It happened. I was in Vanity Fair. In a fashion portfolio. They didn’t want me to dance, sing for my supper, recommend 17 books, or record my side of the podcast in voice notes and send it to them as a back up if Zoom, riverside or my shitty MacBook Air speakers glitched.*

*Please know this is not an indictment of any newsletter, media outlet, or podcast that was generous enough to extend curiosity, time, or exposure to Pool House. I am so very grateful to all of you. Mostly, this is a condemnation of my inability to just buy a new fucking laptop.

I had no idea what to expect. I arrived at the Vanity Fair offices for a fitting in what I usually wear—pleated and belted oversized trousers with a somewhat rumpled, striped men’s shirt—and was met by a whole World Trade Center floor of racks and shoes and accessories. Wall-to-wall or should I say, window-to-window.

It had been a long time since I darkened a Condé door and the scene was absolutely buzzing. Dramatic. Coming off book tour and promotion, my first literary fiction novel but more notably, my first release in a post-Covid world, where it had become customary for me to conduct back-to-back remote interviews with filthy hair but clean bangs, in a shirt steamed only up to my armpits, I was enthralled by the sheer volume of the operation. Awed by the patent display of resources. The place was crawling with busy, determined people in distractingly good pants. It was enticing. More than anything, it was like seafood towers at a premiere party, it was nostalgic.

I’m old as hell but not so old that I recall the heyday when every editor had clown-money expense accounts, four-hour lunches at 21 club, or apartments underwritten by S.I. Newhouse himself but I did bear witness to a hundred idling town cars and only the tiniest Fiji water bottles littering the corner-office bins and this reminded me powerfully of that. Enough that I instantly experienced dread, a faint whisper of asshole-constricting PTSD, hearkening back to a time where flats were frowned on, as was mixing metals in accessories. I had a cold thought that this might be some awful, practical joke or a gigantic misunderstanding.

Despite the initial intimidation, it was too fascinating not to gawp at the fabulous clothes and the sprawl of shoes and laid out jewelry—tantamount to the estate sale of an ousted despot’s second wife—wondering how much it all cost. There was also that hysterical, call-of-the-void, destructive urge to either sweep as much of it in my arms before sprinting out or smashing the glass on the fire alarm to watch it all get wet.

All I knew about the concept was that it had to do with American Style, something to do with archetypes or taxonomy and I was informed to report to the dressing area where a rack of “Preppy” clothing awaited me.

And this is where I met Tonne Goodman. Tonne Goodman, for those who don’t know—and admittedly, abashedly, I had not known—is a legendary Fashion Editor. A one-time model and assistant to Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute at the Met, who then became Fashion Editor at Vogue for two decades working alongside Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington. Not so incidentally she’d also worked at Calvin Klein, establishing the spare, black-and-white, Bruce Weber aesthetic that became the brand’s calling card in the early nineties that ran counter to the louche, ostentation of the ’80s. A kind of sophisticated, all-American minimalism that we now collectively recognize almost to the point of trope, but was then a stark, declarative subversion. It could be argued that Tonne Goodman invented the defining qualities of The Clean Girl aesthetic. Christy Turlington walked so Hailey Bieber could run, sort of thing.

Again, I knew none of this quantitatively but the instant we met, I could tell. Her pedigree presented itself by her countenance. She is striking in a way that inspires stillness. I was introduced to her and she absorbed me. Instantly I longed to know absolutely everything about her. I wanted the full, 6,000 word New Yorker profile. Diana Vreeland once described Tonne’s perfect bones as aristocratic. I just wanted to know how it came to pass that this woman who only Tilda Swinton could convincingly play in the biopic had anything to do with me. I asked about her scarf. She told me she was partial to scarves. Over the course of the following month, I would acquire three scarves.

I put on the first look, a mustardy leather pencil skirt and a club-collared grey-green poplin shirt, with a beautiful lofty crewneck sweater in a similar color to the skirt but a shade lighter. There was a little reference photo from the runway, so I knew the sleeves would be styled scrunched up. I was given a pair of sling-backs but before I could totter out for approval, I had to finish eavesdropping on the tailors, Lucy Falck and Jacqui Bennett, heatedly debating how they’d dismantle the yoke of a gruesomely fiddly pair of trousers, just dripping with ornaments, so they could cinch in the waist with hidden darts before restoring everything back to sample condition. They were like snipers the pair of them, absolute killers, experts.

It had been so long since I’d been around artisans who possessed true expertise, singular skills particular to a vocation. A career. I’d also only just spent two hundred dollars on tiny fuzzy mics off Amazon as well as a crummy gimbal that I knew even before it arrived would be a shitshow. All because people want content. Video. The shorter the better. No algorithm could give a solitary, portrait-shot-shit about quality. In fact, post the exact same clip thousands of times and your engagement will be rewarded for it. This is the doltish headspace I’d been inhabiting for months in the lead up to my book launch. And the prospect of these two women, tackling mountains of clothes that they’d have to surgically alter and then put back without leaving a trace, astonished me. The humility. The care. The lack of captures of their work. Zero assets to be tagged. I was indescribably moved by this.

Of course a fashion shoot is ultimately about appearances. The funny thing about samples or being loaned clothes for events, is that while it all seems glamorous in photos, the garments themselves, often one-of-one, can feel a bit like a costume. They may carry the whiff of someone who perhaps wore it in another editorial, or an entire evening or press day, if not several someones. It’s like rent-the-runway but without the scrupulous laundering standards. I have shouldered jackets that have endured the company of a person whose deodorant has not only quit but whose entire nervous system is likely on fire or leeching several flavors of benzos, and in those cases it feels a bit like I am putting on the stuffy head of a Disney Mascot.

Hygiene-ly speaking this didn’t happen but in keeping with climbing into Goofy’s torso or Minnie Mouse, knowing full well that spiritually I am very much a Scrooge McDuck, I did wonder if I would be relegated to a look that had nothing to do with me. The clothes on my rack were all, indeed, “Preppy” and, make no mistake, beautiful. There was a play on critter pants. A bright, intarsia sweater with a car knitted into its front. Reminiscent of the sweater from The Shining. All perfectly perfect for someone.

In Look 1, I was positioned in front of a white wall. Photos were taken. A python belt was looped around my midsection. The heels of my pumps kept piercing through the foam board lain on the floor, emitting a fantastic, alarming pop every time I moved.

What do you think?

Tonne surveyed me, steely, glancing at the clothes but seeming more to inspect my body language. I couldn’t tell if the question was directed at me or was simply about me. Her two assistants (both in severe, sensible, unspeakably cool shoes) were on hand, as was Nicole Chapoteau, the fashion director at Vanity Fair.

Tonne’s arms were crossed, the arm of her glasses hovering at her mouth.

How do you feel? Are you comfortable?

I could tell now that not only was she asking me, she was sincere. Also, that there was grace in the question. That it wouldn’t trouble her one way or another, which I found remarkable but also somehow correct. There was no urgency. No imperative. No pressure.

I told her it was lovely. Sumptuous. She canted her head. I admitted that the skirt and sweater also had nothing to do with how I dressed in life. She nodded. And instead of having me try on the other clothes, yet another skirt, or Look 2, she skipped to a pair of trousers, a shirt, jacket, recalling and remarking what I’d arrived in, then finally landed on The Suit. An ensemble that wasn’t any of the Predetermined Looks from what I could tell.

I loved The Suit. I couldn’t believe The Suit. The Suit was God Tier. The Suit was me vibrating on the highest possible frequency. I felt like Human Cocaine. Double breasted, black and faintly pin-striped in gray. Peak lapel. Fuck-off-shoulders. A Gordon-Gekko-adjacent Tom Ford shirt. I wanted to Eat The Suit. I wanted to Fuck The Suit. I wanted The Suit to Fuck Me.

I don’t know if this was the moment that me being “Preppy” pivoted to “Suits” but I’d certainly crossed some spiritual Rubicon. I tried desperately to maintain some sense of equanimity. It wasn’t my shoot after all. I was playing a part. But Good Lord, how I loved The Suit.

And she knew. She took photos. She asked me to unbutton the jacket, which I did, and passingly panicked about what to do with my hands, I slid them partway into the trousers, hitching them in the pockets, thumbs sticking out. A look flitted across Tonne’s face. An imperceptible twitch of her lips. The temperature dropped in the air conditioned room. Her two assistants glanced at each other, a quick flick of camaraderie. I took my hands out and couldn’t help laughing.

Oh, you hate that.

Tonne’s head shifted a few degrees. When she smiled, I would have gone to war for her.

I looked to her assistants. It’s a thing, one revealed.

How many other things are there? I was dying to know. They told me they would think about it. They were all so beautifully attuned to each other. Another rarity that I hadn’t witnessed in far too long. I felt feral for it. Homeschooled, solitary and unkempt. Jealous.

It was decided The Suit would be The Look. And as I left, Tonne glanced at the clothes remaining on the rack and quipped, I take it this car sweater isn’t very you?

I could have kissed her.

The shoot itself was conducted over two days, a week later at Vivid Kid, a studio in Red Hook the size of an airplane hangar. Again, I was gobsmacked by the tenor of the production. To me, catering is one thing, but it’s Craft Services that’s full of tells. It reveals everything about the consideration of the production. The Crafty here wasn’t just the same Pop Corners, La Croix and a gigantic, sticky, pump-top of off-brand Purell, there was a full suite of pre-packaged sweet and savory morsels. Dark-chocolate covered biscotti and a few non-gluten confections. Swedish sweets that weren’t fish (sockerbit what else?). There was caffeine in various forms, some with L-Theanine, also gum and mints, plus various analgesics, allergy meds, prebiotics, probiotics, and a few adaptogens for good measure.

Not everyone can put Craft Services together in a way that is ultimately useful. It’s a bit like a charcuterie board. Just because the shapes are relatively recognizable doesn’t mean the ratios aren’t chopped. Or the symphony of textures. The exact right amount of the right kinds of dried fruit.

There is Craft in Crafty. Thought. Expertise. You don’t have Crafty because Shoots Have Craft Services. You present it with a sense of prescience, to address the myriad needs and impulsive desires of assembled, varied masses. It occurs to me that many start-ups and tech companies are shit at this because they’re shit at everything short of glancing presentation. They peddle in simulacra. AI. Facsimiles of originals. Avatars of Crafty. Occasionally one even has the sense that none of the people have ever meaningly been people before.

At various points on this shoot I was reminded of the halcyon way things used to be, all the cost-cutting and lately, human-cutting measures, that I’d forgotten about, the total erosion not of frivolity or pageantry but thoughtfulness. The recognition of time. Of all of us having bodies.

Soon after arrival, I was herded to glam. Again, I’d arrived Camera Ready and as I sat on the directors chair, a clipboard-wielding producer informed the makeup artist, Mark Carrasquillo (with the troubling air of recitation), that I was to be made clean and minimal. I fretted, wondering how I’d appear without my emotional support eyeliner. Nightmares of being made up at various department store counters where some well-meaning white woman carefully applied an impasto of shimmering, champagne-colored shadow at a rainbow gradient from top waterline to brow, flashed before my vision. But Mark, dressed head-to-toe in white, his preferred uniform despite the precarity of attendant occupational hazards, took a step back, surveyed my eyeliner and red lip and said, I get the feeling this is what you look like. That this is your face.

I told him it was. For better or worse.

He told me he would speak to Tonne and returned with conspiratorial relish to remove all my makeup only to reapply it just as it was, but with a steadier hand and what he diplomatically referred to as a lip with more accuracy.

Then it was off to hair and it was much the same. James Pecis, again, an icon in experience and bearing, credited for Alexander McQueen’s buzzcut and Michele Lamy’s jet-black look, as famous for braids as he is for designing hair for Simone Rocha, Issey Miyake, Marine Serre, was eminently receptive.

You have great hair, he remarked.

He brushed it. Then curled bits of it.

