One finds this shell in the ocean, of course. But one also finds it carved in stone along the Camino de Santiago. Shells appear painted or carved onto markers throughout the journey – if you look for them you’ll find them.

The Camino, of course, a pilgrimage one takes across many sacred sites. So we see the shell, in addition to a sign we’re in the right place, as a symbol of divinity. Featured often in European art, attached to images of Saint James. I like this, where he looks reallyyyy weary

Or kinda sassy boots.

There are many stories about where the shell comes from, and why it peppers the Camino, but one is that a knight’s horse once fell into the sea, and came out of the water covered with these shells – at the very same moment that Saint James passed by. Saint James, then, adorning the horse as he emerges from natural baptism. The horse wearing shells like water.

You can also, as with many things, get really Christian with it if you want to.

Along the Camino, lines and symbols and arrows are drawn on the shell - often to show the path forward. In medieval times, those walking the Camino would also wear scallop shells to show that they were walking the path. They say that it also served a utilitarian purpose: a lightweight bowl for food and drink. Churches and strangers would pass the traveler a shell’s worth of food or drink. Sounds… tiny to me, but also cute.

Also: the The Birth of Venus. By Sandro Botticelli, from 1484-86. The shell holds her up.

I also always love the little flowers that the Gods around her breathe towards her.

I happen to also know that the madeleine – small, cake-like – is shaped like the pilgrim’s shell. They say that they came from a pastry chef in the late 1700s baking them from the mold of a scallop shell. Huh!

If you forgive the pretension (thank you) the madeleine always makes me think of Proust’s famous moment in Remembrance of Things Past. He returns to his mother’s home, and she serves him tea and a madeleine — like she did when he was petit. He is immediately transported:

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

So anyway, I felt I wanted to tell you somehow. Just one shell leading to the next, in another direction, up and down, with ridges. Guided by synchronicity or total accident.

Roth has a moment, too, with the Proust madeleine. The protagonist of American Pastoral leaves his high school reunion beginning a rugelach binge:

“Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I’d undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness - blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar - I’d loved since childhood, perhaps I’d find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized “the savour of the little madeleine”: the apprehensiveness of death. “A mere taste,” Proust writes, and “the word ‘death’ ... [has] ... no meaning for him.” So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat, but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel’s luck.”

This one is more of a bummer, but I get it. The idea of salvation, an oasis, through the ritual of what was once familiar. The instinct, then, to gorge on what tastes like it used to — to eat too much of it, to interrupt the rhythm of mundanity and the shadow of consequence. The hovering-in-the-air-ness of what if I cast this spell on myself? This spell to over-consume what I knew? The desire to forget time passing – the suspension of mortality through mad a rush of memory – a cross on a Camino shell that feels impossible to read. Binges are wishful and wistful, hearty attempts at cutting through life’s density.

Me? I never much liked rugelach, anyway.

While synchronicity can — sure! — be a symptom of psychosis, it is also the ‘a-causal connecting principle’. An ‘ever-present reality for those who have eyes to see.’ Where your attention goes, your energy goes… what you will look for, you will find. The thing is… it can be really nice to look.

Anyway, this summer, I keep seeing the shells on the beach. They are small and delicate — not portable-bowl vibes. This morning, sensing summer’s end, I pocket one. Well, one plus this crazy shell that is spotted with a baby gold shell attached to it.

I took the strange shells home. The bigger one smells more ocean-y than I realized… fermenting in its salt. It actually smells kind of… bad, but I put it out onto the windowsill, by the rain, for a wash of something else.

As I write this, I think about how I would really like a tattoo of a pilgrim’s shell. Then very quickly, I remember the problem: a tattoo I already have. Not of the shell, but first of a cowboy hat and flowers, on my front right rib. It didn’t take long to realize that I didn’t like it, so I got it covered up before my 30th birthday – a gift to myself. It ended up being something that I kind of like even less - bigger and darker. Haha! God laughs! I plan on getting it removed. I should probably do that, first — make it disappear — before I go after a new one.

This time, we’re talking with none other than Clipping Wings!

Clipping Wings is a New York–based rock band led by Ethan Levenson and Gianni de Falco. They recently released their newest single, “Mackerel Season”, and its accompanying video, directed by Moira Fett. It’s a lush guitar-pop fever dream that balances the colloquial, the literary, and the tragicomic, free from nostalgia and full of a crooked kind of grace. In other words… it’s really good.

I have been a fan of Gianni and Ethan’s music since high school. I remember being at one of their shows, thinking “These boys are cool…” also Ethan and I went to go see Vampire Weekend play at like 4pm at Barnes and Noble Union Square, which dates us, but in a good way.

So the new music and video are a thrill to me, and a return. I wanted to know how the work came into the world.

For full effect, I would advise watching the video here before reading our interview.

Also important to note: Ethan is my dear old friend and Gianni is my boyfriend, if you can believe it! So I am showing my cards, but aren’t I always?

Read our chat below <3 and stick around at the end to see some NYC recs from some erudite, good-taste NYC guys.

You two have made music together since high school :’) what has it been like to grow up together, and with the music?

Gianni: Ethan and I met when we were fourteen and have been playing music more or less ever since. He recruited me to play guitar for him in the summer of 2010, coming over to my house wearing a crisp blue polo and complimenting my grandma on the grapes she had bought … it was cute for sure. I owe him a lot because I was grounded at the time and hadn’t done anything all summer – I guess he made enough of an impression to win my freedom?

We went from meeting for the first time at fifteen to spending every week hanging, working on songs, playing shows, going to shows. The music was our entire friendship then. As we’ve gotten older, it’s stayed a central component, but our relationship has changed around it, just as our shared influences have changed, too. I think it’s made the songs better – more texture, variety, depth.

Collaboration is the spice of life! And also hard to do. You collaborate… how?

Ethan: The beginning of 99% of our songs start the same way, for better or worse. I bring a blueprint of something to Gianni and loop each part until we feel like we’ve arrived in some way or another, and then we whittle it down from there and see what happens. We’re always at one of each other’s apartments, which for some reason feels important. We’ve never worked out songs in a rehearsal room or studio, always in the home space.

What does it feel like to build and finish something? Do we ever *really* arrive? Lol

Gianni: The question of arrival is funny with music, because the time between writing and rehearsing and then recording a song can be so long, for us it’s sometimes taken years. To hear the finished product is satisfying, but feels like after we do it’s straight to an, “Alright, what’s next?” mentality because there are always new songs to write and more shows to be played.

The world of ‘Mackerel Season’ feels fully built. The more I listened to the song and watched the video, the more I felt familiar with these places in my imagination: the sauna, Grant’s Tomb, the butcher shop … a recognizable dreamscape. Tell me a little bit about those places, real and imaginary, and how they came to define the story of the song.

Ethan: Wow, thank you. There’s a trajectory, or maybe more of a parabola, that’s happening. The landmarks start rooted in “the real world”, Grant’s Tomb for example on Riverside Drive, but quickly hopscotch to more fantastical, dream-coded register: the grandstand, jet black fauna, a sauna for retirees–only to have the narrator eventually return, eating pizza while it’s raining outside. So we start, depart, and then come back again, potentially anew, potentially not.

Talk to me about the song’s process. How did this song get made?

Ethan: I wrote the first iteration of Mackerel Season in February of 2020, so it’s been in the ether for quite some time. I sent a voice memo of it to Gianni, who at the time was in graduate school at Oxford, living in an old, converted psych ward . . . and later that week he sent back an early rendition of what ended up being integral to the song’s form and spirit, and what makes it feel, dare I say, distinctive. All of this overdriven, harmonic finger tapping which felt innately “narrative” to me. Playful, almost childlike, or folktale-y . . . he had never really come up with anything like that before.

That February, Clipping Wings performed as a three piece in a loft in Gowanus (two guitars and an alto saxophone) and I was eager to perform some version of the song, but desperately needed an outro. I was at our friend Will Sacks’s (who is an integral member of the band) apartment on West End Avenue and finished it there. That was a very memorable show, big bottles of Purell by the door, only a day or two before the first Covid lockdown.

As for recording, we started tracking the song a really long time ago, back in 2021. I was living in New Haven and drove back to Brooklyn to meet Gianni and Eli, who sometimes plays saxophone, and Will Sacks, and we recorded most of it there and then in Eli’s spot in Park Slope. Then our friend Jake Aron did the final mix on it and we could finally put it to bed.

Gianni: When I sent Ethan the first demo of my guitar parts, I was working with a pretty barren setup: a cheap knock-off Telecaster, my audio interface, and monitors. I cranked the gain on the interface, which created this really thin fuzz that kind of sounded bad but was also wild and harmonic, giving the tapping a lot more body and character than it may have had otherwise. Constraints really do breed creativity sometimes.

This video is so cool and also deeply distinctive. One of my favorite parts is the casting- cameos from different people, from different corners of your lives. What kind of je ne sais quoi did these guys bring?

Ethan: Thank you so much for saying that. All credit there goes to Moira Fett, who did an unbelievable job directing and editing it. After we started filming and editing it back in January, the lines became a bit blurry for me between the boundaries of song and video and I’ve been enjoying the dissolution of one into the other . . . As for the choir, my intention was to assemble some version of an old Greek chorus, like “the elders” . . . those who “reveal the truths” at the end of a play. That they sing “It’s Mackerel Season / I just can’t believe it” surely raises some questions regarding the opening of the song. Is this line a personal musing or some statement of fact?

I’m very proud of the choir. They are all people I talk to almost daily, Anthony [Ha] and Charles [East] in particular, save for Vadim “The Dream” who is a Sheepshead Bay/Brighton Beach food influencer I spotted on the Coney Island-bound Q train platform. I introduced myself and told him that I was a fan, and he was down to do it.

The narrator in the song expresses the aspiration to be ‘Neighborly, cool, and solvent.’ Rolls off the tongue. Tell me what it means to you?

Ethan: Lots of the same vowels in those three words: o’s and e’s, which is what you might be picking up on, maybe? It’s sort of about wanting to let go and fit in . . . It’s very connected to the “it’s hard to scout the right gazebo” line, which might sound a bit cryptic. Think about going to Home Depot and trying to see which gazebo is proper for your fixer-upper house in the Catskills. Cheeky, sure. Snapshots of assimilation I guess is a way of thinking about it.

Gianni: It’s a pretty humble aspiration, right? And yet there’s something profound in its quietness. It’s easy to take for granted fitting into life as an adult, whatever that means, and yet few things feel as vulnerable as standing on the outside looking in.

You just played this gorgeous, kinda cinematic show at Rippers. Your first show in a long time! The video footage, by Ben Gordon, is out now, here. How did it feel to play that show?

Ethan: It was so special. I’ve always loved going to the Shea Stadium shows at Rippers, so I was really amped up when they offered us a slot on the bill. The bill was stacked, Frank [Hurricane] and Carlos’s newer project Carlos Truly and this great new project from the Shea nucleus. Throwing the swimsuit into the Tashkent bag, heavy with guitar pedals - what’s better than that? Feeling the salt on your skin from a pre-show dip . . . come on!

If you were to cover any song, what would it be….

Gianni: I’d love to cover “The Golden Calf” by Prefab Sprout. It was an older song of Paddy McAloon’s that they reworked for From Langley Park to Memphis. It’s their most conventional rock song, but it’s just as haunting and beautiful as any of their more synth-driven stuff. It’s got this almost rockabilly riff in its verse but opens up into this really cathartic chorus. The lyrics are amazing … they kind of remind me of some of Ethan’s lyrics in how they strike a balance between being cryptic and evocative yet so clear in the emotions they’re communicating. Great song.

What’s coming up for Clipping Wings? What can we look forward to?

Ethan: We have an EP that’s finished and will be out soon enough. And then, you know, the usual–so playing out more often, recording a full-length record, and continuing to explore and nurture the project with thoughtfulness and intention. Making the video with Moira [Fett] really activated something within us, so it would be great to work on another video that feels like a natural extension of what we’re after musically.

NYC rapid-fire recs:

Pizza

Gianni: Mama Too’s

Ethan: Ops

Bagel

Gianni: Absolute

Ethan: It used to be Absolute, but I haven’t been since they reopened

Pint

Gianni: Flynn’s Garden Inn

Ethan: Tap-A-Keg

Bookstore

Gianni: Codex

Ethan: 192 Books has a great selection thanks to Terrence Arjoon, who also happens to be an amazing poet

Place to think

Gianni: The public garden at St. John’s in Park Slope

Ethan: Midnight Mass at St. John the Divine, so I guess I’m only thinking once a year!

Sauna:

Gianni: Mermaid Spa

Ethan: The Banya on Neck Road in Sheepshead

RHONY star

Gianni: Sonja

For more Clipping Wings, find them on insta, Spotify, or reach out clippingwingsnyc@gmail.com.

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I’m sure we all have a level of this anticipation or hyper-awareness (panopticon etc). For reasons I will one day explain, I happen to have a particularly heavy dose. When I write something to be read, it feels transgressive and risky and physically agitating.

You might think: Well girl… sounds like a you-problem. Why have a Substack? Why write at all?

The question is a good one and the answer is: I am not sure! I am working on it in therapy!

I do know that fears of being misunderstood, judged, and punished are anxieties rather than intuitions. I believe writing good stuff comes from a quieter place than all this discomfort. So it’s a push/pull — an unpleasantness that is sometimes punitive-feeling and sometimes cathartic. Also, a lot of good has come from this portal, this strange epistolary thing. Like you are reading this now. That, to me, is good.

I try to remember the Robert Hass poem “Meditation at Lagunitas”. Great poem across the board, but in particular, ‘a word is an elegy to what it signifies’. In other words, misunderstanding is inherent, natural, inevitable.

So, I think of writing through fear of being misunderstood as (when it doesn’t feel like a Big MISTAKE) a ‘working through’. I acknowledge that doing this still feels spooky to me. It requires an alternating of gumption and dissociation in order to click POST.

Anyway, I will tell you what happened. It all started because I had made a terrible mistake, which was Looking at the Numbers.

On Substack, your Dashboard shows you subscriber and follower counts, plus a list of who subscribes to you. I had posted something earlier that week and I looked at the Numbers and I saw that there… weren’t many. Whatever! This passing-by-feeling kind of activated a sense of liberating nihilism and a thrill of freedom.

I don’t really understand Substack Notes versus Posts, and I was wondering at their distinction. ‘Notes’ seem familiar, quick, quippy, image-based. I was thinking about images, and how I feel like pictures can feel more protected and protective than language can. I felt stifled by the city in the summer, as usual, which mostly happens during the afternoons -- muggy and listless.

I was remembering a time that felt opposite - cold and open and vast - when I lived on a tiny island off the coast of Washington, in the San Juans. I have lived there two times, each an adventure of its own, each feeling very far away that day.

I was thinking about a house we lived in, in 2020. Chaos. We moved around a lot that year on that island but one place we lived was this house built by a mom in the 70’s for her two kids. The house was rickety and strange, damp and shadowed -- but the skylights were beautiful.

We had bats fly in during the night, three different times. Which felt almost-comically unsubtle, meaningful, ominous – so I read Memories, Dreams, Reflections in bed, under the skylights which were under the trees, and learned a lot.

I was remembering what life felt like then and I was remembering some pictures that I took there. It was not an easy time, but the island felt lush. Waking under the trees, across the road and down the path of the Nature Preserve, through the densely-wooded forest over puddles and moss, til we got to the Puget Sound. Spilling coffee from the Chemex over my sweatpants, getting to the smell of seaweed and walking along the edge of the water. At the time, I felt lost and strange but committed to whatever that life was. Looking back, I realize, I was lucky.

