As a young girl, I had a spunky friend, who bossed me and dressed me, and she'd stand in her driveway, hand on her hip, taunting me, "How does it feel to want?"
It was a line in a film she saw.
At that time, I could not afford to want. But still, I wanted to have her hair, the way hairspray and crimping irons gave her that perfect Who’s The Boss, Alyssa Milano flair; her capacity to pick up dance moves, jumping off a chair like Janet Jackson in the “Pleasure Principle” video. I wanted her mom, how she sat with us at night and tickled our backs until we fell asleep, how she stocked the kitchen with healthy food, wheat germ, and honey.
Later, in foster care, I was nothing but a meat sack of want. I wanted privacy, time alone; I'd sometimes sit in the bathroom, door and eyes closed, blocking out everything outside. I wanted a home—a real home, with a dog and a family. I wanted to go back to my school where I was enrolled in accelerated classes—where I still had the freedom to dream of becoming a neurosurgeon, or a lawyer, or whatever profession would pull my mom and me out of poverty.
And the less I have, the more I want: Even now, I want ridiculous things with no purpose, the little capitalist elves getting to work on my brain. I want nail polish and lipsticks, nonsensical outfits—jumpers, one-pieces—boots, espadrilles, soaps and face creams. I want accolades, acceptance notices from fancy literary journals, and fellowships. And underneath it all, what I really want is love—to be seen, to be touched, to be held, to be kept, to be possessed wholly with all my good and all my naughty bits, a no turning away kind of love.
I want to move through the world with ease.
~
We try hard to make sense of things in a senseless time. My friend, who I'd spoken to every day before all this, but who's since been exposed to the virus, or some other cruel thing that has her sleeping and using an inhaler, says wistfully into the phone, "I miss malls."
Of malls, Frederic Jameson wrote in Postmodernism, “Overwhelmingly, our daily life, our psychic experiences, our cultural languages are processes performed in and contingent on commercial space.”
In the early days of the pandemic, I wonder what happens when we no longer have that commercial space or when that space becomes virtual. Where do we go when that pinnacle remains burning inside us, but the space to make it grow—disappears? What is America without the physical space to Want?
~
After World War II, Americans embraced the ideal of the suburbs. People moved away from big cities, and malls were a new indication of what LIVING would be like. For all those suburban households, the mall became the epicenter of activity, a place where we could brush arms with the Joneses. And all of us drove there—a luxury in itself. As Joan Didion writes in her essay "On the Mall," "as a child in the late Forties in California, I recall reading and believing that the 'freedom of movement' afforded by the automobile was 'America's fifth freedom.'"
The previous four were outlined in Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address: 1. Freedom of Speech, 2. Freedom of Worship, 3. Freedom from Want, 4. Freedom from Fear.
As for the third, what better homage is there to Want than the mall?
~
America's first malls were outdoors; they were to be community centers—our zocalo—where people could come together for social interaction. These first malls appeared in the 1920s. One of the earliest was opened in the California boom town of Lakewood. With its 154 acres and sprawling parking lot, the Lakewood Shopping Center transformed fields of lima beans into a big city suburb—a precursor for what was to come.
J.C. Nichols, generally regarded as the father of the shopping center for his role in developing Country Club Plaza in Kansas City (1924), established many of the mall’s fundamental merchandising and management concepts. Nichols’ 1945 Urban Land Institute publication, Mistakes We Have Made in Developing Shopping Centers, codified the tenets of the modern mall with a list of 150 maxims, which covered everything from strategies to ensure local political support to adequate ceiling heights.
In 1956, the first enclosed mall—Southdale, in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis—changed everything. It also firmly cemented Austrian architect Victor Gruen as one of America's great mall pioneers. Gruen created a completely introverted building by enclosing once-open spaces and controlling the temperature, establishing the prototype for how we think of most malls today. As William Kowinski illustrates in Malling of America, once inside, the commercial potential of enormous spaces was realized in theatrical "sets" where "retail drama" could occur. Southdale was covered for practical reasons; Minnesota weather allows for only 126 outdoor shopping days a year. But the contrast between the freezing cold or blistering heat outdoors and the mall's constant 72 degrees was only accelerated by its atrium centerpiece, the Garden Court of Perpetual Spring, filled with orchids, azaleas, magnolias, and palms.
~
Kowinski identifies mal de mall (literal translation: bad of mall, which could be interpreted as mall sickness) as both stimulation and sedation, characterized by disorientation, anxiety, and apathy. Margaret Crawford writes in her essay “The World In A Shopping Mall” of The Gruen Transfer (named after Victor Gruen), which “designates the moment when a ‘destination buyer’ with a specific purchase in mind is transformed into an impulse shopper, a crucial point immediately visible in the shift from a determined stride to an erratic and meandering gait.”
These effects, in part, might help explain the expansion of the typical mall visit from twenty minutes in 1960 to nearly three hours today. Eventually, the mall became a place to cruise. For teenagers to hang out, and work, and steal, and kiss. Gallerias everywhere achieved a reputation as a safe place for singles to meet, and where "mall walkers"—senior citizens and heart patients seeking a safe place to exercise—could arrive before the shops opened to walk a measured route around the corridors.
To that end, terrazzo tiles were introduced in the '80s because developers thought the carpet would slow shoppers down. Architects also gradually increased lighting to create the illusion of longer afternoons. Finally, in 1992, the Mall of America opened, eventually featuring a whopping 5.6 million square feet of retail. The largest mall in North America, the mall sits just south of the Twin Cities, in Bloomington, Minnesota, and was built on the site of the former Metropolitan Stadium. To honor the location of home plate, the mall houses a plaque in its amusement park that commemorates a home run hit by hall-of-famer Harmon Killebrew on June 3, 1967—definitively placing this shopping center, and its absurd representation of excess, alongside America’s favorite past-time.
By the mid-90s, malls were being constructed at 140/year.
~
I was a latchkey kid when the Westside Pavilion finally arrived in Los Angeles in 1985; my young spunky friend who quoted movies about Want would raid her mother's empty Sparkletts of change, and we'd walk the two miles to the mall. We spent all day trying on clothes at Wet Seal and Contempo Casuals; we'd spend any money we had on Mrs. Fields' cookies or slices of pizza from Sbarro. We’d ride the escalator up and down.
Later the mall became a site for me to act out what feminist theorist Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism": “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” During the holidays, I'd go to the mall and finger all the items, look on longingly at the shoes and handbags, listen to the music, and see the line for Santa, and a part of me secretly hoped that perhaps someone would see me, and take pity on me, and offer to buy me all the things. But no one ever did.
~
There is, of course, a conventional association between women and mall space. Iconic films like Valley Girl and Clueless. Roseanne Barr's television show, wherein her title character worked in the mall. And then, there's the music.
I’m shuttin’ shit down in the mall
And tellin’ every girl she’s the one for me
And I ain’t even planning to call
I want this shit forever man, ever man, ever man, ever man
—Drake, “Forever”
For rapper Drake, girls are granted equivalence to stores as sources for reaffirmation of male dominance and economic success in the hip-hop market. As early as 1998, mall space provided a similar referent for Jay Z in "Can I Get A?":
Do you need a balla? So you can shop and tear the mall up?
Brag, tell your friends what I brought ya
Jay Z directs his curiosities about mall space to female listeners, engaging end rhyme between “mall” and “balla,” a term initially used to describe wealthy athletes but which now refers to anyone or even anything admirable. While these dialogues with mall space certainly perpetuate the same anti-feminist stereotypes—positioning women as shoppers and as “shopped” by the male speakers—they reproduce the very real social relations that occur in mall space, both through the exchange of money for clothing, and sexually, through the bodies of the spatial practitioners.
For example, around 10 AM on April 12, 2019, a woman and her 5-year-old son were standing outside the Rainforest Café on the third floor of the Mall of America when 24-year-old Emmanuel Aranda approached. She asked him if they were in his way and should move. Mr. Aranda, without warning, picked her son up and threw him off the balcony. When asked why he did it, he said he was sick and tired of years of being rejected by women at the mall.
~
My generation, Generation X, could also be aptly named the Mall Generation, as we were around in the before times of malls and now in the after. The before times, for me, were riddled with trips to the local Kmart. A store that allowed for layaway, where we posed for studio-like holiday photos, drank bright blue or red slushies, and ate at the Kmart Cafe.
The first Kmart opened in San Fernando, California, in January 1962; 1500 miles north, and five months later, Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in Rogers, Alaska. Both were the blueprint for what a mall could be. In our small military town in northern California, Kmart was one of the few places to hang out. I touched and longed for all the items, imagined a need and a stealthiness with the camping gear, and extended the fictive dream of Capitalism—that somehow being near Jaclyn Smith's discount clothing line put me in closer proximity to becoming one of Charlie's Angels myself.
In the ‘80s, Ma got a job as a security officer for Kmart, and when they were robbed, she was blamed and then let go of. Years later, I worked graveyard at the Winchell's Donut, and I, too, was robbed and then fired. In reality, Jaclyn Smith's discount clothing line just put me closer to who I always was, a girl whose Ma's bounced check was on display at the Food King on Westwood Blvd. A girl who was called to the front of the class with all the other poor kids to get her lunch tickets. The tickets she tucked into the side of her Payless Shoesource ProWings, a brand of shoes all the kids talked smack about.
~
In researching genres, I recently discovered a form of ‘80s minimalist literature called “dirty realism,” also known as "Kmart realism." Author Paul McFedries, in the craft book Word Spy: The Word Lovers Guide To Modern Culture, defines the precursors of Kmart realism as “trailer park fiction, Diet-Pepsi minimalism, and hick chic.” Miriam Clark writes in Studies in Short Fiction that it "represent[s] and reproduce[s] the disintegration of public life [and] the colonization of private life by consumer capitalism."
Authors Bobbie Ann Mason and Joy Williams are most known for this genre, likely coined by author Tom Wolfe in reference to stories that mention Dairy Queens and third-rate motels. In his introduction to Patchwork: A Bobbie Ann Mason Reader, George Saunders writes, "You could say, as critics have, that Mason is writing about a particular form of late-twentieth-century American sadness, a moment during which something has fundamentally shifted in the American ethos. The way I would say it is that she is bearing witness to our descent into a new era of pure materialism."
~
If Bobbie Ann Mason is representative of Kmart realism, then I wonder who or what literature would represent Caruso realism. I'm speaking here of Rick Caruso, the Los Angeles mall developer and mayoral candidate. Caruso's The Grove and The Americana at Brand are the epitome of Los Angeles' animated spaces, spaces that are part fairy ground and part extensions of the body of Los Angeles. Caruso's intentional use of mall space and large multi-use dwelling-consumer spaces have become LA's theme park phantom limbs, filling the ghost imprint of the homes and apartment units bulldozed in the mid-20th century.
Both The Americana at Brand and The Grove are organized upon the idea of a city center—with a mix of architectural styles, building heights, materials used, and vast open spaces at their center. The Grove is reminiscent of 1930s Los Angeles; meanwhile, The Americana reflects the brick factory facades of the industrial era, with its massive elevator shaft with exposed steel beams.
Each of the two intends to appear to be a public space but is private property and is protected as such. But if mall decor and design are not explicit enough to tell young people of color or the unhoused that they are not welcome, more literal warnings can be issued. A bronze plaque placed at the Grove's southern entrance spells out the house rules: "The Grove is private property and has not at any time been dedicated to public uses," listing 18 activities from which visitors must refrain. While the two-acre park in the center of the Americana is technically public property, the private security force that patrols it prevents anyone from photographing with professional equipment without permission. "Sitting on floors, handrails, stairs, escalators, trash receptacles and other areas not specifically designed for seating” is also restricted. The Americana at Brand allows dogs on the property—except on its grassy area, and unless the dog in question is a pit bull.
Still, in a city that lacks accessible public space, The Grove and The Americana provide a peek into an alternate reality. Pedestrianized streets. Seamless sidewalks. Reliable transit. Shady trees. Alissa Walker writes in New York Magazine, “Yes, in theory, the Grove represents the dystopian future where billionaire developers have cordoned off our public spaces into oversurveilled fortresses. But in reality, elements of this future are very appealing to Angelenos. That’s why they go there. If they don’t readily admit that they do, they’re lying. Everybody loves the Grove.”
I will confess here that in recent years, I, too, have found some joy at my local outdoor mall—Americana at Brand—after one winter, as the fake snow blasted upon us, my now-wife bent down on one knee and proposed beside the iconic dancing water fountain.
~
In 1787, Grigory Potemkin, former lover of Empress Catherine II, supposedly erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River to impress the Russian Empress and her guests on their way to Crimea. He would then disassemble and reassemble the village along the way. Today, the term "potemkin" is used in politics and economics as any construction whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country that is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better.
As I write this, Caruso is running for mayor, and some Angelenos are concerned that he will try to apply these same guidelines and principles to the entire city. "You go to the Grove; it represents everybody in this great city of ours. It's every background. It's every color. It's every creed," Caruso told the Los Angeles Times editorial board earlier this year. Often compared to Walt Disney, the 63-year-old is known for a similar pseudo-urbanism, equal parts utopianism and nostalgia. He’s also known for switching his party affiliation for the race, as he was very publicly registered as a Republican three years ago. Caruso is now making it to the general election after sinking millions of his own money into ads for his campaign, featuring actors and personalities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Snoop Dogg. The Americana, as I see it, is the modern-day Potemkin Village; and Caruso, the modern day Potemkin.
~
Being an off-brand kid—a Kmart kid, sometimes even in the time of malls—I was always consumed with desire; that achy want. The word consumption from the late 14th century to mean "wasting of the body by disease"; from Old French consumpcion, "A using up, wasting"; from consume, "the using up of material, destruction by use."