I know this makes me horrifically superficial but you have to understand how good-looking everyone was. Each one an aesthete in a way that is woefully lacking in contemporary society in certain milieux (tech; finance; west village). Everyone at the shoot wore some kind of uniform that was dialed in, proportionate and uniquely pleasing to the eye. There was taste everywhere I looked. And most notably, the taste was hyper-specific.

James Pecis, is tall, blond, reminiscent of The Butterscotch Stallion, AKA, Owen Wilson at his peak. Tanned, tattooed, he is also cool but very much in a different register from Tonne’s Patrician comportment. With his rangy bearing and improbable ease, James Pecis resembles a Z-Boy. A member of the Bones Brigade in the fluidity of his movements, the floppiness of his hair, but somehow dialed up ever so slightly, enough that when I complimented the minimal packaging of one of the products he used—part of his line, called Blu & Green—I glanced at the design and clocked him.

What are you from the Bay or something?

He laughed.

This confirms a pet theory I’ve long fostered about the terroir of rizz particular to the people of Northern California, one that remarkably transcends gender, class or even race. James used to live in New York but now spends a great deal of time in Costa Rica with his family and when I asked about the spiritual whiplash of going back and forth, between surfing and doing fashion hair, he maintained that he needs both for counterbalance.

Yeah, but do you ever feel like your life is basically Zoolander?

All the time, he said.

I was continually bowled over by the accumulated training and knowledge. But also how attentive everyone was. How unfailingly warm. Even while waiting, a logistical inevitability no matter the level of coordination, no one, outside of TalentTM, seemed to be on their phones.

I got dressed in The Suit, feeling resplendent, hair done, makeup done, nails transformed from red to buff, when Tonne’s two assistants and Nicole, the Fashion Director, somewhat in hilarious unison, all stopped to ask me to remove my earrings.

They’re yours aren’t they?

Mind you, these were tiny gold hoops akin to the sort for your first piercing at Claire’s. And possibly this was the issue. Earrings off, I was presented to Tonne but this time also the photographer Luis Alberto Rodriguez. A New York native now residing in Paris, award-winning, esteemed, with multiple photography books to his name, he is also impossibly charismatic and looks like this.

I mean, come the fuck on. I truly laughed out loud several times at how appealing everyone was. He went to La Guardia for dance. Received a BFA at Juilliard. Performed all over the world. Moved to Berlin. Then, Paris. Then became a self-taught photographer where the forms in his portraiture evoke the dynamism, physicality and weight of moving bodies because of his very particular eye, his provenance. His experience.

He shot numerous photos, Tonne instructing me to keep my arms jutted out an angle where you could see the triangles of light at my elbows to accentuate the waist and shoulders. Luis Alberto moved around without ceasing. Discussing with Tonne all the while. Smiling, putting on music, then changing it, all of us agreeing that Madonna was the only option.

At another point they decreed they needed a sense of movement in my hair and lo if James didn’t appear with—I shit you not—the tiniest leaf blower I have ever seen. The most perfect miniature cordless red Milwaukee.

Wait, did you pack that in your suitcase?

He nodded.

And lemme guess, you like the Milwaukee because you tried other ones and they weren’t as good?

He nodded again. I thought I was going to die of delight.

Zoolander!

The entire day felt loose-limbed, joyful, and thrillingly competent. José Criales-Unzueta, fashion reporter at Vanity Fair whose work I’d followed from the time he was a news editor at Vogue, he of the elongated T-shirt, front row dispatches, and Fit Check newsletter, stopped by for a chat. We knew each other parasocially from Instagram and again, he was nothing short of lovely. Granted, this shoot, even over the course of two days, is likely nothing compared to the compressed, live-wire atmosphere of Fashion Month for any of the people working, but I’ve often found that while all talented people are not uniformly kind, that almost all confident talented people are.

And in an age of AI, end results, minimal effort, no visible strain, only the unseen wholesale destruction of the planet through warming its atmosphere and oceans, I think back to the tailors Lucy and Jacqui. I asked them how it could be that they so carefully and forensically returned the clothes to their original state. They reminded me that most designers, particularly those of a certain caliber, with clothes priced as investments, replete with generous seam allowances and reinforced stress points, made garments designed not only to be tailored once but throughout the course of the wearer’s lifetime. They revealed that some brands didn’t do this anymore but wouldn’t name names. Only that it gave me yet one more thing to consider in this era of Temu dupes and scammy shortcuts. It reminded me that Nice Things are Nice. As are expensive, time-consuming efforts. And now I have this portrait and the memories forever.

My mother is my muse. If that makes me sound like a loser virgin, you should know that spiritually this is absolutely the case. I credit her with every book and essay. I also credit her with my decision not to have children. She is an awful mother but she is an endlessly compelling character and if I struggle at all to inhabit Main Character Energy it’s because this fiery little dynamo has sucked it all up. Along with any oxygen in a room.

She is glamorous and overbearing with absolutely zero self-interrogation or “theory of mind.” Does this make her autistic? I have no idea. Does it help me to think of her this way? Yes. It removes any morality or blame. She is unaware of her own interiority or the interiority of others. To give you an idea, when my nephew who is now 8 had to undergo surgery for his hands several years ago, she got up at 4AM that morning to weed the yard for hours until her hands bled, raging and furious at the rest of her family for not helping.

Clearly, she was heartsick and feeling helpless. And was left with no recourse than to transmute her sorrow and impotence into self-pity, outrage and resentment. It feels both Korean and Catholic. Metal to the Nth degree. The stigmata parallels are too obvious to ever be useful in a book or movie (my main beef with ‘mother as muse’ is that she’s often too baroque in her choices; you can only have so many big swings before a narrative falls apart).

I think about this morning often. It must have still been dark when her hundred pound figure ventured outside to tackle her lawn. She used no tools. She wore no gloves. I’m telling you, she yanked and raked with her claws until her palms were shredded. That my brother had his son’s small hands weighing heavy on his heart only to be accompanied by his mother’s, is simply par for the course. It’s no wonder both of us are artists. There’s just so much to sort through.

She’s not heavy, she’s my mother.

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OK, so I don’t think referring to myself as Mama’s going to stick but last week I tried an archery class to see if I’d get into it. First of all, this was not AT ALL inspired by The Odyssey despite the fact that I am being absolutely lambasted by my friend group for loving that movie so unequivocally. That said, to further dissuade baseless accusations of being an Odysseus obsessive, I elected to learn on a compound rather than a recurve bow. This is called bargaining with terrorists. In any case, to paint you a picture bow-wise, think Rambo rather than Katniss.

While it wasn’t my intention, apparently signing up for the preliminary safety course on a weekday afternoon at 4:30PM meant that I would almost guarantee myself a private class which ended up being far less confrontational and exhausting than a person like me would naturally presume 60 minutes under the tutelage and scrutiny of an “instructor” would feel.

The class was 20 minutes of safety, when and when not to load your bow, where to place your feet on the shooting line and walking like a zombie with your hands outstretched while retrieving arrows so that you don’t accidentally impale an eyeball sauntering downrange whilst texting a friend about your archery prowess.

As you can imagine, all the jargon is instantly compelling. I learned what a whisker biscuit is. Fletching. Then, there were the heretofore unbeknownst to me elements of physics that knocked me back for six. Like, did everyone else know what a dry fire was? It’s like touching the third rail. It’s like when I learned what an episiotomy was. It’s all a WAY bigger deal than I would have naturally assumed.

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It’s funny but this thing keeps happening when I talk to outsiders (anyone who does not currently live in New York) where they go, “How’s it feel?” with this very expectant look on their faces and my mirror neurons go batshit grinning back without knowing what the fuck they’re talking about.

It turns out they are talking about The VibesTM. It’s true that we wish A Very Happy Mamdani’s New York to all who celebrate. It’s also true that the Knicks won. Plus, it’s summer. The stone fruit is going insanely hard. Maybe it’s post Book Tour Blues but I’m experiencing a strange discordance with the overall spirit of how New Yorkers are meant to be doing right now.

Recently, I spoke to pal, artist, and lifelong Knicks fan Andrew Kuo about the spectacular euphoria and the attendant grief of the Big Win. How elated he was but also how he had to make space for the crashing acknowledgement that this was the absolute apotheosis of his career as a Knickerbockers devotee. Everything else could only ever be downhill. Not only that but he’d been swept up by tidal melancholy as all the other disappointments rose up in his memories, sort of a fan’s life flashing before his eyes, and I can’t stop thinking of this.

There are times when I feel bullied by this relentless expectation of festive bonhomie. I find it oppressive. It feels manic, this insistence that things are great when they’re really only ever as Mid as life tends to be. In the same way that it would be masking for my friend Andrew to experience unalloyed joy about the Knicks winning, it feels vital for me to remember that I am actually mildly depressed.

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[No spoilers: Never spoilers!]

I know this entire interspace is banging on about The Odyssey but God damn, if I don’t love me some summer blockbuster. As you can imagine, it’s a bit of an endurance test. A total runtime of 172 minutes—2 hours and 52 minutes— with a good half-hour of the most tiresome ads imaginable (someone please murder that Oura ring ad with the conductor, and that inane AT&T ad about the dude driving and using his phone as that girl walks her dog [although here I am talking about both so…]).

In any case, The Odyssey is a solid, two seltzer, plus an insulated wide-mouth Stanley bottle full of ice-type situation. You’ll definitely need a proper snack and I encourage you to choose your seating in accordance with the acceptance that you will be peeing. Possibly twice.

Also, as Delia mentioned in her latest stack, if you want an optimal viewing experience like IMAX, just know the good seats are sold out forever. So, cut your losses, watch it in the most convenient location possible with the optimal viewing conditions (for me = reclining seats; matinee, smallish theater).

Oh, addendum for ‘tism hive: I brought my earplugs but fascinatingly the sound was mastered to where there were no outlying deafening bits which I hugely appreciated.

In any case, I was fated to enjoy this film with my whole heart. I have always adored mythology and the classics. I am a Madeline Miller with a Frank Miller rising.

Which is to say that I have not read Homer’s version. Or even the Emily Wilson version of Homer’s version. I am a dyed-in-the-wool, attention deficit, dopamine-seeking dilettante which means I will watch the shit out of a movie but become spectacularly aggrieved if the filmmaker needs to advertise how much of the original canon they understand. This is why I will never be down for the Zack Snyder cut of anything and why I loved Hamnet’s film-adaptation because Chloé Zhao and her cinematographer Łukasz Żal (Zone of Interest) openly admitted that they don’t know shit about Shakespeare. To me this is how a film remains nimble, effective and emotionally resonant to an audience.

In any case, here are the thoughts that either sailed through my mind while watching The Odyssey or in the day following.

1. Not only do I love Matt Damon, I am Matt Damon. Maybe Taylor Swift is your person. As in, the celebrity with whom you experience a powerful kinship. Maybe it’s Beyoncé, her triumphs are your triumphs. Music doesn’t work on me in quite the same way but man alive, if my person isn’t Matt Damon. I don’t know how other people watch movies but most of the time I’m seated firmly in the audience watching the action unfold. But there are Matt Damon roles over the years where I’ve identified so powerfully with him as a character that I embody him completely. I put that blonde man’s body on like a Mech Suit and sit in his head with zero detachment. Matt Damon is my Brojan Horse. I love being inside that man. The Bourne Identity remains one of the most significant experiences in my life. The moment in the diner haunts me and now, twenty-four years later I think it was a presentiment of being autistic.

2. That lift was worth it! I never should have doubted you Matt Damon. A well-timed upper bleph if ever there was one (I do not know if there was one; do not sue me please).

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Seeing as it’s one thousand degrees outside (and stormy!), down from one-million degrees over the weekend, I don’t need to announce in any way that it’s officially summer. The city’s pools are open. The US of A’s 250th birthday celebration has occurred. Other nations have laughed heartily at us for our jejune status as a failed social experiment masquerading as a democracy country.