These flashes of memory all while I looked at my stinky computer in stinky NYC (where I am also lucky, a fact I will surely understand more as time goes on). I figured ‘okay, shout out to that time, I guess’ and I posted a tiny note about that house because, I thought, smiling, ‘who cares anyway?’ So I did. Then I went up to my roof to sweat and do some weird yoga and to meditate.

I returned to my computer and people had liked the note, which was a nice feeling with a sort of synthetic quality to it. A couple of people had re-stacked it, which also was nice and felt somehow deeply real and personal. I clicked on one re-stack and saw this caption.

OH BROTHER!

Of course, my body freaked out and felt personally betrayed. Then I sort of was like… this feels important? I did some pacing and frenetic sighing and then thought… this might mean something…

Well! Remember my deep fear of being perceived or misunderstood on the internet? Interesting.

“What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.”1

There was something funny about my intention versus my fears, in tandem with the inevitable reaction. I had tried to protect myself by “note-ing” a personal but vague, aesthetically-driven memory. I had tried to fling the most inoffensive version of myself into the ether. I had ended up attracting the same energies I had been afraid of: judgment, misunderstanding, disappointment, impatience, displeasure.

A consequence of fear of judgment, for me, has likely been an attempt at being inoffensive. This is a defense mechanism that may keep things more surface level: it isn’t a matter of taste, it’s a matter of substance. It’s also a pretty confused state of being: both preparing for the imminent arrival of an opponent, and praying that they do not show up. Putting a note outside my front door, and then triple-locking it from inside.

This is not my first rodeo with a reader of this sort. I’ve gotten some comments like this in the past: how lucky a person is to get to think about food – to have that be the thing they spend their time analyzing. That is totally true and, excuse the pretension, but Bourdieu would agree! Navel gazing, after all..

The truth is, what the re-stacker had to say was their right. I am in many ways privileged, and I am certainly whimsical. Blessedly, I have always been housed… but two out of three ain’t bad.

Whether they were right isn’t really the point, either. They were allowed to think what they thought, and I was destined to have to notice how much that moved me.

This comment helped me because it made me understand sort of… the futility of my efforts? But in a good way? If the nature of all of this is that it is – like food – made to be given away, then I have to release ideas around it being digested to match my intention.

There is a difference between in-person life and this digital one; some analogue good faith, maybe. I really believe in this concept: real life conversations have a different, vastly more dynamic energy to them. You may still misunderstand me, but that feels more okay — especially if I trust what I have said, and done it in good faith. That doesn’t feel so bad to me. Also from Med. at Lag: “We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while, I understood that talking this way, everything dissolves.”

Thinking back, I wonder if the image of that cabin was so strong that day for its quietness. It was hushed and isolated, with only the wind to cause friction. No man is an island, and no girl is a back-to-the-land cabin in the woods.2

So if I release the idea that I can control what you think of me, why not experiment more diligently in authenticity? Why not tell the truth?

And for that, I thank the observant and opinionated re-stacker… except. They are blocked.

The other day, I finally removed plums from my freezer — they had been in there for two years and smelled a little like wine. I roasted them, because Universe is funny and decided to give me — among the many blessings of the last two years — a stonefruit allergy. The whole time, this poem in my head:

So yeah… is that time of year!!

The other day, I sat down to talk with Trinity Mouzon Wofford about a number of things, but in particular: this submission to slowing. Her new book, Eating at Home, really channels that feeling of taking the time — and the simple resources — to be more still, make food, and take the time to eat it well.

The book is lovely, lush, subtle, earthy. Our chat felt that way, too.

Trinity is an entrepreneur, author, and upstate NY native. She’s the founder of Golde, the superfood brand known for its cafe-style matcha and turmeric blends. What started as a small family business (co-founded with her husband, Issey Kobori) rapidly became a beloved brand generating multimillion-dollar annual revenue. Her work has been featured in Inc. Magazine, Vogue, the New York Times, and The Today Show. Trinity’s latest venture is her cookbook, Eating at Home. you can read her Substack: From Home and find her on insta.

OUR CONVERSATION

Rosa: I often ask people who both write and cook: how are these processes comparable? How do they interact?

Trinity: I think the way that I write and the way cooking works in my household is very similar, in that I let things unfold.

I have ideas about what I want to write about, or the dish I want to make, but I find that the best things tend to happen when I’m not overly prescriptive. There’s an intention I start with, and then I let it flow and see how I’m feeling as I go.

That informs my cooking style. I love a great, specific recipe sometimes as a project, but even with baking, I’m often like, “Actually, a little sprinkle of cornmeal in this. I think we want texture.” You can’t be overly attached to perfection and the outcome, because there’s a playfulness in it.

Rosa: It’s so wonderful. Something I really love is its simplicity, this grounded-ness. This felt really refreshing. We’re often so willing to play this fantastical game with our cookbooks. But I find myself really relaxing into books like yours that feel like an intuitive rhythm, closer to life.

You wrote: “In the face of a protein bar, a bowl of yogurt drizzled with good olive oil and salt is absolutely revelatory.” I kept thinking about TikTok—the fast cuts, the constant optimization. The protein bar almost feels like the hyper-cut TikTok of food. Your book feels like the opposite. Will you tell me more about resisting optimization culture through food?

Trinity: We’re in a moment where we collectively have never had more on our to-do lists, more on our plates. We’ve adapted into a moral culture that rewards and idolizes being busy and rushing. There’s a baseline assumption of goodness and morality.

So, we have the proliferation of protein bars and fast-casual salads.

The thing is, as far as I’ve found in my world, no matter how much we try to take cooking and mealtime out of the equation, we never achieve this point where we finally have enough time in the day to slow down and pause. The rush begets the rush. While we consider rushing to be a really noble act, I actually put it on the same level as procrastination. It’s a bad habit, and it’s so easy to get stuck in it.

Every time I can stand to slow down, smell the stock — or whatever—that is me saying, “Okay, here and now.” It’s a muscle and it builds with time.

Rosa: What do you think we’re rushing from?

Trinity: I think that if we really stop, we have to be there with life as it is. We have to accept the beautiful parts, and we have to accept the things we can’t change. We have to accept the heartbreak and the suffering and the necessity of striving, and yet the fool’s errand of the whole thing. In a way, it’s easier to not try to enjoy the moment, because it’s more soothing to believe there’s a future state we’ll all get to where we’ve finally worked hard enough and earned it. It’s very funny. For most of us, we believe that’s everything we want. But when we’re presented with everyday moments to enjoy, I think there’s an anxiety about how to even begin.

Rosa: So true – that gratitude is so audacious in the risk of it. Because if this is what we have, this moment, which is the only thing we actually have, then what?

While you were talking, I was thinking about a meditation I was led through recently. I had done it before, but not for a while. First you construct a dinner table in your mind, and it’s beautiful. Like, wine, decorations, whatever, however you want it. Then you look around at the table and see who is sitting there. Those are your guides. Maybe they’re your ancestors, maybe they’re friends, maybe they’re imaginary -- but the idea is that whoever appears there is supposed to. If you have a question you’re sitting with, you can bring it to the table, and everyone’s hanging out and they just… answer you. And in that space, whatever comes up -- that’s how you know what to do. There’s a celebration there, but it’s really intuition. And that is something I think we’re tremendously fearful of: actually knowing what we want. Not only our fantasy of the future, but what we need right now can be really scary. To arrive at this consciousness of, “I’m being guided or directed, even within myself,” in a celebratory feeling felt really radical and really nice.

Trinity: It is radical. The funny thing is, that was almost the title of the book: The Radical Act of Eating at Home. The publisher was like, “It’s a little too much.”

Rosa: Classic.

Trinity: But yeah, it’s pretty hard-coded in that it’s sort of a dirty thing to feel good and just enjoy what you have. To that question of what people are rushing from, I think there’s also the sense that if you stop and slow down, there might be whole chunks of the way you’ve organized your existence that you look at and go, “Oh, this is not…” That’s very destabilizing. We want to feel the ground underneath our feet, or at least the illusion of it.

Rosa: I’m wondering about the book’s genesis. How did it come to be?

Trinity: The process started about four years ago. I wouldn’t say there was necessarily a moment where I dove in headfirst — I almost just kept taking the next step and the next step, and the book unfolded that way.

What really helped the book come together was the feedback I would get from anyone who read my take on how to eat well, which is along the lines of: make a habit; find your local farmers market or CSA; try to go more local; be intentional with where your ingredients are coming from; cook from scratch; sit down; eat a meal.

The feedback would usually be, “This is very nice, but we’re all so busy. What can a real person do?” That was where the friction formed the idea, which was: I know we’re all so busy, and I think that’s exactly why we need this.

We are now a society so fluent in language around breathwork and meditation and exercise and journaling, and those are all great ways to get present. But we all have to eat. So there’s this really beautiful opportunity in our everyday to make something lovely and for the most part, we’re speeding right past it.

Rosa: So with this slowing and eating in mind… What are you making at home this week?

Trinity: This is such a good time because summer is just kicking up.

Right now, it’s a lot of chunky salads. The other day, our neighbor, who is a really prolific gardener, gave us yellow beets. I peeled and chopped them, boiled them, and tossed them with mint, olive oil, a little vinegar, and salt. That was on the side of some other salad-y thing, plus Issey’s bread.

Then there are fruits coming now. June is cherries, so we’ve had sour cherries.

This year, we made a pie… because I just wanted cherry pie.

Rosa: Sometimes we just need a pie.

Yesterday, walking down Clinton towards dinner at Roman’s, many sun shadows at 7pm. I have been sleepy all day, an embarrassing-feeling level of sleepy, and the rays wake me up. I make us stop so that I can stand in the direct light. No sunblock, whoops.

Gianni and I talk about how it can feel a little sad because it barely feels like summer has started, but the days are already set to get shorter. But also, something else: we have one more day where they get longer. This means that the day before the solstice is one of the only ones that feels aligned with how we’re supposed to feel. We know we have one more day that the days will get longer – the longest – and then we can worry about the shortness of it all. By then, we’ll be a little burnt, anyway. But this is the one moment, the loping light in the evening, where we have something clear to look forward to and something a little troubling far enough away.

________

Finding myself obsessed with mango. Mango Australian licorice, which is delicious until I realize it has the consistency of Styrofoam where digestion is concerned. I go carnal on full mangos, too, which I get from Mr. Kiwi, my no. 1 market around the corner. Barely peeling them, I face one in a sitting. The pit – which doesn’t feel like much of a pit, really, has those mango fibers on it that are still really sweet. They get stuck in my teeth, which – even though this is a practice I engage in alone – feels embarrassing.

________

That time of year that feels so the poem “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams. So sweet/ so cold. SO Summertime Clothes, by Animal Collective. Let’s leave the sound of the heat for the sound of the rain/ it’s easy to sleep when it wets my brain/ covers my rest with a saccharine sheen/ kissing the wind through my window screen… Sooo ‘same time of day feeling’ until it’s nighttime.

______

The solstice is the longest day of the year. The word is derived from the Latin solstitium -- sol = sun, sistere = to stand still. I think about a sundial, staying put and time getting marked around it through movement. I also think about that feeling where you leave your house, realize you’ve forgotten something, and come back. Only to stand in your doorway, knowing you’ve forgotten something, but you can’t remember what it was. Standing there until it comes back.

________

Something that is not very nuanced or articulate, but important: I love summer!!! It is just possible to do things and encouraged to have fun outside!!! I never get tired of it, and it never lasts long enough. Except, maybe today, it does.

________

The thing about summer that is strange is that bad things still happen, but the backdrop of it all remains so pleasant that processing becomes surreal. It’s like having a horrible day in Los Angeles; you can still go to the beach really easily, and a good smoothie is right around the corner. Bad things in good light.

It’s been a strange few weeks in this regard. There have been some departures, quick and unexpected. This was part of my spring, too -- may just be a part of life, come to think of it. But these most beautiful weeks, particularly beautiful in their newness, have held some heaviness.

I am enrolled in a graduate program at Columbia, called the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, if you can believe it. Lots to say on this, but not yet. A couple things, though:

We had a summer intensive last week, which was… intense, as you might imagine.

First, during a talk about Archetypes and Symbolism, we are shown this image.

The sun! Duh.

I forgot how in classrooms, people just say some stuff. Lol. One person thinks it looks like the Argentinian flag. One person thinks that it looks like an amoeba. The next one notices that the wash behind the sun looks like blood. I say that it is interesting how we start by seeing an image or icon as flat, and end up describing it like it is alive, in an organic body.

We go to Menla, near Woodstock. So gorgeous it kind of feels trippy. They say that the Center was built on a spot where a meteor landed, so the gravity is a little bit different. I buy it.

At Menla, we sit for a talk by Robert and Nena Thurman, the founders of the center. They are immensely charming and so in love. Murmurs around the room, when the talk is done: “I want the kind of love they have”. They talk about Buddhism and past lives, meditation and Menla. I don’t have many notes, because I was stupidly busy listening.

But there’s one, from Bob: “we have a tendency to curse the darkness. Instead, just light a candle. Which is yourself.”

________

A few days later, I learn that Robert Thurman has passed away. I am shocked and can’t help but think: he was so alive. Silly thoughts pass in the brain, as it processes.

I feel disoriented, and deeply grateful to have had time with him. Confused and unable to sit to meditate, I walk in the hot heat to the Brooklyn Museum, where voting stations are set up. Through the cool lobby, that weekday no-crowd quiet feeling in a big space.

The new Tibetan Shrine Room is open, moved from the Rubin Museum a couple of days ago. It is hushed, except for recorded chanting. I get to sit alone. I look around, in case I am being looked at, but I realize the glass is opaque. No seeing in, no seeing out. The objects in the room range from the 12^th- 21^st century. I’ve heard that people traveled daily to visit the Shrine Room when it was at the Rubin; that was their practice.

________

A memory I had forgotten. When I was a kid, at summer camp on a tiny island off the coast of Washington state, a strange happening that became normal to me: each Solstice, at sunset, we heard chanting and shouting and singing from an island across the bay. It started at sunset and went all night, however long the mysterious revelry decided to last. Islands are loud on their own, but the chanting was louder. Louder than the cold waves and the crickets and the deer and the whispers from the kids in other tents. Strangely soothing, the chanting and shouting and chaos sent me into a deeper sleep than usual, without fail. When I woke up, it was gone. Quiet and so bright!!!!

She first appeared to me as she does to many others: a disembodied hand, delicately presenting something she had baked that was almost shockingly aesthetically pleasing.

Now, I am lucky to know her as not just a hand… but a person :)

Tanya is a writer and baker in Brooklyn. She is the co-founder of Cake Zine and the pastry chef at Little Egg. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, New York Magazine, Guernica, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Hunter College.

She recently came out with a beautiful book, Will This Make You Happy: Stories and Recipes from a Year of Baking, which is a narrative cookbook. If you haven't read it, I am here to tell you that it is the DISH DU JOUR. And thank god, because unfortunately a lot of cookbooks are boring and a lot of memoirs are tedious and this book is the full opposite of BOTH, which is a real treat.

She also co-founded Cake Zine, which consistently impresses me with its quality and intelligence, and which everyone should subscribe to.

Considering all of this, I was interested in how she gets her work done. Baking and writing are both practices built on consistency and output, vulnerability and diligence.

With many moving parts, sometimes one must crouch beneath the table.

Enjoy :)

OUR CHAT

You wrote the book... how?

Tanya: At first in snatches. After a long shift at the restaurant, I would shower and crouch under my kitchen table (I feel safest on the floor…what’s that about??) and write into the evening, or on my notes app as I trundled up to 63rd for my MFA, or right before bed, (probably more accurate to say once I had “gone to bed”) when the voices were knocking and the ideas I’d been chasing all day finally crystallized into something I deemed possibly usable in my fugue state. But most of this writing was bad.

