Before meeting Dr. Robby, Noah Wyle’s fantastically competent and tragic character in The Pitt, I can’t remember the last time I saw my parental role depicted onscreen. Dr. Robby, like myself and so many others, has a close bond with a child who is not his own. As Dr. McKay explains to a new resident in Season 1, Robby is not his dad—or even his stepdad. Robby and Jake’s mom dated seriously for a few years, Robby developed a uniquely strong bond with the kid, and though he and Jake’s mom are no longer together, that bond remains.

I love this because I relate to it—deeply. Depictions of stepparents are here and there onscreen (though still mostly negative), but rarer still is the depiction of the quasi-stepparent. Or what I like to call the “step-ish” parent. A person who parents a child, but is not a parent, not even—technically—a stepparent. As marriage rates plummet and blended families soar, more and more people are encountering this step-ish parent role.

My partner and I are not married. Though we’ve been together for almost six years, living together for the past three, neither of us has any desire to marry. In fact, both of us have an active desire not to. At forty-four, the formality of it feels forced and superficial, the planning exhausting, the expense prohibitive. And though I can imagine being with my partner forever, the delusion that I’ll know that for sure has long passed. Every aspect of the marital enterprise has lost its appeal.

Unfortunately, according to the dictionary—and also my partner’s ex-wife—marriage is what officially makes someone a stepparent. My step-ish kid is told by his mom not to call me stepmom, though I have been tucking him in and making him dinner and helping him with homework for six years, two-thirds of his life, since he was able to form memories. The worst part is that—technically—she’s right. “Stepmother” is defined as a woman who is married to the parent of a child.

But after so many years, introducing myself to the teenage-looking school aide who eyes me up and down when I mumble that I’m his “dad’s girlfriend” at pickup, after I’ve wiped his nose with my bare hands, feels debasing and also inaccurate. It’s not only that I care what the teacher or parent of whoever I’m introducing myself to thinks of me—I don’t, not usually at least. It’s that this little boy is standing beside me, clutching my hand and something in my stomach twists at how off it sounds to define our relationship by way of his father, when he—this child—is so clearly my family.

The first few times I tried to introduce myself as his stepmom, he’d jump in and corrected me. “’Technically she’s my stepmom,” he’d add, mis-using the term but still getting the point across—kind of, but not really—with a hurried, worried tone as if his mom might be listening. I’d nod, distort my face into a polite smile, and exhale a laugh in an attempt to breathe. “That’s right. I’m kind of his stepmom.” I’d told him I considered myself his stepmom because I loved him so much, like a mom, but, not wanting to force him into a position against his actual mother, said he could call me whatever he wanted.

Watching the doctors on The Pitt awkwardly describe Jake as Robby’s “kind of step-son,” I perked up as if catching my reflection in the mirror for the first time. The same way I sort of mumble “I’m like his stepmom” to the school aides feeling a flash of betrayal using the word when I know his mother doesn’t allow it, reprimanding myself for caring what she thinks, then for not caring, and back and forth again, not knowing where to land. For the sake of ease and dignity, I often say it anyway.

Most of the time, I don’t mind this in-between role. The part of me that wants absolutely everything but freezes at the thought of commitment to anything, thinks it’s kind of perfect. I made a very conscious decision not to have kids of my own. The idea of bringing another human into the world because I want something to love and care for when there are so many millions of people and things that already need love and care, then having my life be all but consumed for the next eighteen years preparing three meals a day, shuttling to and from school, the nine-to-five structure I’ve spent my life extracting from, buying this and then that to keep up with growth spurts and playground trends, all decisions in relation to what is best for the child, my own (long buried, finally emerging) desires sublimated under theirs, makes me want to crawl under the covers and stay there.

But I love the spirit of children. I love them so much that I have become, at least according to some (my sister), a little too tapped into my inner child. To have this kid be an intimate part of my life—to be there for him and see each step of his growth— without the tedious day-to-day responsibilities resting on my shoulders as it does for so many women, is a sort of dream. Of course, there are trade-offs, of which not having a name is merely one. I am not, at the end of the day, a final decision maker in his life, which has caused a fair share of conflicts between my partner and I. But I can also go away to write whenever I want, I don’t have the everyday costs of childcare, and I avoid many chores of parenthood. Most days, I feel like an old-school dad. Giving all my love, but not all of my time. And—say what you will—I love it.

That’s not to say I take the role lightly. And I have yet to meet a step-ish parent who does. I’m the one who reads him stories and tucks him in at bedtime. We have our games, our shows, our jokes. When he wakes in the night, he calls my name. There are responsibilities (like drop off and pick up and packing school lunches—that flare my depression, make my body freeze at the thought of being trapped in the tedium of everyday routine and so I rarely do those things. In every other way I give him all the love I have, and I actually have the space and energy to run around and bounce on the bed pretending we’re warriors then wizards then warriors again because I’m not bone-dead tired from trying to have it all.

I wish there were more words for this increasingly common in-between role. Not because I care about my title. My step-ish kid can scream “Em” from every room till the end of time for all I care and I’ll never not come running. But because words create meaning. They give shape to reality. As the grown-up who has read him stories fifty-percent of the time since he was three, I’ve seen the way kids’ stories represent and shape how they view the family structure. There’s always a mom and dad, or, in the strangely popular orphan genre, a dead mom and a dead dad. There may be an aunt or a grandparent who steps in to help. If you’re grabbing stray books from Brooklyn stoops like us, you might even get the treat of two moms or two dads. But there is no me. And without something to call me he doesn’t know where I belong.

The opposite of the joy that comes with freedom and choice, is the terror of being unbounded and undefined. To love something so much, so fully without any legal rights or even a name feels like walking a very high-wire act. At any point it could all be taken away as if it never happened at all. I’m currently writing a novel about my specific familial situation and relationship to which my editor, after reading, tentatively commented with a tremor of worry, knowing the seed of it is based on my actual life, “Um, this feels like a…. horror story?” Me, eagerly nodding— It is! It is!

Robby’s stepson, Jake, doesn’t appear in Season 2. He’s not even mentioned. I’m haunted by this fact though no one seems to be talking about it. This haunts me even more. Season 1 ended with Jake blaming his step-ish dad for not saving his girlfriend’s life. Jake was hurt and furious at Robby. Did he stop talking to him as a result? Cut him off in a way that would be harder—if not impossible—with an actual mother or father. Is it a coincidence that Dr. Robby is on the verge of suicide throughout Season 2? And why has no one connected those two dots? Perhaps because Jake is not his real son, not even his stepson. Robby has no legal right to the boy. In fact, to Jake, he doesn’t even have a name.

For a long time, I’ve worked as two selves. During the day, I help build products for tech companies. I make spreadsheets and run meetings and more or less optimize along an axis of efficiency and profit. I’m an analytical person, and before I started writing, I studied engineering and business, so for a set period of time and in the right circumstances, I can convince myself to get excited by the straightforward challenge of the linear race we call capitalism. Mostly because it pays my bills.

When I started writing in my thirties, my brain had to adjust to a different kind of thinking. There were no clear KPIs to optimize on. No straight line towards a singular goal. Most of it was what I had previously considered “wasted” time—figuring out characters and story lines by writing endlessly, cutting almost everything I had written, then writing more, cutting more, and over and over again. For much of those early years I felt insane—surely this wasn’t how it worked, certainly I was actually wasting all my time—because it was so extraordinarily different from the end-goal orientation capitalism beats into us. But after befriending other writers and listening to writer interviews nonstop, I learned I was not insane, this was just how making art worked. The idea of “wasted” time was simply not a thing—it was all part of the process.

This balance of using two very different sides of my brain works for me. Ideally, I would spend all my time on my novels, but given I have to make a living, I don’t entirely mind switching between my quantitative day job and a more feelings-based side passion. In some ways, they’re strangely similar. Both product management and creative writing are primarily (for me) about building something from nothing, little by little, block by block. And cracking open an essay (understanding what it’s really about), or architecting a novel, is, in many ways, a form of problem solving. In this sense, my two selves have always regularly learned from one another.

But recently, the two sides of my brain have not been growing together, but moving further and further in opposite directions. While my writing brain is continuing to build the muscles I’ve been training for years, my day-job brain feels as if it’s deteriorating, and quickly. Because it’s now regularly forced to use AI.

In my tech job, I’m encouraged to use AI as much as possible. In my writing, I refuse to. And so I’m in the somewhat rare position of seeing first hand the effect AI has on my brain, while using myself as a sort of control group.

In the last six months, the tech world has shifted tremendously. Everyone is expected to use Claude; if you aren’t, it’s a red flag. Workflows and processes I’ve been using for a decade transformed overnight. A built-in assistant for everyone. Now, when I’m stuck on a new challenge at work, I don’t think so much as tell Claude about it and ask what it would do given all our existing conversations and files and meeting notes, and then I contemplate the answer and ask it some more.

There has always been a transition period between my work self and my writing self— when I turn my Slack icon from green to grey and tab over to my novel-in-progress. I need to reset my brain before it can wander creatively, sip some wine, talk to a friend, go for a jog. But beyond the brief switching costs, my analytical work has never adversely affected my creative brain in any real way. Until now.

Now, when I open a draft and hit a blocking point, my first thought is: ask Claude. Increasingly, my brain feels like honey when staring at a blank page (an already difficult task but crucial to the writing process!), or any open question that makes me pause. Lately, anytime I hit a blocking point in my narrative, I feel dumbfounded, frozen. Like the part of my brain that can work independently is atrophied or dying.

Ask Claude if this opening sentence works, or how to uniquely describe a feeling of anguish. Ask Claude what to fill in for this rule of threes to land comically, or if this paragraph should be cut. But I won’t. Of course I wont. I would never trust Claude’s answers, not only because I think it produces bad writing. But because the best solutions come from the deepest parts of ourselves, from mining our humanity, which is the opposite of whatever Claude would spit out. A huge reason why most writers write is to search and discover and surprise, if not others, then at least ourselves. That pause when staring at a blank page or contemplating the structure of a sentence is the entire point of writing, to make yourself stop long enough to actually form your own thoughts, to figure out what it is that you think. And the more I’m pushed to use AI in my day job, the harder it is for me to stop and think in my writing.

But that’s not the only reason I won’t cross the AI line with writing. One might make the case that there are innocuous ways to use it, that asking Claude for a different way to describe a “sweating glass,” say, is not so different than using the thesaurus (which I do—a lot!). But another reason I will never use AI for my writing is because I’m terrified of growing reliant on it.

I see how my brain is adapting to it in my day job, how quickly it’s become my first step, a crutch—eliminating that pause entirely, and with it my instinct to think on my own. The tech industry (to their own detriment) blindly rewards this. I’ve heard some companies literally track AI usage and reward employees who are using it the most—the singular, one dimensional thinking that never ends well. It does in fact make many, many things much easier and I feel no moral qualms about using it to build slide decks and spreadsheets when my job is on the line if I don’t.

Unfortunately, this is not Severence. I am not two separate selves. How I use my brain at work, affects how I use it elsewhere. I hate that Claude now crosses my mind when I write, that the mental muscles I use when I hit a blocking point are noticeably eroding. To use AI a little, I’m realizing, is to weaken the part of my brain I value most: the ability to build something from nothing.

Though all the writers I know, myself included, refuse to use AI for their personal writing, the conversation isn’t simple. Taking classes on literature, or anything related to the arts, was not a possibility in my college engineering program, and through my twenties I was heads down trying to be financially stable; the only books I read were of the business self-help variety. And so I often feel like I’m working with one hand tied behind my back compared to the other writers I know, and occasionally I ask Google if a certain turn of phrase is correct, or if my punctuation is okay; a form of AI, one might argue. I rationalize that I did not have the luxury so many writers had of studying writing or reading since an early age, that I am so far behind the curve, the extra help is justified.

Extend this idea: A non-native speaker, say, or someone with a great idea, a great voice, who can’t possibly afford an editor to give them feedback—a process many authors, including myself, have paid for leading up to the sale of their novel—wants to use AI for help. There’s an accessibility question at play. But it’s a complicated one. Ideally, our society would give artists the space and resources to pursue their work humanly, no matter their financial starting point. Instead, the only people who can seriously pursue the arts are (by and large) the people who can afford to. So the logical result in this exploitive system, is that people have to use the tools available to them to get by.

Art has long been disrupted by tech advances. Digital cameras, recording devices, Garage Band, you name it, making long studied artistry both quicker and more accessible to the masses, to the disappointment of an incensed few. But given the nature of LLMs, literally using other people’s words to write your own, AI feels different—not supporting a person’s writing so much as replacing it. Sadly, though, it’s not going away. I wince to think of a world where writing is not so much filling a blank page—because we’ve lost the ability—but the art of prompting AI (yes, I hate using “art” and “prompting AI” in the same sentence), and then editing what it vomits up. At some point, we’ll need to find the line.

I’m afraid of what’s coming in the publishing industry and in general. But I’m not in the novel writing business for the money (if you are, please reconsider immediately), like I squarely am for my day job. I’m in it for the thrill of figuring out a story, capturing a truth just right, neither of which AI can take from me. Ideally, this connects me to a patch of like-minded readers, which may become harder with AI slop crowding the market. But I believe most readers, the ones who are in it for the connection, searching for that spark of recognition at an unearthed truth, will see through the noise. And that writers will continue to spend years and years filling blank pages, chipping away at their stories to find that spark, and none of that time will be wasted.

As I write this, it’s been a year to the day since I published my first novel. This also marks the paperback release of the book (yay! please grab a copy!) But what I’m drawn to write about here is how this was the year I stopped working my traditional job. For fourteen months, I focused all my energy on making a sustainable living from my creative practice. But after various experiments in how to monetize my writing, I decided I didn’t actually want to monetize my writing enough to keep trying. In other words, lots of lessons were learned.

The first thing I did when I realized, in my thirties, that I loved writing and wanted to give it a real shot was quit my job at a nonprofit and get a higher paying job in tech. This may sound both counterintuitive and also very depressing but it’s what has allowed me to take career breaks every few years since, and what allowed me to take a full year off while I promoted my novel. Working a job that was not around-the-clock and paycheck-to-paycheck (which impact-driven work sadly often is) allowed me to have money for classes and workshops, which I desperately needed as someone coming into writing cold, offered more flexible hours, and allowed me to actually save money so I could eventually take extended time off to work on projects. It also fundamentally shifted how I thought about work—and myself. I no longer viewed my career as the pillar of my identity, I viewed it as a means to an end, what most artists call their “day job.”

In the decade since, I’ve taken about four career breaks in order to finish or gain momentum on a writing project. The first time I left my job to spend a few months working on my novel-in-progress, it literally changed my life. Once I experienced that kind of freedom, I couldn’t go back to the idea of never having it again. Creatively, hours on end, any time day or night, with my novel was wonderful. But also mentally, physically, meandering, jumping in a lake, long walks to audiobooks, so completely consumed by ideas I had to stop every few minutes to jot down a thought is, to me, bliss. I hadn’t actually realized life like that was an option. I had always plowed along on the professional track, assuming I’d turn a certain age and—I don’t know, automatically?—have kids and then life was nothing but a blur of chores and routine. But after those few months of freedom, I only pursued contract-based work and more or less decided I did not want kids enough to sacrifice that feeling. I wanted flexibility and space, even if it meant I’d have to give up the things most people structured their lives around.

Mostly, these career breaks have come when I needed bursts of momentum to start or complete a project. Like little power-ups at points when I felt I might otherwise explode. I’ve talked to a number of people who want to take time off to pursue writing seriously, and though I think anyone who is feeling an itch should absolutely do it, writing is a long game. The runner in me thinks of a drill we used to do in track where you’d sprint the straights and jog the curves. Career breaks, to me, have always felt like creative sprints, then you continue, not stopping but steadily jogging along, until the next one.

What changed for me during that first break was not my writing career so much as my priorities. Like a blast of clarity, I had a new north star—space and freedom and a desire to write. But I didn’t get a book deal or land my agent or any major milestones like that. I quasi-completed a draft manuscript that I would continue to revise for years, that would never be published but would inspire me, on another career break years later, to finish another manuscript that would. And I published an essay that helped me feel confident as a writer, which helped me connect with other writers. None of this was particularly profound, but all of of it was foundational to feeling like I could keep going. And that’s by far the most important thing: figuring out what you need for yourself in order to keep going.

When I published my novel last year, I felt like I’d finally earned the chance to give writing a real shot professionally, not just another sprint but a launching point. I wanted to be a “real” writer, someone who made a living from her writing. So I planned and saved for a year-long break from traditional work to give it my all. Publishing a novel felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity and I wanted to channel all the momentum I could from that experience, and see if I could quit my day job for good.

The six months leading up to my book’s publication was a PR hustle. Reaching out to bookstores, reviewers, pitching essays, planning book tour. If you don’t have a huge chunk of cash (~$30k) to spare on a highly-connected publicist, any money spent on PR is mostly just help sending outreach emails, which you can totally do on your own if you have the time. In fact, I found people were more likely to reply to my personalized emails over a PR person. And so I pitched the hell out of essays and interviews and cold-emailed reviewers and book-influencers for months.

Then came the launch and book tour (self-organized, self-funded, even with a big 5 publisher). This was ridiculously fun because I’d planned my stops around places where I had friends and where I wanted to visit anyway. I don’t know how writers who don’t have day jobs pay for book tours, I think mostly they don’t go on book tours anymore or they’re lucky enough to get events paid for, which happens occasionally but less and less often. Meeting readers and talking about my book in the cities I love most was the coolest thing. But only if you orient it around places you want to go, where you have friends who will show up to support you. Bless them forever.

And then it was over. At least the main thrust of it. When I needed proof that it all really happened, that I actually had poured my heart and soul into a novel that was on bookshelves and strangers were actually reading it, I’d load Goodreads, then proceed to have a full-on breakdown reading reviewers who got some sort of glee out of eviscerating unlikeable female characters. Apparently wanting their characters to be emotionally mature and logical (???)—the polar opposite of what I live to write. Reading these was like a form of cutting, even if it hurt, it reminded me it was all real.

Obviously, this needed to stop. So I reoriented my ambition towards this newsletter, using it as another lever for book promotion. I attempted to publish two essays a month, essays I genuinely felt proud of, which felt more fun and engaging to me than attempting to craft TikTok reels, and I did because I finally had the time. The most successful writers aren’t always the best, they’re just the writers who have been given the privilege of time and space to create, or have figured out how to create it for themselves.

I also, crucially, shifted my energy towards my next novel. I felt guilty moving on at first, like I was abandoning something, giving up too soon on promoting my first novel, even if I also felt like I was banging my head against a wall after a point. Then I heard the great Lynn Steger Strong talk about how she immediately dives into her next project in order to maintain her sanity and that felt like permission. Once I was deep into my next book, I remembered why I was doing any of this in the first place—building worlds and indulging obsessions, tediously untangling a feeling one small interaction at a time, consumed by the work, not the perception of the work. I was happy.

But I was also trying to make a regular income from writing, and any literary fiction writer will tell you that a draft manuscript is anything but an income guarantee. I’d always wanted to teach a workshop, specifically for people like me who came to writing later without a formal background, but I didn’t have the typical credentials (I have an MBA, not an MFA :)). With a published novel, though, and ten years of navigating the writing world under my belt, I felt I had enough to share. I launched my class—From Corporate to Creative Writer—as an experiment and I loved it. I did this for two months, 6 or so cohorts in total, and it covered my living expenses for those two months. But it got increasingly hard to get new people without being part of a bigger brand. And so the bulk of the work shifted from teaching to marketing.

In the meantime, I was also experimenting with monetizing the newsletter. But every time I tried to publish more regularly (weekly instead of every other week, which already felt like a lot), I felt a psychological, almost physical barrier. And then even more when I tried to add a juicy hook that would make people cross a paywall. It would just come out worse. More power to writers who can work this fast (they exist!) but my brain doesn’t work that way. When I first started writing essays I was proud if I wrote a good essay once a year. One essay a week—for free—felt not only unsustainable, but insane. I found myself feeling like a failure if I didn’t produce a coherent essay each week like a full-time opinion columnist. It was stressful and unpleasant and whenever I sat to work on my novel-in-progress, I felt consumed with guilt that I wasn’t trying to write a monetizable Substack essay.