Taylor Swift is married. Knicks won. Mamdani’s still great. And I actually vowed that this was the year I’d get better at Upstate.

What does “being good at Upstate” entail? Well.

I mean, I’m not sure. What I can tell you is that historically I have been “bad at Upstate.” I’ve tried! I’ve been to about a half-dozen locations ranging from 90-minutes outside of town, to a solid 3.5 hours and stayed anywhere from a weekend to three weeks for a self-directed writing residency (truthfully I bailed eight days in; the only time I have actively bugged out and bolted).

A friend of mind suggested that it was possible I wasn’t bad at it and rather I just didn’t like it but I refuse to accept this! Upstate is vast. And I love trees desperately and long for them constantly. I love to swim in bodies of waters that leave others squeamish like lakes. Loads of people who are equally shit at the outdoors seem to go year after year and frankly, I am just too poor, cheap and socially anxious for The Hamptons or going Out East or whatever the tech/finance people call it.

In any case, I think I’ve cracked it! At least for a solid, three-night, four-day jaunt. Here’s the pertinent data.

• Not too far! I am a beginner and I can’t yet commit to anywhere requiring a 5+ hour drive. Long drives set my nervous system on fire. I already struggle with flying to LA and feeling tremendously shortchanged that I could have flown to Europe for the same duration. This is why I left Texas; that you could drive eight hours and still be INSIDE THE STATE? FOH. In any case, we went to The Catskills. It was a town called Monticello that was, frankly, hideous to an astonishing degree but the nature was terrific.

• Fuck the town, it’s all about the house. I kept trying to do both. Get a beautiful house in a picturesque town and honestly, it’s like naturally having cute abs and a cute face in your forties at the same time. It is just not possible unless you are paying gobs of money for one or the other but usually both. Turns out I don’t care about the town. We drove to Livingston Manor which was about 45-minutes away because the guides and the friends all insisted it was the loveliest and I instantly knew it wasn’t for me. It’s like the West side vs the East side in L.A. It all just felt like Austin post tech boom. I don’t fuck with stores in Venice because the vibe gives me the ick. It felt like that strip in East Hampton or the West Village. It was all just a bit AI-y. Which is how I have taken to denounce everything that seems to have been intentionally curated in that anodyne, monied way where the only true variation is the detectable degree of performative allyship. Which is to say that going to mini Brooklyn two hours north doesn’t make Upstate feel any less Deliverance, it just still feels like the auction scene in Get Out except it’s smiling way harder. Yuck. No thank you.

  Which is to say, for me, bag the town and focus on the house. The house we rented was perfect. Sadly, my partner and I cannot stay in hotels because of our condition. Our condition being that we are both total fucking pills who jointly and separately cannot abide by not having our own kitchen, our own groceries and a real, full sized kettle for as many cups of tea throughout the day as we like because we are fucking adults. All I can say about why the house was perfect is that there weren’t superfluous utensils running amok, it was spotlessly clean, like forensically clean, the mattress was excellent, there was a grill, plus a 1:1 ratio of adults to bathrooms, there were no carpets or decorative pillows (mites! gag!), the linens were considered and the knives were sharp.

• The trees Upstate are Real Tree Camo Trees. I need to remember that whenever I look at the surrounding area of a house that I will not be impressed. The trees Upstate look paltry and unlovely to me. The trees there have Ozempic face and it is not their fault. In person they are beautiful and I will appreciate them and breathe deeply and with full gratitude but in photos they will do nothing for me. This is because (TW: horrible obnoxious privilege) the woods I want when I think of summering and foliage are in literal, actual Switzerland. Or rural Japan. Northern California people will feel me on this. Same with, I don’t know, Oregon people maybe. A part of me always goes, Oh, what’s the point? The point is: Upstate is accessible by car for a few days and the Swiss Franc isn’t going to murder me on the exchange rate when I get there. I never think a vacation will hit unless it is elaborate. This vacation hit.

• The H Mart in Paramus. The East Village H Mart galls me to no end. I one time saw blueberries being sold there for fifteen dollars. Regular fucking blueberries that at most cost $5 everywhere else. These K Pop demon prices are not fucking it. The H Mart in Paramus is as enormous as the H Mart in Alhambra and the prices reflect the droves of multigenerational Koreans in the area who would BALK IN OUTRAGE at the banchan prices that I have witnessed. I recommend stocking up and stuffing a cooler. I know this does nothing for the local economy but I cannot buy actual comestibles in a shoppy shop because I am not Hailey Bieber at Happier Grocery. I have made different choices with my life.

  

• FOMO is for the birds. I think it’s crucial not to get magical thinking about going two hours outside of town and becoming a different person. This is obvious to lots of people but not to me. I will not suddenly become a hiker or a wine taster or be interested in local crafts but there’s always hope and that hope makes me miserable. Especially if I am chasing the hope instead of reading the entire collection of Calvin and Hobbes anthologies that the Perfect House provided. It’s like wanting what you have instead of getting what you want. The thing is, I live in New York City, the best country in the world. I know what I like and all the best things are right here. I don’t need to try so hard.

• This salad. This salad was so good that I honestly had the thought that I might have gone into entirely the wrong vocation. This salad actually made me look into occupying the abandoned butcher shop on my corner to see if I wanted to open a business where I would just sell these ingredients. Basically, I wanted to open a mini H Mart that would be just as overpriced as the one I already resent because congestion pricing would make it untenable. This salad was that good.

Warning: I realize that I have turned into my mother because I will not be supplying you with a recipe rather an idea for you to riff on that I’m sure will yield unreliable results. Basically, when you go eat Korean food, especially the grilled meats, they give you a mess of lettuce to wrap it in and some various odds and ends. This is a convivial, joyful experience especially if Korean food is novel and your Korean food is always the grilled meats (no shade) but the flavor profile is just as good with cold soft tofu or grilled eggplant. Make no mistake, it is sensational with meat but sometimes I want the variation. And since I am terminally lazy I like to eat it all bunged in a slop bowl like an animal.

Anyway, I added a bunch of shredded cabbage, cucumbers and tomato (unorthodox but j’enjoy), shredded scallions (shredded lengthwise, suburban H Marts sell it in this format which is crucial), these hysterically green spindly peppers (I do not know their names but they are not that spicy [though YMMV]), a fuckton julienned sesame leaves (akin to Shiso but superior because: Korean), a bit of Ssamjang (basically soybean paste with gochujang and aromatics and sugar), a soupçon of bibimbap sauce (gochujang, toasted sesame oil, sesame seeds, rice wine vinegar, bit of sugar, garlic, soy sauce) and the juice of 1/2 a lime which will feel insane because lime does not typically go anywhere near Korean food.

Anyway, the result tastes impossibly verdant and fresh and miraculous and you can dump some rice into it and eat it with an egg and feel like a champ. Oh, big note: It helps if your friends all eat it too because your breath will be hilariously bad.

Again, I never claimed to be a recipist. Basically, I feel like the asshole who first deconstructed Eloté and wanted a prize for being a genius. Especially since in this case the sauces and the scallions came pre-made.

Anyway this is a food and travel blog now. I hope you still like me.

Oh, wait, no. There are still book-related announcements. There are two more Pool House events this month. One is with the good folks at Tables of Contents in conjunction with Cocktails in Color who will be serving book-themed beveraginos. It’s going to be on Monday July 13th, at INSA in Brooklyn, from 7-9PM. And if you’re not familiar, the whole set up is $35 for three small dishes and a cocktail which is an incredible deal for this town. It’s also going to be TOC’s last event of the summer since they’re taking August off.

Here is a link for tickets.

(I guess that still counts as a food-related announcement?)

ADHD aside: Another thing I am hyper aware of is that INSA is Korean food (thrilling) but also that they have Karaoke, which technically makes this my FOURTH Karaoke-adjacent party in the past two months. Is this a thing? Is it becoming a thing or has it always been a thing?

In any case, I do not DO Karaoke but I increasingly think this is a lie. I think I LOVE Karaoke but have historically been too embarrassed which I tend to signal with a great deal of eye-rolling or else chagrined forbearance at “extroverts.”

Anyway, I have picked a song for a possible next time: Hoobastank’s The Reason, with Erasure’s A Little Respect as back up.

OK.

The second event is with Warby Parker who does a lovely book club reading event called Book Report and I will be joined in conversation with my friend Rachel Syme who I once saw conduct a chat between Julianne Moore and Todd Haynes in a special anniversary showing of one of my absolute favorite films of all time, Safe.

It was competence porn on a trillion. I have seen outright terrible interlocutors and passably bloodless ones but during their conversation, Rachel actually made Julianne say: “You never told me that!” to Todd Haynes with whom she has worked for decades.

It was a feat of connoisseurship! A talented interlocutor is a rare gem and I can’t believe I get to talk to her about my book so please join us.

Those details below:

Oh, even more news!

As the many, manymanymany, subscribers to Roxane Gay’s Audacity newsletter already know, Pool House has been selected for their July Audacious book club.

The Audacity.

Introducing Pool House

Mary H.K. Choi’s debut novel, 2018’s Emergency Contact, opens with the particular and unrelenting embarrassment of a teen girl whose mother happens to be a MILF. Choi’s protagonist, Penny Lee, is just four days from heading off to college and is at the Apple store with her mom, picking up a promised new phone, when disaster strikes. Penny’s mom, Celeste…

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2 months ago · 65 likes · 2 comments · Roxane Gay

Obviously, I am screaming.

In the beautiful write-up Roxane threads the needle between Pool House and Emergency Contact, my first novel that I love. It makes me feel deeply understood and to have Roxane give both such a close read is thrilling.

Choi’s fourth book, Pool House, is her debut in adult fiction; some might claim that it is a sharp departure from her previous work but that isn’t the case. Pool House carries both the echo of Penny and Celeste’s relationship and Choi’s diligent reporter’s eye, this time attuned not to teenhood, but to motherhood and Hollywood…

Pool House opens with a tension similar to the opening of Emergency Contact: Stevie both admires her mother’s beauty and laments that she does not measure up.

You can register to join us for our zoom conversation here on July 30th, 8PM ET. I’m so pumped.

I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since Pool House came out. I’m writing a big thing about my reflections as a whole but not all my feelings have settled so hopefully they will soon.

Thank you to everyone who’s purchased a copy. Especially those who have tagged me on Pool-Side photos. It thrills me always.

I don’t know if it’s a sign of mental illness but ever since the show’s inception in 2023, I’d catch myself in the shower practicing my Subway Take. There was some urgency in it too, as though someone would quiz me or take me by surprise, testing me as though they were letterboxd on a red carpet. I’d watch other people’s and be like, Damn, that’s a good one. Or I’d workshop it, again, all by myself in my head, like, Solid but I would have worded it another way.

And the second I knew I’d be promoting Pool House, I set about trying to lurk or wheedle anyone who could get me on that show.

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I am sobbing my eyes out because I had the forethought to have therapy this morning. Big time huhu’s over here. Mostly I’m grateful. I’m so glad to be in this moment on the time line. Whatever I could do is done.

There’s just so much feeling in this book. I really need you to like it. I mean, I know that the people who hate this book will detest this book (goodreads). But I need people who know me even a little to love this book because I need you to approve of me. The way I see things.

Seems reasonable, right? I guess, that’s the thing about writing, at least for me. It’s how I make any sense of the world. What’s happening around me. It’s also how I understand the more complicated choices I make. The ones that carry a long, snarled tail for me to reconcile over the rest of my life.

It’s funny, but when I posted the above image to the various socials, people thought I was taking shots directly at Yesteryear but I’m mostly talking about wives in general. Mothers. And the roles both play in the world. I’m not casting aspersions on Ballerina Farms or performative homemaking. This isn’t about Belle Burden’s Strangers either. I am marveling, the way many women are, about how it is that we’ve backslid several decades in terms of what women should be capable of doing. How we should be looking. There is a sickening obsession with competence and thinness and youth and effortlessness that is materially impossible yet unfailingly seductive.