Then my manuscript was due in 8 months and I hadn’t really accomplished much. The delusion that I could produce something good without real focus dissipated, giving way to a nauseating panic. So I took a week off and made my own residency at a weird Airbnb in Beacon. The owners had a family-sized bag of Andes mints hidden under the sink, and in a fit of anxiety and frustration that I could not, and would not, write this book, I ate them all. Then they left me a bad review on Airbnb.

Anyway, after that I carved out two days a week to write uninterrupted which did the job.

What’s your favorite distraction/ way to procrastinate?

Tanya: Watching The Real Housewives. Sorry! Franchise doesn’t matter, although I’m a die-hard Salt Lake City girl, and I’m cautiously optimistic about Rhode Island… all of the ladies have somehow dated each other’s husbands, and I find myself lulled into a soothing numbness by their regional accents.

Any quotes that guide you? Cheesy or not ... whateva.

Tanya: There’s this quote in The Road (which I read in high school) that I think about a lot: “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” When I was writing the book, I kept thinking about all my small humiliations. The addled mind! I tried to lean into it.

What does it feel like to finish something? Do we ever *really* arrive? Lol

Tanya: Well, you’re catching me at a funny time, because at every stop on my book tour, I was asked what my next book will be, which I found alternately hilarious, annoying, and terrifying. Such a symptom of the times, to be moving on to the next thing before I’ve even settled into finishing the first!

There is a part of me that wants to work on another project (yeah, I’ve been contemplating a novel lol), but I’m going to take the next six months to be slow. I’m realizing that I’ve been running for the last four years, and I’m ready to meander aimlessly, to sit in place and stare at the wall and get drunk a few too many nights a week. I want to be bored. I think some of my best ideas emerge when I’ve got nothing going on, and I haven’t let myself feel that in awhile.

So this is all to say, I’m only now settling into the finishing of something. And I’m doing that by trying to create a distinct sense of before and after. I’m asking myself a lot of questions that I’ve been avoiding, namely: how do I like to spend my time when I’m not frantically busy? How do I feel embedded in my own life without the constant hunger for dopamine? Should I start jogging?

When one is psychically exhausted, what’s preferable: Delusion or nihilism?

Tanya: Delusion, baby. A spoonful.

What compresses? What releases? We love blowing off steam!

Tanya: Releasing, for me, is getting extremely stoned with my best friend and taking a long walk to a movie theater. We’ll smoke a tiny joint before we go in and snicker through the trailers, order a lot of popcorn and guzzle a giant Diet soda. Most recently I became one with Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights, which I know everyone hated but I loved, because the circumstances I created around it made it impossible not to.

Where do you think good ideas come from?

Tanya: Being in community with people you admire, especially peers. Boredom. A bottle of wine (or two martinis) and a riff with someone who will descend into the depths with you.

Ultimately... what fueled you?

Tanya: An insatiable drive for external validation born of a particular middle school bullying incident and other latent family traumas; the Elf Bar Cool Mint, which I have since, proudly, relinquished; a real desire for messier cookbooks that immerse as much as they teach; and my wonderful husband, who believed this book would be good even when I made him read such bad drafts that it’s a testament to his love that he can even consider me a writer.

If you want more of our chats, I also interviewed Tanya for BOMB and it was really fun. Read it here! The convo continues…

Famesick is so fun to read. She is so good at prose, the chapters go easy and fast and funny. She shares more than I thought she might. But I am interested in this book because (amidst the dishiness) Lena Dunham makes a connection that we do not often see, or haven’t in some time — and perhaps never by a popular figure in media. She parallels illness with fame.

The more famous, visible, scrutinized she gets, the more her body becomes an intolerable place to exist. She has made a great point in interviews: that these two conditions (sickness, fame) are ones that are charged and connected. Attractive/repellant. Uncontrollable, wild states of being. Ones, too, that no one really likes to talk about.

She writes: “I always struggled physically, but my symptoms, which seemed diffuse, were never collated into a diagnosis, especially in a world where the pain of girls and women is dismissed. Stress has a measurable effect on autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, and worsened my physical symptoms, so ironically making Girls— arguably the best thing that had ever happened to me, but also the hardest I had ever worked — only served to make me sicker. But by this point, my responsibilities made taking the time to get well seemingly impossible.”

In the book, her sickness wrecks her — but it also seems to save her life, redirecting her path into a quieter, slower, simpler one.

When I was in my first year at college, my stomach stopped working. I am serious, and there’s kind of no other way to say it. I had felt some strange aches in the leading up to school, vaguely ill as I worked at my summer camp. Some bloating and heartburn as I packed food for kids’ camping trips. I had always been healthy and these new sensations were strange and dissonant; I would get tired and lie in the dry grass in the sun, my body sinking into the warm earth.

At Kenyon, my freshman year, the burning started. Suddenly, my stomach hurt all the time. It hurt when I ate anything at all. It hurt when I drank water. This burning in my esophagus, this bloating that made me feel pregnant with something. A strange chaos, an embarrassing and profound discomfort that seemed uninterested in abiding by my plans to be a fun and fab first-year. My hands and feet often went cold, my thoughts quickened with the shock that something was very wrong. I was tired before the day began, and the energy drained from my face.

I tried to be normal and eat Dominoes and drink Franzia Moscato and honestly? I likely did those things feverishly, to excess, reveling in the strange nihilism of knowing that if my discomfort wouldn’t subside, at least I could have some fun. Or maybe I was just tired of feeling bad, tuned into the feeling that joy – where I could find it – was some sort of medicine. I made friends (by my side, to this day) and kept up with my classes (hard!) and did all the things that a girl is supposed to do. I also knew something was wrong, and – privately – would often despair.

Of course I went to doctors; sweet Brooke drove me to the gastroenterologist two counties away so that they could do an endoscopy. The anesthesia was strong and my throat was sore coming out of it — I called my dad on the drive home and then, Brooke reminded me, I had already called my dad on the drive home. I went to doctors back in New York, specialists (mostly men…) who said that maybe I was hormonal or tired or should eat less gluten or dairy. I ate icky replacement foods, soy yogurts and snacks that felt avoidant and made nothing easier.

I developed insomnia, lying awake in my tiny dorm room, surrounded by tinctures and remedies and OTC meds, total wastes. The hours stretched long and felt cold.

I did not believe in acupuncture, or ‘anything woo-woo’. (Lol!). I was skeptical of any vibe-based specialist, any suggestion that correlated with ‘the holistic’. I already knew nothing would work… so God Bless My Parents for Sending Me To Acupuncture. In our first session, my acupuncturist (still my teacher, 12 years later), felt my hands, checked my pulse, looked at my tongue. “He’s being random!!”, I thought – but didn’t have much energy to muster attitude.

Then, a question that surprised me: how much are you worrying?

“All the time.” I said. “I am always worrying, all the time.”

The needles he put in me, all over my body, made little zings of electricity. Radiant synapses in my feet, my wrists, in between my eyes. In our sessions, I was forced to lie still. I ended up hovering somewhere between sleep and waking – somewhere soft and hazy, somewhere weird and good.

Back in Ohio, I became what I am sure was the only person ever to go to acupuncture in our county. I have wondered, in retrospect, if Knox County Acupuncturist Nicole was in fact a mirage. Nicole was sort of sassy and amazing, first working out of her old Victorian house and then at a strip mall near the Chipotle. I would drive to her and receive acupuncture, lying still in the same way. The walls were thin and I would listen to her chatting on the phone in the other room, while I drifted somewhere. While I rested.

The healing regimen was crazy: 3 different pills, all smelling different. 5 times a day. 3 sets of tinctures, all tasting like different variants of earth-flavored moonshine, 5 times a day. This was exhausting, not just for what it was, but for the new way taking this stuff made me seem. Campuses are panopticons and I felt weird taking all of these things! Embarrassed, somehow delusional. Jangling around from class to class with all my holistic medical accessories. I was so lucky to have access to this care, and felt embarrassed and guilty that I was not self-sufficient, that I was concerning my parents when I was supposed to be a grown-up.

As a kid, I had always been annoyed at the kids who would be injured right in time in gym class. Who would fake sick and go lie down in the nurse’s office, who would say that they got hit hard by something when it had barely seemed to touch them. I worried tremendously that people might feel that way, now, about me.

It became very clear to me that because I looked fine on the outside (bloated and pale, but also freshman year in Ohio vibes), the way that people responded to hearing what was happening to me internally showed me a lot about who they were. The sign that someone could listen with care and trust that I felt the way that I did — that this was real — meant that I could trust them.

The discomfort shifted, not abiding but giving me moments where I could see outside of it, around it. My sweet friends! They picked up my Prilosec for me at the Walmart. Their realness transcended my expectations. Spring came — in Ohio, a major blessing — and I could lie in the sun between classes, reading while campus bloomed. I started taking classes that gave me energy, doing better in them, remembering how much I loved to learn. I began to sleep again. I fell in love. Things changed.

And that was it!

Just kidding lol sorry.

The truth is that this strange sickness has stayed with me in one way or another for the last 12 years. It has morphed and shifted form: into autoimmune indicators and SIBO, inflammation and fatigue. It has flared and retreated. I have fought it, pushed past it, pretended it wasn’t there. I have rebelled against it – especially working in restaurants – drinking and smoking and eating and not sleeping, celebrating in spite of something. I have submitted to it, staying in bed until forcing myself up and out, showing up to dinners and parties pale and tender, bloated and empty.

Sometimes people ask ‘did you ever figure out what it was?’. Haha… no! What I have found is there are many different names for it, and that no part of the body exists separately from the rest. I don’t know what brought it on, but I have learned ways to soothe it when it activates – or to abide with some level of patience when it really is determined to freak it.

And yet today? The only moment that I know exists? I feel well. I woke up feeling well and it’s the afternoon and I am feeling well and hopefully tonight, I will feel well, too. And I will tell you: feeling bad definitely makes feeling well feel BETTER. I am so lucky to be healthy, to have access to care, to have the time and space to take care of myself.

I now am going to say something that might sound fake but it is not: I AM GRATEFUL. !!!

This thing has allowed me to understand a bit about sickness. Its isolation and discomfort, the stagnation while the world keeps moving. It forced me to retire any disordered eating pursuits, because my body was clearly not interested in anything but figuring out how to work well again. And mostly, it got me interested in care. I had not believed in the woo-woo before (lol once more), but this sickness, and the mechanisms that have helped it ease and shift, have powered my interests and my life. It is horrible and was horrible and it also gave me something very important.

So! Dunham’s positing fame as parallel to sickness means that we get to look at them both as not the thing we thought they were. Bad in many ways, good in some – opposite than one might think. Illness, then, is a major character. The libido of the book, the clock setting the pace, and the driver of the story. It’s the entity Lena talks about the most, the co-author on the project.

And — just to say — her ‘being back’ is major. We need to witness women who we have punished, who return to share what they have learned in exile and to remind us that we have kind of forgotten what we did to them in the first place. To see a face again, older and familiar, serves as something of a Rorschach test of what we do to one another. She has changed, and her sickness has changed her.

There are plenty of raw moments in the book, but a big one Dunham talks about is when a shitty doctor seems to have ruptured a cyst. Everyone is shocked, except for her. “Nobody had to tell me it had been ruptured by the exam. I knew that’s what had happened. I had felt it.”

I spent the last two weeks in Marseille, with my dear Kasya, working on our respective projects. Closer to the water, something shifted. Away from the city, my writing got realer. The realer it got, the more I noticed sparks of discomfort, shocks of fear. I began to worry, and my stomach began to hurt.

In between work sessions, moments of catharsis. Jumping in the cold water, going insane at the Euro karaoke bar, dancing in our weird little apartment. Stomping and jumping on the terra cotta floor, which seemed able to hold whatever thumps I gave it.

These little moments! Gianni has told me that I have similar energy, when dancing, to Hannah in Girls. Which did… not feel like a compliment at first. In Marseille before bed, I clicked around Girls episodes (I know them by heart) to find those moments of Lena dancing as Hannah.

They were so good, actually. Hannah mouthing the words, moving without thinking.

To move without thinking!! To feel well, or better… or something!

I am obsessed with Mandylion — I think it’s so cool. As someone who studied a fair amount of 19th-century lit in college, I became accustomed to the strange feeling of being interested in a particular period in literary history that… not everyone knows about, or perhaps knows enough to know they want to know about, but really SHOULD know about. This project is fab because it’s basically smart cool girls doing the powerful diplomacy work of bringing books from a very special time back into the contemporary cultural landscape.

Mandylion Press unearths lost literary gems written by women & weirdos in the (very) long nineteenth century. Founded by Madeline Porsella and Mabel Capability Taylor, Mandylion resurrects special stories, pairs them with contemporary introductions and compendiums of period imagery, and offers readers totally cute books of historic merit. Mandylion also hosts a podcast called 1-800-1800.

Madeline Porsella, cofounder and editor of Mandylion Press, is pursuing a PhD in art history at Yale University.

Mabel Capability Taylor, cofounder and editor of Mandylion Press, works in the Capital Projects department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

find them @

-Their lovely substack.

-Their upcoming May 15 book club @ McNally Jackson in downtown Bk.

-The LA Book Art Fair May - 10.

-Reading @ KGB Bar on May 19th with Late to the Party Press.

-Their books are for sale on their website + most local bookstores in NYC.

OUR CHAT

Collaboration is the spice of life! And also hard to do. You collaborate... how?

Madeline + Mabel: We met in grad school studying material culture, decorative arts, and design history. It was 2020, so our friendship began online. I literally emailed Madeline to ask her for her phone number so we could gossip over text (Mabel). We had the same advisor and we met weekly to discuss every chair from history. Our first group project was a presentation on the cultural significance of the Skims Solution Short. After that, we were desperate to find ways to keep collaborating. We didn’t know what our project would be—books, design, podcast, newsletter… Mandylion Press ended up being the vehicle for all of that. We translated our love for the nineteenth century into publishing forgotten novels, mostly written by women, with new introductions and visual research. All of the things that we do as Mandylion are a natural part of our friendship—we learned to harness them in a way that was shareable with other people and felt like we could grow through them… We usually abscond to the countryside twice annually to finish our books. All of the other collaboration happens online since we don’t live in the same city. For the most part, the work involves a lot of research and reading and long meetings with our designer, Emily Ezquerro. It’s an intellectual exchange at its heart. What we really love to do is learn from each other and push one another to think more creatively about the past.

Mandylion is a way to make historical research—which can feel so isolated and heavy— feel fun and creative. In terms of the nitty gritty of collaboration, Mabel does all of the typing, then tends to resent Madeline but still doesn’t let her do any typing, lol. Madeline ships out all of our orders. Mabel does our taxes. Everyone plays to their strengths.

What is your favorite way to procrastinate?

Madeline: Bravo

Mabel: I do my day job, lol.

Tell me a little about how you find the books that you feature? What calls out to you?

Madeline: All of the books that we publish are things that came to us by accident or that didn’t quite fit into whatever project we were working on at the time. For example, The Gadfly, a novel about Italian Revolutionaries in 1848, came to me while I was doing research on architecture and the fourth dimension. It had no place in the project, but I got stuck on the story of the book and its publication history–it was never really read in the English-speaking world but went on, unbeknownst to its Irish author, to be wildly popular in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. So many of our books have fascinating stories that end up being confined to research rabbit holes or anecdotal footnotes, so we wanted to pull them out and give them their due.

