There’s been a lot of chitter-chatter about 100% mineral SPF lately, but unless you have a sensitivity to the chemical kind, I think the best thing to do is to use both, to really cover your bases. (The lead aesthetician at the fancy dermatologist’s office I occasionally frequent once told me that if everyone switched to 100% mineral, she’d have job security forever, because it doesn’t work. Slightly more scientifically, perhaps, the dermatologist there said that I should be looking for a mineral formula that’s 20% zinc oxide, which is an almost impossibly high bar to clear. So that might be the issue with most mineral-only sunscreens?)

I typically use a hybrid sunscreen, which includes both chemical and mineral UV blockers. But if I’m really on my bullshit, I’ll layer a mineral formula over a chemical formula. (I’m pale enough that I can use an untinted mineral sunscreen—the one linked above has a green cast to combat redness—but if your skin is any darker than “fair” you will probably want to try a tinted formula, many of which can be used in lieu of foundation. That being said, I have heard good things about this one!)

Second: Retinol/Retinal.

Similar to sunscreen, retinoids are one of the few anti-aging ingredients that have been clinically proven to actually work. The problem is, they can also cause irritation, peeling, and maybe even purging. I was prescribed Retin-A in my late twenties and noped out after about six weeks, because of what’s now known as “the retinol uglies.” I probably would never have tried it again, except the pandemic happened and I figured nobody would be looking at me for a while anyway.

I started with a French pharmacy formula called A313, and I still recommend it to newbies. It’s cheap (although it used to be cheaper), it’s effective, and it’s relatively easy to tolerate. The big drawback is that it smells weird and has a texture similar to that of Vaseline, so it really might not align with your goals for your sex life. A friend of mine uses this retinol, which is available in three concentrations, so you can start with the lowest and work your way up. But if you have access to a dermatologist, you can do the same thing with prescription Tretinoin, and it’ll probably be cheaper and more effective. Lastly, the formerly prescription-only Differin is now available over the counter. I’ve never tried it but I can’t imagine it’s not good?

Third: Vitamin C.

Vitamin C serums work two ways: They help prevent future damage from free radicals, and help repair damage that’s already been done, including lightening dark spots and improving overall tone. But it’s apparently a bit tricky to work with, because things like exposure to light make it less effective. Look for a stabilized formula in a dark glass or opaque package, at a concentration of 10 or 15%. This one is astronomically expensive because they basically invented the whole category, but some people think it smells like “hot dog water.” I prefer this one because it’s been tested on all skin tones, is available in three concentrations, and has a texture similar to a face oil. But there are cheaper options that reportedly work almost as well, including this one, which I’ve used, and this one, which is essentially a dupe of the OG SkinC serum. (One note: That last is 20% C, which might be too strong for some people.)

Literally we could stop there. If you’re not already using these three actives, they will change your skin. Obviously you also need a moisturizer—personally I like an oil-free one that isn’t doing too much—and a mild cleanser. For lots of people that’s enough!

Ostensibly, S was not a major factor in my decision-making process as I dithered over when, and then whether, to return to New York. But I can no longer pretend, half a decade later, that he wasn’t a regular feature on pros side of the pros and cons lists I was continually writing and rewriting in my head.

Brooklyn had: L’s father, for better and for worse; her school, which she was still attending remotely, in part because the IRL students were being required to wear clear plastic face shields1 over their cloth or paper masks; our apartment, which was full of our clothes and books and art and toys (and empty of people who expected us to put every single glass straight into the dishwasher the exact second we finished drinking out of it); and my friends, who had declared that they now felt safe enough to sometimes hang out with us, so long as we could do so outside.

Whereas Vermont had: my own father and mother, at least until they flew back to Florida at the end of October; an alternative (if surely temporary) school for L that was going from two days a week in-person to four the week after my parents left; a very large house, complete with our own en-suite bathrooms; a reservoir to swim in, until it got too cold, and endless trails and dirt roads to walk on; and, yes, a boyfriend, albeit a brand-new one who resided nearly an hour away.

Staying as long as my parents did was a no-brainer. Living with other adults, especially adults who loved L and were willing to occasionally watch her so I could go for a run, or to write for a few hours on the patio of a nearby coffee shop, or on a date with S, was infinitely superior to being alone with her. But the choice to stay longer was much more complicated, and it would have been almost impossible if I’d had any idea what I was actually choosing.

The problem was, I couldn’t think more than a few months ahead, tops. We didn’t know whether the vaccines then being tested would work; if they hadn’t, the lockdowns could have gone on for years. The only thing I did feel certain about, circa October 2020, was that, with winter coming, the situation was going to get worse again before it got better. If we went home, our chances of exposure would skyrocket.2

I’d been steadfast in my refusal to admit, even to myself, that I might have been swayed by my desire to keep seeing S. The most I’d say, when pressed, was that he was the person I thought most likely to continue regularly spending time with me once the temperatures dropped; I didn’t believe that any of my friends in Brooklyn would, because they hadn’t the previous March. (I now realize that this was probably trauma, rather than an objective analysis of the facts.) But that didn’t stop me from telling him—within weeks of deciding that L and I would be staying put until early 2021, at the earliest—that I wanted him to date me the way he’d be dating me if I lived in Vermont, because now I kind of did.

When I said it, we were walking through a large, wooded preserve across the highway from his house. We did that a lot, because there wasn’t much else to do once you’d had sex and were waiting for it to be time to make dinner.3 “What does that mean?” he asked. “Is there something concrete that you want to be different?”

“No,” I lied. In fact, there were several things that I wished were different. We’d been exclusive, by necessity, from the beginning, but we still only saw each other once a week,4 and it wasn’t enough for me. We’d never gone to a restaurant together, except to pick up carry-out, and I hadn’t met any of his friends.5 He’d recently surprised me by mentioning, in passing, that he was an introvert. I hadn’t had any idea, because I’d never seen him interact with anyone besides me.

“So what are you asking me to do?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess I’m asking you to change the way you’re thinking?”

When we first messaged, he’d expressed concern about a line I’d added to my Tinder bio after we’d matched, noting that I was only in Vermont for the summer. He was, he said, looking for a long-term relationship. After our second date, he’d softened his stance, writing in a multi-paragraph text that he was “comfortable with the idea that [our] potential future is open-ended” due to my “geographic situation,” because he found me “hot and intriguing,” and wanted to get to know me better. (I did not point out that my theoretically imminent return to New York actually rendered our potential future the opposite of open-ended. That, I knew, would have been neither hot nor intriguing.) Lately, though, I’d begun to worry that he was too accepting of my temporal and spatial limitations. If he viewed our eventual breakup as a foregone conclusion, I thought, he wouldn’t allow himself to feel what he might otherwise have felt for me. I wanted him to feel everything.