For me, it is a truly American experience to be overwhelmed with this desire to consume, to waste. I walk around my college campus and cut through USC’s University Village, a Caruso-endorsed project. In this instance, University Village is a $700 million multi-use development described by the LA Times as “a fantasia of just-add-water heritage, equal parts Disneyland and Hogwarts.” As trustee and longtime donor, Caruso has been quoted as stating, “It makes it a much more vibrant neighborhood.”
University Village is home to an Amazon pick-up center, a Target, a Trader Joe’s. But there’s most reliably a line outside of Dulce, an artisanal cafe and donut shop. I spy a plump matcha donut in the window dusted with sugar, a dollop of cream winking on the mouth-hole. I want it. Between classes, sweaty, and arm aching from my heavy book bag, I rush past a spa called Face Haus, where customers can stop in for an afternoon facial; I see the aestheticians, their face masks, an advertisement of a woman, her hair wrapped in a towel, eyes closed, relaxing beneath a cool layer of serums. I want it. Some days when I’m in need of comfort, a hug, words of encouragement, I linger a bit too long in front of Honeybird, with their southern fried chicken, banana cream pie; it smells like somebody’s home. I want it, too.
This year, I’ve received notice from two of my undergraduate students stating they had to leave the school after tuition was raised from the already-staggering $60k/year. They do not want to leave. I do not want them to leave. But they do not have what they need to stay. Money.
~
In 1943, The Saturday Evening Post published a series of oil paintings by the Americana artist Norman Rockwell that came to be known as “The Four Freedoms,” along with corresponding essays for each. “Freedom From Want” was published alongside an essay by Filipino writer and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. At the time, Bulosan was a migrant laborer working intermittent jobs when the Post tracked him down to contribute the essay. Initially, the Post lost it, and as there was no carbon copy, Bulosan had to track down the only other draft he had stashed at a bar in Tacoma.
Ultimately, Bulosan's essay proposed that while citizens had obligations to the state, the state had an obligation to provide sustenance to its citizens. Unlike Roosevelt, Bulosan presented the case that the New Deal had not already granted freedom from want as it did not guarantee Americans the essentials of life.
Lately, walking through University Village, I find myself thinking of Want. The facials, the nail salon, yes—but also, the grocery store. As an undergrad, every week, I’d buy a loaf of bread, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and a container of instant coffee. I’d pour the milk on my toast for breakfast and dinner and use it to lighten and sweeten my coffee. I remember the anguish of passing the fast food restaurants on my campus; how the credit card companies would set up tables right outside the Burger King. It worked.
In 2022, it costs up to $30 a day to park on campus, but if you can nab it, there’s free parking on Frat Row off of Hoover. Here, there are people tabling, too—but rather than signing students up for credit cards, they’re selling test strips people can put in their drinks to make sure they aren’t roofied. It works.
If you travel about twelve miles southeast from USC, you’ll hit The Compton Towne Shopping Center, a mall not designed by Caruso. You likely won’t find many USC students there. Compton, a city of 95,000 residents, acutely faces issues of racial injustice and structural inequality—issues that largely haven’t touched USC. Many of Compton’s residents are either unemployed, poorly paid, or ineligible for government assistance. Upwards of 1 in 5 Comptonians live in poverty—double the nationwide average. Compton also happens to be home to the largest city-based guaranteed income pilot project in the country, The Compton Pledge. According to the Compton Pledge website, “Local housing assistance in Compton is at capacity, presenting unaffordable hardships for a city where 46% of residents are renters. In Compton, rates of unemployment have risen to 21.9% since the beginning of COVID-19, and a growing number of residents regularly rely on food pantries.”
Ninety years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and local governments and private nonprofits are still trying to deliver on its promise. Ninety years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and we still haven’t achieved his promise of “Freedom From Want.” Because ninety years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, America can’t even deliver on freedom from need.
And what we need, of course, a mall can’t give us.
A small portion of this essay originally appeared in Lenny Letter.
Additional fact checking by Apoorva Tadepalli.
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A review and a revisiting of Carla Lonzi’s "Self-Portrait."
On a peaked December day of a sunless Berlin winter in 2021, I attended a meeting of the personal is theoretical, a feminist reading group hosted by diffrakt center for theoretical periphery. A few weeks before, we had collectively decided to read “Let’s Spit on Hegel,” a 1970 manifesto written by Italian feminist thinker Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) and published by the feminist group she'd co-founded, Rivolta Femminile. As we read the text aloud over mugs of overly sweet mulled wine, we discussed how second wave feminism texts can feel both outdated and exciting, simultaneously limiting in terms of what the (white, Western, cis) female body can be, and inspiring in terms of what a (collective, non-hierarchical, sick of Hegel) feminist politics could demand. Towards the end of the manifesto, Lonzi declares, “An entirely new word is being put forward by an entirely new subject. It only has to be uttered to be heard,” a utopian demand for a new woman and a new feminist world to emerge through writing. Despite some reservations, I nevertheless left the meeting very curious about how Lonzi might further seize this act of self-creation in her other work.
The demand for a new word/world/woman resounds between tense and vibrant frequencies in Lonzi’s 1969 Self-Portrait, recently translated into English by Alison Grimaldi Donahue for Divided Publishing. Often positioned as Lonzi’s last work before her entry into feminist activism, Self-Portrait is a collection of interviews with fourteen Italian artists mostly associated with the Arte Povera movement throughout the 1960s. More than just an attempt to destabilize the hierarchies between artist and critic, Self-Portrait significantly not only critiques the Italian art scene, but how collective configurations should grapple with power, authority, and desire. One of the more popular works in Lonzi’s broader ouvre, it is an important text in Italian feminism because it reveals tensions in the broader cultural, political, and social movements of the late sixties and seventies that led some women to turn to feminism as the main means of achieving their demands for change.
As a whole, Self-Portrait records Lonzi’s discontent with the modern critic in a strict remove from his artistic subject, the desire to let artists speak for themselves, and the limits of art. The artists shift between flattering and talking over Lonzi, each vying for her attention but often losing themselves in the void of a soliloquy. Long-winded monologues on the myth of the artist, the mechanics of sculpting an erection, and the differences between Italian and American art scenes are peppered with casual and blatant sexism. When I first read Self-Portrait, I found myself alternating between moments of boredom and mirth fueled by frustration at most of the artists, and excitement when Lonzi’s clear voice cut through their bullshit. It felt like Lonzi was sketching the void where the role of the traditional critic wavers, and a feminist voice is needed to intervene.
Upon revisiting it, I found myself thinking of Self-Portrait as less of an enjoyable reading document and more as a template for how one can play with the boundaries of the self and others through experiments with the (spoken) word. On the one hand, Self-Portrait is a mash-up of the things normally cut out of interviews, such as pauses, stutters, and ramblings that go on for too long. On the other, it is the product of a seven-year project, the first of Lonzi's works in cutting, pasting, and editing conversations as a work of art in itself. As translator Alison Grimaldi Donahue describes in an interview, what seems to be the simple transcription of interviews was a long and highly mediated process. “Maybe she’s just treating their voices as a piece of found material. She is the manipulator, she is the fabbro…they sold their voices away,” Donahue muses. In a highly performative gesture, Lonzi poses her most eloquent questions to Cy Twombly, who was never formally interviewed and whose answers are always denoted by “[silence],” seeming to ask and answer itself about how to push back against those who try to take up too much space. Just when you think Lonzi’s aim is to let artists metaphorically hang themselves with their own words, interesting bits pop in, the best being her exchanges with eventual Rivolta Femminile co-founder Carla Accardi—the only woman interviewed. “I want to kiss you!” Lonzi exclaims amidst Accardi’s reflections on collectivity. In response, perhaps smirking, Accardi continues her answer unfazed.
Carla Lonzi studied art history and worked as an art critic in Florence, but is best known for her years as a feminist activist in Rome and Milan. After declaring a decisive break from art, Lonzi co-founded the radical feminist collective Rivolta Femminile with Carla Accardi and Elvira Bannoti in 1970—just a few short months after she released Self-Portrait. Lonzi and Rivolta Femminile were major figures in second wave feminism, often seen as part of the transnational movement of women from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, united by their rejection of sexual violence and the patriarchal order. As a collective, their demands were for equality in the private and public spheres, self-determination of female bodies and reproductive rights, and equal education and work opportunities. But globally, their work has largely gone overlooked: Historian Maude Anne Bracke argues that narratives of second wave Western transnational feminism tend to give primacy to the US and UK, while positioning Italian feminism as “atypical, with its distinctive features including its non-institutional basis, the centrality of theory, and the emphasis of sexual difference.” While Rivolta Femminile did indeed emphasize female separatism, Lonzi spent her career challenging this limited depiction of Italian feminism, most notably through the incredibly multifaceted nature of her writing, between theory, manifesto, poetry, diary entries, and manipulated transcripts of conversations, as in Self-Portrait.
While the art critic and feminist Lonzi are often described as at odds with each other, these two hats are connected by a thread of experiments in collective ways of being together—experiments that call attention to and aim to break down the hierarchies of modern capitalist patriarchy. In Self-Portrait, this is explored through illuminating these structures in a toxic art world that must ultimately be left behind. In later works, these concerns take the form of explicit demands to reject patriarchy as the central form of oppression in all strata of life and to form separatist feminist groups. Lonzi played with exactly how to live out such concerns throughout her life, and was often depicted as a strong-willed figure who simultaneously sought leadership roles while trying to break them down theoretically. While one can say that such a struggle is embedded in the nature of collective politics, it is in this realm that Lonzi’s varied writings resonate as unstable experiments in blurring the boundaries between the self and others to try to reach a conception of the new woman—usually coming back to the self after all.
In thinking about Lonzi’s legacy today, I came back to the original tensions that appear in Self-Portrait and Lonzi’s broader corpus, and how these same tensions have appeared in recent discussions of the #MeToo movement. When it went viral in 2017, years after it was first used by Tarana Burke in 2006, #MeToo brought together some of the hopes of the early, seemingly long-gone internet as an equal space, textually juxtaposing a variety of women from different races, classes, and statuses through verbal repetition and collective authorship of two simple words. It also recreated a false illusion of a de-hierarchical space, namely that it was based on the accusations of the privileged as a means of creating space to hear those who had cried out unheard against such abuse for many years. In regard to Lonzi, this again underlines the tensions between self and collective at the heart of the promise of feminism to make the personal political, along with the question of whose self we are led back to. Self-Portrait came at a breaking point for Lonzi, in which she turned to a more overtly feminist agenda to address what she saw as major wrongs with living together. Her issues with self portraiture itself mirror the very demands for more inclusivity and diversity that eventually broke down many second wave feminist collectives. Even as she dismantles the critic, Lonzi struggles with the hope of writing experiments to create new spaces and the lived reality of power and hierarchy.
While the road from the self to the collective is not an impossible one, from a contemporary perspective, it is a task that demands much more reflection on and attention to its intersectional scope. Lonzi's experiments speak to both the hope for the collapse of the formal bounds of established hierarchies and the need for such a dream to be constantly recontextualized and reevaluated. Perhaps then Lonzi is best approached as an entry into writing as a malleable extension of the feminist self, one whose contours change with a feminism in flux with the demands of its time. While Self-Portrait is nominally about art, it radiates with this demand to perpetually reimagine and reinvent the self when up against the realities of breaking down such boundaries. “Mine wasn’t an interest in art…” Lonzi confesses at one point in the book, but rather the feeling that, “extraordinary things were possible between beings… a potentiality that I felt humanity possessed. I knew I had it and I felt that it belonged to everyone.”
Divided Publishing
[post_title] => Can We Write Our Way to a New Word?
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An exclusive excerpt from "It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror."
In My Skin / Dans ma peau
IT WASN’T UNTIL I got pregnant that I finally saw how distant I was from my own body. This was late 2016, early 2017, and I was about to turn thirty-five, a late age for a first baby. I spent half my day reading pregnancy manuals and websites, baffled and embarrassed by their maniacally chipper tone, which seemed to be aimed not at parents of small children but at the actual children themselves: Baby is the size of a grape! A papaya! A spaghetti squash! It’s all right to be nervous. But more all right to be happy! Mom (the pregnant person is always addressed, in these texts, as “Mom”) is getting ready for a big change!
I was not getting ready for a big change, I was in the midst of one. My personality shifted with my hormones, giving me new tastes and interests and a terrifying ability to cry in public. I swelled and rounded, changed shirt sizes and pant sizes and shoe sizes, puffed up at the joints until I had the tree-trunk legs of a brontosaurus. In the more scientific manuals, I learned that my body had doubled its amount of blood; that the baby’s cells were mingling with mine, and would stay there after I gave birth, rendering me a biological chimera; that I was growing a new organ, the placenta, and when I gave birth, I would both expel and (the manuals strongly encouraged) eat it.
The teenage edgelord in me delighted in this information. A parasite turns you into a mutant and forces you to eat your own organs; what’s cooler than that? Yet, when I tried to talk to other people about how disgusting pregnancy was, I was met with baffled politeness, not only from the world at large but from pregnant women. This experience of being lost at sea in my own body, held captive to its processes, seemed to be mine alone. In fact, if the expressions on people’s faces were any indication, it was mildly crazy.
Yet the more I sat with the feeling, the more it seemed to me that my body had never belonged to me. There were whole areas—my hair, my breasts—that I was keeping around primarily because they got a reaction from people. There were processes that had always felt unwelcome; as a teenager, my periods were so distressing that I once passed out in the middle of a McDonalds because I felt one coming on. I could never figure out all the little things women were supposed to do, how it was that they managed to look adult and female and put-together. It seemed easy, or at least manageable; a necessary life skill, like cooking dinner. I just couldn’t do it. My body was something I needed to manipulate, a weird, soft machine I was never quite sure of operating correctly. I fed it like a pet, washed it like a car, exercised it... well, no, I didn’t exercise it, because that would require getting in there and fucking around, and I spent as much time reading or drinking or otherwise getting out of my body as I could.