I started writing as an antidote to the performance of self. I entered my thirties thinking I needed to be a certain way and live a certain type of life and when I discovered creative writing it felt like an escape from all those expectations, a place where I could just explore my weird little obsessions and play. Even just writing that makes me exhale. Scribbling away on my Word Doc every weekend was a safe haven. Accountable to no one. Away from all the corporate bullshit, the online dates, judging my progress against arbitrary, inherited milestones. Ten years later, trying to churn out writing for the sake of “engagement” felt like a knife to the very thing I was trying to sustain by taking this time off. It didn’t feel like “hard work,” it felt like regression, a checking of boxes, what I was trying to escape with my writing in the first place.

It’s hard to divorce money from pride when everything in our culture incentivizes us to associate the two. All the tech companies that are now integral to our lives and brains and selfhoods, reward us for optimizing external signifiers, constantly reinforcing that if our work is not directly connected to dollars earned or followers amassed then we are failing. It’s how they grow, which is sadly the only metric they care about. But it’s exhausting, and I felt my writing getting worse the more I catered to it.

My tolerance for hard work is high. I’ll bang my head against a wall for my novel from now until eternity, I’ll forgo plans and spend all weekend working on an essay. I don’t like feeling like a “quitter.” So when embedded in the framing of these apps—more, more more = success—the thought of stepping away filled me with shame. But there’s a difference between quitting and choosing to opt out of something that doesn’t work for you. What I didn’t want, at forty-three, was to, once again, lose my mind trying to prove myself via external signifiers. I’d been there and done that.

I had wanted to take this time off to try and build a life that felt more aligned, more alive, by “doing what I loved.” But trying to monetize my newsletter or churn out marketing strategies for my class was not doing the work I loved, and it also paid way less than my actual work. I have the “luxury” of having other skills besides writing (I studied something very practical because I had no financial safety net growing up). And though I would much rather write novels than work my day-job, what I realized is that I would actually rather work my day job than build content strategies, churn out posts for the sake of it, and compulsively self-promote. This is not the case for everyone, some people would rather do these things than a day job (or don’t have the option). The problem is our hyper-capitalist culture makes us feel like failures if we can’t monetize everything we do, even though it’s often just a choice.

And so after a year of experimenting with “professional” writing, I’m back to working a day job (part-time, contract based). Not because the experiments failed but because they taught me what I needed to know for now. I finished the first draft of my next novel before starting work, again using the career break as a much-needed burst of momentum. And then I was lucky enough to find a part-time job, prioritizing free time over maximizing income so I can have the space to work on the writing I enjoy, without the pressure to monetize it.

I’d love it if one day I could make a living writing novels and the occasional long-form essay (wouldn’t we all!). But today is not that day. For now it’s nice to have a break from trying to commercialize myself. To sign into a job for part of the week and let my brain run mechanically on tasks, like a tidy puzzle. Then go wild in my fiction. It feels a little like finding a rock to rest on, a steady income without the weight of self-promotion, so I can continue churning on the next big project, because if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the ride is a long one.

NOTHING SERIOUS Paperback Launch!

Come join us this Tuesday, March 3rd at P&T Knitwear for what will definitely be a hilarious and juicy conversation with Courtney Preiss and Ali Kriegsman about using real life in debut fiction! Would love love love to see you there! RSVP

I love watching Tell Me Lies, and not only because I, like the main character, was once obsessed with a man named Stephen to the point of lunacy. The show is a soap-opera-esque, over-the-top drama centering a group of incestuous college students circa 2007, perfect for us millennials who attended college in the aughts, when the jeans flared and The Strokes blasted. There’s something soothing about remembering how young people can’t help but throw themselves into one emotional fire after the next, too innocent to know how to protect themselves, too oblivious to know how to protect their friends, only just figuring out who they are and so pushing every shred of feeling to its limit. I’m also fascinated by manipulative narcissists so it’s a bit like cat nip.

But my favorite part of the show is the music. I think everyone has an era, if you will, that constitutes their “music years.” When the heart of your musical taste is thoroughly cemented because your emotional landscape is running so wild, your feelings so ravenous and precarious that every song is dense with meaning, each lyric an attempt to make sense of the chaos around you, to fill in for all that’s lacking in your blind and immature interactions, and so you cling to songs to crystalize what it all means. Your life in those years is one long soundtrack that will forever remain, for better or worse, the soundtrack of your entire life if you’re being honest.

For me this was the aughts, specifically 2005 - 2012, which happens to be the exact era from which the songs in Tell Me Lies are pulled. Even the instrumental background music seems like a riff on The xx (and maybe it is! I have no idea, but I’m immediately transported to a mattress on the floor of some San Francisco dude’s Victorian, navy Jersey sheets showing a few too many stains, waiting to see if he’ll ask me to their show at The Fox). I was already out of college in that era, but I think what matters most is that it was the wildest and most romantically immature time of my life. College for me was heads down in problem sets, work-study, overnighting in computer labs. But my twenties were fun. Single with money for the first time in my life and a gaping hole of abandonment in my heart. Back then, I wanted nothing more than to channel some kind of creative spirit but I mostly spent my days creating PowerPoint decks. So I dated emotionally avoidant musicians, or, rather, men whose walls were lined with records, but were too insecure or lazy or both to create their own music. These were the men most likely to “get” me.

So I was watching the most recent ep of Tell Me Lies last night and suddenly BRIGHT EYES is playing in the background while Wrigley and Bree consummate a long run of will-they-won’t-they tension, and specifically LUA(!!) from I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (2005), one of my favorite albums of all time, and the lyrics are slapping me in the face—so simple in the moonlight—like my ceiling just collapsed and suddenly a swarm of birds or bees or bats, something I absolutely do NOT want in my cozy 43-year-old bedroom, has invaded my space with the sole purpose of ravaging my entire emotional wellbeing. I’m now praying for the scene to end, actually holding my breath to see if I can make it through because at this point I’m really not sure. The number of times I’ve ran to this album, sometimes with tears streaming down my face, in order to process a painful heartache or a sea of mixed romantic signals is too many to count. I couldn’t possibly tell you the specifics of these heartaches, which can’t even be called breakups because they were all with quasi-situationships at best, but the terror hearing this song resurrected was truly visceral. As the song goes: The reasons all have run away, but the feelings never did.

A thing about one’s “music years”—they can not be rationalized or debated, they simply have to be indulged. Because very few of your favorite songs from these years are actually any good, they’re simply the songs that make you feel the most and the hardest. And that’s an infinitely personal thing. Which is alls to say—I promise to stop quoting Conor Oberst for the rest of the essay!

But before we completely move on, this is also how I felt watching, with awe, one of my favorite songs of all time played in Scott Hunter’s (François Arnaud’s) earbuds on Heated Rivalry. “I’ll believe in anything, and you’ll believe in anything,” Spencer Krug is suddenly shouting at me from my laptop perched gently on my pillow. Words I, too, have shouted dozens, possibly hundreds, of times while running, eyes wet, steeling myself to press play one more time.1 I felt almost betrayed watching this, like, wait, that’s my song!!! Like I was stripped naked, fully exposed, heart racing as this absolute fossil of my former self was spontaneously resurrected in a way that felt nearly dangerous, like a little gremlin waking up inside of me. A gremlin that has the capacity to run the show (ie. my soul) and in doing so destroy me slowly and steadily. A gremlin I’m pretty sure I once called passion.

I sometimes wonder whether or not I’m capable of feeling this gremlin-like passion again, and, though it’s hard to imagine, I think the answer is probably yes? You don’t spend forty years living off those fumes without some kind of permanent impact. But the bigger question is whether or not I want to feel that kind of passion again. Because when I think about it, my body freezes up—slam down the laptop of your heart!!—a clear trauma response when I imagine what comes next. Of course there is (supposedly) a kind of falling in love that does not involve the utter loss of self or make one’s heart freeze in terror. And in truth, I did mostly experience that with my current partner, who I was head over heels for but not in a way where friends and family were regularly reaching out to make sure I was okay. But I have no songs from the era of my partner and I falling in love. I have playlist sure, and gun-to-head, I could tell you a few songs that remind me of our coming together, but nothing that would elicit the physical response of my early situationships.

I’ll be forty-four in a month. I’ve been with my current boyfriend for five years— which feels insane—arguably the first stable partnership of my adult life. That little gremlin is no longer present (except apparently when I hear Wolfe Parade!). We got together when I was on the verge of forty, so my music years were long gone. I don’t feel butterflies with him, but I also don’t feel dread. I do feel joy and frustration, and white hot rage from time to time because you can take the girl out of her 20s but you can’t really take the drama out of the girl. But mostly I feel a sturdy sense of love. A freedom of having escaped the highs and lows of infatuation that requires music to stand in for feeling.

When Ben and I met—3,000 miles from home while I was chasing the aforementioned namesake of the Tell Me Lies villain—it was as if a million red flags had collided. We were both only just on the other side of respective emotional explosions. I don’t even know if I’d call them heartbreaks, as much as entire reorientations of the self, a respective waking up, as a result of someone else’s rejection. I assumed our relationship would only last a few months. So rarely did I have a soft place to land, I appreciated the warmth of his attention and care even if I thought we were in too fragile a state for it to go anywhere.

The heartbreak I had before Ben was a “music years” kind of heartbreak, in that it was misguided and never going to work. In that I intentionally chased someone who was not good for me, ignoring all the signs because at that time the distraction of running into a fire felt good. It felt like being alive. Until it felt very much like the opposite of that. It was a regression of self during an unstable time, and looking back felt like a sort of last hurrah. When it ended I felt absolutely no desire for that gremlin-like passion. You could say, at thirty-nine, I was finally open to stability.

Dating on the verge of forty, after that experience, felt very different. Mostly this was because I was finally chasing not just whatever activated my nervous system but what actually felt good. But also because my expectations were lower, in a sense. Not for the person, but for a relationship in general. I didn’t want someone to fill gaps in my identity or show me how to be. I wanted someone who could appreciate who I was.

I’ve seen many women talk recently about dating after a divorce. Women who start dating again for the first time in their 40s after being married often mention how nice it is to have a “boyfriend,” not look for a partner to complete something, be the perfect husband or the ideal father, but simply to enjoy and exist with, to forge intimacy without too much expectation. And yet this approach to mid-life dating, I’ve found, has nothing to do with whether or not you’ve been married before. It comes with age; divorce, schmi’vorce. There’s something relaxing about feeling sturdy in yourself, hard learned after too many falls, whatever those falls happen to be. Not assuming every relationship has to feel volcanic, and actually realizing that maybe it shouldn’t.

Not to say I don’t miss the thrill of that lava every now and then. Hence, I love nothing more than watching these kids run around blinded by feelings they can’t yet work through. It’s intoxicating and disorienting and thank god music is there to help us piece it all together when we need it. But most of the relationships in my life—romantic or not—where love is genuinely and mutually flowing are not associated with a song that has the power to make my heart stop without warning on a quiet Tuesday evening. These relationships don’t need music to fill the gaps, they’re loud enough in their own ways.

Happy V-Day!

Around this time last year, The New York Times referred to my debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, as a “rom-com.” And while being mentioned at all by The New York f’ing Times was earth-shattering, the descriptor was laughably off. I wrote an entire post on the matter, and my dear friend Sarah Kasbeer, who generously blurbed the book as “a slyly humorous and deeply relatable ode to female obsession,” coined the far more appropriate term: “traum-com.”

So, if all you want to do on V-day is curl in bed solo, covers pulled tight to chin, and feel solidarity with others who crave the same, might I recommend my debut novel?? More accurately called a “modern, feminist, dating world thriller” and “an unflinching and incisive look at modern dating, friendship, and obsession” it’s meant to be a fun, relatable read for anyone extremely sick and tired of dating apps, societal expectations on single, childless women, and all the ways men are let off the hook while women continuously bear he consequence of their mistakes. ❤️❤️

I really expected—and wanted!—to like Pluribus. When I heard about the series, there was no way I was not watching a major sci-fi show, which was also kind of a one-woman show, with a queer, childless, middle-aged, woman novelist at its center. And, to be clear, Rhea Seehorn is fantastic. Unfortunately the material she’s given is not so much.

While I can understand the anticipatory buzz about a new Vince Gilligan show, especially one with as wild and timely premise as Pluribus, I genuinely cannot understand the praise having watched the series in full. I feel as if I’m amidst the alien collective consciousness at the heart of the series, everyone nodding pleasantly along, enthusiastically supporting what is very obviously a disaster.

I’ll acknowledge that it’s a great premise: some mysterious alien virus-type-thing invades the human race causing everyone to share a single consciousness except for the eleven people on the planet who are somehow immune. I can absolutely picture Vince Gilligan in a big-shot meeting or maybe just texting a big-shot executive with this bonkers logline, the AI symbolism bursting at the seams of each scene, a literally explosive ending to boot. I imagine he doesn’t have to finish his sentence before said executive is wiring him a gazillion dollars to get started.

Unfortunately, the intrigue more or less stops at the premise. Because…well…nothing actually happens. Each episode chugs along relying on classically compelling Gilligan desert-heavy shots, with bits that are meant to be quirky and clever but are so heavily relied on they end up being unbearably tedious (the repeated message every time Carol calls “them,” the back and forth of the translation app). The only thing that motivates me to keep watching is the approximately 45 seconds of unearned intrigue at the tail-end of each episode. A sign of cheap writing and one that feels almost cruel after enduring nearly an hour of self-satisfied, slow-moving repetition.

It would be one thing if the characters were actually layered and nuanced and we were on a believable emotional journey (even a slow one!) that set up these “twists” that (barely) carry the season along. But every character on the show is weirdly flat. In some sense, this is a by-product of the premise. Most people in the world Gilligan has created are void of all individualism. But even the surviving characters are more like one-note caricatures, including the lead, Carol Sturka (played as best could be by Rhea Seehorn). If this is an intentional philosophical prod for us to ponder what being “human” really means, it’s not working and it is also very boring.

But I don’t think it’s intentional. Carol is meant to be human, albeit someone who—very humanly—lets her emotional avoidance and stubbornness get in her way. She leads with her anger, and I’ll say up-top that there are few things I’d rather watch than a woman getting angry. Primarily because there are so very many things for women to be angry about. But in the case of Carol, in the case of Pluribus, we have unfettered, dogmatic rage in the face of an extremely complicated, mystifying scenario. Most of the time, there’s no clear reason for her one-note rage other than to knock the viewer over the head with the fact Carol is an “Angry Woman.” Her anger is so extreme that her utter lack of curiosity becomes a sort of punchline when she meets the other survivors who all know way more about the dilemma facing them because, well, they… asked.

At times I found myself wondering: is this really what the writer thinks a middle-aged child-free queer woman is like? Of course there’s no singular personality for any identity but in so many ways her character felt off, like a cartoon.

At one point, Carol is so angry [spoiler alert from here on in!] that the collective consciousness of humanity retreats and she is left alone for 40 days. A (very boring) period of time that we’re meant to believe changes her entirely because she proceeds to hook up with her very attractive, albeit robotic, brain-dead-in-a-sense, “chaperone,” Zosia. And while I’ve never experienced alien-takeover levels of loneliness, I was single in 2020, I’ve gone months without human touch, years without sex, a decade without a relationship—and so I’m here for her hooking up with her hot chaperone! Granted, there is no chemistry whatsoever and Carol up until this point has been nothing but hostile towards Zosia, but it’s the end of the world! Except this hookup somehow transitions into a full-on love affair, culminating in an actual montage? Carol has apparently abandoned her sole personality trait up to this point—a stubborn, angry resolve to save the world—for a connection that is so dull and nonexistent it’s almost comical (the height of conversation is a literal “fun fact!”).

Presumably, the show was trying to humanize Carol, but this attempt at an arc felt forced and misplaced. Until I read that the role was originally intended for a man. I could actually believe that a stubborn, angry man would stupidly, happily plunge into a relationship after a bout of loneliness with someone he didn’t connect with because she did whatever he wanted and was also very hot. But watching that would have been blatantly boring. With a woman this kind of empty, eye-roll tedium is at least slightly masked. Because it’s typically unnatural for a woman to deprioritize intimacy and indulge in her own superficial pleasure (and also incongruous with Carol’s character who was presumably deeply connected to her ex and set on saving individualism), and so there is at least a sliver of tension. But without a steadier line connecting the dots from “Angry Woman” to cheesy-love-affair montage, the tension is cheap, built on lazily plopping a woman into an arc that makes absolutely no sense for her character. It’s manufactured and unearned, and—I will die on this hill because “prestige” TV has been guilty of it since the dawn of West World—confusion does not equal intrigue. You cannot make inconsistent, unearned moves in a story and call it interesting.

I should have known not to trust the decision makers behind the show, because from the very first episode I could not get over one simple fact. The world crumbled around Carol Sturka. Only 11 people on the planet maintained their consciousness. And she is still continuously, constantly wearing pants with buttons. Excuse me, what? How am I, a forty-three year old woman novelist, supposed to buy into the fact that when this woman leaves her house in this new dystopian hellscape, she’s putting on khaki capris and a button down shirt?

I can’t help but contrast this with the other show I’m watching, which is the exact opposite of Pluribus in almost every sense. A kind of palate cleanser to remind me that I actually do really love television. And that is the once under-watched, now highly-anticipated HBO series Industry. Compared to Pluribus, Industry has one of the most boring loglines out there: new college grads enter the cutthroat world of investment banking. I’m not surprised people didn’t race to tune into the pilot; we’ve been watching some version of this since the 80s.

I had my own reasons for avoiding Industry until recently. When it piloted in 2020 I was too emotionally fragile to confront what I knew would hit a very particular and personal nerve. For the first five years of my career, I was dead-set on climbing the corporate ladder and making as much money as possible. In Middle School, when tasked to do a report on “what we wanted to be when we grew up,” I went to the library and studied investment banking, knowing only that, growing up poor, I wanted to be rich. Senior year of college, I had full-day interviews with the likes of Morgan Stanley and ended up in corporate consulting, donning a suit each day to my client offices and falling asleep each night calculating how many years it would take to reach Partner. But I abandoned my life-long dream of being rich once I had enough money to simply feel stable, once I learned that the game of capitalism, having always seemed like the most mysterious and difficult of challenges, was actually quite straightforward, depending mostly how much of yourself you were willing to give up.

And so, Industry. A very visceral part of me sees the drive, the unfettered, youthful ambition that sits at the heart of the show, each character fueled by their own specific flavor of trauma and I feel nostalgic for that part of myself, the striving child who imagined going to great lengths to sit in a glass-windowed corner office bossing people around. And not only nostalgia, but a sense of failure—though I wouldn’t want it any other way—that, at least in some sense, I gave up. In other words, for a long time Industry felt almost too close to home for me to turn it on.

But then I did. And thank god. As soon as I finished the pilot, all the addictive tendencies I’d learned to suppress, the same tendencies that once allowed me to excel in our extremist, exploitative system flaring up as I skipped the intro and clicked from one episode to the next. I’m now re-watching the series in full in preparation for the Season Four release. I fall asleep to it each night, strangely comforted by the sociopathy embedded in the plot-lines, the way the tidy, transactional nature of the trading desk thrills, until, when applied to human relationships, it slices.

The lead, Harper Stern, played incredibly by Myha’la is a juicy, rich character, the same kind of character, in fact, that Vince Gilligan himself helped pioneer in Breaking Bad! The classic anti-hero. Someone who is “bad,” pathologically so, but who you still, somehow, can’t help but root for. Importantly, she’s not just a shadow of the typical male anti-hero that we’ve all seen enough of by now, she is very much her own version of it—uniquely unpredictable, but fully cohesive; all the wild specific parts of her fit thoughtfully together. And while Harper sits at the center, the complexity of her relationships, especially with her publishing heiress frenemy, Yasmin Kara-Hanani (played impeccably by Marisa Abela) and her I-Banking veteran boss, Eric Tao (chef’s kiss, Ken Leung), charge the show. Every single character is dense with their own layers of trauma and desire, malice and longing, flailing—fabulously, tragically—to fill their own uniquely shaped wound.

