Essays on...

"Big Swiss and Milk Fed feature highly unstable protagonists and credulity-straining plots that have been described by reviewers as “madcap,” “strange,” “off kilter,” “eccentric,” “deranged,” “graphic,” “obscene,” “a riot,” and “a romp.” In the logic of these stories, sexual desire for a woman is not a queer expression of romantic or erotic or, god forbid, political meaning, but rather evidence of the female protagonist’s emotional incoherence. Queer sex here is just another zany life choice, like living in a house full of bees or being obsessed with frozen yogurt. It is no wonder then that both books have been highly successful with devotees of the hashtag “unhinged women,” which has over 35 million views and counting on TikTok and includes titles such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Eileen, Mona Awad’s Bunny, Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, and Lisa Taddeo’s Animal, among many others.

This genre, which I’ll call Unhinged Bisexual Woman Fiction, is characterized by a kind of mean, dry, deadpan first-person voice that communicates to the reader that the protagonist views herself as exempt from the embarrassing task of being a human being. Her voice, which is the opposite of caring or earnest, implies that everything is material for a joke, love is for suckers, and politics, including gay liberation, is a bore."

"The experience of uncertainty and partial knowledge is one of the great, unheralded pleasures of fiction. Why does Hedda Gabler haunt us? Who does Jean Brodie think she is? What does Sula Peace want? Sula’s early life is thick with incidents, any one of which could plausibly provide the wound around which personality, as understood by the trauma plot, might scab—witnessing a small boy drown, witnessing her mother burn to death. But she is not their sum; from her first proper appearance in the novel, with an act of sudden, spectacular violence of her own, she has an open destiny. Where the trauma plot presents us with locks and keys, Morrison does not even bother to tell us what happens to Sula in the decade she disappears from town, and from the novel. Sula doesn’t exist for our approval or judgment, and, in her self-possession, is instead rewarded with something better: our rapt fascination with her style, her silences and refusals."

an investigation into the trauma plot + why it doesn't work.

KW: "I’ve read several interviews in which you describe yourself as “happy.” You’ve cast it in the past as something integral or defining about your temperament. It surprised me because I don’t think of “happy” as a stable characteristic."

JW: "I’m an enthusiast. I’m not at all a cool girl. There are very many earnest young women at the moment, because young women who are creative feel that they need to be earnest. And all I would like to say is that you don’t. You’re allowed to make jokes. Men don’t worry about being funny or serious. They think they’re always serious even when they’re being funny and at the same time they always think they’re being funny when they’re not. But, as usual, women separate themselves off from many possibilities in order to be taken seriously."

"Forgive me father for I have scrolled."

According to orange peel theory, which went viral at the start of this year, you can ascertain the level of your partner’s love and commitment by asking them for an orange. If they hand you an orange, okay, sure, they passed. If they plate up the orange, one grade better. If they peel it for you first, then congratulations! Flying colours, distinction, gold medal, etc etc etc. If your lover has done this well, they might as well go one step further and feed you the orange, segment by golden segment, whilst you recline in leisured state like Cleopatra in her bath of milk and honey.

If they raise an eyebrow and say: ‘My love, are you in engaging in another viral internet trend in order to prove some sort of point about the status of our romance, a habit which is tied to your competing impulses towards a) proudly and zealously exhibiting your ‘green flag’ relationship where ‘green flag’ means ‘does everything I want’ and b) asserting yourself as an activist ‘testing’ our relationship in a way which claims to be a feminist takedown of the patriarchy (which you fear you have bought into by dating a man) but is in fact the tiniest gesture of interpersonal spitefulness, because it sounds like you are. And besides, I don’t have an orange to peel for you. Wait — have you got a camera hidden in that fruit bowl?’, they have definitely, manifestly, 100% not passed."

"What everyone really wanted to know about giving up my phone was whether it had miraculously increased my attention span, and whether I was getting any more reading done. To be honest, I’m not sure. In the six weeks of Lent I read ten books, which is decent going but not really exceptional, even if some of them were quite long.2 But reading did feel easier. Usually, whenever I sit down with anything more demanding than your average Sunday Times bestseller, I instantly start hearing the voice of a scratchy little demon, scratching away at the inside of my skull. Look at your phone, it says. Stop reading and look at your phone. Look at your phone this instant. Something might have happened on your phone. The book will stay the same forever but there might be something new on your phone. You might have notifications. You might have some of those red circles you crave so much. You can just put the book down for a moment. One quick moment to look at your phone. Don’t you know who I am? My name is Astaroth and in the Ars Goetica or Lesser Key of Solomon I am a mighty, strong Duke of Hell commanding forty demonic legions. I can show you fulfilment beyond your knowing if you choose to follow me, but first you must LOOK AT YOUR PHONE."