It never would have occurred to me to call these feelings “dysphoria.” I pushed through them the same way I’d always pushed through the pangs of shame and panic I got when I tried to do girly things or present as convincingly feminine, telling myself it was just internalized misogyny or poor self-esteem. Yet it seems clear to me now that my pregnancy was the beginning of my coming-out process as a nonbinary transmasculine person. It called my body to my attention. It made me realize that I could successfully and intentionally undergo a big change.
Now that I’m out, my former alienation from my body seems normal. I wasn’t “put together” because I was trying to put together the wrong thing. It’s like I bought a coffee table at IKEA and spent thirty-five years trying to assemble a couch with the parts. Frustration was inevitable. Yet in the moment, before I knew any other name for my experiences, my only comparison was body horror—specifically, the body horror movie I loved most in the world, and have loved ever since I saw a crappy VHS copy of it in college: In My Skin, the 2002 independent movie by French writer-director Marina de Van. In My Skin (Dans ma peau) is one of those movies that frequently makes lists of the “most disturbing movies ever” or “toughest horror movies to watch.” The college boyfriend I rented it with noped-out by the second act, telling me he was just too uncomfortable to keep going. I’ve always enjoyed the nerdy flex of watching a horror movie that is too much for some cis guy, and yet it pains me that In My Skin is remembered primarily as a gross-out feature. The violence here is nowhere near as graphic as the average Saw or Hostel movie. In My Skin is scarier than those movies precisely because it reaches the viewer on a level that soulless splatter porn can’t; the injuries feel real and painful because they’re grounded in a frighteningly believable portrait of one woman’s self-destruction.
We open on a heroine, Esther (played by de Van, directing herself), who seems to more or less have her life together: she’s got a job at an advertising firm, with a promotion in the near future; she has a boyfriend who wants to move in together; she’s putting him off, but it seems clear where things are headed. It’s a recognizable white, upper middle-class, postfeminist, heterosexual trajectory. It’s what she’s supposed to want, even if some key elements, like the boyfriend, don’t excite her as much as she’d like.
One night, at a drunken party, Esther manages to rip her calf open on a piece of jagged metal in someone’s yard. Due to some combination of shock and nerve damage and alcohol, Esther doesn’t feel the injury, and goes through the whole night without realizing that her leg is gushing blood. She only sees what’s happened when she goes to the bathroom; she gasps, and fingers the edges of her wound, and begins crying. It’s not clear whether she’s in pain or simply horrified by what she’s seeing.
I mean to say: Esther is betrayed and traumatized to see her body shedding blood from a hole that shouldn’t be there. You can see where the transmasculine viewer might connect. It is also bizarrely relatable to see how Esther tries to deal with the injury, which is, at first, by pretending she doesn’t have one; she goes over to her friends and casually mentions that she might need to go to the hospital, but she wants to stop at a bar for one last drink first. The doctor who eventually stitches Esther up is baffled by her dissociation: “Are you sure it’s your leg?” he jokes.
Esther doesn’t laugh. She also doesn’t answer. Esther becomes obsessed with her injury, and with the numbness that seems to be spreading out over her whole body. She begins trying to re-create the thrill of getting hurt; first pinching and picking at herself, then cutting herself, then doing several things so gross that one hesitates to spoil them, except to say that this one woman somehow becomes both the perpetrator and the victim of an entire Texas Chainsaw Massacre before the credits roll.
The gross-outs are real, but never cheap. Esther’s self-harm addiction mounts slowly and realistically; the brief relief of a cutting session in the break room slowly giving way to more sessions, more extreme injuries, entire weekends spent alone in a hotel room, doing things to yourself that you have to explain later as the result of a car accident. Some scenes are uncomfortable precisely because de Van’s slack-jawed, compulsive pleasure as she works on herself feels like watching someone masturbate. It’s that kind of problem: an urge you can’t get rid of without indulging, a gross but pressing need.
Esther’s self-destruction is a symptom of alienation: from capitalism (during a business dinner, Esther has to forcibly restrain her hand from skittering around the table) or from womanhood (after one cutting session, she watches a female friend apply moisturizer, baffled by the concept of feminine self-care) or from heterosexuality (her boyfriend tries to “cure” her by fucking her while asking if she can feel him; he does not get the answer he’s hoping for). Careful viewers will have noted that de Van’s heroine shares a name with Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. Like that other Esther, she self-destructs in part because meeting the expectations placed on women already feels like a kind of self-harm.
Most importantly, though, the cutting is symptomatic of Esther’s alienation from Esther. She doesn’t hate her body, she tells us, but she also doesn’t think of it as her. Her self-injury is exploratory, almost clinical; she’s a scientist, testing the foreign object of her flesh, trying to see what it can do. In fact, there is no part of Esther’s life that is truly hers: her friends are not really her friends, the man she fucks isn’t someone she particularly wants to be fucking, her professional success is maintained at the cost of disappearing into back rooms and wine cellars and coming apart at the seams. She takes her body apart because she is trying to get back inside it. She’s not trying to kill herself. She’s trying to prove she’s alive.
~
It’s dangerous, I know, to connect transmasculinity or gender dysphoria with a movie about female self-mutilation. The idea that transmasculine people are self-harming “women” is currently one of the main talking points TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) use to try to argue us out of existence.
As I write this, the number one book result on Amazon for “trans men” is a book called Irreversible Damage. The title is splashed across the page in big, bloodred letters, with a subtitle promising to expose the “Transgender Craze That’s Seducing Our Daughters” in the same tone 1950s horror movie posters used to advertise a “Terrifying Monster of the Ages!” or some “Students Made Victims of Terror-Beast!” Beneath the titles, there’s an illustration of a little girl, or possibly a baby doll, who is still alive and conscious despite the gigantic, red-rimmed, perfectly circular hole scooped out of her stomach.
The message is clear: transmasculinity is body horror. The average trans boy, according to Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier, is “psychologically alienated from her [sic] own body, and headed toward medical self-harm;”she predicts that medical transition will leave such a boy “angry, regretful, maimed, and sterile.”Give or take a “sterile,” he sounds very much like Esther from In My Skin.
Other TERFs have resorted to putting transmasculine bodies on display, hoping that the supposed freakishness of top surgery scars or testosterone-squared jawlines will scare the public away from supporting us. Photographer Laura Dodsworth has published an entire series of seminude portraits of “detransitioners,” women who formerly identified as transmasculine. Dodsworth was inspired, she says, by the horror she feels when she thinks about trans men’s bodies: “For me, the idea of having my breasts, ovaries, and womb removed, and then wanting them back, creates a feeling so unnerving that I cannot occupy it for long.”
She can, however, ask other people to occupy it in front of her while she takes pictures. It’s not clear whether Dodsworth informed her subjects that she would accompany the photos of their naked bodies with commentary on how scary and disgusting they are; nor is it clear how Dodsworth’s “unnerved” feeling is different from the pleasurable disgust carnival-goers feel at freak shows.
First things first: The posttransition body is not a mutilated body. It’s a healed body. Transition is not a symptom of psychological distress but a means to cure it. That “unnerving” feeling Dodsworth imagines—the horror of looking down at a body you don’t recognize, one which can’t do what you want or need it to do—is already felt by many people who are uncomfortable in their assigned genders, and it is spectacularly cruel for someone to use her own imaginary dysphoria as an excuse to deny transpeople treatment for theirs.
Yet the rubbernecking dread transphobic “feminists” have for trans bodies—Shrier, or Dodsworth, or J. K. Rowling, for whom trans boys are merely psychologically damaged and self-hating “girls” who’ve succumbed to the “allure of escaping womanhood”—is not unfamiliar to me as a horror fan. Whether these women know it or not, they’re talking about transpeople in the same way that sexist men have historically talked about the bodies of cis women.
The body horror genre is deeply rooted in cis men’s fear of femininity, and considers cis female bodies to be inherently freakish, flawed, and deformed. In particular, body horror often focuses an obsessive disgust on cis women’s reproductive cycle, either in a sideways fashion—like the exceptionally vaginal face-hugger in Alien, or that franchise’s many chest-bursting images of “child-birth”—or directly, as in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, where a woman’s fertility dooms her man to a life of tending the foul horror she’s produced. Body horror king David Cronenberg spent much of the ’80s explaining why he was scared of vaginas. There was the pulsating external uterus of The Brood, where a (cis) woman’s capacity to reproduce without a man led to countless hammer-based murders, or the “mutant women” of Dead Ringers, with their insatiable sexual needs and triple-headed Cerberus vaginas. Both movies feature a woman chewing through an umbilical cord with her teeth, I guess because no one told Cronenberg about the placenta thing.
This is how horror is used by the dominant culture: to justify fear and violence toward the Other, the Alien, the Mutant—and in a patriarchy, that title will always belong primarily to people who aren’t white cis men. Whether it’s David Cronenberg’s umbilical phobia, Laura Dodsworth’s close-ups of top-surgery scars, or the countless ways that cis-directed comedies and slasher movies have trained us to fear the bodies of trans women, horror is always located outside, in the marginalized person, in the body that doesn’t look like the person behind the camera.
I’m not interested in this type of horror, to put it mildly. Yet I still describe my own experiences in terms of body horror, because I am my own person to describe. I still hold out hope for body horror stories told by marginalized people, stories that are not about demonizing or destroying the Other but confronting the least comfortable parts of yourself. (It’s significant that when David Cronenberg discovered male anal penetration in the ’90s—Naked Lunch, eXistenZ—his gross-outs were improved.) There is a difference between feeling uncomfortable with your own body and having others proclaim how uncomfortable they are with you, between the horror felt by a person and the horror caused by a monster. Few movies understand this as well as In My Skin.
Marina de Van spends a lot of time naked in her own movie. Esther is perpetually taking clothes off, putting them on, hanging out at home in her underwear, taking showers. The camera encourages us to study her body in detail; here are her hands, here are her legs, here’s the odd fold of skin gathered at her right hip. The nudity has a strange dissociative effect, like catching your reflection unexpectedly in a mirror—de Van is both the object of our gaze and the subject directing it, somehow behind the camera and in front of it at the same time. All this serves a very practical purpose: de Van wants us to understand the architecture of Esther’s body before she destroys it. She’s laying out the parameters of the crime scene, giving us a tour of the house before she tears it down.
These points were missed by the film’s early (and nearly all male) critics, who invariably took the sight of a woman’s body on screen as an invitation to rate her looks: “Ms. de Van, who resembles a feral, gap-toothed version of the young Leslie Caron, is at once beautiful and ugly,” runs a representative assessment from Stephen Holden’s New York Times review. Dennis Lim at the Village Voice praised her “arresting screen presence” while also calling her “pale, flared-nostriled, and gap-toothed.”There are just so many more interesting things you could say about Marina de Van’s teeth in this movie—like, for instance, the fact that she uses them to eat her own leg like a chicken wing. Even in a movie about how women’s bodies are treated like meat, these men can’t help but leave three-star Yelp reviews for hers.
Cis men seemed incapable of understanding that a woman’s body could be put on screen for reasons other than objectification. We’re not meant to want Esther—we’re meant to be her. The movie is effective precisely because de Van blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, person and object, audience and action; when viewers of In My Skin scream or flinch at some gruesome injury, it’s because we’re so connected to Esther’s body that it feels like we are being injured. In the moment, as he squirms and averts his eyes from the bloody screen, the cis male viewer of In My Skin has become the very thing he’s spent his whole life trying not to resemble: a woman.
It’s that invitation to occupy the marginalized and monstrous body, to feel what it feels, that makes In My Skin unique. The power to make our oppressors share our perspective, to make them see the world as we see it—to bring them inside our skin, as de Van puts it—is one of the most potent tools any storyteller has. In My Skin is not an overtly feminist movie, but it makes the still-radical assumption that we will be able to identify with a woman enough to take her suffering as seriously as our own.
It worked. I’m not a woman. I feel my own pain, and Esther’s, when I watch this movie. What I relate to is not the cutting, though; the TERFs are wrong on that. What I relate to is the suffering the cutting is intended to relieve. It’s the baffled sense of being locked out of your own body; unable to connect with the person that is supposed to be you. Esther’s desperate need to get back inside herself, to have even one moment of being fully present in her own life, is something I’ve felt many times. It’s something I stopped feeling only when I transitioned.
I got so used to pushing past discomfort in the first thirty-five years of my life. I maintained my disconnected body in a manner that pleased others, gritted my teeth through periods and pregnancy, suppressed the flashes of anguish and shame and self-disgust that arose at predictable moments, but for no reason I could name. It’s only now, when the discomfort has lifted somewhat, that I realize I was hurting myself every day of my life. The injury was there. I just didn’t let myself feel it. I covered it up, mopped up the blood, went out and asked if anyone wanted to grab a beer.
When we cannot put ourselves together, we tear ourselves apart. This is true no matter who we are, no matter what reason we have for not fitting into the lives we’re given. Esther never explains why she needs to destroy herself, yet the answer is always right there in front of us. Why does any animal chew its own leg off? Because it’s trapped.
Want to be a better tourist? Start by embracing local lore.
When I visited Iceland, there were a few things on my list: an active volcano, a museum of witchcraft in the Westfjords, a puffin tour, and running into Björk and becoming best friends. I kind of knew I wanted to visit Hafnarfjörður, a port town close to Reykjavík, home to an idyllic volcanic park known for elf sightings. But it was an afterthought, a kitschy stop that I expected to experience as a skeptical tourist rather than a believer.
Icelandic people’s belief in and deference to the Huldufólk (Hidden People) is well-documented. Tourists know it, and mock it, all while indulging in activities like the Elf School, which is exactly what it sounds like.On an episode of Travel Man, host Richard Ayoade and his companion attended the school and spent the segment mocking the very elves they were supposed to be learning about, leaving no more enlightened than when they went in. Global headlines read things like, “More Than Half of [This Country] Believes in Elves,” but obscure what that belief really means. It’s a punchline, something to make the people of Iceland seem naive, primitive. As if to say: There was a time when it was appropriate, but now there are cars on the road. Grow out of it, already.
