That Wet Look

I’ll Sign It For You

Claire Carusillo — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:45:33 GMT

Ahoy,

I meant to do a commemorative That Wet Look to coincide with the release of my first novel The Responsible Party, which is 1/8 about a skincare newsletterer who sends a reader to the hospital with organ failure after recommending she ingest “ten thingies” of colloidal silver a day.

To prepare for this newsletter I never ended up sending, I even bought magnesium to spray on my feet before bed, and I was gonna show them for free on main. But I own a bookstore/skate shop/coffee bar called Storyboard now in Midway, Utah, and I haven’t had time to make those little moving images since the book came out.

Pic of the book today in the Oak Brook Barnes and Noble that Dad sent me. I told him that I hoped my haters would see it, but then I tried to think of any that would be in proximity to the Oak Brook mall and realized that they might all be dead.

I’m sure I’ll get around to it soon. When my post-book release busy work and freelancing dies down, I won’t know what to do with my time. For the first time in a decade, I won’t be thinking about how to arrange my fake-real book characters.

But in the meantime, I wanted to let all of you know that if you want a copy of the book, order it from me, and I’ll sign it for you. Let me know what it is you’d like me to say on there by replying to this email! I’ve been getting pretty good at drawing anchors and lighthouses in pink Sharpie.

BUY A SIGNED COPY HERE

OK, and I’m really loling now that the image of the book is sideways when you click the link. Maybe one day we’ll be able to hire some guy to do this stuff for us. I can’t be bothered to fix it right now. I’ve been up and down a step stool all afternoon.

Thanks for your support over the last ten years. None of this wouldn’t have happened to me if one of you hadn’t turned blue and sued my ass. Kidding, of course. The book is a work of fiction! Kinda!

Claire

Weighted vest review

Claire Carusillo — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 22:18:05 GMT

I’ve been in agony for the last eighteen months, and something that’s been helping since it’s gotten cold out is walking alone slowly up a mountain in a weighted vest. It’s a difficult trek, but it’s not like I’m summiting some rugged metaphor out there. From the top of the trail system, if I look one way, I see Ballerina Farm, and if I look the other, I see the new lifts at Deer Valley.

I listen to swooning guys from the 1970s or a pop psychology audiobook co-written by a hostage negotiator. As far as I can tell, if one finds themself “held hostage,” his suggestion is to just keep asking the jailer “Why?” and “How?” until the guy with the gun gets so annoyed that he’s like please, leave.

I didn’t know about weighted vests until a doctor who I pay to try and get to the bottom of that feeling up-top with me mentioned the benefits of wearing one. She learned about it from her buddy, another doctor. The buddy-doctor actually advised to her get one that looks like a chic, sportif puffer vest and wear it all day while seeing clients, which made us laugh.

I bought the cheapest 16-pound weighted vest late summer as my last-ever Amazon purchase. Sydney Sweeney had done one thing or another that pissed me off again, and I took it out on her best friend spacebride Lauren Sanchez. A week after I deleted my account, the Subscribe and Save biodegradable towels I use to dry my face arrived. A few days after that, the every-six-weeks Nutrafol. Oh my god, I will never escape these people.

Now that I know what a weighted vest looks like, I see women wearing them everywhere I go. They’ve been hiding in plain sight this whole time, and I didn’t notice until I opted in to their training regimen. I worry we’ve all been subtly coerced into buying weighted vests by social influencers working closely with the War Department. It’s embarrassing that I’ve become ensared in such a scheme, so I hide my weighted vest under an enormous denim pullover.

I lost track of what my body looks like a few years ago and haven’t really been able to get it back. In lieu of a grasp on all that, I’ve decided that my body should always be at a level of lung fitness where I can climb a mountain and ski down one in case the Midway crater explodes and we need to escape to Cheyenne, or worse. For the first time since college, I own a car, and I keep it stocked like a mobile command station. I got High Chews and canned air in there. More hypochlorous acid than salmonella would be willing to fight. I have an e-bike now, too, and I made sure to get a Captain’s Chair on the back.

I used to climb great mountains with Mars but ever since he got a skater boyfriend, the dog prefers galloping great distances around eight-month-old cul-de-sacs while the human on wheels behind him wields that leash like a tow rope off the back of a ski boat.

