You probably won’t ever read this. Maybe you don’t like my writing. Maybe you like my writing but you’re not into this title. Maybe you don’t want to read something entitled “You Won’t Read This.” Plus you have a lot of shit to do. I understand, believe me.

But can I say something embarrassing that doesn’t matter because you won’t read it? Sometimes when I was younger, I would look in the mirror and secretly like what I saw reflected back at me. I knew the rest of the world didn’t give me a second glance, and if they did it wasn’t a look of admiration. But for one luminous, fleeting moment of recognition, as I fell like Alice into the looking glass, I perceived the outlines of my beauty, such as it was. And it was enough.

I think I truly learned to love my writing the day I realized that it was highly likely not many people would ever read it. I learned to love my writing when it made my chest swell with pride, when I looked at the page like I once looked in the bathroom mirror and saw myself turn from smudge to swan, from speck to spectacle, from hollow to holy.

I want you to read this but I don’t ever want to need you to read this. If I crave you too much, as an audience, I don’t know if I’ll remember who I am, and what matters to me.

I want you to care. I can’t want it more than I need to write.

You probably won’t read this, and I certainly don’t blame you.

But I bow my head in thankfulness for your careful attention, just in case.

Talking about an album that you absolutely love is always so fucking embarrassing, particularly if said album is one which has reduced you to puddles of tears in public spaces and which you speak about only in the hushed tones of the deeply devout. I am a lapsed Catholic but art in all its permutations became my religion after God and I drifted apart for many years. Yet the closest I’ve come to feeling the presence of something divine in recent times was the brutally cold winter day when I first listened to Cameron Winter’s debut solo project Heavy Metal.

Let’s get this out of the way now: Cameron Winter is a controversial cultural figure, mainly because he is young, his label promoted his band Geese in a way that some found to be a “psyop” (cue me rolling my eyes and clutching lovingly at my Getting Killed vinyl), his mom wrote a bestselling memoir about polyamory, and because he is preternaturally talented in a way that makes a lot of people throb with jealousy and glow as green with envy as the light Jay Gatsby longingly stared at (Gatsby would have definitely loved the yearning in this record, but that’s for a different essay). Winter is catnip for a certain type of person who loves singer songwriters with elaborate song structures and esoteric lyrics, and who perhaps is a touch on the pretentious end of the spectrum. In other words, if you know me at all, you know that of course I love him unabashedly.

Heavy Metal is a haunted record, in part due to Winter’s aching lyrics, his sparse and gorgeous piano melodies, but also in large measure due to his voice. Winter’s voice is so unique that I lack the lexicon to properly elucidate its hypnotic and heartbreaking qualities. It is a voice that quavers and is as deep as a crater, and it sounds absurd when you first hear it. But if you give it time to work its serpentine seductiveness into your soul, you will find yourself profoundly moved by it. I once listened to Heavy Metal on a loop for an entire afternoon, and at one point jotted down in my notebook, “he always sounds like a man who retired from a desk job whose true love left him, and now he doesn’t care what happens to him and lives off of canned soup and walks around in the chill of winter without a coat.” Cameron Winter is a young man who sounds like a wizened elder, and whose emotions are so close to the surface that he seems unprotected from the elements that could hurt him the most. It is this rawness, this bruising vulnerability, that appeals the most to me, and that is such an exceedingly rare quality in a male artist.

There are so many moments of spectacular and shattering tenderness on Heavy Metal, from the lilting and lovely single “Love Takes Miles” to the self-lacerating “Drinking Age” in which Winter confesses “ today I met who I’m gonna be / For the rest of my life / And he’s a piece of shit” to the moment in the exquisite “Nina + Field of Cops” when Winter sings, “I’ll love whatever kicks me hardest in the mouth.” The overall thematic thrust of the record is one of barely sublimated sorrow, and it is the aural equivalent of an exhausted sigh. There is resignation here, but there is also a great deal of faith, which makes for startling juxtapositions and which also makes the record seem true to life and its muddled messy experiences.

I am usually able to keep my composure now when I listen to Heavy Metal, with one glaring exception: the song “$0.” The song begins with Winter warbling “fuck these people”, and the music slowly begins building more and more around his fatigued rumination about feeling “like a dollar in your hand, you’re making me feel like a zero dollar man” until the show stopping finale when Winter begins belting with all of his might that “God is real/I’m not kidding, God is actually real/ I’m not kidding this time/ I think God is actually for real/ God is real, I wouldn’t joke about this/ I’m not kidding this time.”

The power of great art is that it can be interpreted in endless and multifaceted ways. I am certain that many people who listen to those lyrics believe Winter is taking the piss, mocking the sincerity of the devout with a wink and nod to the absurdity of their devotion. But I interpret it very differently. Perhaps going through cancer and surviving was, to paraphrase the great writer Andrew Solomon, too deeply felt to be a godless act for me, or it is the old Catholic school indoctrination knocking on my consciousness once again, but I hear Winter sing those lines and feel he is being serious. I hear someone who is broken and bedraggled clinging to the life raft of hope in the form of a benevolent God, and whether he means it or not, whether or not he is kidding this time, I feel the presence of something beyond our world. Maybe it’s just Art, but maybe it’s God. All I know is that it is Cameron Winter who made me feel this way, and that is something to be eternally grateful for. Amen.

I fell in love with her image before her words. I saw an exhibition of photos from the great Nan Goldin and there she was: back against a wall, smiling with her eyes closed, an image so joyous you could practically hear the laughter ringing in your own ears. I read the title: Cookie Laughing. I immediately went home and started researching who this Cookie was to see if there was a reason I felt so drawn to her. And it was there, during those days of shaky WiFi searching, that I began what has been a longtime love affair with a ghost.

When I tell you that I love Cookie Mueller, I mean it as much as you can mean that when discussing someone long dead whom you never met. If you speak to fans of Cookie Mueller, you often find a similar sentiment. Her work is so much about her true self, and that self was a mixture of huge heart and self-destructive fragility, which is a combination that is irresistible as peanut butter and chocolate to a certain segment of the population, myself included. Cookie Mueller was hugely human, flawed unto death, and an utterly spectacular writer and personality.

“There was no moon. The sky was like black cotton batting that enveloped us in a way that felt like walking through clear water in a pool painted black.” “The night Max was born mongrels roamed in packs.” “The act of being alive is certainly an oppressive job.” “Change is seen as something evil only by those who have lost their youth or sense of humor.” “I had two lovers and I wasn’t ashamed.” These are just a few of the sentences that Cookie wrote over the course of her life in short stories and autobiographical essays and advice columns. She was writing all of this crystalline beautiful prose while also finding the time to star in several John Waters movies, attending every party she was invited to (and many she was not), intermittently raising her child, having several messy love affairs with men and women, shooting heroin, and generally behaving like the hottest mess you’ve ever met who would give you the shirt off her back if you needed it, even if she was nodding off into her soup.

