1000 hours. But also it was no big deal and I WANTED to do it. That's the catch, always. When a student -- a talented and deserving student, by the way, who had an essay in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS last year and who I had no trouble finding several paragraphs of heartfelt and specific praise for -- asks me for a recommendation, of course I want to write them a recommendation! I want to do anything I can, always, to smooth the paths of people in their early writing careers. I want them to get into fully funded programs or get grants and fellowships that will enable them to attend non fully funded programs. What kind of monster wouldn't want that?

But also, I have to somehow find a way to prevent myself ever from doing that again. Or at least: not doing that again til I feel like I can be generous without resenting what generosity takes from me, which is something that, right now at least, I can't afford to give.

During a therapy session about whether it's a good idea for me to take a part time "day job" type job, I was listing off a bunch of "being a good literary citizen" things I do-- things like blurbing, being interviewed for podcasts and documentaries about other people's work, doing 'in conversation with' book Zoom events. If I got a part time copywriting job, I really won't have time to do that stuff anymore, I told her. And she said, therapistishly, "What would happen if you stopped doing that stuff anyway?"

Because I was trying to downplay to myself that it would be my first in-person yoga class since February 2020, I purposely picked a teacher I didn't know. At the beginning of class she asked, because good teachers ask new students this, if there was anything she should know about me.

"Well, I have scoliosis but I've been working with it for a long time. And I have some lingering abdominal and pelvic floor stuff from pregnancy and childbirth."

She seemed to be waiting for me to continue, and so even though that was all I had planned to say, I found myself continuing,

"Also I used to teach here, I taught the teens and tweens class, like, a million years ago."

Quick housekeeping note: many of you are experiencing technical difficulties, apparently owing to the fact that some "premium" subscriptions weren't imported from Substack, and people who (correctly) thought they had already pay-subscribed have now had to re-subscribe via Buttondown. Ideally the amount of time you would spend thinking about whether or not you're paying for my newsletter is ZERO especially if you already made that decision once, so this is all VERY IRKSOME. Everyone has been very polite about it so far and I'm grateful for that. Thank you for bearing with me as we get this straightened out. If you want to get two emails a week from me instead of one, first, thank you, you're a true hero and second: if Buttondown is telling you you already have a subscription when you try to pay, email me (reply to this or emilgou@gmail.com) and I will get the situation sorted. WHEW.

On Saturday night, Keith and Raffi went uptown for a slumber party with Raffi's cousin and I had the whole apartment to myself!!! Whoops, no I didn't, I have two children. However, Ilya had skipped his afternoon nap, so he passed out at 6pm while watching Frozen. Perfect! I had invited girlfriends over for dinner at 7. We went up to the roof and had a great time, but then when we came downstairs to get dessert Ilya was sitting on the couch in his Ana dress, looking sleepy, confused and aggrieved. He proceeded to hang out with us for the remainder of the dinner party. He then watched "just the starting" of Frozen 2 as I cleaned up, after which he sat in my bed refusing to sleep until just after midnight, which didn't prevent him from waking up around 7:30 Sunday morning. "The sky's awake, so I'm awake!" he said, in the words of his cinematic idol "Ordinary," which is what he calls Ana when she's wearing the green dress. I dragged myself upright and began my day, deeply sorry to have drunk rosé continuously during the interregnum in which I'd thought Ilya was going to sleep 6-6 and also for then having eaten a bag of peanut butter m&ms at 11:30 pm in a fit of chagrin after it became clear that he was not.

One of my friends read my last newsletter and asked me what my mental health crisis had been about. "Or is that information for subscribers only?" Way harsh, Tai. But I guess it's the kind of thing you should expect when you promise emotional intimacy to paying subscribers.

The thing is, I have felt myself to be much more guarded lately, in all realms of my life, much more #boundariesgoals. An early-pandemic experience of being my usual very chatty IRL self and getting rebuffed hard still feels like it has cured me of bringing my entire wackadoo self to the table immediately with semi-strangers forever.

It was Spring 2020. Cast your memory back to that fucked time. There were rainbows in the windows, we were clapping for essential workers, and almost everyone who had the means to do so had fled NYC. Only the worst assholes and most essential workers had kept their nannies or sitters coming to work. Everyone else with little kids was fucked. Playgrounds were closed. No one was sure what social mores should be about little kids playing with each other -- it's impossible for kids under 6 to social distance, or at least it was then, in those days when all of this stuff was new.

Keith and I were splitting the day into AM and PM shifts, both of which were bad in different ways. In the AM, it was nicer to be out in the park with the kids, but then in the PM you would be left too exhausted by trekking (with a double stroller and recalcitrant 4 year old) to the park and dealing with their tantrums to get anything done. If you got to work in the AM, that part of the day was a blessed reprieve, but trudging back to re-enter the fray was depressing as hell -- likely as not, you'd find the kids napless, at the end of their tiny tether, with infinity hours left to go til bedtime and very little chance at making it further than the bleak office park two high-rise blocks over if you even made it out of the house again that day. This is a tiny sliver of the horror of April-May-June 2020, obviously, but it was my sliver.

