We’re not gonna put sunscreen on your head. We’re not gonna put sunscreen on your head.

We’re gonna have to put sunscreen on your head, little man.

We’re not gonna put sunscreen on your head. You’re gonna get a sunburn.

We’re putting on sunscreen. Almost done.

[Crying].

Okay, let’s go look for blackberries.

We’re gonna look for blackberries in the woods. Green is no good.

That’s right. Green is no good. You gotta let them wait. Red is okay, but not great.

[I extend my right forefinger and he takes it in his left hand.]

We’re holding hands. We’re walking in the woods.

Yeah.

There’s a lady up there. There’s a dog. Yeah.

Yeah.

We’re going to get water from a water fountain. We’re going to get water.

Rocco, look. They’re shooting bows and arrows there.

They shoot bows and arrows there. Like the guys

Who else shoots bows and arrows?

Robin Hood and Little John…It doesn’t turn on. [It turns on] It’s working…we’re gonna go to a bathroom. We’re gonna go to a bathroom and close the door…we’re gonna use the bathroom.

Rocco, do you want to climb this rock? You want to climb this rock?

You want to use the bathroom.

You want to be inside or outside?

Yeah.

You don’t need that. You don’t need any more paper towels.

You don’t need paper in the woods.

You want to go see another water fountain?

Hi. Hi. Hi. Good morning…Good morning…Good morning…it’s great to stay up late1…I don’t want to see a blackberry. You want papa to get?

Okay, I’ll get it for you.

[He eats a blackberry.] This one is too green…it has to grow. Too spiky. Oh no, I tripped. Do you want to have that berry?2

Okay, I’ll get it.

That’s a big dog…that dog wants to eat some water. I want to press the button.

Okay, that’s enough water.

Trucks. Here come the trucks. Look at the fire trucks.

Let me know if we’re too close. You guys don’t mind?

They’re all done driving. They have a light that flashes, that beeps, that goes Beep Beep Beep. There’s a button on the bus. You cannot push it. Let’s look at it. So? So? So?

Yeah, you can’t push it.

There’s a door on the bus…he’s thinking about it. I kicked the bus

Yeah, you did.

You did. I can’t open this door.

I think it’s locked.

Because a guy closed it and it’s locked.

Yeah

I’m a very curious baby…I think it’s a guy’s fire truck…my hands are filthy.

A little bit, yeah. It’s okay to get dirty in the woods.

There’s a hose…the guys might use it. [Slapping his hands against the footrail] It’s like a bongo! My sticker is on the bus…There’s a light that flashed…wee ooh wee ooh…I tripped in the grass. I see some more blackberries.

Yeah, let me get that one.

You can try…I think it’s locked…gonna get on the other one on the one (?) it’s like a bongo…those are a part of a wheel [Sings “Wheels on the Bus”]. It’s like a piano. Stuck to the bus!

[I fix his pant leg.]

Not us…not our bus…wheels…the guys…he likes fire trucks and the wheels, definitely…definitely…Do you wanna sing “Make ‘Em Laugh”?

[I sing a few bars].

You want to go back up the hill?

[No answer.]

You want to go back up the hill to the planetarium? The planetarium should be open now.

Panetarium pagatarium.

Yeah

We’re going to the planetarium. We’re going to ride the elevator on the planetarium. You’re going to…you’re going to press two on the elevator. You’re going to press five on the elevator.

Yeah, we can do that

Here we go here we go

If you take a group vacation together that you would describe as only moderately successful; if she comes out after getting divorced; if she stops talking about retirement with you; if she adopts a dog; you’re in danger, and worse still, you’ve been in danger for a lot longer than you realize.

All opinions are courtesy of Barbara Foerster, the narrator of my latest book, Meeting New People, available for purchase now, et cetera.

I love her very much. I would probably cross the street to avoid her in real life.

On group vacations:

“Taking a vacation together that doesn’t quite come off is is just as bad as taking a vacation together that goes ruinously wrong, only a lot of people don’t realize that. If you take a vacation with a close friend and it’s not the best goddamn time either of you has ever had in years, it was a flop, and marks the end of the good times between the two of you forever. Or if you take a vacation with a big group of friends, and at the beginning you and your best friend always pair off whenever it’s time to pair off without having to say anything about it, but by the end of the trip you’ve once or twice come down to breakfast and she’s already there talking with someone else, then it’s over, absolutely it.”

On signs your best friend is tiring of you:

“Another sign your best friend isn’t going to stick around much longer is if the two of you used to joke a lot about retiring somewhere together and then she stops bringing it up, or even talking at all about what she wants her life to look like when she gets old. Maybe she doesn’t contradict you when you bring it up, but she stops adding little creative details to the picture, like where you’ll put your rocking chairs on the porch, or what you’re going to call the part-time male nurse who has to bring you both your coffee, or whether you want to monogram your matching bathrobes. And you only realize it from its absence in the conversation, that she’s mentally withdrawn her old age from yours, and that’s a lonesome thing to realize.”

On being friends with lesbians:

“The most difficult kind of divorced women, in my opinion, are the late-in-life lesbians. I don’t know why this is, but women who come out during a divorce simply radiate smugness. I do think it may be possible to be best friends with a lesbian, except then you usually have to be friends with a lot of them all at once. Plus, I don’t think they can ever really respect anyone who isn’t a lesbian, so I’d rather avoid it if at all possible. They make good acquaintances and terrific coworkers, but in my experience, it’s best to keep them at a slight distance.”

On being friends with men:

“In theory, I am not against the idea of having a man for a best friend, as long as he is the right kind of man. He wouldn’t even have to be gay, necessarily, but it is statistically a lot more likely that the person I’m looking for will be a woman. I don’t think I’ve met more than a handful of men whose idea of friendship strongly resembled my own, and I’m pretty sure I met that entire handful back in college. In my experience, men don’t break up with their men friends as often as women do their women friends, and when they do, they claim they “just lost touch” instead of admitting they’ve gotten sick of each other.”

On being friends with divorced women:

“The biggest downside, unfortunately, in finding a best friend my own age is how many women my age are also divorced. In my experience, divorced women, as a rule, have totally lost whatever interest in behaving reasonably they ever had in the f irst place. Worse than that, they think of themselves as having been so long held back by their failed marriages that they make a virtue of acting out. Someone who has convinced herself that selfishness is actually a reward and an ethical obligation after years of repression is dangerous. I’m sure many of them were plenty repressed. But not all of them. And even for the ones who were, there’s no call to take it out on the rest of us. I make it a rule to never say anything bad about my ex-husbands. Nobody needs to hear anything more emphatic than ‘Well, it didn’t work out…’

At any rate, I’ve never listened to a woman complain about her ex-husband and thought, ‘God, I’d really like to get to know her better.’”

On being likable:

“There are some ex-friends you’re glad to see the back of, some you hardly ever think about again once you split up, and there are some where you never really split up at all, you both simply repair to separate stages, and pretend they’re your audience for the rest of your life.

Thinking about all of this in one go feels a bit chilling. Mine is not an especially harmonious record of conscientious thought and behavior. I can see that much already. I mean, most people wouldn’t look over my history and think, “Wow, it’s hard to believe that she couldn’t keep a best friend.”

But then I think, No, there are hundreds of thousands of people much more unpleasant than me, people who are leagues more difficult, graceless, embittered, stubborn, and selfish, and even they still have best friends. So why shouldn’t I have one?

On pets:

“One thing my friendship with Lydia did teach me was to avoid anyone who’s too into animals. Lydia was really into animals, even though she didn’t ever have any pets. She was always on the verge of adopting some totally decrepit and broken-down specimen she’d show me pictures of, from various shelters. The nearer an animal was to incapacity, abjection, and death, the more she liked it, which I should have taken as a warning sign but didn’t. That type of person is always adding new hypothetical trials to their pet’s backstory. They get more abject and innocent the longer they’ve had them, too: We think she was probably pregnant before. She was probably abandoned after being pregnant. We bet she was part of a puppy mill. We think they were keeping her pregnant seventeen years in a row. We think she was attacked by a gang of bigger dogs. We think she was in a dog-fighting ring.

Well, you might think that, but of course you have no idea, do you? Maybe she attacked another dog once. Maybe she was the aggressor from time to time. Maybe she even had a reasonably good home and just got lost one day. Maybe you’re not a saint for getting a pet.”

On putting yourself out there:

“I spend at least twenty minutes trying to brainstorm a list of places I might try to meet someone, and manage to come up with “At work” and “Ask friends of friends for recommendations.”

I don’t go to a gym, I don’t volunteer, and I don’t know nearly as many people as I used to. I had thought about adding “at a bookstore” to the list, but I’ve never talked to a stranger at a bookstore in my life, and I really don’t see myself starting now. The same goes for cooking classes, learning a new language, or joining a “meetup group”— all that sort of pointless adult busywork that gets recommended to the lonely, aging, and incompetent. The problem with that sort of thing is that these places are also filled with lonely, aging, incompetent people, all of whom are hoping to meet someone charismatic, someone whose life is already full to overflowing, with something worthwhile to share, and not another social vacuum. It would be wonderful if we could help each other, but lonely people usually despise other lonely people, and for good reason.”

Well for Christ’s sake what do you like, Barbara?

“I could be good friends with a cheesemonger. I could maybe even be best friends with a cheesemonger.”

[Image via]

About thirty miles on the bus (two trips to SF plus a few spins around the block training the director of Memory Care how to drive the bus). About fifty miles on the car.

Everyone keeps asking me when they’re going to sell the old bus, which seats twelve but requires a Class C license, which I haven’t got, and which hasn’t been used since I got the job last August. Man, I don’t know. They keep saying they’re going to sell it. If you need a twelve-seater passenger van and happen to live in Oakland, send me a DM or something.

A few days ago when I was driving out of the parking garage I saw a homeless man having a pretty bad day, crossing the street and cursing. There were at least fifteen feet between us and I was turning in the opposite direction, but nevertheless I had the feeling you sometimes get before someone decides to come yell at you in public: I knew that once he saw me he was going to come after me, no matter how calm I looked or how discreetly I tried to move away. When he saw me he lunged towards the driver’s-side door, making as if to get in; this was particularly startling because he had no arms below the elbow. Knowing that he would be unlikely to get the door open before I could drive away did not make me feel any more relaxed. Between the two of us he was clearly having the worse day, but I still felt pretty unhappy about the whole encounter.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING

A few months ago I switched gyms. I used to go to a rock climbing gym down in the Oakland flats, but between my day job and the baby and writing I never made time to go. I found a place halfway between my house and work and started going there instead during my commute. I’ve never belonged to a smaller gym in my life. It’s terrific. You sign in with a pen and everything. Most of the clientele is 60+ and a number of them (I suspect mostly the older men, as a form of opsec, but you never know) sign in as “Elmer Fudd” or “Daffy Duck.”

Occasionally the free weights section is given over to personal training between men in their 70s. I try not to eavesdrop, but I don’t try very hard. Some highlights from this week included:

[Over bicep curls] “I don’t think being a biological father makes you a father.”

“It doesn’t. It’s showing up every day.”

“That’s right! You’re right.”

“My kids know I’m not the easiest guy in the world. But they know I’m there.”

“My grandson respects me because I’m patient with him. He’s a hyperactive kid. ADHD. But when you’re a kid you’re always hyperactive. [Son] was the same way.”

“I had two grandmothers. One Irish, who always wanted me to sit still and not do anything. My Italian grandmother would give me a chore to do, and I’d take off to do it. She trusted me. She understood me.”