The belief varies person to person, but the general consensus is that elves exist in nature, in rocks and volcanoes and forests and water. There are over 50 kinds, all with different physiques and temperaments, depending on where they live. And regardless of proof or lack thereof, one thing is for sure: When an elf’s home is moved, to make way for construction or similar human disturbances, bad things tend to happen. This alone is enough to deter most people from fucking with them. When starting construction, many people will consult with elf experts like Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, who can liaise with the elves and find out who lives where and whether they’d consider moving on. If they won’t, construction stops. The result is a country that lives in harmony with its expansive, alien landscape. A country and a people that moves and develops slowly enough to let nature—and the Huldufólk who protect it—flourish around them.
It’s that volcanic landscape that drew me, and draws most tourists, to Iceland. Fagradalsfjall was still active, as it is again now, and the country-wide presence of volcanic rock is enough to distinguish it from anywhere else I’ve ever been. Whole fields of lava feel like a walk on the moon, sparse and removed from humanity, and yet teeming with life. Where another country might have cleared them away, Iceland builds tourism around its volcanoes, turning large expanses of hardened lava into family friendly parks and attractions. I ultimately decided to go to Hafnarfjörður, not for the elves, but for this scenery and the quiet that comes with it.
The park in Hafnarfjörður, like much of Iceland’s scenery, grows around lava and the ever-present threat of volcanic eruption. Despite the human feet stomping around, however, locals say that all that untouched nature creates the perfect environment for elves. Hafnarfjörður plays up the legend somewhat, with little human-built elf houses and a gift shop that sells elf dust. It’s kind of a tourist trap—but a very quiet one, with local families just hanging out. While I thought I just wanted to relax in the park, I was also primed to retreat into the rocks with the Huldufólk: That morning, my phone was filling up with people congratulating me on something that should have been exciting but instead felt overwhelming. I set it to airplane mode and set off into the park, trying to let myself be in tune with another world, which felt easy with an unusually warm Icelandic sun on my back.
It was there that I found the Huldufólk, or they found me. I came across a crack in the lava and crouched down, laying my hands on rock that still felt warm, alive. I peered inside and saw nothing in it, no elves teasing me, so I lay a flower at the entrance, where thick, hard, clear slime interlaced with rainbows decorated the grass. I sat, still, the peace that had been evading me finally gathering. I thanked the elves for the quiet and moved on after a while, enjoying the rest of the park.
In all of the photos surreptitiously taken of me hanging out by that crack in the rock, there is a rainbow enveloping me. It hadn’t been raining and I hadn’t seen the rainbow, except in the slime, but there it was. When my fiancée and I later told a friend of his, an Icelandic professor, about our experience, she said, “Oh yes, elf slime,” like it was the most normal thing in the world. She also gave a stern warning: Do not follow the elves, no matter what they offer.
When we later shared our experiences with other Icelandic people, it caught me off guard how difficult it was to be embarrassed. They listened, told us that we were lucky, that the elves didn’t appear to just anyone, and so rarely to tourists. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t “seen” an elf—the extent of my small interaction was enough. I felt grateful to be believed, but I also felt some gratitude in return that I hadn’t questioned their beliefs or culture. I went in, two-footed, willing to see the elves if they would show themselves to me. What I got was something special, an experience to talk about, but also a moment of peace that I desperately needed, elves or not.
For much of my early life I believed in magic, something that faded as I got older. As a child, I believed wholeheartedly in the tooth fairy, insofar as I believed she would be my friend and bring me gifts. So maybe it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise that I found myself among elves, wanting to fall into gaps in the volcanic rock. But why shouldn’t we look for magic as adults, especially in places like Iceland that offer it up so freely? Who does it harm to respect someone else’s version of the tooth fairy I’d loved, and maybe even try to meet them, too?
When—if—we share our supernatural experiences with people who don’t come from cultures that share them readily, there’s always a moment of shared trepidation. You can sense them tip-toeing around their own experiences, hedging with “I don’t usually believe in this stuff” or “it could have been anything.” After a while, when each person realizes they are safe, they share. We might not always have proof, but what we experience and how we perceive it is real. When we experience it with others, our beliefs—and our confidence in our own experiences—gain power.
More than that, when we as tourists are lucky enough to spend time in other people’s countries and cultures, we need to honor them. That means trying their food, understanding their customs, learning to fit in. That means not immediately complaining if you don’t get enough ice or the service isn’t fast enough. It means exploring temples and monuments and other important sites with respect. It means trying your best to speak the language and not just shouting “chips, PLEASE” in a waiter’s face.
It also means taking on those customs and beliefs that are maybe even more foreign to you, like believing in elves. It means not laughing at something that means a lot to a lot of people in a country that for the most part gets by just fine without you. In Iceland, the Huldufólk maintain the rule of the land, a respect for the sparse, otherworldly landscape that blooms freely. Believing in elves or magic or ghosts or God or tree spirits isn’t inherently childish or naive, it’s a part of being a human being with a belief system and a desire for rituals and order.
More than that, by having patience and respect for the places you visit, even when it requires a suspension of disbelief, you might open yourself up to a little magic. You might make friends and take home experiences that you could never have had if you scoffed at something meaningful to someone else. You might even meet an elf. Plus, you’ll just seem like less of an asshole, one less reason for people to hate tourists. And wouldn’t that be nice?
[post_title] => I Didn't Believe in Elves Until I Did
[post_excerpt] => Want to be a better tourist? Start by embracing local lore.
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I found my dead father's house on Airbnb. It looked nothing like it.
Recently, while looking for an Airbnb in my hometown for an upcoming visit, I found my dead father’s house.
Bewildered, I scanned the listing. Could this really be the same house where I’d scrambled eggs for him every morning and watched his favorite movies on TCM every night? The new owners had stripped the place of its shabbiness, though I wondered as I read whether they'd been able to do the same with its termites. Back when I’d lived there, an unusually ballsy mouse had ruled over the kitchen, where one side of the fridge stood on bricks because otherwise it tilted to the left from the warped tile floor. When the mouse startled me one day, calmly eating an English muffin on the countertop when I went to make coffee, my father had rolled his eyes at my scream. “That’s Mister Jingles,”he said with exasperation. “Be nice.”
The house was no “castle,” as the ad’s headline claimed. Each of its rooms was a quarter of the size that the wide-angled photos made them appear to be. Photos of the kitchen diligently cropped out the bottom left corner of the fridge, where the bricks held it up. Yet, brightened by a ring light and stuffed with the same West Elm bric-a-brac that furnishes every Airbnb, it did look like a plausible getaway. “Nobody lives here full time,” bragged the ad. “You can make yourself at home” for $145 a night.
“Nobody lives here full time”—that opposed the entire ethos of Airbnb as it once was, when it presented itself as a cheaper alternative to hotels and a win-win for everybody who used it. Founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky say the idea for Airbnb came to them when they were struggling to afford the rent on their San Francisco apartment in 2007—they crammed in a few air mattresses and charged guests $80 a night to sleep on them. A year later, they turned their “Air Bed and Breakfast” into a business.
Supposedly, the idea was always for the experience to be somewhat personal, on both hosts’ and travelers’ sides. Travelers could see a new place from a lived-in home base that lent the trip some local flavor; hosts could make money off their spare rooms while offering a little hospitality. But as Airbnb’s popularity exploded, so did its problems. Tourist-heavy neighborhoods became Airbnb hubs where long term residents could no longer afford to live. Landlords converted rental units into more-profitable Airbnbs and stopped renting them to tenants. Cities’ attempts to regulate the app’s presence have proven difficult and feeble. And, of course, as more homes became full-time Airbnbs, those Airbnbs got worse.
The average Airbnb used to be friendlier than a chain hotel room. The aggressively anodyne watercolors and unopenable windows of a hotel gave way to the warmth of a real person’s home. But a real home also comes with real hassles. Guests at a hotel can leave the room as messy as they want; guests at an Airbnb have to clean up after themselves and leave the place roughly as they found it, even though hosts collect a “cleaning fee” on each reservation. The hassles were only worth it for as long as Airbnb remained the cheaper option.
And while, in 2022, data suggests that Airbnbs are still cheaper, the gap is closing quickly, and not just in terms of cost. Anecdotally, Airbnbs have been losing all personality for years. My dead father’s house—correction, my dead father’s “castle”—looks just like the “artist’s studios” and “boutique lofts” that proliferate every city on the app. Add some moose antlers to one wall and it could be a “peaceful ski lodge”; throw in a hammock and it could be a “beach house paradise.” But such hifalutin terms fail to justify Airbnb’s skyrocketing prices. When guests pay $145 a night to stay in my father’s castle, do they coo over the brass-plated vases on every surface, or do they scream at the sight of its long term resident, Mister Jingles?
Alongside the spendy soullessness of these units, the annoyances have continued to mount. Because people really did live in most early Airbnbs, they came stocked with cookware and basic amenities. Hosts who actually lived in their units were also intimately familiar with them, and could answer questions about what to do with a sticky key or whether the cat was allowed on the fire escape. The increasingly impersonal nature of Airbnbs has turned them into hotels with none of a hotel’s conveniences and even more pointed surveillance. Paranoid about their liability for everything from accidents at their guests’ family barbecues to long-term guests’ ability to claim squatters’ rights, hosts have cut corners and set unreasonable limits. For example, I am presently writing this from an Airbnb with an in-unit washer/dryer that’s padlocked to keep guests from using it.
Airbnb is still the most plausible option for guests who will be staying somewhere for a while and need a place to cook, or people looking for a place where traditional accommodations aren’t possible. Even towns that are light on tourism and don’t have many hotels usually have at least a few Airbnbs available—like the one where my father once lived. His “castle” is one of about a dozen Airbnbs in his far-flung suburb, and it’s by far the priciest one. In more remote locations like this, Airbnb sometimes retains some of its old charm. But in the case of the castle, I scroll through photo after photo of beige furniture and wonder what’s lost when homes are turned into working sites of capital.
My father died in 2018, and I liked to visit his house on Google Earth in the months after his death. I’d drag the photo of the building in circles with my cursor, trying to peer into windows. Here was where he held my head in his lap after I left my husband, patting my hair until my mucous-inflected sobs dried up; here I botched our meatloaf dinner and he laughed, said we could go to Popeye’s instead. I would imagine that we were in the Google Earth photo, nestled into that sweet dilapidated cottage with our junk food and our mouse, watching a movie, out of sight of the camera but very much at home.
Google posted photos of the place in 2012 when he lived there, a month after he died in 2018, and in 2019. As time goes on, the little pink house looks less and less loved. The vivid azaleas and carefully pruned dogwoods that lined the front walk in 2013 gave way to hostile overgrowth in 2018, all to be abandoned to a completely bare lawn by 2019, when the house’s current owner took over. The dogwoods and azaleas are long gone now, seemingly not just cut down but obliterated by the roots from the earth. The grass is perfect. The house is no longer pale pink, but a whitish color that is no color at all. It has been transformed from a home into a rentable castle.
It could be an Airbnb in Vancouver, Woodstock, or Miami. It could be anywhere, could belong to anyone. Nobody lives there full time. You can make yourself at home.
[post_title] => What's Lost When a Home Becomes a Working Site of Capital
[post_excerpt] => I found my dead father's house on Airbnb. It looked nothing like it.
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In order to gather the people you love, sometimes you have to make a plan.
“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.
It started as an aspirational text between buddies: "I want to run away somewhere for a month and just disappear." I'd sent it to my friend Matt in a fit of pique. I was on my fourth daily hour of Zoom fatigue, my twentieth month of consistent burnout. The text was an ice pack to the soul, a delusional light at the end of the tunnel, completely untethered to reality. So I was surprised by the speed of his response:
"OK but yes. Let's do it."
Matt's and my platonic love story was born in proximity, forged in the fires of our twenties and a New York media office. At first, we were just wallpaper to each other's daily lives. It was in the commuter crush of the Q train that real love formed. We'd talk about our flailing twenties, our pasts, and what we were working towards. There was a through line for us both: a steadfast commitment to creativity, to love in its many forms, and to making space in which we could become our best selves. At the time we were young and broke, stealing bananas from the office kitchen for sustenance. But we dreamed of growth, of room to write and play—and of travel. Before long, our commutes turned to regular walks around Gramercy Park, to writing dates, and to my first ever trip abroad: Matt, my roommate Brittney, and I absconded to Paris for the ultimate Friendsgiving.
Eventually, as these things go, I moved across the country. The structure of us shifted. Matt and I would FaceTime, send voice notes and TikToks and check-in texts, but it wasn't the same. Proximity in friendship is a privilege that rarely lasts forever; we were used to this. Distance became de rigueur, especially as the pandemic raged on. Both Matt and I were run down. We felt boxed in. I battled panic attacks that had become commonplace at work. I craved the metaphorical wide open spaces Matt and I had daydreamed about years before on the Q. I needed something.
Luckily, Matt and I were the kind of buds who frequently exchanged travel fantasies. Our long distance love language had taken the form of links to hotels and Airbnbs in far-flung places. These plans were always both serious and unserious—part aspiration, part ambition. It was impossible to tell when a flight of fancy might go through chrysalis, willed into existence. We'd aged a thousand years since that first trip to Paris. The world had changed a thousand times, too.
A month after my text, Matt was in town for a conference, and he and I experienced something rare: the opportunity to sit on a couch together. We binged a season of Bridgerton in one sitting. That night I sat with him and another friend on my balcony, each of us balancing glasses of rosé, knowing very well we only had 48 hours to catch up on each other's lives. There was an undercurrent of energy to this visit, too: Over the weeks preceding it, our fantasies about running away had taken on a tone of reality. On his last day we brought out our laptops. Matt sucked in a sharp breath and breathed out excitement, his octaves climbing: "It's happening." The only way to make this trip real, we'd realized, was to actually book the damn thing. We'd figure out the rest later.