Cookie’s writing and her life were erratic and intense. Her art was so closely tied to her persona and personal life that the two became inextricably linked, likely to her own detriment. Her final years were excruciatingly sad. Cookie fell in love with a cartoonist named Vittorio on a trip to Italy and eventually married him. Unfortunately they both continued their IV drug use which resulted in them both becoming infected with HIV at the height of the pandemic. Vittorio and Cookie continued to make art until the very end of their lives, with Vittorio creating a series of beautiful drawings on his deathbed and Cookie writing an incredibly funny and often poignant advice column called “Ask Dr Mueller.”

Vittorio passed away in September of 1989. In one of the most heartbreaking photos of her career, Nan Goldin photographed Cookie at his funeral, holding a cane and looking desperately thin and unwell. The contrast from just 14 years before in her incandescent Cookie Laughing incarnation is almost unbearable. The photo is of a woman whose husband is dead, whose friends are expiring at a rapid rate from a plague that the US government is deliberately ignoring, and a woman who will soon be dead herself. Just seven weeks later, Cookie would pass from pneumonia. Nan Goldin’s last photo of her friend is Cookie in her casket, the only time anyone ever saw that extraordinary and manically energetic face in peaceful repose.

The life of Cookie Mueller can be viewed as a tragedy but her warmth and love of life despite her personal struggles is apparent in every piece of work she put out, and it is that emotional expansiveness which remains her true legacy. Her work is ultimately a celebration and not a lamentation. It was a glorious and destructive whirlwind of an existence, and it is life whose wildness never precluded sensitivity for the most vulnerable amongst us.

In one of her last columns, Cookie wrote about AIDS and illness and fear, and about all which holds us back. She wrote this knowing she would not be around much longer. It was as if she was determined to impart wisdom to all who would struggle and stumble across her writing some day. She was always the leader of the pack, and she was going away before us, but she wanted us to know it would all be okay in the end. She wrote:

“Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes.

You will be released from sexual obsessions.

You will not have drug addictions.

You will not need alcohol.

You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease.

You will be free.”

I don’t consider myself a braggart. In fact, I have always historically been on the lower end of the self-esteem spectrum. But one area of my life in which I am unapologetically boastful is my book collection, which is massive, carefully cultivated, and deeply treasured. As anyone who subscribes to or follows our account knows, every day I post a “KELLY’S BOOK COLLECTION QUOTE OF THE DAY” note. Here are some of my absolute favorites, some of which have been posted before and some which have not until now.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

-The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Every time you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.”

-Trouble on Triton written by Kathy Acker

“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

-A Room of One’s Own written by Virginia Woolf

“I don’t know if depressives are drawn to places with that certain funereal ambience or if, in all their contagion, they make them that way. I only know that for my entire junior year of college, I slept under a six-foot-square poster emblazoned with the words LOVE WILL TEAR US APART, and then I wondered why nothing good ever happened in that bed.”

-Prozac Nation written by Elizabeth Wurtzel

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”

-Just Kids written by Patti Smith

“Trent Reznor? It’s like, come back to me when you’ve looked horror in the face, farmboy.”

-Courtney Love interviewed in the book Grrrls: Viva Rock Divas written by Amy Raphael

“Each friend I’ve lost was an extraordinary person, not just to me, but to hundreds of people who knew their work and their fight. These were the kind of people who lifted the quality of all our lives, their war was against ignorance, the bankruptcy of beauty, and the truancy of culture. They were people who hated and scorned pettiness, intolerance, bigotry, mediocrity, ugliness, and spiritual myopia; the blindness that makes life hollow and insipid was unacceptable. They tried to make us see. All of these friends were connected to the arts. Time and history have proven that the sensitive souls among us have always been more vulnerable.”

-Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black written by Cookie Mueller

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

-Bird by Bird written by Anne Lamott

“Your silence will not protect you.”

-Sister Outsider written by Audre Lorde

“The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,

The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,

Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:

We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,

One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.

She has folded

Them back into her body as petals

Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed

From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,

Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.

Her blacks crackle and drag.”

-from the poem “Edge”, featured in Ariel written by Sylvia Plath

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

-Slouching Towards Bethlehem written by Joan Didion

“They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn’t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.

“Smell this,” the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. “It’s a heavy bread, but rich.” They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.”

-“A Small, Good Thing” featured in the book The Collected Stories of Raymond Carver written by Raymond Carver

“It is so hard to be more and better than the terrible things that have happened to you, but it helps to start seeing bad people as more and better than the worst things they’ve done…We may never, in the mundane monotony of our daily lives, know what it’s like to be cut down to so little, to be reduced to such a slight fragment of our own humanity that we are forced to use all we have, to find the liveliest life force within what little is life-and to accept that the only choice that has still been granted to us is whether to be bitter or gracious.

All I would like in my life, what I wish for so very much, is to someday have the strength and be free of the resentment and the anger that I carry around with me like Linus’ blanket for just long enough to become one of those people who is better than the worst thing that happens to her. How I would love to be that woman.”

-Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women written by Elizabeth Wurtzel

We are fast approaching fall, my personal favorite time of the year, and also the time of year when my barely repressed melancholic streak tends to run a bit amok. When the leaves fall and the sweaters return to my regular rotation, I crave three main things: cuddle time with my husband (aka the Human Heater), chocolate chip pumpkin bread, and books about sad shit. Here are three of my favorite sad novels that I revisit every fall.

Veronica written by Mary Gaitskill

Many of you know my profound love for the dearly missed writer Kathy Acker. I don’t believe such a singular voice could or should ever be replaced, but I believe her spiritual daughter might just be Mary Gaitskill. Gaitskill is an expert chronicler of the lives of sorrowful women, women who commit to self-destruction with such intensity you would think it was their profession. Gaitskill’s best novel is this tale of a former model and her dead friend, whom she loved and loathed in equal measure, and it is about the toll that being a reckless dervish of a human being takes on someone. Gaitskill knows none of us leave this life unscathed, and she knows that the most beautiful on the outside are often the ones dying the most on the inside. The book is an incredible achievement.

SADNESS RATING: This book features abused women, insights on the tyranny of beauty, the horror of being “temporarily credential by youth” (in the words of author Colin Harrison) and why that means your relevance has a built in expiration date, ill health, and addiction. This book always makes me stare at a wall for hours after finishing it, paralytic with despair but also in absolute awe over the staggeringly great writing. So yeah it’s pretty goddamn sad but trust me: you need to read it anyway.

The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Many of you who know me personally know that in the literary canon of Dead Male Authors, I am a Fitz Partisan. I once wore a shirt that stated “I Wanna F. Scott Fitzgerald” and I still believe it is one of the greatest sartorial choices I’ve ever made. We love who we love in this life, and Scott captured my heart at 14 and never let go. Anyway, back to Gatsby. This is widely considered a summer book but the hollow emptiness and hushed secrecy underlying the whole enterprise always reminds me of fall (and of course the book contains the classic observation that “life begins all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”) Nothing else can be said about Gatsby other than that it is my favorite book of all time, the greatest novel ever written by an American author, and a reminder that capitalism is vampiric.