But I couldn’t say that. Instead, I said something lame about wanting us both to be open-minded. I can’t remember his exact response, but I’m pretty sure he made the obvious sex joke before saying, basically, that he would.

A few weeks later, just before Thanksgiving, I brought it up again. L was visiting her father and his family in Connecticut, so S was able to spend two nights (in a row!) with me at my parents’ house.6 We were downstairs, laying in my antique canopy bed, and I had just told him about my appearance on a then-13-year-old episode of This American Life, during which I’d observed, “Breaking up is literally so common. Like, everyone you know has broken up with everyone they’ve ever dated, except maybe the person they’re currently with.” I was old enough to know, by then, that most relationships end, and that ours probably would to, for some normal and not currently obvious reason. That, I explained, was what I had been asking him for. That was what I wanted.

“You wanted this to run its course?” he asked, laughing.

I laughed too, because we both knew I didn’t. But I also didn’t want to have regrets. I didn’t want to be back home in New York City the next spring, or summer, or fall, thinking about him and wondering what might have been. Intellectually, I said, I knew that falling in love—at least, the kind of love you’d change your whole life for—was a low-probability event. That was why I thought it was better to risk it. If it didn’t happen, at least we’d know that we’d taken it as far as we could. And if it did, well, I’d deal with the consequences.

Of course I would. I’d have to. Because I was in love with him already, even if I would have sooner died than tell him that.

[OMG I’m so sorry I guess there is eventually going to be a Part 3?]

Typically, the trip took at least six hours, longer if we left after mid-morning in the middle of the week. But on that day, a Thursday, it took fewer than five, because there were no other cars on the road. (It feels wrong to admit it, but even apocalypses have their advantages.) My daughter, then a kindergartener, rode in the back with her iPad and approximately two dozen stuffed animals; the front passenger seat was piled high with backpacks and insulated grocery bags.

I’d filled a wide-mouthed plastic water bottle with peonies and ranunculi, the remains of an arrangement that my friend Kat had made me for Mother’s Day, and set it in one of the cup holders on the center console. I knew it was silly to try to transport fresh flowers in that fashion—my arm kept bumping the blossoms as I drove, causing them to drop petals and dust my elbow with yellow pollen—but I couldn’t have thrown them away. Those were difficult times, and I needed all the evidence I could collect that the world contained both beautiful things and people who loved me.

It was the search for same, I suppose, that led me to Vermont in the first place. I adored Brooklyn, and I still do; I dragged L to Fort Greene Park every halfway decent day that spring to look at the blooming magnolia and cherry and crabapple trees. But I was scared enough of getting infected as we traversed the dangerous terrain between our apartment door and the sidewalk in front of our building (a hallway, an elevator, another hallway, and an air-locked vestibule) that I limited our excursions to one per day. We stayed out as long as we could—I packed snacks and drinks and books and sidewalk chalk—but eventually one or the other of us would have to pee and we’d be forced back inside until the following morning. The thought of spending an entire summer thus imprisoned was intolerable.

Also, I was very lonely. The only non-L person I saw with any regularity for the bulk of that period was my husband, A, who’d moved out at my request just over a year before. He’d rented a studio a few blocks away, but he rarely took L there. Instead, he stopped by our apartment daily, at pretty much whatever time he wanted, to spend an hour or so with her in our living room. (Except, of course, when he wasn’t feeling well, which was often—he was an alcoholic, a smoker, a depressive, and, maybe, a hypochondriac.) Our interactions were, as you might imagine, challenging.

People had begun to talk about forming pods, but nobody was actually doing it yet. Even if they had been, L and I weren’t the most attractive candidates. Our frequent contact with A meant that we couldn’t really isolate; while I didn’t know exactly what he was up to when he wasn’t with us, I sincerely doubted that he was strictly adhering to social-distancing protocols.

I did have one friend who was somewhat receptive nevertheless—around mid-April, we’d begun timing our outings to coincide whenever possible, so that our children could, if not play, at least shout at each other from a short distance through their homemade masks—but that receptivity had been premised on her and her husband’s belief that their entire family had gotten sick with the virus right around the time the schools shut down, and was therefore immune. When the antibody tests they’d lined up for hours outside of CityMD to get said otherwise, I knew that L and I were on our own.

Even still, I dithered, waiting to leave until practically the last possible moment, just sixteen days before my parents would arrive from their other house, in Port St. Lucie. (There’d been an intrafamily debate earlier that spring vis-a-vis the advisability of them getting on a plane—technically, my father still had cancer, even if it was so small that the doctors couldn’t figure out exactly where it was—but by mid-April, he’d decided that he’d rather risk death than endure a summer in Florida.) I figured we’d remain in Vermont, in their finished basement that was bigger, and in some ways nicer, than our place in Brooklyn, just long enough to make our two-week quarantine worth it—maybe six weeks total, or eight, or ten.

But that’s not what happened. By late June, I’d decided to stay until at least mid-August. By mid-August, I’d begun thinking that maybe we’d leave when my parents did, in the beginning of November. And in the beginning of November, I enrolled L in the local elementary school.

Remote learning, which we’d been attempting through her Brooklyn school, had been, for L, a disaster. She was still only five, and while I wasn’t that concerned about her education per se, I could see that she very much needed to be in the physical presence of other children. I rationalized that even if I pulled her out of the local school and re-enrolled her for in-person education at P.S. 11 at the next opportunity, just after Christmas, the seven weeks of extra socialization would have been worth it.

“Yeah, you’re not going back to Brooklyn after Christmas,” my then-boyfriend, S, said when I told him this.

I don’t know why he was so certain, but of course he was right. Perhaps it was just that he’d been watching me not move back to the city for months, ever since we’d met2 in early July. Living with my mom and dad again at 44 wasn’t ideal, but it was much better than the isolation we’d experienced in the spring; I honestly didn’t quite believe my friends when they started telling me, circa midsummer, that the situation had changed, and that if I came back, we could (sometimes) hang out. The lockdown had shown me that, when the shit hits the fan on a world-historical level, people mostly choose their real families over their chosen families. And while I didn’t blame them—at least, I tried not to—I felt like I needed to do the same thing.