“I go in on a half a cow with the kids, we drive up to Santa Rosa to pick it up, put it in the chest freezer, lasts us a year….Six dollars a pound for the whole thing. That’s porterhouses, T-bones, ribeyes….you know what they’re charging for ground meat at the supermarket right now? Nine, ten dollars a pound. And this is six dollars a pound for the whole thing.”

“Nine dollars for hamburger meat.”

“And this is six dollars a pound. That’s including T-bones.”

I’m still leading exercise class at work on Sundays and Mondays.

A few of the new residents have started standing in the back, which throws me off a little, because ordinarily everybody sits for the exercises. Now I have to think about how to modify the exercises for someone who’s standing up, which is no joke, because half the moves involve lifting both your feet off the ground at the same time. I’m going to have to reevaluate my system this weekend.

WHAT WE’RE EATING

The best meal at work this week by a country mile was Monday: Chicken-fried steak, sauteed zucchini, mashed potatoes, butterscotch pudding.

The zucchini was especially terrific. The mashed potatoes I suspected of coming from a box, but when you’re trying to feed 150 people at once using the instant flakes is an understandable choice. I love chicken-fried steak and could happily eat it once a week for the rest of my life. That’s hand-breaded! They bread the chicken-fried steak here, it’s not the frozen patties from Sodexo or anything, so I’m inclined to be pretty forgiving about the potatoes.

The gravy was fine, but I don’t ever want to get into a position of taking daily free gravy for granted, you know? Even just “fine” gravy is nothing to sneeze at, particularly when you don’t have to do the dishes afterwards.

Plus I recently found out where they keep the plastic knives, so my days of eating lunch with only a fork are over.

A resident told me that her husband and her brother both died at the age of 61: “They said they’d never live long, because they were in the Army. They said it was the food.”

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

All movies are screened in the theater at 6:45pm. I get to schedule the movie calendar myself, as long as they’re available on streaming or I can successfully download something in advance.

Every once in a while residents will request something in particular. Most recently Jon and David asked for Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which I’ve added to the week of 6/20. May and Yae have both expressed interest in seeing Raise the Red Lantern again, but I haven’t been able to find it streaming anywhere. I haven’t seen it since high school and would love to figure out a way to make it happen.

Monday night: A New Leaf, 1971, by Elaine May. (You know how much I love this one.) I was shameless about promoting it this week. I was texting residents from the driver’s phone to be sure to come down. I thought about staying late at work just to watch it on a big screen, but there’s only thirteen chairs in the theater and I’d hate to take a spot away from someone who had never seen it.

Tuesday night I’m not sure yet. It was supposed to be Gosford Park but the front desk told me someone accidentally played that last week, so it’s being swapped out for something else.

Wednesday night: Interiors, 1978, Kristin Griffith and Marybeth Hurt.

Thursday night: The English Teacher, 2013, Julianne Moore and Greg Kinnear.

Friday night: Crazy Rich Asians, 2018, Constance Wu and Henry Golding.

Saturday: The Summer Book, 2025, Glenn Close, Emily Matthews. Based on the terrific Tove Jansson novel.

WHAT WE’RE READING

The short stories group that meets on Mondays just read Grace Paley’s “Friends,” which was a real hit. We’ve done a lot of New Yorker-in-the-seventies stuff, which is nothing to sneeze at, let me tell you; discussion for Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” took up the whole hour even though it only took about seven minutes to read through; Lydia Davis went down a treat, as did Donald Barthelme’s “Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby.”

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him a while to decide. I pointed out that we’d have to know soon, because Howard, who is a conductor, would have to hire and rehearse the musicians and he couldn’t begin until he knew what the music was going to be. Colby said he’d always been fond of Ives’s Fourth Symphony. Howard said that this was a “delaying tactic” and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra and chorus would put us way over the music budget. “Be reasonable,” he said to Colby. Colby said he’d try to think of something a little less exacting.

The group even liked Edna Ferber’s “Old Man Minick,” which I hadn’t been sure about. I’m crazy about Edna Ferber personally but Old Man Minick can shade into patronizing if you’re not careful about your tone while you read.1

Another resident sent me a link to a Washington Post article but I can’t read it because there’s a paywall. She thinks there’s a way to send it to me as a gift article. If it works out I’ll be sure to let you know once I’ve read it.

At the front desk they’re reading manga, coursework for a film degree, and a Christian devotional. I don’t know which manga Roberto’s reading right now. He most recently finished Chainsaw Man, I know that, but I can’t remember which series he’s on presently. He has a manga guy who usually gets him a pretty good deal when he buys in bulk, and I put him on to the new comic shop they opened next to the Dark Carnival in Berkeley.

I’m reading Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That after finishing Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. It’s terrific, although unfortunately I picked up the edited 1950s version by mistake, and will eventually have to hunt down the original 1929 version that alienated all of his friends.

Next week there’s caper chicken on the menu (one of the best things they do here) and I’ll be screening the absolutely magnificent The Plot Against Harry, His Girl Friday, and Dave.

I’ll also be driving people to the Oakland Rose Garden for a picnic lunch. Pickup is at the lobby at 10:45am, but I’ll wait for you if you’re a few minutes late.

Danny: Hello my dear wife,

Recently we saw the movie Backrooms together. I think we both had quite a good time, although I hadn’t expected the primary onscreen relationship to be between a man and his therapist.

Did you get the sense that her self-help book was meant to be sort of gimmicky/inauthentic? Normally when I see an infomercial for a self-help book in a movie, it’s pretty clear that the movie wants me to think of it as a money grab, but I’m not quite sure about this one. I remember a big part of season one of Severance is Adam Scott’s brother-in-law’s self-help book, which I remember finding very (if broadly) funny, but Dr. Mary’s claims seem a lot more restrained, and her delivery in the voiceover reads more melancholic than authoritative.

What did you think of their final session, where she told him off? “Tie me up, blame your brain; you are your brain, you dipshit.”

Grace: I really liked this movie too. I’ve seen a number of the more reputable US film critics seeming a little lukewarm on it, and preferring OBSESSION, which, while interesting, is much less so to me than BACKROOMS. But then they all seem to misunderstand OBSESSION too.

Justin Chang’s comparison in The New Yorker this weekend completely fumbles the plot of OBSESSION, which concerns a regular Gen Z nice guy named Bear wishing that his crush Nikki would fall in love with him, and the wish coming true. Then, Chang writes “despite [Bear’s] superficial nice-guy pose, is all too happy to reap the benefits.“ Nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, the moment Nikki reveals herself as a lover, rather than merely a beloved, Bear’s fragile masculinity recoils and never recovers. Desire for oneself, Nikki insists when describing a fiction she’s writing (before her brainwashing), is unattractive in others, and the truth of that sentiment is exposed as Nikki becomes a screeching void of terrorizing love. Chang further thinks that the out-of-control ambivalence Nikki exhibits, careering between abject affirmation and murderous rage, is “the spectacular by-product of a losing battle with not only the unseen entity that has seized control of her but also with the man who made it happen.” Late in the film, we do learn that a non-brainwashed Nikki still exists somewhere, and can speak when her hijacked body is sleeping. But still, there is nothing to make the viewer think that Nikki’s swings of violent lust and violent hate are the result of two entities struggling for control of a body: surely, those swings themselves are instances of the singular object named in the movie’s title.

I mention Chang’s OBSESSION snafu (and he is generally an excellent critic) because part of the challenge of these two movies is that they are both made by very young men, who are younger than the majority of their audience: OBSESSION’s Curry Barker is 26, and BACKROOMS’ Kane Parsons is 20. That spectacular fact conditions the way that you or I, or Chang, encounter these movies: they are generational testimony from people we don’t understand (the Skibidi covid cohort), and perhaps also occasions for a normative pedagogical impulse that one doesn’t usually get in response to horror cinema.

So a question like “what did you think of their final session” becomes also a question like “what is the future of psychoanalysis?” or “has therapy been displaced by optimization?” I like all these questions, but they all sort of wrong-foot me in different ways.

The first question is, under what circumstances could we consider that scene over the dinner table to be a session? Clearly, Clark is staging it that way, and invites Mary to walk back through the transcript of their earlier section, with each utterance of hers (in his mind) peeling the words off his record and tossing them into the no-place of the Backrooms. It is hard to avoid evoking Marc Augé when discussing this movie, but I find his actual work oddly static and unmoving.1

Yet in so far as Clark’s set up seems to intensify the logic of the verbal role-play in session, its inadequacy as a diorama is all the clearer. Mary has never seen Clark’s house, but the audience has seen hers, both her current home and the mythically-resonant home of her childhood, in which she was trapped by her mother, an agoraphobic psychotic.

Clark’s homelessness, on the other hand, is axiomatic. He has been kicked out of the house he owns—a wanderer, like Odysseus, as well as a seafaring pirate and a gallant sultan. So whose home, exactly, has he recreated in the Backrooms? Perhaps that from which he has been cast: when he mutilates the woman-furniture-object-sculpture, she is positioned in the kitchen—almost cowering—like a frightened, belittled wife; that is, the violence against her scalp mimics somehow the violence Clark had committed against his ex. Perhaps, at this point, we learn that he murdered or attacked her before leaving. But if it is his home, Mary doesn’t know it: to her, and to us, it looks like her childhood, all blockage and wreckage, half-light and threats of madness. (I was reminded of Oz Perkins’ interiors in LONGLEGS, here and elsewhere.)

So then Mary, undergoing a regressive intervention completely unknowable to Clark, loses her own shit and experiences her own role-play breakthrough: unable to do so as a child, now finally she can tell the crazy person she has spent a lifetime trying to cure that he is the problem, and she can’t help him, and he should fuck off and die, which he promptly does. Mary misdiagnoses Clark as her own mother, ascribing to him a passive-paranoid position that might vaguely ring true, but rather lets him off the hook for his physical violence and more perfectly fits the passive agoraphobia of the mad mom. It’s quite an ingenious psychoanalytic subversion: the analyst’s countertransferential breakthrough succeeds through the literal and figurative sacrifice of the patient.

Parsons’ investment in psychoanalysis is, I’m sure, close to zero; but the question of whether language has a role in liberating us from the “loops” that protect and terrorize us, is a central concern of his film. His answer would seem to be something like: plenty of hope, just not for us.

Danny: I can’t imagine she was able to bill him for it, so in that sense it probably wasn’t a session. I shared your sense that Clark’s scalping of the furniture-woman was an admission that he had probably attacked the wife he claims kicked him out, and possibly killed her.

I enjoyed how deliberately slow and repetitive the movie was before this scene, and how piratical and unpleasant the movie was afterwards. Also like Longlegs, Backrooms is interested in mostly-wordless flashbacks to growing up with a hoarder mother who plasters the windows with newspaper. Mentally ill cinematic mothers are often depicted as hoarders, certainly more often than mentally ill cinematic fathers are. Crazy mothers are accretive, they accumulate instead of distribute; I didn’t pack your lunch today but there are a hundred boxes blocking the front door, will that do? That’s probably related to how much the central conceit of the movie seemed to be Aren’t chairs frightening? And I found the question persuasive! I kind of do think they are, now.

Sooner or later, everything and everybody becomes furniture. And what good does language do for a chair?

Grace: I’m also persuaded that chairs are frightening! Or rather, the tendency of objects to become chairs, which is to say, to become inert, receptive, and movable. The revelation that the creatures are stuffed with plastic fluff, but wet and apparently edible, is appropriately grotesque, because it reveals the indifference of the remembering-machine to flesh. That which is remembered is thereby manufactured, a process which is crueler than death: remember, man, that thou are wet plastic fluff, and to wet plastic fluff thou shalt return.