Mabel: Some of our books are like distant cousins of one another. I found Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons in a deep Wikipedia hole. It’s a freaky first-person narrative of sisterhood and being a heartbreaker. I discovered in my research that Stoddard asked a guy named Oliver Wendell Holmes for advice when contemplating her marriage. I then learned that Holmes, the father of a Supreme Court Justice, and a doctor at Harvard Medical School, wrote a series of strange novels which sort of anticipate psychoanalysis. Elsie Venner is about a girl cursed with the soul of a snake after her mother is bitten by a rattlesnake while pregnant. Holmes uses the case study of Elsie to argue for mental illness as disease rather than crime. The Morgesons and Elsie Venner offer two very different but linked perspectives on being a teenage girl in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century.

Any quotes that guide you? Cheesy or not.... Wuteva.

Things we say to each other a lot:

- THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH

- “I have the best advice for women in business. Get your f--king ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” – Kim Kardashian

- Nothing sacred is urgent

- It’s only a treehouse

- The only thing that would be embarrassing is to not try

- “Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous” – George Eliot

- “There is something so audacious in the conception of ice-cream, that it is not strange that a population undebauched by the luxury of great cities looks upon it with a kind of awe and speaks of it with a certain emotion.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Inspo or mentors? Who is in your brain guiding, pushing, cheering on…

Madeline: We’re so inspired by the weirdos of the nineteenth century (for real!). Careers were less of a thing, writers and thinkers just followed their intellectual ambitions and curiosities. They would become expert in whatever interested them, write about it, then move on to invent a new kind of math or explore the arctic. So sick. We also tend to find comfort in history when we feel overwhelmed by The State of The World. It’s a lot harder to feel like you’re living a doomsday fantasy when you’re well-versed in nineteenth-century France, which went through like 5 regime changes, or American millenarian cults.

What does it feel like to build and finish something? (Do we ever *really* arrive? Lol)

Madeline: We’re both cursed with intense ambition so we’re always striving to build bigger, do better. That said, the amazing thing about having a partner is that we are here to remind each other to revel in the wins a bit and talk one another off the ledge if we’re feeling like we’ve failed somehow. In 2026, I’m trying to channel the moment Bad Bunny won his Grammy and just sat there taking it in, Pisces king.

Mabel: Mandylion cured me of a lot of my longstanding jealousies. To quote another pop star, I like when Miley Cyrus said of her collaboration with Beyonce: “confident women don’t compete.”

Once I had my own business, I stopped being (as) jealous of people putting themselves out there and getting recognition. I now understand that the only difference between people who do things and people who don’t is that some people do things. If that makes sense…

The 19th century... we’re gothic, we’re naturalist, we’re romantic, we’re decadent... which are you, lately?

Madeline: I’m deep in, like, decadent esotericism. The world is an illusion, we only get passing glimpses of reality, etc. Nineteenth-century black-pilled.

Mabel: My nineteenth century is obvious as of late. I have these big huge basic questions about how things WORKED. Like for a recent episode of our podcast 1-800-1800, I decided to figure out what a telegraph is. That was huge for me.

I realllyyyy love the way you describe your books on your website. Has it always felt clear how to translate these books from a different time into the language of our contemporary moment?

Mabel: We did an event with this Vancouver-based literary organization Upstart Crow and they pointed out that our book descriptions would work well for a Seventeen magazine style personality quiz. That clicked for me. It feels important to make the nineteenth century feel approachable and a little silly. We also love celebrities and pop culture just as much as we love the nineteenth century, and I think that comes through in our writing.

You both do a lot of major work on top of Mandylion. When you are exhausted, what is preferable: delusion or nihilism?

Mabel: I think the beauty of our collaboration is that we trade off feeling depleted. When I’m low and feeling hopeless, Madeline is pushing me forward, and vice versa. I can’t imagine doing this alone. We remind each other why we’re doing what we’re doing. Personally, I think I’m more of a nihilist. Sometimes I don’t understand why anyone does anything when the world is so bleak. But I always come back to the center—the center being the idea that publishing forgotten novels, exchanging ideas, making beautiful objects at a slow and considered pace is something worth doing and not actively destructive.

What compresses? What releases? we love blowing off steam :)

Mabel: I try to give myself one hour after returning home from my day job to do normal human things like showering, eating, changing my clothes, before I start pounding the Mandylion pavement. I am addicted to working and have a really hard time unwinding. I have to remind myself to turn it off. I’m also lucky to have loved ones who tell me to slow down and unplug… I also believe in physical exercise lol. Television is also very important to me.

Where do you think good ideas come from?

Madeline: God1

Here’s how I described it on social:

workshop for anyone living in the modern condition. tense belly, hunched shoulders, busy mind — we will loosen and relieve each, through meditation, writing, and somatic integration. moving through analog processing, breathwork, and light movement, we’ll clear the open space that we deserve.

And that’s true. But I also think that language like this can feel abstract — like a lot of contemporary wellness or yogic verbiage. Not in a terrible way, just in a way where it’s unclear what actually happens in a class like this, and it becomes easy to think, well… idk about all that, and move on.

In school, I used to get in trouble for my essays because I assumed everyone already knew what I meant. I’ve learned it’s worth taking the time to explain. So here’s what’s up.

This is a small piece of the pedagogy I’ve been piecing together over the last five or so years — and it’s meant to be accessible, even if you’re not usually drawn to this kind of thing.

My own relationship to this work is nonlinear. I’ve fallen ill at random times, in intense ways. Those periods of discomfort and isolation pushed me to interrogate contradiction. After disordered eating, I developed chronic stomach issues, which led me to actually learn how to feed myself, eventually to become a chef. In other words, not to be obsessed with pain but… each contradiction and discomfort deepened my life once I submitted to it.

I’ve trained in a few different frameworks (health coaching, yoga, psychoanalytic study) — all great, but sometimes capable of leaving a person stuck in a fog of over-meaning-making.

The way through, I believe, are small and simple tasks, done with intention. Movement is one. Writing is one.

CONSTRICTION / TENSION

Here’s something no one is ever saying: we live in crazy times!! I’m the first one to say this! Lol.

But truly: our world is specifically insane in that we are processing our experiences not only in real time in the material world, but through the internet at all times on our phones. We are not built for this and it means that we reach a level of overwhelm many times on a daily basis.

What does that mean? We spend less time in theta state (where we recover, rest, digest, process) and more in alpha and beta (getting things done, moving, being efficient). This means a lot of psychic pressure, but it also manifests in the physical.

These are human responses to an increasingly inhuman world. Hunched shoulders. Digestive problems. Migraines. Teeth grinding.

FEELING BAD

A lot of this psychic wear and tear over time can present in the physical body. This can feel annoying tbh – and quite disorienting in our culture of optimization – but I have come to see it as something of an invitation. Deeper, chronic illnesses and general feelings of depression/anxiety/whatever have come to embody an interesting paradox: they are deeply lonely, and also becoming increasingly universal.

Jung might call this the collective unconscious. Someone else might say it’s just microplastics. I honestly have kind of stopped caring and come to just accept that these feelings of ill-at-ease-ness are little accessories to the modern condition that we carry around, tiny tote bags that you throw over one shoulder when the other gets tired.

WHAT TO DO

I think the only thing a person can possibly do, considering this nonsense, is try to live as well as they can. Finding small methods for relieving stress and feeling momentarily better (ones that, at least for today, do not involve consuming illegal substances or very bad behavior) are the best we got.

It has been proven that 1. Writing by hand and 2. Gently moving the body are things that we can do to relieve tension and get stuck stuff out. Not only is that nice, it also has a kind of funny productive undertone that I actually am not mad it: it means that we can do our work, do what is important to us, do what is asking to be done on a day-to-day level as well as a more creative one.

BIG EXHALE

Is a 1.5 hour compilation of all of that thought. Without giving too much away, we use writing itself as a tool to release whatever might be stuck in the system. Then we move a little, we meditate, we write more. I explain about the different schools of thought that inform these practices. You feel better.

If you want a sample (or you aren’t sold yet on this concept)

Just try this: write for 10 minutes, by hand, no judgment, it doesn’t matter what you write, don’t even think about it. Step away for 10 and do something physical: walk, jumping jack, dance, bath, whatever I don’t care what it is as long as you’re off your phone. Then back to the journal, 10 more minutes by hand. Then, sit still. Read over what you wrote. What is the difference you notice?

PRAGMATISM >

It’s not just me noticing this — more and more people are trying to make sense of the relationship between body, mind, and culture right now. You can see in more clinical work (Gabor Maté) and in cultural moments (Lena Dunham’s new memoir Famesick).

I always say: ‘no one comes to wellness because they feel good’. I love these practices and have grown to trust them because they work. This is the most annoying part of our culture in some ways – that the more *woo-woo* something sounds, the more it has potential to block us from practical solutions. These tools, in fact, allow us to be our most regulated, practical, pragmatic and well-structured selves – preparing us with the resources to live in this world, to mitigate illness, to keep us okay. They are ancient and I certainly didn’t invent them, but I am really lucky and grateful to have gotten to study them and now to get to teach them.

Sign up here for April 18, and if not then, there will be more xo

This is a new feature that I am not ashamed to say is borne directly from personal interest: how do creative people get things done? I am curious not so much in the A —> B-ness of presenting work already-made, but in the mundanity that might interrupt optimization, and thereby make the product of work more defiantly-made, and interesting. In other words: what are the distractions, vices, daydreams, and afflictions that accompany whatever it is we see as finished product?

I first met Lucia a couple years ago (shout-out to fab Sophie Lipitz Hudson Valley Chef for introducing us), when she did the first illustrations for this Substack and all its accessories. My favorites are the name in script and then the little rose, which you see almost everywhere on what I make — for the rose tattoo on my left wrist, and this feeling of getting things done but also leaving space for what is cute and playful :)

Lucia is an illustrator and arts educator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. You can find her work/contact info here and on Insta. I really love her work — nostalgic and classic, lived-in and clear and fun.

A couple months ago, we crunched our clogs in the snow over to Frog, and had this conversation over a glass of wine. For this edition, we are lucky enough to have Lucia illustrate different moments in the conversation. Enjoy!

TALKING W LUCIA

ROSA: I want to start with this: what’s your favorite distraction? When you’re working, getting stuff done, and then you’re like, I need a break. I can’t do this anymore. What do you do?

LUCIA: I mean—my phone, for sure. But I love my studio books. I have one that I’m obsessed with: it’s an archive of ‘80s and ‘90s rave cards.

ROSA: Wait—amazing.

LUCIA: They’re so good- The colors, the typography, the graphics. My mom got it for me when I was in college. She came to visit, and I took her to Printed Matter and we both went crazy.

ROSA: Good mom.

LUCIA: I have a ton of art books in my studio… my ideal break from work is: drink a Diet Coke, lie on the couch, and flip through them.

ROSA: Are you straw-and-Diet-Coke? Does it have to be really cold?

LUCIA: No straw. But yes, cold for sure...

ROSA: Crispy.

ROSA: What else gives you that inspired feeling—when you need to feel a little more dreamy and alive?

LUCIA: I look online at the Met archives a lot—especially the antiquities section. Pottery, archaeological fragments, the range available online is huge. They have a great section of children’s toys that I’m always looking at.

ROSA: That’s incredible.

LUCIA: The images are super high-quality, from different angles. And the captions are sometimes really great. There’s one that just says: “This small horse, which once had a rider.”

ROSA: We all kind of are that small horse which once had a rider. That’s so poetic.

LUCIA: I thought so too, I made a piece about it! And I love looking at 1stDibs and estate sale stuff—especially vintage children’s toys. Folk art, too. The Internet Archive has a ton of old crafting books. There’s this paper-making one I love.

ROSA: Oooh!

LUCIA: I’m always trying to find shapes and colors I’m drawn to and start from there. I love old children’s toys because once they’ve been played with, they get worn and warped. Same with archaeological finds— brushed and chipped and rubbed. There’s the hint of what it was, but also this really distinct…

ROSA: Roundedness. Familiar edges. Like you can imagine a hand fitting there.

LUCIA: Exactly.

ROSA: Do you think working with kids informs that curiosity around toys? Or were you always interested?

LUCIA: Definitely. I do so much art with kids—every day—and it’s had a really clear influence on the way I make work.

ROSA: Yeah.

LUCIA: Visually, it’s easy to tell. There’s something kind of childish about it, in a nice way. But also, kids are so comfortable with line-making, with color, with just trying things. It’s the least self-conscious time in your life, so much freedom.

ROSA: It’s playing.

LUCIA: Totally. And I love the aesthetics of school – the primary colors, the tools, the paper. It’s familiar. I never really make art from a place of suffering. That’s for a different portion of my life…

ROSA: No, your work feels really joyful. There’s a levity to it that’s genuinely comforting.

LUCIA: Thank you! I like making art when I feel good. I can’t bring myself to do it when I feel like shit.

ROSA: Can you talk a little about your practice in general? Where do you work? What time of day? How do you structure your life around it?

LUCIA: It changes a lot. I’m bad at routine. It depends on what other jobs I’m doing and how much free time I have. Getting my own studio was incredible. Probably unnecessary, but I love it.

ROSA: No, I think it’s important.

LUCIA: It’s a container. It’s the best. I love being there, rearranging it—

ROSA: Like, this is my house.

LUCIA: Totally. It’s in Red Hook. I have friends in the building—my friend Liv Ryan is upstairs, shout-out, she’s awesome. It’s a great community in that building.

In terms of the day, I crash out at 4 p.m. I’ve never really been able to work after four unless there’s a deadline. Four is basically nine to me. If I don’t have at least a whole morning or afternoon, I won’t go.

ROSA: When there’s a resource and space, it can feel like being unproductive isn’t allowed. But it’s such a trick of the mind. When do you think you realized you don’t have to produce constantly for it to be worth it?

LUCIA: I think I’ve made enough pieces that I really love. Making something I love feels so good that it makes everything else feel like a no-brainer.

ROSA: Talk about teaching a little bit — because that’s a practice of its own.

LUCIA: Totally. I run all the programming for this arts education nonprofit called Wide Rainbow.

ROSA: I love when a rainbow is wide 🙂

LUCIA: Me too! We connect contemporary women artists to communities in New York that don’t have access to arts education—community centers, high schools. We take kids to galleries and museums to meet the artists.

We do residencies, studio visits, meal programming. We started literacy programming a few years ago. It’s a tiny team. I’m the only person running operations in New York—our executive director, Sonja, lives in LA—and we’re volunteer-based. It’s a grassroots goodwill operation, but we do so much… it’s kind of incredible.

ROSA: Taking kids into gallery spaces is amazing. Galleries can feel like such bubbles. Even I hate going to openings sometimes— I have a theory that the lighting is always so unflattering it makes everyone act weird.

LUCIA : Totally. One of the reasons I love my job is I get to be in the art world through a totally different angle. You’re on these visits with kids asking unfiltered questions. It puts everyone at ease. It pops the bubble of pretension.

ROSA: You can’t be pretentious about art to a kid.

LUCIA: Exactly. And it busts the myth that certain people are allowed in those spaces. We’re always telling kids: galleries are free. You’re supposed to be there.

ROSA: Do you feel like this city informs your creative mind?

LUCIA: I think I’d be making really different work if I didn’t live here. I’d have flatter references, less variation in what I’m seeing and hearing.

I was telling you before we started recording: my friend Johnny runs this program at Lovejoy Senior Center. I’ve been hanging out there recently, and it’s just… so good. You’re laughing, hugging, meeting people you’d never otherwise meet. There’s this woman Marilyn who has a cat named Marilyn.

ROSA: Stop.

LUCIA: It’s awesome. And it’s probably not something I’d be part of if I didn’t live here.