[Part 2 is up!]

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I was probably due to lose my freelance job at some point this year, and obviously there are many people in much worse straits, so no major complaints there. And I actually have been exercising a lot, although I’m not sure it’s a huge net gain once you’ve factored in the loss of the kind of almost-passive exercise that one gets simply by moving around New York City, a thing that I no longer do.

But. But! Instead of acquiring more childcare, as intended, I (like nearly everyone) lost what childcare I did have, a now-unbelievable-sounding forty-plus hours a week, most of which was provided free of charge by the city in the form of public kindergarten. Technically, of course, my daughter was still enrolled in school through the end of last month. But despite her teachers’ heroic efforts, and notwithstanding the once- or twice-daily live sessions that she (usually) deigned to attend, it was really more like private kindergarten. By which I mean that she was alone, with only me to assist and motivate her, and I’m not sure I was especially great at it.

I am far from the first to observe that this period has felt very much like a second maternity leave—not since my daughter’s infancy have I spent anywhere near this much time with her. In some respects, it’s been better: I’m tired, but not can’t-form-new-memories tired, and while I remain nervous that everything that’s going on right now might mess her up, the potential consequences are mostly a lot more nebulous and remote than, like, crib death. In other ways, it’s worse: While my first maternity leave was, like this one, unpaid, at least I got to decide when it ended. Eight weeks after having her, I had already hired a part-time nanny and was inching my way back to work. What’s happening now feels like it could go on for ages.

So, I suppose it was only a matter of time before—plot twist—I started to accept it? Had I known, when I picked her up on March 11th, that my daughter would not be returning to the school building again for the rest of the academic year, and possibly even the rest of the calendar year, I’d have been inconsolable. As it was, I was close, and I was only thinking that this might go on for, I don’t know, six weeks?

But the set-point theory of happiness, as explained by the APA, posits that everyone has their own baseline of “subjective well being…that is generally stable throughout life and that they are likely to return to despite life-changing events” both positive and negative. I think I believe this! Yes, certain things in my life have improved over the last two months (for example, my daughter and I have relocated to a house in Vermont that’s just a few miles away from the nearest swimmable body of water), and I’m sure that’s a huge part of it. But I think it’s probably also somewhat due to my lifelong habit of just being relatively happy.

That habit is, of course, a privilege. It is also, I suspect, a byproduct of the many more concrete privileges I’ve enjoyed throughout my life, e.g. the ability to relocate to a house in Vermont. I’m not exactly immune to the anxieties that so many of us are experiencing—about the virus and our various governments’ utterly inadequate responses to it, about the not-even-creeping-anymore authoritarianism of our current presidential administration, and about the structural racism and state-sponsored racist violence that has recently, finally (I hope) become un-ignorable even to most people who look like me—but those anxieties have felt a little more manageable as of late.

I still miss my friends. I miss my job, by which I mean I miss my very charming coworkers and the money and even, at times, the work, and I miss being able to walk over to Xi’An Famous Foods at lunchtime to pick up an order of spicy cumin lamb noodles and a tiger vegetable salad. I miss karaoke, and meeting someone for a drink, and at least having the option to go out dancing, and a million other things. I’ve been feeling better nevertheless.

But even as I’ve returned, however improbably, to my old self, there are some things about me, this summer, that I hardly recognize. For example: I paddleboard now? I’m not fantastic or anything. But on Friday morning, I rented a paddle and a board and I stood right up on it like it was easy, because it was, and I pushed myself away from the beach full of children, one of which was my own, to a distant part of the reservoir, where I could be alone with only the water and the trees and mountains and the sky, for several minutes at a time.

Maybe this is who I’d have been, before this, if certain other things hadn’t worked out the way I thought I wanted them to, earlier on. (Obviously, it’s not only the paddleboarding.) Or maybe I’m just good at adapting? I don’t know. This feels like a time for asking questions, for being open, and for hoping that, eventually, the answers will come.

Lauren

P.S. Want some more coronavirus-inspired musings from me? I wrote an essay back in March for Glamour, headlined “Will My New Relationship Survive the Pandemic?” (Spoiler alert: It did not.)

Nobody has been waiting to hear from me. I know that. Even my very few paid subscribers have likely not noticed that they spent the last year giving me money for a product they did not receive, and might in fact respond to this reminder of such by canceling their subscriptions. (That’s okay, if that’s what happens! I get it.)

It’s been a hard year for everybody, but it’s been an especially hard year for me. I don’t know why it’s so difficult for me to say that here, but it is. In person, I can be open to a fault, telling pretty much anyone I meet pretty much anything that pops into my head. But in this format, I feel exposed. There are, somehow, hundreds of you, and this is not what you signed up for. But I guess I might need to say this, just so I can clear the decks: It’s been a hard year. And the reason it’s been hard is that I spent almost all of it in the (still ongoing) process of getting divorced.

Getting divorced is, as you may have heard, terrible*, and I do not recommend it. In fact, I’m not even sure I’d recommend marriage at this point, because getting married increases your risk of getting divorced. In my case, for example, it went from 0% (as an unwed person) to somewhere between 22% (that’s the likelihood, according to one study I found, of a college-educated woman not making it to her twentieth anniversary) and 50% (which everyone agrees is not actually the overall divorce rate, anymore, but no one seems to have settled on a new one). Whatever the exact odds, I certainly never thought they’d apply to me; I never believed that I would be in this position. That is, I guess, a mark of the level of privilege I’ve enjoyed throughout my life, but it’s also exactly what almost everyone would say, I’m betting. Who would get married, if they thought there was a real chance that they’d end up like this?

Anyway: Because it’s been a hard year, I’ve had a hard time writing. I’ll spare you the details, but I don’t think it would be too dramatic to say that I’ve mostly been in survival mode. The vast majority of the professional writing I’ve done has been in the form of marketing emails for a fashion brand, and the bulk of my “personal” writing has been very personal, because it’s been in my journal. Beyond that, I haven’t really been able to accomplish much.

This past weekend, though, for the first time in a year, I had precisely 71 hours to myself in which to write (and eat, and exercise, and sleep…) My parents came to the city to take care of my five year old—and, apparently, to give her a thorough introduction to televised professional golf and MSNBC—and I went with three friends on a soi-disant writing retreat in a small town a few hours north of the city.

