I’m on multiple deadlines right now. Actually, I’m on one deadline, Monday, for multiple stories so this is going to be on the shorter side.
First, thank you to everyone who checked in about the phone situation. Whatever Jack and Rose did, the problem seems to be mostly solved (tbd what next month’s phone bill looks like…but, so far, ça va).
Here’s what I’ve been reading.
Paris, When It’s Naked, by Etel Adnan
Paris is drowning in TicTokers and Instagrammers. (New York is, too, and presumably many other places.) I don’t know if it’s the Emily in Paris effect (I’ve never actually seen), or just my just being extra aware since I spent last year trying to capture Paris in my own writing, but it feels out of control here. The Paris in these posts is the idealized city. The perfectly composed shots. The delicious food. Fine. Yes. Paris has always played that role (including for me at times). But also…Paris is a complicated city. With lots of dark sides. I’ve been enjoying this book because Adnan (a Lebanese-American writer who spent many years here) manages to weave together both, and the result is the city closer to how it feels to me.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein
I’m currently spending a lot of time thinking about why people buy books. I just came out of the blurb cycle. The getting of blurbs is awful business for everyone involved. The author, the person being asked to blurb, the agent, the editor, the publicist. It’s the worst. No one likes it, and yet it persists. Mine were due last week, and I had a few bad days of wondering if ENJOY would be a blurbless book (I suspect every writer wonders this at some point) but some amazing, brilliant, generous people came through, for which I’m very grateful. Whether blurbs actually sell books is questionable. When I think about why I buy books, it’s because people I know and trust have recc’d them. It’s all word of mouth. Which is why I’m reading (actually listening to) Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. It’s been coming up in conversation and on my feeds fairly consistently for months, and in interesting ways.
So far, parts of it are incredible and alarmingly clarifying and it’s making me rethink how we are existing in the weird world we’re in. Consider this a recommendation.
His Latex Goddess, Anna Holmes
I loved this piece. Gloria (one of my favorite newsletters), remarked that four years out from the pandemic we’re beginning to get a different sort of pandemic story “These aren’t exhausted-parent narratives, though we consumed plenty of those over the past few years. They are more about a need to be seen and desired.” (Definitely include ENJOY in the latter.) I think this need is probably true of everyone, and the older I get the more I realize it is not specific to age.
In Defense of Divorce, Lyz Lenz (Slate interview with Hillary Frey)
“People are really uncomfortable with a woman who is free and a woman who chooses herself. I think that adds into the dissonance—it makes people really uncomfortable when you say, “Hey, my marriage was not great and I’m leaving.” And you know this, too: The moment you get divorced, so many women go, “When did you know? When did you know? How should I know?””
BONUS. I dream of one day writing a lede this on fire. [related: Edith makes a brief appearance in ENJOY]