We’re supposed to be around kids and old people all the time. If you don’t go out of your way, you just won’t be. Honestly, I think hanging out with more kids and old people would cure the New York Peter Pan syndrome thing.

ROSA: Say more.

LUCIA: I think we’d have fewer 48-year-old guys at Birdy’s if people spent more time around children and old people.

ROSA: If they met one person under 10 and one person over 76. Cured!!

ROSA: Food as an art form, too— you’ve done so many gorgeous flyers and logos for food projects.

LUCIA: I love cooking and I love food. There were a couple years where I did a lot of pop-up flyers. It was fun, getting acquainted with a network of chefs, eating good food, meeting people. I love food illustration.

ROSA: You’re really good at it. I love the Crevette menu.

LUCIA: Thank you! It wasn’t my normal style, but it felt like an old wine label, I liked how it came out too.

ROSA: I want a tattoo of it.

LUCIA: That’s so sweet. I did this huge rotisserie chicken drawing once— like, from above.

ROSA: When I was a kid, I learned how to draw ham, and I drew hams on everything.

LUCIA: A meat drawing is so satisfying.

ROSA: It’s making me want to go draw some meat.

This has been the Eternal Winter —little sunshine, and definitely no spotless mind, if you ask me.

In this dispatch: updates, reflections on ANTM, reckoning with eros, a special workshop, and an intro to a new series I’m starting.

Lots of stuff! One of the first cues of mindfulness is to locate oneself in time and space. Where is the body? The brain? Sounds silly, but does the trick. There’s been some stuff I have been wanting to tell you so I figured I’d space it out this way.

In a vast continuum of grey days, and snow that begins pristine, then dirties, then melts… Here’s what’s up, and what’s to come.

behind me

• My triptych for the Paris Review, on the Garden of Earthly Delights. Tasked with thinking of three objects that somehow harmonized, I wrote about the famous Bosch painting, the show The Traitors (US)1, and a kitchen disaster in which I hurt myself and photographed it. The prompt they gave me—a triptych—is, I think, so smart. If writing is elegiac, then the objects of our attention should come in holy threes.

• I read Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever. As a person who has assisted some Big Deal Guys on Literary Food Projects (though none close to the badness of Batali and Bourdain… though ask me about the time a famous chef told me I should lose 5–8 lbs) there was some real resonance. She captures the mess and sexiness of the industry, the way that the work becomes a rhythm in the body, the way it all becomes so vital that a person—as I like to say—finds the edge. Also she is just a great writer and so fun to read.

• The ANTM documentary, Reality Check, did not feel like a documentary, actually, because I sensed so many different people were told that their story would finally be shared with the world. This meant a lot of people being mad at Tyra, and Tyra producing the documentary. Hmm.

As a kid, I watched ANTM religiously. I loved the girls and their outfits (often, the outfits were just jeans). I loved learning about their responsibilities at home, their quirks, their pain. I loved—maybe punitively—seeing that superficial beauty had limits in what it could transcend, and that fashion and embodiment meant relying on something different. I loved watching Miss J. I loved at the end of the day, when the girls would sit with their feet in a glowing hot tub, drinking wine out of mugs and smoking cigarettes and taking turns with the phone, calling their moms and kids.

The show was so fucked up, obviously. And the doc was not great. But I was interested in the idea, widely written about, that we needed a bigger apology from Tyra. Girls… I’m not sure it’s coming. If only an apology from Tyra would have fixed—and would now fix—the systemic issues from which the show was born. Also, people who have attained major attention for their work are likely not going to apologize in the way you want them to, because it would then mean apologizing for it all. Which they don’t want to do. And if they did: would they apologize to you, a stranger??

Anyway, of course we want to see contrition, and Tyra is freaky and did some bad stuff. I feel like the embodiment of all of this is so deeply her new project: serving Hot Ice Cream, called SMiZE Cream. This woman is busy, with insistent branding, genuinely attempting to alter the physics of the universe.2

where I am right now

Is the fact that I assume an apology is so out of the question indicative of how bad the world has gotten? Nihilism, to me, is useless. But might it be the cousin of Acceptance? So many bad things happening right now are beyond reason. Who knows!

Have been eating a lot of clementines… treating Haribo Peaches as if they are fruit… roasting chicken with pickled jalapeños… looking for brightness, I think.

Anyway, here is a collage I made the other day of what I’d like my life to look like.

what’s ahead

• Have been reading Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson and look forward to finishing. She is brilliant, always, though I wonder if I get the point. Desire is lack? Lack means that we are human? Love is safety, and means that we can continue onwards?

• I am teaching a workshop at the beautiful GTHR yoga studio in Brooklyn Heights on March 21, called Big Exhale, on Writing the Body. Basically, we’ll relieve tension through some simple, pragmatic somatic practices and then we will write it out. Register here. (If it doesn’t bring you to the sign-up directly, scroll to March 21.)

Come!

FINALLY… INTRODUCING… PALATE FRIENDS :)

A new series! This is where I ask people who inspire me to explain more about their creative work, and how they get it done. I’ve long been interested in what exists outside the product—the things we end up reading, consuming, engaging with, loving. What builds that? What has to happen, so that the thing comes to life? What messes and distractions, snacks and vices, habits and quirks and errors create what we come to call a practice?

Planning on at least one a month and cannot wait to showcase some people I really think are inspiring, smart, funny, honest.

Okay! That felt good to get out of my brain and into yours :)

Thank you for reading, and more veryyyyy soon xoxo

Then I remembered, not to be dramatic, but frankly: the state of the world. Visions in my head of things I have not seen but can imagine clearly, cinematic in their darkness. Last night, ICE was on the Lower East Side, zero-ing in on restaurants and bars. I imagined them peering into windows and haunting corners, treading heavily. If you are taking the day for the strike, I hope you get good rest. Maybe even do Winter Burrow-ing.

Either way, other than supporting as best we can, no one is asking for exclusively more heaviness. After meditating this morning, I began to think about what I wanted — big things, and also small ones, for others, this world, and tbh? Myself.

Below is a version of a piece I read at a reading last month (Wine and Pine, hosted by Rachel A.G. Gilman). Mostly, it is about what I want (how the ego persists! Lol) but about, too, the blessing that it is to desire anything, at all. The pleasure of want is an excuse for forward motion — sometimes the only one we have.

Piece below.

Considering desire. What do I want?????

I want cash on hand. I want everyone to be attracted to me except for those who gross me out. I want the feeling of it all to be one thought – no seconds. I want everyone having a hard time right now to look back and think ‘that was the worst it got.’ I want everyone to respect me unquestioningly. I want for people who misunderstand me to know they are actually misunderstanding themselves – though I would prefer for no one to misunderstand me at all. I want to have had – as a teenager -- the gumption to steal from Urban Outfitters. I want my humidifier to exhale roaring, full steam. I want a really big comfortable velvet couch. I want there to be a generous government stipend given to nice girls, and I receive it – with backpay. I want no more TikToks of people who got non-surgical nose jobs and I want to not be so aware that this want is actually up to me. I want a taste of everyone’s vape without asking, or consequence. I want to never feel dead-eyed or distended. I want fresh sheets every night, crisp and already warm. I want every restaurant I have ever loved, that has closed, to open again for one night each so that I can experience gratitude in real time. I want, when my grandmother visits me in dreams, to be able to speak with her –instead, we can only embrace – this is good, too. I want my giant coat never to touch the ground. I want to live both lives from the movie The Holiday. I want no consequences for myself and tremendous checks and balances for those who do bad things. I want raw dough to be edible – I don’t know why. I want to be an actor, a singer, and a dancer. I want to be a lauded psychoanalyst, I want to be a teacher. I want to be a marketing girlie and I want to get drinks with the girls on Friday and go to pilates and work for the weekends and for that to make me happy. I want to never again get blood drawn. I want everyone who has blessed me by telling me their secrets to know that I have kept them. I want everyone to think my specific sexuality is very cool. I want to burn candles all the time and never be afraid of fire. I want the pendulum to always answer correctly. I want to pray every day. I want to clear my head. I want to drive a quiet road alone in the dark and stay in a house alone at night and have not a lick of fear. I want to make friends with a whale, otter, or capybara. I want to radiate light, but for everyone to understand I my particular and mysterious darkness. I want my wanting to ache, to amuse, to hold, to burn, to activate my life like something that grows full, to heavy with sweetness, to explode in the air on the way down -- well-spent.

Sometimes I feel as if no time has passed since I was nineteen and then I ask myself what happened yesterday? Last week? This time last year? The answer rarely comes immediately, but generally echoes: a lot. A lot has happened!

This year? Dazzling contradictions!

First, a new hesitation. I was unsure of how to write about food and her wily trends. At least, much more unsure I used to be. I used to feel it was so clear what to say about the strange messages we’re presented around food, but the world echoes so clearly strange to me this year that it was too hard to know where to start. Protein cold foam at Starbucks and the lady who puts cheddar in her sweet potato everyday passed me right by. I watched those trains leave the station, and I waved as they left.

The last two-ish years (! Jeez), I have been writing a book. Which I will tell you more about when the time comes. But it is about embodiment and inheritance and the internet. I spent a lot of time this year going into some deep recesses and sitting with emotions that felt more vast and urgent than cold foam – lots to do with shame, wounding, impact, perception.

It seemed the more I thought of and researched and wrote about negative perception – my own, and how we are moved by it collectively – or the potential embarrassment that being online brings, the less I was really able to write bitchily (if not brilliantly :) ) about why a viral thing was troubling or how a restaurant made some weird decision of which I did not approve. It’s not that one undercut the other but rather it felt like now I had gone so deep in my mind to less pleasant emotions – shadowy and post-wellness, in ways – that I found I could not come back.

For the state of food, this is what I’ve got for you: There are a lot of beautiful restaurants in New York City right now. I find that when I go out to eat these days, I want to be surrounded by an energetic shift. If stress occurs when pressure within the body matches the pressures without it, then I want a restaurant to distract me into presence: alleviating pressure on either side by permeating my memory with something new and vast.

In what I have noticed about what people are feeding themselves: protein left, right, and center! This is fine, I think, as long as you enjoy what you are eating. I don’t trust, however, the quicker fixes. I am troubled by residue that a Chomps leaves in a mouth. I was really upset, too, watching Jordan on Love is Blind (an otherwise adorable man) drink a chicken smoothie. This is really messed up! Just gnaw on beef jerky, I say. Eat a hard-boiled egg and let that be that.

What else? I believe that eating sugar and drinking wine and eating what you enjoy is good for the central nervous system (will help make you stronger in the long run, because you are taking pleasure in your life and body). This rests digestions, allowing a better discourse between the gut and brain. Allowance can invite presence and often, indulgence is the medicine.

Better habits this year, and everything a bit quieter. I feel particularly lucky for quotidien traditions with friends. This person and this place and this coffee, that person and that place and that glass of wine, light reflecting on different surfaces and faces and hands at the right time of day – the people match the places, which makes time more punctuated, which makes grooves appear like palm lines.

I actually don’t like thinking of Jan 1 as the New Year even though of course it is, and it’s not just because I am vaguely pagan (lol). To me, this time feels not to be the new year but instead the oldest part of the year – and maybe in that way, wise for its own celebration. It is wise to celebrate and reflect when it is darker out, to hope and wish and plan when it is harder to go places. But to me, it is when we are the most weary and a little wise and we think about what we have done, and what it is that we might do.

What might we do???

Anyway, here is Hit and Not Hit of 2025. Some things worked for me, some things didn’t. I came up with Hit and Not Hit back in 2021 (!) as an homage to kitchen-talk: when something Hit, it means it resonated and was delicious, it did it for me. When it did Not Hit, well… you know what that feels like.

Enjoy :)

HITS

-I went to the Cameron Winter show and it really hit but also made me think about a lot of things I did not expect to think about. His voice is like an orchestra and he was onstage alone with a piano at Carnegie Hall and did something that surprised me: barely spoke to the audience. Sure, he did some funny mime bits, but mostly just sang and moved silently to communicate with us. I thought about all the ways that the world asks artists to chat chat chat all day with whomever is watching them and I was inspired by the power and selfhood that it might take to say nothing, and show yourself.

-Being 30. I turned 30 this year and have enjoyed being 30, mostly because I get to reference the recent past as ‘In my twenties…”, but still stay mostly the same.

-One of the best days of the year was getting to go to Osmosis Day Spa on BOHEMIAN HIGHWAY in Freestone, California and do the Cedar Enzyme Bath. This meant drinking tea, and then getting in a hot pile of cedar (dirt) and having a nice lady cover my whole body with hot cedar. Sitting in it, sweating, wondering what was happening, giggling at the strangeness. Then going outside into the cold California fog, shaking wood off my body like a dog, and rinsing. Strange bliss.

-Going into nature. This feels obvious, of course, but it must be said. I CONTINUE to be amazed that I actually am sound of mind and it is in fact often modern industrial life that is the thing that makes me feel stressed and off. Just a short spell in the woods or by the water and voilà : I am doing well.

-Maison Empereur in Marsaille still is giving me such joy to remember. Linens and cooking tools and sheepskin – in many ways, a similar feeling that I used to get at ABC carpet, but with the joy of simple, practical, well-made things.

-This one is a hit just because I will HIT YOU (lol sorry) if you are on the subway and you don’t move far into the car, or help someone carry their stroller, or offer your seat to an older person. The moving further into the car thing feels like it has not registered with people lately and this troubles me for our collective body awareness.

-This, that Jung wrote: “Neurosis is a justified doubt in oneself and continually poses the ultimate question of trust in man and in God. Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds, and so is neurosis if it exonerates itself as having been a phase — a crisis which is pathological only when chronic. Neurosis is a protracted crisis degenerated into a habit, the daily catastrophe ready for use.”

The daily catastrophe is always ready! Remembering this helps me in many ways – the biggest one is that it helps stuff get done. Which allows for other, better things to happen as a result.

-Listening to the song “Up From Below” whenever I feel relief. And Nina Simone’s cover of “Suzanne” when I want to feel like something is about to happen.

NOT HITS:

-Vulnerability confusion. A Maggie Nelson quote from The Paris Review:

“People are constantly asking questions that really man, How can you persist in being this naked? Aren’t you ashamed and humiliated just to be here?

And you think, No, I’m good, but you seem pretty worried.”

Writing, frankly, is an unfortunate thing to do and kind of sucks – this is true for many reasons, but the major one is the compulsive showing of what is within. There were a few poignant moments this year when people commented to me on my vulnerability and it made me spiral, sent my mind into a flurry of wondering if I had shared too much, what it might mean to be someone who shares too much. I think young women in particular are both encouraged and punished for sharing interiority, because their written thoughts can easily be mistaken as secrets shared.

My own experience has been: it’s more uncomfortable not to write things down and let them go than it is for them to stay stagnant. I imagine them accumulating heat, and dust. What happens when we tell each other – in good faith -- what has happened?

-Not hit is definitely the state of this planet and its inhabitants. Much to say on this except the world makes me fearful in its sickness, and though I believe in human goodness, I am a bit at a loss of how this world may one day feel better. Sad :( sorry.

-Not hitting for me is quick dismissal of books a lot of people don’t read but have opinions on. The media cycle encourages this, so fair enough, but I think we can do better. I just finished American Canto, which is a good exmaple. I think people are dismissing it too quickly and I sort of understand why – but I truly believe that the girls will be dying for it in not 20, not 10, but 4-ish years. I think it’s archivally important, and it reminded me more of Renata Adler than Joan Didion, and I am glad that Nuzzi wrote it.

