I talk a lot about idols in this newsletter. Mostly fleeting references to my tendency towards putting people on a pedestal, defending the habit (within limits). At any given point I usually have at least one person to whom I’m engaging in some sort of hero-worship. For most of my life, that energy was wasted on various artist-adjacent men who I wanted to be with. Now my obsessions tend towards actual-artist women who I want to be like.
The first time I saw Jacqueline Novak perform was during the first New York run of her show, Get On Your Knees (GOYK), now on Netflix, back in 2019. I’m not generally a theater-goer, but my friend Karolina invited me to the show and I love Karolina and trust her taste entirely. We laughed for the full 90 minutes and were left stunned. I’ve kept the program displayed on my shelf since, in the section amongst my favorite books, knowing it left an impact greater than a single piece of work, more an introduction to the type of work—writing, thinking, dare I say a philosophy on being—that fundamentally shook me.
But my deep admiration for Jacqueline didn’t start right away. The show spoke to me on a near-cellular level but Jacqueline as a character, a thinker, was not really known. My fascination grew when she teamed up with her friend and fellow comedian, Kate Berlant, and started the now famous (to a certain milieu) weekly podcast, Poog.
Given how much I rave about Poog, I’m often asked to describe it, an impossible task to anyone familiar with the show. One can start by explaining it’s a kind of mock-wellness podcast and that the name, Poog, is “Goop” spelled backwards. But I hate starting there. More than anything, it’s a weekly dissection of the mundane. An exhaustive interrogation of the ridiculous, hilarious, humiliating act of being human. The conversations are so winding it can veer into chaos, but, for me, it is church. A demonstration of the liminal (to use a Poog word) space that so many of us occupy, between the thralls of cultural influence and the criticism of it. A reminder that women can analyze everyday minutiae with the utmost seriousness, which by no means excludes hilarity, but invites it. And that when they do, it is layered and complex and winding to the point of absurdity. Like life itself.
Listening to Jacqueline on Poog, with the weight of her work in the back of my mind, was when my admiration kicked into full gear. Not only the way she fixated on seemingly minor moments with the analytical weight of a both scientist and a poet, but also because every reference she had from her own upbringing felt eerily close to my own. (It’s important that an idol feels similar enough that, however delusional, becoming them somehow feels within reach). We were both raised in the culturally stunted suburbs of New York City, and we were born the same year. Needless to say, when she describes the glory and thrill of the Bourbon chicken sample at her mall’s food-court as a teen, I feel as if my whole life is suddenly made real.
It is this making my own self feel real that ultimately fuels admiration; a narcissistic but undeniable pull. When she recently claimed on Poog that “babies screams are the sound of truth,” I stopped in my tracks. What a relief from my day-to-day of nearly everyone around me falling over themselves to have babies and care for babies and make babies stop crying as if screaming at the top of one’s lungs every time you open your eyes doesn’t make absolute perfect sense!
Post-pandemic, GOYK came around to New York again. This time, three years later, I brought my boyfriend, and then my sister. Feeling like a fourteen year-old making a mixtape: if anyone in my life is going to understand me, they need to understand this. When J announced that she was recording her special for Netflix, my sister and I got tickets (again) on the spot. Aptly, Jacqueline called the taping of this special her “wedding.” Obviously, this made me love her more. I have never had a real wedding, nor do I have any desire to, but you can be sure my book launch next year will be met with a similar grandeur.
I will not do her special justice by trying to sing its praises here. There are critics far more talented than me who have done that in spades. I can describe it as a treatise on our misguided portrayals of gender, not insulting men but exposing them as fundamentally “feminine.” It is also, most obviously, about blow jobs, which I (like most women) have my own storied past. Mostly, though, it’s a hilariously precise plunge into the embarrassment of the human experience. About how performance as a way of life becomes the expectation for women, and one woman’s pursuit to rigorously resist the facade. “Authentic or not at all,” is a common refrain.
And how rarely are we held accountable to authenticity? The most “raw” of social posts drip with performance. My day-job alone precludes me from the pursuit. I make quiet protests instead, refusing to repeat “happy Monday” at the start of a Zoom call or utter the word “sync” when I simply mean “meet.” Jacqueline’s show is a performance, of course, but it’s fully and intentionally so, and one shrouded in self-awareness. To lean into the act, really own it, is ultimately, as we see in the show, the way to overcome the embarrassment of it. And this taking a performance seriously while grappling with the horror of it, and doing both well, is a force to witness.
Before this special came out, I would wear my Jacqueline sweatshirt proudly, but few knew who she was. This didn’t make me feel cool or in-the-know so much as it made my support calcify, knowing she deserved more. She’s been open about her periods of depression (her first book is called How to Weep in Public), has talked on the podcast about being perceived as too weird to get normal writing gigs. But that kernel that some perceive as weird, is the essence of her genius.
To be clear, much of my obsession is play. I love Jacqueline but I don’t know her. She’s a placeholder, an idea of a woman who is a little bit closer to being the type of woman, in one specific way—authenticity or nothing at all, intellectual rigor on the most minor of details—that I’d like to be. A handful of women artists have had this role—Sheila Heti, Carrie Brownstein, essayists I’ll leave unnamed. It’s childish and ridiculous and intentional. Rest assured, I’m sane enough to not actually want to be someone else, or to think any one person has anything figured out.
But—hear me out—the modern world is godless and with worship comes a sense of community. A lot of people lament the lull in their friendships as they move towards middle age. I can’t help but think this is less about age specifically, and more about a stage in one’s life, which often correlates with age— wrapped up in children, work, aging parents, increasingly disconnected from our own pleasure, as is common, especially for women, who move into a caretaking role.
So let me plug innocent obsessions, which make for fantastic friendship fodder. On a near daily basis, I’ll text back and forth with at least three friends about Poog and whatever writer-woman I’m in the thralls of. Friendship has always started with a shared interest. Is part of the challenge with building and sustaining friendships that we grow ashamed of playful passions as adults? It’s a blast to care so fully about something not packed with stress, to really lean into taking your interests seriously, blow jobs and all.
If you somehow haven’t yet: Watch her special on Netflix! ❤️