We had until a month before the reservation to change our minds. But we knew once we hit “book” that it'd be done. So we did it.
Our place for August would be a villa in the Chianti Hills of Tuscany, with four bedrooms and five beds. After years living paycheck to paycheck, we were finally at a point in our lives where we could front the initial costs before the details were all ironed out. We were burnt out enough—experience-hungry enough—to just fucking do it already. But we also had our limits: Though Matt and I would have been happy wandering the Tuscan countryside just the two of us, if we were to be financially responsible, the plan would rely on filling the place with friends. People who could cut the costs into thirds, fourths, eighths—but who would also enhance this ambitious escape from our daily realities. The more we thought about it, the more people we wanted to invite into our world away.
We started contacting people. Friends we knew were itching to travel. Friends who shared the same fantasy of disappearing, even if only for a week. Friends we missed, who lived in different states or on different continents. Friends of all economic realities to whom that round trip ticket felt necessary to their very spirit.
It was not an all-encompassing effort, nor one that yielded only positive results. Some passed, some flaked, others yearned but couldn't pull together the PTO or funds. As time to takeoff inched closer, Matt and I weren't sure we were going to have much company at all. Anyone who's tried to gather the whole group chat for dinner knows the feeling.
We blinked and months passed. Three weeks from when our villa would welcome us… and still, almost nobody had confirmed. We worried about the costs. Mentally, I calibrated what this month would be like in relative isolation.
But then, the tide turned. A friend from New York told us she'd be there for one of the weeks. A confidante from college followed shortly. A newer buddy, from Chicago, tiptoed onto the reservation. Her time would happily overlap with the friend from New York—who she happened to be close with from their days in college. Soon we'd hear from a friend in London, and one in Los Angeles. The latter would bring her long-distance best friend from Miami.
We'd wrangled eight people to join us, spread over twenty-four days. Friends from all different eras of our lives, and multiple who were strangers to either Matt or me. Another function of what we were doing became clear as we gathered the confirmations. We had always intended to create space, to go to a beautiful place where we could breathe and recoup. What I hadn't taken into account was the thrill in my chest seeing who'd be there.
For me, the trip had originally been a haggard Hail Mary, a desperate attempt to escape burnout that had stopped me in my tracks. Those texts with Matt had been a temporary escape; now we were building a tangible one. My therapist's grin spread to her eyes when I told her: This was a chance to rebalance, she said, to center myself. That I could be some small part of helping friends find their space to recoup, as well, only aided in that journey.
I know I'll see these friends in other places eventually. I'll see two of them at upcoming fall weddings, if only for a few hours here and there. If we're lucky, work or family will take us to each other's neck of the woods within the year. We'll have dinner, or spend a night on each other's couches. Then, inevitably, one of us will get on a plane and disappear back to their own time zone.
This trip will have a similar ending, but the very body of it will be different. Realizing the kind of time I'll get with these people changes the shape of the whole experience. Our time, now, is a kind of summer camp, an adult friendship retreat—for some a recreation of a time where we were all living in the same space, and for others the first ever opportunity to do so, with fewer deadlines and pressures to boot. We will find space for ourselves. We'll take our breaths. We'll also commune with each other in ways we haven't before, reshaping our friendships in a whole different kind of proximity.
In preparing for the trip, I scoured the aisles of Target. Into my cart I dumped a pack of Uno cards and 2009 favorite Cards Against Humanity. I bought a watercolor kit and a sketch pad. As I was checking out, I made a mental note to gather recipes that worked for groups; ones we could cook together while drinking and yelling and laughing.
Friendship changes shape in adulthood. They don't warn you about that. "Your friends will move away!" they should say as they pass out caps and gowns. "They'll scatter, find new partners and jobs and put their roots down far away from you." They should tell you that when you do see these people it’s likely to be at a wedding, or at a funeral; through elusive FaceTimes or on brief holiday breaks. They should warn us early so we can shield our hearts. So we can know the reality: that in order to see these people you care about so much… you’ll have to make a plan. A deliberate, unfortunately expensive, frustrating, ever-shifting plan. But if you can make it happen, it will be worth it.
There's a dull ache that comes with realizing you've lost track; the intricacies of intimate friends' day-to-days become, at some fuzzy point, no longer automatic knowledge. It's just natural. But in that villa forty minutes outside Florence, Matt and I will be roommates for a month. One friend will be there for fourteen days, another for nine, another for six. There'll be plenty of bickering, plenty of long nights holed up in our individual rooms, the craving of quiet time. Alongside all that, though, will be friendships that have lived and changed over years—and friendships that haven't even yet begun—colliding and congealing into something new.
As I write this, most of us are packing. Here are a few things I'm looking forward to: the drifting of eyelids as someone I haven't seen in two years falls asleep before the movie's over; the crick of a brow as they judge the cheese I chose for dinner; long, long walks, talking till we're hoarse, finally saying out loud the nuance of a feeling we had months ago but are just now working through. The effort, financially and physically, that we all made to be there, and the ache I already feel for when it will be over. Friendship, when done right, is not fleeting. Time, however, is. What a relief then, to have made this space.
[post_title] => The Healing Power of the Friendship Retreat
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Making friends in your 20s is one thing. Making friends as a mom in my mid-30s felt nearly impossible.
“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.
You wouldn’t know it to meet me now, but as a child, I was deeply, almost paralyzingly shy. I struggled with new situations, always anxious that everyone around me knew something I didn't—what to say to boys, what to wear, how to act. It was the '90s, so I was often alone, in the benign neglect style of parenting that was so prevalent back then. I spent most of my days riding my bike around, making up games for myself, finding comfort in the solitude. I felt woefully unequipped for socialization of any kind, something that wasn’t helped by the fact that my family moved a lot, and I changed schools often. I wish I could say this was because of something practical like work, but really, my parents were just bohemian and broke. My mom once moved us across the country because she had a dream about the mountains out West, mountains she’d never seen in real life. So I retreated into myself, choosing to focus on making a small number of very close friends, rather than a wide social circle.
But it wasn’t quite enough, the way nothing really is in adolescence. My younger sister was always the social butterfly in our family: People were (and still are) attracted to her warm, joyful nature and eagerness to include everyone in on the joke. She’s thoughtful and funny and kind, and watching her make friends has always been a pleasure, even when I was jealous of her ability to do it. You can’t imagine how difficult it is to admit to your younger sister that she’s better at making friends than you, but I was stuck and she was the one to set me free. I finally asked her outright one day, in the safety of our shared bedroom, full of Tiger Beat posters and Barbies, how she did it. She told me I needed to adopt a “fake it till you make it” approach, not just to friendships, but with my shyness in general.
And it worked. I pretended not to be shy long enough that I actually became less shy. I cultivated a more open and less guarded approach to friendships and social scenes, and slowly, I became more comfortable meeting new people. In my early 20s, this led to a solid group of close friends and a large network of acquaintances that made the first half of that decade so exciting and fun—though not without its own drama and heartache.
Then, halfway through my 20s, I left my hometown of Vancouver, Canada and moved to Toronto. At the time, it was a little uncomfortable having to make a new group of friends in a new city, but I was going out, I was meeting people at work, and there didn’t seem to be a huge barrier to recreating the social life I’d had in a different city. I settled deeper into the relationships I had: Some friendships got better, some faded away, some ended very painfully. With no need to make new friends, my skills atrophied.
When I met and married my husband, things shifted again. His friends and my friends became our friends. Merging our lives in the biggest, most important ways necessarily meant bringing together how and with whom we socialized, and I embraced it. I loved seeing this disparate group of people become a community that we took care of and who took care of us. This was made abundantly clear when we had our first child, and this big group of people came together to feed and look after us in the painful postpartum phase.
But the cruelty of finally leaning into the friendships you’ve cultivated over decades is that you start to feel like you don’t have room in your life for new ones. In my early 30s, I closed rank. I shed acquaintances, avoided making new pals at work or when going out, and focused on maintaining a very close inner circle of friends, a lot like I had when I was a kid. On the one hand, that meant easy, comfortable friendships where we’d developed a rhythm that was second nature. On the other, I can admit I also took a lot of those close relationships for granted, picking some friends apart when they irritated me, or not putting in the kind of work either of us used to when we were first becoming friends.
And it probably would have gone on like that for many more years, until my husband and I, along with our five month old son, moved to the UK in 2018.
As far as relationships go, it’s an accepted truism that the older you get, the harder it is to make new friends. Whether it’s a lack of time for the friends you already have, feeling overwhelmed by the rigors and responsibilities of life, work, and family, or just plain old apathy about chatting up fresh faces—“no new friends,” as Drake more aptly put it—it can seem not just impossible, but unnecessary to open up your world of acquaintances after, say, your 20s. I readily accepted, even embraced this idea myself, up until we moved to a new country and I was forced to start from scratch.
Making friends in a new city in your 20s is one thing, starting over again as a mom in my mid-30s felt nearly impossible. It took me right back to elementary school, to feeling like there was a shorthand that I was missing, a piece of the puzzle I’d dropped on the way to the playground. I found it hard to meet people at work because I had to rush home at five for daycare pickup and it was tricky to meet up on weekends because I was still breastfeeding every few hours.
Yet, paralyzing loneliness is a good motivator—at least it was for me. I forced myself to be as open and willing as I had been as a child. This meant reaching out to fellow parents for play dates as often as possible, including strangers I met in the park near our house, painful as that was to do. It was like rebuilding my atrophied muscle: I had to do friendship rehab just to make one or two new friends.
But it was also invigorating. Forging a close relationship with a stranger for the first time in almost a decade reminded me of how necessary it is not to cut yourself off from the world. The relief of having someone to call on for a walk or a vent or both was incalculable. Working on that part of myself after so many years not only led to making new friends, but also made me appreciate the friendships I had back in Toronto, the community I’d spent years building.
When we decided after a couple of years to move back, I was determined to bring this energy home with me. Being curious about people, making an effort to see the good and work through the bad, especially after the pandemic, felt (and feels) like radical self-care. It was precisely because making friends in London was so difficult, that has made making friends in Toronto so exciting—I want to make the effort. I love stretching my sense of community in a place I’ve always called home, where it would be so, so easy to just coast and take all of it for granted. It seems so obvious now, once you’re on the other side, but it really is true that no one knows what they’re doing; some of us are just fumbling a little less.
And after nearly twenty years, I think I’m done faking it: I may have actually made it.
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Summer doesn't officially end until September 22. Here's what to read before then.
Whether or not it's factually true, I have always been of the belief that September feels like the hottest month of the year. This could be because I live in Los Angeles, where there is rarely a meaningful difference in weather once we cross the threshold of August. (A problem that only gets worse each year.) Or maybe it's just some latent, adolescent part of my brain that associates September with school and, therefore, with fall, thus making the heat feel like a punishment—the sun taunting me, the same 80-degree day sitting differently with my body than it did in July.
Either way, early September has always felt like purgatory to me; and while I like summer just fine, come September 1, I often forget it isn't technically over yet: This year, the fall equinox begins on September 22—another three weeks away. With that in mind, I asked a few cool folks to tell us what they're reading until then. (But I think it's a list worth devouring year-round.)
This is my favorite book to bring to the beach. Many books have tackled reimaginings of the classics, and it’s been interesting to see a hearty subgenre emerge within that category of same-sex romance. But for me, Anne Carson did it best with this poetic take on one of the labors of Heracles: Instead of slaying the red monster Geryon, he breaks his heart.
The story is told from Geryon’s perspective. He is soft, sensitive, and insecure. So, you know. Gay. I found that relatable to begin with. The most beautiful parts to me are the passing mentions of Geryon’s wings, which exist, but most people don’t seem to pay much mind to. Love, flight, Greek mythology, being different, the erotic—it’s all here, rendered so splendidly and with such tenderness. It’s an incredibly quick read. It will only take you an afternoon or so to fall in love.
I’m a bit burned out on media about women in their early 20s living their messiest lives—but when I started Sarah Thankam Mathew’s debut, I felt excited by its fresh approach. In a coming-of-age that considers capitalism, queerness, and cultural identity, recent graduate Sneha lands in Milwaukee during the Great Recession thanks to a corporate job that offers free rent and enough money to support her family in India. As funny as she is frustrating, with that naive mix of knowing nothing but believing everything deeply, I saw a lot of my younger self in Sneha, and I appreciated the chance to spend a rainy weekend in the world of her and friends, knowing I’d return to the stability of my late 20s after I finished it.
Personally, summer tends to either be a blossoming time of creativity, or I feel like a raisin withering on a vine. The fact that I’ve mostly spent the summer reading screenwriting guides, I can say this one was the former. One memoir has become the center of my practice, however: Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel. A quick read, Misfits refuses to sit firmly in any genre. Coel shares stories from her life, explores her creative ambitions, and provides guidance for Black people trying to survive in the entertainment industry. Reading about Coel’s process and life has inspired my own work and the risks I take.
The linked stories in John Keene’s Counternarratives took me a month to read and will take years, I’m sure, to weave through my thinking. This is the kind of book that makes me return to what Toni Morrison and Stephanie Smallwood have said about imaginative literature as a necessary part of the history of slavery (and, I would add, indigenous genocide and survival). How else? In these pieces of the quilt we have an interior monologue from Huck Finn’s Jim (who now belongs to himself), we have a deckhand from Hispaniola on the uncolonized shores of Manhattan, we have conversos in 17th century Brazil. We have Langston Hughes in bed with his translator, Xavier Villaurrutia. We have so many forms and their wild reformations. I was already a fan after reading John Keene’s experimental memoir Annotations, but now he’s a top five fave.