But mostly it’s because I am gutted that I didn’t have children. That I do not feel resourced enough to delight in them the way they deserve. That life becomes strange with fewer models available as reference. That work evolves without anything to take its place. Am I jealous? Of course I’m jealous. I’m also relieved. This is the book where I wrote through all those feelings. This is the book that, when my dad died, a dad turned up in its pages and died. This is why the allure of using AI to write evades me.

I talked to Meg Zukin for her newsletter, Shut Up and Read about Pool House, about how it’s so different from my other books because it absorbed so much turbulence from my life in real-time.

“With this one, I’m like, ‘I love you, but you still feel like a radioactive isotope. You really hurt me. I don’t understand.’”

But it’s not so much that Pool House hurt me, it’s that it took on so much of my pain. In losing my father, I also had to contend with being ‘alone’ with my mother. (Meanwhile, I have a brother. He’s just far more well-adjusted. I think ultimately because he did have kids and loves them with an unalloyed vastness that I’m grateful to witness).

This book is where I audited and interrogated the tidal feelings about my Mom. The mother-hunger that drives my work and the woman I am desperately in love with and ceaselessly inspired by.

“This book went far in terms of allowing me to hate my mother with the completeness of my entire heart, soul and psyche. And also forgive her. They say that forgiveness is letting go of the hope of a better past. And I was never angrier at my mom with less shame than in the writing of this book. I’m coming into my own sense of selfhood. In some ways, [I’m] preparing for my mother to die. And hating her truly and completely is the only way to allow her to fully become a person and to allow my mother to become a person is the only hope I have of surviving her death.”

If this all sounds like a bummer, then you might find this book a bummer.

But I’ve learned that experiencing life with the full breadth of bummerness is what makes the joy clean. Vivid and piercing.

There’s so much life in this book too. Absolutely fatted with the love that I feel for the people in my life. And while Moon is not inspired by any single woman, she is made richer, realer and infinitely more lovable by the influence of my friends and their lore that I’ve remorselessly shoplifted as they became mothers.

Rose blew my mind when I watched her deliver a full-throated apology to a pre-verbal Luna about a misunderstanding. It’s Carol, whose story I pilfered when it comes to Moon and Stevie sharing a notebook to ask and answer questions about sex and bodies. Dana and Helen, when it came to a diaper-clad baby who had a preferred area of carpet where she liked to poop. Jayne and her twin girls’; their defiance in stereo. Kathy and Bea, both of whom got on the phone with me to talk about their experiences with the other.

I’m really so lucky to be loved and ceaselessly inspired. This book is an offering to the myriad muses around me. It is rife with Easter Eggs. Viv Chen’s Monah Li dress. Bowen Yang’s pod. The grounds at MacDowell. It’s Yasi Salek I had in mind when Moon is wearing a Sci-Fi Fantasy T-shirt. Allison P. Davis, when I referred to an article on Adam’s BDE (or a “D, baby, D” in catching print terms). Mostly, I don’t want to embarrass these people.

I also just want everyone who put up with me for the past five years to be proud of me. Sam. Asa. Leilani. Film Club. Mark Lotto. Megan Lynch at Flatiron who was so patient. Jin Ha who shared so many voice memos about acting.

I took big, big swings with this story. You’ll see when you get to the ending. I feel pretty dazzled by it all. What a ride.

Pool House is ultimately how I see life. It’s a little grim. Bodily uncomfortable. Unpalatable yet dazzling. It’s about how I feel about families, the family I had and the family I am trying to make.

It’s why I really need you to like it. I really need you to like me. I don’t know how reasonable that is but I’d be lying if I said otherwise.

In any event, Pool House is out today. Order it now if you haven’t already and thank you. I’ll see you tonight at Yu & Me if you’re coming. And I’ll see the rest of you on tour.

I LOVE YOU.

Several weeks ago I met author and singer of the rock band Thursday, Geoff Rickly at a book event. More specifically, we were on the same panel about audiobooks and literary fiction and we’d left with the bonhomie and good humor of two people who were vibrationally compatible and happy/relieved to have done well for a crowd.

Yesterday, he texted me about how much he’d enjoyed DJ Khaled’s memoir The Keys, a book I’d ghostwritten and we had a lovely chat, after which I was prompted to pull it off the shelf.

Technically, it was my first New York Times bestseller but more crucially it was the first time I was tasked to write a book without any idea of how to go about it. I had written several celebrity profiles by then. I had been on tour with Rihanna for seven days with a caravan of other journalists but nothing had quite prepared me to sliding into the fiefdom of a rap personality as they were blowing up.

If you’ll remember, this was when DJ Khaled whose name is Khaled Khaled, had gone stupendously viral on Snapchat for getting lost at sea on jet skis at night. It was a harrowing yet heartwarming ordeal and all the while, lit only by the glow of his phone, he narrated the events through a series of reassuring platitudes. The key is not to panic. The key is to make it. The ocean is real. The key is never give up. It’s not easy to win.

And then the most crucial key: The key is not to drive your jet ski in the dark.

For this, he flipped into selfie mode giving us an indelible image that was equal parts Blair Witch and Paddington Bear.

He looked frightened and guileless and we were rapt and invested.

Eventually, he was able to navigate his way back to the intercostal and find his way home and we were all relieved but also acutely aware that we’d collectively witnessed the formation of a powerful shift in personal branding.

He’d already had wins. Most notably, the colossus All I Do is Win, as well as eight studio albums but this is the moment where America noticed him. The morning shows wanted him. Ellen. Martha Stewart. He’d become a household name and knew it, and everything he said caught fire. He churned out content like an influencer in a clout house, shining his light on his workouts, his brief stint with veganism, his chef, the stone lion in his yard, his partner, his lotion, his cronies, his cars and occasionally, his biographer.

I met Khaled through his literary agent who was also my agent. I have said this before but this always reminds me of when the former rapper (and current Belizean politician) Shyne Po and Puffy had the same defense attorney for the nightclub shooting on West 43rd street where J.Lo was famously present. Which is to say Shyne went to prison and Puff did not.

Which is only to say that the same agent should not have been handling both deals.*

As Khaled’s star was rising, the book deals inevitably arrived and my name quickly made the short list. Years later I’d find out how much Khaled made on the deal and while that figure is not my business to share, what I can say is that I was offered about $25ishK and had six weeks to turn it in. It felt doable. I could sense the momentum and had always been a fast writer. They put me up in the St. Regis for three nights and I knew that if I could get even two hours with him every day, I would have enough for a business book of aphorisms that would not only chronicle his origin story but give color to his life.

The long and short is that it was classic rap shit and he ignored me for all three days as I skulked around his house. I eventually elbowed my way onto his tour bus so I could get time with him on his way to Atlanta. At this stage of his life DJ Khaled was afraid of flying and this ended up being a gift.** I interviewed his parter Nicole, his right hand Kiko, his photographer and videographer Ivan, as well as many of his friends. I still have Fat Joe’s number in my phone from that time and both Cool and Dre’s. I also have Big Boi from Outkast’s number in my phone but that was from something else.

The longer, longer story is that I observed DJ Khaled for about 8 or 9 days total, this trip and later when he came to New York. I blended into the decor, threading my way through the crowds that clamored towards him like fast zombies for “fan luv,” I overheard his conversations, he was constantly calling people, and learned who this man was beyond the phrases.

I also thought about the shape the book should take and was grateful for having launched several magazines by then. Each key would be a chapter, that much I’d discussed with the publisher since a formal book proposal didn’t exist, but I would have to run them with some sense of chronology which would be supported by interstitials, interviews with his friends to give context but also heft.***

Mostly I watched DJ Khaled, obstinately sitting in his sight line like a begrudging, plotting cat with my notebook and recorder. On day five of him not speaking to me, I decided I’d invoice him directly for more money since he was eating into my deadline. I’d seen how dedicated he was in securing the bag and wanted his attention. “I’m raising my rate,” I said. “I’m going to invoice Patty (his childhood friend who also ran operations at the time).”

He told me, and I’ll never forget this, that he had a special, tailor-made key for me:

Are you an artist? He asked me. I was startled by this sudden pop-quiz and hesitated. Of course you’re an artist, he said. I wouldn’t have hired you if you weren’t an artist. But if you’re an artist don’t talk about money before you make the art, he advised. Make the art, then secure the bag. He went on to tell me to allow the agents, managers, lawyers to handle the details. And that even bringing business affairs into the room was compromising the potential magic of the art.

At the time I balked, dismissing this bespoke key as the oily justification of a scammer but whenever I’ve had occasion to be reminded of this moment in the intervening decade, I see how right he’d been. It’s only now that I think about how DJ Khaled is also the first person to call me an artist.

pre-order Pool House

Inside me there are two wolves. One is belligerent and capable of greatness. I refer to this part of me as The Tank. She is instinctive, impulsive, persuasive and not easily intimidated. There is a single-minded dedication to any task, any vision. She rarely questions the goal, the conviction is unwavering. Mostly, she moves her body and words in alignment with abject trust. It never occurs to her that we may fail. It certainly doesn’t occur to her to be intimidated or humiliated as an end result for having tried. Weirdly, there’s genuine equanimity to the objective as well. Whenever I interrogate this part, the results are reminiscent of this:

Every response is: “*”

It’s always giving, Well, what the fuck else would we be doing?

I could also call this part my inner DJ Khaled because the essence is exactly the same.

Then there is the part that is highly analytical. I hate to describe this part as autistic but it’s far more reminiscent of this:

This part is constantly plotting, scheming, testing, modeling. Picture a single, incredibly busy worker bee in a long-abandoned factory bustling about making costumes and disguises and masks, straining desperately to think her way into becoming a one-person LLM, analyzing all possible permutations of future scenarios to become a competent enough predictive tool to know the success rate of the outcome before committing to a single action. This part is utterly unaware that the only reason the “viral content strategist” seated in the above reel is so confident is that she and the inset “viral content creator” are on different timelines.

Stay away from ‘They.’

Oh, god, how all of this is ‘They.’

Pool House comes out in less than one week. I’ve noticed that in interviews so far I’ve largely talked about how difficult the book was to write. The fear that is knotted in my chest. It’s this sabotaging, recoiling instinct to perform exactly the opposite of the gleaming, cold perfection of the peptides x AI world that I see.

And for some reason I think about how when Khaled was ignoring me—we eventually found a process that worked for us; each day I would read aloud the ‘dailies’ to see if he hated it in real time—he remained kind. And whenever I successfully secured his attention, he rewarded me with something startlingly brilliant and that often took a few days to reveal itself to me.

During the time I spent with him, he got the call that Beyoncé wanted him to open for her on tour. He shot a series of ads (one with Neal Brennan that I was particularly impressed about). He was already on tour for his own album. He’d received a Roc Nation chain. He’d only just discovered he was going to be a father.

He knew this moment would dictate the course of the next chapter of his life. Life is what you make it so let’s make it.

I think I’ve been talking about how hard Pool House was to write to insulate myself from future disappointment. As if to say that the difficulty was somehow a clue or a hint, that I should have known it was doomed from the start.

The very busy worker bee is wringing her hands, ready to pack it in even before the book has come out. Meanwhile, the Tank is bashing about wondering when we’re getting our new assignment.

Don’t complain. Complaints are excuses and excuses are for the weak-hearted.

Which is to say:

WIN, WIN, WIN NO MATTER WHAT!

*For as salty as I was about me and Khaled having the same agent, it’s how I got the job.

**After I finished this book, I brokered a meeting between Khaled and Tony Robbins so that Tony could help him with his fear of flying and he did. Khaled now flies mostly private but he flies.

***I am just now realizing as I write this that the format of Pool House—the revolving POVs with short, mini chapters in between—most closely resembles DJ Khaled’s book. I find this both hilarious and incredibly moving. Oh, no I am crying!

Some other things.