Like any piece of art I glom onto, the lore, the process of creation, plays as big of a role as the artifact itself. I’m fascinated by the creators of Industry, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, who themselves started in investment banking upon graduating from Oxford. It’s my favorite kind of writing, when the heart of the work is glaringly, viscerally personal. Both Down and Kay admit to mining the details of their own lives to achieve the depth of characters we get on screen. They both have their own history with ambition and success, as this fantastic New Yorker profile explains. But in the world of television, they were underdogs. They wrote scripts while living with their parents and had never made a show of their own. When Industry first came out, it was one of the least watched series to ever air on HBO.

When you watch Industry, you know that whoever is heading up the writer’s room has felt a version, however distorted, of the emotions you see onscreen. Not only did Kay and Down create the show, they wrote most of the episodes and played a heavy role in directing. The two men are mining their souls for this series and it shows.

One could argue that the relentless backstabbing in Industry is sometimes just as one-note as the monotony of Pluribus. But at least it’s trying—to make its characters feel alive, to make its viewers care. I loathe Harper Stern and I also somehow want her to run all banks everywhere. Am I rooting for Carol Sturka? I have no idea, because I don’t actually know her. (Speaking of, why is she a romantasy writer?? Maris Kreizman very generously tried to make sense of this and there’s certainly a lot the screenwriters could do with that, but other than a few minutes of scribbling end-of-world storylines on a whiteboard, it’s almost entirely peripheral).

Pluribus prompts a lot of fascinating philosophical questions, and I’ll keep watching to see if they lead anywhere interesting in the actual storyline. Unfortunately, so far the answer is no. The culminating realization of the series, that we may have to destroy the world as we know it in order to save it, is not exactly revelatory in the genre. I’m waiting for it to go deeper, to actually get personal.

Industry is not perfect. A handful of plot-lines don’t land, some scenes are excessive. But it’s a hell of an interesting ride. The dialogue, by and large, is great. And, most importantly, it is trying. It is not produced to entertain itself, to mock from a distance, but to cut people open and look at all their gnarly parts—head on, uncomfortably close. Pluribus is clever, it asks big questions. But it’s afraid to step into them. At best it elicits a cocked head and a half laugh. It’s standing on the sidelines of itself, patting itself on the back. Industry is brutal and unapologetically messy. It leaves you wincing in discomfort, mouth hanging agape.

A recent essay on here made me realize what I think the ultimate difference between these two shows—why one hits at my core and the other feels like a waste of time beyond reading the undeniably catchy plot summary. Increasingly, we are funding people who have already become famous in some way, who think of a TV show as a side project, or at least not the thing that will make-or-break them, because they’ve already made it into the proverbial room.

I can’t help but think this is the case of Vince Gilligan. He had a real stake in the game when he created Breaking Bad, and he birthed something visceral and unique with Walter White. I’ll leave my personal opinion aside here, but a generation of men connected with White’s journey of the overlooked everyman morphing into the all-powerful super villain. They were invested, not just in the concept but the character.

What we see with Industry, and what we need more of—what prestige television once relied on—are people whose soul rests on the creation of their art. Who are obsessively trying to capture something very personal and very real and do it just right. People who don’t care about having the coolest logline, but are simply determined to capture a certain sliver of life.

My hope, especially as we enter the AI era where any dude with deep pockets can feed a clever idea into machine and get a script vomited out, is that we channel money towards people whose souls depend on their art. Whose material is coming from their life blood, who are invested in the premise not because it’s cool but because it’s everything to them. Let’s get obsessed, let’s get personal, let’s not mock the world around us, laugh along ironically at the end of it all, but cut ourselves open and pour our fucking hearts out.

My Favorite Shows of 2025

So many shows last year were entertaining. Producers have found a real precise recipe for a profitable streaming series—sociological thrillers with “complex” female leads—and they’re churning them out en masse. To be clear, I watch them all! Think: The Beast In Me, The Girlfriend, All Her Fault, Sirens, the list goes on. They were a blast. But they were mostly shadows of the same mold. Like store-bought chocolate chip cookie dough. Yes, please! Won’t say no to a reliably yummy cookie. But it’s not homemade.

Here are my favorite shows of 2025 in no particular order, unique creations that tumbled me over:

• The Pitt (HBO)

• The Rehearsal (HBO)

• Adolescence (Netflix)

• Dying for Sex (Hulu)

This year was by far my highest growth year on Substack, and the reason is no mystery: I gave myself the space and time to work on it. For the entire year—first time in my life I’ve gone this long—I did not have a paying job. I intentionally took the year off from paying work so I could spend more time promoting my debut novel and focus on my writing. A privilege and a cost, a glorious but temporary situation.

I set out to publish every other week, and ended up publishing 32 essays this year, growing my subscriber base by nearly 4x. I’m very proud of this, and yet it has to include the caveat that I had the time to spend on it. It’s frustrating to see artists talk about their output without acknowledging the circumstances that enabled them. How many more visibly talented writers—artists of all kinds—would there be if we all had the luxury to spend our time creating?

I’m now back to work (part-time as I continue working on my next book) and while I want to keep spending multiple days on a single essay, I have less time to do it. I could wake up early and squeeze it in before my day-job like many do, replace my wind-down television time with my obsessive editing, or skip catching up with friends to stay in and work more, but I don’t really want to. I’ve done that for years. I’m forty-three and I’m tired lol. More to the point, I’d rather spend my writing time deeply lost in a topic (whether it be a long-form essay or my novel-in-progress) not rushing to meet an arbitrary self-imposed deadline in an attempt to satisfy the algorithm. What I don’t want is to make myself miserable and lose sleep (god I love sleep) over something that is meant to be an enjoyable, creative outlet because I feel pressured to hit numbers that don’t really mean anything. I love writing lengthy essays, and participating in the cultural conversation around topics I care about, but publishing regularly on Substack has come to feel like another part-time job (and one that doesn’t pay). I would much rather it be the place I go when I have an idea I just have to articulate, a thought I must spend days working out. Not because I feel I have to, but because I want to.

Everything’s a trade-off. This new non-writing job takes time and energy away from writing, as jobs always do. The force it takes to transition from constant, cross-functional Slack messages and spreadsheets to shutting out the world and going heads down on a long-form essay is not trivial. I miss the expanse of time I had this past year to write. But it’s also an intentional choice. Working a non-writing job frees me up financially, which then frees me up creatively. To truly make a living off my writing, I would have to churn out content in a way that doesn’t work for me personally. To not have to worry about “performance” feels like an exhale, if only temporarily.

This past year, I put a lot of effort into my essays on Substack with the goal of possibly monetizing it. I even published my first paid post (my only one lol, I did not like charging). But I learned that writing, the thing I’ve grown to love, can feel just as burdensome as any “day job” when too many external (capitalist) pressures are imposed on it. I do not write quickly, I write incredibly slowly. Until my thirties, I identified as an engineer, not a reader (and certainly not a writer). It takes significant time for me to parse out thoughts, refresh the thesaurus, to make a sentence, then a paragraph, then a whole piece flow. And so I do not want to write for the algorithm, and I actually can’t write well fast enough to satisfy it (props to those who can)! I want to write because there is something I have to untangle, something—however arbitrary—that I can’t stop thinking about. Because I feel the urge to, which actually happens quite often, and then (without the pressure) it’s very clearly my favorite thing to do.

For now, I’ve turned off paying subscriptions, which is what I always do when I have another source of income and don’t want to feel the pressure to publish at a certain pace. Bless all my paying subscribers who I am infinitely, genuinely grateful for, but what I make on this platform monthly is not enough to go out to a NYC dinner, and so it’s not worth the stress of feeling as if I always have homework. You’ll still remain a paying subscriber but won’t be charged until I turn payments back on, which I will eventually. At some point, I’ll tire of day-job life and shift back to trying to monetize this space, but for the moment I’m allowing myself to avoid that pressure and appreciate the creative freedom that steady, non-writing income affords. When I have more time to spend on each piece and know that I can reliably produce consistent, valuable writing without feeling overwhelmed, I’ll turn paid subscriptions back on.

I’m incredibly proud of what I wrote this year when I gifted myself the time to do it. I’ll absolutely continue to publish when I have something to say (I’ve spent the holiday break working on a new essay I’m excited to send in a few days!!) because I want to, not because I have to.

My Top 10 Posts of the Year

In order, starting with the most popular…

(Fun fact: this essay on TV was quoted multiple times in The Atlantic!!)

Funny enough, my favorite essay this year, an essay I spent years working on, didn’t make the top ten. “When My Coworkers Drew Dicks, I Laughed” was possibly the essay that meant the most to me, personally.

Wishing everyone the space to explore and pursue your creative obsessions in 2026, to follow your curiosity—algorithm be damned! 🥂

Typically, I take little notice of end-of-year lists. I prefer my recommendations real-time—just read a book you can’t shut up about? I want to know, time of year be damned. But this year, these lists are jumping out at me like a slap in the face. Because this year I published my debut novel (full post on that rollercoaster process here), and I can’t help but wonder if I’ll see it. So as a distraction, I put my own little favorite novels of 2025 list together. “Little” because I read about 35 books a year, which is absolutely nothing compared to the number of books published. And “novels” because spending most of the year writing my second novel, I almost exclusively read fiction. I don’t only read new books, I actually prefer not to read new books, so the list is half new and half old. In no particular order…

My favorite novels that came out in 2025:

1. HEART THE LOVER by Lily King

   This is on all they year-end lists and for good reason. I cried my eyes out in the best way. A world-changing love, never fully realized, then revisited later in life, on the verge of death. Honestly, no one knows how to write love like Lily King.

2. FUNDAMENTALLY by Nussaibah Younis

   I love a novel that pulls from the writer’s own life. Before Younis was a novelist she was an academic and humanitarian worker focusing on Iraq, just like her close first-person narrator who runs a rehabilitation program for ISIS brides. She brings a hilarious, smart, and charmingly bold voice to a truly unique and touching story that interrogates the nature of beliefs, our often self-interested urge to “save” others, and the universal desire to belong.

3. SEDUCTION THEORY by Emily Adrian

   I have no relationship to academia other than the years I spent heads down in engineering, which I have mostly blocked out, so I’m often too quick to dismiss sweater weather campus stories from writers who spent years pouring over Proust. But this one pulled me in utterly. Gorgeous writing with sharp insights on relationships, childlessness, infidelity (blatant and blurry), admiration and envy, all while interrogating the fine line between life and art. Yes, please.

4. HAPPINESS & LOVE by Zoe Dubno

   I was weary of this single paragraph stream-of-consciousness book before I started reading it. But from the moment I began, I could not put it down. The long, run-on sentences are pure gold and though nearly nothing happens except the narrator’s complete evisceration of the elite art world snobs in the room around her, snobs she once wanted nothing more than to be accepted by, it somehow manages to be a truly hilarious page-turner.

My favorite novels that did not come out this year, but I read them this year and loved them:

1. LUSTER by Raven Leilani

   I’m horrified that it took me this long to read this brilliant book. I think I was weary of the vast age difference in the central romance—the narrator is in her twenties, her love interest married in his forties—but that only shows you how much our own biases can get in our way. As most people know by now, it’s gorgeously written and Leilani’s meditations on race, art, and class are masterful.

2. SCAFFOLDING by Lauren Elkin

   I honestly forget the details of this book but remember it reminding of me of All Fours and being a beautiful depiction of a particular unhappy and uncertain point in a woman’s life as she approaches the notion of commitment—to a person, a home, a life—that often comes when we inch closer to middle age, while grappling with loss, past relationships, and our own lingering obsessions.

3. THE FIFTH CHILD by Doris Lessing

   This book is brutal and Doris Lessing is a genius. The premise alone had my mouth on the floor: a young couple wants to build the perfect suburban family, they have more and more children, filling their too-big home, until their fifth child is born as a sort of demon and ruins the family entirely. It’s wildly human but also horrific and devastating, as humanity so often is.

4. INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

   I hate to name such an obvious choice but I really did love this book and I really didn’t expect to. I like Sally Rooney and lost my shit over Normal People (a sort of porn for the emotionally avoidant) but I fell off the boat with Beautiful World, and given that Intermezzo centered around chess and two men, I wasn’t racing to grab a copy. But I did, eventually, a year after it came out. And I loved it. I should have known that relationships would be the life blood of the book after all, and I’m continuously impressed by how well Rooney writes men.

Nonfiction Shoutouts!

I didn’t read nearly enough nonfiction this year to put any semblance of a list together but these incredible writer friends wrote these fantastic books that I must shout out:

Trying by

The Mother Code by

Dyke Delusions by Samantha Mann ()

I’m aiming to publish a much longer post in the next few days about television (hinted at here), including my favorite shows of the year.

Meantime, I’d love to hear some of your favorite books! I’m always looking for recs.

Hope everyone had a very happy holiday and best wishes in 2026! ❤️

I’ve long maintained that the period after you sign a book deal but before the book comes out is the most blissful period in the lifecycle of an author. The time in which you sit gloriously in the window of possibility. This was the mode in which I entered 2025, mere weeks away from the release of my debut novel. Obviously, the backdrop of the world was disaster, and on a global-political level I was full of dread. But on a personal level, back in January, I was brimming with hope.

My book came out on Feb 17th. It was freezing and I was ecstatic. I had been laid off from my full-time tech job in August of the previous year—six months before my launch date—and decided not to look for a new job until after my book tour (subsisting on savings and severance) so I could focus entirely on the launch and navigate the jungle that is book promotion. I had no idea what promoting a book entailed, so in those six months I simply did anything I could think of. Mostly this meant pitching essays, publishing regularly on my Substack, forcing myself to post to IG, sending copies of my book to anyone who might remotely be into it, and planning a book tour.

The thing about working a traditional job, which I have done for most of my adult life, is that you have other people holding you accountable, making sure you’re spending time on the right things, who presumably tell you when you’re doing well and help you when you’re not. Even when I ran my own company, investors and coworkers played this role. Working entirely alone, though, especially on something as nebulous as “book promotion'“ when you know very little about “book promotion,” can feel crazy-making, as if nothing is ever enough and and you’re racing on a hamster-wheel with no end in sight.

I tried hard. I made a giant spreadsheet. I sent dozens of outreach emails. I got fantastic blurbs from angel writers. I pitched my heart out to various essay publications, newsletters, and podcasts. I took too many selfies and force-shared them with the public. Some things randomly hit and for that I’m deeply grateful. I was lucky enough to do a handful of interviews, largely a result of my existing network (the power of a genuine author network is tremendous and takes years to build). I also got a few essays placed, like this very personal one in LitHub that I’m tremendously proud of but which I’m honestly not sure if anyone ever read. Then there were others—the essays I spent the longest on, actually—that never found a home, some of which I eventually published here on Substack.

During this period leading up to the book launch, I spun. The manifestation of which mostly took the form of endlessly buying, then returning, various tops from Aritzia in an attempt to curate outfits for my book tour. Never mind that up until this point it would have been physically and emotionally impossible for me to care any less about the notion of “outfits.” Still, the chaos of that overcrowded beige rainbow of a store managed to put me at ease—there was always a new top to try on, and it was always only slightly (nearly imperceptibly!) different from the top before it. I also obsessed to the point of lunacy over where I should host my afterparty. In other words, I found very silly things to worry about as a way to escape the crushing worry of whether or not the book I’d spent the past decade working towards would sell.

Finally, the day came. I walked to my local bookstore that morning with my sister, giddy with months if not years of anticipation for this moment. Eager to see my baby resting on its hard earned spot amongst other prominent titles. But my book was not displayed prominently. Actually it was not on the shelves at all in my local bookstore. And this violent crash between hope and truth on the morning of my launch was the defining thread through this year of publishing my debut novel.

As normal, everyday book consumers, we are used to mostly seeing the publication journeys of the big titles, which are very much not the journey of 95% of books hitting the market. I loosely believed that because my publisher—William Morrow, which is an imprint of HarperCollins—published major titles, that my book would be wherever those other big titles were. I am infinitely grateful for my publisher and all the things they did for me (a lot!), but the journey of most books (even those published by the “Big 5”) is not at all the same as the journey of the rare big ticket, big advance titles.

And yet! Someone did, by the grace of god, pre-order my book from my local bookstore where I stood frozen with shame and embarrassment and the freezing chill of February that morning, so there was actually a copy of it on a little shelf in the corner. And that was enough! Suddenly my book was there, out in the world on its own, in my hands in public, in the same store I’d lived above when I first moved to New York and decided, at 32, that I wanted to give writing a shot. And it was with this single copy that someone had fatefully pre-ordered that I took the above picture, in which I am genuinely beaming, and tossed it off with a little caption about seeing my book on the shelf of my local bookstore that wasn’t entirely true but wasn’t entirely untrue, either, but it was launch day so I stopped caring what I wrote, hit post without a thought, and after six months of essentially banging my head against a wall, it went strangely viral swinging me between what would become a year-long pendulum of crushing disappointment and divine elation. And the next time I went back to that same bookstore (Community Bookstore on 7th Ave, love you!), I saw Nothing Serious sitting prominently, as I’d dreamed, on the shelf with its amazing new release buddies.

Ultimately, I chose the wrong bar for the afterparty (a smaller space would have been more intimate and less expensive). But, as I should have known all along, it didn’t matter at all. The day was a dream. “No notes,” as the kids say. I cried many times during my event. I cried upon entering the venue and seeing multi-decade friends who had flown in that morning to be there. I cried—sobbed, really—when my oldest writing friends pulled me into the back room and showed me the inconceivably gorgeous cake they had made of my book cover. I cried when the event started and , my first writing teacher, now one of my dearest friends, started her intro and I realized, no longer distracted by my Artizia tops and petite afterparty dilemmas, that a shit of ton of people were sitting in front of me and I had a book on the shelves of this very hip Lower East Side bookstore where I sat, that my dream of nearly a decade had finally come true and now a room full of people were waiting to hear me talk about it. And so we did! We talked. We laughed. We cried. And then, of course, we partied.

I’ve never felt a sincere desire to get married, the idea of being a wife gives me the chills, but I’ve always been envious of an excuse to get everyone from your life together under the auspices of celebration. And that was how my book launch felt. Being in community with the people I love, celebrating something I’d long worked towards. Then I went on tour, hitting eight cities, which I paid for entirely on my own (a fact I was deeply ashamed of, putting “book tour” in quotes because it didn’t feel legitimate, until I realized almost all authors pay for their own tours). For me it was worth it; I only stopped at places where I had friends and family, places I wanted to visit anyway, so it was more of a friendship tour, an excuse to see all the different people in my life, and meet new ones who connected with this part of me that was suddenly on display, literally, if I was lucky.

And then came the crash. From approximately May - July I hibernated to an extreme degree, a kind of extended morning after. After months of prepping outfits and attempting to capture selfies, I didn’t want to worry about how I looked or what I posted or really anything at all. I wanted to be alone. In bed. I did not want to answer the question “How is it going?” or confront anyone in any real way because I didn’t know how to answer. Once I’d lifted my head up from the gloriously distracting events that I had self-organized, it was clear that nothing much had actually changed in my world at all. I was back to my same normal unemployed life, but now without this ginormous event hovering in the distance to prepare for.

Before launch I had grand visions of a Nothing Serious mini-series. In my mind it would star Julia Garner and Patrick Schwarzenegger and preparing for it would obviously take up my entire summer. If you can believe it — that didn’t happen lol. It was of course absurd to think it would. But I did get a great film agent. And I did have a ninety-minute meeting with a few Warner Brothers producers who praised the book at length. It wasn’t THE thing. But it was something and it was pretty cool. Which was essentially my whole year—up and down, up and down. I never did see my book in an airport. But I did get texts from friends in all different parts of the country who spotted it in their local bookstore, or on display at their library. 2025 has been an exercise in riding the highs and lows of anticipation, pride, and disappointment and slowly learning how to not let any of it knock me around too much.