At the end of the film, when we see Mary smoothed out into a plastic form, the Backrooms scale back to become the setting for “Ozymandias”: “round the decay / of that colossal wreck / the lone and level sands stretch far away.” This rescaling is accomplished technically by a montage of stills, depicting the space’s gradual hollowing out. But while this moment was doubtless handled skillfully, in a sense it pulled back the most disturbing element of the Backrooms into a more familiarly apocalyptic temporality. The movie’s central paradox is the position of a pretend pirate who sells furniture—a wayfarer that sells fragile fantasies of stability, which fall apart when you sit on them or remember them.

In the staggeringly good penultimate episode of THE LEFTOVERS, in a context it would take too long to explain, we encounter a fragment of a fiction of which I was reminded:

“The port was alive with strange faces. It was dawn by the time he found an old salt willing to part with a vessel for what bullion he had left, a cutter with a Bermuda rig called the Merciful, its sails ragged and ripped, its compass cracked, its rotten hull just barely able to cut the breakers. But it would be enough to make his escape. It wasn’t for another hour when he was a mile from the docks that his thoughts turned back to her. He imagined her alone. By now, she would’ve searched the house and found it empty. She had suspected it all along, and now she knew he was a coward. A coward dressed in the uniform of a brave man. Brave enough to cross two oceans and a continent to find her, to fight countless enemies, and yet in the end, he was terrified. He was terrified of her. To lie beside her, to be comforted by her as he wept, to show her he was small, for her to know that and touch his cheek and whisper words softly into his ear. All of that was a nightmare. All he knew to do was run. He took a deep breath of the air, tasting the salt on his tongue, and closed his eyes, leaning into the spray as the Merciful picked up speed and sailed for the horizon. He was alone, and all was well.”

[Image via]

The next week will be an exciting one.1 My third novel, Meeting New People, will be released on Tuesday, June 2nd, and I will be going on an abbreviated book tour to launch it.

On Tuesday, June 2nd I will be at Powell’s Books in Portland.

On Friday, June 5th I will be at Local Economy in Oakland.

On Saturday, August 22nd I will be at the San Diego Book Festival in San Diego.

That’s all, so do come out if you happen to be on the West Coast and can spare an hour or two to say hello. I would very much like to see you.

Often a book launch involves being genially quizzed by a friend of the author’s, or, more interestingly, a professional rival or employee of the bookstore hosting the event. I won’t be in conversation with anyone at either reading, because I forgot to ask around ahead of time.

Besides, I always feel a little self-conscious about asking a friend to pretend to finish a book of mine in order to sit onstage with me and say things like “It seems like you really cared about your themes. What was that like?” I like my friends; they shouldn’t have to do that sort of thing.

I will be offering a free copy of Meeting New People at each event to whichever audience member has most recently gone through a friendship breakup. You won’t have to prove it or anything. We’ll go by the honor system.

In the event of a tie, I will cut the book in half, and whichever two people who have been most freshly dumped will have to share.

There is a curious and heady mixture of indignation, self-justification, self-pity, humiliating attention to detail and clarity of recall, and abjection that attends the friendship which has ended definitively, rather than being allowed to gracefully fade out. (A shared vacation, booked on points, non-refundable.)

Incidentally, if you become a paid subscriber to the Chatner this week, you’ll do so at a 38% discount for the next year. Why not give it a try!

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Please don’t worry that I’m going to poll the audience about their freshest emotional wounds. Really, I won’t. But the thing people always say about friendship breakups, isn’t it, is “it’s so hard how nobody talks about it,” so I’d like to create a little opportunity for people to talk about it.

The idea for Meeting New People came to me a few years ago when I was working on Women’s Hotel, a book about quite a few reasonably polite people living in a fairly constrained environment with a number of internal and external inhibitors governing their behavior. It interested me to think about a single person, exhausted by politeness, incapable of self-governance and desperate for intimacy, eager to speak and unable to find anyone to speak to.

Here’s Barbara, eating at home alone and making the best of things:

I made it home late enough to make it up the stairs in peace. Lorraine had already retreated to the back of her apartment to watch TV at the loudest possible volume, and all the hallway lights were out. I was too hungry to make a big production out of dinner, so I just threw together a big plate of pieces of cold, shaved vegetables and meat. I don’t have a name for it. It’s not quite a salad and it’s not quite a ploughman’s, either. It’s a good sort of meal to keep ingredients on hand for, when you live alone, because you can assemble everything in just a few minutes.

The real key is that the thinner you slice everything, the more vibrant it all tastes, because of the increased surface area. In spring, a lot of what people think of as big, tough winter staples are actually very delicious, very crisp and tender, like celeriac, horseradish, and turnip. A small spring turnip is an absolute dear, and nothing at all like those huge softball-sized things you see in the supermarket in December.

So I had a big bin of very thinly sliced roots I’d run over the mandolin earlier in the week, tossed in a very lightly sugared brine, just bay leaves, sugar, vinegar, water, salt, a few juniper berries, all of them still snappy, and I arranged them on a very wide dark green plate with a salad of celery leaves, lots of parsley (I like using parsley as a lettuce), and a little parmesan-rind dressing, and some cold ribeye, also very thinly sliced, that I brought home last night from work. You eat the whole thing with chopsticks, one ingredient at a time, very slowly, and it’s just terrific. A hot, bright breakfast and a cold, unhurried supper, that’s the right way to finish a day. I only had water to drink because I’d already cried once today and didn’t want to get maudlin.

If my sister and my mother were still alive, I don’t think I would be in this position. I would have needed Susan less in the first place, and probably would have been easier to get along with as a result. We might have still ended up quarreling, but it wouldn’t have gotten as bad as it did, and we probably would have ended up closer than ever after we made it up. Things would certainly be better between Ezra and me, and the improvements would keep radiating outwards from there. I didn’t realize this until after she was gone, but I loved my mother more than I loved my son. And I did love him, quite a lot as it happens, so I’m not saying I didn’t try. But my childhood was better than his was, I can admit that. Sometimes it’s like that with people, and you don’t always find out which kind of person you are until you’re done having children, which is a shame. Immediately and in almost every way, I became a worse person after my mother died.

I do hope you’ll give Barbara a chance. I’ve been so looking forward to introducing her to people.

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I have a new novel coming out in three weeks in which the narrator is unexpectedly dumped in her living room by her best friend in the middle of making dinner. She does not handle it well. I do not have much in common with her, but I do share her habit of believing I am acting with great dignity when I am in fact making a real spectacle of myself.

I thought I would commemorate the occasion by asking several of my friends a number of intrusive and frankly presumptuous questions about their own experiences with friendship breakups. Here’s a condensed version of our conversation:

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Have you ever had a friendship end definitively, rather than simply drifting apart or losing touch? If so, were you surprised by the nature of that ending, or could you see it coming?

A: My most devastating breakup was with a friend, and I initiated it. We’d lived together and been very close for years. She was my plus one and my emergency contact. Friends always joked that we were basically a married couple and that we would end up together romantically. It could have ended up that way, except I thought that she didn’t treat her romantic partners very well. In retrospect, that was a red flag.

E: I’ve had three friendship breakups that I can think of. I was the dumper in two-and-a-half. My partner once told me that their definition of a friend is “someone you would go out of your way to say hello to at a party” and that blew my mind. I have maybe five categories: enemy, stranger, warm acquaintance, someone I would allow to stay in my home rent-free for an open-ended amount of time while they looked for a place (“friend”), and Best Friend in the Whole World (title currently vacant).

There are probably a few people who would be hurt by knowing I think of them as a warm acquaintance, and probably slightly more would be baffled to hear I’d let them stay in my house indefinitely, but since I’m lousy at staying in touch with people my feelings of friendship do not degrade over time when I haven’t spoken to someone.

K: Yes, I had a former friend break up with me. Her reasons were not that clear to me. We’d had some conflict that I thought we’d resolved, but at a certain point it felt like I was walking on eggshells. At one point I had made a passing joke about her boyfriend, and later apologized to him personally without telling her that I had apologized to him. Then she wanted to have a phone call with me and she dumped me.

Jo: Be patient with me. I am an autist and a child of analysis, and every prompt to examine myself is a new thousand-piece puzzle to a puzzle hound. My first intimate friendship as an adult (ie, the first time I felt I belonged around someone without wondering if it was only the forced proximity of the school day which made it so) imploded. I made the decision to end it after two years.

She was, without exaggeration, a con woman — she exited our tight friend group, of which she was the center, and by that time we realized that even the name we knew her by might have been a fiction. She could have been a cult leader, sometimes I think I was in a cult.

She had suddenly burned bridges with other people in the group and no one was talking. I didn’t know the context and was bewildered by the conflict. She admonished me for asking about it, and my other friends feared that I wouldn’t accept her overwhelming fault in the conflict (she had stolen from them and called the cops on them for weed possession when discovered. Moreover, her entire life story had been fabricated).

What it came down to was, while I idolized this woman and credited her with fostering me as a person (attachment and mommy issues? Yes), I realized she had become severe, that I felt like pure shit when we were together, and immense dread hung over our meetings. The last time I saw her, she knew her plates were losing spin and she concocted a story about how she was moving away — she wasn’t, and didn’t, but she could have sold me anything and had already sold a lot. It was bittersweet because I loved her, and it hurt to be around her, but initially in that moment I resolved to accept her departure and continue my life, somehow, without her. If it had been left at that, I might have grieved more.

But then she made some awful, cutting remark about my other friends, who I loved as much as I loved her. Without even thinking, I told her not to speak of them that way, and instantly it was though she had plunged into icy water. She said that I and the others deserved each other. An hour later we said we’d get together again, but I knew we wouldn’t. I didn’t want to, which was unfathomable but true.

I got in my car after that and cried deeply, called my friends and told them. They made sure I was good for the night and the next day they threw me a party and told me everything. I remember the time and date. I walked around feeling concussed. I still loved her, but I was also proud of myself for having made the decision to end things. These days, her memory evokes a bemused and tender pity.

S: I have actually been the one to definitively, formally end several enormously important, passionate friendships over the course of my life. L, R, N, J (all women). Somehow it was unimaginable in these situations to countenace letting the relationships fade out, so I initiated formal breakup conversations.

It may be relevant here that being ghosted seems like one of the least tolerable ways of being treated, speaking for myself. There may have been a fantasy in play that the breakup conversation would make it all less painful, because less ambiguous. Whether any pain reduction occurred is impossible to say, I suppose, but it was always extremely fucking painful.

Je: By the time these relationships ended, I wasn’t totally surprised. The only really unexpected one was P, a fellow writer, who had a normal supportive conversation with me one day, then crashed out a few days later. We had met when we were both stuck on rewriting our first novels, but she got more and more stuck while I finished and published mine. It caused tension that we couldn’t overcome.

Do you remember the first time a friendship ended in a breakup? The most recent time?

E: I remember the hardest one. I thought of Brad as my platonic life partner. He even made a website that tracked whether we were hanging out, which he updated whenever we visited one another. He’d dated people before and it hadn’t changed our friendship, but in the last year he started seeing his now-wife and he became distant.

I kept trying to get him to talk to me about our changing friendship and he kept denying it was. happening. I lost my job and was trying to decide whether to take a new job in Portland or Dallas (we were both living in Seattle at the time), and he kept being noncommittal. I figure at this point he just doesn’t want to be my friend anymore and disengage, but a few weeks later I got an email from his now-wife about how she was throwing him a going-away party because he was moving to Dallas. He knew the whole time and didn’t say anythign to me. I sent him a really angry email ending our friendship. I felt really righteous and aggrieved at the time, but here I am more than a decade later and I still have dreams where we’re still friends.