Depending on the type of person you are, or perhaps on how much you know about the type of person I am, you either will or will not be surprised to hear that I had some trouble getting into it. My first fifteen or so hours were lost to travel, dinner, and sleeping, and when I woke up on Friday morning, I made the questionable decision to spend a couple of hours on freelance work, which is absolutely not the work I’d gone away to do. Then everyone else got up and it was time for breakfast, and then a coffee run, and by the time we made it to the studio it was nearly one o’clock.

I set up at a desk and kicked things off by spending more than an hour writing in my journal. Finally, at around 2:30 or so, I opened my manuscript, only to be instantly overcome by a wave of transparently Freudian exhaustion. Because someone else was, by then, sitting on the space’s one small couch, I decided to get my sneakers and go on a walk. Which was a good idea except that, by the time I returned, everyone else was about ready to pack it in. We went book-shopping and to another friend’s house for dinner and that was it for day one.

Day two was better, but day three, being the last day and only a half day at that, was worse. By mid-morning I was nearly in tears about how little I’d done, how difficult everything is, and how ill-suited I am to my chosen profession. Deep down I knew, of course, that any writing goal I might have set for a long weekend away from my normal life would necessarily have been both too ambitious and not ambitious enough, whether or not I met it. When you’re trying to finish a novel, any given three-day period is going to be a drop in the bucket. But when I expressed this, my friend E. suggested that I take a break to write something short, noting that in having gone a year working on a novel without actually finishing or publishing much of anything, I’d been doing only the hard part.

So, here it is. When I started working on this, on Sunday morning, I felt deeply un-confident. Right now, I feel slightly less so. Like, it at least seems possible that I’ll finish this and go back to my novel and feel a bit more capable? So I guess in that sense it has helped.

When you go through something like what I’ve been going through (again, leaving aside the details!) it wears you down. Which is the problem with the metaphor at the beginning of this letter. Like, yes, the tasks I need (or want) to complete have seemed to get bigger and bigger, and more and more impossible. But maybe the real issue is that I’ve been the one rolling downhill, and, completely unlike a snowball would, I’ve been getting smaller and smaller.

So. With apologies to Miley Cyrus, maybe it’s time to start climbing back up that mountain. With apologies to no one in particular (but: I’m sure they’re owed to Katy Perry or Kesha or Kelly Clarkson…), maybe I need to learn to take up a little more space again.

Lauren

*No, I haven’t seen Marriage Story. But thanks to the friends I was away with last weekend, who discussed the plot for like an hour on Thursday night, I now know pretty much everything that happens in it.

I love it so much. It would match both of the couches in my apartment, which makes sense, because I am pretty sure it would match every couch on the planet, except of course those couches t…

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Nearly a decade has passed since I lost my Teen Vogue contract, a slightly belated casualty of Condé Nast’s McKinsey-led 2009 purge. (Belated because they’d held off on letting me go until the day after the release party for The Teen Vogue Handbook, a New York Times bestseller of which I wrote roughly half.) If memory serves, I was fewer than eight weeks into a new year-long agreement when they cancelled it, and they had to keep paying me for several more months, because I’d already done nearly half a year’s worth of work. Which is to say: I wasn’t exactly dead weight. Even after they voided the contract, they continued to assign me lots of stories.

Overall, I’d guess that they saved very little money when they first converted me from a contributing editor to a regular freelancer. But for me, it had a big psychological effect. Suddenly, I became like so many other freelance writers, never quite sure where my next check, or maybe just the check after the next check, was coming from. I love freelancing, but I’m not particularly well-suited to that aspect of it. So, for most of the last nine years, I’ve held some part-time job or another. And for many of those years, I was more than a little ashamed of that fact.

To some extent, the shame stemmed directly from the jobs themselves. True, there have been several semi-prestigious (or at least non-embarrassing) short-term gigs: early on, for example, I did a five-month stint at InStyle.com, where I created a slideshow of Michael Jackson’s “most iconic” looks to commemorate the first anniversary of his death and took a snapshot of an instructional sign that was taped to the wall above the printer and was headlined, “How To Retrieve Your Print Job.” (Of course, I had nowhere to post the picture, complete with jokey, rueful caption, because it was 2010 and I hadn't joined Instagram yet.) But, even as I continued writing for Teen Vogue and InStyle and, eventually, Elle, I earned an increasingly higher percentage of my annual income generating copy for a couple of magazines that were significantly less, um, aspirational.

On a practical level, I was worried that if the wrong person found out that I’d begun moonlighting for a gossip magazine, I might be blacklisted from the other, fancier publications I preferred to write for. (Now, of course, it makes me laugh to recall that I ever thought myself well-known enough, even if only by the publicists of celebrities, to be blacklisted.) But I was also deeply uncomfortable with the content, especially of the first of the two weeklies that I worked for, which was well-sourced enough that at least a few of the negative stories I was asked to write up seemed as though they might actually be true.

Fortunately, I only made it a few weeks before I was taken off the “hard news” beat, because I’d burst into tears while working on an article that would expose a professional athlete’s infidelity. I genuinely couldn’t help it—as I was typing, I kept thinking about how the piece might eventually be read by his wife, a beautiful former pop star. (“He’s the one who did this to her, not us,” my editor said, exasperated. “This isn’t even the first time he’s done it! He got caught screwing their nanny like five years back.”) But the crying, coupled with my congenital inability to go for the jugular, worked out well for me: I felt better about the work once I was relegated to the shorter, lighter stories about various celebrities’ sibling rivalries and birthing plans.

The second weekly I worked for didn’t pay as well, but it was closer to my apartment and, I thought, less ethically dicey, because the “files” I received appeared to bealmsot entirely made up. You know, “Palace Confirms: William & Kate Named King & Queen.” That kind of thing. What I honestly didn’t realize, all through the election of 2016, was that the nasty stories about politicians that ran in one of the magazines’s much seedier sister publications were actually only ever really nasty about one candidate, mine, and in fact were fairly positive about the other. (I know, I know, but why would I have noticed? I never read that rag!)

It wasn’t until a few days before the inauguration—when I saw an article about yet another weekly, one that was reported to be for sale, which observed that it had begun running similarly upbeat stories about our objectively horrible new first family in order to attract, as a buyer, the company for which I worked—that I grasped what was going on. From there, it didn't take me me long to figure out that I, too, might soon be asked to write frothy pieces humanizing a racist would-be authoritarian, and I decided, with only a little hesitation, that I’d rather be fired than do so.