I had a tiny, seemingly very self-contained petite crise de santé mentale two weekends ago and in its aftermath I decided that the only thing that might help me to feel better -- or at least, not worse -- was taking time off of Twitter. Now, the really amazing flex would be to get off Twitter without announcing you are getting off Twitter OR writing about getting/being off of Twitter but unfortunately I don't have that kind of superhuman ego strength.

The past 10 (but who's counting) days have been a trip, and not the blissful peaced-out kind. I plumbed the depths of my other capacities for procrastination, like:

answering ancient emails that could easily have gone forever forgotten

texting endlessly

On October 21st, Gris Tormenta will publish a book version

On October 21st, Gris Tormenta will publish a book version

On October 21st, Gris Tormenta will publish a book version

I went to a new pelvic floor physical therapist on Monday and on Tuesday I went to the DMV to get my learner’s permit. Just some little treats to spice up my life! On both occasions I thought about how hard it can be to just stay in my brain and experience discomfort without bailing out into dreamland or phoneland. Like, it’s fine to live in the moment if you are, for example, walking down a beautiful street at sunset. Great to live in the moment if you’re following a fluffy corgi through the beach dunes. Being in the moment as someone you met twenty minutes ago digitally penetrates you, in a room that is not nearly air conditioned enough, and both of you are wearing surgical masks? Being in the moment as you listen for your number to be called in an infinite litany of out-of-order numbers, as tv sets blare PSAs featuring photos of adorable children who were killed by drunk drivers, and also in this situation obviously everyone is wearing a mask? Absolutely no fucking thank you very much! But I did those things, those things were my main accomplishments this week.

I actually didn’t hate going to physical therapy at all, I had been looking forward to telling someone new the story of my body, or maybe it’s more like my body’s CV. As my 40th birthday looms, I have been thinking more than usual about how I want to live in my body, the only body I’ll ever have, in a way that is sustainable for the long haul. I don’t want to be in low-grade tolerable pain all the time from my scoliosis. I want to heal my diastasis completely, not just enough to be able to wear non-maternity jeans, but enough to support my spine and organs well. I want to be able to walk around and lift heavy objects/children and carry bags of groceries and run up and down subway stairs, now and far into the future. The idea that mere maintenance is a goal that requires a commitment to a daily not-very-intense regimen of little stretches and exercises and rolling around on foam rollers and rubber balls is, I admit, boring and annoying. Getting ripped or getting cut in order to become progressively hotter and hotter is a much easier sell, so I understand why that’s how all forms of exercise are sold. It’s weird that I spent so much time in the yoga studio in my 20s without understanding that the whole thing wasn’t about mastery and accomplishment so much as it was, or should have been, about avoiding avoidable pain. I mean, add that to the infinite litany of things I wish I had figured out twenty years sooner.

The learner’s permit thing is also about trying to undo or revise or compensate for the past, obviously. It would be nice to be able to just go back in time to 1997, take the road test a FOURTH time, pass, and go on with my life like a normal person who can drive. Failing that, though, I will have to go to driving school in NYC. My friend Bennett, when he heard I had gotten my permit, was like “well parking is so much easier now than it used to be because all the cars have those cameras.” I was like, “Not my car!” But there is always going to be an excuse, and I haven’t so much run out of excuses as I have run out of the meta-excuse of not understanding the extent to which there is always going to be an excuse. If I really can’t do it this time, it won’t be for lack of trying. In general I am trying not to give myself a pass about things that are “just not in my nature.” A lot of the things I want to accomplish are terrifying, and the only way past the terror is through it, through my shitty nature, through myself.

In my dream life, I start every morning with a healthy breakfast and then a quick workout that invigorates my brain and body for the rest of the day. Then, if I feel like plunging right in to whatever fulfilling creative work I have lined up, I do that. Or, if I’m feeling lazy and in need of inspiration, I read some of the novels that are lying around, then dive in after I’ve recharged and refocused my brain. For an hour or two I delight in productive, joyful work then take a break for lunch – healthy, of course, but also budget-wise and homemade. I eat every bite mindfully! I take a little walk, do some errands, maybe listen to a podcast. I listen to the podcast because I enjoy it, not to forcibly block out my own thoughts. My thoughts are pleasant and happy, not overly concerned with whichever climate emergency or intractable systemic injustice is currently making headlines. I don’t even keep close tabs on those headlines, to be honest – my news diet is careful and deliberate, mostly taking the form of deep engagement with the print magazines and newspapers I subscribe to. Why would I let a bunch of strangers’ algorithmically-suggested amateur analysis of breaking stories penetrate my subconscious? Better to calmly ingest the work of thoughtful, artful reporters and writers at a time when I know I’ll be able to process that information. Anyway, I finish up my little walkaroo and then return to my desk (in this fantasy, I have a desk) for another few hours of steady, engaged writing and thoughtful correspondence. Then I pick up my kids from the childcare they reliably have access to, take them home, cook them a nutritious dinner that they love and we all fall asleep by a reasonable hour so we’re ready to do it all again tomorrow.