Over the next few days, a bunch of profiles and essays and interviews will be coming out that I am excited about. High Snobiety just printed a fashion essay and it’s beautiful.

The artwork by the wonderful Anna Haifisch is especially evocative and I’m so happy that Noah Johnson, Claire Landsbaum and Delia Cai thought of me for it.

“They try to tell me that Quiet Luxury is dead and it’s a lie. It’s inside me. It will not detonate like a spore; it lacks the drama or the myopia to destroy its host outright. Rather, it will continue to leech its influence like contaminants into groundwater forever and ever long after I’m dead. Quiet luxury is microplastics.”

Speaking of Delia, she very kindly just published a “How I Made This Book,” with me over at Deez Links.

“Writers are so greedy. We’re just constantly hungry. It’s what makes the work so difficult. But I’m so interested in things, and I want to know how they work, and I think curiosity is the only way any of this is worth it, because I think existence is a terrible, terrible slog. Being — sentience, largely — is a curse. And so being able to transmute that or alchemize that into something else is the only solace.”

God, I’m so annoying.

If you want a signed and personalized copy of Pool House but cannot make it to any of my tour dates, please order one from Books are Magic. They ship nationally and the deadline for this is June 5 at 4PMish when I go over there to sign them.

In other, other news, I am also, weirdly, reading Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist with Traci Thomas at the Stacks for her book club pick of the month (find our amazing talk about Pool House here!). I am a big fan of reading a random book timing-wise and we’d both agreed, despite both having read it ages ago and recalling having hated it, that we’d suspend judgment as much as we could. I won’t comment on specifics of how we fared (not great!) but there was a part I was moved by.

“They continued across the desert. With every day that passed, the boy’s heart became more and more silent. It no longer wanted to know about things of the past or future; it was content simply to contemplate the desert, and to drink with the boy from the Soul of the World. The boy and his heart had become friends, and neither was capable now of betraying the other.”

This idea that my heart and I might one day be friends really makes me cry. I really think it’s possible. I feel that I am close.

I’ve already listened to my heart. I’ve already heeded my Personal Legend and the Soul of the World! The book is done!

Pals, if you’re enjoying choitotheworld, chances are you’re neurodivergent, peripherally interested in writing but also possibly incapable of figuring out how to do ONE THING and doing it well.

I have several jobs and many projects and infinite tabs open in the browser of my mind.

The algorithm is cruel to this.

The algorithm is ableist.

The algorithm likes best when we sound like the machines.

Legible. Taxonomizable. Tidy.

This newsletter will never be about one thing. It’s never going to have an unmistakable hook within the first second with a clear call to action.

It makes it impossible to discover in many ways. Also, yuck, “discover,” what are we f*cking Christoper Columbus?

This is all to say that word-of-mouth is everything and it would be huge if you would be that lip-flapping person upon whom my entire future and success hinges.

The math is simple. Refer friends and receive benefits.

1. Share choitotheworld. If you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit. I love points! I love the clarity of transactions! If you send the link in a text, email or share it on social you also get points!

Refer a friend

2. Points? What are we talking here?

• Get 1 month free for 3 referrals

• Get 3 months free for 5 referrals

• Get 6 months free for 25 referrals

And this for ALL subscriptions. PAID or UNPAID.

If you have questions, please refer to Substack’s FAQ because I do not know how most things work.

That said, I do thank you with my entire heart.

Pre-order Pool House out June 9 etc etc.

But also, LOOK AT THIS AMAZING PEOPLE EXCERPT THAT JUST WENT OUT AS I WAS TYPING! You can read the very first chapter of Pool House! Never before seen! Oh, I am shivering with hives just thinking about it!

I hope you like it! Oh, won’t you love me?

(Please also ignore the unsightly little “Ad” thing over there. Hideous! Avert! Avert!)

Hooray June Kim for the photo.

And thank you Harry for being on my one-person street team. You’re the greatest. This really is the energy I’d like to be seeing more of.

We’re so close.

Check this space for all tour dispatches.

Meow meow. xx

Westport Library - WESTPORT, CT 6/8 7PM + Julie Sarkissian

**** Yu & Me Books - CHINATOWN NYC 6/9 7PM + Michelle Zauner - SOLD OUT!!!!

Skylight Books - LOS FELIZ LA 6/11 7PM + Yasi Salek

Stacks Book Club - ORO VALLEY 6/13 6:30PM + Courtney Gustafson

BookPeople - AUSTIN TX 6/15 7PM + Shea Serrano

Books Are Magic - BROOKLYN 6/17 7PM + E. Alex Jung

Barnes & Noble Upper West Side 6/18 7PM + Miwa Messer

The other day I went to a friend’s birthday party. It was not The Birthday Party but rather the smaller dinner on the actual day of their birthday with another blow-out to follow. It was sweet, convivial and because it was held at a bar, I made the strategic decision to join everyone after dinner (before cake) so that I could recharge my social battery and have a quiet meal at home before heading back outside.

I was already high on my own triumph that taxis weren’t surging, that the bar was relatively close to my apartment (despite being in Brooklyn), and that the party was well on its way so that I could slip in rather unobtrusively amongst a few people to form a smaller, satellite, splinter group. Socializing for me is a bit like tempering chocolate, incorporating eggs, or making a salad dressing—I have to do it slowly—in stages—otherwise I’ll seize, scramble or refuse to emulsify.

Booze has historically helped but after a long period of sobriety I realized that I didn’t have a problem with alcohol. If anything I didn’t even like it very much. It tasted bad and as a pH for my system, it was way too acidic. Even still, I was contemplating a martini for vibes (this always happens!) until another friend offered me a packet of MDMA gummies. As well as a nasal pump bottle of cocaine.

I am told by the youth and the culturally relevant that drug modalities have been evolving for a while. And for anyone who has been following my writing, you’ll know that I’ve written about how to cognitively escape myself for decades. This was before I sought semi-sobriety, at least from recreational drug-use, and before I was diagnosed with ADHD and Autism.

I have written about the experience of doing Molly again after a twenty-year break and smoking weed, but I’ve also written about what I refer to as sober drugs, like sensory deprivation tanks.

Before my diagnoses, I carried a general unease that I can only describe as a very scratchy label on the inside of a shirt made of hair. Or the persistent, grueling discomfort of a knee or spine that needs to be popped back into place. It’s not uncommon for neurodivergent people to seek substances to scratch that proverbial itch until it bleeds or attempt to correct whatever feels internally “off” until they’ve properly mangled themselves.

The very first photo is from when I was rolling off my face at 18, at Austin Music Hall. You can tell I am callow and uninitiated by the impressive thinness of my eyebrows, the thickness of my eyeliner and the incalculable volume of collagen in my cheeks. My frontal lobe was not yet developed. Nor was social media invented to where everyone could comment on frontal lobes developing and Saturns returning.

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My mom runs fast for a 65-year-old. She’s small — 5 ft even — and clocks in at just over 100 lbs. Her compact frame slays in the juniors section of American department stores. I see her sprinting toward me as I stand on the corner of Austin’s busiest intersection, on its busiest fortnight — the two weeks it plays host to South by Southwest, the annual multimedia conference. It’s just after 11pm and traffic is an absolute shitshow. My mom’s always been sporty but since she stopped dyeing her hair she looks her age. As she gets closer, I worry that her brittle avian skeleton is going to crumple atop the hood of a swerving SUV. Being picked up by my parents is an experience I thought I’d grown out of entirely. After all, I am 33 years old, live in New York and am here on business. But they live just an hour outside of town, and I pulled the trigger on hotels late enough that I’m staying with them. They’ve been stuck in traffic for two hours coming to get me.

I was on the phone with my dad, both of us barking over the imperious GPS voice — him in a road rage and me in a full-body eye-roll — when my mom bolted from the car to run ahead, figuring I’d be easier to peg on foot. I’m watching her beam and wave big, while running hard and yelling my full name in English, just like that: first name; last name. My parents both do this as though it’s for my benefit. Like, calling a child by their full government name is super-casual. Like, it’s not a dead giveaway as the weirdest, most ESL affectation in the world. I’m waiting with a 24-year-old colleague that I hired straight from college who idolises me and I’m worried that my mom will hurt herself and that people will see. The whole thing infuriates me. I refuse to eat the snacks that she’s tin-foiled from home.

I love my mother a not-normal amount. It’s all twisty because she tried to kill me when I was young. Just kidding. My mom is an excellent mom. She knows I am irascible, prickly and antisocial. She knows that most human interaction makes me tired and that I either scare people away with precise invectives or trot out the fakest, nicest skinjob of myself because it requires zero effort. She nails me on all of it, asking one billion follow-up questions until I get behind my eyeballs and engage. She forces me to call distant relatives, dialling the phone and pressing it into my cheek while my eyes get hot and watery. She pulls rank all the time and once judo-flipped me onto my back in a grocery store to remind me where things stood. She is my favorite and it makes me crazy. You can tell that she was popular in school, but I am a fundamentally more popular person. I care more and I’m great at rules. I’ve known it since the first grade.

When I was small I thought I was just cooler than my mom because of how foreign she is. She’s really foreign. You’d think it would kill her to get store-bought snacks, she’s that foreign. She grew up in a Korea filled with Koreans, married a Korean and then moved to Hong Kong in her mid-30s. I was 11 months and my brother was two years old. This was back when Hong Kong was a British Crown colony, which meant we were living in Asia with heaps of Australians and bronzed Europeans who dated Filipino women. It was all very James Clavell and linen shirts. In any case, I speak four languages and am a ruthless assimilation ninja. I will renounce all kin in the name of camouflage because everything is a contest and I am a disgusting sell-out. It’s the twin moon to my being popular in any context provided I put my mind to it. I’m sure there’s a field of corn withering somewhere in my soul that fuels this despicable talent, but everyone’s got to die of cancer some time, right?

My mother, on the other hand, speaks English poorly with a screwy, poncy Korean British accent, as if she learned it from watching one 1960s Merchant Ivory movie on repeat. She’s also ridiculously formal, deeply private and not a joiner. She transitions poorly. The move to Hong Kong with two wee kids and an absentee partner was rough. My father had elected to set up a shipping company. He was out of the country for eight months of the year, and sometime around my tenth birthday I discovered that he spoke conversational Russian for reasons that remain murky. All this is to say that he wasn’t around a lot.

When I was five, I compound-fractured my arm, pulverising my elbow. I was on a play date at my mom’s friend’s house and so naturally blamed my mother. I actually remember lying on the floor, howling accusations of neglect at her while she frantically summoned an ambulance that arrived with a squad car and a firetruck in tow. I was already having a tough time adjusting at school, and it looked like I would miss weeks of class. I found speaking in English disorienting because we spoke only Korean at home. I even preferred Cantonese to English since we’d attended a local Chinese school for a week while waiting on test scores to admit us into a British private school. Forced to wear a massive cast during my fifth month of British school, I began referring to myself in the third person — my English name — announcing, daily, that ‘Mary would not be going to school.’

School was awful. I had to leave during the middle of the day for physical therapy that involved swimming and returning to class with inexplicably wet hair. Lunch sucked. My mom would pack the dumbest garbage. She once smeared bits of raw garlic left over from making kimchi onto white sandwich bread, thinking that’s how the garlic bread advertised at Pizza Hut was born. I waited until she got off work that night and yelled at her with rank breath. I’d eaten most of the seemingly innocent square, elated that a sandwich had turned up at all in a lunch box that usually contained punishment food that sometimes had eyes. The stress of navigating school as a teeny-tiny uncomfortable person with an enormous gimp wing was taking a toll.