I find summers to be catastrophic for reading, but recently it's been a nice salve. Mostly I have a hard time reading when it's too hot, and of course, the world is the hottest it's ever been. The heat in Toronto has broken just a touch, so I can sit in the shade and finally enjoy a few pages. I'm very lucky to be able to get sent novels all the time, and recently I've been reading the novella by Sam Cottington, People Person, and Allie Rowbottom's new novel Aesthetica. If you know me, I am always buying out of print books and trying to find certain titles. I just got the novelization of the film The Way We Were by Arthur Laurents. I think the story of The Way We Were is one of the best portrayals of romance, ever! I'm hoping reading the novel will be instructive...
When I think biography, I think dense. I was delighted to find Odell's bio of Vogue Editor-In-Chief Anna Wintour to be the opposite. It flows nimbly through decades of media, culture, and fashion history, all told through the lens of one powerful, embattled, iconic, often deeply contradictory woman. Perhaps most impressive is that despite Wintour's fame, Odell manages to neither valorize nor villainize the notorious editor. Her reporting is fair, the book's voice compelling. It's a fascinating look behind the scenes of what makes Wintour a powerhouse—the privilege, the skills, and above all the survival instincts that may make or break her in the years to come.
I just finished reading Samantha Allen’s Patricia Wants to Cuddle, a novel that somehow manages to pack horror, queer romance, and comedy elements all in one book, perfect for readers who love reality dating shows (whether ironically or not). This fun read follows the contestants—and producers—of a Bachelor-like reality show called The Catch as their experience filming on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest turns more Stephen King than Nora Ephron, all because of an uninvited guest lurking in the background. The relationships between the women vying for the attention of the titular “Catch” created legitimate laugh-out-loud moments, only to be followed by suspenseful twists and turns that kept me turning the page. Those who watch reality TV will truly appreciate the way Allen has written these characters, though you don’t have to be a devotee of dating shows to appreciate this book. It’s honestly just so much fun, and a great summer read.
I must start off this recommendation by admitting that I am not a sports guy in any sense of the word; as a Philadelphian, I will defend the Birds and all of our other rambunctious sports teams until my dying breath, but that is only because to do otherwise would be deeply unwise in terms of my personal safety (and would severely piss off my neighbors, who own a meat smoker and like to share its bounty). However, Sam Anderson's sprawling, ingenious, lovingly crafted narrative nonfiction debut about Oklahoma City, its messy frontier history, and its oft-beleaguered basketball team not only got me to care about sports, it made me want to look up the (living, breathing, balling) characters in his book to find out more about them. It scratched my eternal itch to learn about places that seem overlooked and written off, the way that Oklahoma City and its Midwestern brethren often are; it made me consider listening to the Flaming Lips, and taught me a hell of a lot about tornados and the benign cult of the local weatherman. I really cannot recommend it highly enough. Even if you do not care about any of the things I've listed here, trust me—Sam Anderson will change that, and teach you a thing or two besides.
A cult book is a bit like a cat, in that it has many lives, and you never know when you might encounter it. For Imogen Binnie’s Nevada—a squirrely novel about a slacker named Maria—a close friend told me it was absolutely her favorite book, then emailed me a PDF. I read it quickly, as one tends to do with anything on their computer screen, and found it to be the rare, actually-funny New York novel, more possessed by the grime of the city than its glitz. But it’s the book’s surprising second act that takes place in the state of—well, you can guess—and the way it swerves past the obvious ending that has stayed with me.
Nevada was reissued this summer by FSG, giving it a new audience and me a reason to read it again. This time, as a handsome paperback, I told myself I would consume it more slowly. No such luck. The book is too funny! I read the whole thing in a single afternoon at the park.
I just re-read J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise. As the story opens, a hyper-modern tower block welcomes its new tenants. The building offers them every imaginable convenience, from an onsite supermarket and swimming pool to automatic trash chutes and a rooftop children’s garden. Well-heeled women walk pedigreed poodles across the building’s pristine elevator concourses. By the end of the novel their feral husbands are hunting those same dogs for food and roasting them on improvised spits over pyres of burning furniture. The housewives, themselves, have turned to cannibalism. The most alarming thing about this calamitous fall is that absolutely everyone in the building sees it coming—which makes this novel an unsettling read in the early days of our climate apocalypse. It’s easy to call Ballard prophetic, but he was just attuned to the human subconscious and fascinated by the ways in which our desires could be set loose by architecture and technology. In High-Rise, the building itself gives shape to the worst of humanity. I can only hope we imagine some new shapes to avoid such a fate ourselves.
I believe summer reading calls for books that either tap into a refreshing deep freeze or enhance the heat and entropy of the season. Mary Robison’s first novel, Oh!, mixes these effects—it’s the ice in your tea on a blazing afternoon, a pristinely funny account of a Midwestern family, the Clevelands, who seem dysfunctional to outsiders but may be living more authentically than the rest of us. Underneath the booze and bickering is a love strong enough to sustain them through the disasters that, besides the tornados, are mostly of their own making. I felt right at home.
I spent the last year researching, writing, and promoting a book. It’s been transformative, exhilarating, and frankly exhausting. My goal this summer was to be as lazy as possible. My tolerance for holding a book, as well as my attention span, are at an all-time low, so I turned to audio books (yes, I realize I am decades behind!). Listening to Emily Wilson’s lively, lean, and rhythmic translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, narrated by Claire Danes, is the perfect soundtrack to lying down, on my bed or warm grass, my preferred summer activities. It’s a fun reminder of the physicality of words and storytelling, and Wilson’s accessible language lets me focus on all the human drama—like I’m eavesdropping on some hot, ancient gossip!
I feel like I read Andrew Sean Greer’s Less whenever I’m traveling or trying to write—which, I suppose, is all the time. The book follows Arthur Less, a “minor author” and “magniloquent spoony” pushing fifty years old, who skips his ex’s wedding by going on a round-the-world trip where he writes and teaches and meets a sparkling cast of life lessons masquerading as humans. I have four big trips this summer (Manila, London, Sewanee in Tennessee, and Tuscany; writing through all of it), so I’ve kept Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning baby in my carry-on this whole time. It’s been nice having a friend with me for the long layovers, for the writer’s blocks, for the reminders that this burning world is something to love.
I regret to open my first ever blurb for this wonderful publication by triple-bypassing its single instruction and recommending a book that I actually read in the dead of winter, but I devoured The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård, and you should, too. I had never read him before but, based on the man’s healthy ego and reputation for excruciating minutiae, I half expected to give up almost immediately. Instead, this haunting, imaginative, at times philosophical, and at times humorous collection of loosely interconnected stories gripped me from the first page. What can I say, Knausgård can write!
This is a book about being Vladimir Nabokov and wanting to flex with language. Some would say it’s a book about love, or that it’s a family chronicle, but really it’s Nabokov dancing giddily across the page. There’s wordplay galore, with the title itself being an example—”Ada,” the author notes, when pronounced with a “long, deep Russian a” sounds like “ardor,” and so a person can be construed as a tribulation.
There’s a plot to be traveled down, should you need one. But the point of reading the book, to me, is to remind the reader that prose can be pursued so rapturously and with such confidence. It’s a great book to read if you’re experiencing writer’s block. Watching Nabokov shape language like a master ceramicist is inspiring, if you can push past the confusing names (there are two different “Van Veen”s) and, well, the incest. There are plenty of beautiful descriptions of bugs to distract you, at least.
The whole thing also takes place on an entirely alternate Earth called Antiterra, for some reason, which to me gave the austere trappings of the book an alluring sci-fi sheen to it. It’s truly an imagination, run amok.
This new adult contemporary romance is the debut novel of the author of Love in Colour, a master of the love story. Set at a university in the UK, with an exclusively Black cast of characters, Babalola's crafted a world with such care and attention to detail that it rises from the page to greet the reader. You are invited in, summoned to come play with some of the best romance tropes in existence (Enemies to lovers! Fake dating!), and also to bear witness to their reinvigoration.
I devoured this book beachside, taken over by rich characters who by book's end settle into your heart like old friends. Most incisive, to me? This book is ultimately about how hard it is to open your heart: the pits that form when you fear hurting or getting hurt, and the rewards that come when you do the work to do better and be open. A tribute to the "babygirls" and "babyghels" of Babalola's life, the novel's a love letter to all kinds of love, not just the romantic.
This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in trans history, queer history, or any kind of history at all, really. In 1912, Ewan Forbes was born to an old aristocratic family in Scotland; assigned female at birth, he was nonetheless very clear about his identity from a young age, and that resolve (and his mother's love) led him to seek out an early version of gender affirming care. All Ewan wanted was to become a family man and live a quiet, decent life; he achieved this for a while, until a grasping younger brother came knocking, and Ewan's entire world—and identity—was turned upside down. What happened afterwards led to a pivotal, precedent-setting legal ruling that was summarily buried and kept secret for decades, until now. Ewan's story intersects with many different moments and movements throughout his long and eventful life, and as Playdon deftly illustrates (backed up by years of intensive research), the roots of the UK's current abysmal plague of transphobia do not run nearly as deep as its hateful proponents would like us to think. Her thrilling, warm-hearted excavation of Ewan's life and legal battles unravels a fascinating tale that challenges modern ideas around gender, healthcare, human rights, the British legal system, and even the aristocracy. Read it.
I loved Elaine Castillo’s novel, America Is Not the Heart, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from her first nonfiction release. Ostensibly a critique of reading and how we, as readers, can do it better, it sounded esoteric. But Castillo makes a strong argument that reading isn’t just for books, but also the reading of the world: the broader consideration of other people, and ourselves in relation, using topics like Joan Didion, Watchmen, and the films of Wong Kar-Wai as a lens. Her essays are so honest, funny, and sharp in their criticism that after just a few of them, I felt like some of the stuck gears in my thinking had come loose and I felt immediately motivated to write.
This contemporary young adult novel is aMamma Mia remix of the finest degree—and it knows it. The book's main character, an eager Manhattan theater kid, makes frequent reference to the musical, but somehow the novel is never bogged down by its origins. It's a fun read, gripping and gratifying. I found myself looking forward to the end of my workday so I could keep going and find out what happens in both the novel's winning romance and in its mystery. And here's a non-spoiler: That end is as gratifying as you'd hope.
—A.B.
[post_title] => What a Bunch of Interesting Humans Are Reading This Summer/Fall Purgatory
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The women of color writing new narratives in perfumery.
When I travel, my souvenir of choice comes in olfactive form: a TSA-compliant bottle of perfume that embodies the spirit of the place I’m visiting, so that I can return to it later in my mind. One cherished example, from a trip to Tokyo, smells like a cup of green tea enjoyed in the cooling clarity of a shaded garden. To someone who grew up surrounded by tea rituals, it also smells like coming home. At its heart is a photorealistic green tea accord—soft yet assertive, bright and smooth at once, bitterness and sweetness in an entangled dance until the end. The scent was composed by someone who understands tea in all of its kaleidoscopic facets: Satori Osawa, a licensed Japanese tea master and one of the country’s few recognized perfumers. She was also the first East Asian perfumer I’d ever met.
Perfumers, admittedly, are hard to come by. They work in chemistry labs sheltered from the public eye and, for the most part, anonymously. But they also tend to hail from the same small pocket of the world, even though their work caters to audiences all over the globe. Looking at headshots of famous perfumers feels like playing a difficult game of Guess Who: From Jean Claude Ellena (Hermès Terre d’Hermès, Bulgari Thé Vert) to Olivier Cresp (Thierry Mugler Angel, YSL Black Opium), the creators behind some of the biggest household names in perfumery are all born in France—often into perfumer families—and trained there, too.
France is hardly the only place in the world with a rich cultural scent heritage; nevertheless, the traditional perfumer’s mold continues to be cast in the French man’s image. For those who try to challenge this convention, the barriers to entry unpack like nesting dolls: gender, race, nationality, lineage, and, at the heart of it all, access. “When I first started out and wanted to establish my brand name, it was incredibly difficult,” says Chavalia Dunlap-Mwamba, self-taught perfumer and owner of Texas-based fragrance brand Pink MahogHany. Whether it was finding other Black perfumers in the industry to reach out to, or bulk manufacturers and compounders to scale her business, helpful information proved to be scant and elusive. She found herself bootstrapping as a complete outsider.
For many, the barriers to perfumery are also profoundly financial. From minimum order quantities to the price of raw materials—250ml of jasmine absolute, for example, can retail for over a thousand dollars—every aspect of the industry comes with a price tag to choke on. “Perfumery is an expensive hobby, and historically, only the very privileged have been able to partake in it,” says Loreto Remsing, creator of artisan brand LAROMATICA. Learning the tricks of the trade is equally prohibitive, and usually involves moving to France to study at one of its prestigious fragrance institutions. For Remsing, an immigrant to the United States who faced poverty growing up and ended up putting herself through college, a formal perfume education was never an option; and even if it had been, she would have felt out of place. This exclusionary feeling is shared by Lula Curioca, an olfactory artist and perfumer based in Mexico City, and also pushed her to pursue the self-taught route. “[It was] like going against water all the time,” Curioca admits. “I was like, ‘That gate, at the moment, I can’t cross it.’”
In conversations about the industry, this image of gates comes up time and time again. “[Historically,] women of color haven’t been given the opportunity to come up in perfumery,” says Yosh Han, self-taught perfumer and creative director at Scent Trunk, a fragrance publishing house. “Many have been in marketing or sales roles only.” Disregarding the rules of convention, she launched her eponymous perfume brand in 2004, as an Asian-American female with no formal training. She recalls the industry reception being one of shock: “Everybody was like, ‘Who the fuck is this girl?’” Han, who now champions other independent and self-taught perfumers by commissioning their work for Scent Trunk, is a vocal advocate for doing things the untraditional way. She likens it to good cooking: talent can come from any kitchen, not just Le Cordon Bleu’s.