On my heavy, solo, vertical walks, which can sometimes get boring, I write a new book in my head about a couple boring into a shuttered mountainside mine and discovering a cavernous parlor carved from silver. This book in my head used to be called My Prospects, but lately I’ve been calling it Our Prospects as we hurtle toward opening a business together. Writing a new book in my brain is a coping mechanism because my publisher is no longer allowing me to touch the manuscript for The Responsible Party, which comes out in August.

Because I used my own name as the narrator’s in the real novel, the manuscript just went through legal vetting simultaneous to its copy edit. For a minute there, I was emailing back and forth with lawyers about the veracity of a killer anecdote I included about showing up to school with a picked pimple in 7th grade.

My work ended last week, but the rest might still feel hard. As I plod upwardly, I try to locate whatever is making me cry that day and turn it into plot fodder for my pretend new book. Lately, I’m crying because a burger place is moving in next door, and the drive-thru exit goes right past our bedroom and living room windows. In March, we moved into a small brick house behind the commercial building that had been a commercial kitchen for many years before we decided to live in it. You’ve never seen so many refrigerators in your life, and all of them were left with chicken salad inside.

We’re still not open, but it’ll happen soon, and I’m not worried about foot traffic. It seems like everyone in the world is finding out about my secret valley home now, and the landscape is disappearing. If I’m this protective, this white, and this new, I wonder how the mythical Timpanogos Ute princess, whose coffin pose profile is carved into the ridgeline over town, must feel. She’s been here 15,000 years.

Unfortunately, last week, I learned that bit of authentic oral history I’ve been repeating to visitors to my home as I point toward the mountain was actually invented by a BYU professor giving a cave tour in the 1940s. We went on an early morning lantern tour of that same cave on my 34th birthday, and our ranger, who looked absolutely adorable in a centennial-honoring National Park Services outfit, apologized to the tour group for all the holes the uniformed stewards of the land had dynamited into the cave over the course of the last 100 years. Obviously, we would do things differently now.

Pre-order my first novel THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY

Claire Carusillo — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 18:39:45 GMT

Ahoy sexy!

Last week, I turned in the final edits of the book I’ve been working on for eight years. Like twelve hours later, I got to announce that it exists and that it will be available from Henry Holt at a bookstore or website near you on August 11, 2026.

I guess I’d call it “disrespectful historical fiction” if someone asked what genre this book belongs to. You can pre-order here.

The cover is beautiful, and the team at Holt did a remarkable job modernizing my request of “make it look like those freaky Virginia Woolf covers.” If there’s ever a CC2, obviously my own Julia Carusillo, artist to the stars, will design it. I’ve been pretend-writing a new novel in my brain for the last 2 years since I moved to Utah again called MY PROSPECTS. And also a romance based in 1981 called THE LAST SILVER MINER OF BRIGHT NOOK MOUNTAIN RESORT that I will need to publish under the pseudonym Claudia Carillo.

The novel is called THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY, and it’s about a beauty writer named Claire Carusillo who gets canceled for sharing some acne advice that puts a reader into organ failure.

A few years before her career downturn, this Claire girl got a DNA testing kit in a swag bag at a wellness conference (based on true events) and submitted a cheek swab to the corporation on a lark. She sorta forgets about her public DNA profile until a creek dries up and police uncover a male bog body with a single hair curled around its tongue. That hair matches her maternal line’s genetic material, and a cop and a genetic genealogist come a-knocking.

Claire, who has moved home, blackmails her mother, a legacy-obsessed, high-intensity inventor named Kath, into confessing some pretty wild stuff about her time partying as a high schooler with a rich old guy (third-generation scion, money’s squandered, he’s 37) named Irv at a condemned lighthouse 400 yards off the coast of Navy Pier.

We also learn a lot about the regional legends who raised Kath (who are my IRL great-great-aunt and great-great-grandmother). There’s Fanny Mounsey, who was presumed to have drowned in a beaver stole and embroidered underwear in the 1914 sinking of the RMS Empress of Ireland. A year later, she washed up on the shores of Liverpool, moaning and blue. Upon hearing the news, her daughter, Sarah Mounsey left Chicago for New York and then carried on to England aboard the RMS Lusitania with the intention of collecting her wet mother and bringing her home. Famously, though not as famously as the Titanic, that boat sank, too. She survived!