SADNESS RATING: You have dead women lying on the street, rich people getting away with literal murder, Jordan Baker serving levels of cunt never seen before or since in a female supporting character, Nick Carraway being so obviously in love with Gatsby but unable to act on it due to societal predjudice, Daisy being just the worst on levels I cannot even begin to properly elucidate, and the tragic, self-loathing Gatsby, a fool with a flaming heart who believed in two concepts which proved illusory to him: true love and the American Dream.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics written by Marisha Pessl

This book is about an incredibly studious and preternaturally brilliant teenage girl and her womanizing, wayward professor father. Fall always reminds me of school and school always reminds me of new beginnings, and what I love most about this book is how completely and utterly original it is in every way, from the descriptions of mundane events (at one point Pessl compares shadows falling on a floor to “skinny widows killed with arsenic”) to the truly incredible ending. The book is a huge commitment at over 500 pages, and it is worth every moment of time you invest in it.

SADNESS RATING: The book features everything horrible that can befall a teenage girl, from your teacher being inappropriate with you to your friends being assholes to your dad being an embarrassing boomer to stumbling upon a murder mystery to learning that the boy of your dreams who EVEN HAS A COOL MYSTERIOUS TATTOO (GASP) thinks you are a bad kisser.

I hope you curl up with a warm apple cider and a blanket and enjoy wallowing in the beauty and sorrow of some superb novels! Happy Fall!

The day after you die by your own hand
The traffic will be just as loud
The sun will shine or the clouds will obscure the light
The rain will lash windows or the grass will be dry as dust
The snow will fall in soft convulsions or the lightning will strike the bark of an ancient tree
The wind will be still as your corpse or approximate the whirling dervish that was your mind

The guy at the coffee shop might briefly wonder where you are and then go back to flirting with his coworker
Songs will be sung, photos will be taken
People in power will still get away with terrible things
Everyone you have ever known who is still alive will inhale, exhale, you will not stop their breath when your heart stops
Every cliche will still be applicable
Life is aching tedium and constant tumult

Someone will miss you, maybe many someones
But remember the ones who kill themselves kill their whole world but not the world of the living
You will never make that seismic of an impact with your absence
A suicide breaks the heart, it does not change the world, and certainly not for the better
I think you shouldn’t die today
Fate’s fickleness will get all of us soon enough
Take your time, come on over
I baked a cake, I can’t eat it all by myself.

Feral and flesh haunted
Sleepless eyes smudged with circles of exhaustion
Chest aching from all that is hidden, secreted away in the bone, metastasizing melancholy, every conversation an eruption of ellipsis
My hobbies include reading, crying in the bathtub at 2am and
Counting my ribs like the rosary beads my grandmother prayed with every day
Her knuckles gnarled and liver spotted
“Love is a loaded gun”, she used to tell me.
“It goes off when you least expect it.”
“A comma is a breath”, my idol Kathy Acker once said. “A sentence is a thought, a paragraph is an emotion.”
“It’s like hammers in my head”, my father used to yell at me. “I can’t take it when you talk.”
I am the weapon that breathes and thinks and hates and throbs
I am my blood’s wisdom
I am the tragic writer’s targeted audience
I am my papa’s only child, his bellicose offspring
I am the metallic aftertaste of bloody lips
I chew on myself to keep from devouring the world.

1. Low self-esteem which forces you to relentlessly analyze every thought that has ever entered your brain, and every interaction you’ve ever had, which gives you a shocking amount of material.

2. High self-esteem bordering on egotism which gives you the audacity to assume anyone gives a shit about what you think and feel about any given topic.

3. Paralytic bouts of depression seasoned with hefty servings of existential anxiety.

4. Daddy issues, mommy issues, guy at the coffee shop gave me a dirty look for no reason issues.

5. A laptop with a sticker on the back indicating you are a feminist/humanist/hater of AI/lover of local bookstores/Carrie Bradshaw enthusiast.

6. A pack of cigarettes. You don’t need to smoke them (in fact you shouldn’t smoke and you know that) but you need to know how to hold them for perfectly droll photoshoots à la Joan Didion.

7. Regular panic attacks that you will dub Writer’s Block.

8. A flip phone, which removes your ability to disassociate via endless scrolling and which also introduces boredom into your life. Boredom is good for a writer-it is fertile soil.

9. Snack plates. When you are deep in writing/ trying to write/ doing something where you alchemize words into sentences into a poem or essay or piece of fiction, you can end up eating nothing or eating like total shit. A snack plate featuring some hummus, veggies, cheese, and whole grain crackers can keep you balanced and nutritionally sound. Drink lots of water and green tea as well- NO FUCKIN ENERGY DRINKS! And gift yourself some dark chocolate at the end of a creative session. It should taste both bitter and sweet, like the best writing always does.

10. Friends, lovers, nice people in your neighborhood or church or activist group or local library. Writers are notoriously complicated people who need community more than most. Do not be afraid to be alone but do not isolate. You need the salve of human connection in order to maintain a semblance of balance and health. Plus other people are always good material.

11. An open heart. It might be cracked and bruised and barely beating, but your heart is your greatest asset as a writer, and from mine to yours, I wish you nothing but success.

AI Can’t Love You Like I Can

If you ever looked up from your phone
You might see a woman
With lips as red as a freshly fucked cunt
Eyes as shiny as polished penny loafers
Hips as wide and mysterious as ships sailing to unknown destinations
A brain swimming in the soup of sorrows subtly sublimated by SSRIs
A heart jackhammering its jagged beats in seditious syncopation with the manic restlessness of the city
A gut twisted with a yearning so specific for every inch of every part of you that
it would incinerate your eyes into bursts of flaming brush and knock you into merciless, vertiginous swirls of concupiscence
But you won’t ever know
Since you won’t stop staring blankly
into the imagined and the approximate long enough to fall into the real.

I am a woman with a history of clinical depression and anxiety so it is considered axiomatic by the Internet that I would unconditionally love the musical output of Phoebe Bridgers. The truth is that I was a Bridgers Agnostic for a long time, even though I was a listener from the earliest days of her career. I felt that Bridgers was a truly exceptional lyricist but that the music accompanying her writerly landscapes could be emaciated and undercooked at times, and while the spareness of the arrangements seemed to be what many listeners craved, I felt Bridgers needed a sound as big as her ideas and as sharply honed as her observations. I also felt her work was clever and precise but sometimes felt ever so slightly removed from itself, as if Bridgers was somehow reluctant to fully press the bruise of her broken heart, and explore the raw nerves of her complex emotions.

I read all of the breathless reviews for Lost Weekend with some trepidation. I am always cautious when I see a project reach a critical consensus of overwhelming praise or virulent dislike. I worry ecstatic praise or deep disdain are viral contagions of sorts that exist to infect a certain type of online music writer, and that these people become so interested in hopping onto what is trending as a prevailing opinion that they are almost afraid to be fully true to their honest appraisals of a piece of art. Plus the opinion I trust most is my own, so I had no expectations when I began listening to the record. I was ready for anything and everything.