My therapist likes to remind me that my mental health is best when I’m in the throes of a writing project. And so as quickly as I could manage, I threw myself back into one. I’d started a novel back in 2020, but—like most people—was too depressed and emotionally confused at the time to push it forward. Over the five years since, the arc of what I wanted to explore crystalized and after I left my full-time job last August, I started exchanging pages with my writing life partner, , who somehow—bless her soul forever—took my slop seriously and told me to keep going. By the end of this summer I had a full draft.

Escaping to the woods to work on a writing project has become a sort of essential ritual for me — the joy I feel being alone with a project has informed how I shape my life: no kids, a work-life that allows for extended breaks, a relationship that does the same. This fall I took multiple trips to my favorite places north of the city to work on my new novel. And in going back to work on a new project I realized something had actually changed. I had published an f’ing book, and so there was something a little different, a little more thrilling, a little less daunting about attempting to do it again. When I finally had a draft that could loosely be called done, I had an agent to send it to for feedback, which not for one second do I take for granted after spending nearly a decade perfecting drafts in the hopes that an agent might glance my way. After a few rounds of feedback, I finished the book at my first artist residency, five days that felt like magic. And now it’s in my editor’s hands and I’m checking my email every four minutes, thrown once again into a pit of despondency. Such is the year. Such is the cycle.

In my much neglected journal, I have a page where I write each year and it’s general theme — the personal significance or thrust of what happened in a few words. This is the year I published my novel. But it’s also the year I felt legitimized as a writer—a much needed refill of confidence. Coming to writing in my 30s after studying engineering and business, knowing nothing about the publishing world let alone how to write a novel or really write anything at all, I’ve mostly only ever felt ridiculous. Initially, I approached the endeavor of ~writing a novel~ with the brazen confidence of my male tech coworkers, but after so many years of trying and failing to get an agent, I’d started to really think I was delusional. Two months before I got my agent, I had gone back to a full-time job in tech after working for myself (to make space for writing), thinking it was time to give up the dream and get back to real life like everyone else. Six months after I started that job, I sold my novel.

At some point this year I realized the best part of this whole process isn’t actually the months before launch, which were mostly characterized by a manic, almost electric anxiety. It’s those first few weeks when your book comes out and you hear from new readers, people who discover you in odd places, or old friends who you assumed forgot you existed until you get a selfie of them and your novel with a genuine message of love. It’s being bed-bound with depression cause you’re not on any of the end-of-year lists, then receiving a note from a stranger about how uncannily you captured their experience. It’s proving to yourself you can do it. And then hopefully having the courage and stamina to do it again and again.

A Playlist!

In the spirit of the post, I’m sharing the playlist I curated for the Nothing Serious afterparty (aka my “wedding” playlist, and yet another black hole in which I channeled my anxiety). I’m pretty sure the inadvertent theme here is “elder millennial.”

Thank you so, so, so much to everyone who has reached out about the book and / or this newsletter. Your notes genuinely mean everything and have made my year. If you have any questions at all about the writing / publishing process please don’t hesitate to ask! My hope is to make this black-box of a world as transparent as possible. <3

It’s rare to experience a moment where you see yourself from outside yourself, and can acknowledge progress on something that is normally indefinite and immeasurable. So much of writing is pushing ahead aimlessly, flushing out ideas that go nowhere but lead, however loosely, to the next, getting words on the page, without glory or validation and certainly, most of the time, without pay. There are few concrete measures of success—whatever that means—in the typical life of an aspiring writer. But last week, pulling up to my first artist residency (at the ), surrounded by gorgeous mountain views, I felt a pang of real pride, able to see the last decade of head-against-the-wall drafting as a sign of clear and steady progress.

Eight years ago, I pulled into the same dirt lot of the same inn, stunned by the same gorgeous mountain views. Back then, I was there for a weekend writing workshop with my friend and teacher, Chloe Caldwell, and a small group of writers (many of whom I now love to death). I remember opening the door to my room—a simple white bed, an enormous window facing the mountain, a bare wooden table to write, and a kitchenette in the corner—and feeling as if that was all I needed or ever would need in life forever and ever amen.

The group of us sat around a communal table during the day workshopping one another’s essays, doing writing prompts, and reading famous works aloud to understand the difference between a braided essay or a lyrical essay or any number of essay styles I now forget entirely. But what I do remember, what always stuck with me, was the feeling of leaving. Specifically the overwhelming dread at the thought of going back to “real life.” At the time, I was working full-time as a product manager at a tech company, a job I had worked hard to get. But all I wanted to do—and I won’t count myself as special, all most writers want to do—was live in that weekend forever, thinking and talking about writing, being in community with other writers, and having empty space in a setting so stunningly natural that you can’t help but think that nothing else matters. That weekend felt like a little magical alcove of life, and then it was gone.

When I pulled into the Spruceton Inn again last week, the first thing I saw (after the same stunning mountain views) was a chalkboard sign that read “Welcome Artist Residents!” I have never been accepted into an artist residency. And I have a fractured relationship with the word “artist.” I grew up with the notion that “artists” were a different species—people who couldn’t help but ooze emotion and artistic talent and were unable to do anything other than constantly create their art. But I could do other things. I was very good at math and science and actually enjoyed both subjects which was definitely not artistic. This combined with growing up very poor and wanting to not be very poor made me sprint into engineering without ever considering a life in the “arts.” And so for many years (until recently), if someone asked if I was an “artist” I would laugh uncomfortably and change the subject. But then there was a key waiting, with a tag that said “Emily,” next to the sign that said “Welcome Artist Residents!”

When I unlocked the door to my room, it felt viscerally familiar. The simple, rustic decor of the rooms had not changed. I was back in that little alcove of life, where I could live and breath writing, where nothing else mattered. But this time, I wasn’t squeezing it into a two-day class, I wasn’t beholden to any schedule, actually, and I was not toying with an essay, wondering if I would maybe one day get published. I was there for many days to work on my second novel, with my literary agent who had just given me feedback, with the plan to send it to my editor at HarperCollins who had published my first novel.

Between that first visit eight years ago and now, I had somehow managed to keep going. I never forgot that feeling, the vast crater between my joy that weekend the pure dread I felt at the thought of my “real life.” And I let it (and the community from that weekend) guide me, push me to prioritize writing, eventually leave my job, and take little continuous steps to bring my “real life” closer to that magical alcove.

After I left that full-time tech job, I began crafting my own writing retreats (not having the laurels to be accepted into formal ones), renting the cheapest place I could find in the woods on the internet, and going away for a week or so at a time. These chunks of self-imposed solitude allowed me to shut out life in a way that felt impossible when I was in Brooklyn surrounded by the typical, nagging responsibilities of the everyday. Not everyone needs this kind of space—or has the luxury to create it!—but when I’m working on a novel, I’ve come to rely on it.

The night before I arrived at the residency, I had received feedback from my agent on the latest draft of my manuscript. To have an agent send you thoughtful feedback is the most helpful thing in the world, and as someone who did not have that for many, many years, I do not take it for granted. (Note to writers without an agent: if you have the funds, it’s also tremendously helpful to hire a developmental editor for this if you feel you’ve hit a wall. If you don’t have the funds, offer to swap work with another writer!).

There were a number of things to fix, but my primary goal this round was to cut 5k words from an 85k novel. I tend to lean heavily on inner monologue (I’m an essayist!) and my agent gently (rightfully!) suggested that some of those pontifications went a bit long. It’s hard to know what parts of the prose you very intentionally took the time to write need to be deleted entirely, but I’d had a few weeks away from the book, so was ready to give it a shot.

When I’m at this stage, I like to print out a copy of the manuscript so it feels like I just grabbed a book off the shelves and want to be engaged by the story, not that I’m a writer editing a manuscript. (Tip: public libraries usually have cheap printing services) It shifts the mindset so instead of getting caught up in fixing a sentence you can easily spot when you get bored or excited or confused by a section. It helps to read it in one continuous swoop in order to feel the shape and flow and spot the repetition quickly.

In the past year or so I have become a bit of a Patricia Highsmith completist and I had gotten this craft book of hers from the library, occasionally flipping through it for inspiration. Having never formally studied writing, I often assume I’m doing it all wrong, that “real” writers (I no longer believe in that term, but it repeats itself regularly in my shadow psyche) surely do it differently—correctly. But it struck me, in her section on “second drafts,” that she recommended exactly what I was doing—a big quick read to assess the work at large, writing short notes along the way without getting stuck in the details.

After I finished the big read, cutting ruthlessly—there’s something viscerally satisfying about striking out unnecessary text with a physical pen (or crayon as Highsmith cheekily recommends above)—I went back and addressed my notes, reworking passages that felt thin or confusing or lame. Then I did another read for more detailed line edits, to make the writing at the sentence-level better. I read the book three times in that week. It all takes so much time. Which, as I’ve written about, is the most important thing.

The artist residency (versus my own self-imposed retreats) adds the glorious layer of community. I made the terrible mistake of locking myself in my room the first night, heads down on my edits, not realizing someone had left a note in the common room and everyone had gone to dinner together. But the thing about the people at something like this is that they get it. If someone is locking themselves in their room, that means they’re flowing and everyone is happy for them. It’s a glorious combination, the space to be in the zone as long as you need to and then when you lift your head, you’re surrounded by an intimate group of other artists—yes, I no longer laugh uncomfortably at the word!—who immediately understand what you’re in the midst of, and are there to talk about it for hours, or just sit together around the fire and look up at the enormous moon.

Recommendations

One thing I recommend: This essay on cosmentic surgery. It’s maybe getting some pushback because it takes a firm stance but I think the response has mostly been positive as so many women relate. The ways in which the beauty industry imprisons women and wastes their time, energy, and money is a tale as old as time, but the increasing prevalence of surgery is taking it to new, alarming heights.

One thing I do NOT recommend (though I of course I’m still watching it): The new season of Nobody Wants This. It feels like a carbon copy of the last season and also somehow feels like every episode is also a repeat of the episode before it? Thank god for the sister whose facial expressions alone make me laugh out loud and also Jackie Tohn who makes every scene she’s in better.

Will end with a huge thank you to the Spruceton Inn for the time and space to write, and with this excerpt from the same Highsmith craft book mentioned above:

Venture funding has arguably ruined the world—is something I find myself thinking a lot these days. The venture funding model breeds a particularly all-or-nothing kind of mentality—go big or go home, winner takes all. It’s a bit like a giant gambling scheme in that a VC fund will put a ton of money into a handful of companies in the hopes that one will achieve “unicorn” status (a billion dollar valuation) and make it all worth it. The assumption being that the rest will fail.

In venture-backed tech, you essentially either have to be huge, or you are nothing. There is little room for the in-between. And to be huge, to get that exponential return, you need a growth-at-all costs mindset. Success is measured in relation to how much you grow week over week, year over year, stasis is death. And so even if you start a company to solve a single problem (how most companies start) and end up doing exactly that and very well, if you don’t continue inventing new problems and solving them just as well and for even more people, you will fail.

Which is why you see tech companies attempting to squeeze blood out of a stone, making up new problems to offer the illusion of solving them, creating demand where demand had not previously existed. Demand by way of addiction? Even better. Companies that become a shell of their former selves, growing for the sake of growth, the original aim completely out of sight.

This is par for the Silicon Valley course. But what’s disturbing me lately is that this all-or-nothing, growth-at-all-costs mentality that governs nearly every digital product we engage with including the venture-backed app in which I write this essay, is seeping into how we live our lives to a deeply uncomfortable degree. Increasingly, it seems as if we are all our own little VC-backed businesses and have to keep getting bigger and bigger or we feel as if we’re nothing at all.

Except we don’t actually have VC hounds or Wall Street analysts breathing down our necks, demanding the latest year-over-year growth rates, we just have our own subjective expectations of ourselves, distorted mightily by the culture around us. More and more I’ve been looking around at the incessant hustle and wondering — to what end? When is enough simply enough?

When I see Substackers with bright orange checkmarks, for example, who very obviously have other substantial sources of income, push for more referrals, hide their posts behind paywalls, and aggressively promote subscription sales, I feel strange. Finances are relative and tricky to talk about, but I find myself wondering, do these people really need more money? Is it power they’re after, or to be at the top of the dumb leader board or… what? It all just seems very tiring and as regular human people, not little pre-IPO companies who are trying to increase our valuation on a singular monetary axis, I wonder what the end goal is for these already very successful writers.

I was wondering this same thing a few weeks ago when the news of Jia Tolentino’s spon-con deal wrecked a certain corner of the internet. I know very little about Jia other than the fact that I love her writing and that she has the literary career any essayist I know would give a limb for. Clearly, though, she wants more, and that’s completely in her right. It’s not that my mind jumps to criticizing her so much as it just kind of haywires out, and I simply wonder—why?

There are a million possible reasons. She has a ginormous dog and two children in the most expensive city in the U.S., possibly a vacation home upstate by the looks of her Instagram, not to mention a stunning wardrobe and great taste. There could also be stuff going on in her personal life to which I know nothing of. Point is, the woman has expenses and she wants more money, just like most people in late-stage capitalism. Yes, she probably shouldn’t have been so bold as to consider herself above spon-con for years but we’ve all changed our minds at some point. It’s just a bit depressing to see someone who valued a certain level of freedom from capitalist influence, who arguably (unlike most of us) has the flexibility to more or less avoid it’s suffocating grip, now caving towards it.

We’re all continuously balancing the line of what we’re willing to give up for money in order to live—time, values, a continuous shift in priorities. But more and more the line is moving. And when every product we interact with is built on the VC-style foundation of more-more-more, it’s not surprising that we start to operate in kind.

Meta is of course the prime example of growth-at-all-costs. Among many other indefensible moves, Meta has made it such that it is nearly impossible to share anything that is not within the Meta kingdom on its platforms, pushing users to develop their own little fiefs of content rather than share actual articles and real information. Has there ever in the history of technology been a clunkier experience than Link In Bio? Worldwide media companies now posting their articles in the comments section on FB so as not to get deprioritized by the algo. Breaking news in the form of a slideshow. It’s truly bonkers. This intentionally walled design of the product has transformed social media from a place to connect with and celebrate other people’s work to a place where we’re all mini startups curating our own content and identities in order to promote, grow, and monetize them.

Substack is also (of course) designed around profit and growth. Their “leaderboards” are calculated not on how much people engage with or read a person’s writing but how many new paying subscribers someone acquires in any given period (if you don’t charge for posts, you don’t make the board). In other words, they’re not about whose content is most engaging—elevating good writing—but who is making Substack the most money. And yet, because of how these boards are displayed, we take it personally and map our perception of success onto it.

The examples go on, but there are holdouts. Tech companies (like Kickstarter and their 4-day work week) who have no desire to IPO, who do something well and are happy to keep doing that thing well without needing to take over the world Pinky and the Brain style. And people everywhere quietly rejecting the push for more if you look (and you do have to look because these platforms certainly aren’t elevating them).

This past weekend, I was listening to an interview with Zadie Smith, who explained that she doesn’t engage with social media, her brain doesn’t work that way, it takes her longer to think.

“Must be nice!” I immediately thought, then called my sister to complain. “None of our brains work this way,” I griped, “but we’re not f’ing Zadie Smith. We have to engage with social media to make a living as writers.”

My sister, wise as ever, reminded me that Smith could probably be making a lot more—on Substack, for example (or Patreon? lol), or with any number of spon-con deals—but she’s chosen to prioritize slowness and space over the ever increasing chase for monetary gains. Of course, she has the luxury of that choice. But there’s still a feeling of relief in seeing someone tap out, the reminder that we don’t always have to be reaching for more.

Every time I open ’s newsletter, I laugh out loud for about four minutes, then immediately go to “like” it. Until I remember she doesn’t have “likes” enabled on her posts. They’re all free, just out there to be read, not measured and optimized. Again, Irby has other income sources besides Substack, which offers an enviable freedom. Still, she chooses not to optimize and monetize every bit of her self and I exhale each time, remembering we don’t all have to plug into the algorithm.

Something I find myself asking, especially as I get older, is how much is enough? For the entirety of my twenties, I believed that more money and power defined not only my success as a person but operated as a kind of feminist proof point—as if chasing money in a patriarchal capitalist system was inherently feminist. This was deep in the era of “girl-boss” feminism and I was ignorantly eager to buy in. Obviously, money does buy power and freedom to a degree. But the older I get, the more I find myself (and the women around me) asking when does reaching become self-defeating? At what point would I rather have my time (or agency or integrity)? When does leaving the race make more of an impact that winning it? Reminding each other that there are other axes of growth besides the dollars and followers and engagement metrics that all the platforms we now live on ruthlessly push us to track, tout, and optimize.

The answer to how much is enough differs for everyone and is ever-changing. We all have our own lines and preferences. I haven’t totally figured out my own, except loosely knowing that “enough” for me means the ability to keep writing books while maintaining my mental health (no small feat). But more and more I’m at least pausing to ask the question. Because without that pause, a bigger pull will almost certainly dominate. We’ll fall into the same flow as all the products around us—growth at all costs—until we’re a shell of ourselves, growing for the sake of growth, the original aim completely out of sight.

Related Post

Recs — Revenge Art!!

I f’ing love women using their art to be honest about men’s shitty behavior (ie. my entire novel!). So obviously I’m deep in Lily Allen’s latest album (who I had not previously listened to, oops!) and absolutely loving it.

My fav specimen in the category of revenge art is Fetch The Bolt Cutters, which I had on repeat as I walked around Brooklyn alone, depressed AF, in April 2020, peak pandemic. Fiona saving me once again.

Also, I’m not a Taylor person (no shade, just missed that boat) but I do LOVE how far she took her revenge on Jake G in the creation of her All Too Well video.

It’s getting chilly in New York! If you’re looking for a cozy read to pull you in, might I recommend my debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS? It was included in The New York Times’ most anticipated list and LitHub called it “brutal, complex, and necessary.”

Save The Date: Nov 18th

I’ll be in conversation with and of Open Book Club about using real life to inform your fiction at Liz’s Book Bar in Brooklyn. It’s one of my favorite local bookstores and I would love to see you there!! RSVP here.

I am wrapping up a ten-day period of total isolation. This is not for everyone but it is most definitely for me. The only person I’ve talked to face-to-face in the last ten days is the employee who rang me up at the local grocery store when I arrived. I am living exclusively in my head, my favorite place to be. And I am working on my next novel.

In another post I’ll go into the layers and phases of what writing a novel looks like (at least for me), and the dogged nearly pathological faith required to write full-length books without any payment or promise of publication. But for now I want to talk about time. Specifically, what it costs to make it. For most of us, having time to write is not something that just happens (sadly). Over the past decade, I’ve made big, conscious choices to carve out the space to write, choices that comes at a cost (often very literally) and are, of course, a privilege to even have the option to choose.

When I first started writing, I carved out time on the weekends. Back then, I’d hole up in a coffee shop and write little scenes for an hour or two—to what end? who knew!—moments that had stuck with me and felt necessary to detail. This patchwork of scribbles would one day become the foundation of my first unpublished novel, which would one day become the foundation of my first published novel. The whole process—from playful scenes to a novel with a Big 5 publisher—took about a decade.

Carving out these slivers on the weekends didn’t cost anything financially, but it did chip away at my pride. While my friends were going on hikes, picnicking in the park, getting married and having kids—what I viewed as legitimate, normal 30-something ways to spend one’s time—I was scribbling in a notebook like a thirteen-year-old with a crush. I had no background or experience in writing, so to say I was working on a “novel,” felt as ridiculous as saying, sorry I can’t meet up because I am on my way to the moon. Instead, I told my friends I had competing social plans, or that I was sick, too embarrassed to admit I was actually spending my Saturdays attempting to put my silly little thoughts into words.