One lunch, I was dragging myself around the playground when I saw my mom standing by the fence, waving big and calling my name. I wanted so badly to ignore her. She was supposed to be at work and I didn’t have physical therapy that day so I was immediately suspicious. As confusing as her presence was, my curiosity did not outweigh my desire to be left alone. Especially by her. I began to back away so she started shouting loud enough to be heard over the playground din. I shuffled towards her with every intention to roundhouse-bludgeon her with my plastered arm. She held out a paper box. It was a McDonald’s happy meal: a cheeseburger one, which was my favorite. The offering was so out of character that I considered it a bribe. I wondered if my parents were getting a divorce since that was huge at my school at the time. I asked her what was going on. She mentioned something about how she wanted me to have a lunch that I liked.

I then did what any normal kid would do and yelled and yelled about how embarrassing it was to have her at school with me during lunch of all times. She presented me with a sack of cheeseburgers that I could give out to my friends. I refused the damp bag and screeched about how it was so cheap that she didn’t spring for bright red boxes with toys for them as well. I made her take the burgers back with her. If I were an actress and had to think of something sad to make me cry in a scene, I would think about this moment. This and the time I was 13 when I kicked my mom across a room and ran away for two days because she tried to ground me — for breaking curfew after my friend Jacinta stole money from her dying grandmother so we could rent out a nightclub and write the names of those blackballed on the sign outside. For the record: I don’t know why people have kids.

he summer before I turned 14, my mom, brother and I moved to Texas. We’d always known that some day before Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule, we’d join my mom’s side of the family in the US. While our Green Cards were being approved, my father bought a house in suburban San Antonio despite our extended family living 1,400 miles away in LA. After 13 years of sardine life at high-rise altitudes, he liked the idea of spreading out. The prospect of opening all our dresser drawers without hitting bed frames or doors sold him on Texas-sized everything. My father split his time between running a business in Asia and visiting us. When I arrived in Texas, it was mid-June and 104 degrees in the shade. I was fresh off a forced breakup with my Hong Kong boyfriend, a dishy 17-year-old rugby player. Between the heat and the heartbreak, the move was not my favorite. Trapped in the suburbs, I began to notice that the mother I’d largely ignored in Hong Kong was interesting — so long as she was talking about me.

My mom was the only one of us with a driver’s licence. Some time in mid-July, I started speaking to her again on car rides and we became friends. She told me stories about how when I was two I would dangle out of my parent’s window on the 18th floor to play in the tiled flower box. She told me about the time I wandered off with another family in a park, which I totally remember because they had empirically superior toys. She said that when I was four, I stole hundreds of dollars from her and bribed my bus driver to drop me off last and to make a pitstop at the deli so I could buy candy on my way home. I’d stuffed the change in my shallow pinafore pockets and when my mother frantically berated me for stealing the money and trying to get myself kidnapped, I told her I loved money more than I loved her. I found all of this fascinating.

This is going to sound absurd but my first year in Texas was the year that I first cared about being smart. I’d always prided myself on being popular. My older brother was the one with good grades and I was the one who dated burnouts from the year above him. There was something in the complete reboot of Texas, the comparative stillness of heavy skies and quiet nights that made me read a lot. I read a new book every other day and aced exams. Even as a sophomore, I easily slid in with the popular seniors. But by the time they graduated, I couldn’t be bothered to imprint on the next guard. I kept to myself and took a slew of Advanced Placement to college classes.

School was easy for me but those years were tough on my mom. In Hong Kong she’d had tons of friends. She was active at church and there was a sizable Korean community. In Texas she didn’t have anyone but me and my brother. Every morning when the bus would come to pick us up while it was still dark out, I could see her slight backlit frame outlined in our blinds as she watched us drive away. A senior on the bus once asked if my mom knew that we could all totally see her. I told that kid to go fuck himself and to quit looking at my mom. To this day, I still can’t watch her watch us leave.

It’s a blessing that life is riddled with diversions. I work a lot. I’ve never had the weeks between Christmas and New Year’s off, but these days I don’t love money how I used to. My mom though, I’m crazy about. I think about her all the time and can’t stand it. When she rings during a meal I get indigestion if I don’t call her back immediately. There’s a roiling shame spiral wherein I become resentful that she called at all and punish us both by prolonging the wait. I have no idea when my perception of my mother became the calculated crush of my life but it has. I don’t go home for birthdays or holidays, and on the occasions I do visit, I express my affection in strange ways. I wait for her to fall asleep and peer over her body and imagine what it’d be like if she died. I just stand there, hot silent tears coursing down my face. We’re not a demonstrative family, and such maudlin, psycho behavior is fair grounds for riotous derision. I love my mom and it’s a secret. I love her so much it kills me, and you bet I’d sooner die than tell her. I kinda want her to know though. Maybe someone could tell her for me. Someone who isn’t my dad. Because that would be weird.

I haven’t been on tour in so long. Not officially since my second novel, Permanent Record, which was opens many tabs SEVEN years ago. Good lord, how is that even possible?

I have some apprehension in my heart because the story I tell myself is that I am an indoor cat who is afraid of crowds but to be honest, I was GUTTED that I didn’t get to tour Yolk because of Covid. And there’s this unnerving feeling rising up in me and it might be excitement.

It might even be jubilation?

I don’t know what is going on but I’m actually, really—cautiously—pumped.

Admittedly, I am also a little worried about what to eat while I’m traveling (containing multitudes and all). I will definitely pack those Trader Joe’s envelopes of tuna and carry little sacks of crudités to supplement any weird sandwich wraps but any undue concerns may be a little moot since I am in such a different place with control and food and body.

Joy is such a bizarre experience. I often conflate it with anxiety, it’s so unfamiliar. But I am glad this book will be out soon. I am grateful that these independent bookstores have invited me to their towns since it’s such a gamble on any given night. I am also so happy that friends will travel to inconvenient parts of their cities to come see me or else be my conversation partners when I know they have so much going on themselves. Sometimes, whole books to finish, articles to write, classes to teach, or massive (truly humongo) podcasts to edit.

I don’t know what I’m wearing yet but have some ideas. I don’t know how many pairs of tabis you can fit into a carry-on but am eager to find out.

More than anything, I feel so lucky to have such a beautiful community of writers and brains around me. I haven’t seen Michelle, or Japanese Breakfast, in person since we were both at a soup party (it is how it sounds, people bring soup; it was incredible). She was kind enough to blurb Pool House (even while she was working on her second book) and is generously kicking off the tour at Yu & Me Books.

over at Fast and Loose, host of Bandsplain, who right now is absolutely crushing during Madonna month, will be chatting with me in LA. We’ve been friends so long and I just know the SECOND I see her face at Skylight books, it will calm my nerves and get me so oozy and cozy because it will mean that I’m doing it. I will officially be on tour. I hope she brings her dog.

I was torn a little about doing Austin rather than San Antonio, where and my family actually live, but I love Book People and have such fond memories of it when I went to college at UT. Shea specifically, as many of you will know, runs Good Movie. He’s been a #1 New York Times Bestseller multiple times and is possibly the only person in the world who can convince me to buy independently published books—sight unseen; in advance—truly without even telling me what it is. I trust his sense of humor so much and find him to be one of the most inspiring people. Selfishly, I am going to ATX to ask him tons of questions so I hope you’ll join us for that.

I’m also grateful to people who I have never met like authors Courtney Gustafson and Julie Sarkissian whose vibes are sublime parasocially. And I can’t wait to see what Westport Library and Stacks Book Club are like.

Alex E. Jung isn’t #onhere newsletterly-speaking but he’s so on here spiritually and emotionally and materially when it comes to the internet and it will be so lovely to land safely with him in Brooklyn Heights at ’s store at the end of the tour. And then I’ll head uptown to record the Poured Over podcast with Miwa who has heard me complain about this book for years so that will be particularly sweet.

Below you’ll find all the links, places and dates.

Please RSVP early so that you can reserve a spot and to signal to the respective bookstores that their seats will be filled. I can’t stress how vital this is. There’s nothing more agonizing than throwing a party and not hearing back. IRL meatspace can be such a chore but it’s also so enlivening. And more than anything, I’d love to see all your lovely faces again.

Westport Library - WESTPORT, CT 6/8 7PM + Julie Sarkissian

Yu & Me Books - CHINATOWN NYC 6/9 7PM + Michelle Zauner

Skylight Books - LOS FELIZ LA 6/11 7PM + Yasi Salek

Stacks Book Club - ORO VALLEY 6/13 6:30PM + Courtney Gustafson

BookPeople - AUSTIN TX 6/15 7PM + Shea Serrano

Books Are Magic - BROOKLYN 6/17 7PM + E. Alex Jung

Barnes & Noble Upper West Side 6/18 7PM + Miwa Messer

**With the Chinatown debut at Yu & Me, the book is bundled with your ticket to see me and Michelle but IF you already pre-ordered with them (because I’ve been banging on about THAT for weeks) and are thinking, WAIT, do I have to buy two books, don’t fret.

You can contact them directly and they’ve assured me that they will sort out the book bundled cost for the ticket.

Big hugs. Love you.

I never knew about audiobooks until a few months ago. Which is to say that obviously I knew they existed but I didn’t know how they would fit into my life. I have friends who exclusively read by listening and occasionally they’d reveal this fact with some degree of sheepishness or outright embarrassment. Sometimes they’d even ask with total sincerity if this counted as reading and I’d tell them, of course, without meaning any of it but holy smokes, audiobooks are amazing. Audiobooks fuck.

To me audiobooks are to reading what coke-flavored candy is to regular coke. A wholly separate hankering that scratches a different itch. As an overstimulated, under-resourced autistic person with ADHD I am constantly searching for tools that make the world a less scribbly and terrorizing place. And in the past I’ve resorted to chewing gum or candy or cigarettes or music, sometimes all at the same time, in order to make the transition from my very cozy living room to the great outdoors.

Lately, though I’m trying to move slower. (Partly because I have no choice, I am currently nursing an injury). And I’ve taken to actually negotiating with myself to reassure the parts of me that are terrified and disoriented about having to be anywhere on a pre-determined schedule and it turns out story time is a spectacular motivator. There’s also something in the length of a book that is helpful at linking the various segments of my day together, lending a sense of reassuring continuity that tricks my brain into thinking we’re not switching tasks. It helps me feel a sense of competency that otherwise evades me. Especially if I have a lot on as I currently do since I’m doing everything to promote my own book (Pool House June 9, etc etc). If I’m in the middle of listening to a book, everything is predetermined. I’m not picking a new song, it’s already set up. The consistency is hugely soothing.

In any case, forgive me if you already know this but for those who don’t, I thought I’d share some (OK, two) resources I find helpful in my new life as an audiobooks person. (Does anyone remember that old David Sedaris joke? The one about being a tapeworm rather than a bookworm because he was listening to books on TAPE? Anyway, I’m a baby tapeworm!)

1. The libby app. AKA the library app where you can sign up for multiple library cards and borrow so many books all the time. I know I’ve mentioned this before but have a library card for Manhattan and another one for Brooklyn but honestly, the most hardbody library card I have is my L.A. one that is linked to my cousin’s house (is this fraud? Am I defrauding the L.A. public library system?). The L.A. one has ten holds (you can queue up for ten titles at a time) with unlimited magazines (!!) and will get you the Kanopy app, featuring films and documentaries that are curiously (egregiously?) absent from the streaming services and often even Criterion. In any case, many newer titles that may have humongous wait times for the book-book often offer audiobooks that are available right away.

2. I am very late to the news that spotify premium features a great many audiobooks but I mention this here since apparently lots of us didn’t know. (Specifically, I’ve seen commenters around the Famesick discourse point out that it’s available to stream for free for premium accounts and then other commenters being really grateful about it.) They launched books two years ago and either the algo didn’t know to recommend audiobooks because I wasn’t already reading them (one shortfall among many with algos) or else I must have assumed they were all in-app purchases, the way it is with streaming services and movies that are still in theaters. The caveat is that you get 15 hours a month which is just shy of two books, and then you’re invited to pay for a top up of 10 hours or more. In any case, you can monitor how many hours you have left and how long you have to wait to be re-upped by tapping your profile picture » selecting settings + privacy » account » and then it’s all there. I am somewhat terrified to know what this means for royalties but if anyone knows please tell me in the comments.