The book is a lot of fun, but it’s also pretty dark and I don’t have any empowering messages to share or lessons to extol. “ROLLICKING” is the term all decided to use for marketing purposes. Much of it is autofictional, but I think it’s more fun if I keep what’s true and what’s not to myself for now.

The book is also about:

Snake oil salesmen 1900 to present day
British almshouses in the mid-1910s
The wind
Genetic genealogy used in a law enforcement context
McDonald’s
Beauty, as a concept (I’d show you my head right now as I just got my third TIXEL treatment and that’s what That Wet Look was all about, but now I’m more scared about putting my face online than I used to be)
Women going insane by legit no fault of their own
Haunted forest preserves in Western Chicagoland
Regional vaudeville as the art form sunsetted
Chicago in the early 1970s as experienced by a 17-year-old from the suburbs
Seasickness
Morse code
Scold’s bridles
Doing drugs but not being that fun about it (The title is a pun: Who is responsible for the Empress of Ireland and the Lusitania sinking? Who killed this bog body? And who is the fuckin’ drag Windexing the makeshift bar top under the stairs).

Once again, you can pre-order it here or anywhere! The other big news in my life is that I’m in the process of opening a bookshop/skate shop/coffee bar called STORYBOARD in MIDWAY, UTAH, the cultural center of the universe. I’m an above-30 skater now, too. I always wear a helmet to protect the moneymaker.

In an ideal world, I’d have a pre-order link exclusive to my forthcoming shop, but my life has gotten a little wild lately, and I have yet to hack that particular mainframe. Any pre-order helps, and we’ll probably do a little special fun thing exclusive to Storyboard later!

Thank you so much for reading this !!! I love writing !!! I hope we all make it to August 11, 2026 because it’s not looking good, gurlie !!!

CLAIRE

Paws

Claire Carusillo — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 16:16:04 GMT

Hi Wetgirlies,

I’m pausing this newsletter for a minute. I haven’t been all that active with it, and while I’ve been donating 100% of proceeds, I still don’t want to swindle anyone into setting up a subscription, forgetting about it, and then just randomly getting billed by Stripe for a product I haven’t done an excellent job of providing lately. I don’t think any of you feel that way, really. I just don’t want any of you to be confused even for a minute!

If you get stuck in an in-between billing cycle, and it seems too confusing to contact Substack about a refund, just let me know and I’ll Venmo you or buy you ~2.5 of these refillable hand sanitizer bracelets that roughly add up to the $7 you spent on me this month.

The politics of having a Substack right now is maybe interesting to eight people, and I think they’ve already written about the politics of having a Substack better than I can. There is no ethical blogging under capitalism!

Ok, lol, that said:

Starting next week, and then more importantly when the site launches at some point in the next few months, I’m going to be writing at new Gawker, probably about beauty, but also about the totality of what’s been occupying my mind: that one tweet from three years ago that said that Aladdin, Grimes, and cop horses were class traitors, the espresso martini agenda, fear of oblivion, fear of socializing, fear of men, this jaw chiseling “chewable” I keep getting ads for that is hailing itself as “flagship jaw muscle growth technology” (incel), and I guess that’s probably it. My brain is slower than it used to be, and I am less sure of myself than I was when I was younger.

I haven’t had a staff job in a long time, and this one has somewhat of a cultural cachet attached to it, and I’ve only been back in New York for two weeks, and I’m not used to anyone having an opinion about what I’m doing at all. I’m not even used to being a part of an organization or a group. I forever feel like some random chica, or someone’s sister with less-precise eyebrows, or the one who got off the waitlist, or the tacked-on wedding guest added to a low-energy table because I ask follow-up questions and allow people to feel seen and heard while the hotter people are off doing drugs in the bathroom. So I’m a little nervous!

I’ve asked for part-time work because I’m in a real high-octane circuit editing and rewriting my book (my book! MY BOOK! My Book! MY BOOK!), but I will be on the site 3-4 days a week. That’s a lot of visibility, even from my miniature ground-floor sublet mostly occluded by a tree and a set of stairs.