I currently don’t have a Best Friend, except for my wife, and saying your wife is your best friend just isn’t the same thing. It’s weird not having one for the first time. I have filled the best friend-shaped hole in my life with hobbies and family and trying out normal pleasant friendships with locals I don’t feel especially strongly about.

S: Yes. L was the first, J the most recent.

Je: My big friend breakup period was 2008-18. Five close friends bit the dust in that period

Have you ever later reconciled with a friend who dumped you (or who you dumped yourself)? How did that work out?

E: Over the 28 years I've known Connor, we've probably spent five of them not speaking; most of those were him doing friendship-breakups with me over text or email, and then one of us sending an email months or years later. The last time we did this was in 2016, and I think lasted about eight months or so. This time feels different.

K: Once, but now we’re back to not really talking. I occasionally text him and he doesn’t respond.

Jo: I did once, a friend who was sort of arrested in some ways — she was an adult woman who nonetheless reminded me a lot of teenage boys I knew. She dealt with a lot of anxiety and depression, and that could manifest in a reactionary frustration, getting prickly and judgmental about people and the world. That built up friction.

I can’t even remember what the dispute was, but we stopped talking for about three months. And then, just like teenaged boys, we started chatting again over music and started seeing each other again as though nothing had happened. We never spoke of the problem, but I think we tacitly agreed it was silly.

S: Never, no, although actually, I suppose, maybe it counts as “reconciliation” that J and I say Happy Christmas to each other via Whatsapp and call each other “my love” when we do so, which feels very strange but also very nice.

Je: No.

What do you think of the expression “friendship breakup?” Do you find it apt? Clunky? Does it elide something important? Have you got a better phrase the rest of us can use?

A: I don’t know what else to call it. Sometimes I jokingly refer to it as my divorce when referring to some of the things we bought together and had to divide up afterwards.

E: I like the term "friendship breakup" because I think I've always been someone who feels things strongly and the end of friendships don't play the same role in society or pop culture as romantic breakups, even though the friendships are often longer and more emotional than whatever situationship you were in for a couple months.

K: While I do think the "we don't talk about x enough" is a somewhat irksome line of rhetoric, because undoubtedly a discourse does emerge, but I think it is an adequate way of describing the emotional turmoil involved. Falling out is too glib, too simple. Breakup does a decent job of approximating the way that the intimacy between two people has fractured.

Jo: About the language itself, what comes to mind for comparison, strangely, is people referring to their pets as their children. It gestures toward something that is uneasily defined via something that is easily defined (perhaps in the sense of being socially mandated). In this way, the simile scans as glibly inappropriate on some level. There is a love relationship being alluded to, but it is not, or rather is not supposed to be, the actual sacred bond that infuses a life with meaning, all by itself, by its fact.

I’ve seen parents get het up about this kind of pet language in that defensive way which common to people who need reassurance about things they broadly maintain are unquestionable. So it frequently is with the language of partners and friends, it seems to me.

So, unpacking that more deeply, while there might be a less rigid gradation of investment being acknowledged in one sense, the expected gradation of grief among categories (pet / child, friend / partner) is very sharply defined. We can more readily beat around the bush re: the potential immensity and propriety of love felt for an animal, or a person one is not affirmatively and romantically devoted to. But the potential of immensity for grief at their loss is very strongly enforced: the hierarchy is clear. The socially acceptable quantum of grief, the degree of tolerable dysfunction, is observed and recorded according to that placement.

I guess you could theorize that this is in large part a function of capital: there are points of established detente between wage work and life outside of it, points at which your boss is supposed to excuse you for not showing up to build his wealth for him. But it’s just as crucially a product of the nuclear family and couple form: Your partnerships and blood relations are primary and load-bearing, while other forms of relationship are supplementary.

And here I think we get to something unambiguously and intensely pathological: a barely suppressed panic around and impulse to quarantine grief. A person in unchecked pain is a volatile substance. One is meant to gain and lose pets, gain and lose friends, quietly — one of the expected functions of the family form is to absorb the pain of these things and keep its membership externally ordered for the things expected of them. I mean, it’s commonly understood that you give children pets to foster precisely as training wheels for death, presenting a controllable lesson in carrying, if not resolving, grief; quite often that loss is framed, among adults, as a kind of “hot stove” comeuppance for the disordering quality of love a child allows themselves to give.

The trauma of losing family, or even a lover, produces by contrast something more serious, complicated, and respectable. But to invoke distress of any kind in public will tend to freak out the western subject. People in pain are watched very closely, and judged very harshly…Suffice to say that I don’t actually see any reason why we ought to perceive these categories of experience, love and bereavement, as meaningfully distinct, even if we’re obligated to perform them socially.

S: I’ve never really felt that it elides something important—a “breakup” feels like what it is. Incidentally, I use the same word for the breakup I’ve had with my dad.

Je: Works for me.

Do you think you were at fault in any of your friendship breakups? Do you think the other party was at fault? It doesn’t have to be a 100/0 split, but do pick someone to assign the blame to, please.

A: I have regrets but I think my decision was the right one. Mutual friends expressed concern when she would call and text them to find out where I was if I didn’t respond to her quickly enough (usually because I was at work or in class). She’d get upset if I went out without her. It got to a point where she would invent emergency scenarios to get me to cancel plans and come home.

E: I of course think I was in the right every time, but I also feel I was in the right because even if I was the issue, people knew what they were getting into by being my friend in the first place? Autism and a religious upbringing is a terrible combination, because while I think a lot of girls in the church get golden-ruled into being perfect submissive little darlings or whatever, my ironclad sense of right and wrong took the idea almost as a threat: like if I am a GREAT FRIEND and I adore you enough you are then LEGALLY OBLIGATED to reciprocate, which is an insane way to go through life. I think I'm better now, albeit in the sense that I am improved and not cured.

K: I think it takes two to tango. But what pissed me off about my friendship breakup was that she didn’t tell me what was bothering her early enough to allow me to correct my behavior, and she took no responsibility for herself. She was judgmental and impatient and sometimes categorically incorrect about things. I tended to let that slide because I admired her work ethic, her moral compass, and passion.

Jo: Obviously I’ve had my share of fuckups — I’m as liable as anyone to react to my own expectations when I ought to communicate and listen. But as Paul F. Tompkins once sang, “when every other relationship ends, remember! You’re your own best friend.”

S: I think it’s in itself interesting that a breakup is so often framed as something that is bad, and for which someone is to blame! What if people were congratulated for skillful, courageous breakups?

Je: I still regret writing a scene for a playwriting class in high school about a then-best friend. She was justifiably hurt. I couldn’t face the fact that I was jealous of her.

Was there anything you enjoyed about participating in a friendship breakup, even if the enjoyment was perverse? For example: Did it get you attention from other people in ways that made you feel more interesting, or deserving of consolation? Did you take pleasure in the moral high ground, if you had the moral high ground? Did you like enumerating your former friend’s faults to others, after keeping your resentments to yourself for a long time? Did you engage in any gratifyingly petty acts of retaliation?

K: No, it was fairly upsetting. Of course, the alternate version of me had all the right, clever, and wickedly witty things to say about it only after the fact. But it was the kind of situation that started to give me ulcers.

Jo: That first time, having an impromptu party thrown for me (with presents and cake!) was pretty fucking great, it’s true. It is by far the most interesting period of my life to describe to other people, and the heart of it is a mystery I get to mull over even after fifteen years and a lot of forgotten detail.

The pleasure of describing the situation is really in trying to convey that, convey how I don’t hate her, all the pity and gratitude I have, which I can’t necessarily defend, and which I know is only maintained by distance; if she were to reenter my life and we were to reckon with it all, I don’t doubt that the wistful air would curdle.

It’s not about forgiveness or regret. I don’t even think it’s about knowing the true meaning of her actions. We exchanged something. I’ll probably be thinking about that for the rest of my life.

After that, though? The normal breakups? It hurts more, but it’s less interesting. You get to kvetch, just like when you lose a job. Still, as I did with the con artist, I try to give people grace in the long run. At least as much as I give myself.

Je: No, it’s a complete loss. I can’t even write fiction about it without making all my current friends mistrust the confidentiality of our conversations.1

Has anyone ever ended a friendship with you in a way you felt you could respect, even if you did not like it?

Jo: I was wounded by one of the friends I met through the con artist. She ghosted me after ten years. I have often suspected that I am merely tolerated by people I thought of as friends. I recalled the times when she seemed happy and thought, was she performing for my benefit? When she was struggling through life, was I another burden, another task, because she couldn't bear to leave me then the way she ultimately did? Was I an object of pity and misery for her? Did she end up resenting me? I went back and forth and bludgeoned myself with the thought for a few years. There ten years is too many for me to believe it was a falsehood.

S: I invariably have found the whole experience unfathomably miserable, and have wished that there was more of a social norm of rushing to the aid of people who are going through such experiences, in the way that people do for romantic partnership breakups.

Je: Absolutely. About 20 years ago, I was the sidekick/protégé of a woman roughly old enough to be my mother, who led my evangelical Bible study group and a women’s writing group (this was before I transitioned). We bonded over kindness to each other's sensory sensitivities and a shared contempt for Marcus Borg. This ended when the Holy Spirit led me to write explicit gay romance in her class. The friend breakup was mutually agreed upon and sad for both of us. We respected each other's directness. Neither of us believed in shallow friendships where you tiptoe around your essential values mismatch.

How many friendship breakups have you experienced in your life? Fewer than five? More than ten? None?

A: Three, I think; one in high school, one in college, one in my twenties. The first one was pretty uneventful. The second friendship had been pretty short-lived.

K: Fewer than five. Only one in adulthood that I can remember.

Jo: Ones that stick in the memory, with defined endings? Maybe five.

Je: Five that I would consider true breakups.

Who was the first person you told after being dumped by your former friend (or vice versa)?

A: I told those mutual friends who had previously expressed concern to me about my ex-friend’s behavior. What’s weird is that after I moved out, they both complained that it was “awkward” to try to maintain friendships with both of us. I think eventually they both stopped talking to her.

K: My now-ex, because they were coming over when my friend and I were having our breakup phone call.

Jo: For the ghosting friend, I’m pretty sure it was you and my therapist.

Je: My husband is usually the first to know about anything big in my life.

Do you remember what you were wearing when the friendship ended? Did you still have any of your former friend’s stuff at your house, or vice versa, and did you ever participate in a post-breakup “give me back my stuff” swap?

K: I was wearing these grey college sweats. Thankfully there was nothing to return.

Jo: Negative on clothes, but I'm hardly a model of sartorial care. Of the ghosting friend, I still have gifts she gave me — paintings, sketches of me from when we hung out together. My left arm is inked exclusively with her work.

Je: B— left all her stuff in our spare room and we had to ship it to her for hundreds of dollars.

Do you think you are, on balance, a better or a worse person than your former friend?

K: I think we are both decent people in general. She works in public health so she might have a slight edge on me karmically. But I would like to think that my...what I feel to be a general noncombatitiveness, and I hope sense of care and willingness to work things out, is a point in my favor.

Jo: The ghosting friend and I are the same, although I think she’s braver. I knew her as well as I’ve ever loved or known anyone. I felt I understood her, and she understood me. I knew all about her weaknesses and mistakes. I loved them too, because they were hers, and I forgave them. I forgive them now. I forgive and admire her. She has not diminished in my mind at all.