Anyway, if you want to be on the wave I’m on, I recommend Famesick and then sliding into PRK’s London Falling. This isn’t a book club or anything, more a vibe check and I have no idea if I enjoy audiobooks for fiction but I’m open to finding out.

On a slightly scope-crept note, as a codependent elder whose favorite vice in the world bar non is smoking cigarettes (menthols at that), I invite you to see what function cigarettes are currently serving in your relationship to anxiety.

Listen, I know all cigarettes are not created equal and if I could just have the post-prandial one on a rooftop or plaza in Italy or France or Switzerland, I would still be smoking. But I’d gotten to the point where I was lighting up the moment I stepped outside even while acknowledging that they made me feel wretched and smelly and sour so this past January when I got sick and couldn’t smoke for a few days, I decided to ride it out.

I miss smoking every day. I still think about her all the time especially as the weather is warming but I watch myself not light up (although I found a pack in my suitcase the other day and couldn’t bring myself to throw it out), but it seems that, weirdly audiobooks are helping me with that one harrowing moment of feeling like I will perish when I hit any atmosphere that isn’t my house.

The other wonderful, unanticipated side effect of audiobooks is that they’re proving to be helpful in thinking about my next projects. It calls to mind that phenomenon of how music people do the “car test” and the “AirPods test” and “phone speaker test” to feel how the song sounds in all different places. Most writers do a similar thing and I’ll read a chapter aloud or have someone else read it aloud for me or print them out to read off a screen and then sometimes even download it as a PDF onto a kindle to see how engaging or non-engaging it is on the least charming screen known to man. No shots. It’s definitely a feature not a bug.

I usually fling myself into a new project the moment an old one wraps up. Again as a function of nerves, I feel too disembodied and overwrought when I’m not working or inside a book. But this time I’m taking time to support Pool House (out June 9 etc etc) and be receptive about what direction I want to go in before committing fully. I’m lightly working on a show as well as a non-fiction proposal and a novel set in New York. And observing all three with a bit of distance while ingesting other shows and books has been illuminating. I’d previously never given too much thought to chapter length as someone who creates a vomit draft and is very much a pantser when it comes to writing (vs a plotter - I just fly by the seat of my pants), and there’s something rhythmic that I can really feel and hear in a new way when I’m listening that evades me when I’m reading. It’s as though I can hear the bridge and the hook and the verses in a chapter of prose.

Listening to non-fiction particularly also lead me to the insight that while I’ve only been writing books for a decade, I’ve been writing personal essays for over twenty years and there’s a sense of proprioception and music that I experience innately with the form that is perhaps not as intuitive or free or confident when it comes to book-length projects. But it occurs to me now that there’s no reason I couldn’t write entire books and novels in “personal essay voice.” And this is thrilling despite it being obvious. I love those moments of astonishment, of being made aware of biases or self-limiting beliefs or rules, that sense of, Holy shit I didn’t know we were allowed to do that.

On a related, exciting note, I am thrilled that this weekend, specifically this Saturday, The Roxane Gay, as in The Bad Feminist, Dua Lipa’s best friend and the co-owner of The Rumpus and the steward of the Audacious Book Club, has invited me to teach at her day-long memoir writing workshop.

I am chuffed to pieces to be considered. It’s open to non-students and you can still sign up here. It’s thrilling to rub shoulders with authors and teachers like Alex Chee and the inimitable Mira Jacob.

I’m teaching about what it means to write a personal essay and it’s been fascinating to take work apart and examine its components. A personal essay really is the tiniest morsel of real estate when it comes to an entire life. The sweetest ones are around 1,200 to 3,000 words, at least to me, which is only really ever one incident and a few other supporting incidents around which a shift in thinking or understanding or realizations take place. Since I’ve never gone to school for any of this, I don’t spend too much time examining the reasons or particulars of structure and timing. I really should hammer down exactly what I’ll be talking about but there’s so much to choose from. I’m thinking Michelle Zauner and Youngmi Mayer, since I adore them both to bits and I love looking at individual essays as puzzle pieces of entire memoirs.

I may also talk about Famesick as well as passages from Cintra Wilson, since they all have such distinct voices. I love what happens in their “viewfinders,” the way they describe time, space, people, and even in the selection of what moments to highlight. You really do learn so much about a person by which memory they choose to dust off and polish.

It all calls to mind what Rachel Khong and I discussed a few weeks ago when she was in New York touring her collection of short stories. The way her metabolism for short stories varies from her larger fiction projects and how they both nourish each other as long as she is patient and curious when it comes to “her writer,” the part of her that writes. Every time I panic that I should be writing, every time I feel urgency or impatience or feel tempted to force myself to write something, I discover that, inevitably, I have already been writing in some other way. That in so many ways I don’t ever stop writing. It also doesn’t get old that I not only get to write but that I’m in community with so many other writers. I complain often and vociferously about how this work is lonely, only to discover that I’m rarely alone in any of this.

I’ve largely avoided Lena Dunham until now. The way some people do with Survivor. Or Real House Wives. It’s never interesting when someone mentions not doing something. “I’ve never tried sushi.” Or, “I don’t take the subway.” You almost instinctively steel yourself against whatever coming next. It’s usually crazy or racist or some other deeply revealing shit that truly nobody asked for.

The only reason I mention it here is that I’m listening to Famesick and enjoying it immensely. It’s all I want to talk about or think about. And if you like reading about blog media, recovery, New York at a particular time, process, artistry, show-running, writing, families, it’s for you.

It’s also basically for anyone who has ever been terminally online.

Anyone in media now. Media then.

As someone with a book coming out in six weeks, I am obviously forensically studying the rollout that has played across substack in the canniest way. I am writhing with jealousy in a way that feels good and exciting. And it makes sense that what has felt like a hurtling juggernaut was a considered process that required months of forethought. You can read all about it in this interview with Lena and her strategist Dolly Meckler that came out as I was writing.

I still have questions though, like, why Lena Dunham hasn’t done a grub street. I want to know how and where she eats. One of my favorite aspects of Famesick is how clear and unflinching she is in her audit of the collective attitudes towards her weight and size over the years. She is matter-of-fact, lovingly unsparing even when she describes her grandmother as anorexic. And the way she talks about her own mother’s excitement towards a sweet potato as part of this legacy, reminds me of so many testimonies that I know from recovery rooms.

I’m also curious about her subway take.

Still, I don’t know that I would have read Famesick had it not been available to stream for free on spotify premium. It felt a little like the U2 album in that way. Just suddenly inside my phone.

When Girls came out in 2012, I wasn’t even in my twenties anymore but the backstory had been thrilling. About as ubiquitous and retold as the urban legend of that one assistant who had gotten into Anna Wintour’s car on her way to the airport and been so convincing and engaging that she was later given a job at Vogue.

We’d heard about Tiny Furniture. And how Judd Apatow was somehow involved. Judd Apatow who I staunchly believed had been wronged by The Networks, been screwed by The Man. He of a single, brilliant season of Freaks and Geeks. Undeclared, another iconoclastic show that had been waylaid by literal 9/11.

I was working at MTV Style and writing a culture column at Wired. Possibly blogging for The Awl, a blog run by ex-Gawker staff. The magazine I had launched in my twenties, Missbehave, had folded around the time of the subprime mortgage crisis. Everything was bad. The music industry had imploded because of streaming. Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt. And I was curious what the writers of Girls would do with a New York I felt I knew.

This was a New York where you had no health insurance but you could still go to an open bar in your Cheap Monday jeans or American Apparel leggings every night of the week. Everyone had aggressively jagged bangs and every event was underwritten by Vitamin Water, Scion, Mountain Dew Green Label Art, Red Bull, or American Spirits. An epoch in which every vodka arriving on the market was energy vodka, what with a guarana + taurine blend being to beverages what protein is to everything now.

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Hi friends. Apparently it’s going to be in the high eighties today. I don’t know about you but I don’t feel emotionally prepared. Everything feels swollen and portentous. Possibly a little unhinged. It’s also tax day today in this warmongering country of ours which feels like its own very deranged thing and to commemorate I have broken out into hives.

Truthfully, I filed my taxes months ago along with my corporate taxes. Me, a corporation of one. With intermittent-at-best-income. But I’m also too embarrassed to disclose how much I pay my accountant. I know I can’t afford him and he raises his fees $500 every year. Is this just the regular cost of inflation? Is this dynamic pricing (is it dynamic if it only ever goes up?) Is this actually just a sign that I should be raising my rates across the board?

Such are questions!

All I know is that last year when I had the cheapo temerity to ask if there was a less godly tier for smaller, more humble clients, he laughed with a deep expensive resonance that instantly made me feel reassured.

It makes me think there is no pecuniary cure for the type of poor I feel.

Even still, I felt accomplished and even a little virtuous for going to a free screening on Monday night. And that for however much grousing I do about living in Manhattan, I could walk to the Mother Mary opening in thirteen minutes from my apartment.

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I don’t know about all of you but I loathe being perceived. The only thing that makes it worse is when that moment is captured for posterity and held up to the light. There is a reason why all my avatars on social media are the same photo of a toddler in a white helmet playing a plastic guitar that I stole from the internet. This baby is probably some pouting Gen-Z person by now. I can only be grateful that I stole it so long ago that it is likely not AI.

I despise being looked at. I can barely make eye contact without my teeth chattering from the scrutiny. There is a reason why I work mainly in a fetid lair banging away at a keyboard. In this way, being a fiction writer is a bit like being strapped into a VR headset for great swaths of time as a means of “living.”

Weirdly I don’t mind being looked at provided I am Doing A Thing. I actually like public speaking. Mainly because I love blacking out. But also because it’s not Me anyone is looking at, The Thing becomes the central focus. Also, I am moving around. I only like my face when it is traveling through many expressions, without any single frame having to represent WHAT I LOOK LIKE.

To me, The Head Shot is the most excruciating kind of being looked at. It’s the dissonant ick of your recorded voice times a trillion.

It’s the capturing of my appearance but with such high stakes since it is what people will think I look like in the absence of my real face and in the absence of knowing me. It has to not only resemble me but also capture something about me that I am keen on transmitting to other people. Something engaging. Smart. Inviting maybe. Possibly more friendly than I really am. Neutral enough that you won’t find me needy or effortful. Hot would be great but hot can so quickly veer into “the face of smelling a fart” or “squinting in a way that suggests neurological quirks.” I also have a very real tendency to go cross-eyed whenever I try to evoke any particular feeling.

Everyone knows that this is the one photo in the world where you had total photo approval. It says a lot that you picked it.

Anyway, I’ve been using this one for ages.

It’s over ten years old and it was starting to feel like catfishing. But weirdly I think I look more like this than other photos from that exact same day where I look like a fucking zygote compared to now. I don’t know why but looking at the one below is like looking at a sonogram I look so baby.

Anyway, maybe this is only interesting to exactly me, the owner of this face but I enjoy certain photos and abhor others. Or else derive a very specific feeling about it. Like, the first photo in this post, the one where I am laughing, makes me feel like I am dead. It’s giving… In Memoriam.

In any case, the middle one has carried me far and for a long time. I have used it as the representative for my face as the author photo inside all three of my previous books. And including Pool House (out June 9, pre-order it please etc etc). I have used it for announcements whenever I am appearing publicly in support of friends. Generally whenever anyone asks for a portrait, that’s my trusted steed.

But again, it’s been too long. I needed new photos. And there were things I wanted to do over again so I sat for another shoot. Here’s what helped it to be exponentially more helpful and a lot less painful in terms of faffing around dying of humiliation or just leaving my dumb meatsuit for dead and letting my soul flit off and then being mystified and disappointed by the selects that came in.