The first time I heard Lost Weekend, I was extremely impressed by some of the lyrics and intrigued by how strange some of the production choices sounded. I was especially pleased that Bridgers decided to break out of her usual soft strumming and whispery vocal phrasings. I was very fond of what I heard, but I wouldn’t say that I was instantly in love with the album.

But then something curious happened over the next few days. I kept returning to Lost Weekend over and over again, and it began to haunt me( fittingly, since one of the best songs on the record is entitled “Haunted”). Certain phrases began to hit me with more and more intensity, and the idiosyncratic interludes and joyous screams and melancholic vocoder vocals began to coalesce into a realization that this was not merely the third solo record of a now rich and famous (for the indie realm at least) artist whose personal life has become TikTok fodder for Normal People heads. This was a devastatingly complex portrait of the concurrent strains of romantic love and parental grief, and how one of the damned bitchiest and best things about life is how you can be gushingly happy and utterly heartbroken at the same time, and for vastly different reasons.

The record is getting attention on social media for the “lore” attached to it. There is a lot of buzz about the fact that Bridgers is so in love with Bo Burnham that she no longer needs her sex toys, but, to be fair, we only know that bit of information because she sings about it in detail on the fantastic love song “Bobby.” Many people are hung up as well that Bridgers is perceived to be taking jabs at her ex-fiancé Paul Mescal’s new girlfriend, the songwriter Gracie Abrams on a beautiful song called “The Governor’s Waltz”. These salacious bits of celebrity gossip scratch that little parasocial itch inside all of us, but they are ultimately the least interesting parts of this record.

What makes Lost Weekend so special is that Bridgers is mourning and celebrating, changing without losing her essential self, trying without always succeeding, disassociating while never fully turning her heart into ice. The record is about Bridgers, but it is primarily about growing up, and how that can sometimes only begin to happen when we lose something we never knew we’d fully miss (in her case her estranged and troubled father) and when we love something we are scared will go away (in this case her relationship with the supremely talented Burnham).

I was washing dishes yesterday and had this album on shuffle, and the song “Still Standing” began playing. I held it together until Bridgers began to sing, with a voice as delicate as vellum paper, about her dead dad. “You are back to the ocean, burning red/ I can’t imagine you dead/ but you are every day/ thank you for everything.” I won’t tell you specifically who I was thinking about in that moment, but it was a long passed family member whom I hadn’t thought of in years and who I hated and loved in equal measure during their lifetime, and I heard those lyrics in that moment, dropped the remaining dish in the sink, and began to sob for a good twenty minutes. I don’t know a greater compliment to pay an artist than to say the intensity of their emotion broke open something dormant inside of someone they will never know, and that is exactly what Phoebe Bridgers does in Lost Weekend. She writes with hyperspecificity about universal experiences, and if you are patient with this record, it just might do for you what it did for me: slowly and inexorably wrap itself around your heart, and not let go, and you will be thankful for such a rare and beautiful gift.

This Won’t Go Viral

Fig trees don’t communicate with you.
Fig trees aren’t fat with metaphors.
Fig trees aren’t typographical maps to your future.
Fig trees aren’t fecund with fraught possibilities.
Fig trees aren’t stuffed with story prompts for Type A girls.
Fig trees aren’t soggy with your sorrowful sentiments.
Fig trees aren’t breathing fire at the solar plexus of your enemy.
Fig trees aren’t whispering secrets, trailing their fingers down the backs of those who brand images of their magisterial beauty on their sacred scarred flesh.

The poet didn’t die for your sins.
She did not perish to become, as her daughter said, your “Sylvia suicide doll.”
She did not place attenuated fingers to typewriters and dip bony knuckles in inkwells to become the shorthand for self-destruction.
She didn’t warn you about figs rotting at your feet because she believed the starving crotches of trees were gaping maws fed by lost female potential.

She just wanted to write cool shit.
She wanted to piss and puke all over the lies she also clung to because a faulty belief system is still a rickety boat.
A rickety boat might kill you but without it drowning is inevitable.
She wanted you to wake from a narcotized haze.
She wanted you to bite the neck of life until it drew blood.
She knew choices were never infinite, and never without a price.

The figs sat on my plate.
I slathered them with honey.
You think I’m going for some sort of metaphor here.
The poet knows it is never as simple as that.
If you live long enough, the figments fade.
I was just hungry, I ate the fruit.
The seeds didn’t multiply inside me.
I was old, parchment paper for skin, but the gnawing had ceased.
I was finally full.

I fell in love with Camila Cabello’s vision for C, XOXO from the first moment I saw the video for the single “I Luv It.” It was outrageous and sexy and visually and sonically reminded me of a hot sweaty night in a big city, grasping and gasping for air with blonde highlights and dirty fingernails and broken heels as your accessories. It sounded messy and hyper, sugary and sinister. It was transfixing and odd. It was everything I didn’t know I needed from a pop star who previously bored me. I decided that the album would be a must listen for me when it arrived.

C, XOXO was released in late June of 2024. I remember that, upon the first listen, I was amazed by the production and impressed by the vocal performance put forth by Cabello. I was annoyed by the Drake cameos. But mostly I was genuinely and honestly captivated that an artist could release a concept record that was both thematically cohesive and sonically chaotic. I further fell in love with the landscape created by the album when Cabello released a deluxe edition, which included my favorite song of 2024, an exquisite ballad called “Godspeed,” where Cabello makes the case that she would be a diamond sharp Substack Heartbreak Essayist (yes it’s an official job description) with lyrics including “peace is so elusive/ joy is so elusive/ kisses for my muses/truces for the bruises.”

It was clear to me from my first and innumerable subsequent listens that this album was some sort of flawed masterpiece. But every single time I would go online and search about the record, I would find hot take after hot take excoriating it, calling Cabello a try hard, pathetic, a wannabe, a “fake depressive”, and so much more. People castigated her for everything from dyeing her hair blonde to her dance moves to her focus on hyperpop. I would like to state that the reaction was pure misogyny, and while that undoubtedly played a significant part, I believe that the greater reason for the outrage was that Cabello did something every great artist of any field should do: she took a risk.

Cabello chose to deliberately eschew a winning and financially advantageous lane to success she had set up for herself in music in order to tell what she felt was the real truth of her life at the time. She was partying and having the time of her life but perpetually haunted by a love she could not shake even though she knew the person could never emotionally fulfill her. The vast majority of us who live long enough will have a similar experience at some point. We will suffer from the dichotomous nature of existence. We will cope with the echoing loss of love in the ways that make sense to us. And some of us will set it to a piano ballad and a Reggaeton beat and watch keyboard warriors shit all over our sincerity. But that doesn’t make the art less valuable or the work less impactful.