At the time, I had recently left my corporate job and landed what I had considered my “dream” job—running a large program at a nonprofit I respected. I had studied engineering in college, knowing I needed to support myself and pay for school, and rushed straight into corporate work after graduation with the sole goal of being financially stable. It took a while to ask myself what I actually wanted to do. And when I did, writing didn’t occur to me because by then it felt obvious I wasn’t an “artsy” type. Instead, I went into nonprofits, so I could theoretically do something that mattered. But once I tried writing in my thirties, it was all I wanted to do.

Eventually, I couldn’t deny that writing felt more satisfying than what I’d previously considered my “dream” job. But you can’t just quit your job to be a writer—at least most people can’t—because writing generally pays nothing. What I needed was time to write…and money (to buy time). My “dream” job, while meaningful, had me working long hours for very little money. So I made the hard choice to leave. I got a tech job instead, which paid more and had better hours, but was a demotion in terms of title and also in terms of my soul. But it was a lesson in compromise. The new job afforded me money to go on retreats and take classes which can cost thousands of dollars, classes I wasn’t able to afford on my nonprofit salary, let alone take given the hours. It also allowed me to start saving money so I could eventually take chunks of time off.

The more I carved out time for writing, the more I wanted it, like a dog at the dinner table, give it a scrap and it wants a meal. I started prioritizing time for writing over all other non-work activities. When most people think about making time, their first thought is giving up sleep (I’ll wake up early!). But I love sleep. I need sleep. For me social obligations were the next to go, then the gym. Not entirely, but significantly (more here on the life-changing power of not exercising). I had been going out most nights and hitting the gym each day because it felt “productive,” like what I should be doing. But with each year, I let writing take up more and more space. Eventually, I published a few actual essays in real outlets and felt, however slightly, like I was moving towards legitimacy.

And then I was laid off from my job. Or, rather, I was given the choice as part of a massive layoff to either switch roles or take severance. By that point, I was thirty-five with a full draft of a novel and what I wanted more than anything was time to immerse myself in that story, not squeeze edits in 45-minute increments before the office. So I allowed myself to dip into my savings and break from full-time work. I left my job, holed up in the woods, spent as little money as possible, and worked on my novel.

When anyone talks about taking time off work, they have to talk about money. I never had parents or a spouse to support me, or even give me health insurance. I grew up in a low-income house and as a result have operated instinctively from a scarcity mindset for as long as I can remember. So taking career breaks, not having a clear, secure path to regular income was extremely uncomfortable—financially, and also pscyhologically. Many artists have long thought of their jobs as “day-jobs,” but my career had typically been a stand-in for my self-worth. Leaving it was a big step, but also life-changing.

A novel is an enormous undertaking. To hold the full capacity of a story and all its characters, hundreds of pages of narrative, in your mind at one time is hard. (You also have to write the entire thing and make it really, really good without any promise that anyone will ever give you money for it.) I wrote the first few drafts of my first novel between the cracks of my “day job,” driven by a somewhat demonic need to express myself. But it took many painful years and it never even sold. To have full, uninterrupted time to live inside my novel was a revelation. A sort of bliss. And so I began to reorient my life around making space for these breaks.

For years after that layoff, I did part-time consulting work, making less money than I would at a full-time job, but giving me the flexibility to break if and when I needed to. It’s a privilege, of course, to make a living with part-time work. And when that part-time work dried up, I went back to full-time work. The stability and salary of a full-time job felt great, but I continued to save as much as I could in order to take another career break when my debut novel published earlier this year, a novel that I wrote and re-wrote on previous breaks.

It took a while to get comfortable investing in myself in this way, each break got a little longer as my writing gained momentum. Not because I began to make money from writing but because I got more comfortable investing in myself. We are not—especially not as women—encouraged to spend money on ourselves in a way that is not directly tide to some form of capitalist consumption or beautification / optimization. In these breaks I’m spending my money, but I’m not actually “buying” anything—except time. Actually I stop buying everything extraneous during these breaks (goodbye nice face lotion!). Once I experienced what it felt like to have windows of that time as a writer, it became very hard to prioritize anything else.

And so I continued to make decisions through the lens of prioritizing my time. Which, of course, had an affect on my decision to have children. Anyone who reads this newsletter knows that I am not one of those women who never wanted kids. I always assumed I’d have children. I still regularly consider the joys parenthood might offer (I froze my eggs and still haven’t stopped paying the storage fees). But every time I consider it seriously, I’m not willing to make that trade—I want my time more. I know how hard and expensive life is with a child. Especially in NYC where I have to live because of my partner’s constraints. I know I would have to go back to full-time work for the long-term, and that between work and mothering and managing my mental health I would mostly likely have no time. And so I make the trade-off. A pretty major one. But one that feels right for me.

I often encounter people who are beating themselves up that they haven’t written more. And then I look at their life. They’re working full-time, reaching for the next step on their corporate ladder, taking care of children, hitting the gym daily, stretching themselves socially, getting regular blow-outs, and ALSO they want to write. To harness the spirit of our late, great Diane Keaton, something’s gotta give! Of course you haven’t written, I think, although of course some Herculean women who are biologically disposed to consistent energy on no sleep, can maybe possibly who-the-f-knows, do it all. But most of us cannot. We need time. Which comes at a cost.

“I know, I know, we’re all busy!” these women (almost always women) will say, not wanting to appear as if they think their circumstances are unique, as if not having time is no excuse for not writing.

But it definitely is. Time is the most important thing! And the only way to make time is to sacrifice other things. Not to bring my nerdy engineering self into this, but the law of conservation of mass states that mass cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. Only rearranged or changed in form. I think about this a lot when I think about time. It’s a finite resource.

“We’re not all busy,” I respond. “I’m not that busy.” And I don’t mean it rudely or in a self-depreciating way. I mean it honestly; it is not a requirement for all or our time to be filled to the brim. I cannot imagine trying to write a novel with all those obligations. More and more as I get older, I try to keep my life somewhat spacious. That’s a privilege, no doubt; I’m incredibly grateful that I can structure my life this way for now. But I’m not a multi-millionaire who never has to work again, or someone supported by their spouse. I have to work, which is also why I have to very consciously carve out space. Many people who want to write more have this privilege of choice, but have a hard time giving up other things in their life to make room for it.

And it makes sense. Money is the axis to which capitalism forever pushes us to orient around. This notion that we need more, more, more—optimize money and self via things that cost money at all costs!!—is killing us. I’m not someone who thinks money doesn’t matter; life without it is f’ing traumatic and money absolutely buys happiness to a degree. But it is not an increasingly, infinite direct relationship. What people should suss out for themselves is where their personal plateau lies—how much money is enough to feel good, and then stop optimizing around it.

There are little intangible costs, too. My house is not the cleanest. Anything I cook takes less than 15 mins (i.e. is generally terrible). My relationship would probably improve if I didn’t need to hole away for weeks to write. I haven’t gotten a haircut in nine months because I don’t want to spend the money. I am in no way saying this is the right way to live (lol, no way by any means)! But I am saying that if you want to write a novel, trade-offs need to be made. Don’t feel guilty about them! It is completely valid to prioritize your own time for unpaid writing (if you are able) over all the other many things that our society pushes us (especially women) to prioritize.

The best advice I can give people who are trying to write is to give up other things in your life. Finding time doesn’t just happen, it comes at a cost. But hopefully you find enough joy, or at least some twisted sense of satisfaction, in the practice of writing such that the cost is worth it many times over.

Some numbers

Below the paywall is more detail around finances, and actual numbers about what I saved to make this happen. I put a lot into these newsletters and this is my first post with a paid section—please subscribe if you enjoy what you read! I so deeply appreciate it.

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The devotion I once had to the gym is now unfathomable. For a long time, the sweaty, cramped space—everything a different shade of gray—was my sanctuary. My sessions were nothing fancy. No personal trainer. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a class. I worshiped only at the altar of the treadmill.

After battling with anorexia in college, running seemed like a more socially acceptable loophole for maintaining control of my weight while not only seeming normal, but “healthy.” Friends would ask about my mileage with an air of praise and I’d say things like, “it’s my escape,” or “it keeps me sane.” And it did, the way drugs keep any addict at ease. My daily runs were a clear, measurable goal to be proud of, while the usefulness of everything else in my life grew blurry.

Until I started writing in my thirties, I would never admit, not even to myself, that I had an eating disorder (ED). The fact that I scheduled my life around running was just “my thing.” Never mind that without it I felt completely worthless, undeserving of social interaction, leaving the house, or even — and especially — food. The validation I got for my “healthy” habits made me believe it was all perfectly normal.

Last week The Cut published an article about a specialized sect of raw veganism called fruitarians—people who only eat fruit—and one woman who died from malnutrition while broadcasting her “health” routines on the internet.

I have a hard time reading about EDs or food trends in general. To hear quasi-celebs gush over a mouth-watering dinner of grilled cabbage or a life-changing breakfast of celery juice makes my spidey-senses pop. I know what it means to fill your plate with spinach and call it a meal. And a part of me I don’t like drifts towards the fantasy of cabbage-only dinners and green-liquid breakfasts. I’m too aware of the tricks my mind can play on itself, and it’s too tiring to spot them, quiet them, then brush away the shame of still being drawn by the pull of self-delusion all these years later.

I was curious, though, about the fruitarian. Something about it seemed so tragic, so extreme. But also so simple, so dangerously appealing. Reading about this woman who ate only fruit, who believed in cleaning out her body, I felt the rush of my restrictions cheering underneath my years of recovery like little pesky Minions. The relief of full control. The fortress of intricate rules. The proof of progress each day, as you feel your body grow weaker yes, but smaller, too, a steady servant to the heft of your willpower. The weakness itself almost its own reward, an excuse to sit when you can barely stand. Proof of the power you have over something, if only the destruction of your own body.

Reading the piece, I’m horrified to admit that I felt envy. Though it should come as no surprise. Eating disorders are notoriously competitive and though I would call myself a recovered anorexic, it is such a horrific, insidious disease that part of me sometimes feels like a failed one.

From my novel, Nothing Serious: The first thing she did whenever she heard someone had an eating disorder was search for their image. She knew it was inappropriate; pathetic, too. Though her rules had been strict in college, she could barely consider herself a competitor anymore. Now she was a spectator, like a sports commentator who was once a star. But she still needed to see what other women with rules looked like, to compare her own discipline to theirs.

People might think of eating disorders as vain, but they ravage the mind as much if not more than the body. I was not envious of the woman’s body, which I could recognize as painfully sick, heartbreaking to look at, that I very much wanted to help. I was envious of the fortress she’d created. She died in the bed of her Bali hotel room, eating her fruit, unable to do anything else. With a certain squint, it gives the tidy illusion of control, while in reality she had lost control entirely to the disease. It is devastating and tragic, and yet a part of me understood how she could get there.

I can only speak for myself, but overwhelm and despair, however subconsciously, sat at the core of my ED. Control, too, of course, but control as an attempt to quell the other stuff, the realization that life unfurls in ways we don’t expect, that we can’t actually be and do everything and do it the best. That we are sometimes helpless and often limited, and those limitations are playing out all around us. And so you cling, you create a world you can control, in which you can feel powerful, where there are concrete steps to progress on the arbitrary axis you set for yourself—a clear “right” and “wrong”—and where the potential for achievement feels thrillingly infinite. Imagine falling from a cliff, stomach dropping, limbs flailing, and finding a branch to grab onto, then another. That’s what the rules of an ED can feel like. Something to keep you up, to offer the illusion of progress when the ground feels like it’s falling out from under you. Never mind that you’re killing yourself in the process.

Modern womanhood is an exercise in paradoxes. We’re expected to be beautiful but not high-maintenance. Firm but not a bitch. Impressive but not threatening. Very early we’re taught to suppress our needs and our hunger in order to impress and delight, and rewarded for doing so. Woman are raised to be high-achievers, but in a patriarchal society, a woman’s greatest achievement is often the destruction of her most honest self. Eating disorders fall squarely into this dance, and the sheer volume of brain power wasted on indulging an ED is heartbreaking. In a way it’s the ultimate symbol of the female paradox in patriarchy — strength in weakness, power in disappearance.

What’s striking about this fruitarian article and what we are seeing everywhere in culture is the denial of what is right in front of us. Women are continuing to decimate their natural selves in new ways as technology improves and we, as a society, are continuing to encourage them. Praising them for their own destruction and more so than ever now that we can all broadcast curated version of ourselves over the internet. Between this and the comparative tendencies inherent in the disease it’s terrifying to consider what’s happening with young women behind their screens.

Because it can feel good—the illusion of doing something “right,” following rules that society openly rewards, in the sea of life that can so often feel overwhelmingly wrong. Routines are concrete and measurable amidst so much grey and uncertainty. Until you’ve lost sight of what right means to you, beyond closing your eyes and following those rules. Until you follow the rules right off a cliff.

But it was the very last sentence of The Cut piece that made me start this essay:

“Siira doesn’t blame the fruitarians for Karolina’s death — she had been sick long before she ever arrived in Bali. But she does wonder why Karolina died alone, without the sun-dappled soul fam she had traveled nearly 7,000 miles to find.”

I know nothing about the particulars of fruitarians, but the idea of a “fam” in this context, or any kind of genuine community in the context of disordered eating, feels oxymoronic. When I imagine a group of raw vegans, I imagine everyone clinging to their routines, a togetherness fueling more calculations, stricter rules, fiercer comparisons. Everyone in their own corner, moving through their own elaborate web of ritual. That this woman died completely alone is both tragic and unsurprising.

Eating disorders are a ruthlessly isolating disease. They inherently keep you at arms length from other people. Not because you look ill or have unbearable eating habits (most become experts at hiding these). But because you become two selves: the self you present to the world, and your private, disordered self. And you will do anything to protect the sanctity of that private self.

During the height of my orthorexia, I was eager to be in a serious relationship, going on upwards of four dates a week. But I was always balancing, calculating, a hum buzzing beneath the surface of the self I was presenting. If I ate a burger and fries on a date, care-free and easy, I knew exactly what the next forty-eight hours of eating and exercise would look like in order to make up for it. In this way, my time with others was a constant posturing. My time alone, with my routines, was when I exhaled.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that writing saved me from myself. At thirty-five, I had a medical procedure that prohibited me from running for almost two months. It was the first time since I was a teenager that I could not exercise for an extended period of time. In fact, I did not exercise at all. It was like having a doctor’s note to get out of school. Someone had given me permission to break my rules, and, importantly, it came at a time when I was finally ready to embrace that permission.

Without the mind-bending shame that had haunted me on the rare occasion I didn’t go to the gym, I sat on my couch each night, safe in the knowledge that I had no other option. At first it was hard, miserable, even, but soon it was glorious. Because I had somehow short-circuited the thing in my brain that made me obsess over my routines, I allowed myself to eat things I never would have eaten. I ordered takeout, lots of it. And I wrote—for hours. I had started to explore creative writing a few years earlier, but wasn’t finding the time or drive to do it regularly. Until I stopped running. And wildly—finally—I had the time and energy to take it seriously.

Two months later, when I was allowed to run again, I could not fathom going to the gym. The thought of the treadmill felt like returning to war, my body freezing with dread considering it. I had imagined that if I stopped running—I honestly don’t know what I imagined, my brain couldn’t process beyond it, like I would morph into a blob of uselessness then combust on the spot with an overwhelming sense of self-hatred. But I did not combust. I was very much still there. On the couch. Essays pouring out of me I hadn’t known I was capable of. My body resting in a way I’d forgotten was possible. I wasn’t cured from my eating disorder in a matter of months, not at all, but it allowed me to step into the process of recovery—terrifying at first, until it began to feel like freedom.

Writing, like EDs, also requires extreme solitude. Not everyone can handle this part, but I often wonder if the solitude is the very reason I’m drawn to writing in the first place. After those first few months, my new found commitment to writing gave me an excuse to be alone, immobile on my couch—exactly like that feeling of a doctor’s note. I don’t love that I needed an excuse to rest, but I did, and that excuse became my novel. Except with writing, I was growing closer to myself, attempting to unite the outer and inner versions with steady reflection, not carving myself further into two separate halves. And through the attempt at self-acceptance that came with writing, of slowing down and waking up rather than racing through arbitrary, self-defeating goals, I actually did find my own version of a “fam.”

Though I still need huge swaths of time alone, I’ve since built the kind of community with writing that would have been unfathomable when I was shrouded in ED rituals. The friends I’ve made through writing know all my disturbing layers, there is little room for performance, only the attempt to pinpoint some version of the truth, no matter how absurd and shameful, and wrangle it into words.

On one of my very first writing retreats, a small group of women who are now my dear friends went for a nature walk in the idyllic woods we were surrounded by. I declined to join, needing to do my daily run instead, knowing if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the day, that I would be too self-hating to concentrate on anything else. This was typical back then: declining awesome, enriching activities of all kinds to preserve the sanctity of the disorder. I came back from my run tired, and not happy exactly but at least feeling as if I deserved to be a person in the world after checking the box of my run. My friends came back from their walk elated and closer than ever, sharing stunning photos of the woods, all agreeing it was magical, that I should have come.

“The eating disorder wins again,” I joked to my friend , who was leading the retreat and who still jokes about it to this day. I happened to be workshopping an essay about my history with anorexia. There was no hiding from these women and we all laughed at my use of past tense in the piece. I had made progress but not enough.

That was eight years ago. Now, there is no way I would skip a walk with friends to check the box of a run. Now, I would ask myself what I wanted to do more, and the noise would be quiet enough that I could hear the answer without needing the compulsion of my routines to prove my worth. I’m not sure the noise ever fully goes away. And I’m pretty sure it will always be a work in progress. But the eating disorder will not win the end. I won’t let it.

News!

In a fun, full-circle moment, last week I was accepted into ’s artist residency! As mentioned above, Spruceton Inn was where I took one of my first writing retreats eight years ago, and I’ve been admiring their artist residents ever since. It’s a dream come true to now be one of them. I’ll be using the time to work on my next novel, which I have a full draft of, but needs some flushing out. More on that next novel, and the process of writing and editing it soon! xx

I love TV. I love it so much. I often wonder if the main reason I write novels is the very slim chance that one might get adapted into a series and then my actual dreams will come true. There is nothing I would rather do than cuddle up with my favorite takeout and a good show. Or honestly even a bad show! As long as I’m invested, television to me is a comfort of the highest order.

Anyway, things are dire. The first amendment is being stripped blatantly and before our eyes. In TV terms, we are now living in a BoJack Horseman punchline. The company in BoJack is brilliantly called “AOL-Time-Warner- Pepsico-Viacom-Halliburton- Skynet-Toyota- Trader-Joe's;” everything has merged such that one conglomerate has full control, and we’re not far from that reality. Between Colbert and now Kimmel being forced off air, we’re seeing how the Trump administration is wielding influence through these mega corporations to silence high-profile voices speaking truth to power.

Though the Kimmel news comes just months after Colbert’s cancellation, Kimmel is hitting harder because there is no question that he is being removed by ABC (Disney) as the result of an on-air comment. Whereas CBS (Paramount) had plausible deniability, lamely claiming Colbert’s chart-topping 11-year-run was removed for “budgetary” reasons (despite the fact that the decision came just days after he criticized Paramount for a $16M settlement with Trump). Never mind that criticism of power is exactly what late night hosts are paid to do and have always done best. Never mind that Kimmel’s comments felt not only innocuous but par for the late night course.

But even before the Kimmel news, just days before, large-scale silencing was happening on the national awards show that honors TV at large — the Emmys. This form of silencing however, was not a blatant cancellation, it was a subtle trick that mostly went overlooked. Because it was wrapped—eerily, disgustingly—in the guise of philanthropy.

As the (entirely unmemorable other than his exceptional banality) host, Nate Bargatze, explained in his opening, he had devised an elaborate bit to curb the notoriously long acceptance speeches. He would donate $100k to the Boys & Girls Club of America, but for every second a winner went over their allocated 45-second speech time, a thousand dollars would be taken away. And for every second they went under, a thousand dollars would be added.