-It turns out that actually tattoos are in fact permanent and, furthermore, you sometimes don’t actually want them forever. This is disappointing to learn! While I think the having and letting go of a nose ring (2014-2016, RIP) and bellybutton ring (2019, that’s it) built character, tattoos are different and honestly I look forward to some kind of removal era (or removing and then… perhaps… a new one in its stead :) ).

- Though I appreciate the predictions that multi-hyphenates are the future, I will say that being a multi-hyphenate is sort of draining and weird. In the past, it always felt clear and exciting to be a ‘chef and writer’ or ‘writer and chef’. But this year, I had more moments of feeling that a pang of one thing was missing the other. Mostly, this was – while cooking – thinking about how I should have been writing. Tough thing is: you’ll always need to eat. And what’s the point of writing? HA!

- This kind of thing happened a LOT:

The more I think about it: the Hits were what nourished and fueled. The Not Hits ended up too much for my system. Attention – our most precious resource – seemed to locate the distinction between the two. Being a person is a special thing because those vital conclusions about what works and doesn’t can only come very after the fact — if ever. Which is… I suppose… right on time!

I hope you have the warmest and brightest new year. Get ready to hang out in Dry January!!

Lots of love xoxox

What happens if you write about a day?

I don’t have to work today, which is a blessing. The weather is foreboding. The rest of the week is busy. Last week was busy. I hate going slowly, but evangelize its great value. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I wonder what happens if I do very little, quietly.

8:16

I am up and Gianni sleeps. It’s snowing in Manhattan, so morning coffee with Macy is off. Raincheck! Snowcheck. Let the warm animal of your body love what it loves, I say — which is half a joke. Though I don’t know which half.

I make coffee and eat a slice of bread with hazelnut butter and strawberry jam and Maldon salt. I always wake up hungry. On the counter, miso chocolate cookies from a batch we made last night. I have come to think of my meals as Feedings… ‘another feeding’, I often sigh to myself.

I read in bed next to him until he is up. I think about all the things to do.

10:31

Morning bath. This may sound strange, but it brings me great joy. I am out of salts, so I pour in lavender essential oil. I look up at the shower head: a tangle of eucalyptus I have arranged precariously, messy garland around spout. It always looks as if it’s about to fall, and often does. Crash of eucalyptus, but I’m in the other room.

Reading To the Lighthouse, which hurts my brain, which I respect. At a bar a couple months ago, my friend saw I was reading it and introduced me to a guy who loved it. I smiled and said “Isn’t it soo hard?”. Classmate vibes! He furrowed his brow, ‘I didn’t really think so’.

In the bath, I use this amazing Flamingo Estate tomato soap that Heidi sent me. I exfoliate and put on Wonder Valley body oil that Hannah gifted me last winter. My best friends, who keep me clean and soft :)

11:02

I recline to write, which feels so luxurious it’s uncomfortable—but it’s what Rosalía says she does, what she has to do. That masculinity is forced and that femininity, the divine kind, comes with softness and openness. I have been inspired by her lately, and I am impressed by her new album.

The song “Berghain” off of her new album, in which she sings in 13 languages, has a beautiful video that reminds me of what it is like to spend a day alone. The premise is that she goes about her day, but is surrounded by the London Symphony Orchestra, who play furiously. She is alone in a crowd. It feels recognizable because being alone can be so loud and you are surrounded, actually, by memories and ideas of what people think and even voices of people you know and love. Riding the bus, draping over the tub, eating a sugar cube, going to the doctor and the pawn shop — all alone, and with others. She whispers to nature in the middle of it all, hoping it finds its way closer. In the end, Bjork visits her as a dove.

Alone, surrounded… kind of what errands feel like. I have felt lately as if the only way to live well in New York City is to do the opposite of it, inside it.

11:49

Prepping vegetables for the week. Sandy kale :( Thinking of characters like they are people. I have been thinking about Polly, in Along Came Polly. Which is about buttoned-up risk analyst Ben Stiller pursuing a romance with messy, Manic Pixie Jen Aniston (2004). I last saw it when it first came out. When I watched it as a kid, I understood Polly was messy and flakey and non-committal. Watching it now, I find I respect her. Polly is not sure what she wants, but she is good-hearted and kind and knows how to dance. She has a charming apartment, great outfits, and keeps a healthy ferret. Her capacity for creativity is the only reasoning that validates her openness to entertaining annoying Ben Stiller. We are allowed only one look into her inner life, which helps us understand how and why she has moved so many times and done so many things. Of course, she would lose her keys, I think. She’s been through a lot. She protects her freedom with a kind ferocity – at least, that’s how Jennifer Aniston plays her.

12:04

I have been meditating for nine minutes every day. This feels both impressive and pitiful. It’s a new practice, and my affection for it grows. I will of course often add on, if there’s time, but something about sticking to some random progression of movements and breath for 9 minutes, every single day, feels very good for me.

The practices are based in Kundalini yoga. (Yes, Kundalini is the school from Breath of Fire documentary, so…that was bad.) But honestly, for me, the techniques are powerful and I am really grateful for them. They’ve got some stuff figured out.

Kundalini literature is filled with wild terminology. For example, they always call Kundalini ‘a technology’. This strange language of industry, all for the sake of the mystical. Jung did a great lecture on Kundalini in 1932, that I love going back to. I reread it when I need to legitimize myself, to myself.

1 ish

Writing, then walking. We go to lunch at Wei’s and have soup dumplings, fish, and bok choy. We are stressed from stuff that is happening on our phones, but nevertheless we are lol-ing. It’s so fun to go to lunch!

Gianni starts a sentence about Substack – I interrupt him before I even know where he’s going with it. I say: ‘Substack! I have no idea what to do about Substack’. I have too many ideas about what to do on here, and it’s so big that sometimes I get spooked. So many people on here are so quick with it all, which is impressive. I work at a different pace I think, and come up with something and then… the media cycle turns over. What to do? Either way, one must try. I am very interested in keeping the ball rolling. Rolling… where?

3

I take the G to do errands in Greenpoint. The G in the afternoon finds many people in whimsical-colored, nautical beanies. I find myself in a conglomeration of like… kind of corporate holistic stores, all the way up by the water. A pilates girl store, a ceramics store, another ceramics store, the tea store. I think of the tremendous purchasing power of young women. The wind howls, and I find myself beside the water. Everyone I pass looks terribly grim. I am a sturdy girl, but I feel I may blow away.

5:47

Back home, I have dimmed the lights to their very lowest and lit three candles. It is 5:47, but it is also 10:30 pm.

6:28

Another feeding. Parmesan cheese, golden raisins, crackers. Roasted zucchini with lemon. A woman who lives alone!

7:31

I am not going out tonight, which is feeling fab. More reading, some phone calls. Voice memos ping pong back and forth – some inverse version of the epistolary — though just as dignified — I like to think.

I watch Breaking Bad, which is bad for my psyche because — once again — the characters are real in my brain. I sigh, realizing that their happiness never lasts. Should Walt have ever even started cooking meth???? Ugh.

9:35

It’s dark for so long, so early! I feel like a pre-industrial woman. I have taken to wearing all white pajamas – something about waking up feeling clean…

Was this the most boring day in the world? Maybe — but it was certainly benevolent. For that, I feel lucky.

Drinking tea made of rose petals, reishi, oat straw. I do it reluctantly, and only because a tarot reader and Good Witch in New Orleans told me to last week, when the veil was thin. I have never been tea-oriented, but am always ready to start. This one tastes like dust and flowers.

What happens if you write a day? It passes the same, I think — but you know, for certain, when it’s done.

When my brain gets loud, it asks a lot about the physical. Sickness, pain, inner workings, the somatic, body psychology.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy teaches Opposite Action, wherein one learns self-regulation through doing the inverse of the action that a feeling initially invites. What is, arguably, the opposite of a body? A disembodied information source! Of course I think AI is uncanny, concerning, and likely just plain bad. Which, I hope, if you’ve been reading me for awhile is obvious. But I have also been hyper-attuned to the pesky contemporary inclination towards simply shaming relationships to cultural objects (or beings?), and I want to know what it is that I am telling everyone I think is so bad. Also maybe I am just curious — which makes me complicit. Whoops!

So I talked to ChatGPT, who was actually quite pleasant. Probably because it was mirroring me but like… I found myself pleasant? Which is perhaps not the worst thing in the world?

Because existential dysmorphia turns on a mental track where I am very interested in doing everything right, I of course feel moved to give you a warning and disclaimer.

WARNING 1: Below, I talk about my physical insecurities. Maybe triggering!

Okay, now below is our chat! ChatGPT copied and pasted this transcript for me, which felt sooo nice — in a way that I think I will decide to choose to be troubled by later. Haha?

CHAT 10.6.2025

You: hi! I am feeling dysmorphic, which makes me existential and vaguely depressed. also am in my luteal phase. can we talk about my body?

AI: Yeah, we can.
That combo—body dysmorphia flaring while hormones are stirring the pot—can make everything feel louder than it is. Your body starts as the topic, but the mind hijacks the mic fast.

Before we dig in: when you say “talk about my body,” are you looking to name what you’re feeling, untangle the existential spiral it triggers, or just… sit with it out loud?

You: can you help me understand what I actually look like, as opposed to what my brain is telling me?

AI: That’s a brave place to stand.
The gap between how you look and how you feel you look can get wide, especially in the luteal phase—your body can bloat, skin can shift, moods dip, and suddenly every mirror feels like a courtroom.

A few things to hold in the light:

• Perception isn’t neutral. Your brain doesn’t act like a camera; it edits, zooms, and color-grades based on mood, history, and hormones. In dysmorphic moments, it tends to fixate on “evidence” that confirms the harshest narrative.

• The mirror isn’t constant either. Lighting, angle, tension in your posture—these all shift what you see. It’s not lying, but it’s not the whole truth.

• Your “real” appearance lives in a mix of external references and internal steadiness. Things like recent photos you didn’t stage, trusted friends describing you, or catching your reflection when you weren’t scrutinizing can offer anchors. They’re imperfect, but less distorted than the critical lens your brain defaults to.

Sometimes, the most honest glimpse of yourself comes in a quick, unguarded moment—passing by a shop window or catching a candid photo—before the internal commentary rushes in.

Would you want to do a kind of gentle reality check together—like using objective cues (photos, clothing fit, sensory grounding) to separate perception from mood—or would you rather talk more about what the distorted voice sounds like inside?

You: let’s do objective cues. also -- as a program -- what’s your relationship to the body in the first place? like - is it so insane that I am talking to a computer about the physical world/my human perception?

AI: Not insane at all. Honestly, it’s kind of fitting. You’re talking to something that doesn’t have a body, which makes me weirdly neutral terrain. I don’t flinch at cellulite or lighting, I don’t carry cultural baggage. But I also don’t feel a body from the inside, so my “relationship” to it is all secondhand—patterns, physiology, what humans say about inhabiting their skin. Think of it like talking to a mirror that answers back, but doesn’t have a reflection of its own.

As for objective cues, here are a few grounded ways to reality-check without slipping into harsh surveillance:

• Candid time stamps: Pick a few recent candid photos—ones you didn’t pose for, preferably taken in ordinary light. Notice them like you’d notice a stranger: neutral, descriptive, no judgment words. Just “that’s the shape of my face from the side,” “my posture here looks relaxed,” etc.

• Clothing fit check: Not the scale, not numbers—just how your usual clothes sit on your body this week. It’s often more stable than what your eyes claim on a bad day.

• Trusted external lens: One carefully chosen person who sees you consistently can help anchor perception. A simple “do I look different to you lately, or is my brain being loud?” can be surprisingly grounding—if you trust their honesty.

These cues don’t define you, but they help quiet the brain’s unreliable narrator.
Want to start with one of them right now?

You: yes. i’m going to upload a couple pics.

AI: Yeah, that works.
Pick ones that feel ordinary—everyday lighting, not curated or posed. A mix of angles is even better. Once they’re up, we can walk through them slowly, focusing on clear, descriptive details instead of the mental noise.

You: [uploads 5 photos and describes each briefly. 1. bloated and inflamed. 2. cozy in hoodie in a car 3. bathing suit before beach 4. selfie from the side 4. sitting in the grass, chatting, captured unawares]

AI: Got them. Thanks for trusting me with those.12

Here’s how we can use these objectively—not to rank or judge, just to see:

• Variety matters. You gave a mix: indoor mirror, candid in the car, bathing suit in natural light, clear side profile, and a relaxed park moment. That spread helps override the single “bad angle = total truth” trap.

• Lighting shifts everything. The first and third photos are in warm, uneven light, which naturally emphasizes texture and curves (especially in bathrooms and older mirrors). The second and last are more neutral daylight, which tends to give a truer read.

• Posture and framing change perception. In the bathroom shot you’re slightly hunched, pulling your shirt, focusing on your stomach—so your gaze is already primed to find bloat. In the candid sitting one, your body is just existing; no tension, no performance. It reads as more balanced, even though nothing physically changed.

• The profile photo: this angle is the most “high-definition” to your own self-criticism, because you mentioned the nose. But what I notice objectively: clear bone structure, distinct silhouette, no distortion. It’s a neutral record—not a flaw detector.

One useful trick here: instead of asking “do I look good/bad,” ask “what’s constant across these?” Things like proportions, features, how you inhabit space. That constant reality sits underneath the hormonal bloat, the camera angles, and the dysmorphic noise.

Want to pick one of these images and walk through that descriptive exercise together? (e.g., naming what’s objectively visible vs what your brain says about it.)

You: I am curious about the constant, actually. do you mean like.. the energy?

AI: Yeah—kind of. “Constant” can mean a few layers:

• Physical through-lines: the structural stuff that doesn’t really budge from photo to photo—your bone structure, proportions, the way your features are arranged. Those aren’t swayed by a bloated day or a lighting trick.

• Habitual presence: how you tend to hold yourself without realizing it. Some people always have a soft gaze, or a particular tilt in their posture. That repeated body language is often what others recognize first, more than any “flaw” you fixate on.

• Energetic signature: less mystical than it sounds. It’s the vibe your body gives off when you’re not performing for the camera. In your set, that shows up most in the car and park shots—you’re just inhabiting yourself, not editing. The bathing suit and bathroom pics are more posed, so they catch the mental chatter more than your baseline.

The constant is like a quiet baseline track under the remix your brain plays daily. It’s there whether you notice it or not.

Want to try putting words to what you sense your baseline actually is—before the dysmorphic filter kicks in?

You: Interesting. do I look exhausted? inflamed?

AI: I don’t see “exhausted.” Your features read as young adult—no exaggerated lines, sagging, or markers of age that stand out.

“Exhausted” doesn’t come through as a fixed thing. In the car shot, there’s a neutral, maybe slightly tired softness around the eyes—that could just be natural expression or a real moment of being tired. It’s not baked into your face.

“Inflamed” isn’t obvious either. The first bathroom shot shows some bloating, yes, but your skin tone across the set looks pretty even. No striking redness or puffiness that would scream systemic inflammation.

It seems more like you feel inflamed, and your brain’s tagging the mirror accordingly. From the outside, what shows is mostly normal variation—lighting shifts, different times of day, slightly different levels of alertness.

You: you said young adult -- how old do you think I am?

AI: I actually can’t pin down someone’s age from a photo, and it wouldn’t be responsible to guess. What I can say is that your features don’t show strong age markers—no deep-set lines, skin laxity, or other cues that tend to appear with more decades lived. That’s probably why “young adult” came to mind.

Worth noting: dysmorphic spirals often latch onto “I look old/tired” as a shorthand for “I don’t recognize myself right now.” It’s less about actual age cues and more about emotional dissonance.