Less than a week later, I was given the file for a feature that described how the First Lady planned to redecorate the Oval Office (never mind that she’d so far demonstrated zero interest in leaving NYC), and I immediately told my editor that I wouldn't write it. Like, until they started running stories that made the Trumps look at least as bad as the Jolie-Pitts, I didn’t want to be involved.

Both my boss and her boss took it pretty well—neither of them tried to argue that my increasingly meager day rate, which had been unceremoniously cut the previous fall, due to the harsh realities of the magazine business, compelled me to create political propaganda for a president I opposed. Instead, they asked one of the other writers to do it. But as the weeks wore on, I began to feel that not working on those stories, personally, probably wasn’t enough; capitalism being what it is, I reckoned that I was worth at least a little bit more to the company than what they were paying me and, therefore, I was indirectly contributing to their efforts. So, to make a long story short (I know: too late), I quit.

Since then, I’ve been working as a fashion copywriter three days a week. And though it’s further, in some ways, from what I originally set out to do with my life, I think I prefer it? I mean, as far as day jobs go. For one thing, I don’t feel like I have something to hide. Obviously, I still fantasize about what I might be able to accomplish if I could spend all my time writing whatever I want to write (or, in darker moods, I wonder if I’m holding myself back with my pedestrian preference for financial stability). But, given the state of the industry that I stumbled into circa the very late 1990s, just long enough before it all went to hell for me to be able to imagine precisely how great my life might have been if it hadn’t, well, I’m doing okay. Like: I think we all know, by now, that I’m not going to retrieve that print job.

P.S. For a less woebegone take on this topic, starring some pals, click here.

P.P.S. Did you see this piece? The working title (in my head) was “Darling Don’t You Go And Cut Your Hair.”

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P.S. I went to see Liz Phair last night and I have to say, it was weird and interesting to be out in the world on the same day that Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court! I knew, of course, that there were going to be men at the show, but I still felt irritated by the fact that they were present in seemingly equal numbers and that they didn’t have the sense—ON YESTERDAY OF ALL DAYS—to gather quietly in the back of the venue. Instead there they were, standing obliviously in front of me despite being eight inches taller and having full bodily autonomy guaranteed forever, putting their hands in the air with their index fingers extended? Can you imagine? You know I’m mad because when she was singing “Polyester Bride” which is one of my favorite songs, I kept thinking, “Why do we have to hear what this guy Henry thinks?” Also her band was all men and I had heard somewhere that they were all extremely good-looking but big surprise, it was just the usual rounding up that average white men seem to enjoy in all things.

P.P.S. The Northern Virginia Jewish Community Center, aka the one where I both attended camp and worked as a counselor, was covered with swastikas (again?) early Saturday morning. Everything is FINE!

I don’t have to tell you that spring 2014, when this agreement was made, was a very different time. Like everyone, I’ve changed a lot, and my centuries old alma mater has changed too: Several absurdly fancy new buildings, including a 63,000-square-foot Center for Theater and Dance, have been erected, even as certain less tangible structures have, perhaps, begun to crumble.

In 2016, the Academy admitted in a letter to alumni that a certain very long-standing former faculty member had, in fact, been “required to retire” and then “permanently barred from campus” a few years prior, after two separate women reported having had sexual relationships with him, as students, in the 1970s and 1980s. This admission—apparently motivated by a need to get out ahead of a then-forthcoming investigation into sexual abuse at New England boarding schools by the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team—prompted several more disclosures of the same kind; in August, the school released a pair of reports which accused eleven former staffers of abusing teenagers who’d been, one way or another, in their care.

Largely unaddressed were the many student-on-student assaults which (I think we can safely assume) have occurred on campus over the years. Although nobody has said as much, I think the school may feel that their responsibility for these more quotidian violations is… not as great? Perhaps rightly so: The teacher I mentioned above, in addition to having been vetted by the school, had more or less unfettered access to his victims—from what I’ve heard he lived in the same dorm as them and may have even been their advisor, meaning that he was the adult who was acting in loco parentis for those girls—whereas teen-on-teen assault is the kind of thing that can, and does, happen everywhere.

Anyway, I’m sure it’s perfectly obvious why this has been on my mind! The violent sexual behavior of overprivileged teenaged boys has been on pretty much everyone’s mind lately, to some degree, thanks to the fact that an apparently horrible example of the type is only a few votes away from getting to literally rule over all of us for the next several decades. As I am very far from being the first to point out, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that whoever takes that Supreme Court spot is probably going to be decisive in loads of bad judgements, so the fact that the GOP is going balls-out to ensure that the person who gets to deny a generation of women their right to bodily autonomy is someone who is widely believed to have real-world experience doing same is just… well, it’s putting it mildly to say that they’re adding insult to injury.

But there was something else that I was a bit more surprised to find myself thinking about during my visit to New Hampshire, even though I’m sure that it, too, is directly related to the current news and just to everything that’s been going on in this country over the last few years. As I walked around the campus, my beloved former home and the setting for, embarrassingly I suppose, some of the best years of my life, and as I sat through the Leadership Weekend Assembly and listened to speakers who described a variety of frankly amazing-sounding new classes and, of course, detailed the school’s copious fundraising needs, I thought: Is any of this really conscionable?

My particular prep school now charges boarders more than $50,000 a year, up (way up) from around $20,000 a year in the 1990s. Even if roughly half the students are receiving some kind of financial aid—and even if those whose parents make less than $75,000 annually are getting a full ride—is it in any way ethical to concentrate so many resources in the hands of so few?

Perhaps to combat this, the Academy prides itself on turning out good citizens; the school’s official motto is “Non Sibi,” or “not for oneself.” But when I think about what I’ve done with my life, and, frankly, what my classmates have done with theirs, I’m not sure it’s enough to justify all that we were given, when so many others go without. I’m not sure anything could be.

Anyway, my apologies, this edition is both a)not exactly related to the stated topic of this newsletter and b)kind of half-baked. But if any of you are thinking and working 100% efficiently in the midst of this slow-motion shit-show, this horrible period in which we are, all of us, to some degree stuck in high school, well, congratulations. Feel free to write back and tell me how.

P.S. In other news: I’m doing a reading next week! Please come to Wonders of Nature at 131 Grand Avenue in Brooklyn at 7 PM on October 10th to see me, Hossannah Asuncion, Yoojin Grace Wuertz, and musician Alice Danger at the season opener of the beloved Mixer Reading Series. I will probably read from my novel, so there will be more boarding school content, although ideally it will be better than this and also more fun!