Access through the well-trodden pathways, too, comes with asterisks and caveats for those who do not fit the profile. “It’s really guarded. And still, despite what a huge industry it is,” says Anne Serrano-McClain, founder of independent perfume brand MCMC Fragrances. She’s what the industry dubs “classically” trained, through a year-long professional degree offered by the Grasse Institute of Perfumery (GIP), a rarefied and renowned perfume school located in the South of France, that only accepts 12 students a year. When she enrolled in 2009, most of her fellow students were from Europe, with familial ties to the industry; one of them was the aforementioned Olivier Cresp’s son. “You are expected in the industry to follow a very particular path,” she says. “I walked away with the technical skills, but I also walked away with this understanding that made me passionate [about] breaking that mold a little bit.”
Dana El Masri, a Lebanese-Egyptian-Canadian perfumer who launched her line Jazmin Saraï shortly after graduating from GIP, recalls clashing with her French teachers and classmates throughout her time there. Often, it came down to cultural differences as a person of color in a traditional Euro-centric environment. In one instance, while working on a group project for a perfume that she was leading—inspired by a luxury hotel in Siwa, an oasis in northern Egypt—her unusual choice of fragrance materials was called into question as being “too oriental.”
Here, “oriental” is accompanied by emphatic air quotes. Until recently, the term was a part of the perfume industry taxonomy—a fragrance family that encapsulates scents with warm, resinous, spicy facets, featuring materials such as vanilla, labdanum, and tonka bean. The classification has always played an othering role in perfumery, used to describe scents that represented fantasies of foreign places. “It means nothing from an olfactory perspective,” El Masri explains. “You can eliminate it entirely and break it down into balsamic, ambery, powdery, and gourmand.” In school, she was praised for being skilled at making “oriental” perfumes—until those compositions started to smell too foreign. “We were playing around with materials that you find in ancient Egypt. So I was using myrrh, I was playing with papyrus. Palm frond. Carob. Jasmine,” she recounts. “So yeah, it was going to be a little ‘oriental.’”
Today, due to growing pressure from industry advocates—including many of the perfumers featured here—a term that was once deemed part of perfume tradition is now understood as terribly outdated and offensive. In 2021, the perfume database Fragrances of the World updated all instances of “oriental” to “amber,” as did the perfume encyclopedia Fragrantica. Some brands and retailers followed suit. Still, many haven’t, and the industry remains riddled with disparity and ripe for change. “If a [fragrance] company cannot acknowledge a word description because they’re upholding colonial white supremacist beliefs,” asks Han, “how is a woman of color ever going to get to leadership positions?”
To amplify and uplift the presence of BIPOC creators within the industry, Han, El Masri, and their network of advocates have assembled resources like Decolonize Scent and the Diverse Talent in Fragrance & Perfumery Database. It is, after all, in perfume companies’ best interests to expand their pool of talent; diversity begets innovation and creativity. And when perfumers are hired from all over the world, not just the microclimates of the South of France, they distill their experiences and unique olfactive associations into their work. “When you bring in women of color, you are bringing in unique cultural experiences, traditions, history, heritage, and stories,” says Remsing, who attributes the inspiration for some of her creations to a childhood of living on isolated farms, surrounded by herbs, plants, and folk medicine.
Before I had the chance to visit Satori Osawa, I had smelled a dozen green tea scents—all pleasant and lovely, but none that hooked me by the heart. When I smelled her specific translation of green tea—with the sparkle of a portrait painted by a person who loves the subject—the rest of them dropped out of qualification.
Perfumes have always been prized for their transportive properties, how they allow us to return to a beloved memory, or armchair travel to new surroundings. This is why fragrance marketing copy is saturated with references to fabled worlds and exotic destinations, to odysseys and adventures. But as the olfactory terrain of fragrance becomes more and more diverse, those responsible for creating these concepts remain the same.
To the brands who capitalize on the allure of the unfamiliar yet default to working with the old guard, El Masri presents an alternative perspective: “Don't you think you're going to get more of an accurate and potentially even more soulful, passionate, connected interpretation of what you're trying to express,” she asks, “if it was made with a local [perfumer] or someone who understands the culture on a much deeper level?” This is not to say that only people who’ve lived those experiences should get to tell their stories, El Masri clarifies. “I’m just saying that we need to give those people that chance.”
For the women who’ve plodded their own paths in perfumery, a shared belief is the moral imperative to create more opportunities for the scent-curious, whomever they may be. Dunlap-Mwamba, who also works as an educator, sees it as more than a DE&I concern—it’s the missing representation that helps close gaps for the next generation. “My mission is to create more visibility for perfumers of color,” she says. “Because what happened with me is that I didn’t know this space existed until I was grown.” If fragrance became incorporated into elementary school curriculums alongside electives like art or dance, she suggests, students would be exposed to the different facets of the fragrance industry at a younger age—which broadens their avenues in the job market.
Serrano-McClain has a similar mission: to pass on her technical training from the GIP to those in less privileged positions. “We don’t treat perfume like it’s accessible art,” she says. “And we could do more of that.” She had previously taught a perfume class at a local youth engagement center, and recalls being impressed with the wealth of olfactive ideas that her teenage students brought to the table—evidence that good ideas in perfumery can come from anywhere, at any age. But what is understood for other artistic mediums—that capital and institutional training are not prerequisites to great art—still pushes the boundaries of this one.
One of the silver linings of the pandemic is how it has normalized and democratized online education—and that includes more remote perfume courses, previously rarely offered. Organizations dedicated to accessible scent education and experimentation, such as the Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO) in Los Angeles, make it easier than ever to dabble in the art and science of smells. Curioca, who herself learned to make perfume through sessions at the IAO, offered advice for other outsiders with interest in the industry who are unsure of where to begin: “If you want to, you’ll find a way. Maybe it’s slower. Maybe it’s different. Your own path will find you—you just need to let yourself be guided.”
As they say in the industry: Just follow your nose.
[post_title] => Follow Her Nose
[post_excerpt] => The women of color rewriting the narratives of perfume.
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“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.
“My friend Rachel is getting married.”
I say the words in my head, and out loud, and marvel at the way the syllables align; laugh a bit at the obvious joke about the 2008 movie; pull my mouth into a half-smile as I imagine Rachel as I knew her best, someone I sat with during tenth grade biology and who gifted me so many of the foundational touchstones of my personhood now. Rachel, goofy and unguarded and easily earnest, who spurred me to be my weirdest and wildest self. Rachel, who introduced me to Britpop; who introduced me to a lot of music, actually, including the artist Annie, whose song “Heartbeat” is a top five for sure. Rachel, who taught me to be funny in the exact way that would make her giggle, an expression and sound I can picture without any dimming over the distance of space and time.
The thing is, I haven’t seen Rachel in person in over a decade. Before this past year, the last time I’d spoken to her was back in 2017, when our friend L, who’d sat at that same bio table, passed away, and knowing that she and L had been as close as sisters, I’d reached out to Rachel over a flurry of texts. We made the kind of promises that happen over death, to be more present and ready for each other in the now. And I thought I’d meant it, but I couldn’t follow through. When everyone descended back on our hometown for the funeral, I demurred, citing life and time and work—and did I mention life?—letting the memory of who I was to them attend instead.
There were real reasons why I didn’t go back. I was in the throes of an internal gender crisis as I assessed and tried to repress my rejection of womanhood, a bridle bit that was carving a waterfall of blood from my metallic mouth. I was still reeling from a big move—out of Los Angeles, my home for seven years, and into a domicile with the man who’d become my spouse—and hadn’t quite found my footing, financially and otherwise, in this new place. But the most elemental reason I didn’t go back to New Jersey was that I didn’t know what to say to the friends I’d essentially left behind when I moved to California and decided to become the person I couldn’t be back home. Back where I knew and loved them. Back where I maybe not loved, but at least thought I knew, myself.
~
Four years later, death is what brings me back to Rachel again. She’d always been attuned to what one might call the “pop girls,” and in the early 2000s, that included Girls Aloud, the British girl group whose impact and influence never quite crossed the Atlantic like their most popular predecessors the Spice Girls' had. Rachel had made a hagiography out of their music and careers—as a group, as individuals—with the expertise of a stan, which she was. And then, last fall, one of the members of Girls Aloud passed away suddenly, at an age where your first reaction is, “That’s too young.”
I read the headline on the music blog I’ve been reading since high school and felt the impact in two waves: first, a sharp kick in the throat, and then, a dull pang tunneling through my chest cavity and into my gut, where it settled into the heavy, heady ache of guilt. I needed to tell Rachel. Did she already know? Did she still care? Would she want to talk about it with me, and could this transparent bid for reconnection actually in turn open the door for us to discuss everything I now knew about myself and everything I didn’t know about her?
~
We fell out over a boy, or at least that’s how I framed it. After my high school ex and I broke up, he’d stayed on the East Coast for college like most of the people I’d gone to school with and made plans with them and reached out to them and made them feel wanted and seen, and that included Rachel. Meanwhile, I’d crossed the country and immediately began my free bitch makeover montage, seeking nothing less than sublimation, to seem cooler, smarter, more self-possessed than I’d ever felt in the town where I’d grown up, to leave my body behind and diffuse into a sun-baptized spirit. I quite literally tried to shed my body of its mass, its baggage, its racialized cocoon, to cultivate the effortless, weightless glow of success and satisfaction that’d make people look at me, want me, and maybe even accept me. No wonder my ex broke up with me over a video call right before Halloween our freshman year; no wonder my attempts at conversations with my once-best friends became buckshot in sparse forests, doves with clipped wings released to their doom, cursory “happy birthday”s and then merciful silence. It didn’t matter that our high school friend group started to break apart on its own, that many of the friends my ex had “won” in the breakup custody battle didn’t stay friends with him or each other. I surrendered my past completely, and more than anyone else, I surrendered Rachel.
Honestly, the loss of most of those friendships was for the best. And eventually, I figured out how to become the kind of person I wanted to be without brutalizing myself for the achievement of that want. But I never got over Rachel, who was one of the only people I knew from back then who went on to work in the entertainment world, too; whose influence in my life goes down to my marrow.
I went alone to a Robyn concert and thought, “Rachel would’ve gone with me.” I went to parties and wondered what she’d think of their soundtracks, because she was the one who’d taught me how to listen to—really listen to—and contextualize music. In many ways, she was my shadow sensei and my twin, not in the biological sense but in the Hilton Als essayistic way. A mirrored soul, someone who knew how to draw the best of me out of myself.
I’d never told her any of this because nobody we grew up with talked about friendship like that. But maybe we’d always picked up a singular frequency from each other. When I heard through the grapevine that she’d come out in college, I yearned to tell her that I understood even though I hadn’t come out in my own way to myself then. When I did come out, I’d often imagine, unbidden, how I would break the news to her. How she’d process it; whether she’d recoil from or reach for me, whether she’d still recognize our similarities despite the new difference between us.
~
I stared at the headline and imagined a world where I took my regret to the grave, and texted her something that, between the lines, simply said: I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.
We talked for what felt like and actually was hours. Her girlfriend-now-fiancée had to remind her of the life outside our impassioned recollections and brutal revelations. Our mutual admirations and jealousies and drafted but scrapped overtures. She asked me what happened back then, and I told her with no shame or fear or gloss, the kind of honesty we’d never achieved as friends.
And really, we’re barely friends now. I don’t know the rhythms of her day-to-day life and she doesn’t know mine. We haven’t talked at length since that first outpouring, but we both agreed that all we could do was keep placing stones in the river that’d grown between us. I text her every time I think of her and she does the same. She’s back into British girl pop again and told me when she sang Little Mix at karaoke. I asked her for her address to send her flowers for her engagement though I’m not (and didn’t/don’t expect to be) invited to whatever ceremony she’s got planned. I won’t be in New York for a while and she won’t be in California anytime soon, but the door is open if/when one of us crosses over the same expanse that’d once divided us.
I want to shake my younger self by the shoulders and tell her/them that the only thing that ever kept me from rekindling these kinds of connections was my own damn ego, so fixated on the idea that something was broken that I couldn’t imagine reforging it into not the thing it was, but the thing it could be. I want to leap across the country and shake Rachel’s shoulders and promise, really promise, that I won’t let our friendship become a memory again. I want to watch her face morph with indescribable emotion as she sees me and I want to know she sees my face go through the same.
Maybe I’m coming on too strong. It’s true, whirlwind courtships have slimmer odds than ones that grow from deeply planted roots. So here I am, enriching the soil; soon, though, I hope to have more flowers for her.
[post_title] => How Do You Reconnect with Someone You Haven't Spoken to in a Decade?
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In my 20s, this question consumed me. Then, I asked a better one.
“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.
At the nadir of the Great Recession, as I prepared to hurl my about-to-graduate self into a labor pool that looked more like a quicksand pit, my many preoccupations about the future—Where would I live? How would I pay the bills? What would I do, in both a cosmic and literal sense?—were always overshadowed by a quietly devastating question: Why don’t I have any friends?
The thought was born of confusion more than self-pity. I had plenty of flaws, yes, but I wasn’t a uniquely unlikeable person, nor an especially cruel or boring or stupid one. At no point had I ever made a conscious decision to reject friendships; in fact, I craved them with a somewhat pathetic sincerity. Yet, for whatever reason, most days I woke up feeling deeply alone and went to bed feeling the same way.
Soon I’d learn this was normal, that feeling like you have no friends is one of the most universal experiences of being an adult in the 21st century. Every year there’s a new study that quantifies our collective loneliness. The specific statistics are irrelevant, the takeaways interchangeable. The numbers say little we don’t already know. Who needs an expert to explain that a society built around perpetual, exponential growth must demand ever-greater exertion and attention from an increasingly exhausted population, and that this state of affairs sucks ass?
On some level it was nice to know my misery had company. But not that nice. It certainly wasn’t enough to allay my fear that I was trying my best to make friends and failing miserably. No matter how often (or where) I put myself out there, I had nothing to show for it. Desperation is a stinky cologne, and it often felt like the more I yearned for friendship, the faster people ran away from me. After two years of playing pickup basketball at the local YMCA, I’d bonded with zero other humans. My weekly trips to the meditation center were wonderful, but even joining a “Dharma Friends” group didn’t yield any actual friends. I chatted with classmates in the halls after lectures and struck up conversations with strangers at the bus stop, often with the promise that we’d grab a drink later. We never wound up grabbing a drink later.