What impressed me most about Cabello was her reaction to the reactions. Cabello remained calm and articulate in interviews, stating that what mattered most to her was that she knew she had created something beautiful to her, and that the nature of art is that sometimes it takes time for certain works to find its audience. She was sanguine in the face of stupefying amounts of hate, and as a writer I found and still find this response to be incredibly inspiring. We must remember as creative people that our main goal is to make art that we believe in, and to trust that if we do that, time will help it find the audience whom it is meant for.

And a curious thing happened in just the past week: the music magazine The Fader wrote an impassioned article defending C, XOXO, stating that it deserved its flowers. And since the article was published and unexpectedly went viral, the album has seen a significant uptick in streams, and people who previously mocked Camila Cabello are now recognizing that her best album is a banger and a deeply vulnerable and brave collection of songs from a young woman who was previously believed to be lacking in depth and artistic gravity. Many have been forced to admit what some of us have always known: C, XOXO is a wonderful album and great art will always find its home, and on its own timeline.

I used to really loathe myself. I used to truly and honestly despise everything about who I was, from my body to my voice to my anxious personality. This is sadly not an uncommon trait amongst young women. As I matured and grew into some semblance of actual adulthood, I tangentially also grew to accept and become rather fond of myself. I did not think I was the best person to ever walk the face of the earth (that level of insanity is reserved only for our current leader) but I stopped being at war with my essential nature. There was one aspect of my existence where I did not gift myself this level of grace, and that was regarding my love of writing. No matter how much I wrote, no matter how much writing meant to me, I did not believe I deserved to call myself a writer, let alone a “good” writer.

What is a good writer? Like all artistic endeavors, writing is by its very nature subject to the whims of subjectivity. Not everyone will agree on what constitutes good writing, but nearly everyone who loves reading words placed down for a chance at immortality by a person can tell you that they know for themselves when they believe they have encountered good writing. You might think you’ve experienced sexual pleasure, but you KNOW the first time you cum. Writing that moves you and challenges you and inspires you and situates itself somewhere deep inside of you has a similar trajectory: you know it when you feel it, and you know when you don’t.

I would sometimes write something and feel a shiver of sorts. I would believe that what I wrote was special, that it was interesting and maybe even original, or at least not entirely indebted to my influences. I would feel like I produced something from my brain and heart (two notoriously messy places for this author) that was polished and elegant, and that would impress me ever so slightly. But then that little mosquito of caveat would come buzzing into my ear, and I would quickly tell myself that it was either arrogant or delusional to believe my writing was good, and therefore it should certainly never be shared with anyone.

It took surviving a near fatal illness to begin to change my mind about my writing. I began to realize that if I died tomorrow, I would not have lived to my fullest potential, because I was so worried that my inclination that I just might be a writer was misguided and ridiculous. I believed that to put my work into the world would evince only contempt from faceless trolls who would like nothing more than to drag me back to a place of self-hatred. And then I thought about all the countless hours I spent in hospitals, pumping my veins full of poison to kill even worse poison that my body kept rapidly producing. I thought about how hard I fought to still be a sentient human being on this ravaged but still ravishing planet, and I realized that maybe I didn’t survive for a grand purpose. But I did feel a moral obligation to myself to live with intention and with joy, and writing was what provided that for me.

And once I started to realize the importance of writing in my life, I began to produce reams of writing at a vertiginous rate. Not all of the writing provided me with that shiver, that thrill of feeling like my creation had worth. But a curious thing began to happen the more I embraced the title of Writer and the more I wrote from a place unencumbered by worries of future audience indifference or disrespect: I began to realize that a lot of my writing was special, and beautiful, and lovely, at least according to my own standards. I began to realize that I might just be a good writer.

When you accept for yourself that you might be a good writer, it does not mean you are great. It does not mean you are above criticism (provided it is the constructive kind and not of the bitter random asshole variety), and it certainly does not mean you do not still have a lot to learn. It does not mean you will get published, and it certainly doesn’t mean you will make money pursuing your passion. But it does mean you can sit down in front of your computer or typewriter or notebook and every time you begin to extract something from yourself that you then alchemize into sentences, you can know that you are doing something that is entirely important and worthy, because you know that you just might possibly be a good writer in the eyes of the most important audience of all, and in the place where it all begins: inside yourself.

“Because you lived, I have a heavy debt to God.” That quote is from a beautiful poem by Eirann Corrigan about a friend who could have died but through some invisible hand of mercy did not perish. I understand that sentiment much more than I did when I first read it in my early reckless twenties. This week marks five years since I was diagnosed with breast cancer, an experience that changed everything in my life forever.

It is a very good sign for my overall survival that I have made it this far, and that three and a half of those five years have been cancer free. In fact the “surviving til the five year mark still cancer free” was emphasized to an almost dizzying degree by my oncologist and surgeon and nurses. While it is true that cancer can come back years and even decades after treatment, my particular type almost always recurs in the first 60 months. So yes this was an important milestone for many reasons.

The journey from sick to well was arduous and felt at times insurmountable. I remember it all, but here’s some of what I remember most.

I remember the first day I met my surgeon (strange fact: you often meet your surgeon before your assigned oncologist if you go through a hospital system) and that he spent fifteen additional minutes after the visit chatting with us about Stillwater, Minnesota (one of our favorite places to visit) and the independently owned bookstore where he liked to go with his family. I remember he made us feel like we were people he took a vested interest in helping, that it was important he know something about our lives, that it motivated him to save me. When he left the office after that first visit, he lightly touched my arm and smiled and there was a kindness in his cerulean blue eyes that did not feel like anything less than a benediction, a blessing, a promise of “if you do this with me, I’ll see you to the other side.”

I remember the first oncologist I saw, who seemed aggressively okay until I asked him to repeat himself and he snapped at me and said “Didn’t you hear what I said?” He later screamed at Zach on the phone that “IT IS NOT NECESSARY AND I AM THE DOCTOR” when Zach asked if we could check my bloodwork before a particular visit because I was worried about my sodium levels. I remember how afraid this doctor made me feel during the five subsequent times I saw him, how he would monologue at me like some demented David Mamet play set in a hospital, and then ask me if I had any questions. Because he had snapped at me previously, I never did ask. I would just say “thank you” meekly and leave the hospital. And then I would get in the car and cry.

I remember Zach bringing this up at a subsequent visit to the oncology nurse (nurses should rule the world - they are the most efficient and empathetic people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing) and the nurse being so outraged that she arranged for me to instead visit the oncologist that oversees my care to this day, a very nice and slightly scatterbrained but nevertheless competent physician who, incidentally, never lets me leave the visit until I ask any and all questions that pop into my head or that I’ve written down ahead of the visit, and who answers them all without objection.

I remember Zach insisting on taking me for long car rides multiple days a week despite working full time (thankfully he works from home) because he knew I was constantly anxious and nauseated and car rides were narcotic for me, when moving inside a car I somehow felt at ease and could distract myself with music and images zipping past me. When you are going through what you and frankly most of the world perceive as hell-cancer and its attendant miseries- you find even the smallest pleasures can make the agony endurable, allow you to get enough oxygen to your brain and enough balm to your psyche (or, if we are being grand, soul) to recalibrate and Zach provided this for me every day. He provided motion and speed and moving image and sound and a warm driver by my side. Unconditional love looks like many things. Sometimes it is a man driving a car to make his sick wife feel something other than awful, even for an hour or two.