Watching this live, my jaw was on the floor. Was he really going to make the winners—people who have worked their lives to get to this point, the crowning achievement of their careers— not to mention us! the audience! who tune in precisely to see the most unhinged of speeches, otherwise tight-lipped celebrities wild in fits of elation, be in cahoots with this unbearably cheesy gimmick?? Could he not just deliver a few mild jokes like most mediocre male hosts and leave us alone? Instead he was implicating the entire room in this twisted plot like a Disney villain trying to squeeze the joy out of one of the few moments of joy remaining. First of all, the whole bit was bad TV, as many noted the morning after. But it was also so much more—so much worse.

The donation tracker was, in essence, a wildly effective silencing tool. We are in a state of political crisis and awards shows are a platform for celebrities, whom the general public (for better or worse) envies and respects, to share their beliefs. But with the donation ticker, winners were seemingly stuck between a rock and a hard place. To speak politically would be to go over the limit—to take money away from the boys and the girls!— and no one wanted to be perceived as that kind of monster.

The first thing I thought when Seth Rogan went on stage to accept the first award of the night and was rushed by the dumb donation ticker was—well, first: fuck, we’re actually doing this. And then second: just pay the difference!!! You, Seth Rogan, obviously have the money. Please donate a few thousand dollars and relieve the entire audience and all of us watching of this horrendous gimmick for the love of god. But he didn’t do that. He spoke quickly, then rushed off. And the only reason I can think that he wouldn’t say something along the lines of “fuck this, I’ll donate $100k myself!” is that he didn’t want to appear as the kind of guy who obviously has that kind of money to spare, to be perceived as someone who doesn’t think a few thousand dollars is a big deal. Even if for him it really isn’t.

The thing about a major awards show like the Emmys is that most people in the room, certainly most people accepting awards, could toss off a few thousand dollars to The Boys and Girls Club without even noticing it was missing. But instead most people got on stage and performed the act of caring.

This hit a particular nerve for me because I see this kind of performance in tech all the time. There is a certain type of person who makes a ton of money but likes to pretend that they are the same as people who make a modest living. They’ll chase happy hour deals or split the bill so as not to embarrass you or maybe just to feel normal. But this is not comforting, it’s insulting. It’s as if they are cos-playing caring about money and it’s infuriating. Who knows, maybe they really do care about saving three bucks on dinner. Which—to be clear—is far worse! Obviously everyone’s money situation is personal and particular. But, generally speaking, if you’re making half a million dollars a year, please don’t pretend you care about two dollars off a beer. Just buy the table a round!

There is a difference between performing equality (I’m just like you, I also care about a thousand dollars!) and actually working towards equality, which often requires hard truths about wealth gaps and more importantly action. Because as I was watching these mostly boring-AF, unnecessarily stressful speeches, I realized something was glaringly missing.

We’re in the middle of the biggest crisis of our lifetimes and no one was talking about politics. They were rushing off before they could say anything of significance under the guise of putting the Boys & Girls first while avoiding the genocide in Gaza and influx of fascism. The network essentially had them in a performative chokehold, wielding guilt in order to prevent them from veering political at a time when we arguably need it most.

I watched the Emmys on regular, good old antenna tv—CBS (channel 2 in New York)—so I was glaringly aware of what network was doing the choking. The same network that had suspiciously ousted Colbert just months earlier. The same network that is owned by Paramount, which is in talks with Bari Weiss to buy her right-leaning publication, The Free Press, for $100M while giving her a top editorial position at CBS News. The same network who notoriously bended to Donald Trump months ago by settling an egregious lawsuit. And then this entirely unfunny nonsensical gimmick started to make a ton of sense. Of course CBS is invested in curtailing speeches, they don’t want this mostly left-leaning crowd to get political.

Cut to a few commercial breaks later. Hannah Einbinder wins the award for best supporting actress in a comedy (Yay! Hacks forever!!). She is losing her mind in the best way, the way that has made me tear up every year watching awards shows like this for decades, her actual dream coming true before our live audience eyes, and then suddenly she’s going over, but she has more to say and she, unlike most others before her, will not be silenced. It doesn’t seem planned, she’s clearly nervous, overwhelmed and says exactly what comes to mind because it’s so very obvious, the thing most television stars up there should be saying, the most important line of the night, the line the represents freedom from CBS’s sinister trap: “I’ll pay the difference.”

And then she continues gloriously over her time-limit: “Go Birds, Fuck Ice, Free Palestine.”

That next line was echoed all over social media and for good reason; there were so noticeably few political moments given the dire state of the world. But just as noteworthy to me was her matter-of-fact declaration that she’d happily pay to speak her truth. It’s not that Einbinder is richer than the winners before her. She was just the only one brave enough to break the farce. And probably because, as someone who is new to this kind of wealth and fame, she wasn’t concerned with her image as a wealthy person, it was simply the most obviously logical thing to say as she weighed the options of the trap she’d been placed in: shut up and help the children, or speak freely and harm the children. But there was always a third option: speak freely and also help the children.

In the end, Nate whatever-his-name donated 100k anyway and CBS donated a few hundred-thousand more. Because of course they did. It was all a farce. But they got what they wanted: the planned presenter speeches went way too long, and the unplanned (i.e. FREE!) acceptance speeches were mostly cut short.

We’re in a bad place and it’s only getting worse. The Kimmel cancellation is scary at a time when so much is scary. The least we can do is look closely at the line between performative impact (pretending to care about a few thousand dollars on a ticker when you own a 5 million dollar house, for example!) and actual impact, and make the right call.

Fuck Ice. Free Palestine. And let’s hope next time the Emmys secure a host that can actually crack a joke or two so we’re not beholden to more anti-free-speech gimmicks wrapped in faux-philanthropic bows.

Recs

TV recs this week given the subject matter. Thanks to my sister for turning me onto this show bc I loved Pernille (Porni) so much (on Netflix) and did not want to leave this universe.

Also YAY to Jeff Hiller. If you haven’t yet watched Somebody, Somewhere, it is pure gold, get on it (on HBO)!

xx

I’ve been on Substack for about two and a half years and I have never once published a paid post. For most of that time, I was working a day job and wrote here primarily as a creative outlet. I originally started Unresolving with the goal of making myself write more, giving myself a more playful outlet when more traditional publications were shuddering and there were fewer places to publish essays. At that time, I had a steady income and didn’t want to squeeze the joy out of writing by trying to make money from it.

But now I no longer have a steady income, and I’m actually trying to make a living writing. I’ve been publishing here with relative consistency for the past nine months and each essay takes days (sometimes weeks) to write. So, though I’ll still publish my regular long-form essays every other Friday for free subscribers, I’ll also attempt to publish paid posts every other Friday in an effort to recoup some amount of value for the large amount of time I pour into this platform.

I’m thinking these paid posts will offer tips, prompts, and insights about the writing and publishing process. While there’s already a lot of this floating around Substack, my path to writing was not exactly typical. I’ll try my best to offer a unique point of view from someone who came to writing later, was a total outsider to the literary world, and then eventually published a novel with a big 5 publisher by trying, learning, and trying again.

But before I go full steam ahead, I’d love to ask what you specifically want to hear about! It can be related to the writing process—how to get an agent, where ideas for novels come from, how to stay motivated, how to get started, the cost of a book tour, etc. It can be about balancing a corporate and creative life, what it costs career-wise to shift paths, when to take the jump away from your “day job” and how. It can be questions around selfhood and identity, dating and relationships, which are by far my favorite topics to get into. Please send ideas, questions, or half-formed thoughts—anything that comes to mind! You can leave a comment below, DM me on Substack, or reply to this post (it goes to me).

Last call for my workshop!

We’re kicking this off next week (Monday the 15th!) and have an amazing group with a few spots left. We’ll meet Mondays at 7-8pm ET for 4 weeks, this also includes two 30-minute calls with me and an edit of 5 pages of writing. Message me for details or apply here!

In case you missed it

Last week’s post was a big one. I’ve worked on it, in some form or another, for years and was proud to finally put it all out there. Also great conversations in the comments.

If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter please consider upgrading to a paid subscriber, it really means a lot. Thank you so much for being here and much more to come!

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When a coworker of mine at a San Francisco-based tech company drew a giant penis with blue marker pointing at my face on the conference table (the table was made of erasable whiteboard, nothing permanent) while we were on a call with a client, a call I was leading, a call most of my teammates were also on, many in the room watching, I did not get angry. I barely flinched. What I did was laugh, and hard.

I know this because I recently came across a photo of the giant penis and me. Someone had sent it around in case anyone missed out. Staring at it, I can see, with disturbing clarity, a younger me falling over the table—the penis—with laughter. At the time the penis barely registered as weird. The day before a coworker had sent me a link in the middle of a large meeting and when I clicked it, porn took over my screen. We both laughed so hard we had to excuse ourselves.

Only now, over a decade later, do I notice my dangerously thin frame, the unnatural straightness of my curly hair, as I waive my middle finger at the photographer, a close friend to this day. Part of me wants to jump in and save the person in the photo, though she hardly looks like someone who wants saving. She’s laughing, busy, and unbothered. She looks like the reflection that another part of me still guiltily wishes she saw when I stare in the mirror—young, happy, attractive in a typical sense. I feel sorry for my former self, but, at the time, she embodied what she viewed as empowered.

The picture was taken in 2011. I was twenty-nine, fresh out of one of the world’s top business schools, eager to get ahead, and academically trained to do so. But even then, the conversation around gender equality in the workplace was a nascent one, especially in tech. Women had earned the right to get hired. That was about it. One’s difference, essentially the whole concept of diversity, wasn’t really discussed. Getting ahead meant fitting in, with the mostly white-male workforce. For context, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, a now dated plea for women to lean into the toxic masculine culture permeating most workplaces, the very culture that so effectively holds them back, hadn’t even been published.

It’s not that I was afraid to get angry. It’s that getting angry didn’t occur to me. Dicks on tables were the jokes we bonded over, the jokes everyone laughed at. The drawing didn’t make me feel left out. I felt let in. It was a chance to show my strength, my indifference, tossing everything aside with a laugh and a friendly flip of a finger. Indifference was currency in tech and anger was poison. If you were angry, it meant you didn’t get the joke.

Shockingly, it wasn’t work that tipped me off to the idea that something might be wrong. It was romance. Gender dynamics in the workplace, especially in tech, are much examined. But to limit those studies to the office is to focus on the tip of a mountain. Work was smooth. I was rewarded for mirroring men, laughing at their jokes, following their lead. But that imperative to fit in had seeped into the core of my instincts. And while I was getting ahead at work, in my personal life I was flailing.

Outside of work, I chose men not because I enjoyed their company or liked how they made me feel—mostly disappointed, insecure, and longing—but because there was something about them I admired, envied, wanted as my own. Through my twenties it was as if, in order to develop a new part of myself, I needed to see it in a man first, to know it was worthy. Though I can barely type these words now, I felt it deeply back then, that men were the gatekeepers—of knowledge, of taste, of success in all forms.

Thus ensued too many years of chasing men who arguably cared more about which color New Balances to buy than my well-being but who allowed me to purse parts of myself that felt off-limits otherwise. Mostly, I craved men with unrelenting artsy sides. Not artists, per se—nothing made me feel more uncomfortable than conversing with someone who mined their soul for a living while I, knee-deep in PowerPoints, made a living muzzling mine. No, I chased men who were too insecure and self-loathing to create anything themselves, but who lined their walls with records, poured over documentaries, judged everything in their wake, me especially. They weren’t artists, but they were obsessed with art. And I was obsessed with men confident enough to have obsessions. If they could, then I could, too.

For a long time I used my relationships with men—professionally and personally—as data points on how to be, which let me skip the hard work of figuring out who I was, and then the harder work of standing up for that person over and over again. This did not feel weak, or like a shortcut, but like training. I was devising an intricate map of right and wrong, a value system, as defined by men, and following it steadily. That I was unconcerned with what I liked or wanted or even felt beyond the joy of winning in this system was not weakness. In my mind, it was my greatest strength. Back then, I associated self-respect with power, and power, for me, had always been on men’s terms.

Studying electrical and computer engineering in college, my classes were almost all men. Even in the theater-like rooms where one might hide in the masses, my long curly hair and colorful sweaters felt like sirens, and in a sense they were. If there was another woman in the room, we found each other instantly. But mostly, the seats filled with men, offering a nervous hello or going to pains to avoid eye contact. It felt like everyone was wondering what I was doing there. It didn’t take long for me to wonder that, too.

Eventually, I adopted the uniform of the boys around me—Hanes t-shirts and sweatshirts, baggy jeans and sneakers. In some ways this was a welcomed invitation to a club I’d always wanted to join. I’d been devastated when, come middle school, it became clear that sweatpants and oversized t-shirts no longer passed muster for girls. College boys, it seemed, at least the ones in engineering, couldn’t care less about how they dressed, so it only made sense that I wouldn’t, either. A win.

But this monkey-see-monkey-do mentality grew like a weed. What the men around me did, I wanted to also. Part of this stemmed from the survival-esque need to blend in. But another part was plain ambition. The people excelling in class seemed to be the boys, and with unfathomable ease compared to the small group of always-studying women. The boys were having fun, barely working, getting dirty and playing games. I’m sure there were many boys who were also as quiet, hard-working, and insecure as I felt, but those weren’t the ones I noticed. The ones I noticed spoke loudly and laughed hard. They were happily doing their thing. And I wanted in.

Thus began my quest to be one of the guys, a journey that would shape all aspects—professional and personal, physical and emotional—of my life for the next decade. I tagged along as they slid way too fast down hilly streets on their motorized skateboards, I screamed along to Pearl Jam as we jumped up and down on our tattered couches, listened to Howard Stern and watched Sylvester Stallone until we couldn’t keep our eyes open.

It’s too easy to say that this was just me being who boys wanted me to be—that’s not true at all. These were some of the best times of my life. I admired them, I loved them, and, of course, I dated them. Following their example felt good. It’s only in retrospect that I wish I’d had more examples to choose from. It’s impossible to decipher which parts of my fitting in was a true aligning of sensibilities and which were a form of self-silencing, because I hadn’t really become a person yet, not really. I was in the process of becoming, and men just happened to be my guides.

When I hear about girls who read Didion in college or rocked Sleater Kinney, I can only stare back blankly. Neither would have passed in my world. If I dabbled in anything of the female variety, I would have had to like it alone, which meant I would have had to be so sure it was good, despite everyone I knew telling me it wasn’t. And frankly I didn’t have it in me. If I followed along with the boys, I never had to question if I was right, because they never questioned if they were.

This created an echo chamber of sorts. The media I consumed in college (and until my thirties) was all from men, so there was no voice explaining gender dynamics, the female experience, or even feminism at all. At least no voice I cared to listen to.

Then there was the issue of the body. Mine had curves. Mine bled every month. Mine was different. I can’t say for sure that my anorexia stemmed from this same desire to fit in. But I can say that by my sophomore year of college, getting smaller felt like progress. Surrounded by men with functional bodies in thoughtless, functional clothes, the more it seemed that a woman’s body existed for others. When my period stopped my junior year—it didn’t return until my late-thirties— I was thrilled. Like I had conquered the worst part of myself.

It’s impossible to identify an exact turning point, some kind of ah-ha moment when I realized how distorted my framework had become. It happened over time, slowly noticing I didn’t really work like other people, that something felt stifled, no sense of my own pleasure beyond chasing flashes of approval. It happened as I met other women who showed what it meant to value oneself and one’s femininity, replacing the role models I knew with people closer to who I wanted to be.

There’s a trend these days of women de-centering men from their lives, but before the hashtag was circling around TikTok, I had stumbled on the approach. A few years after that photo, I left tech to work at an all-female nonprofit. I stopped dating men, stopped reading men, and stopped listening to music by men. I read women writers who gripped me to the point of breathlessness, knew me better than I knew myself. In a world with no men as my guides, I attempted to rebuild my identity without the pull of their expectations, to learn who I was, men aside.

In my mid-thirties I made the kind of friendships that one assumes is too late to make in one’s mid-thirties. But unlike the men I’d been drawn to, my friendships with women were more than admiration, a desire to learn from them and mirror it back. It was connection—admiration, yes, in spades, but this time it went both ways.

And culture was changing. A year after that photo was taken, Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s classic feminist thriller, was published and the concept of the “cool girl” was named—a woman who goes to pains to align herself with men in order to appear easy and carefree. The following year, Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller Lean In explained that to get ahead, women simply had to be more like their male colleagues, sparking a rise of “girlboss” feminism, a carbon-copy of individualistic, capitalistic climbing with a bright pink twist. The first step to solving a problem is naming the problem, and seeing how blatantly women were encouraged to mimic men, then rewarded for doing so, shifted something in the culture. A year after Lean In, Beyoncé threw up a giant, bolded “FEMINIST” on the backdrop of her VMA performance—a word many women still feared identifying with after the gnarly feminist backlash of the early aughts—rattling culture and signaling change.

Major feminist wins followed: a surge in diversity budgets encouraging women in tech, improvements in the representation of women in media, a re-focusing on intersectional feminism, prioritizing collective equality and structural (versus individual) change, and the rise of the #metoo movement, sparking a global conversation and increasing awareness around sexual consent, gendered power dynamics, and workplace harassment.

Things are different now. A man would be fired on the spot—I think; I hope—if he drew a giant penis on a conference room table. We have (mostly) adopted the language and the visuals of executives wanting creative, out-of-the-box, diverse teams, we’ve eliminated candidate assessment criteria like, “would you want to drive cross country with this person?” which inevitably leads to a culture of sameness. But we have made little dent on the core issue: a lack of mutual admiration, genuine respect for a feminist approach, largely because capitalism is inherently at odds with feminist values. And so for many women, answering the question—who am I, men aside— often comes at a monetary cost.

Despite progress, studies show that in the past few years women are voluntarily leaving leadership positions at higher rates. The most commonly cited reasons were women’s lack of recognition and advancement at work, leading to burnout. And it’s true that it is harder for women to get ahead in positions of power; data shows women are paid less and judged more harshly in leadership positions than their male counterparts. But these double standards have long been the case. What’s notable in the last few years is the seemingly indirect relationship between the increased cultural awareness of feminism and women’s pursuit of power in our stubbornly patriarchal system.

Women want a better life for themselves and they’re letting themselves have it, no longer feeling a desire to “have it all,” to prove themselves on masculine terms. As I enter my mid-forties, the most common reason my women-identifying friends and colleagues are leaving the proverbial room at higher rates is mostly overlooked—once we feel confident in ourselves and our values, we realize we actually have no desire to sit around laughing at dick jokes, literally or metaphorically.

This kind of self-awakening for women is happening everywhere. This is not a lack of ambition, but a re-orientation of ambitions from a patriarchal framework to a feminist one. The women I know did climb the ladder and they could certainly climb further, but they simply don’t want to. And the notion that this is because they are frustrated by lack of pay or power doesn’t quite fit. It’s more that, as they come to terms with themselves and their own, independent values (provided they have the freedom and privilege to do so) they realize they don’t actually want it.

I eventually did answer the question—who am I, men aside. I had always used men to get closer to my creative side, but when I removed myself from them entirely, my creativity burst open. This year, my debut novel was published by HarperCollins. The book centers a 35-year-old-woman in tech learning to untangle from her own internalized misogyny. It doesn’t lead to the life she’d always dreamed of—a high-powered career with a husband and kids—it actually moves her further in the opposite direction, but it gets her closer to herself, so she can build her dreams anew.

As we cope with the most toxic of boys’ clubs—cuts in all programs supporting equity and inclusion efforts, Zuckerberg publicly pushing for more “masculine energy” in the workplace, the removal of cultural events like Pride and Black History Month from Google’s calendar—this tension between the values of feminism and capitalism becomes more prescient than ever. We should of course continue to fight for increased pay and diversity efforts, but a culture that refuses to prioritize feminist values will inevitably lose the most empowered feminists. Embracing principles of equity, flexibility, community and care earnestly, not just by way of buzzwords, is no small feat. But the first step to solving a problem is naming the problem.