My inability to make friends would’ve made more sense if I’d been a “real” adult, I reasoned. If I’d had the excuse of a kid who ate up all my free time, or a career that chained me to a desk. It would’ve made more sense if I’d just moved to the area: Minnesota isnotoriously inhospitableto newcomers. None of this was true, though. The only remaining explanation? The problem was me.
In hindsight, I think this was correct, but not for the reasons I imagined.
Compared with all the time 21-year old me spent pondering why I didn’t have any friends, I spent very little wondering how I might be a good friend to others. I don’t think I was unique in this regard: Young people are typically (if not always accurately) regarded as self-centered. In any case, my own needs were so urgent and ravenous that I had no brain space to contemplate the needs of anyone else. My obsession with having friends made me poorly suited to be one myself.
Another thing I’d rarely considered was if the question of Why don’t I have any friends? waseven valid. It’s not like nobody was ever nice to me. The YMCA basketball guys, for example, may not have invited me over to play video games—but we did spend 5-10 hours a week hooping together, cracking jokes and talking good-natured smack. And some of the people I’d met at the meditation center had shown me remarkable kindness. There was the yoga teacher who’d stay after class to help me practice headstands (and, much to my surprise, commiserate about trying to quit smoking). Or the avuncular gentleman who carved me a beautiful portable altar after I told him I was moving to South Korea. I remember admiring the wood’s live edge and choking up as he hugged me goodbye. Isn’t that something friends would do, even if we’d never hit the bars together?
And then, a strange thing happened: I left the place I’d spent most of my life and promptly made a bunch of friends.
The change of scenery didn’t hurt, and finally having a small-but-steady source of income wasn’t bad either. (How invisible you can feel in a city when you have no money, and how limited your options for socializing become when a $5 drink is beyond your budget!) On Thursday nights, we’d have barbecue feasts and sing karaoke; on weekends we’d go to mud festivals or lewd sculpture parks. At last my life was full of the friendship I’d craved, the bubbly and adventurous camaraderie of beer commercials and Benetton ads. This miracle didn’t happen because I somehow got smarter or funnier or cooler, though—all the attributes I’d thought were essential for having friends. Instead, I’m pretty sure it happened because I got more curious about other peoples’ lives and less obsessed with my own.
Looking back, it feels unsatisfying to say that my reintroduction to friendship came thanks to a change in my material conditions. People can’t just pack up and move if they feel alone in their town or city, and finding a decent job has always been easier said than done. But it feels equally unsatisfying to say it happened because I shifted how I thought about things—as if the only thing standing between me and a brunch table full of chums was a pinch of positive thinking.
When it comes to making friends as an adult, the deck is indeed stacked against us. It’s not just me: This is a shitty and difficult time to be alive. Life under a hypercompetitive capitalist regime is hostile to the conditions that make friendships possible. We have little free time for long meandering chats, and we have few nice public spaces in which to have them. We’re taught from birth to view ourselves as consumers and competitors. We’re punished for having any vulnerabilities. You could say this makes friendship more urgent than ever… but when hasn’t it been urgent?
All these points are true in a big picture sense, which made it essential (in my case, at least) to ignore the big picture. Ignoring stuff tends to get a bad rap—but for me it was an act of liberation instead of neglect. When I started paying less attention to my own neuroses about friendship and the structural reasons it felt so out of reach, I had more time and energy to pay attention to other people. I started to notice little things about the ways they talked, moved, thought, ate. This was genuinely interesting to me, and it turned out that taking an interest in others was a good way to get them interested in me, too. Not all the time, but often enough that I felt less alone.
In the decade-plus since my existential friend crisis, my thoughts about friendship have changed so much they might as well belong to a different person. My urge to impress morphed into an urge to care. This shift didn’t happen because I gritted my teeth and tried extra hard to be nicer; it came when I took a break from beating myself up to notice all the fascinating humans moving around me. There’s an old Buddhist joke that goes, “Don’t just do something, sit there.” And as silly as it might sound, not trying to fix my friend problem was the first and most important step to letting it fade away.
I wish I could go back and explain all this to about-to-graduate me, but who knows if he would have listened. Maybe he had to experience it all firsthand for himself. Better late than never, though, and better now than even later. What a blessing it is to realize that we don’t have to be better to be worthy of friendship. What a relief to know that flowers bloom even if we don’t pull them up by their petals.
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Canadians tend to see the extremism expressed by the truckers and their supporters as a fringe movement imported from the U.S., but that is a gross oversimplification.
The so-called “Freedom Convoy,” a highly disruptive protest organized and led by Canadian truckers who oppose vaccine mandates and other pandemic-related restrictions, is now entering its third week. Protesting truckers drove their rigs into downtown Ottawa and set up camp, blowing their horns at eardrum-shattering decibels for hours each day and holding tailgate parties, making the downtown area of Canada’s usually placid small capital city unlivable. City residents are incensed by the noise and disruption, while the chief of police has resigned under fire for his failure to disperse the demonstrators.
The protesters are deeply unpopular in Canada, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world with 90 percent of the population overall—including truckers— having received at least two doses. And yet, the Freedom Convoy has managed to dominate the news cycle and paralyze Canada’s capital city, forcing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act, which gives law enforcement expanded powers to arrest protesters and break up demonstrations.
The angry, anti-vax truckers have harassed residents to the point that older people are afraid to leave their homes; they have committed multiple acts of vandalism and violence, some targeting journalists; and in one egregious incident were spotted lighting a fire in the lobby of a residential apartment building. They have blockaded roads, and not only in Ottawa. The freedom convoy participants have also shut down multiple border crossings as the protest has spread west, with particularly large presences elsewhere in Ontario and in Alberta, an oil-rich province known for cattle ranching and the prevalence of strong right-wing views, including secessionism—a combination that often elicits comparisons with Texas.
On Sunday police cleared and reopened the Ambassador Bridge, where protesters had for a week choked off a critical commercial route that connects Detroit, Michigan, to Windsor, Ontario. But the authorities have not yet found the stomach to forcibly break up the protest in Ottawa. As the siege drags on, journalists, pundits, and the public have been digging into the ideological motivations, funding sources, and cross-border networks of the protesters.
Protesters have displayed swastikas, Canadian flags, Confederate flags, Gadsen flags, Trump flags, U.S. flags, and QAnon messaging. Observers have also reported conservative Christian messaging and symbols that were likewise present at the U.S. protests against the 2020 election results that culminated in the January 6 insurrection. The elements clearly inspired by American right-wing Christians include “Jericho marches” around the parliamentary precinct in Ottawa, in a symbolic reenactment of the Hebrew Bible tale about God causing the city of Jericho’s walls to collapse after the Israelites marched while blowing ram’s horns, or shofars. Right-wing Christians have in recent years appropriated these Jewish ritual instruments, blowing them during church services and at “Jericho marches” in both the U.S. and Canada. The organizer of the Canadian “Jericho marches” is Benita Pedersen, an Albertan.
As Jorge Barrera reports for the CBC, “Christian faith — with an overtly evangelical feel — flows like an undercurrent through the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa.” But how much of this represents the direct influence of the American Christian Right, as opposed to an expression of homegrown, if fringe, Canadian extremism and majoritarian grievance?
Catherine Porter, the New York Times’s Canada bureau chief, observed that “many believe the unrest is essentially a U.S. import,” but this is an oversimplification. The discourse reminds me of how, when I first began researching networks involving U.S. Christian Right actors and right-wing, pro-Putin Russians (many associated with the Russian Orthodox Church) in 2013, the spread of illiberal, socially conservative policies in the global South, Eastern Europe, and Russia was often framed in terms of the exportation of America’s culture wars. A few years later, when the connections between Donald Trump’s campaign for president and various Russian actors became apparent, many liberals embraced the simplistic and frankly absurd notion that the U.S.’s right-wing extremism and deep social and political divisions had been essentially manufactured by Russian disinformation. The reality is that Russian influence operations managed to exploit and exacerbate problems that already existed.
Throughout those years, while monitoring the various networks and connections between American, western European, and Russian right-wing extremists, eventually in my capacity as a senior research associate with the Postsecular Conflicts project based at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, I stressed agency among actors from all factions and rejected temptations to view the efforts of organizations like the World Congress of Families (now known as the International Organization for the Family) as sites of unidirectional influence.
By the same token, the international ties between Canada’s right-wing extremists and those from other countries, primarily the U.S., must be seen in terms of multidirectional influence and feedback loops. The U.S. Christian Right does have ties to Canadian extremist groups, and at least a diffuse connection to the convoy wreaking havoc in Ottawa. Whereas transatlantic connections are usually limited to elite, higher-level actors, Canada and the U.S. share the world’s longest undefended border, making it easy for less well-funded, less sophisticated, less easily monitored actors to connect with one another—people who are ready to engage in street violence, or ideologues and agitators who are happy to appear alongside street brawlers.
Proud Boys Canada may have officially dissolved itself after Ottawa declared it a terrorist organization last spring, but the organization was founded by a Canadian. And, while the Proud Boys have become mainly an American group, some Canadians have been involved in violent right-wing protests on the U.S. side of the border. These include the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C., where at least one Canadian flag was spotted, and where a group of Proud Boys knelt in an unmistakably evangelical prayer that was captured on video before playing a prominent role in the violence. Canadian actors have also been present at right-wing protests and incidents of street violence in Portland, Oregon—a city frequently targeted by the Proud Boys and similar far-right group Patriot Prayer.
The most well-known Canadian who has frequented Oregon is the notorious Artur Pawlowski, a Polish-born evangelical pastor based in Calgary, Alberta, who has led raucous protests and direct actions against public health mandates in Canada throughout the coronavirus pandemic, claiming that public health protections violate his “religious freedom.” In one such protest, Pawlowski and other participants carried tiki torches in a clear nod to the August, 2017 white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pawlowski was recently arrested in Coutts, Alberta, in connection with his support for the protesters blockading the border crossing there.
As for the American Christian Right’s connections to the trucker protest in Canada, major figures such as Franklin Graham—world-famous evangelist Billy Graham’s son and head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—have spoken out in support of it. Although they are not household names, prominent “prophets” and “apostles” associated with the radical charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation—the kind of Christianity espoused by former Trump spiritual advisor Paula White—are also broadcasting their support, as researcher Bruce Wilson, who has published numerous articles documenting Christian Right and NAR activities and networks, confirmed when asked for comment.
The man holding the sign told 'The Catholic Register' that Pope Francis is a heretic and that the government is forcing people to take vaccines.
But perhaps the most significant U.S. Christian Right connection to the so-called “Freedom Convoy” is represented by the explicitly Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, which has become infamous in recent years for funding white supremacist causes, including the legal defense of Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down supporters of Black Lives Matter at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Crowdfunding has allowed massive amounts of dark money to flow to the Canadian extremists behind the protest at a rate that dwarfs typical Canadian political fundraising, a worrisome development that could continue to undermine the country's civil society and democracy after the current protests are over.
Last week hackers broke into GiveSendGo’s network, releasing donor names, email addresses, and other information to journalists and researchers. One scholar looking into where the money originates is Dr. Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University. Lecaque posted a Twitter thread of messages from donors (without disclosing their names or other personally identifying information), as well as the countries (and in some cases states/provinces and cities) they come from. Eight of these messages “explicitly discuss Jericho,” Lecaque tweeted. The donations referenced in his thread mostly stemmed from the United States and Canada, but one came from the UK and another from France.
Lecaque told The Conversationalist that while the donors came from a broad geographic range, a high proportion were from the U.S. His keyword search of the messages donors posted brought up “a lot of religious themed entries, some more extreme than others.” Most of them were of the anodyne “God bless” variety, but there were some violent ones as well, with “themes of spiritual warfare or QAnon.” Lecaque acknowledged that explicitly religious messages were in the minority, but their presence nevertheless stood out.
The mostly white, racially aggrieved, conspiracy-theory believing crowd in the U.S. and Canada espouse unpopular views and support unpopular policies, but by using technology to connect and crowdfund internationally, they have managed to punch politically above their weight. Both countries have homegrown extremists and their own respective racist and colonialist realities to confront, but right-wingers from either side of the border are also influencing each other, probably more through media (including social media) than through direct cross-border interactions.
But what is it exactly that facilitates the mutual admiration and networking? That factor seems to be affiliation with conservative Christianity—especially, although not exclusively, evangelical Protestantism. This tracks with what I’ve observed in my own research both with respect to the domestic Christian Right and international right-wing networks. We are living through a moment of surging right-wing populism in North America, Europe, Australia, and some other parts of the world—a massive backlash against civil rights gains and the rise of multicultural democracy by the heirs of European colonialism and genocide.
A sense that they are outnumbered has contributed both to these individuals’ radicalization, and to the easing of traditional theological, cultural, and geopolitical enmities between various Christian and ethnic groups, paving the way for aggrieved (and mostly white) hardline Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Orthodox Christians to band together in attempts to assert dominance through the promotion of a “traditional values” agenda—whether in the European Court of Human Rights, the U.S. Supreme Court, or the streets of Portland and Ottawa. While most American, Canadian, and European Christians are not right-wing extremists, most American, Canadian, and European right-wing extremists identify with Christianity, and find in it a justification for their bigotry and anti-social, anti-government, and anti-democratic actions. For democracy to prevail, we must find more effective ways to counter the diffuse international threat of Christian extremism.
[post_title] => Conservative Christianity's influence on the 'Freedom Convoy' indicates global spread of authoritarianism
[post_excerpt] => The protesters are deeply unpopular in Canada, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world with 90 percent of the population overall—including truckers— having received at least two doses. And yet, the Freedom Convoy has managed to dominate the news cycle and paralyze Canada’s capital city.
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[post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12
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