As for the con artist, I am better than her, but I saw and felt frailties in her. She must have been terribly lonely.

Je: I can't judge the whole of a person based on their relationship with me. I believe I'm a more reliable friend than most people, in that I know what I can offer, and I follow through. However, some friends and ex-friends would say that my limits on what I offer are too tight and rigid.

Do you think there is anything you could have done to avoid the breakup, in retrospect?

K: I regret not telling her that I had apologized to her boyfriend. But part of my frustration was I never knew what else I had done wrong.

Jo: I can't think about that question for any length of time. I want too much to be loved.

Je: Honestly, I should have pulled the plug sooner in most instances.

Were any of your friendship breakups with a “best” friend? Or just friend-friends?

A: She was my person. I’d always thought of romantic relationships as temporary, and that she would be in my life forever. I was a mess. I started seeing a second therapist.

Jo: I write this warmly — I distinctly remember you pointing out that characterizing the ghosting friend as my "best" friend was a strange thing. That was kid talk!2 But yes, both women were what I'd call my "best" friend, from their respective periods. They were people I thought welcomed everything about me, and we lived, corporeally, in the same place.

S: Always with a best friend.

Je: One former friend always called us “best friends” in a way that made me uncomfortable because it felt possessive and akin to a loyalty test. The one person I really consider my best friend is a guy from college. We never discuss our friendship.

Have any of your current friends been dumped by another friend? Did you secretly suspect that your friend was at fault, or did you believe that they had been mistreated?

K: A while back, there was a falling-out between two of my friends who belonged to another small group. I can see how both of them contributed to the demise of the relationship. It was very much a matter of communication.

Jo: The con artist absolutely mistreated our friends -- much more severely than she did me. But overall, the people I hang out with tend to be conflict-avoidant, so the heat death of friendships is slow and unremarkable. There were no spectacular endings... except when friends developed into romantic pairings which subsequently ended.

Je: I tend to be the last friend standing.

Do you often suspect that your friends withhold their resentments from you until such time that these resentments reach a critical mass and they feel justified in turning on you?

A: I fear this sometimes. At this point in my life, though, I have trouble imagining a big, dramatic falling out with anyone. I could be wrong. But I think it’s likelier we’d just drift apart due to different priorities.

K: I do think that. I also think it’s natural to some degree. I do it myself sometimes. But I also don’t wait until things become unsustainable to bring something up, and when I do I try to be diplomatic. If you rip the bandaid off and get things over with, usually things turn out fine.

Jo: Autistic as I am, I like to think I can read a room, and that I can detect resentment when it builds. When conflict arises from someone else, it’s almost never about the thing being discussed/yelled about. It’s either a proxy, or more often a reaching for the nearest outlet re: unrelated stressors. All those need is time.

But do I bottle up resentment and let it out in one big litany? That’s a question There have been times. When it does happen, and I’m not heard, those are the instances I feel most justified in detonating a friendship. I can be unforgiving, I just prefer not to be.

Je: That was a huge issue in one of my former friendships. I have gotten better at choosing my friends.

What would it take for you to turn on your current best friend? Be as vague or as specific as you like.

K: If she did another thing that was blatantly racist.

Jo: 1. If they affirmed the things I suspect are my greatest faults, and defined me by them.

2. If they seriously harmed someone without apology or recompense.

3. If they somehow became a fascist.

Beyond that, I’d like to think I’m imminently appeasable.

Je: I’ll always consider my college best friend my brother, but that doesn’t mean I will “help” him in a way that I don’t think really helps him. That’s what we are fighting about at the moment, actually.

How long has it been since you last spoke to the big one? And are you still angry? If you saw them on the street right now, what do you think you would you do?

K: We saw each other at a mutual friend’s wedding a few years ago. We were cordial. I actually got along with her boyfriend quite well. He and I never actually had beef, which is part of what made the whole breakup so confusing. I don’t know what she’s up to now.

M: I am haunted by my friendship breakups. I actually dream about my friend-exes all the time.

Jo: Last contact with the con artist would have been about sixteen years ago. Ten years ago, I ran into her by chance in a different city — she was sitting outside the deli where I got lunch while in town — but she didn’t see me, and I turned around and walked away.

The ghosting friend, that’s a different story. It’s been about five years now. I would embrace her and ask to know everything about her life. I would want to hold her face in my hands, see the way it’s changed and stayed the same. I would tell her I love her, but she knows that, and what has she demonstrated through this long absence if not the fact that there’s no place for me in her life? If she sought me out, that would be something else. But a chance encounter, I would greet her warmly and briefly, and give her the opening for graceful exit. Then I’d call my therapist and cry and nurse my heart until I remembered other things and people. What could I say? She was the great love of my life. Really, that fact might explain everything.

S: I’m not still angry… it would feel crazy to see any of them on the street right now. I think I would want to say hello. What a thought experiment! I’m reeling a bit just from picturing it. I think I would feel (or perform feeling) rueful, maybe even sheepish or ever so slightly contrite and ashamed. Worried about how they perceive me to have changed in appearance over the years. I think I would to have, and want them to want to have, a sort of soulful, melancholic but ultimately heartwarming cup of coffee together or something—and then just go on our way again.

Je: It’s been about eight years. Whenever I display something she used to bully me about, I have a moment of anger, but I realize the “heat” mostly comes from my own shame at the behavior and my own vulnerability.

[Images via Wikimedia]

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Sam is a “writer and woman of loser experience” who writes the popular newsletter cc: helmet girl. I particularly enjoyed her recent article about the perpetually-viral Tom Holland “Umbrella” dance, and heartily recommend that you read it.

Every so often a short-form video will get people talking about relationships online in a really interesting and degrading way. This week the conversation was precipitated by the following exchange, a TikTok video of a young woman dressed like Kelsi from High School Musical [Note from Sam: Kelsi was obviously a formative crush for me, thus everything I say from here on out should be disregarded as projection] reacting with disappointment to the disclosure that a young man, presumably her boyfriend1, had watched porn in the previous week.

Sam and I had a lot of fun taking the bait.

Danny: Sam! Hello and thanks very much for agreeing to chat with me about this. I’m interested more in the conversations that have sprung up around this initial exchange, rather than in weighing in on this particular young straight couple and whether they’re in a healthy relationship or not. Or getting paid $100 by Mr. Beast or whomever to pretend they’re in a healthy relationship. I wish them both reasonably well but don’t care to tell either of them how they ought to spend their twenties.

Can you tell me a bit more about how you came across this? Where did the question of “boundaries” enter into the conversation? I don’t see either of them bringing it up in the video, so I assume it came from someone else.

Sam: I wish this couple the best and I hope, for their sake, that they never feel compelled to discuss a relationship with The Cut ever again.2

Danny: If that’s a veiled criticism of me, I won’t hear it, and I won’t respond to it.

Sam: Anyway, this came up because I follow a higher-than-average number of NSFW accout; they are mostly my friends, but also just things I like. Since the Twitter algorithm is a pressure cooker of antagonism, I get pushed a lot of rad-fem discourse. This probably got scooped up around there.

I reject most iterations of the idea that Gen-Z is uniquely sex-negative, especially to millennials. Part of this is anecdotal counterevidence; I am certainly fucking, my friends have always been fucking. I’d buy that the Telegram users of the world are more sex-negative than they would have been in the nineties. But besides a growing standard deviation of conservatism amongst the youth, I’ve not seen any meaningful data that the median Gen-Z person is especially puritanical.

Danny: That seems right to me. People online often talk about generations in sweeping/totalizing ways I find totally baffling. There are a lot of different types of young people doing very different things! I remember that being the case when I myself was young, for example.

Sam: But I do think one place where I have found people my age have particularly bizarre notions around intimacy is the concept of “boundaries.”

Danny: Carmela Soprano had the same problem, and she’s older than both of us.

As P.E. Moskowitz recently put it:

“He continues: You’ll never be able to feel good about yourself, you’ll never not feel guilt and shame, if you’re Tony’s accomplice. Carmela tells him he’s wrong about her being an accomplice. He replies that maybe he should call her an enabler instead, then.

Carmela takes a moment to process this.

“So…you think I need to define my boundaries more clearly,” she finally replies. “Keep a certain distance. Not internalize —”

The therapist interrupts and hammers home his point. Leave! But it’s too late. “Boundaries.” “Not internalizing.” Carmela has used the language of therapy not to take accountability and change her life, but to keep it exactly the same.”

More from The Chatner archives on Carmela Soprano’s problems:

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Type I Fun

An activity that is enjoyable, relaxing, and/or pleasurable both while it is happening and when remembered fondly later, such as sunbathing on the beach or eating a delicious meal.

Type II Fun

An activity that is unpleasant, difficult, or even dangerous while it is happening, but which may appear meaningful or rewarding in hindsight, such as giving birth or working for Gawker in the mid-2000s.

Type III Fun

An activity that is neither fun while it is happening nor in recollection, often involving tremendous suffering and great risk.

Type IV Fun

An activity that is neither fun while it is happening nor in recollection, often involving tremendous suffering and great risk, but might later bring joy to many if a documentary is made on the subject; if, for example, you died in a highly preventable accident while cave diving, and a popular streaming service later commissioned a documentary on the mad folly of cave divers, where various solemn talking heads ask unanswerable, weeping questions of you like, “But why didn’t she turn back?” as viewers sit on something comfortable at home and congratulate themselves for having the good sense not to want to go cave diving.

Type V Fun

An activity that was fun in the moment, like a particularly creative moment of cruelty leveraged against a peer during adolescence, but painful in remembrance.

Type VI Fun

Something that was neither pleasurable in the moment, nor in the aftermath, but that someone else might hear about with a horrible sort of perverse pleasure. If, for example, they heard about a gruesome attack you suffered on a true crime podcast and felt simultaneous compassion for your terrible suffering as well as overwhelming relief that it did not happen to them.

Type VII Fun

Something that was not pleasurable to you in the moment, but was pleasurable to someone else after the fact, and that a third party took additional pleasure in denouncing the second party for experiencing.

If, for example, your gruesome attack were featured on a true crime podcast, and then someone else later decried the existence of the true crime podcast, saying everyone who produced such podcasts was tastelessly profiting off of the suffering of others, and derived pleasure from said denouncing the tasteless pleasures of others.

Type VIII Fun

Something that was darkly pleasurable to you in the moment and profoundly shameful in the aftermath, for example betraying a close friend or circumventing rationing laws, but that years later impelled you to write a complex and celebrated memoir about shame, and thereby bringing you closer in spirit to the vast majority of humanity.

Type IX Fun

An activity that was unpleasant both at the time and afterwards, such as surviving World War I due to a clerical error, but that led to your being ranked as one of the great martial poets.

Type X Fun

An activity that was unpleasant both at the time and afterwards, such as surviving World War I due to a clerical error, but that led to your being ranked as one of the great martial poets, only for your reputation to be completely overshadowed by the onset of World War II.

Type XI Fun

Dying in a highly ironic and immediately reported-upon fashion, for example in a national park or on Mount Everest while Jon Krakauer is there, such that countless others feel edified by your avoidable demise.

Type XII Fun

Something that is not fun in the moment but is noble and results in a sort of quasi-immortality, like dying in a plane crash and begging your fellow passengers to eat your body if it would help them survive long enough to see rescue.

Type XIII Fun

Something that is fun in the moment, painful and embarrassing for others, but impossible to remember, like becoming addicted to memory-loss drugs or developing delusions which please and reassure you but alienate those around you.