BUY NOTHING SERIOUS

Generational analysis is an imprecise art but one I can’t seem to pull myself away from. As someone who sits on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial, I’ve long been fascinated by the generational differences between them, and where a 1982 baby like me fits in. Recently, as I watch millennials age into their mid-to-late-30s, that formative period when you feel as if you must decide how the rest of your life will go, I’ve been fascinated with how they’re hitting this turning point, compared to their Gen X counterparts.

In the 90s, the big fear entering adulthood was the idea of “selling out.” The term has become almost prehistoric these days, rendered all but meaningless since capitalism has wedged its insidious claws in absolutely everything. But as a refresher it means compromising one’s personal values or integrity for monetary gain. “Damn the man,” the refrain in the 90s cult-class, Empire Records, embodied the generational ethos acutely. Anything even close to gaining broad success was shunned at the smallest whiff of popularity. Profit, in nearly any form, was simply lame.

Every generation is a response, in one way or another, to the generation before it. In the broadest sense, this anti-corporate attitude was a response to the Regan-Republicanism and Wall Street rush of the 80s, which was a backlash to the social upheaval and free-spiritedness of the 70s. Growing up poor, I couldn’t entirely buy into this “damn the man” mentality (though I memorized Empire Records in entirety regardless). Mostly, I wanted our family to have health insurance and money for groceries. This eagerness for money, rushing into a corporate job as soon as someone would hire me, made me definitively uncool. But I was a cusp baby, and millennials would soon emerge with an entirely different approach to work.

Gen-X graduates generally avoided the corporate workforce for as long as possible—or if it couldn’t be avoided, the prevailing sentiment towards big business was skepticism—with alternative scenes thriving in the 90s. But eventually one has to confront reality. As the “slacker” generation approached middle-age and began settling down and starting families, many traded their Pavement t-shirts for button-downs, submitting to the man they’d long damned in order to make a living. Even those who continued to hobble together counter-culture gig jobs often became slaves to the algorithm like everyone else, needing a “brand” in order to stay above water.

At their core, Gen X-ers are individualists. But most young people, no matter their generation, share a blinding obsession with the self, a yearning to feel unique. The way that manifests, however, depends on the cultural context of the moment. And at the turn of the century, the moment was changing.

As Gen X embarked on middle-age in the mid-to-late aughts, young millennials were entering the workforce for the first time. And corporations had figured out how to harness (ie. exploit) the hyper-individualist nature of youth. Work was not positioned as the glitzy, money-making hero of the 80s, or the soul-sucking devil of the 90s. Now, in the aughts, work was—like everything else was becoming—about you! A way to showcase your unique contributions to the world.

In 2006, Time Magazine named “You” the person of the year, a controversial mirror on its cover, mocked contemporaneously but more prescient than we could know. The piece mostly highlighted the rise of user-generated content and burgeoning social media, but the writing was on the wall—a young person’s burning need for self expression and individuation could be exploited, and wildly. By the late-aughts, work was no longer about bowing down to the man, it was about showcasing your own unique identity, a representation of self.

Every millennial entering the job market was encouraged to “do what you love,” fostering the somewhat absurd notion that working wasn’t actually about money, but one’s identity. The idea of getting a job no longer equated to selling out; work did not compromise one’s values, it represented them.

By the late-aughts, every company and their parent (company) began positioning themselves as saving the world, HR departments going wild with meaningless, highfalutin mission statements. Green-washing and girl-boss feminism spiraled, painting corporate greed and growth as some distorted version of empowerment. Companies had young people working around the clock and they were happy to do so, one’s busyness a badge of honor we’re only now crawling out from under. Personally, I ate all this up like the goddamn cookie monster. The idea of doing good and making money? Yes, please! I’ll work weekends for that cup of Koolaid! But it didn’t take long for my antenna to pop, a heavy dose of Gen-X skepticism prickling behind my millennial hope.

Whereas Gen X entered the workforce drenched in their characteristic distrust, viewing paid work as the devil that devours the soul, Millennials entered dripping with enthusiasm and optimism, viewing work as a kind of savior. Neither ideology ends well, but both end similarly. Gen X accepting that money is not the death of self but a means to an end in capitalism, and Millennials accepting that work is not the ultimate representation of self but a means to an end in capitalism.

A generation's trends are set by their youth, but time is the ultimate truth-teller. As we age, idealism inevitably crashes with reality. It’s not a shock that the millennial mid-life awakening feels like the inverse of what Gen X experienced. While Gen X had to bow their heads in reluctant submission to professional life, millennials are lifting their heads up from it and asking what the hell are we doing? Everywhere I look there’s a new think-piece about millennials opting out of the workforce they’ve long put their beliefs into, or (if that’s not financially feasible, which it often isn’t—especially for millennials) at least seeing it for what it is—a job, not an identity.

And now we have Gen Z, who seem to have a more practical, realistic, and somewhat (who could begrudge them?) nihilistic stance. Countering the idealistic, hopeful nature of the generation before them, which unfortunately proved a bit deluded, they seem to be embracing “softer” living. Perhaps a generation characterized by a lack of dogged ideology will suffer less of a boomerang as they age. But as always, only time will tell.

September Workshop

Speaking of taking a break from corporate life, I’m teaching a class! From Corporate to Creative Writer is a 4 week workshop designed for professionals who want to get started or progress in a creative writing practice, while making meaningful connections along the way.

Learn more and apply!

“I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with a yearning to write (or write more!) but doesn't feel like they have the time or confidence to do it - this course will help!”

“Emily’s ability to maintain candor and vulnerability with unfailing optimism and encouragement was a revelation for how I want to approach writing and other hard things.”

My debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, is out now from William Morrow / HarperCollins! It’s been featured in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, and more. Publisher’s Weekly said, “Smith’s exploration of themes like feminine insecurity, self-erasure, and dating double standards sets this apart from similar fare.” LitHub called it “brutal, complex, and necessary.” Please consider buying a copy!

I wrote this essay seven years ago, after leaving my full-time job in tech to pursue writing. I was 36 and felt crazy, like I was moving backwards when everyone around me was settling into “adulthood.” But it also felt like the only possible way forward. Writing this essay, which has since become one of my favorites, helped me understand why breaking away felt so urgent. It wasn’t just about writing, which felt like a pipe-dream at the time, but finally meeting myself on my own terms, after living for others for so many years.

This weekend I’m on my way up to the same small town mentioned in this piece, one I go to every summer, a published novel finally on the shelves. And I’m forever grateful to my younger self for taking a risk back when she had no idea what might come next.

The Art of Being Completely Alone

The woman taking my temperature is young, not yet 30. Her skin is tight and glowing in a way I only recognize now that mine is dragging and a little dull, her eyes eager to smile, her whole face nearly smiling already. She wears a crisp white shirt under a teal cardigan. The accents in her gold necklace are the same teal; so are her glossy nails. Staring down at my hands, I notice the coffee stain on the arm of my sweatshirt, a rip in its cotton cuff.

As she inspects my ear, I explain that I’m going away for two months, and though I know it’s probably only a cold, I wanted to get it checked out before I left, just in case it was serious. She asks, sweetly curious and excited for me, a complete stranger, where I’m going, and I tell her a small town in Vermont. She asks if the trip is for work, and I say no, I work from home; I just want to get away. She asks if I know anyone up there, if I’m visiting family or friends. Again I say no, my voice now shaky. I see confusion hit her face, a flash of concern. Alone? she asks. I nod. She smiles, this time not because she wants to, but because she has nothing else to say.

It’s really not the weirdest thing in the world, taking a break from New York, trading my small apartment and subway traumas for a farmhouse with mountain views at less than half the rent. But for a single, 36-year-old woman, leaving the city to be completely alone for months seems distinctly strange to people. My aloneness, at an age when people expect me to be settling down, when — according to popular studies and nagging mothers everywhere — these next few years may be my last chance to have kids, makes people uncomfortable. They expect me to assure them that I don’t want children or don’t believe in marriage, to give them permission not to worry for me. And while I wish I were one of those women who could flaunt her disinterest in these typical paths, I’m not. I’d love to find love; I always assumed I’d have kids. It’s just not happening. What I’m realizing now is that the question isn’t whether I want those things. Sure, sounds nice. The bigger question for me is: at what cost?

While a woman’s late-thirties mark the beginning of the end of her fertility, they also seem to mark the beginning of some next level self-discovery. As my other childless female friends and I enter the pressure cooker that is this age, many of us are starting to examine our lives more honestly than ever. When you assume life will float a certain way — the way movies and books and nearly all stories end for women — and then it doesn’t, you’re forced to ask yourself which direction you really want to go. Forcing myself to consider this has been unendingly difficult and possibly the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It was through this line of questioning that, after many years of misguided, albeit ambitious attempts to “have it all,” I allowed myself to take writing seriously. So, while on most fronts I find myself deviating from the path I’d always imagined, in some sense, I did find love.

But it gets complicated when this renewed self-discovery hits right when you think you should be creating and caring for a new human entirely — when it may be your last chance to have what everyone else seems to want. Sitting alone in my apartment, for example, which I’ve recently allowed myself to accept is my absolute favorite thing to do, I’m plagued by the worry that my future self will look back on my new, reclusive writerly self with venom for not dating more before it was too late. The parental chorus that says there is nothing more powerful than having children rings in my ears, even the dumb saying that you are not complete without your “other half” haunts me daily. Yet after decades of chasing love, I have never felt more complete than I do now, alone.

When I explain that I like being alone, people call me lucky, like I am a different species, and I can’t help but laugh. Of course I’d prefer to be in a loving relationship with someone who adores me and makes me laugh (and also leaves me be for large swaths of time). But when I consider interrupting my writing with a Tinder date because I basically have to meet the love of my life tomorrow if I want to have children, choosing whether to go out and fall in love is not really the decision I’m weighing. I’m weighing the decision to interrupt whatever it is I’m happily doing alone for the more likely alternatives — spending time and money taming my frizzy curls because men continue to suggest I straighten them, monitoring what I eat more than I’d like because thinness has wedged itself so thoroughly into my consciousness that it’s hard to feel attractive otherwise, pretending to laugh at mediocre jokes and fill gaps with too many questions, pulling men out of their emotional shells, work that’s become reflexive but drains me to my core — alternatives I’ve wasted far too much time on already.

Even now, especially now, there are too many ways I’d rather spend my time. And yet this question of kids still haunts me. These days, I ask myself if I want kids as often as I contemplate another snack, which is to say constantly. In my most honest moments, my hunch is that I don’t want children. My hunch is that any desire I might have is mostly a superficial concern about how out of place I’ll feel without them. The same way I feel out of place without a partner. The same way I feel out of place when my hair is wild, natural, and just how I like it. The same way I feel out of place for not wanting to go outside when it’s sunny because the only ground I want to explore is the ugly terrain of my mind and I’d prefer to do that from the comfort of my couch.

To friends and family, I say I’m escaping to Vermont to write, a self-made “writer’s retreat.” And it’s true, I do plan on writing, but I write all the time in Brooklyn. Opting to be completely alone for two months is something else. I want to not feel wrong doing the things that, for me, feel right. I want to exist in a space where partnership is not an option, so I can learn who I am without considering who I should be for someone else. I want to spend the day blissfully, stupidly lost in my writing without lying awake all night wondering if I should have put myself out there instead. I want to look in the mirror and feel good, not because I spent time and money primping myself in someone else’s image, but because I’ve done nothing at all and I’m allowed to like it. I want to let myself experience the uninterrupted joy that comes when I’m alone, so I can trust it later on when so many voices are telling me it’s not enough. I want to understand what it is I actually want when no one is around to tell me what’s missing.

Special Announcement!

I’m hosting another workshop! From Corporate to Creative Writer is a 4 week class designed for professionals who want to get started and / or progress in a creative writing practice, while making meaningful connections along the way.

Over the course of a month, we'll have in-depth discussions about different paths to publication (essays, novels, Substack, etc) and the steps involved, examine how a professional career and a creative practice can co-exist, and unlock how to make progress and stay accountable in a way that fits with your goals.

Details:

• Weekly one-hour sessions for 4 weeks

• Two 30-minute individual sessions to discuss your work and personal goals

• A detailed edit by me of any piece of writing, up to 5 pages

• $500 per person (this is a discounted price for early cohorts)

Note: You will NOT be required to share your writing with other people in the class.

Learn more and answer a few short questions if interested!

Testimonials

“Emily’s ability to maintain candor and vulnerability with unfailing optimism and encouragement was a revelation for how I want to approach writing and other hard things.”

“I left this course inspired & with a much clearer and more consistent writing practice. Simply hearing the stories, experience, projects, and blockers of others interested in deepening their relationship with writing was worth the investment alone, but Emily provided a 'holy trinity' of base ingredients to make me feel more confident in calling myself a writer: simply creating time to write, practical tips to write more, and connection with other writers.”

“Emily really understands the challenges of writing while also working your corporate day job, and it was such a supportive space to meet others trying to do the same.”

“I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with a yearning to write (or write more!) but doesn't feel like they have the time or confidence to do it - this course will help!”

Learn more and apply!

My debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, is out now from William Morrow / HarperCollins! It’s been featured in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, and more. Publisher’s Weekly said, “Smith’s exploration of themes like feminine insecurity, self-erasure, and dating double standards sets this apart from similar fare.” LitHub called it “brutal, complex, and necessary.” Please consider buying a copy!

Order Nothing Serious

It’s been exactly five months since my debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, was published from William Morrow / HarperCollins. When I first started working on a book, I was thirty-three and had no idea what I was doing. I had never taken a writing class aside from High School English and back then I was more of a physics gal. But as I entered my thirties, a story began to fester and I became obsessed with figuring out how to tell it.

Specifically, I wanted to write a book from the pov of someone who grew up with extreme financial instability. Who spent their early adulthood heads down working practical jobs, people for whom “the arts” were out of the question, who were paying for college on their own and couldn’t afford to explore, make mistakes, or be reckless with their choices. For these people—for me, at least—self discovery came later. If my twenties were spent contorting myself to excel in the hyper-masculine, capitalist world of business and tech in order to pay off loans and establish some loose sense of financial security for myself and my family, my thirties were a breaking out, learning to trust myself and access my desires outside of a reflexive desire for (our centrally patriarchal) societal approval. I wanted to write about a specific kind of thirty-something coming-of-age.

As I’ve written before, it took me a decade of trial and error to ultimately publish my novel. The first book I wrote didn’t sell, but it did—through workshopping, classes, and obsessively reading similar work—teach me how to write. After six years of rejection on that manuscript, I tried again. I wrote a similar later in life coming-of-age story with the same main character, but this time it had a mysterious death carrying the plot forward, threading in themes of revenge and retribution in addition to self-actualization. Eventually, I sold it to a top five publisher and my dream of being a novelist came true.

Now, I’m forty-three and my novel has been out in the world for five months. The first few months were a whirlwind of anxiety, adrenaline, and pride. The next few months felt like a morning-after brick of depression. But almost half a year out, I feel ever so slightly more stable. So I’m sharing a few things I’ve learned along the way.

1. Don’t let them fool you! It really does feel great to publish a book.

I’ve noticed some writers on here, mostly very accomplished writers, have dismissed the notion of publishing a book with a sentiment along the lines of, “publishing should not be the point.” This is a lovely notion, one I theoretically agree with! Of course to focus on the outcome of art is to inevitably compromise the art, etc etc. And yet to have your work read, to be in conversation with others through your writing, is very, very much the point for many of us.

Almost everyone who claims publishing a book is overrated are people for which it seems publishing has become a sort of given, already in the bag, something to take or leave. I will tell you, as someone for whom publishing was very much not an option for a very long time but was desperate to share a specific kind of story, seeing my book on the shelves of Barnes & Noble, at my hometown library, unexpectedly at a bookstore on vacation, still sweeps me away with an overwhelming sense of awe that a stranger may pick this incredibly personal artifact off the shelf and maybe even relate to it.

Not to say the process of publishing isn’t chock-full of disappointment. The biggest of which is that very few books sell. Still, it’s unbelievable to to get messages from women (and even some men!) who understand what I was trying to do withe the novel so fully, who feel seen whether it be in the learned instinct to contort the self for male approval, parsing between desire and expectation, the catastrophe of modern dating, or even just thin frizzy hair struggles. To say nothing of the events! To sit in front of a room and talk about the Word Doc I’ve been chipping away at for years and have people actually listen and even ask detailed questions? It’s like exiting a cave, finally able to breathe, to have your work out there, not just hammering over and over in your head wondering if any of it will make any sense to anyone else.

There is a rare and special feeling a writer gets when someone takes their work seriously. I’ve mostly felt this when a dear friend gives me detailed feedback on a piece. Objectively speaking, most of my pieces don’t matter all that much, but to finish a piece of writing you have to believe very much that it does. And when someone else buys into that same belief, really gets what you’re doing and grapples with it themselves, it’s this intense flash of intimacy and connection you’ve been working for in an otherwise devastatingly lonely space. This is how I felt constantly in those first few weeks post launch and every time I’ve received a message (thank you to everyone who has reached out, it’s by far the best part of all of this) about the book since.

I still have a gaping hole in my soul, but it is ever so slightly less gaping because now there is a book there, too. And that’s not nothing! Actually, it’s very much something.

2. Nothing will ever be right.

If you put your heart and soul into a book, it is very rare that all the different pieces, pieces that are very much out of your control, unlike the actual text which you have labored over for years, will be the way you want them to be. (And even that text, btw, will never be just right.)

Where to begin? The cover, perhaps. As I’ve written before, the cover, for me, was somewhat of a crisis. Style-wise, I wanted it a bit more threatening and adult, in line with the novel. But also, shouldn’t it convey that it’s a San Francisco story, a tech story, a love story, a queer story, a dark almost-thriller kind of story, but also a very human, hopeful story?? I wanted—needed—it to convey All The Things. My agent and editor are angels (and, side note, it still feels INSANE to say “my agent” and “editor,” at Harper-fucking-Collins, casually like that.) But they really are. And they reminded me that a cover can’t possibly and also shouldn’t try to convey the entirety of a book in a single image. Anyway, once I held the hardcover in my hands I fell in love; it was my baby and it was gorgeous.

There is a person in my life who regularly calls herself an “artist.” What do you do for a living? Someone might ask and she will reply, stone-cold, straight-faced, “I’m an artist.” Now, I know, intellectually, that writing is art and I spend most of my waking hours these days writing, and yet if someone were to ask me directly, “Are you an artist?” I’m not sure I’d be able to so much as nod without giggling wildly at my own pretension. Anyway, this woman was appalled that I would accept a cover that was not 100% exactly how I imagined it, that I would let my art be compromised in this way. Unsurprisingly, she got incredibly lucky in her career and has scarcely had to worry about success; she has the option to be demanding. But for most of us, it’s an ongoing balance of when to assert yourself and when to know not to be a dick about it.

Then there’s the audiobook. Does any author listen to their words read by another person and think—YES, this is exactly how I imagined it would sound! Maybe…?? Alas, this was not my reaction. I cannot detail my reaction at any length because I was only physically able to listen to about three lines of my audiobook before I threw my headphones across the room in horror. No offense to the incredibly talented and accomplished narrator who read it—I’ve been told it’s fantastic! Truly. But I’m not sure (short of a ten-year production staring Claire Danes and Jake Gyllenhaal), that it would ever meet the fantasy I harbored in my head.

What else? Everything else, of course. Press, events, film and foreign rights—the whole post-publication phase is all a slow coming to terms with reality. One might advise a person to keep their expectations low. Not me! No way. Pre-publication is full of anxiety, sure, but it’s also gloriously full of hope. This blissful window of hope is extremely rare in writing. Mostly, writing is the excruciating process of managing one’s self-loathing in the face of unending rejection. So when you land a window of possibility, let yourself dream. Don’t expect it all to happen, but expectation is different than hope, and I’m a big fan of hope. I poured over my launch event, for example, for months, and it was a dream come true. Go big, try hard, but if and when things don’t work out exactly the way you expect them to—know that that’s okay, and in fact perfectly normal.