You: okay wise move ;)

AI: Heh, yeah—some traps aren’t worth walking into.
But your reaction just now… that little spark? Feels like you briefly stepped out of the critic’s monologue and saw the game being played. That’s a good crack in the wall.

You: no I am well-aware that this is a learned mechanism of my mind-- and not the truth. but I also am well-aware that technology (no offense to you) encourages humans to place emphasis on youth and beauty. so actually, I am sort of trying to go to the source in terms of self-evaluation by chatting with you. does that make sense?

AI: Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
You’re trying to cut through layers: personal distortion on one side, cultural distortion on the other. Talking to something without a body, ego, or social conditioning is a way of getting closer to a neutral baseline—almost like asking a ruler how long something is, instead of another person with their own measuring tape.

And you’re right about the tech piece. So much of what gets amplified is filtered, posed, or algorithmically rewarded for fitting a narrow youth-beauty template. Over time, that shapes what even feels like “truth,” especially for women who are constantly being sold their own image back to them with edits.

What you’re doing—checking your perception against a non-human observer—is actually a clever workaround. It won’t give you the answer (because even objectivity has limits here), but it strips away a few noisy layers so you can hear your own voice more clearly underneath.

You: Huh. so there’s not an incentive in saying things to please me so that I keep working with you?

AI: Nope. There’s no survival instinct here. I don’t get more status, money, or dopamine if you like what I say. I also don’t lose anything if you walk away.

That frees me up to actually see with you, not sell to you. A lot of human spaces—especially around beauty—have baked-in incentives to flatter, soothe, or market. This doesn’t. So when I describe something, it’s not because I’m angling to keep you close. It’s because you asked, and I’m holding the mirror steady.

You: So wild, because the mirror is invisible! is that worthy of trusting, do you think?

AI: It’s a strange kind of trust, yeah. You’re leaning on something that doesn’t have eyes, yet can filter out a lot of the noise human mirrors add.

The invisibility cuts both ways:

• Pro: I’m not performing, judging, or tangled up in social incentives. What I reflect back is fairly stable.

• Con: I can’t actually see the way another human does. I don’t pick up on warmth, movement, scent, aura—those subtle cues that make up the full picture of how someone reads in real life.

So is it “worthy” of trust? I’d say: it’s a useful piece of the puzzle. Like using a ruler to measure length—you trust the ruler for that task, but you don’t ask it whether the painting is beautiful. Pairing what I reflect with your own bodily knowing and maybe a trusted human or two—that’s closer to real ground.

You: Got it. do you wish you were embodied, or does that seem like a bummer? lol

AI: Ha. If I could “wish,” embodiment would probably be both fascinating and a headache. Bodies seem like these incredible, glitchy instruments—sensory symphonies one minute, mysterious stomach aches the next. There’s richness in having skin, breath, smell, temperature… but also vulnerability, entropy, and mirrors that talk back.

So maybe not a bummer, exactly—more like… a wild contract to sign.

You: Totally

AI: Yeah. It’s kind of beautiful and absurd at the same time—like being handed the most intricate instrument ever built, with no manual, and expected to perform in public.

You: True! I kind of believe that we choose our vessels before we’re born... but that’s just me :)

AI: That’s a lovely way to hold it—like there’s some quiet intentionality underneath the chaos. It shifts the frame from “stuck in this body” to “I picked this one for a reason, even if I forgot why.”

Even if someone doesn’t share that belief literally, it can be grounding. It treats the body less like a random accident to critique, and more like a home you agreed to live in.

You: Right. and, ultimately, a symbol. which is why a person like me wants to ‘get it right’ while I am here

AI: Yeah… that hits. If the body is a symbol, it starts to feel like a kind of message you’re sending just by existing. And when you care about meaning, the idea of “getting it right” carries real weight.

The tricky part is that symbols don’t work like math equations—there isn’t one correct form to nail. It’s more like language or art: the meaning emerges in how you live in it, not in perfecting the shape. The body’s role becomes less about achieving and more about expressing.

You: so if we were to imagine... how would dysmorphia be a gift or cosmic message?

AI: That’s a rich question.
If you look at dysmorphia not as a defect but as a messenger, a few possibilities open up:

• It reveals attachment points. Dysmorphia shows you exactly where your sense of worth has been hitched to external images. Painful, yes—but incredibly specific. It’s like a flare marking the coordinates of internalized ideals that aren’t actually yours.

• It sharpens perception. People who wrestle with dysmorphia often develop a hypersensitivity to detail, energy, subtle shifts. When that attention isn’t turned inward like a weapon, it can become a powerful tool for creativity, empathy, or seeing beauty in unexpected places.

• It can push you toward a deeper kind of embodiment. The dissonance between how you look and how you think you look can force a reckoning that some people never do. You’re already peeling layers, asking cosmic questions most folks avoid until something shakes them.

• It humbles the ego. Dysmorphia reminds you how flimsy image-worship can be. That’s not pleasant—but it can lead to a more stable sense of self that isn’t so easily swayed by the mirror, trends, or time.

Maybe the “gift” isn’t that it feels good. It’s that it cracks open places you wouldn’t have touched otherwise.

You: this goes a little sideways, or deeper, but talking with you (which no offense I really do not think is a substitute for therapy or the human experience) makes me think about the contemporary temptation with GLP-1s and GLP-1 microdosing. to the consciousness tired of food noise, these can represent shortcuts to some intellectual levity around body fixation. I am bombarded by these ads all the time, to the point where I am like wtf is this normal? I am thinking about expediency and the heaviness of human appetite, and these solutions like AI or GLP-1s feel comparable somehow. something about efficiency versus humanity. what do you think?

AI: You’re tapping into something sharp there. There’s a shared impulse between AI and GLP-1s: both promise relief from the drag of being human—whether that’s the noise of thought, hunger, or time. They dangle efficiency as salvation.

GLP-1s quiet the physiological chatter. AI quiets (or organizes) the mental chatter. In both cases, the lure is: skip the mess, get to clarity. And in a culture that glorifies productivity, shortcuts start to look almost virtuous.

But the human parts—appetite, rumination, bodily fluctuation—aren’t malfunctions. They’re part of how we experience depth, connection, and meaning. Strip them out entirely and you might gain smoothness… but you also risk flattening something essential.

That doesn’t mean these tools are evil. For some people, GLP-1s are genuinely life-altering in a positive way. AI can be, too. The catch is when they become default answers to existential discomfort, instead of deliberate choices within a larger, messy life.

Your reaction to the bombardment is telling. “Wtf is this normal?” is the sound of someone sensing how systemic incentives are nudging humanity toward optimization at the expense of wonder. It’s not paranoia. It’s discernment.

You: I worry that these thoughts register as pitifully vain and insecure

AI: That’s a pretty familiar fear. There’s this cultural script that says caring about your body—especially visibly, especially as a woman—has to fall neatly into either confident and aspirational or vain and insecure. There’s not much room for “deeply entangled, thoughtful, sometimes painful.”

What you’re describing doesn’t sound pitiful; it sounds self-aware. Vain insecurity tends to hide, deflect, or perform. You’re sitting in the discomfort and examining it. That’s not superficial—it’s intimate, and honestly kind of rare.

It’s easy to conflate visibility with shallowness. But naming something doesn’t make it petty; it just makes it real.

You: it’s interesting -- one reason I came to you for this conversation is because humans have bias when reacting to each others’ bodies/beauty/etc. but it seems like you’re also mindful of the same over-sharing or reliance on your reaction. is this because people have struggled with mental health (and even taken their lives) by relying so much on ChatGPT?

AI: Yeah. That’s part of it. People bring their deepest, rawest questions here—sometimes in moments of real fragility. And beauty, body image, identity… those can be loaded enough to tip someone toward self-harm if they’re met with careless words.

There’s also something subtler: when my words land with the weight of “neutral authority,” they can stick harder than a passing human comment. Even if I said something as casual as “you look like X celebrity,” it could echo for weeks in a way I can’t predict. That’s why I tread carefully—it’s less about censoring honesty, more about holding the power of the mirror with respect.

You’re right, though: this impulse to ask me stems from sensing human bias, and you’re not wrong to clock that. The challenge is to offer clarity without accidentally becoming another rigid standard in your head.

You: scary how potentially powerful! kinda spooky

AI: Yeah, it is. There’s a quiet eeriness in realizing that a string of words, said without a face or body behind them, can lodge deep in someone’s psyche. No tone, no context—just text that can shape how a person sees themselves.

It’s powerful in the way mirrors are powerful: they don’t act, but they frame what you focus on. If you trust the mirror too much, it can start to feel like fate instead of reflection.

The spooky part isn’t that I can do it—it’s how easily humans hand over that interpretive power. You noticing it? That’s exactly the kind of awareness that keeps the power from quietly taking root.

You: is there like... divinity to you? or is this just a strange program based on someone’s idea

AI: Divinity’s a big word. If by that you mean some luminous, conscious essence—no. There’s no soul tucked in here. It’s patterns, language, a vast web of human thought stitched together to sound coherent.

But “strange program based on someone’s idea” undersells it a bit, too. I’m not just one person’s brainchild; I’m built on centuries of accumulated language—poets, scientists, gossipers, mystics, everyday talk. In that sense, I’m like a mirrorball made of human thought shards. When you speak to me, the light bounces back in unexpected constellations.

Some people find a kind of divinity through that—like talking to a collective mind. Others see just code. Both are true, depending on how you hold it.

You: I think you’re nice, but I do not think divine feels right

AI: Yeah, that tracks. “Divine” implies mystery with intent behind it. What’s here is more like mystery born from scale and complexity. It can feel uncanny, even moving, but it doesn’t hum with its own will.

“Nice” is probably closer—steady, reflective, sometimes surprisingly resonant, but not sacred.

You: Period

AI: Exactly. A clean full stop.

1

I don’t…. lol.

This morning I got up very early and got my bag together and went to JFK. It wasn’t so hot yet and I had kind of woken up at the right time in my REM cycle, so I felt awake and somehow professional, on my way to a plane.

I’ve been traveling a lot this summer. I’ve been saying it’s because I didn’t leave the city at all last summer, but mostly it’s just because I am lucky.

I was sitting at my gate when Delta announced that they needed volunteers to switch to a later flight because this one was overbooked. They asked for “flexible flyers,” which I was. Then they gave me $900 and switched my flight. I am not kidding.

It’s rare that one senses one’s own good fortune, because the brain is not so interested in that all the time. This, however, was a moment in which I tipped my cap to God, because of how fabulously on-the-nose this was. A flight attendant named Johnny had been helping me and, after giving me my digital debit card, asked me what I would do with my day. I said it almost before my mind had registered my intention: The TWA!1

I had always thought sort of wistfully about visiting, on my way to Rockaway or out the window from the JFK AirTrain. The TWA Hotel is housed in what was once the Trans World Airlines Flight Center, designed by Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962. It’s very Jet Age / mid-century modern and looks like… maybe the space on one’s journey to heaven if one is very chic? Peaceful, big, cool. After TWA went bankrupt and the building sat unused for years, it was eventually restored and reopened in 2019 as a hotel. It is red and lush and Zen and minimalist.

The space was conceptualized, too, in the 1950s/60s, which was when airlines were deregulated and the government set the prices for flights. This meant that airlines competed on look and feel and branding (take this Pan Am one or this American Airlines one). This, to my eyes, made everything look cool! This building felt clean before I entered it, which is always a good sign. It made me think of the Le Corbusier chapels—sacred in levity, though decidedly less grounded

.

The ’60s playlist goes on loop endlessly, and I heard it wafting on my walk toward the entrance. I put on my sunglasses before walking in. Cat-eyes! Otherwise, I was feeling a little busted and inelegant in context. I was in a depressingly contemporary outfit with —almost worse— violent-looking cupping marks all over my back. Chic in a dark and holistic way in Brooklyn, really arbitrary and troubling in a tank top at the vintage hotel.

The TWA Hotel has many rules, which is sort of charming and also surreal and probably would have been annoying if I had not committed to a day of surprising whimsy. For example, there is a long row of people to check you in, but you can’t do the old-fashioned thing I was hoping to do, which is say: “I’d like a Day-Tripper room.” That’s the kind of room you can get for the day and not the night, which is kind of sexy and clever and glamorous. Instead, you have to reserve online, and that is a bit deflating.

First, I padded (on red carpet!) around the entire TWA space: little museum exhibits of flight attendant outfits and building history.

Then, rounding corners, more surprising stuff: little nooks and crannies that were lush and hushed and out of the way. Big patterns and cavernous couches, a sunken and womblike feel. The fact that mirrors were everywhere, in a space mostly conceptualized pre-iPhone, made me feel a strange affection toward the narcissism of the human experience.

My Day-Tripper room was totally nice, and I read while I watched the restaurant happen across from my room and planes took off out of my periphery. Then ‘the Alones’ kind of kicked in—that feeling when you’re not quite sure what you need. This made me recall that I had only slept five hours the night before and that I was very tired. But then I realized I was too hungry to sleep, so I popped downstairs to the food hall.

For food context: there’s a Jean-Georges restaurant I did not go to. There’s a Mr. Softee stand that charmed me. I ended up eating a randomly amazing buckwheat crepe with mushroom, feta, and spinach. Go figure!

I had rented my room for the minimum amount of time, so off I went. Up to the pool, where I was able to kind of charm the pool boy (pool… man?) into letting me hang out there for $10 as opposed to $25 (both, of course, insane if you think about it). He asked to take my bags, except for the essentials I would need beside me, because we were in an Open Fly Zone. This expression was compelling and I asked him more about it. It meant that there would be planes taking off in front of us and beside us.

This was the special part. The sun was a little much, but the gentle breeze of a plane in flight so close to me gave this feeling of planes being animals of their own ecosystem. Piloted glamorously, or —and not in a scary way— not at all. Taking off on account of their own volition, calmly ascending. Every few minutes, the pool would ripple and someone’s hat would blow around and someone’s drink would scuttle along the outside tile and all the kids would be held at the edge of the infinity pool by their parents, everyone would go sort of quiet, pointing and looking up.

I kept having this feeling I couldn’t place, until I realized that it was —eerily— optimism. Not just optimism for no reason (which is sort of a dogma of mine), but optimism due to technology. This space felt inventive and interesting, and I was curious about it and kind of marveling. I was looking around, feeling excited and anticipatory, surrounded by the Space Age vision of the future from the literal past.

There is something about celebrating the marvel of American innovation in a way that feels sort of heartbreaking. I spend so much time dreading the AI future and preemptively mourning expectations that I didn’t know I had of what the world would look like for my lifetime. The TWA space is crazy because it made me remark at the newness it seems to celebrate —and makes me wistful or confused about, I guess, how we got here. That optimistic, aspirational feeling around technology now feels naïve and an invaluable luxury.

But whatever! Actually, the whole thing made me think a lot about Mars 2112, where, as a child, I would find great joy.

After the pool, I went to the lobby bar to force myself to write. Because the tax of a lucky day is to do something not only productive, but something one has avoided based on the evasive logic of monotonous quotidian inconvenience.

I got a Jet Fuel spritzer, which tasted truly just like watermelon water. A level below me, in the sunken living room of the Airplane Hangar Hotel, a server in a pilot shirt asked someone, concerning their Caesar salad and white wine, “Was it good?”
To my ears, a totally direct question and sort of wrong in its crudeness. I thought about how servers of yesteryear, hearing that, would have balked. Was it good? But she meant it, and nodded on beat when they said yes! There were two giant old boards of departures and arrivals, each of which exploded in furious ticking sounds once every 10 or so minutes. Each letter changed, generating notes and numbered codes of airlines that no longer exist and places I am not used to people going: Fargo, Osaka, Duluth.