Type XIV Fun

Something enjoyable for you in the moment but impossible to quantify after the fact, such as imposing your will upon others in the form of a ranked scale of types of fun it is possible to have.

Type XV Fun

Something pleasurable at the time but with a relatively short half-life, such that the pleasure must be endlessly renewed by constant repetition, like asking your friends to take the Enneagram.

Type XVI Fun

Something which is dangerous and shameful in the moment, painful to recall in the aftermath, and which leads to an unpleasant late-in-life religious conversion which puts off nearly everyone, like for example being Lord Alfred Douglas.

[Image via]

Soft Play

It was perhaps the first really sunny weekend morning of the spring.

As it was still early in the day there was only myself, my tot, and another fellow about my age with his own tot, standing around at the tot playground. The other father – I never got his name – was not as well-turned-out as myself in the question of dress. I say this not to boast, as there have been plenty of times when I have staggered half-dead into the tot playground in long shorts and slide sandals, but in the interest of strict accuracy and faithfulness to detail.

First his tot began to amble, and then mine, sizing up the plush furniture littering the ground – a train half-submerged in spongey asphalt, a slide emerging from the side of a mock-Tudor cottage, that sort of thing – before beginning to play in earnest. For a long time we did not speak. Then, as neither of our children required milk or a sun hat or encouragement, we adopted attitudes of profound physical leisure.

At some point during the proceedings we found ourselves in agreement on the question of whether children were too soft these days. Children generally, that is. Neither of us thought that our children were too soft. They were certainly in danger of becoming soft, if neither of us were careful, but we were both of us careful men.

You would not have been able to tell just by looking at him, in his soft clothes, but I can appreciate that one does not always dress to reflect one’s strongly-held personal values first thing in the morning, not with a tot in the house.

Both of us agreed that children were too soft these days, although neither of us cared to blame the children for their condition.

“If your kid would like to shove my kid,” I said, just a little grandly, “he is perfectly welcome to do so. I myself was shoved frequently as a child, and gave just as good as I got, too. A little shoving is beneficial, I think, in childhood.”

“Oh, certainly,” he said, “although of course not too much shoving. There is such a thing as too much shoving,” although you could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. He was only saying that to make sure he didn’t cross the line first. His face had that keen look men sometimes get when they suspect they are being offered license.

The tots continued to dangle harmlessly above us.

“Oh, of course,” I agreed, “not too much. I would not shove my own child, for example. My shoves are too imposing, my demeanor too formidable. It would not be apropos. But for one little child to shove another little child – like so” – I gave myself leave to demonstrate what I meant – “almost harmlessly – on a bed of wood chips, you know, it is a good introduction to the laws of force and momentum and cause and effect, and so on. Someone ought to be shoving children. Not their parents. But someone.”

“By all means,” he said, and his expression was magnified by sincerity and eagerness, once he began to grasp the wisdom in my speech. Once people realize I am a sensible man with good ideas, they become eager to comply. “By all means. And in turn, if your small child would care to shove my small child. If, for example he grew tired of waiting his turn at the top of the slide, I would be more than happy to permit it.”

“He ought not to kick him, though,” he said, frowning thoughtfully, after a moment’s further contemplation. “I think we can both agree they ought not to kick at one another.”

“There is a case to be made against kicking,” I said, “to be sure.”

“It’s not that I object to it, on principle,” he said. “Only it might be harder to explain to his mothers than a little shove. Their outlook on kicking is far harsher than my own, the tot’s mothers.”

“It is not always easy to explain things to a child’s mothers,” I agreed. “They are remarkably understanding in some ways, mothers, and surprisingly close-minded in others.” Or is it closed-minded?

As is so often the case in public these days, the conversation now turned to the subject of just how many mothers our tots had.

I must say I dislike this sort of thing. As it happens my own tot can boast of six, but I don’t like to boast. I would prize him just as highly if he had only three or even two. I would still permit him to drink from my best golden cup at luncheon, and eat from my own golden plate after I have finished eating from it. And were he motherless I would still work assiduously to secure a good position for him in an honest and upright household. I would spare no expense in the search.

At a certain point in the conversation, I really couldn’t say when, we had begun to attract an audience. There with other fathers, and other tots, climbing the rope-webbing on the artificial spiderweb along the perimeter of the tot park, and sunning themselves along the picnic tables, and climbing the wrong way up the slide, which was against the rules.

At this point I ought to say that I was no longer sitting down. I had become – I will not say agitated – I felt dynamic. I felt my internal condition would be best represented by a dynamic posture.

I did not accuse him of lying. In all my years of fathering I had never yet met someone with more mothers to his credit than myself, but there is a first time for everything; I merely expressed genuine surprise that I had not encountered this family before, with a seven-mother team, although we must have moved in some of the same circles, to say nothing of the other shapes. I expressed genuine surprise, but I did not offer him a formal challenge. You can ask any of the other fathers within earshot and they will tell you the same thing. The challenge came from him, not me.

Of course once the challenge had been issued, I was perfectly within my rights to offer a mother’s field promotion to one of the bystanders. It’s always a risk, but this sort of thing happens from time to time, and I personally know of at least two families where things worked out perfectly well, and the impromptu mother became a well-received member of the team, as part of a seamless garment.

There was a candidate present I thought had distinguished himself – in mien, and so on, you know, his mien was good – standing off to the side. I believed he would make a good mother. It was not merely that I needed one at the moment. It was not a decision borne out of desperation. I am a man of the world. I told him so straight off.

“Hello,” I said. “I am a man of the world. I need you to make a decision with me immediately, please.”

I laid out the offer in the clearest of terms. No one could say I wasn’t clear. I painted a realistic picture of what he could expect from me and the tot’s other mothers. It was neither rosy nor pessimistic, although I think the offer a good one.

But he waffled at first. I was disappointed. Not disappointed enough to sway me from my choice, but disappointed nevertheless.

“I need you to decide right now if you will be one of my tot’s mothers,” I told him. “He’s a perfectly good son. None of his other mothers have had any complaints about his temperament or his upbringing. It’s a perfectly legitimate offer. This guy’s got me outnumbered seven to six and you have an opportunity here to balance the scales.”

My bystander waffled further.

“What you have here,” I said, “is an absolutely goddamn unprecedented opportunity to balance the scales, to say nothing of entering into the beautiful and sacred condition of motherhood without incurring the slightest personal expense.”

He would not say either yes or no. It maddened me. A beautiful spring day, a practically unheard-of chance to get in on almost the ground floor of a perfectly good readymade child, to be first among a team of equals, of six already really highly qualified mothers, and he dithered! “Do I, or do I not,” I said, “have your consent to make a mother of you?” Without waiting for his answer this time, swiftly I knelt and began making the necessary preparations.

“This shirt is an UNTUCKit,” my bystander began to scream. “This shirt cannot be tucked. It’s designed to be worn untucked.”

In my experience men will say this when they believe someone is about to tuck their shirt in for them without their consent, regardless of whether or not it is actually true. And of course an UNTUCKit shirt can be worn tucked, despite being designed for a more casual untucked look. It is made of performance fabric; performance fabric can survive a little adult roughhousing without snagging or pulling. (To say nothing of the corrosive nature of our relationship with technology. I hope you will at least agree that it is corrosive?)

“For God’s sake don’t tuck it in,” he cried. “Uncle, uncle, I’ll do it.” After he stopped resisting me things got a lot easier.

After I had (perfectly legitimately) re-leveled the playing field, the original father, I mean the fellow who was first alone with me in the playground as we began to discuss softness, began to accuse all of the rest of us of being big game hunters.

“You’re all big game hunters,” he said, pointing lavishly. “Wretched dentists who go on annual big game hunting trips. Oh! Oh! I’ve seen your pictures on Facebook, posing over dead Cape buffalos, grinning your biggest birthday smiles. You grip and grin! You grip and grin over dead gazelles and ibexes and rhinoceroses, and no one in the world hates you enough except for me.”

At this point I was of course filming him, and he was of course filming me. So neither of us gained by it. But I was filming merry hell out of him, I can tell you. I needed both my hands to grapple him, but of course I have a number of mechanisms – a number of ingenious implements and apparatuses – I have other ways of recording people, is what I mean, then simply the devices I hold in my two hands.

He looked like — and I don’t mind saying so — the sort of man who attracted a not inconsiderable following on social media — none of the obvious ones — talking about the importance of memorizing poetry and fixing your attention span by reading certain books with scarcely any covers to speak of. Do you know the kind of books I mean? I scarcely know myself. Where the cover is just a single color with a title on it, and maybe a small tasteful symbol — occultic perhaps, or Masonic — and nothing else. You can make a lot of money doing that sort of thing.

“Do you make a lot of money doing that sort of thing?” I asked, for I know he could hear my thoughts. He was eavesdropping on them quite conspicuously.

I couldn’t hear his first reply through the blood, so I made a courtesy sweep of his mouth so it was free of obstructions and urged him sweetly to try again. A beautiful head of hair, he had. Not quite wavy, but full. I would call it chestnut, but then again part of me didn’t dare to presume the color.

“Not as much as you might think,” he said.

I didn’t like the note of feebleness in his voice — to be perfectly honest I felt he was playing it up, because I hadn’t properly injured him. I found it somewhat difficult to hear him, over the chime of the ice cream trucks, of which there were far too many, circling the action.

None of the other fathers present thought I had gone too far. One or two of them had put up their yellow cards, but aside from the complainers I was looking at a sea of green, with only a few abstentions. For the most part everyone seemed to agree that I was within my rights.

Unfortunately my opponent had neglected to cultivate mass over the years. He ought to have cultivated mass. I fired my stabilizer muscles, and pushed my body to victory.

“I’ll bet you leave your dog in the car on a cool and cloudy day while you run errands,” I said. “I’ll bet you don’t even crack the windows. I’ll bet you don’t even realize that the inside of a car gets extremely hot extremely quickly, even on a cold day? Something to do with the dashboard, I believe. The light can get in, but the heat can’t get out. I think the radio transforms the waves of the sun – something to do with short waves, and long waves. Glass is permeable to radiation but not to light, or vice versa. I’ll bet you don’t even realize how much the poor thing suffers.”

“Children like being cold,” he said. “It’s good for them, getting cold and being cold. They like it.”

“You’re dodging my question,” I said.

“I merely thought of it,” he said, “because of how blue your tot’s hands have grown, playing in the water fountain like that. I don’t think he minds it.”

But I was one mother up on him now, and knew better than to take my eyes off of him to double-check.

At this point my little tot took the hand of the other man’s little tot, and they began walking slowly in circles around us, like ponies in a ring. It was a very formal, sensible, electric sort of procession. I was proud of them both.

“No biting,” the man in the blue hat said. I suppose the other fellows had elected him some sort of referee. He was standing just off of the center yard line in a sort of referee’s stance, if you know what I mean. Wide-legged and belt-forward. He had an air of authority that I didn’t like to argue with.

“I wasn’t biting,” I said.

“No kissing,” the man in the blue hat said a few minutes later.

“I wasn’t kissing,” I said.

My opponent took advantage of the distraction and began to slash at me with an imaginary sword, missing some of my most vital and interesting organs by inches.

“That’s cheating,” I cried. “Swords are cheating.” The man in the blue hat said nothing, the coward. He was blowing bubbles for some of the other fathers.

After that I believe that my enemy was only pretending to be dead in order that I would leave him alone. But that sort of trick never works on me. I expected better from him, and told him so in between kicks.