3. Self promotion is hell but it offers the illusion of control.

On “pub day,” I texted my dearest writing friend something like: Do I have to post on IG today? Please say no!!

In my mind, this day was akin to a birthday (a big one)—all about me and what I wanted. Every other day I’m chugging along trying to do what I’m supposed to. But on my special day, I want to whatever the f* I want. I deserved it, damnit. And what I wanted most of all was to stay off social media.

YES OF COURSE YOU DO!!!!!! she replied immediately.

And so you write all the thoughts swirling around your head, that feel impossible to describe, especially when your entire body is shaky with nerves, but you try your best and you’re grateful to your friend for keeping your head straight as always.

Do some people genuinely not care about the curation of self they share with the world? Or possibly even enjoy that sharing? I have to imagine that there is at least some type of (young) person out there for whom this is true. For me it is hell. To put oneself online in that way feels inherently performative, and so even if I try to make it low-stakes and casual, I end up performing a version of low stakes and casual, which is in itself a sort of earnestness and quite possibly the very worst kind.

But I feel as if I have to do it. Because if you’re not promoting your book, who else will? Yes, my publisher gave me PR support—which I’m endlessly grateful for and did result in some excellent press—but, like most authors, it was limited to mostly the standard, mass outreach, unless you’re willing to dish out 8-12k per month to get your own independent publicist, which most authors cannot afford.

The best part about social media (and maybe also the worst) is that it gives you the illusion of control. In reality, you have very little control. You do have control over what you put out there—posting to socials regularly, reaching out to every relevant writer and reviewer you’ve ever loved, pitching essays like it’s your job, doing everything you can to make a splash. For months, I put my old MBA skills to work managing spreadsheets galore in an attempt to get galleys sent and press secured. But you do not have control over how it will land, how people will respond, what will actually get picked up. It’s all a bunch of spaghetti against the wall at the end of the day and so you do as much as you can without breaking your soul.

That last bit is important. I went outside my comfort zone with social media for sure, but I did not attempt to become some TikTok content creator with new reels every other day (I did about three TikToks and that was enough). I posted a reel once or twice on IG and felt near suicidal urges by the end of the (four hour!!) creation process, further exacerbated by its abominable ‘like’ count. Never again. If whoring my image out to the world every day with fluffy repetitive content is what it takes to be a successful novelist, then I wildly miscalculated what being a novelist entails—drawn to it primarily for the seclusion and utter absence of visual content—and perhaps it’s not what I want to be after all. Point is, there is always a line; find it and respect your own.

4. Books themselves don’t make money, but publishing provides momentum.

If I did the math, it’d probably work out to getting paid a few cents an hour to write my book. If anyone is writing literary fiction for the money—please stop immediately. If I then factored in expenses for publishing and tour (its own post), not to mention the opportunity cost of it all, it would certainly net out negative. Book sales are very rarely enough for authors to make real money. This is why, as I said at the beginning, most people who have no financial safety net (i.e. parental support, a side career, a spouse), cannot even consider the idea of writing because they are too busy trying to financially survive. But if you are able to somehow carve out time for this very demanding endeavor that makes very little money, publishing does offer a form of credibility, almost like a degree (also a privilege), which can lead to other things.

For example, I’m now teaching a class! The month-long workshop is designed for professionals who want to explore creative writing, but don’t know exactly where to begin. Unlike most workshops, you do not have to share your writing with the class (a requirement that prevented me from taking classes for years, so embarrassed I was by my own work) and instead I work 1-1 with students alongside the weekly sessions to understand and support their goals and ease them into a practice. Essentially, it’s the class I wish I had when I started. I piloted three cohorts this summer with about six people in each, and it was amazing. I’m teaching it again in September, apply here if interested!

Publishing a book also helped me gain momentum with this newsletter, and, importantly, connect with other writers I admire. For most authors, it’s not a direct path to a sustainable income, certainly not after your first book, but aside from all the warm amazing feelings mentioned above, practically, it can be a kind of calling card that really does help move your writing career forward.

5. Community is everything.

I’ve written about this at length but the publishing process made it even more clear and honestly I just can’t say it enough: friends are the most important thing. Even with a big five publisher, there is so much you have to do yourself—requesting blurbs, finding conversation partners for events, pitching press. This is not to say build community with an agenda. The people who supported me through this launch are people who I’ve been exchanging shitty first drafts with for years on end. But it is enormously helpful to have those friends, real friends, when the time comes to celebrate something big, when it comes time to call on people for help.

And I’m not just talking about writer-friends. I took my sister and mom on book tour with me because—yes, even in my forties—I needed all the emotional support 🫣. Meanwhile, friends from every crack of life came out to events, driving hours, even flying to be there. I have no desire to get married or have kids—the milestones we usually associate with adult celebration—and so I went big with my book launch as a way to reconnect with friends from all different parts of my life and don’t regret it. I think I cried at least once at every event. There were many times I had to keep my eyes down because looking up at at people I hadn’t seen in years might break me. The last five months have been an emotional rollercoaster and certainly not without disappointment, but a few months out and slightly more stable, I can see what an amazing ride it all was and I one-hundred-percent have my community to thank for that.

Recently, the New York Times published an article imploring men to “come back.” We never needed you to be perfect,” the author writes, addressing men who she says have grown emotionally vacant. “We needed you to be with us. Not above. Not muted. Not masked. Just with…We’re not asking for performances. We are asking for presence.”

Like many, I was struck by something undeniably true in the piece. Men are disappearing from social spaces and intimate connections. “A slow vanishing of presence,” is how the writer, Rachel Drucker, describes it. But inherent in this plea for men to “come back” is the call to an earlier time when men cared about presence and connection.

“There was a time, not so long ago,” she writes, “when even a one-night stand might end with tangled limbs and a shared breakfast.” Like the author, I’m old enough to remember mornings-after filled with fried eggs and the hope for more. But those moments were, more often than not, performed obligations. After the eggs, I mostly never heard from them again. She also notes that men once gained status by showing up with a woman by their side. But that woman always had to fit the shape of traditional beauty standards to achieve that status. It was just a matter of time until she was rendered ever more flatly, an icon that technology could replace.

Reading the piece, I had to wonder whether men have actually changed or if technology has just improved such that they can behave exactly how they’ve always wanted. And now, confronted with their stark preference for emotional avoidance when social pressures and shame are removed, we’re somehow shocked and appalled.

Back when we all met in person, there was some basic level of accountability at play; it behooved us to behave with decency—word might get around. But is the performance of kindness better than the bald disappointment of reality? I’ve never had my heart broken as much as I did between the years of 2005 - 2010, a period that would eventually be deemed the height of “hookup culture.” Facilitated by the rise of cell-phones, we did not “date” back then so much as we met-up. Meet-ups loosely involved texting your romantic interest after dark on your flip phone to agree on a nearby bar while your friends hovered until you were buzzed enough to go home with them. To put any overt effort into the process was immediately deemed lame, though most women I knew (myself included) bent over backwards to seem “chill” and go-with-the-flow.

When OKcupid popularized online dating at the tail end of the aughts, it did not destroy the dating landscape, for many of us it saved it. For the first time in our young lives the idea of a “date” was an actual thing, not just an abstract concept we saw in movies. The introduction of online dating (pre-Tinder) was a kind of social savior when the world of “chill,” drunken hookups was growing unbearable. The formality of crafting long, thoughtful bios and messages (this was all on a desktop, mind you) was a thrill. I remember workshopping these long-form passages with my guy friends who struggled to know what to say, resenting the effort required.

But technology is efficient, its aim is to make things frictionless. Those early days of online dating were a blip. It was just a matter of time before “hookup culture” re-emerged in a new, optimized form, men once again prioritizing ease, always more focused on the photos anyway. Except that, a decade later, women were no longer in the death grip of turn-of-the-century faux feminism, falsely equating sex with power at every turn. If men didn’t want to put in the emotional effort to form a genuine connection, we were—and are—happy to move on.

Men prioritizing ease and women prioritizing connection has long shown up in dating tropes. The “taxi light” theory, popularized decades ago by Sex and the City, continues to strike a chord for a reason. It posits that men enter a committed relationship not when they encounter the strongest spark, but when they’re at a point in their life when they want a partner, then their “light” turns on and they settle down with the closest loosely compatible woman nearby. Men also tend to pair with younger women as they get older, versus women with similar life experiences who (generally) know themselves and their needs better. As I’ve gotten older, I continue to notice the ways in which the women I know will go to great lengths to chase connection, seeking partners who expand their worlds, while men seem to increasingly prioritize ease with age, seeking women who fit neatly into theirs.

The obvious rationale is that women are raised to accommodate. From a young age, we’re taught to be experts at pleasing. We grow up with the notion that something about us needs fixing, whether it’s our bodies, our hair, our clothes. We’re conditioned to be thirsty for guidance and growth, to seek approval on every front — especially from men. And men are generally made to feel as if they need to be the stabilizing force in a heterosexual relationship, that they should have their life in control and not ask for help. But what I’m talking about is not necessarily about accommodation or control, it’s about who prioritizes connection above all else. And why.

As a matter of necessity in our society, women spend much of their lives seeking the approval of men. Some part of us feels the need to be seen and accepted by a man to feel valid. As someone who works in tech especially, much of my professional life has hinged on this acceptance. But women are so rarely seen in the way we want to be — as full, complex people. There is so much we’re encouraged to hide, to apologize for, that when a woman meets someone who understands her layers, who sees her and hears her and appreciates each complicated detail, logistics are a mere afterthought.

I can’t help but think that men’s preference for ease is related to the fact that they do not need to feel seen and understood by a woman in order to validate their existence. They are inherently validated by a patriarchal system. Attention from women may make a man feel more useful and masculine, reinforcing an existing role. But in a broader, intellectual sense — in terms of whose opinions are given weight, whose decisions shape our culture — they don’t need women’s approval to operate successfully in our society; their self-acceptance doesn’t hinge on whether there is a woman who fundamentally gets them.

In fact, if men are truly seen by a woman, they may have to confront weaknesses that society rarely requires them to consider. The mutual understanding some women seek can be the very thing that makes some men want to hide.

Men seeking ease over connection hints at something more fundamental about our inability, as a culture, to admire women. Men truly admiring women, in the sense that there are things about women they want to embody in themselves — to see women, in a sense, as role models — is still notably rare. Men are far less likely to read books by women, consume art by women, or have female heroes posted on their walls as kids. Not to say men aren’t drawn to women they respect. What I’m talking about is the desire to explicitly learn from someone else’s way of life, to not just like them but want to be like them. Inherent in the desire to be like someone else is the willingness to change oneself. And men are not used to introspecting and adjusting in this way—certainly not for women.

Technology changes behavior in so much as it frictionlessly facilitates our most base impulses. But it does not create those impulses. Men continue to be raised to feel as if they should know more than women, be superior to them in some core way. Even if they respect feminine qualities, they still rarely want to learn and inhabit those qualities themselves. And why would they in a culture that consistently devalues women’s work?

This is not to say men don’t learn from their partners over time. Studies show that men get more out of long-term partnership than women. But the growth inherent in the act of sharing a life (and benefiting from a woman’s emotional labor) isn’t what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is something more primal and upfront. A preliminary desire to learn from and expand, not the inevitable, unintentional happening of it.

Social pressures are falling to the wayside on every front—for better and worse. Thankfully, many of us feel less pressure to pursue the heteronormative path of marriage and children. Having a pretty woman as arm candy conveys less status than before—also a win. But why partner with an actual human at all, we may start to wonder, if there’s no social pressure? Connection is the answer. To feel seen and understood by another person—both physically and emotionally— and grow together with all the messiness inherent. As women continue to identify what we want and ask for it, to provide our own validation rather than contort ourselves to get it from men, the potential for connection is genuinely heightened, but the likelihood of ease is drastically lessened.

Technology is getting dangerously good, and it’s showing us who we are. There is a call to men, yes. But it’s much deeper than “come back.” It’s come in. Take the scary, risky step of prioritizing connection over ease. If we continue to let market-driven technology guide the evolution of human relationships, it will always optimize for less friction. But we, as humans, don’t have to. Because, though it’s harder and riskier and takes more time, when it comes to the “why” of it all, that friction is everything.

Related Recs:

TikTok overwhelms me to an extreme degree but two of my favorite cultural commentators have posts on there about this same piece and dating at large — here and here 📱

My friend Sam recently sent me this excellent quote in response to my last essay, and I’m sharing it here because it also relates to this one 🤔

“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.” — Marilyn Frye

And of course my novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, is very much about technology, dating, and everything in between 📕

The first time I made out with a woman I was thirty-five and terrified. We had just finished seeing a movie, the Ghostbusters remake, which, as my dream woman would be wont to do, she’d already seen twice. Following the movie we went to a bar. In an oversized booth, leaning in to hear each other clearly, I admitted that I’d only ever slept with men, that she was only the second woman I’d gone out with. That I was terrified to go out with women because, among other things, I was afraid to admit that very thing. That it had taken me this long to figure out my sexuality, and even that wasn’t quite right—it had taken me this long to start to try and maybe figure out my sexuality.

But despite my awkward admissions, conversation came easy. She nodded as I stumbled, laughed at my self-deprecating jokes. When I glossed over an answer she challenged my empty phrases with witty jabs or thoughtful questions. There was self-assurance in the way she spoke that felt masculine, except that her emotional perception was unlike any man. This combination of confidence and empathy mixed with humility and understanding was like my own personalized love potion. She had only ever dated women, she said, and in that moment it occurred to me that the best version of a woman may be one who was unconcerned with men.

I moved my hand towards hers at the bar, but stopped halfway there, opting to grip the moist coaster in front of me instead, tearing the printed top off the cardboard circle. It was, I’d realized, impossible for me to decipher between friendliness and flirting with a woman. I’d had no practice and the last thing I wanted to do was make a move, like a creep, if she was simply being friendly.

I could always tell when a man found me attractive. This mostly happened when I made him feel attractive. It was an easy trick. I’d comment on an album, pick a favorite from the last guy I’d dated, or a book, Moby Dick or East of Eden, say, and his eyes would light up. I was repeating his tastes back to him, tastes I’d learned from the men I’d studied over the years, and this would make him feel validated, wanting more. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt attractive simply by being honest. It’d been a long time since I’d let myself try.

It wasn’t until we were outside, lingering nervously by the subway stop like the end of every other New York date, that we kissed. She was short, around five feet. Having made a point to only ever date tall men in order to ensure—in my 5’9, curve-less body, draped strictly in t-shirts—that I’d feel at least a little bit feminine beside them, I felt nothing short of a monster hovering above her. Still, I liked her and so I invited her over.

By 10 pm she was straddling me on my couch, thick sheets of hair slapping me in the face. Her height was distracting, her thick hair, while mine was as thin as thread, intimidating, but her openness and desire was what scared me most. There’d been a kind of performance with men that I’d grown used to, the goal of which was not pleasure per say but the accumulation of power, a form of approval from the type of person I’d subconsciously learned to need approval from. Like so much of my life up to that point, going through the motions of chasing validation allowed me to side-step the deeply uncomfortable process of untangling what it was I actually wanted.

***

In college, the period of time when many begin to explore their sexuality in earnest, for some reason I doubled down on mine. Studying engineering with mostly men, long before social media was a thing (but when shows like Girls Gone Wild and The Man Show were very much a thing), the only time I saw women being romantic with other women was when they were vying for boys attention at the bar. This kind of overt performance for men was so off-putting to me—probably because at that point my entire existence was a subconscious web of covert performances for men—that I shut the idea of being with a woman out of my mind entirely. Two women together gave men pleasure, I reasoned, and I did not want to perform for men’s pleasure. I was oblivious to the now obvious irony that in this attempt at denial I was continuing to prioritize men’s reactions over the exploration of my own.

A decade of hetero-disappointments passed. Only in my thirties, as I started to dig deeper into who I was and what I wanted, detach from the all-male environments I’d professionally grown up in, did I begin to notice my attraction to women. It helped that dating men was becoming unbearable. As the reach of feminism expanded across culture, the ways I instinctively contorted my personality to make men comfortable was increasingly apparent—laughing when things weren’t funny, reflexively filling the holes in our conversation, asking question after question that I knew the answers to or didn’t care to know the answers to, to fill the silence. Men were finally being called out for their insufferability, terms like “mansplaining” popping up to describe behavior I recognized but had never considered naming.

I wasn’t attracted to the women I crushed on right away. It happened slowly as I got to know them. But was I attracted to the men I liked right away? Or had I simply learned after years of trial and error what kind of men I ended up working with and so a light went on when I saw their type? I had no idea what my ‘type’ was with women. Flirting with them made me feel awful, disgusting, even. Immediately, I mapped it to the hetero dynamic I was used to, picturing myself as a creepy, pushy guy. The women I liked were kind and open, to then try to convert that openness into something sexual, contorting their vulnerability for my own pleasure felt despicable. It was hard to imagine that maybe we were just two people enjoying one another, two equals with equal capacity to accept or reject.

So I did nothing.

Well, not nothing. I did what any person who is not comfortable with their emotions or human interaction in general does.

I opened an app.

Settings

Sexuality

Straight - Gay - Bisexual…

Bisexual

The word felt strange, too exploratory. It implied an openness to sex, not an instant fear at the thought of it. But there was no box for “Likes women and maybe wants to build up the courage to sleep with them but is also attracted to men even though she kind of hates them” so “bisexual” was it.

A new pile of smiling faces appeared on the screen. I always cringed at the cataloguing of people, but this time it was worse. I was used to looking at men this way, quickly assessing their height and eyes and the way they smiled. It was gross and judgmental but, I’d reasoned, it was nothing compared to the objectification women dealt with daily. This little window of objective browsing was a limited and optional experience for men not a constant grating pressure. Now, swiping through women, I was another person judging them, dismissing their whole person because their eyes seemed a little distant, or smile a little insincere.

The thought came and went as I closed the app. It was as if I couldn’t imagine sex with women because I liked them too much. I know women can be brutal, cause all kinds of heartbreak, but I hadn’t yet operated on that plane. And the experience I equated with sex at that time, a kind of transactional exchange of power and approval felt impossible to imagine with a woman.

Fears raced. Afraid I’d need to re-learn the fundamentals of intimacy, afraid to burden a woman I cared for with the help I knew I’d need. With men, I was happy to be reckless, jump into situations I knew wouldn’t work. I didn’t care if I hurt them, I’d been hurt by them my whole life. But I was terrified of disappointing a woman. And even more afraid of her rejection. There was safety in my failed relationships with men. I was happy to blame them, avoid the role I played in my own singleness. But if I failed with women, where would that leave me?

Life as Fiction

I wrote the bones of this essay almost seven years ago but never published it. Since then, I’ve woven these feelings and experiences into my novel.

Some readers of Nothing Serious have said they can’t understand how a woman can be in her mid-thirties and not know who she’s attracted to, that it feels unbelievable. It’s always funny to me when people say fiction is unbelievable without knowing that the very parts they’re referencing are pulled from life.

This is right under the wire for June, but HAPPY PRIDE to everyone out there celebrating, exploring, or even just contemplating their queerness! 🏳️‍🌈

Recommendation:

This article about the academic study of heterosexuality (specifically the “tragedy” of it) circulated months ago and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. So much here, might write more about it later.

“The straight culture she observed relied “on a blind acceptance that women and men do not need to hold the other gender in high esteem as much as they need to need each other” and “to learn how to compromise and suppress their disappointment” in one another.”

I’m dog-sitting my favorite doggies this week in the Adirondacks, and picked this off the extremely well-stocked wall of classics where I’m staying. Already blown away by the first story, The Pleasure of Her Company, which happens to relate to this post!