"It’s exceptionally clear to me that ever since the advent of the mainstream MeToo movement, the public (even women, even some so-called feminists) has been foaming at the mouth for a neat, uncomplicated example of an evil woman publicly conspiring to bring a good man down. The problem, of course, is that an instance of that is hard to actually find, and so — to paraphrase Voltaire — it became necessary to invent one."

"Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier—and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth."

"We are a generation of adult babies. You can see it in the widely circulated – and largely untrue – idea that the human brain isn’t developed until the age of 25, which means that anyone younger is still essentially a child. It’s there in the notion that people with ADHD can’t text back their friends because they lack object permanence (a skill that babies develop at eight months old). It’s there in the narrative that, because gay people didn’t experience a normal childhood, they’re living out a second adolescence in their twenties and thirties. It’s there in the hegemony of superhero films and the cross-generational popularity of YA, whose fans insist that grown-up literature is only ever about depressed college professors having affairs."

"I don’t mean that people never do things that are cruel, selfish, weak, petty, and vicious. But I do not think they ever do it in a way that’s so tediously explicable. It’s all far too neat; it all makes far too much sense, this moment on which a person’s entire being is supposed to hang. When actual people act, there’s always an element of the inexplicable at play, the sourceless molten stuff we call human freedom. An abyss in the other, the dark hole of their subjectivity. But these people are wind-up toys. Try comparing them to the entertainments of the past: Flaubert or Eliot or Shakespeare. You can work out where Emma Bovary is headed right from her beginning, but her mind still dances. Hamlet might have been the first truly psychological hero, but he’s still an excruciating mystery to us and to himself. ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’ He would like to feel things he doesn’t feel, and to act in ways he doesn’t act. Why doesn’t he? Not clear! There’s room to wonder, which is how you know he’s alive."

"while the intention of not wasting time on a bad first date is completely reasonable, we instead often waste more time creating red flags that might not actually exist OR we get our hopes up too high and invest a disproportional amount of attention on a connection that will only ever exist in the florescent light of your phone. no tik tok dating-fluencer can ever know you better than you know yourself. !!!"

"While I walked I sung to myself, “and I awoke, vaguely bouncing ‘round the room,” thinking about what Louis had said earlier, I want someone to kill me. What I couldn’t quite bear to admit in the moment is how i also quietly yearn for that, for someone to end me, to carry me with them over their shoulder into a future i don’t myself need to decide, i want someone to wrap their legs around me so tightly that i can no longer breathe, i want someone to snuff the life out of me so that i don’t need to face the pressure of living it, i want to smoke something so strong that i enter into a dream,—and they say that when you smoke a cigarette, a joint, whatever, it’s really the joint that’s smoking you and there’s the appeal,—deep down, i want my train to leave the station into the night, to that final unknowable destination who’s name we know too well."

"To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves."

"You have so much within you. Pay attention to it. Pay attention to your feelings of discomfort and uncertainty—watch yourself as you think and feel. The thing I like about writing is that it’s quite literally thinking—a way for me access my own interiority and construct something from it. What I write is all mine, it’s a living thing, it’s an extension of me that wanders out into the world. It is desire turned inwards instead of outwards, focused instead of displaced. It’s a way to access self-knowledge and self-respect.

Treat everything that happens to you as material and write it down. Don’t let someone tell you your experience doesn’t matter—you’re the one who gets to decide if it matters. Give yourself agency."

"I found it in the thrill of squatting twice my body weight for the first time. I found it in the joy of nailing my first pull-up after a year of trying. I found it in the adrenaline rush I get after catching a wave on the Jersey Shore, in strapping up my rollerblades every spring after a long winter, in skiing upstate New York’s black diamond trails. That spot I was looking for, I found it when I loosened that tight grip I had on my mind and channeled it into my long-forgotten body." - really why I love weightlifting so much.