I remember sleeping only three to four hours a night for over a year. At a certain point the lack of sleep makes you paradoxically feel manic and wired, while the chemo and immunotherapy made me feel enervated and bone achingly weak and the combination made me think of speedballs, of illicit drug combinations, and anyway insomnia gave me far too much time to sit and think. At a certain point I decided to spend all of my waking time reading when I could.

I read incalculable amounts of books, and I would underline my favorite passages as I read, in part because it was something I always did (and still do) but also because my chemo gave me neuropathy and I wanted to keep trying to hold objects and not drop them and it sounds silly but holding a fucking pen when my hands alternated between cold numbness and burning bolts of pain was important to me. But some nights I couldn’t read. And when Zach was asleep and I was wide awake with the feeling of a loaded gun nestled between my rib cage where a heart used to be, I would whisper to myself, “it’s gonna be okay, you just need to hang on a little longer” over and over. This seems pathetic to write. It also seems peculiarly and particularly brave.

I remember after the surgery when I was expelling fluid and blood from the spots where my tit and lymph nodes used to be that Zach would patiently help me drain them and then help me into the tub where I could only sponge bathe and that he would wake me every few hours to eat and drink. I could not believe anyone could love me this much. Members of my own family abandoned me when I was a child. My husband by contrast never left my side, unless it was to go to the store for something. When you need someone for the first time in your life-need them to help you survive—and they actually come through for you, it changes everything, including how you perceive yourself. I was now someone treasured by someone else and thus became a treasure to myself.

When the nurse finally removed my bandages and saw my scar, she said it was the best healing job by a body that she’d ever seen in her 15 years of nursing. I knew in that moment that the torturous previous struggles with my body-the anorexia that turned me into a steely cage of bone, the various forms of abuse I recklessly put my physical self through in my younger years-were not lying dormant but in fact gone forever. This body of mine was scarred and damaged forever now. But this body of mine also healed as best it could around that damage, like an apology curled in flesh.

I remember visiting my surgeon a few days after the mastectomy and him telling me I had a complete response to treatment and that I was cancer-free. I remember Zach jumped up from the chair and yelled “YESS!” and that I started to cry and I said “Thank you so much for everything” and he said “Today is a great day.” I remember this past November when he left the cancer center to move to another hospital out of state and how I told him he was the best doctor I’d ever had and that I couldn’t thank him enough. He smiled and said, “It was my pleasure. I will never forget you guys.”

I am a breast cancer survivor. I also now have one breast and I am here to tell you the rules for dressing after undergoing a mastectomy:

1) Wear

2) Exactly

3) What

4) You

5) Want.

That’s it. Now and forever.

XO,

Kelly

Imagine a book so insouciant, so contradictory, so bratty, so tender, so unbelievably long and eloquent and unfocused and brilliant and thought provoking and exasperating and exhilarating that even a cover with the author naked and smiling while shooting a middle finger at the camera is the least interesting part of the whole shabang. Imagine a book that truly does approximate the wild, swinging highs and desperate, driveling lows of the amphetamines that were coursing through the nervous system of the beautiful and troubled woman who wrote it. There is only one book that matches this description, and that is Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women written by the incomparable, improbable, and incredible Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women is a feminist collection of essays that focuses on dating advice books for women, the Bible, OJ and Nicole Simpson, bad girl cinema, Riot Grrrl music, Courtney Love’s cosmetic procedures, Hillary Clinton’s duplicitousness, the evils of conservative men, Edie Sedgwick almost burning her hotel room to the ground while high, having sex with tattoo artists and on the couch of your therapist, domestic violence, self-sufficiency, love, Sylvia Plath eating foie gras with her fingers, depression, refusal as a sign of feminist agency, and the hope for a better future. It is massively entertaining, overly stuffed, and by far my favorite collection of essays by any female writer of the past thirty years.

Bitch was Wurtzel’s follow-up to Prozac Nation, her seminal memoir of twenty something despair and disaffection. Wurtzel told interviewers that she was excited to work on something that was not a memoir, to show off her endlessly interesting and admittedly slightly prolix mind. But Wurtzel was congenitally unable to write without often centering herself. This was considered a weakness by many critics but I believe it is actually the secret to her success as a writer. Wurtzel was relentless in her refusal to be embarrassed by personal truths that most of us would balk at sharing with our most intimate confidants, let alone random strangers picking up a book. It is precisely that shamelessness which renders her such an incisive and insightful judge of human character, and which turns her personal peccadilloes and opinions into universal experiences and truths that audiences can relate to and learn from. She was a fuck-up who knew the one constant in life was our fuck-ups, and she knew that the only proper response to that reality was a mixture of contempt and empathy, for herself and her fellow human beings who could never seem to get their shit together but who deserved love for trying to anyway.

Bitch is not a kind book. It is often harsh in its judgments of others. But it is also harsh because Wurtzel believes that the only form of feminism worth ascribing to is one in which coddling is verboten. Wurtzel believes in the inherent intelligence and discernment of women, and her refusal to let women off the hook for their own mistakes is how she pays us all respect. She knows that we can be better, that she can be better, and that the only way we can collectively and personally make our lives and our culture more tolerant of female equality is through holding ourselves to the highest possible standards. Wurtzel spent so much of her life refusing to take responsibility and show herself basic respect that she knows where such behavior leads: to rehab, to psychiatric units, to bad relationships and bad credit and relentless anxiety.

Wurtzel wants better for the women she portrays in her book, some of whom died before they could find balance and a will to survive. And she wants better for the readers of her book. She wants us all to know that a better world can only begin to be possible if we do not revel in our victimization but refuse those shackles of helplessness attendant with that status. And yet she never lets her readers forget that we shouldn’t have to be this strong. We should have equal pay for equal work. Women should be entitled to the fullness of life without having to beg for it. She never lets us forget that this world, as the great Fiona Apple once said onstage when accepting a VMA, is bullshit. But she also knows we need to fix it and we can’t do that if we sit around all day licking our wounds. She wants us to get mad and get our freedom.

Wurtzel never lived to see the world become an egalitarian place. She died right before the COVID pandemic began in early 2020. Her last post on Instagram was about her belief in a brighter future and her last piece of writing was entitled “I Believe in Love.” She never lost her faith in a better world. Wurtzel ends Bitch with a beautiful bit of writing, and I want to end this essay with her words, in the hopes that it will inspire you to also keep fighting, and so you will never forget this brave and uncompromising genius of a woman who deserved so much more than she got from this life:

“It is so hard to be more and better than the terrible things that have happened to you, but it helps to start seeing bad people as more and better than the worst things they’ve done…We may never, in the mundane monotony of our daily lives, know what it’s like to be cut down to so little, to be reduced to such a slight fragment of our own humanity that we are forced to use all we have, to find the liveliest life force within what little is life-and to accept that the only choice that has still been granted to us is whether to be bitter or gracious.