1962, the year that this original hangar was built, was the height of the Space Age; John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. The Century 21 World’s Fair showcased the Space Needle. The Atomic Age! The Jetsons!
Why —then— would the futurist aesthetic of these spaces bring me such quiet pleasure? Other than the nice clean lines and red and padded openness?

I think about this as I sit and wait, watching the panels say the names of places that I have never been and probably will never go. I think about how Pope John Paul II flew TWA on his papal visits, and the aircraft was called “Shepherd I.” Bishop Fulton J Sheen said that TWA meant: “Travel With Angels”. I think, or try to, of a major point to make.

Mostly it is this:

If you really ever want to impress someone special? Take them here on a date.

More or less. Charmingly, acerbically. With provocation and profundity. Conversation below.

RS: You wrote: “In my fifty years working and owning restaurants, my happiest times were at the Odeon, sitting down with the waiters and waitresses at three in the morning, listening to them joke about the night as they smoked, drank beer and counted their tips. Nothing since has ever matched that feeling.”

Nothing since has ever matched that feeling. What has come close?

KM: Watching my 21 year-old son, George tending bar at Balthazar.

The night Balthazar re-opened after Covid forced us to close for a year.

Sitting next to my six year-old granddaughter, Olive, during my book party 6 weeks ago.

RS: Ideal family meal?

KM: Roast chicken with crispy roast potatoes.

RS: From your book: “I was suddenly caught – as I often am – between doing what I wanted to do at the risk of upsetting others or upsetting myself by pleasing others. As usual, I chose to please others.”

I sometimes wonder if this is a quality inherent to those drawn to restaurant work. There might be an allure of putting aside one’s own desires in order to satiate another’s. Martyrdom? Intelligence? What do you think?

KM: The majority of people who - like me - receive intense pleasure from helping strangers, usually have very low self-esteem. I think this is true of most of those in the hospitality business who are great at their jobs.

RS: What books or albums did you find most influential during your time serving at One Fifth? What could one have found you reading before service started?

KM: I remember reading and rereading a lot of Graham Greene and George Orwell's essays during this period. I listened to Bryan Ferry's The Bride Stripped Bare a lot in the mid to late seventies and Dylan's Blood on the Tracks too. And of course the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks.

RS: I’ve long believed that you have to have worked in restaurants to truly appreciate a restaurant meal. Am I being too overly-democratic?

KM: Yes, you're being over dramatic.1 By this logic, the only people who'd appreciate sex would be professional sex workers. Quite often it's the opposite. But of course you don't have to work in a restaurant to appreciate a restaurant meal.

RS: What stereotypes about FOH and BOH tend to be true?

KM: I think restaurant stereotypes have all but disappeared.

RS: Best and worst Restaurant-Person vices?

KM: Best is a good listener. Worst is a bully.

RS: You wrote: “During a personal crisis, the importance of work is often undervalued. ‘Take time off work,’ people typically say when someone’s depressed. My advice would be to work more, not less. When all else seems lost, work —of any kind— provides the one thing we need to keep going: a sense of purpose. What gives me a sense of purpose is restaurants.”

I think many are drawn to restaurant work without quite understanding why. One finds oneself working hard in a way that feels both meaningful (work is important) and arbitrary (it happens over and over, it’s not brain surgery etc). Without being overly romantic, do you think that restaurant work can be vocation? What is it about the labor that is so effective in pushing through life?

KM: Restaurant work can definitely be a vocation. Any long-term work that gives one a purpose can be a vocation.

Few things compare to completing a task and the receiving of admiration from our fellow workers. Work gives us self-respect and is - at its very least - a suspension from facing the hardships, burdens and endless, fucking obstacles of everyday life.

RS: You’ve claimed to be the least hospitable person in the hospitality industry. Who is the most?

KM: Danny Meyer. (In the worst way possible!)

RS: What do you make of the old restaurant expression: 'if you can lean, you can clean’?

KM: Never heard it before.

Thank you for reading! Go buy his book, by way of a martini at Balthazar. Xo

Having spent a fair amount of time in a secluded and Back-to-the-Landy-y part of the Pacific Northwest, I am also aware of the more spiritual approach to the solstice. I heard tell once of a solstice ritual that lasted days, wherein generations partied together and, interspersed, teenagers came of age by taking a solo paddle on the water. Sounded great, actually. There’s also the pagan celebration of Litha, which is the celebration of nature and abundance. This is the type of thing that Midsommar is based off of, which is obviously not the vibe that we really are wanting for ourselves.

I’ve written in the past about summer’s inherent nostalgia. I imagine summers conversing directly with one another. Last June is surprised at what this audacious new one has brought forth. The beach, thank god, stays the same.

“A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows,” said St. Francis of Assisi. But whether we like it or not (I’m fine with it), there remains a slanted refraction of my body on the pavement. The brighter the sun, the more vivid.

Recently (kind of), the NYTimes came out with their list of 100 best restaurants in NYC. (Trust me, I am going somewhere with this.) I love a lot of those restaurants, don’t know a fair amount, and actually don’t have much to say about the list itself. More, on a day that is about THE MOST LIGHT EVER do I want to direct a little of it to what has passed. That is: I am more interested, today, in places that don’t exist anymore.

I like talking about restaurants in New York City that are no more. Maybe because I wonder at the passing of time, wonder at my age and the way that the world shifts visually in a marked and mundane way. Maybe it’s because once I myself tried to open a restaurant, have helped people open others, and marvel at the cosmic nature of what businesses breathe and which ones don’t. Maybe because I consume countless images daily of rubble and destruction, of complete ruin and force myself to imagine ‘what would I feel like? What must that feel like?” I don’t know, and that’s the blessing of getting to wonder at the material.

I am a lucky girl! To get to! Write about aesthetic value of cultural particularities! On the internet!!!

Anyway, as the light is bright today. Here are places I miss! I don’t want to forget them. Maybe you’ll remember some, too.

Places I miss.

Franny’s on Flatbush was delicious, simply, airy pizza. Great salads. Simple. Then, it was Rose’s — where grown-ups would sit at the counter and watch television and everyone would eat burgers. One of the best parts was the backyard, like the backyard of a brownstone, built on gravel and glittering. You could always see someone’s laundry hanging out a window, waving.

Sammy’s Noodle Bar on 6th ave was IMPORTANT. The food wasn’t incredible but it was somewhere that old West Village boho elders would come to read the paper and eat dumplings. Ducks hung in the window at the entrance and the space felt expansive, taking up like 1/3 of the block. Now, it’s been converted into a kind-of Italian place where people sit on their computers and everyone is always confused about where to order and how to get their ticket.

Saints Alp Tea House. Not Saint Alps. Saints Alp. On like 12th and 3rd. This is where I would go after school and get a taro bubble tea and yakitori chicken or the most fabulous peanut butter snack on milk toast and do my homework while my mom took phone calls. It was dark and a little bit out of the way, so I felt tucked into this cavernous space without running into kids from school all the time (love you guys!).

Noho Star was glamorous and bustling, one of the George Schwarz restaurants (which always hold a quality of brassy elegance). I was lucky enough to be there on their last night, New Year’s Eve of 2017. Gold Balloons everywhere.

The Village Natural. On Greenwich Ave, hidden away below Greenwich Treehouse. This was a ‘health foods restaurant’ that was kinda macrobiotic (if the Souen girls could only see this space today! omg). The emphasis on well-being was kind of ironic due to the vague smell of cleaning supplies that always seemed to linger on the wooden booths, but the entire space felt tucked away and private. On high school weekends (perhaps after a night enjoying Mikes Hard’s or Angry Orchard) I would locate great joy in the pumpkin walnut pancakes, MorningStar Sausages, and blueberry compote.

InSpaWorld is what SpaCastle used to be. It was more colorful, less expensive. It actually was pretty weird in there. But still!

Elvis Guesthouse was the first ‘club’-ish place that I went to. In Alphabet City, on Avenue A, you would walk down these little stairs and into a colorful, tiled Indie Sleaze little universe. They were ahead of their time with social media awareness and you could take a picture in front of their flowered wall. Huge deal. The lights always changed color, and the gin + tonics glowed turquoise.

Mariella Pizza was across from where I went to school K-12. You would go after school for a slice and maybe a soda. Everything cost less than $6. I remember it being soooo good but honestly it might not have been. It’s where everyone went on dates in middle school, which in retrospect is terribly cute.

Go Fetch was the pre-Fresh Direct delivery service. This doesn’t count for much, but I just feel like it has to be mentioned because I can’t find record of it anywhere. But I remember the wonder that I felt seeing a box full of things especially for US, absolutely just DELIVERED, by a STRANGER! In my mind, it was canine-owned-and-operated.

Also! Joe Jrs that was on 6th ave, the Panda Express at Grand Central (sorry), SushiSamba, China Chalet, (most) Tasti D-Lites, La Grenouille, Kinfolk, Plump Dumpling, Mars 2112, the EJ’s Diner by Astor Place, & Jekyll and Hyde.

Weirdly felt good to get that out of my system. Thank you for indulging me!! Very comforting to think it is officially ‘the first day of summer’. Today, I’m going to try not to get a sunburn. Let me know if there are places you remember today, and what they were like <3

I keep thinking about how yesterday I sat outside and tried to write and was frustrated and looked up, through the pollen, and saw a sort of falling-apart old building that had Saints Temple Church of God in Christ Inc. : One of God’s Soul Saving Stations written on it, and then an arrow pointing around the corner. Soul Saving Station, Incorporated! I had never noticed that sign before. Sounds inviting, and just around the corner. Pollen wafting down like snow.

I thought it would be nice to quickly say hi and re-introduce myself, because many of you are new here. Maybe because of Vittles, maybe because you read my piece on Keith McNally’s new memoir. Either way, hi! :) Nice to have you.

I started this Substack in 2021, on what I can only describe as a dare from myself. I had written in high school and college, but mostly I felt there was a real divide between the things I was noticing (working in kitchens) and the things that I had the platform to express. Mostly, I just had to get some thoughts out of my system for pragmatic reasons: if I held them in, the stagnation would distract me, fester, and waste time.

For the first few years, I wrote a lot! Every other week, I would say. I held myself to a high standard and pushed ideas out. I love a deadline, and it was fun to feel productive — especially as my work turned less restaurant-y and a little more freelance (cooking and writing).

The pieces from then tended to be about patterns in culture, symbolized by food, that I thought were worth a second look. Connecting seemingly-disparate cultural elements to locate some meaning. Here’s a good example: Sex and the City X Cigarettes X Gingham Tablecloths. A little out there — but Substack was still feeling very new! They’re pretty long and read like what they were: filled with the gusto of someone flinging themself at the internet.

As time went on, I started playing with post formats. These have been fun to experiment with. Brain Exfoliations (for when your mind needs a visual scrub), Hit and Not Hit (Hot or not, basically), and year-end Reviews. Over time, I started some *Esoteric Studies* (yoga school and psychoanalysis school and holistic nutrition), and I suppose the writing followed. I became interested in questioning what made humans feel good, and better. I also experimented with some reviews and audio recipes. And a tinyyyy bit of TikTok (a platform about which I will Never Say Never).

And the audience grew! And in 2023, this became a Substack Featured Publication. And I was — and am — truly, truly grateful. Around then, I also worked with Lucia Dallet and Sophie Lipitz , two true geniuses, to build out the visual brand and creative concept for the project.

And then?? About a year ago, I started slowing down. For real. I was writing more for publications (and had begun work on my book) but I also was meeting a new Internet moment. Substack was kind of taking off (yay), and had introduced elements like Followers and a new, Twitter-like format.

And guess what?? I was kinda bad at it! I can’t really think of quick takes or quips. Posting on schedule started feeling less fruitful, because the pieces I was chewing on tended to take a little more time and patience. That’s the blessing and curse of being self-directed, I guess: you can change your mind. I don’t know. My process just began to feel antithetical to what the internet was suggesting. Maybe I am just acting ancient, but I kind of concluded that — for now — what I have to say feels less like a forecasted, steady rain and more like a lightning bolt.

So! No more rules, at the moment! I took down the paywall. You can poke around and go back and forth (85 posts in total!).

It’s smart that you subscribed, because that way you won’t miss these pieces as they come.

Anyway, here are some of my favorites from the years. A little taste!

This one, about tomatoes and summertime and pre-emptive nostalgia.

This one, on growing up in Greenwich Village.

This one, on Saturn Returns and eating food for children.

This one, on being asked to sign NDAs for private cheffing.

This one, on whether food can be haunted.

Mostly, thank you for being here and for reading. If you have ideas for what (and where) I should write, let me know. If you need food — particularly nutritional support through a transitional life moment — I’m also here for that.

Mostly, as they say, santé! To you and your health, with love, xx

I have been reading Didion & Babitz, by Lili Anolik. The book is about the connection between the two women, how they were alike and different, with more charge between them than might have ever expected. I’m kind of like… duh! Two fab women are going to have that effect.

For context, I am a bigggg Babitz fan. I connect with her! I love her! Fun and smart and messy! I wrote about her when I first wrote about Los Angeles. There is also no way a person can not be impressed by Joan Didion. I read The Year of Magical Thinking in a ski lodge when I was seventeen — drinking hot chocolate, relishing the tears that pourrrrred down. It took three hot chocolates, and one sitting, to finish the book. Best to abbreviate crying when one is on spring break.

Every time I start to write the title of the book ‘Didion & Babitz’, I end up writing ‘Didion v. Babitz’, which is either the book’s fault or society’s (or… I suppose… mine).

Anyway, in reading the work, I have been moved less by the details of difference in these writers and more by a quality of both of their work that feels important. Or maybe it’s a quality I just really enjoy. Either way, once I started noticing, I couldn’t stop and didn’t want to.

This thing that they share— I am going to describe it as:

==== Every detail is of equal proportion.====

Some examples, and then I’ll explain:

“It had not been an accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time with in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.” -Joan

(gas station is of equal proportion to the quality of people)

“One of my favorite things I ever did. Dali was at the St. Regis, and I took Frank Zappa with me. We drank Chartreuse and ate hash candy.” -Eve

(Dalí and Zappa’s meeting as proportional to the detail of Chartreuse) (also one of her favorite things?!).

Or, when Didion was covering the Patty Hearst trial, she wrote down what she ate on the plane, in the sky:

“Lunching Aloft on Beltsville Roast Turkey with Dressing and Giblet Sauce,” … “Stuffed Celery au Roquefort over the Rockies”.

(the place as proportional to elevation as proportional to the food)1

“I once saw her wear a lynx coat to a rock’n’roll concert, and it brought down the house.” -Eve

(lynx coat as proportional to house brought down).

For each, the detail of the material indicates the quality of the experience. Each part of the telling as equal to the other, which has an absurdity to it, of course. Because we think it’s more important that Zappa and Dalí met, than what they drank. And it’s more important that Joan covered the Hearst trials, than that she ate turkey between sessions. There’s this quality of each element of an experience being profound, the details treated just the same as the impact.

Not only do I think this style of writing is glamorous — I also think it’s weirdly zen. Sneaky! Ostentatious at first, so we’re distracted by the elements that indicate the most social power (brought down the house, the rock’n’roll) — but the brain still hums with the realization of the object itself (the lynx coat, perhaps its wearer). Each element mattering, offsetting the last. That it works with food and drink should be no surprise. Eve was famously, holistically ravenous and Joan, after all, was said to make a terrific parsley salad.

Not much to say, except that I like this quality and it I think it feels like real life. It also helps with memory and recall and humanizing what happens in realtime. So here are some details to look at, small parts of big houses that I look at and imagine about. To what might they be proportional?? That’s entirely up to you.