P.P.S. I haven’t confirmed but I think my interview with Tarana Burke, the founder of the Me Too Movement, might be in the November issue of Elle UK. I loved talking to her so much, so if you are in England or thereabouts definitely pick it up (and send me a copy haha).

My cousin Jen had been on staff at Elle for a couple of years by then, but it didn’t occur to me to wonder whether she could help me snag a summer internship at the magazine until one of my roommates was offered an internship at French Vogue. Jealous, I called New York. Yes, my cousin confirmed, she could connect me to the assistant who was in charge of choosing interns. She couldn’t guarantee that I’d be picked—she wasn’t this woman’s boss—but Jen found it distinctly unlikely that the assistant would refuse to hire me, a fellow employee in good standing’s reasonably qualified relative. 

Nevertheless, having suddenly decided not quite at random that I wanted to work at a magazine, I figured I’d better cover my bases. I reached out to my mother’s best friend from high school, a journalist, and she agreed to put me in touch with the intern coordinator at her main outlet, Rolling Stone. Her level of pull wasn’t quite equal to Jen’s—even though she was more established in the industry, she was a freelancer—but it was enough. By the time summer rolled around, I’d made plans to spend Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays at Elle, and Thursdays and Fridays at Rolling Stone. 

I’m sure it goes without saying that both of these positions were unpaid, unless you count the stacks of unopened CDs that one or another of the music magazine’s many twenty-something male editors sometimes gave me to sell at a used record store downtown. (You shouldn’t.) I’d saved up a bit of cash from my Charlottesville waitressing job, but mostly, for those ten weeks, I sponged off my parents, just as I did during the school year. They paid my rent—an outrageous $750 a month to share a tiny two-bedroom suite in the NYU dorms with three total strangers (the most memorable of which used to sit in our cramped, windowless common area plucking her leg hairs out with a pair of tweezers)—and gave me enough money to ensure that I didn’t starve to death, which in Manhattan, even back then, was kind of a lot. 

Prior to that summer, I’d spent just a few days in New York, not counting my infancy. (My family had lived in an allegedly cockroach-infested apartment off Washington Square the year I was born, while my father attended tax school.) And those days, the days immediately following my graduation from boarding school, had been spent wandering the city with almost a dozen other wide-eyed teenagers; nights, we slept side-by-side on the floor of my friend Blaine’s mother’s Upper East Side co-op. In retrospect, the apartment was beautiful, and rather sizeable for New York City. But at the time, even I—an extroverted middle child who required very little personal space—found it, and the city in general, to be a bit claustrophobic.

Upon my return, though, New York started to grow on me, mostly because I liked my jobs. Not that the work was especially exciting: The main thing I remember doing at Elle that summer was organizing and reorganizing the research library, which was actually more of a closet. (We also answered phones, wrote “letters to the editor”—they weren’t fake, exactly, because they reflected our true feelings about, say, E. Jean’s advice to a woman wondering whether she should enlist a matchmaker to help her find a wealthy husband—corresponded with publicists, and, as my friend and fellow intern Alyssa recently reminded me, occasionally typed stories into the computers that had been filed by fax.) At Rolling Stone, I did even less of substance; the magazine celebrated a version of summer Fridays that included free beer being distributed to the entire staff at around 3 PM.

Even so, I was taken in. At both magazines, I found it thrilling to see pages in process, prior to their publication and then again, in print, a few weeks later. At Rolling Stone, I loved visiting the gallery-like hallway on the opposite side of the floor that showcased poster-sized prints of every single cover, going all the way back to the magazine’s start in the late 1960s. And on my second or third Friday there, just before quitting time, an excited buzz went around the office: The celebrity photographer Mark Seliger was hosting a big party that night at his new west West Village studio, and everyone was invited, “even the interns.”

I called my college friend Sarah, who was working in Manhattan that summer but living with her brother and sister-in-law in Hoboken, and told her to get back on the bus. Rightly so: The guests included everyone from Vince Vaughn, still very “money” less than a year after the release of Swingers, to Jerry Seinfeld, who’d recently broken up with a girl more or less our age. But, starstruck though we were by them, we really only had eyes for Brad Pitt, who was there with a bodyguard and who for some reason permitted a group of us to babble at him for the better part of ten minutes. (At one point, Brad put a cigarette in his mouth and Sarah literally grabbed a Bic out of another guy’s hand in order to light it.) Giddy beyond reason, we interns stayed until the end of the party, long after almost everyone else had left. We’d probably still be there if our host hadn’t kicked us out.

No wonder, then, that by the end of the summer I was sure that I wanted to work in magazines, and, therefore, to live in New York. No wonder I became a culture writer, with an early focus on music, and a celebrity profiler. And no wonder that, even though I’m technically still a magazine writer, I somehow sort of miss it.

Note: I wrote pretty much all of the above before a Refinery29 piece that details the spending life of a (wealthy) summer intern went viral; nevertheless, because it’s 2018, I suppose I should explicitly acknowledge the captial-P privilege that allowed me to get my start in magazines. Which: That’s why I included those details! To be clear, my parents weren’t giving me anywhere near $4000 a month, and nobody I knew had a house in the Hamptons, with their own private chef. But I still couldn’t have held those jobs without significant financial support, and I very likely couldn’t have got them without the family connections that led to my rather thin resume landing at the tops of those piles. Clearly, this is not an ideal way to run things.

And, speaking of working for free: I have added a paid option to this newsletter. It’s early days so I’m not sure exactly what paying subscribers will get that freeloaders (meant affectionately!) won’t. But if you are dying to support my work, please do sign up.

For the most part, they were as I’d expected. But there was one moment at the end of our 2004 interview that shocked me: The actress, then 21, had answered the question, “Is there anything I should have asked you about that I haven’t?” with a rather verbose declaration that, contrary to how she may or may not have come across during the previous hour, “I’m not as serious as I seem… I don’t sit around thinking about, you know, my career… I really don’t take myself seriously in this job at all. Like, if there’s one thing to know about me, it’s that I consider myself, you know, extremely lucky that I’ve had what I’ve had… So, just that I’m very grateful for everything, and you know—” at which point I, then 27, cut her off. “Slow down,” I told her. “This isn’t the Oscars.”