In my real life – well, you can imagine my real life. Some days, it bears a passing resemblance to the dream I’ve just described. Most days, the only thing it has in common with that day is that I eat lunch. I always do manage to eat lunch. I would even consider it a “win” that recently I discovered that I can watch a 28 minute tv show while eating lunch, rather than mindlessly scrolling as I chew. I watched Girls5eva and the first season of Feel Good this way. You’re welcome for this brilliant lifehack!

I have written but I haven’t really written anything lately, if you know what I mean. I put down the beginning of a novel circa December and haven’t worked on it since. I crank out an advice column every week, which isn’t nothing, but to be honest, neither is it something. I wrote a jokey, fun piece about books for the September issue of VF which took a long time to fact-check because it was full of “funny” assertions like “back then, social media didn’t exist!” I would really like to get back to the novel but somehow I can’t. I used the first 5000 words of it to apply for a fellowship that I didn’t get. “As we know how much time, dedication, and vulnerability it takes to share work-in-progress (especially with strangers), we thank you for entrusting your project with us,” the rejection email said. I read it and thought, shit, I didn’t mean to make myself so vulnerable, and now I really wish I hadn’t! I also wish I hadn’t chosen “making myself vulnerable” as a professional identity. Is there still time left in my life for a do-over on that score?

Recently best newsletter-er on this cursed internet, Sam Irby, sent out another masterpiece in spite of the fact that she has a horrible diarrhea disease (I’ll let her amply fill you in on the details). In that newsletter she somehow managed to include a recipe. I was awed and inspired, both by the recipe itself and Sam’s doggedness in writing it, or for that matter anything. We all hate food and are bored of food. But if Sam can overcome being acutely as well as chronically gastrointestinally ravaged in order to share a recipe for “deathbed risotto” what excuse do the rest of us have?

In the past year I’ve gone through several iterations of the same cyclical cooking ruts that might sound familiar to you if you also are in charge of feeding meals to yourself and/or others in, mostly, a total vacuum of edible inspiration. At first there was the dramatically overcompesating/performative domesticity/distraction and disassociation phase lots of people went through last spring – keywords: beans, sourdough, shallot pasta. Then a giving up phase. Then an effortful, agonized attempt to optimize: maybe this is a chance to re-evalute everything, eliminate inefficiency, finally bulk order staples and meal-plan! Batch-cooking kale! Freezing tupperwares of soup! I posted a menu on the fridge and followed it for, maybe, two weeks. Cue: recommence giving up phase. Et cetera, et cetera, repeated with various levels of enthusiasm coupled with newly-discovered nadirs of giving up. A sample dinner from the bottom rung of this ladder: a buffet of pouch yogurts, veggie sticks (the chip, not the vegetable) and seaweed for the children, the combined detritus of which has already formed a trash gyre in the Pacific ocean to rival the size of the first one, plus something for the adults that I can’t even remember, maybe scrambled eggs? A packet of shelf stable gnocchi with jarred sauce that was so inadequate on every level that I later ate a bowl of cereal? Sigh.

Then last week for some reason I remembered a meal I made all the time circa 2003, a pasta dish based on the one I ate all the time for shift meal when I worked at an oddball diner in the East Village. It was always my experience that when I worked at a restaurant that let you order what you wanted from the actual menu I would be overwhelmed by choice at first and want to try everything, then eventually narrow it down to one favorite and eat that meal . This restaurant, which (!!) still exists, was a weird but nice place to work. I made very little money but it was reliable and no one was a jerk to me. At Chinese New Year, the owners gave me lucky money in a little red envelope. Most of their business was (is? no idea, I literally haven’t walked down First avenue in years) delivery to the nearby dorms and hospitals, and they had bottles of wine and cakes/pies on their menu which some possibly homebound people would order daily. Much of the job of a server there was actually just manning the phone and handing off delivery orders. So it was very peaceful and chill, and everyone who worked there got to know each other well because we spent a lot of time standing around being bored. I didn’t have a phone because it was 2003. I doodled on my order pad and even sometimes did homework. When I went on break I would eat my dinner on the back steps of the restaurant, accessed by walking past a back dining room that was almost always empty because, to reiterate, literally almost no one ever ate at this place in person, and if they did they usually got a hot water with lemon and a side salad and tipped in pocket change. In retrospect, this was still quite possibly the best job I’ve ever had. Certainly it was a good fit for my waitressing skill set (poor executive functioning, uncoordinated, medium-good at chitchat).