My dad and I have had to talk about Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel a lot, and the people I go to for career advice have not unkindly reminded me a few times about the time a few years ago, when I was still a niche micro-influencer, I took a “lunch meeting” for the first second failed re-boot of Gawker and I asked about the hiring timeline and the then-editor said, “Let me put it this way: HR has gone through your tweets, and nothing stood out,” and then, in my memory at least, I got on the subway to go home and by the time I emerged into the bright light of 96th Street at 3 pm, there was a Daily Beast article about her own deeply racist, classist, and also not even funny tweets and behavior, leading to a coup. I excused myself from the hiring process, and then, I think, I moved to Utah by accident for almost two years. There might have been a year in between those two events. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t really matter. That was a whole different thing, and I don’t think that person ever knew who I was, nor would she remember this meeting. I got yogurt!

People may generally be confused about how I got this job (I haven’t written online for money in over two years), and I know many of those who know about how media works believe this to be a doomed experiment funded by a dork corporation. I don’t think blogging was really ever anarchist (??), though, and there are maybe four companies left that aren’t yet Amazon Whole Foods, and I can’t imagine we have more than ten years left on this inhospitable earth, and so I can’t wait to be a part of this. I used to come home from high school newspaper production my senior year of high school at nine pm in Illinois, crack open a Chipotle burrito bowl as my third dinner, and see what Emily Gould was up to. This is brand allegiance!

I hope you will follow me over there, and click yourself into the site while you’re at work like you used to. Everyone that Leah has hired is so wildly special (including the only entity besides Adrian Grenier’s Jarlsberg grilled cheese to almost bring Conde to its knees!!!). You can follow me @Clocarustwo for occasional updates (I might even put my name on there in the name and bio in there where now only “Very famous woman’s burner account” stands).

I might be back here, too, or elsewhere, maybe charging for subscriptions, maybe not. Or maybe this book will materialize one day in the next four years, before Manhattan falls into the sea! I also think someone should pick up me and Julia’s 5 episode podcast called Gorgeous that hasn’t been produced in 15 months. My money, my seven dollars, as far as me becoming a media personality, has always been on that. E! News anchor is always a close second.

Love you,
Claire

The Pants Jacket

Claire Carusillo — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 21:03:09 GMT

Today’s letter is a plea: Follow my burner! No, don’t do that. That’s where I like to diary in private about my crushes so that they can see it.

My big ask is this: If you have seen this jacket or anything resembling this jacket, or if you know some lady who works in a quilt shop who might own this, or even if you know some lady who possibly got covid a…

Peanut's big three-way call

Claire Carusillo — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 22:41:37 GMT

What have I been up to, girlies, in my month-long absence? As this platform grows more humiliating with every new centrist blogger acquired, and then even more embarrassing with every tweet posted in malice about those new members, how have I, she of the cult-favorite critically reviled leftist off-label product usage advice newsletter for deeply troubl…

Big Show

Claire Carusillo — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 17:35:06 GMT

Mars and I drove from Park City to Santa Fe on Thursday without ever going indoors. We stopped for gas, of course, but never peed inside or stopped for food. I equipped my mom’s Acura with at least $240 of cubed cheese, tartufo salami, and Harmless Harvest coconut water. We peed on the side of the road, and once, for me, into a jar at a Sonic drive-in s…

Mountain Follies

Claire Carusillo — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 21:00:30 GMT

I don’t think anyone who also lives in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana, or the Dolomites for that matter reads this letter, but you’ve opted in and this is what you get. Here’s a collection of mountain observations that sometimes I tweet on my fake Twitter account but then delete because they’re polarizing and possibly intimidating to my audience of…

I was going to pitch an essay about this, but I let too much time pass

Claire Carusillo — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 18:20:19 GMT

In today’s issue of Lost The Plot Digest, I have no off-label product usage recommendations for deeply troubled pretty little babies, no Seasons Greetings, nothing to link to, and not much to be proud of that I’m allowed to talk about. On the internet, people have been linking to the things that they’ve accomplished despite a bad year. Kudos, I guess, h…