From the vantage point of 2017, this seemed almost breathtakingly rude. How could I have spoken to Anne Hathaway like that? But, per my transcript, she’d taken it more or less in stride. “Stop it,” she’d responded, to which I, apparently pretending that I was accepting an Academy Award, had replied, “Thanks, Mom.” I thought about looking around for the original recording, which was on microcassette, simply to parse our respective tones, but I was due at my friend Sarah’s birthday dinner shortly thereafter, so I didn’t. Instead, when I got to the restaurant, I told everyone about my incredibly obnoxious comment and then I pretty much moved on.

Two days later, Anne and I met for lunch in Tribeca. After some initial chitchat about our young children, she asked me whether I was on staff at Elle, which was my cue to remind her that we’d met before. “You seemed familiar,” she told me. “When did you interview me?”

I told her, adding that we’d been at the Cupping Room, just a few blocks away.

“I remember that,” she said, “because, um. I do remember. Because, do you remember those enormous, like, basically they were bowls of coffee? I don’t know how many espresso shots they put into mine. But I was taking the subway home, and I couldn’t breathe, because it was like, probably, a poisonous amount of coffee. I had to get off the subway, and sit on a curb, and call my boyfriend to come pick me up.”

“That’s terrible!”

“It wasn’t you. But I do remember. It’s nice to see you again.”

At which point I, apparently feeling guilty, said, “Yeah, I was reading the transcript the other day and I was like, ‘Wow, I’m not the same person I was back then.’ Like, even just: knowledge lost. Because at one point you mentioned that you were getting ready to go to Calgary to film Brokeback Mountain, and I go, ‘Is that in Alberta?’ Now I can’t imagine having that information, or asking about it.”

“Oh, this is going to be fun,” she said, “to meet ourselves again and see how we have changed.” She might have even clapped her hands, although I wouldn’t swear to it. “Because knowing who I was back then, if I didn’t know the answer, when you said that, I probably would have run home and googled it.”

From there, we proceeded to have a perfectly normal, pleasant interview. If you want to be a completist about it, you can read the resulting story here. But I must have passed some kind of test, because at the end, as I was getting the check, she said, “I enjoyed this very much. I think it’s cool that we had history,” and then, after I’d produced copies of the issues in which she’d appeared (I have a very comprehensive collection of early Teen Vogues), she asked, “Were we at the Cupping Room, or were we at Candle 79?”

“Definitely the Cupping Room.”

“Because I remember, and I just wonder if it was you, but maybe I’m conflating it with a different memory, I just remember at the end of the interview the person saying, ‘Is there anything else you want to say, or…’”

“That sounds like me.”

What Anne couldn’t have known, and what (I now see) almost certainly contributed to my impatience with her rambling response, was that I used to end every interview by asking if there was anything else I should have asked about. The internet wasn’t as comprehensive, back then, and it wasn’t uncommon for the person I was profiling to answer by suddenly bringing up a just-wrapped indie movie or an allegedly-forthcoming debut album that I’d otherwise never have known about. But the question had not been designed, as young Anne had apparently perceived it, as a way to give my subject the last word.

“And then I started to thank my fans,” she said (that must have been where she’d been going when I cut her off), “and you said, ‘Okay, you’re not winning an Oscar.’”

“That was me,” I admitted. “I just re-read the transcript the other day, and I was like, ‘Did I really say that?’”

“You really said that. I’ve never forgotten it.”

“I can’t believe you remember that,” I said. Truly, I couldn’t. Someone like her, who’s been working at a really high level for more than a decade and a half, has to have had hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of faux-intimate coffees and lunches and drinks with journalists. I’ve done hundreds of interviews too, so I know what it’s like, and I’ve forgotten a ton; in fact, when I was working on the Elle story about Anne I realized that I had no specific recollection of our second big interview. (A search of my inbox jogged my memory: We’d met at midday in an emptied-out Los Angeles restaurant that later became famous as the setting for the reality show “Vanderpump Rules.”)

“I remember it. Because I was so embarrassed.”

“It was so rude…” I began lamely.

“I have no idea if it was rude,” she said, almost certainly lying. “It was a little harsh.”

“When I read the transcript, I was like, that’s obnoxious!”

“It was a little harsh.”

“Oh my god, I am so sorry. I read that and I couldn’t believe I’d have said it. It seems unthinkable to me now. It’s rude, it’s abrupt, it’s strange…I saw it in the transcript, and I was like, that does not sound like me. And it especially doesn’t sound like something I would say to a famous person.”

“I wasn’t that famous at the time,” she pointed out.

She was right, I realized. She’d been in The Princess Diaries, of course—the story was timed to promote that film’s sequel, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (written by Shonda Rhimes, BTW)—and a few other things, but there was no real indication that she’d go on to become, well, Anne Hathaway. Meanwhile, I was the Senior Writer at the premiere teen magazine in the world, according to me, a magazine so generally excellent that it had recently won the American Society of Magazine Editor’s Award for General Excellence.

So, I’m sure part of it was that she was already, even in that pre-Hathahate era, a bit of a drama-geeky try-hard; mere moments before I’d asked my go-to final question she’d listed the qualities she admired in the actresses Jodie Foster, Angelina Jolie, Audrey Hepburn, Katherine Hepburn, and Julie Andrews, and then concluded, earnestly, “Hopefully, a little bit of all of those will be Annie Hathaway.” (Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the statement she was trying to retroactively obliterate with all of her protestations of not really taking herself so seriously—she’d immediately added, “I know how bad that sounded,” and tried again: “Hopefully, if I’m lucky, my career will have elements of all of those wonderful ladies.”)

And part of it was also that I was, maybe, sort of an asshole? At least, at times? Which is bad enough.

But the thing that really stuck with me after our 2017 interview was the self-confidence inherent in my subconscious 2004 analysis of who, between the two of us, had more power, and of who, between the two of us, was the greater success in our respective fields.

Because by last year, even with me writing semi-regular cover stories for Elle, a magazine I’d dreamed of contributing to since even before I’d interned there in 1997, there was no question as to who, between me and Anne Hathaway, had accomplished more of her goals. Who was living her best life, as Oprah would say. And, to be very clear, that would have been the case even if I’d been the most prolific writer at Elle, as I had once been at Teen Vogue. Magazines aren’t quite what they used to be. I’m not quite what I was.

But Anne didn’t gloat.

“Maybe that’s the difference,” I said. “Sheesh.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you again.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for.”

“Please, no wonder you had to get your boyfriend to come pick you up. I was horrible!”

