Welcome

There comes a time in every mildly successful thirty-something writer’s career to launch a newsletter. This, apparently, is mine.

I wake up at 6:30 in the morning now. Did you know that’s a thing that happens when you have a child? One day you’re nine months pregnant, underemployed and sleeping until ten in the morning to “bank up hours” (because that’s how that works), and the next thing you know you’re at a hospital in Poughkeepsie and a nurse named Maria is waking you up every three hours to “feed your daughter.” (Most of you are probably like, 6:30 is really not that early, but you have to understand that I am historically the latest sleeper of all time. 19-year-old home from college during winter break levels of late sleeper.) I tell you this because it is now 7 am, and I am using the kitchen counter as my standing desk while bouncing said daughter in a carrier and trying to get her to go back to back to sleep (#supermom #girlboss), because at 7 am it’s already time for her first nap somehow. Is this boring already? Sorry.

There comes a time in every mildly successful thirty-something writer’s career to launch a newsletter, and this, apparently, is mine. I’ve been feeling eager to write something that isn’t a novel and isn’t an essay and isn’t a professional email and isn’t a desperately pithy tweet. I think I just want to write to write, and to connect to people in a more direct way via that writing than I have in a while. Gross.

But really, I do feel like we’ve lost the thread on the simplicity of the writer-reader relationship. It’s become necessary to create a “brand” for oneself as a writer, which is insane. Imagine Virginia Woolf felt she had to tweet “some personal news,” paired with a picture of a dead bird in her garden in order to get Mrs. Dalloway on the Sunday Times bestseller list? Now I’m imagining Virginia Woolf reposting every single Instagram story of an influencer reading To the Lighthouse and adding three black heart emojis. Or maybe the single dying rose emoji. I am envious of authors like Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney who fully don’t engage in social media because they are famous enough to simply write. They are the exception, at least among Millennials. (Jonathan Franzen got grandfathered in). The rest of us are doomed to try to be good at Twitter.

It makes me happy when I can enjoy a book without any of the hype about the author surrounding it. (I know this is the whole “death of the author” thing by Barthes, which my husband always references, but I have not read that nor do I intend to.) I think it does fiction a disservice, actually, to know too much about the person who wrote it, because so much of the joy of reading for me comes from fully engrossing myself in the story and the world that the author has created. But because of social media and the Internet, we sort of can’t help ourselves from wanting to know everything about the writer who penned the book in our hands, because it is fun to speculate about how much is fiction vs. real life, to see who they’re friends with IRL, what MFA program they went to, who their agent is, etc., even though none of those things actually contributes to the merit of the book itself. I constantly find myself torn between being the kind of writer who tries to let the work speak for itself and the kind who is forever attempting to be pithy on the Internet in order to “strengthen her brand.” I think that’s a shame, but also maybe just how things are now? Am I making a point? Is this anything?

The irony, of course, is that I’m admittedly writing this newsletter in an attempt to strengthen my own brand, as it were. So it goes. (“I’m not a perfect person” -Hoobastank.)

What I’m Reading

I’ve managed to finish two novels since Stelle was born: Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan and Cheat Day by Liv Stratman. Acts of Desperation is about a young Irish woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, and most of the novel is her sorting out her own self-hatred (alcoholism, eating disorder, body dysmorphia) in relation to the emotional destructiveness brought upon her by this horrible man. “Great fun,” you say, but I actually do find this kind of incisive, emotionally intelligent writing about the internal self-hating state of a twenty-something woman hard to come by; it feels resonant and true and not at all drippy, which is incredibly difficult to do when you’re writing about feelings. I especially love the way she writes about eating and body image. (I would put a quote here but I took it out from the library, which is a thing I do now.)

Acts of Desperation is not very plotty, though, so if you’re looking for something more traditional structurally, I recommend Cheat Day. It’s about a compulsive dieter who works in a bakery in Bay Ridge and cheats on her husband with this hot contractor because she doesn’t let herself “cheat” when it comes to food. I had never read a novel about diet culture before and I think Stratman writes about it so well. It would be easy to be heavy-handed on a topic like this, but she uses such admirable restraint. It’s also incredibly fun and propulsive, which are two qualities I need in books right now, given my diminished mental state.

I just started the new Sally Rooney. Stay tuned for my much-needed thoughts on that next week as there is no media coverage on this book whatsoever.

What I’m Watching

Season 2 of The Other Two, a very funny and delightful show about the two adult siblings of a teenage heartthrob. This season their mother Molly Shannon has a daytime talk show and we love the Molly Shannon renaissance. One thing I like about this show is how gay it is -- as in, it’s written by gay people and casts gay people to play gay characters, and all of the gay jokes feel very lived-in. That probably should not be revolutionary, and yet. A highlight from season 1:

I will say, I don’t think they do as good of a job with Brooke (the sister) as they do with Cary (the brother); he feels like much more of a real person to me than she does, and I find myself continually more interested in his storylines than hers. This season, Gideon Glick of Broadway and used-to-be-my-neighbor-in-Prospect-Heights fame plays Cary’s boyfriend and he is beyond good. (Dear Academy: make Gideon Glick a movie star!!!)

I’m also rewatching Succession while Z watches it for the first time. I think I’ll save my thoughts on that whole experience for next week. In the meantime, this profile of Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner, was so much fun.

Finally, I do plan to watch the Monica Lewinsky impeachment show. It might be a hate-watch; TBD. I’ve been obsessed with Monica Lewinsky for a long time and I feel very protective of her for no logical reason whatsoever. Here’s a plug for a piece I wrote about her a few years ago for LitHub. Also, a friendly reminder that she features prominently in The Learning Curve, which is my second novel, which I find it hard to imagine that a single person among the three of you reading this newsletter doesn’t already know.

To you three: tell me what you are watching or reading, too!

Until next time,

Mandy