All I would like in my life, what I wish for so very much, is to someday have the strength and be free of the resentment and the anger that I carry around with me like Linus’ blanket for just long enough to become one of those people who is better than the worst thing that happens to her. How I would love to be that woman.”

I wanted to start this essay with a flowery poetic sentence, but I think it’s best to get right to the point: I watched the new music video for Ariana Grande’s latest single “Petal” and it felt like someone had punched me in the gut. I was a severe anorexic for several years in my life, and have been in recovery for over a decade. I noticed many of the obvious and familiar signs of my previous malnourishment in Grande’s frail form. I saw the clear fatigue and anguish in her eyes, and surmised that it was potentially highly likely that she was struggling with something involving her food intake.

But not once, not in the moment of watching her concave chest wiggle in an attempt to approximate sexiness, and not in the hours and days since, have I felt any disdain for Ariana Grande as a person. I did not see her as an evil pied piper of cachexia. I personally did not see her as inherently malevolent. I saw her as someone who quite possibly is struggling with what I once struggled with, and I feel one thing for her only: deep and endless compassion. But how I feel about her is colored through the lens of my own personal experiences, which may be different than yours.

The body of Ariana Grande now comes with a trigger warning. Her limbs and Bambi eyes and tiny proportions are a Rorschach test for the viewer. Do you see this woman as unwell and a threat to herself and others? Do you see this woman as a knowing participant in her own demise and thus worthy of contempt? Do you see her as irresponsible, a bad role model, a victim of fame, or a perfectly healthy specimen who is just on the smaller side? Do you see her as beautiful or hideous? Do you believe she is sick or that we are sick for projecting so much on to her?

I would argue that there is no “right” answer here ( beyond the obvious that anyone suffering from an eating disorder needs professional help and personal support) because none of us are privy to exactly what is going on in Grande’s personal life. But I would also argue that how you feel about Ariana Grande isn’t just about how you feel about Ariana Grande. I would argue that it also says a great deal about what you think about women, women’s bodies, self-harm, cultural expectations of pulchritude, and what you think about yourself. Ariana Grande will most assuredly never know if you love or hate her. But you know if you love or hate what you believe she represents, and that is why the flummoxing nature of Ariana Grande’s place in culture isn’t frivolous at all.

I believe that because she is a public figure whom we will never know on a personal level, Ariana Grande is whoever we imagine her to be. And I hope we can all someday agree that whatever you think about her body or her presentation to the world, anyone who suffers from an eating disorder deserves compassion, respect, and a reprieve from their pain.

Ariana Grande isn’t the only one whom I hope is well. I hope that for everyone who has an opinion about her, whatever that opinion may be. I hope you are well. I hope you hope that I am well, too. May women in this culture one day know peace.

When I was a little girl, I used to regularly hold my hand to my heart and weep into pillowcases. I thought that was what it meant to be in love, and I wanted to be in love, so I thought about Beauty and the Beast and my grandmother’s favorite soap operas and swooned and sobbed to approximate what I thought were the dizzying heights of romantic passion. I thought you could not know the joy of love without the pain of longing. I was an obedient child and I learned my cultural lessons early and well: if you are a woman, you must suffer. And then I made life worse for myself a few years later when I decided I wanted to be an artist.

I was not just a teenager in suburbia. I was one of the OG ‘90s case studies of the “I’m not like the other girls” girl. I was determined to be an artist, a writer, someone whose brains and talent were so unstoppable that my lack of physical pulchritude wasn’t an impediment: it was merely an incidental finding. Tied up in the belief that I was meant for a life devoted to Art (capital A like you do for God) was an equally fervent belief that a life devoted to art was a life that would be enveloped by suffering. You had to suffer to make art, you had to suffer to understand art, and art was not art if it wasn’t painful for the creator and their audience.

If you think I let go of those beliefs in my 20s, you clearly think more highly of younger me than you should. And if you think I let go of those notions before the age of 30, bless you for your out-sized compassion and your mistaken belief that I learned my lesson about suffering for art before I received my first gray hair. We all get there eventually, it just takes a lot of time and therapy and diagnoses and unnecessary self-inflicted bullshit for some of us before we reach the promised land of a semblance of daily balance.

I do not fancy myself a wise elder, but if I can offer any advice, it would be this: do not believe for one instant that the key to depth and greatness as a writer is any way tied to suffering, pain, or emotional degradation. You are not a superb writer if you are in constant turmoil. In fact, that turmoil will only be the broken down bus on the highway of your life. It will impede your acceleration towards your truest self. And finding your truest self is the key to any form of contentment.

I am not suggesting that happiness is possible for all of us, or that willful ignorance to the horrors of the world or your personal struggles is the key to unlocking your potential. But I am conveying as forcefully and as loving as I can that you do not need to look for trouble. You do not need to purposely indulge in scenarios that hurt because you believe the ache of your bruises is the heartbeat of your creative force. If you live in this world, you will suffer. You can count on that, and you do not need to compound that inevitable strife with your own mistaken beliefs or self-destructive actions.

Your job as a writer is to create. Your job as a human being is to live as fully as possible. My biggest wish and blessing for you is a life of laughter, a life of fuck-ups and fun, a life of fumbling and bumbling and vertiginous giddiness, a life that does not seek pain but when it inevitably comes instead seeks to learn from it, and to write it all down so someone else can understand and recognize themselves and feel less alone. I wish you just enough pain to grow, and more than enough strength to overcome it all and send it back to us in words and words and words.

When we think of debuts - first albums, first films, first novels, first art exhibitions - we often think of imperfections. We think about stepping stones, about clunky writing and uninspired visuals, and we think about how a debut for an artist is far from the work that will always be measured as their peak. We think of it as a jumping off place on the way to becoming fully realized. Debuts in art often inspire their audiences to demonstrate their best selves, the ones who are willing to give grace to missteps and focus on the promise beneath the problems. Unless of course you are Liz Phair.

Liz Phair was blessed but mostly cursed to have created an official debut record that is so perfect it is still considered not only her peak as an artist but one of the finest albums by any woman of all time. Exile in Guyville is brash, bold, breathtaking, heart wrenching, and an absolute blast to listen to from front to back. It is a record of assured brilliance and excruciating honesty, and it decimates you emotionally just as often as it makes you laugh and gasp with shock and awe at its audacity. Liz Phair released several records after Guyville that are astonishing in their own right, full of some timeless songs. And while Guyville was always mentioned as her magnum opus even as she continued to rack up spots in album of the year lists for other work, she retained critical respect and esteem. That is until she released her self-titled record in 2003.