Honestly I don’t know what’s going on with this newsletter, or newsletters in general. I might have made a mistake flouncing away from Substack but all I know is that it felt weird to stay there because I think that company isn’t run ethically or transparently and knowing that was making me less enthusiastic about baring my little soul-bits on here. All I really want to do here is blog, the way I have always done. I included a paid option after months of wrestling with the idea of doing so. There are clearly far better uses of your $5/month! But I also have done some version of this for free for so long, and I do think in general it’s good to support the things we want to see in the world materially if that’s possible.

So just to be clear: this (Buttondown) is the newsletter service I’m using now. It seems to be a truly value-neutral platform with no bells and whistles. Who knows what will happen in the future. I will keep the paid option but think of it more like a tip jar. I do really value your subscription money and will continue donating 50% of it. Also, in general, thanks for reading this far. [Here is the subscribe button. ]

As a thank you, I’d like to send you a copy of , newly improved with a very cute paperback cover. If you’ve already read it, maybe you know a friend who’d like it? It also makes an only slightly quirky mother’s day gift.

Hi, just a note that I thought I had managed to delete my Substack but somehow had not. Please email me for reimbursement if you have been double-charged and I will refund your payment!

Something I don’t talk about much (because I signed an NDA as a condition of my severance) is the job I had from 2013-2014. That was the year that the NYC tech economy started being less fun and more cutthroat. Yahoo bought Tumblr. The people who had worked in high profile tech or blog jobs in the 00s were either rich and established or chewed up and spat out and searching for something new. I talked my way into becoming the lone “editorial” employee of a small startup that made app versions of magazines. I mean, it made the software that allowed people to transform their magazines into apps. The “editorial” part of my job is in scare quotes because it was actually more like sales. (A bigger, more established startup might have called my job “community” or “growth” or “audience.”) I was to convince writers with established internet presences and publications that had no app of their own that they needed an app – for the former group, the pitch was that apps were the future of blogs and for the latter group, the pitch was that apps were the future of print. Apps did not turn out to be the future of anything except apps, which is not this company’s fault. And just to be clear, I’m not going to write anything bad about this company, in part because I am not legally permitted to do that and also in part because Anna Wiener already wrote Uncanny Valley and even though she is 10 years younger than I am and had a different experience in a different city, that book contains everything interesting about my experience. You should read it!

No, I bring this up for a different reason which is that, given my firsthand experience working as a person with print publishing experience among tech people trying to use tech to monetize/reinvent some aspect of publshing, it’s VERY FRUSTRATING TO ME that I didn’t realize much sooner that Substack was not a cool place for us to hang out online.*

I don’t want to support this company with my reputation or (tiny amount of) dollars. Substack has a fundamental flaw that they are choosing not to own or address. They have repeatedly refused to acknowlege that paying some writers to use Substack makes them a publisher. They are simultaneously saying that writers who use Substack are “independent” and that by refusing to make value judgments apart from judging who can make the most money, they are promoting “free speech.”

In other words, under the guise of having no editorial strategy, they are choosing to have the worst kind of editorial strategy. The people who are capable of turning their existing writing platforms into a large paying audience aren’t inflammatory demagogues who sell their audience a simplified worldview that confirms their fucked-up preconceived notions, but a lot of them – inevitably– are. “If your views about whether trans people deserve to exist are too spicy for the New York Times or New York Magazine, we welcome you with open arms” may not have been the explicit intent of this editorial strategy, but it is its inevitable outcome.

Dear subscribers,

This morning I was eavesdropping on the kindergarten Zoom as Raffi’s teacher told the class how to write a personal narrative. Your story, she said, must have some details that make the reader understand what you were experiencing— “It was a hot day at the park” is a better sentence than “We went to the park.” Your story should have a beginning, middle and end. And it should, ideally, start with something called a “catchy lede,” which makes the reader want pay attention. Raffi wrote a story about “two crashes” — him crashing on his scooter a moment after his friend E crashed on his bike. “I hurted my knees,” his story concluded. It ticked all the boxes, and was accompanied by a good illustration. I thought, even kindergarteners can do this better than I can right now.

“Personal narrative” was once how I made sense of my experiences. It was what I did, what I loved reading. I thought that telling the truth could, in the aggregate, change the world. I wanted to champion other people’s autobiographical work and publish it, and I was sure that everyone would agree with me about the writing I found valuable, artful and true and the writing I found phony and gimmicky. I thought that I would get better and better at doing this thing that I loved over the course of a long career. I would write essay after essay and be known as a great essayist.