She didn’t bother to deny, as she had at the beginning of our lunch, that the real cause of her panic attack had been me, and not too much too-strong coffee. But if I’d wanted to confirm it, I did so the next day, when I went back to the 2004 transcript yet again, as I started writing, and saw that she’d ordered a decaf.

“No, it’s funny,” she said. “I think back to… I was a real shit on Princess Diaries 2, like a real shit. And I apologized to [director Garry Marshall] for it, and eventually he was like, ‘You gotta stop. You weren't that bad, you were twenty. We’re good.’ And that’s the point. We’re shits sometimes, and that doesn’t mean that’s all of who you are, and it doesn’t mean you don’t grow up to be somebody else.” And, she added, once I’d apologized a few more times, “I thought about it, when I went away, and I was like, ‘She was kinda right. She was harsh, but she had a point.’”

So. This is a lot of words just to say, “Anne Hathaway knows who I am.” If that had been the goal, I could have simply posted the selfie we took (at her suggestion!) and been done with it. Furthermore, even though we got along very well that day, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that she now felt, let’s say, wary of me again, after reading the resulting story. I was so into her, by the end of our lunch, that I didn’t even want to go into the whole Hathahater thing, but everyone at the magazine insisted.

The point is: This moment was one that made me think about my life a little bit, especially my professional life, and may have even inspired me to make some changes that I hope will eventually pay off, even if they haven’t necessarily done so yet.

And, of course: I can’t wait to see Ocean’s 8!

As the junior assistant, I answered Laurie’s phone, ordered her cars and lunches (almost always ordering something for myself and the senior assistant, too—the magazine reimbursed up to $10 for “working lunches”), and edited the Horoscope and the Table of Contents. I also handled the contracts and payments for the magazine’s many freelance writers, a somewhat difficult task made much, much more so by the fact that it required me to employ an antiquated (even for 1998) accounting program that lived on its own off-brand laptop, which I kept under my desk.

One afternoon, three weeks into my tenure, Laurie paused in the hallway outside her office to inquire as to how I was getting along. “Are you figuring it all out?” she asked, pointing at the PC.

“It’s a little confusing,” I admitted. “But yes, I think I am.”

“Good,” she said, smiling brightly. “Because the last girl didn’t, and we had to get rid of her.”

Roughly a year later, the senior assistant left, and I assumed her duties, which included writing and editing the Contributors’ pages. I had also begun writing for the culture section of the magazine; I’d polished up another assistant’s piece on the band Shudder to Think, timed to coincide with the release of the movie Velvet Goldmine (for which they’d written and performed a few songs), and been rewarded with my very own assignment, a short profile of the actress Monica Potter, then appearing opposite Robin Williams in Patch Adams.

The editor of the section was one of Laurie’s best friends, a kind, excitable man named Richard David Story. Aside, perhaps, from Laurie herself, he was the person most directly responsible for what I saw as my incredible early success: A careful, thoughtful editor who improved my work without re-writing it, he pointed out my missteps with a sanguinity that stopped me from feeling too sheepish about them. (Case in point: When he asked me to propose a headline for the Potter piece, I—having picked up on the magazine’s proclivity for puns on things I’d heard of but wasn’t always entirely familiar with—suggested “Potter’s Field.” He was unconvinced. “Because it’s about her career, you know, her field?” I said. “But what is a potter’s field?” he asked. “Isn’t that where they bury poor people?”)

As the senior assistant, I was also, absurdly, put in charge of coordinating the magazine’s move from 350 Madison Avenue to 4 Times Square, an assignment which required me to inform the editorial staff’s many smokers that they'd no longer be permitted to light up in their workspaces. One of my favorite co-workers, an Associate Editor named Charles Gandee who’d given me the very valuable advice that I’d have to embrace my nosy side if I wanted to make it as a writer, took this especially poorly—he decamped for Talk Magazine not long after we relocated. (At the time, the New York Post reported that he’d left behind a three-page single-spaced screed complaining about, among other things, the size of the window in his new Times Square office. His on-the-record response? “I’ve never written a single-spaced letter in my life. It’s unaesthetic and shocking.”)

And, again as senior assistant, I got to bid a very cheerful farewell to the laptop and the freelancers, assuming responsibility instead for the magazine’s Contributing Editors, a much smaller group whose contracts were renewed only annually and whose checks were processed automatically, at the beginning of each month.

Still, there was some potential for peril: One well-known columnist called to complain every time his payment was delayed by even a day or two, as though ensuring the timely delivery of his mail was my job and not that of the post office. Later, while traveling, he somehow missed several payments in a row—something his assistant, I’d think, should surely have picked up on—and he threatened to hold me personally responsible for the interest he said he would have earned had they been received and deposited in a timely fashion. Laurie, upon hearing this, cackled. “How does he plan to collect it?” We both knew, as did the columnist, that he made more in two months than I made in a year.

On the flip side, Vogue had at least a couple of so-called Contributing Editors so wealthy that they sometimes didn’t bother to cash their checks at all; on more than one occasion, someone in the company’s Delaware-based accounting department forced me to call and remind them to do so before the checks expired and had to be reissued. One of the two, if memory serves, apologized and asked if future payments could be made directly to the New York City Ballet. (I should note that these women made less than the professionals who made a living writing for the magazine—only around twice my annual salary, rather than six or seven times it.)

All of this to say that, at the turn of the century, I had good reason to believe that I might be able to make a decent living writing for magazines for many years to come. All of Vogue’s most regular, well-compensated contributors were significantly older than me, which suggested that it was a viable long-term career path. Not that I ever thought too far ahead back then. What 22 year old does?

I knew I’d been fortunate to get the job, right out of college. And indeed I continued to be very lucky for quite a while. But now, less than two months ahead of the twentieth anniversary of my start at Vogue, after countless changes in the media landscape that I’m sure I needn’t go into here, I find myself, for the first time in all that time, without even a semi-regular magazine gig.

I’m not complaining. Well, maybe I am complaining a little bit. But I’m also just kind of wondering what to do next. Very possibly, I’ll double down—start pitching again, try to find a few new outlets. But in the meantime, as I try to finish writing my novel (more on that later), it seemed like as good a moment as any in which to take a look back.

Not that that’s all I’ll do in this newsletter. I’m sure I’ll also write about the things I always want to write about: pop culture, books, mom-hood, politics, and in keeping with the times (although I actually got an early start with my now-defunct and little-read blog, You Think You Cute), beauty and skincare. If you like me, you will probably like it. If you don’t, well, good thing it’s free.