The reaction to Liz Phair wasn’t merely a diametrically opposite response to her previous work. It was the most appallingly, blatantly sexist response to a work from a female singer songwriter in modern music history. Phair was called a sellout because her songs had more hooks on them than before. She was called desperate and pathetic for announcing she had ambitions towards mainstream success (the HORROR of a woman with a kid wanting to make money for her art instead of being known as a brilliant and woefully underpaid footnote in masturbatory male rock critic penned history books). She was castigated especially for two “sins” that the overwhelmingly male critics found to be punishable by mockery and cool quotient death: she was in her late 30s and she was still writing songs about fucking. You see, the male critics said, it was perfectly fine for Liz to write about blowjobs and affairs when she was a hot girl in her twenties. But a hot woman (a MILF no less) in her 30s? She was clearly just a slut who couldn’t accept that her only purpose now was to write tasteful alt country ballads about the pains of aging out of her once blooming youthful fecundity.

These critics gave the album mostly horrid reviews, with Pitchfork being the most notorious for giving the album a 0.0 rating. What the men didn’t know, the women understood, however. Liz Phair became one of Phair’s most successful records with a female audience, and it did so not just because it sounds fabulous (which it does). It did so because the album was actually full of tales of the wide range of female experience, from changes in sexuality as we age to the loss of friends who turned lovers who never became friends again, to the fears of letting your kid see you date as a single mom. And yeah, the album did have a song on it called “H.W.C” which stands for something hot and white that emanates from certain parts of certain bodies. But that song is also playful, and funny, and catchy as hell. It has a HARMONICA in it, for fuck’s sake. That alone makes it a classic.

Phair, in the dark ages of the early 2000s when any woman close to 40 who dared to wear a short skirt was considered a monster to many in the culture, bravely stood on stage and sang on record about being unapologetic and proud. It was radical, it was feminist, and of course it was hated by those it threatened with its shameless excavation of an imperfect self.

The person who wrote the Pitchfork article about Liz Phair later apologized publicly for his cruelty. Many retrospective reviews of the album now recognize how special it was and still is and how much unfair shit Phair took in the process for sharing her life and polishing up her sound. What moves me most about the record to this day is the way Phair chooses to end it, with a track called “Good Love Never Dies.” She sings about finding constraints in contentment, about never being able to fully relax her body and heart around a safe embrace, but she allows herself in the song to be persuaded by her beloved to take a chance on love and on herself. It is a benediction to the listener, a lesson on the importance of taking risks, and it is a beautiful reminder to this record’s nastiest naysayers that the most laudatory action is to free oneself from ego and fear:

“You tell me good love never dies

It only hurts when we burn our eyes

From staring too long at the sun

You’ve gotta throw your hands up and let the night come

Take your chances and let the night come.”

Only one film has ever upset me so much that I immediately left the theater after the credits rolled and vomited. What I had witnessed for almost two hours was the most emotionally wrenching cinema I’d ever seen, and what made it especially jarring was that the filmmaker was one of my favorites whose previous work was a mostly joyous explosion of California stoners, hot girls and beautiful blank faced boys whose every utterance sounded like a question, and punk rock ennui. The film that provoked my involuntary purging was Mysterious Skin, and the director was the one and only Gregg Araki.

I first grew to love Gregg Araki in the most 90s way possible: through a recommendation by my favorite clerk Antwain at my dearly missed local rental store Academy Video. My entire cinematic education in the pre-Internet days came from Antwain, who recognized this pretentious girl in the Catholic school uniform was a secret wannabe subversive just aching to be exposed to the auteurs of the underground. Or maybe he just liked me because I would often bring him Italian cookies my grandmother had made, and I would listen to him talk about Antonioni and Tarantino with the rapt attention of a cult member. My Dad annoyed the shit out of me as a teen but his one great quality was that he would take me once a week to the video store (and the bookstore) and he trusted in my ability to watch R rated movies as a teenager. He knew I was so anxious and Type A obsessive about schools and scholarships that I could watch the most fucked up film and still make sure to have studied for my chemistry exam while sipping only on Diet Coke. This might be bad parenting, but I turned out alright in the end (in my humble opinion).

Antwain loved Gregg Araki, and he owned many VHS copies of his movies, and had some in the store as well. One day he handed me a copy of The Doom Generation, asked me to watch it, and told me to report back my findings. I watched the movie that night in my room, and I was dumbfounded. The film was strange, violent, beautiful to look at, and utterly absurd. I watched it three more times before returning it to Antwain. And when he asked me what I thought of it, I said, “Gregg Araki is a god.” Antwain smiled and said, “Exactly.”

Over the next several years, I came to watch many more Araki films, and was struck over and over by his gangbusters humor, his love of life, and his commitment to portraying queer life as beautiful and complex and deeply funny. Araki chose to portray the queer community as fully human and utterly relatable, and if you know anything about 90s cinema, you should know what a radical stance that was to take. For instance, name me any other director who could have the empathy or audacity to make a road movie in 1992 at the height of the AIDS epidemic about an HIV positive couple going on a road trip/crime spree that is equal parts heartbreaking and riotously exhilarating. Araki did and named it The Living End and for my mind it puts Thelma & Louise to shame. Araki was utterly unique. But the one thing he never was considered was a “serious auteur.” That is until the movie which decimated me like no other was released.

Mysterious Skin was the first Araki film that I had ever seen in a theater. I had not read the book on which the film was based before the movie, so I was wholly unprepared for what greeted me when the lights dimmed. Mysterious Skin is a film about the ways in which two young men cope with being sexually abused by a male figure they trusted as children. One reacts by becoming a hustler and refusing to acknowledge the event as traumatic, while the other reacts by becoming obsessed with aliens and convinced his inability to remember moments in his childhood stems from alien abductions and not a response to a horrific violation. The movie is absolutely beautiful to look at, with extraordinary cinematography, which makes the emotional destruction and pain all the more soul crushing to watch unfold.

The ending of Mysterious Skin is what made my stomach begin to churn upon my first viewing. The character of Neil who was all swaggering bravado for much of the film goes to find Brian, his childhood friend who cannot remember his past. As Brian lays his head on Neil’s lap, he asks Neil to tell him what happened to them. And Neil does, in horrifying detail which Araki handles in flashbacks with incredible sensitivity and compassion. The movie ends with Neil and Brian reckoning for the first time with the cruelty that they were subjected to, and how those events will haunt and shape their lives forever. Anyone who thought Gregg Araki was a talentless hack (and back in the day many stodgy critics did) was forced at the end of Mysterious Skin to admit that Araki was one of the most important and brilliant filmmakers of his generation.

After Mysterious Skin, Araki made several films, one of which I love and a few of which I’m less than fond of (I plan to see his new movie soon, and it looks cheeky and hilarious). But I will never forget what Mysterious Skin did to me. No movie has ever imprinted itself upon my soul more, and I have never once watched it again since that first viewing. But there is not one week that has gone by in the decades since where I have not thought about it, and for a work of art to have that kind of impact is no small feat. Gregg Araki taught me so much about queer identity, love, fun, joy, and subversiveness. And then he made a film that broke my heart and changed me permanently. What a gift to have been given by such a brave and uncompromising artist. I hope he never stops, and I hope he knows somehow that I will always be in the audience, marveling at what he comes up with next.