I couldn’t have told you whether I was kissing or biting him, myself. It may even have been the other way round. At this point of course all the children were gone; I couldn’t begin to guess where they may have got to.

[Image via]

I’ve been smoking cigarettes again lately. A friend recently brought me back a few packs of Scandinavian menthols after a trip to Japan, so I’ve been smoking those. I love menthols and they’re very difficult to get in California now, unless you know somebody who is willing to bend the rules for you. I don’t know anybody who is willing to bend the rules for me, which is a real shame because I would dearly love to walk into a corner store, exchange a knowing look with the proprietor, and buy something under the counter.

One of the most interesting things about smoking nowadays, as opposed to twenty years ago, is how few designated smoking areas remain in the world, even outdoors. No one used to like smoking areas, exactly, and they were not as a general rule beautiful, but they were at least designated, and one knew whether one belonged in them or not. Now, with no corrals to be herded into, one drifts towards increasingly unlovely and out-of-the-way places, which I quite like, because I prefer to smoke cigarettes when I want to feel persecuted, selfish, vile, unwholesome, disappointing, and out of place.1 Of course I am none of those things. I am a fellow with a regular job, pleasant coworkers, a two-year-old son of great personal charisma, lovely partners, and library cards in at least three major metropolitan areas, but sometimes it’s fun to dress up and play pretend.

No one is excited to see you smoking a cigarette on the street, unless they want to smoke one too and hope you’ll give them one of yours. People who might ordinarily be pleased to see me will avoid saying hello if they see me smoking; this is doubly pleasurable, first because it enhances my sense of being a dangerous and misunderstood loner, and second because it makes me feel reasonable, even generous, as I think, Of course, it smells bad, it’s unhealthy, it’s no good for you to linger here…go on, get out of here, I release you…I forgive you, in an attitude of gratified derangement, like an astronaut who sacrifices himself to save the world in an ultimately life-affirming disaster film, rather than an ordinary person committing an entirely mundane, if lightly anti-social act.

I was moved to read an early review of my next book, Meeting New People, that took seriously the main character Barbara’s unpleasantness. I wanted to write a light novel about a tiresome person who was nevertheless sincere in her desire for genuine friendship, someone who has a meaningful attachment to her own bad temper and fears being ground down into likability:

I really adore a book that has affection for its difficult characters. I recently read Daniel M. Lavery’s forthcoming novel, Meeting New People, about an older woman named Barbara—and Barbara is a pill. Yet you can tell that Lavery likes her despite everything, and you can imagine why someone (someone with the same personality traits, perhaps) might like her too.

At least Barbara hopes so. She’s on the hunt for a new best friend, having burned through nine different ones over the course of her life thus far. We can see, from the first chapter, why Barbara’s most recent bestie, Susan Montgomery, is done with her: Barbara is deeply opinionated about petty things. She can be brusque and grating, especially with her son and her young co-workers. At the same time, her discernment (especially when it comes to the culinary arts—she is a talented home cook who works at a deli) is frequently sharp and delightful; her judgments render her unique and robust.

I have often described Meeting New People as a pastiche of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, only without the justification of marital infidelity to excuse its cruelty and self-righteous judgment. I sincerely admire Ephron’s cruelty as a writer, particularly her cruelty about appearance:

“I can’t begin to tell you how it sent me up the wall…this affair between my husband, a fairly short person, and Thelma Rice, a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.”

But of course Heartburn’s Rachel has a long lead to justify her cruelty; she has been cuckolded, while seven months pregnant, by her famous husband with another member of their social circle, and if ever there were license for cruelty, that is certainly it. Barbara has no such license, having been recently dumped by her best friend Susan Montgomery for what are almost certainly excellent reasons. She has in fact been dumped by a number of best friends over the course of her fifty-seven years, but is not yet prepared to knuckle under and say, “I was wrong about everything.”

I wanted to write about someone who was completely alone, not without justification and yet not merely because they were an as-yet-reconstructed Scrooge who was about to burst into spiritual perfection, either. Barbara is experiencing the social and interpersonal squeeze that comes when “designated smoking areas” are replaced with “guesswork and nothing.” I think of her as the sort of person whose life was made more difficult when, for example, diet talk went from being a generally-accepted topic of discussion with new acquaintances and coworkers to something profoundly personal and potentially damaging. This is not to say that diet talk has been anything like banished from polite society, only that the rules have changed pretty significantly in the last thirty years. On balance I think this has been a good thing, but it interests me to consider what sort of friction and discomfort accompanies it, and what begrudging, unwilling compliance to new norms does to intimate relationships.

It’s perfectly fine in your forties to start to buying the expensive sunscreen instead of just whatever’s on sale at the drugstore and generally looking after your skin, but it’s absolute death to start conspicuously and unnecessarily dropping your age into general conversations, where it’s clear that you’re looking to nudge people into a very particular and outsized response: “Are you telling me that you’re forty-five? You’ve got to be kidding me, your skin looks like a baby peach, I never would have guessed, et cetera,” which of course they’re going to say, because people can usually tell when they’re being prompted.

And now you’ve got the ammunition you wanted, which is a chance to say, “People are always shocked when I tell them I’m forty-five!” Or whatever age you are. I don’t like it when anybody makes jokes about being old, or if they make the acquaintance of someone much younger than themselves, jokes about how lucky the young person is to still be young–it’s all so embarrassing.

It also means that nobody in your life is willing to tell you that you’re embarrassing yourself, which is doubly embarrassing, because it means either nobody cares about you enough to be honest, or nobody who cares about you is smart enough to see what’s going on. Youth is the one thing you can never get back once it’s gone, and the only attitude worth having towards lost youth is a matter-of-fact one. I don’t mean anything like getting old “gracefully” or “with dignity,” which I’ll admit are two clichés I particularly dislike.

Aging is the one thing that happens to everyone, and that no one can do anything about. If there’s any single foundation that underlies all polite behavior, I think it’s got something to do with not drawing unnecessary attention to inevitabilities and trying to smooth over whatever necessary roughness everybody has got to endure. People ought to just get old, full stop, and not complain about it or make cute little jokes, either. Maybe I feel this way because of Stephanie what’s-her-name, but I don’t think of her as having been especially important, except for how she brought me and Ann-Preston together, since before that I hadn’t had a best friend since the ninth grade, when Iliona Lukic purposefully picked a fight two weeks before her stable party just so she could uninvite me. (My best friend at the time, Kimberly G., went without me.) There were horses.

I just think that it’s one thing to want to generally look young for your age, or to occasionally enjoy the company of someone younger than yourself, but it’s ridiculous to sprint after it, or to try to clutch it to your chest, and that it’s better not to be ridiculous if you can help it. That’s mostly what other people are for, I think, to tell you when you’re looking ridiculous, so you can knock it off. When you’re alone, you can’t always tell what’s ridiculous, and that’s one of the reasons I never feel really comfortable when I’m in between best friends.

Something I know now, that I didn’t know then, is that any friendship that first comes together over a mutual dislike of a third person is the best kind. Don’t let anybody tell you different. Yes, when the wheels come off, they really come off, and if you two got together over a shared meanness, you’re probably going to be very mean to each other at the end of things. But so what? Whenever a friendship dies, it feels like a bolt across your life, even if you’re both polite about it. In the meantime, you’ve had a hell of a lot of fun. I can’t think of anything that feels quite like being mean together with someone who’s really good at it, who knows what she’s doing, who knows when to dig in and when to back off, and has a nice sense of scale about the whole thing.

I don’t know if that’s exactly true. Sometimes I say things just to find out whether I really believe them. Those kinds of friendships are wonderful, I will say that, because so few people are prepared to defend meanness, but of course, they can be awful, too. Certainly, I sometimes wish that I just naturally thought kind things about people. That seems very peaceful. And I do want people to like me, and usually being kind helps with that. It’s hard to be unkind and sensitive, I mean. So sometimes—usually after I’ve had a big bust-up with someone—I wish I was naturally very kind, and that when I looked at people I just saw their inner luminous spirits, or their better selves, or whatever it is that kind people see when they look at other people, but I don’t really know how to generate those thoughts, and if I try to, I end up feeling flat and insipid and, frankly, like a liar.

It’s not a mystery to me, why I have trouble keeping people around. I know I’m difficult, and at my age, I’m unlikely to change substantially before I die. I just want to find someone I can be difficult with, without turning on each other.

It was also important to me that Barbara should be desperately lonely. I think feeling beleaguered and lonely at the same time is a dangerous and interesting combination, one that often produces wildly contradictory impulses towards change, retreat, domination, and defiance.

Barbara is not, I don’t think, my mother. Among other things, my mother is a very popular woman, and aside from me I don’t think has ever lost a single friend in her life. Nor is she quite my sister, nor any of my other relatives, and yet if you were to put my mother and ten of her closest friends in the same room as my sister, cousins, and grandmothers, Barbara would surely be gathered together with them. And none of them smoke, either.

Last year I started sleeping with men for the first time in quite a few years, and I did so in a way that was new to me. The locations, the contexts, the parties involved, the rules of comportment were new not only to me but to most of my closest companions, and I found myself with the desire to lift my eyes from my own paper and compare my work against someone else’s: Is it like this for everybody?

A better question might be, And what is this?

One is forever learning new ways to act, which is both pleasurable and destabilizing; one both fears and enjoys the sense of behaving like an ingenue at a decidedly non-ingenue age. Once a man told me while we were having sex that he hadn’t gotten off all day, because he wanted to save it for me. My first thought in reaction to this was And he works from home, so that really counts for something. I found it an astonishingly hot and tender thing for him to say. I found my own reaction a little funny. I still do, on both counts.

I’ve very much enjoyed Davey Davis’ writing about sex with strange men as I’ve looked for fellow travelers:

“Before Dallas, it had been almost a year since I’d fucked an anonymous man. I felt out of practice, for one thing. Then there was…my reluctance to really lean into what I’ve been calling “twink MILF,” a brand increasingly foisted on me by a certain kind of bro who doesn’t know what to do with an older fem other than be mothered. (“Wow, 37! I love cougars 😏,” a guy one presidential term my junior recently told me…)

While he was decisive in his movements, moving my body with the ease that I do my phone, he was gentle; he choked me only briefly, as if to demonstrate that he could, like a flight attendant holding the oxygen mask to her face before takeoff.”

“I think you and I might sleep with some of the same sort of men,” I wrote to Davey afterwards. I was thinking then of chasers in particular, as distinct from men who might only incidentally be interested in sleeping with trans men1, those whose interest is moderate, modest, restrained, manageable, “I could eat” rather than “That’s exactly what I want; I don’t need to see the rest of the menu.”

One thinks of a chaser as having the placid, unconcerned certainty of Pepe Le Pew, bounding ceaselessly and unidirectionally after someone else’s transsexuality. I’ll be the psychologically complex one, sweetheart, you just be your straightforward self, okay?

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Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky is coming back to theaters this summer, the one where Peter Falk and John Cassavetes play best friends who have been assigned to betray one another and try to delay the inevitable by running around Philadelphia all night drinking half-and-half and frightening women.

It’s very good and if you get the chance to see it in the theater I hope you do. It’s also a little stagey and more than a little exhausting in a way I find pretty realistic; every fight I’ve ever had with a friend or a lover has similarly felt totally pointless and insane. One leaves the world for a few hours, and nothing feels possible any longer. Why not switch coats and watches? Why not get off the bus and walk in the opposite direction? Why not go to the movies or get kicked out of a bar; nothing makes sense in the middle of an argument anyhow.

