September swept in a few days ago and injected me with a boundless expanse of sudden ENERGY! I took three beautiful days off for the long weekend and had absolutely zero plans for the first time… all year? Nowhere to be, no obligations, no guilt. It has RESTORED ME in a way I WASN’T EXPECTING and I am so ready for the seasons to change. Fuck me up, fall. Chill my bones, let’sgoooooo.
Last weekend I crushed my favorite book of 2023 again in a day and a half and spent the rest of the time writing and writing and writing. I still haven’t watched The Bachelorette finale (I heard it was a dumpster fire… ughhhhhhh) or finished Love is Blind UK, but I don’t even care! I received a really fucking great email two days ago that I can’t tell you about, but I’m still buzzing! Life is good!
I don’t have any astute or weird observations for you this week (well, I literally always have half-baked essays swirling around in my head; whether they make it into fully-formed sentences is another question entirely) so instead, I’m sending you the soundtrack to my life. Really it’s just the playlist I use when I write or when I’m trying to a catch a certain vibe to put me in the right headspace for the story I’m writing, but I listen to it several times a day.
I don’t know what it is about 2024, but this was THE YEAR of female pop artists taking over the known universe. There’s quite literally no one better to turn to when I need to access a wide range of emotions that aren’t always mine – Charli XCX, Normani, and Chappell Roan have all done the work for me.
(Not *everything* on this playlist is new material – some of these are older songs that still fucking hit for me, like Halcyon Days-era Ellie Goulding. Gah!!!!!)
I started this playlist in March and it’s changed approximately one million times since then; it’s a living, breathing organism that changes with my mood and writing needs. Some of the songs have perfect A+ lyrics for my story (I won’t tell you which ones!!!) and some really just help me jump into a scene with the right vibes. There’s probably less Taylor Swift on it than you’re expecting.
Sometimes I write entire scenes with my Airpods in, music fully blasting in my ears. Sometimes I need perfect fucking silence to concentrate and sometimes I need to bounce to a beat while I write. It depends!!
Anyway, please enjoy the current soundtrack to my life. I spend more time curating it than I should. It’s mostly upbeat, the kind of playlist that might be good to drive to, but there are a few calmer songs in there, too. Tell me if there’s a particular song you love???
“The Growing Gender Divide, Three Minutes at a Time” by Spencer Kornhaber for The Atlantic
This is a delightful review of Sabrina Carpenter’s new album through a lens you probably wouldn’t expect:
“What’s best is that her music is hilarious in the way that only music can be, arising from surprising clashes of sound and sentiment. Think about “Espresso.” Previous hot-and-heavy songs of summer have had sappy, strident choruses, such as Katy Perry’s “You make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream.” Carpenter, however, has us all singing along to a sigh: “I guess so.”
That sigh expresses the core emotion of her songwriting: the exasperation of being young, female, straight, and single in 2024. On “Slim Pickins,” Carpenter sings about setting her standards low and still being disappointed: “A boy who’s nice, that breathes / I swear he’s nowhere to be seen.”
“Lessons from babyworld” by Haley Nahman for
I love reading perspectives/experiences that are really different than mine, because some things are simply not able to be known unless you’ve gone through them yourself:
“There’s a cliche among new parents that as soon as you have a baby, you wish you could apologize to everyone you’ve known who’s had a baby before you, because you realize you weren’t compassionate enough, curious enough, around enough. I felt that regret right away. Try to give your non-parent friends grace versus holding grudges. Parenthood is such a steep and immersive learning curve that sometimes you can forget what it was like before you were doing it. Early parenthood can make you pretty self-involved, too. So try to remember to engage with what your friends are going through. Just as you may feel a bit unseen, they may feel the same way in reverse.”
“The Summer of Girly Pop” by Carrie Battan for The New Yorker
Isn’t it crazy to think about how different Brat girl summer was from, say, Britney in the 00s? Feels like a different universe:
“For the pop stars of ten or twenty years ago, girlhood and femininity presented a double bind. They were necessary parts of building a persona, but also a source of derision. These days, femininity in pop culture is approached from a cool remove and treated as meta-commentary, even in mass culture, à la Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.”
All Fours by Miranda July now officially holds the record for my book club’s largest rating spread – we had everything from a 1 through 9 out of ten. WILD.
Weirdly, I’m giving it a 6/10, which normally would mean I probably wouldn’t recommend it to you. BUT! The writing is stunning, and my friend who gave it a 9/10 convinced me with her pitch on Wednesday night that what All Fours set out to do, it did. It’s helpful to view All Fours as a piece of performance art, meant to elicit a reaction, even if it’s outrage! Lol. My friend’s theater history professor presented Miranda July as a student of the “Theater of Cruelty,” which is essentially an artistic movement wherein artists assault the senses of the audience. This describes the book perfectly for me. So if you want to be assaulted by an insane story with an unlikable narrator while you’re reading a novel full of beautiful sentences and gripping interiority, this is your book.
I firmly reject the idea that if you have a hard time getting into or finishing this book, it means you’re not smart or ~cool~ enough to understand it. No. It’s not that at all. It may just mean that you read primarily for enjoyment, which does not include willingly absorbing pain and discomfort through your eyeballs. Which, like… understandable!
Were you as obsessed with Alexa Chung as I was 10+ years ago? Well, Madewell has decided to make our nostalgic Millennial dreams come true with a new collab, and I’m feeling 22 again. I’m not as obsessed with the collection as I thought I would be, but I did get the green long-sleeved shirt, if only because this photo looks like a Twilight promotional poster:
That’s it! LMK if there are any bangin’ songs missing from my playlist. I need them all.
SUCH a spot on description of All Fours! Thank you for putting it into words!
When I tell you I chortled at that Twilight creative direction observation. Lololololol! In the same vein, I feel like there's a need to discourse about the pop culture moments that supersede their origin point. Moreover, HOW MANY there are from Twilight! E.g. Where the hell have you been, loca?!, Get on my back spider monkey, and, the Baseball Scene. It's all so iconic?