A four-year-old named Leslie

Claire Carusillo — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 20:03:12 GMT

I’ve spent most of the morning trying to get Musher’s Secret, a lip balm for dogs’ feet endorsed by the Iditarod influencers, onto Mars’ paws. When snow-melting agents get in between his little toes, he hobbles and then flees. But when I try to get the Musher’s Secret between his little toes, he also hobbles and then flees. And so this is the first endo…

begrudging Cyber Monday gratitudes

Claire Carusillo — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 18:59:53 GMT

This week, I bought a ton of pieces of cotton, metal, and plastic online in an attempt to become more beautiful. I have nobody around to perceive me as beautiful or not beautiful, but old habits die hard.

This is funny, though not funny haha because as of this week, I no longer have my part-time job at the bookstore and thus, I have no revenue source of…

Utilitarian hand cream

Claire Carusillo — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 20:00:49 GMT

I am trying to settle into a mind of winter, but really I am tweeting and crying on my burner account that is functionally a mood log, I am deleting its contents almost immediately, I am in my unmade bed, I am supine, I am sitting up from the neck up and redeveloping my dowager’s hump which I effectively minimized when I was doing 8 Pure Barre classes a…

No Takeaway

Claire Carusillo — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 14:56:15 GMT

Subscribe now

On one hand, it is the end of the line for us that we are stockpiling birth control just in case!, but I have a feeling that anecdotal shaming of people hoarding Plan B is not actually creating a nationwide shortage. I could be wrong! I don’t ever google anything, and there was that guy with the masks. I didn’t go to mandatory journalism camp at Ball St…

Five dollar gift card inside

Claire Carusillo — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 17:12:32 GMT

I was home a few weeks ago and I was sitting in my dad’s home office on a phone call that determined my future, and I found a letter displayed prominently on his desk from Portillo’s. Portillo’s is an Illinois hot dog restaurant. I’m not a huge Portillo’s head, really, because the smell reminds me of being in the car coming home from the airport. I tend…

Front-facing

Claire Carusillo — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 19:00:37 GMT

I worry I’m getting addicted to the internet again, specifically in the form of asserting my existence on there via front-facing Instagram story videos that I post and then delete after three to six hours. I started writing a paragraph about this, but I remembered I already wrote it in August. It’s a better paragraph that I’m capable of currently, thoug…

Laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis

Claire Carusillo — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 15:28:02 GMT

I just donated 100% of your money from subscriptions in August ($2000, I rounded up a titch) to support the medical bills of the family of Linden Cameron, a thirteen-year-old in Salt Lake who was shot by the police while experiencing an anxiety attack/anxiety separation as his mom was about to leave for work for the first time in a year. She called the …

Jojo Siwa's Ted Talk

Claire Carusillo — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 19:58:46 GMT

I’m sure I’ve talked here about Jojo Siwa’s Ted Talk from 2016 in some iteration of this letter before. It’s not really a Ted Talk, it’s a Tedx talk at some Christian school.

I made Sarah watch it with me the other day because we were doing a Jojo Siwa craft I bought at Michael’s a few months ago and placed in a drawer. I started quoting Jojo Siwa’s Ted…

A return to form dot gif

Claire Carusillo — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 04:41:13 GMT

I haven’t washed my face in like two weeks but here are some gifs anyway, like you used to love. Remember this one?

I’m sure whatever product this is changed my life for at least the eight minutes I spent framing this image.

Crop tops in winter

Claire Carusillo — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 18:05:43 GMT

Hello girly girls,

Once again I am writing with no intention of recommending any sort of product to any of you, except for aloe, which I haven’t ever thought is a good product. It’s very cold on burnt skin and leaves quite the film. It makes my Bright Eyes and/or Proud Jindo Mom tee stick to my back while I’m sleeping.

I have a crispy ass today. I got bur…

No Nuuds is Bad Nuuds

Claire Carusillo — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 19:00:40 GMT

Seems real! ^^^^^^^^^^

(A nearly 500 word *aside* that turns into a brag and also a product schill for something I got for free, which is a brag in itself: Besides this letter and a snack basket article I did for the Eater gift guide in 2019, I haven’t written for the internet in maybe two years, and still, I get probably eight emails a day like this. Al…