• Manage expectations. The author photo I did wind up loving was from the second shoot I did with the same photographer. We shot hundreds of photos and I didn’t like any of them. This will happen. It was my first shoot despite having produced them for other people. I knew I hated one side of my face but I fucked up and told him the wrong one! Worth every penny and all the discomfort to ask for a re-shoot. I’ve found that for every hundred photos, I like maybe 1-2. If I’m having a freakishly good face day, I will maybe like 4.

• Look like yourself. I know, seems obvious. But one of the reasons we had to scrap that first shoot is that I did something ever so slightly different with my hair. Getting the photos back gave me uncanny valley. Similarly, even for this most recent shoot I tried a paler lip for one set of images and I am SO RELIEVED we went back to red. You want these photos to be representative of you otherwise you’ll have dissonance. It also won’t age well if you happened to be blonde for two months or got bangs. Also, observe all the rules of Big Days. Don’t get a facial the day before, you don’t know how you’ll react to it. Don’t eat EVERY sodium in the world the night before etc, etc.

• Wear simple clothes. Same deal here. You don’t want the look to be too memorable. It’s like a statement piece or a truly fire fit. You have to be tactical about when to unleash a vermillion-colored oblong felt Comme shape with arm holes because everyone will remember it. You will want this photo to be your emissary or envoy for every occasion for as many times as possible so my suggestion would be to bring a black top with long or 3/4 length sleeves. A turtleneck is great for this. So is a simple crisp white shirt. Bring a “fun option” so you have it to be emblematic of how you dress in life but bring the boring ones too. White is brightening and black carries a mood. It’s like daytime TV tops and blazers. You may never wear fuchsia or ultramarine ever again but by God if that shit doesn’t just POP and look amazing under those hot lights at 6AM. And by the same mysterious math, black will always make you look cadaverish on TV. It’s how any avant garde shape rarely translates unless you have a stylist who is staying for the whole shoot to fiddle and floof every angle. On that same note, you never know where people will choose to crop your image so keeping it safe and simple is usually the best bet.

• A shot list. Even if you know for sure you only want black and white photos, get the color options. Trade journals HATE a black and white and often will not use it. They would sooner use another random color photo stolen from the internet even if your literal mouth is open and there’s a Comic Con eye in your background than use a black and white. Also, get vertical images but also request horizontal images. I would suggest shooting in a studio so you can capture some environmental shots (next to a window) and a seamless really helps depending on your budget. It’s incredible what a color behind you will add.

  

  Also, know that there are really only three kinds of photos that you need. A new head shot potentially to use inside future books. This is often a vertical image with just head and shoulders. I like black and white for this but that’s a personal preference. Then, a color photo, again, head and shoulders, for authorial announcements. I make the distinction because a headshot can look a bit stylized or else bookish but a professional announcement photo should carry a whiff of LinkedIn about it. You’ll know what I mean. It’s the photo that is in the composite artwork for a Deadline announcement.

  

  Then you need a 3/4 shot that you might want to run alongside an article of you where the outlet doesn’t have the time or budget to commission a whole-ass shoot but don’t want to just run your headshot that’s everywhere else in the world. Always remember to ask the photographer for usage or put them in contact with the photo department so they can catch a check.

  

  

• Hands help. I don’t make the rules but there’s a reason why so many author photos are touching their hair or faces. They give movement and life but also direct and anchor focus.

  

  

• Limit yourself to 3-4 costume changes. More and you will get confused. You will not spend enough time with each and you will regret that you love the face in one but hate the shirt etc etc until infinity.

• Have fun! Just kidding.

Anyway, here is one from the shoot I just did. I don’t know which bucket it satisfies but I like it. I think I like it? UGH semantic satiation but for FACES.

Don’t tell me if you hate it. I have others. I just am not emotionally ready to show them to you yet.

Some notes about this week!

You can find me in real life where I am not only Doing A Thing but am Doing A Thing in Support of Another Author. Twice!

Tonight, April 7, you can find me with the pal Kevin Nguyen at Orion Bar in Bushwick at 7PM to celebrate the paperback launch of his warm, startlingly funny novel, My Documents. The partiful announcement is here.

And later this week, April 9, you can catch me and Rachel Khong at the Strand. It’s for the book launch of her collection of short stories, My Dear You, that is SO miraculous and excellent and hilarious. You can find the eventbrite link here.

I’ve started doing some interviews for Pool House in anticipation of launch (June 9, pre-order now etc etc) and it’s been fascinating to discuss the novel and its inspiration. It’s one of those things where you feel prepared but it’s only as you’re speaking that your face goes slightly numb and your thoughts threaten to unravel. One question I’ve been getting that unfailingly stumps me even though it shouldn’t (even though I’ve had plenty of time to formulate a satisfactory response), is what genre POOL HOUSE falls into.

Part of it is that I’m traditionally a YA author. At least from a marketing standpoint. None of my books have been set in high school or seem traditionally YA in any sense but POOL HOUSE is firmly adult. Literary fiction as it were. It follows Stevie, 20, but in this case also her mother, Moon, 46, and her love interest, Adam, who is in his early thirties. There is also a romance aspect to it. And tons of sex.

[It will never be odd to me to classify books by age rathe…

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I get it, I finally get it, why people rely on comps. It used to irritate me terribly that the world was so keen to taxonomize new work by comparing it to things that already existed. Especially when those other films, bands, or books were literally genius classic works or whatever was monstrously zeitgeisting at the moment.

It’s like K-Pop Demon Hunters meets Citizen Kane!

It’s like Geese meets Björk!

It’s if The Sisters and all the books that Heated Rivalry was based on had a baby!

But it’s just the human brain. The brain loves to sift and sort and create reason because it quells anxiety and feels cognitively tidy.

Besides, it’s also fairly disingenuous if not outright delusional to think that my own work is not informed by others. There’s always a mood board or shelf of 3-4 books that I reread or at least keep close when I am working on a new story or novel. Or else vibes. This time, a smell.

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PRE-ORDER POOL HOUSE!

pre-order Pool House

I am just returning from a massage at Grand Nature. Those of you familiar with Grand Nature know that it’s less a massage than an exorcism. I go see “Little Kevin” who in fairness is medium-sized but one look at “Big Kevin” makes the whole thing lock straight into place.

It was astounding the way I lifted off the table with gnashed teeth as my fascia was getting mangled. I felt genuinely sick afterwards which is really the only way you know it’s working.

Lately, it feels like something in me is thawing. Or else that what had previously been calcified is loosening.

(As an aside, if you’re local to New York and looking for a very unfancy but therapeutic massage, the stackpal Chris Gayomali over at Heavies has recommendations.)

In this moment, POOL HOUSE ARCs are out in the world. Not the finished books themselves but the advance readers copies or “galleys,” in case there’s some confusion. It’s not an insignificant thing to read a book right now. There are many incredibly terrible things happening in the world, not least of all a war, and attention spans are duly scattered.

I can’t account for every copy that’s out there but a few friends have let me know they’ve started reading. This has the curious and pathological effect of opening a tab in my brain with a lo-fi graphic of an egg timer that counts down for how long it is taking each of them to read the book.

As more time passes, the more convinced I am they hate it. Disregarding entirely how this friend maybe has a whole-ass vibrant life filled with other people, priorities, responsibilities and diversions.

Never mind a big-ass pile of other books which is certainly the case with me.

And then there are the friends who are reading the book and live-texting with me about it. Sometimes it’s a few lines. Or a bit of dialogue. Or even just a few emoji. And every time this happens I feel like throwing my phone across the room.

Logically, I should love this. It should serve as affirmation. Instead, I feel personally attacked. If I had an Ouro ring it, I swear to fuck it would catch fire in these moments.

My instant loudest thought is:

Why are you terrorizing me?

But last night it happened again and for the first time, some innate wisdom rose up and swirled out of me to observe the proceedings with enough distance to feel joy.

It’s an inconvenient thing that my body and brain processes excitement or happiness with deep suspicion and anxiety but holy shit my friends love me. Demonstrably. In ways that require time and effort and energy and vulnerability and enthusiasm and celebration.

My friends, in this economy, in these times, with all this noise, are taking time from their own lives/work/doomscrolling/protein-eating/heavy-lifting/child-minding to do their Love Homework of reading an entire fucking book that I decided to make and then telling me about it.

It’s so weird to be a writer. Any artist. To unilaterally choose to make a project every few seasons, suffering, complaining, talking about very little else, and then harassing everyone in their blast radius, talking about how scared they are once they’re finished.

Friend: Are you happy to be done?

Artist: Must we talk about this?

I’m not the first person to say this about sports but I sometimes struggle with the stakes aspect because it all feels like a bit of a made-up little mini war to me. Meanwhile my entire existence is dedicated to taking a little kernel of an idea, worrying it in my sticky little fingers until I can fashion it to closely resemble the thing I see or hear in my head so I can prove to the world that these reedy transmissions I keep intercepting are real. That I am real.

And then, because humans are beautiful, the people around me, friends, families, colleagues, other artists who are perhaps not in a release moment or even those who are, rally around me, all holding unwieldy little mirrors up and smiling their faces off to tell me I’m real.

Only to have me want to throw my phone across the room when they do.

The other other night I woke my partner up from a full-dead-sleep because I’d “accidentally” opened a PDF of my book, circa 2022, on my Kindle where I’d rewritten 10 chapters in first person. I read the whole thing and gave myself debilitating insecurity chills, enough that I had to ask my partner to lie on top of me to weigh me down. Except that he is extremely skinny so it was a bit like those lizards that can literally skitter across the surface of a pond so there was no real succor to be had pressure-wise, only warmth. Until I got too hot.

The overriding feeling whenever I come out with a book is shame. It’s embarrassing. But it’s also such a pleasure to be embarrassed. I told my friend who texted me last night how uncomfortable it was to talk to them directly about it even over a phone. And by then I was openly crying. Then, they started crying about how proud they are because they know this is the only thing I’ve ever wanted and how much they liked my other books and how this time they would make a point of telling me.

Oh god.

Humans.

It’s such a pleasure not only to be understood but to bear witness to someone who is trying to understand you.

I never thought about the vulnerability in displaying the effort of trying.

At varying points when people ask me how I feel about the book coming out, I tell them that it feels like mania but in book-time. That it’s about as cathartic as vomiting a kernel of corn at a time. It’s a car crash at x 0.00002 speed. It is like having your guts unspooled at the pace of amber moving along a tree limb.

And when I say that I want the book to do well I feel amateur and corpulent. Very specifically those two words. It feels childish to admit that I make art to feel loved. It feels horribly gauche and unsophisticated. Ignoble.

I would so much prefer being one of those people who are capable of exhibiting the self-possession and equanimity that makes it plausible to believe they are simply serving as the conduit or the portal for the story to come through. It seems so composed and hygienic.

Meanwhile, it feels fat to be perceived in this unadorned state of wanting a book to do well and publicly admitting it.

And when I say fat here, I mean this in the way that my eating disorder has historically always viewed any appetite or desire I feel compelled to exhibit as being unsightly.

Desires are secret. Feeding myself is best done in private. Having other people feed me? Forget it.

It’s sad that my book of all things is not immune to everything going on with Women’s Bodies at the moment.

It feels like a test to want a book to do well in the time of GLP1s. I don’t even know how that works but it’s true.

I have dysmorphia to be seen issuing forth something right now.

But then again it’s also in direct opposition to the seamless, gleaming ease of AI. To have to actually put a name on something I have made that testifies to effort, embarrassment and human joy.

But the joy is coming. I can feel it.

On that note: here are my new leather Nike Air Rifts that I bought from Japan late last year. I can wear them because spring is basically here (don’t tell me any different) and I am going to have so much perspective and pleasure no matter the outcome of this book. And if not, I’m sure to tell you all about it.

If you would like Pool House signed and personalized, please order it from one of two places that you can walk right into or, alternatively, they can post it to you. Either Books are Magic in Brooklyn (there are two locations). Or Yu & Me in Chinatown, Manhattan. Both are independently owned and operated by amazing humans.