Recently I’ve grown a little talked out on the subject of women interpreting intimacy between men1 (see Return to Pervert Ethnography Island if you’re still looking for more), but I have to admit that Elaine May is the indisputed queen of such interpretation. Not five minutes into her second movie, Mikey and Nicky, Peter Falk breaks down a door so he can start gentling John Cassavetes like a damn horse, petting his flanks and rubbing pills down his throat.

The script opens with a little explanation of the setup that never makes it onto the screen:

One of the oddest and perhaps, most frightening characteristics of a “hit” is the behavior of the victim who is aware that he is slated to die.

He knows, almost as a certainty, that someone inside his organization, someone whom he considers a friend, will be used to set him up for the kill. This is done for obvious reasons. It is easier to kill a man who has been set up, and he can only be set up by a friend, because who else will he trust? The friend must also be known and accepted by the organization, because who else can they trust?

There is also a flavor of ritual about the procedure, as primitive as the Cosa Nostra’s ritual kiss of death. Perhaps it is because of the ritualistic .response of the intended victim. Knowing the custom of the set-up as well as he does, and sometimes having actively participated in it, he will, almost invariably, call on someone inside the organization for help. Why he does this is a matter for speculation. That he does do it is a matter of fact. That he seldom escapes is a matter of record.

I don’t know how many times Falk intimidates Cassavetes into taking a pill in this movie. At least three. And that’s to say nothing of the crackers he force-feeds him. When people talk about Mikey and Nicky they often focus on how May shot an absolute unreal amount of footage for it, something like a million hours more than Gone With The Wind, like she just unhinged her eyes and turned into this endlessly hungry camera and never stopped looking at these two guys for the rest of their lives.

Vincent Canby thought the movie was a mildly interesting failure —

“It’s a melodrama about male friendship told in such insistently claustrophobic detail that to watch it is to risk an artificially induced anxiety attack. It’s nearly two hours of being locked in a telephone booth with a couple of method actors who won’t stop talking, though they have nothing of interest to say, and who won’t stop jiggling around, though they plainly aren’t going anywhere. They just seem to be carrying on—making elaborate actor fusses—in front of the camera. Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.”

— although I think if you look at the review it’s clear he’s anxious that she’s somehow contaminated Cassavetes and Falk with her womanly interest (“Melodrama, claustrophobic, artificial, jiggling, carrying on, fusses,” are these men behaving like men? are these men behaving like women? are these friends behaving like friends?). Canby’s not precisely wrong about the fussing, of course, but I think John Cassavetes and Peter Falk are about as good as actor-fussing as anybody. Sometimes two hours of watching guys with unbelievable heads of hair doing a lot of jittery prop work is just the ticket.

Oddly, Canby also seems to think that Mikey and Nicky grew up in California (“It’s about a couple of small-time Los Angeles hoods who’ve grown up together, joined the same mob and now, on this particular night, find their lifelong relationship passing in front of our eyes in aggressive close-up”), even though the movie is set in Philadelphia. In fact Mikey and Nicky is arguably about how it is impossible to ever leave Philadelphia once you are in it, even if you want to, very badly.

I tried to take notes the last time I rewatched Mikey and Nicky, because I was interested in the reactions it produced in me, but they all looked more or less like this:

• “All my life I wanted to be a guy who knew a guy for thirty years”

• “I want to shave a man’s face. No funny business, just a solid job”

• “People always used to get ulcers, but you never hear people talk about ulcers anymore. They’ll still be anxious or stressed, but they won’t get ulcers anymore”

John Cassavetes behaves unbearably throughout; he is desperately attached to his wretched little life, and becomes more desperate and wicked and brattish the closer he gets to losing it. His behavior is objectionable — more than objectionable — but really the reason no one can stand to be around him is they all know he’s perfectly aware that he’s going to be killed.

If A New Leaf is about the joy of realizing you no longer want to kill your wife, Mike and Nicky is about the devastation that comes from realizing you’re going to let Ned Beatty — a man with a friendless face, a friendless voice, a friendless carriage, a friendless spirit — kill the guy you grew up with.

I’m inclined to think that Henrietta in A New Life is aware her husband is planning to kill her; I’m also inclined to think she manages to get out of it by offering to sign all her money over to him before they get married, less because she thinks of the cash as a straightforward exchange and more because she wants to use his own weight and momentum against him. Henry wants Henrietta to become civilized, or at least civilizable, and Henrietta wants Henry to experience the pleasures of helplessness, and they both more or less get their way in the end. Nicky is similarly aware, but the difference is that Mikey is going to let him die; he doesn’t really want to do anything to him anymore, and there’s no way to get out of that sort of thing.

“I just want to not do it anymore,” Falk tells him on the street in the middle of one of their endless quarrels. “Be your friend.”

“Then I’ll be your friend,” Cassavetes counters, like that fixes everything. Every once in a while in life you’ll run into the kind of person who refuses to be broken up with, and they’ll give you some of the longest nights of your life.

I think people with narcissistic tendencies can do very well in the caregiving and customer-service professions, so long as theose tendencies are properly managed.

I have a number of narcissistic tendencies. In disclosing this, I hope the reader thinks to himself, “What a charming, candid disclosure of what can after all be only a little and eminently forgiveable fault.”

I also prefer to think primarily about myself in the context of my professional life, because I am very anxious not to write down a lot of whimsical anecdotes about the “fun” things residents say and do, to sketch personalities and share homespun wisdom and turn myself into Mitch Albom.

People like to congratulate you when you say you work with children or the elderly. But if you say you work with people your own age, no one has a very strong reaction one way or the other. I think it is better to take a square look at one’s own narcissism, one’s desire to appear special and young and strong by default, than to mistake working with a particular age group for a virtue.

I work in the Activities department of a large senior-living corporation. I drive, I put up and take down fliers, I issue reminders, maintain confidences, I set the evening movie schedule, twice a week I lead a seated exercise class, I am responsible for a number of keys, I help to manage the bistro; in this way and in several others I am very much like François Vatel:

The maître d’hôtel, superintendent of chefs and household staff, acted as the public face and temporary repository of his master’s honor, and was responsible for making all arrangements necessary for convenience, comfort, and prestige. He was master of all servants except himself and very nearly not a servant at all. His role was not to absorb barked instructions and turn them into repetitive acts of obedience, as was the lot of a lower-ranked servant, but to act as if he were his own master in absentia, to think as he might think, to act as he might act, to anticipate and contrive on someone else’s behalf. The task of the maître d’hôtel was therefore doubly difficult: first, he must successfully twin himself, and once that impossibility was achieved, he must teach one of those selves to think like a master of servants, and then teach the other to take orders from the first.

When my sense of dignity is well in order and I feel myself on a stage in the hallways I take great pride in being approachable. If I see a piece of trash on the ground, I sink down to retrieve it in grand humility. If nobody is there to see and admire me as I do it, I might wait until the moment becomes more opportune.

Once, when I was straining to replace the big wall calendar by the elevator bank: “Look at him, with his long arms!”

Once, carrying two grocery bags from the car into the lobby (each bag containing only a single grocery): “So strong!”

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People will sometimes try to recommend Marty in light of the incel movement or the “male loneliness epidemic,” but you can safely ignore that sort of talk. Nor should you believe anyone who describes the movie with any of the following words: sentimental, universal, simple, little, or humble. It’s a movie about how the GI Bill remembered to provide servicemen with college degrees, steady employment, and a home, but forgot to throw a wife into the bargain during the 1950s, a decade that acted like a marriage-producing machine, where your neighbors could lawfully kill and eat you in the streets if you stayed single too long.

Ernest Borgnine plays Marty, a thirty-four-year-old Italian-American butcher living in the Bronx, the only unmarried Italian-American man left in the world, who has ten thousand brothers and sisters, each of them more married than the last. Imagine an Omelas child who is allowed to leave the house once a day in order to slice lamb chops and experience sexual humiliation and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the character. Imagine a world where marriage exists primarily as a form of conversational currency that will prevent people from screaming at you in a butcher shop, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the moral universe this character lives in.1

You don’t get either Moonstruck or When Harry Met Sally… without Marty, incidentally. When Harry Met Sally shares Marty’s preoccupation with New Year’s Eve as a bellwether of the safety the couple-form provides, and Moonstruck manages to pull off the same trick of making a Catholic Italian-American from a traditional family getting engaged seem like the most shocking and subversive act imaginable, with the same remarkable neatness.

In the opening scene, one of Marty’s middle-aged customers, Mrs. Fusari, asks him which of his brothers got married the past weekend. During his monologue she occasionally interrupts him to heckle or correct in an increasingly aggrieved tone.

“No, that’s my other brother, Freddie,” he says. “My other brother Freddie, he’s been married four years already. He lives down on Webb Avenue. The one who got married Sunday, that was my little brother, Nickie…No, that’s my sister Margaret’s husband, Frank. My sister Margaret, she’s married to the insurance salesman, and my sister Rose, she married a contractor. They moved to Detroit last year. And my other sister Frances, she got married about two and a half years ago in Saint John’s Church on Kingsbridge Avenue. Oh, that was a big affair. Well, let’s see now, that’ll be about a dollar-seventy-nine. How’s that with you?”

“When you gonna get married, Marty?” Mrs. Fusari says in response. “You should be ashamed of yourself. All your brothers and sisters, they all younger than you, they married and they got children.”

People will sometimes refer to Borgnine’s Marty as “gentle” or “amiable,” but this is not true either.2 His affability is paper-thin and exaggeratedly wounded. He is not a cheerful man; scratch him and he will scream. He lives in an impossible world. His friends want to meet women, not keep them, and his mother, Mrs. Pilletti, wants him to get married right up until he meets a viable candidate, at which point she sours on them both.

About a third of the way through the movie Marty does meet Clara Snyder at the Stardust Ballroom, it is because her date has approached him in the stag line and offers him five bucks to pretend to be an old army buddy and take “a dog” off his hands. The stag line at the Stardust is a wretched place to be: a row of dateless, danceless men all waiting their turn to work up their nerves or to sweat out a rejection. The “dog” in question is played by Betsy Blair, who has the face of a saint, and spends most of the movie either weeping or listening radiantly. Blair often plays Clara as if she were playing a blind woman, turning her face in expectant radiance towards Marty without making direct eye contact. She wears a terrible little Peter Pan collar with a bolo tie, too, which is how you know she does not expect to ever be loved, and her splendid long face makes a wonderful counterpoint to Borgnine’s splendid wide face.

Everybody will tell you to get married but nobody really wants to let you do it on your own terms. This is where the Omelas complex comes back in; no one is happy when two plain wallflowers find one another. Marriage is for the young and the beautiful. No one is excited for Marty to meet someone, if the someone he’s met is just another Marty. When Marty realizes this, his despair is complete.

Everyone around him is cruel; so excuse him when he’s cruel.

He makes his verbal restraint (withholding is often a better term) conspicuous at every opportunity, and only drops his passive-aggression for the occasional burst of aggression. He is polite only to remind others around him where they have failed to be polite, to highlight their lapse in standards, and the lapses are frequent and deranged. Mrs. Fusari says “What’s the matter with you?” and “You oughta be ashamed” at least twice more before completing her purchase; the very next customer, Mrs. Canduso, asks after the wedding and immediately follows it with “You oughta be ashamed,” while Marty is wrapping up a four-pound pullet for her.

Marty is as far above his surroundings as an Austen heroine, and like an Austen heroine knows his continued existence rests upon resisting the values of his most beloved friends and relations.

Every woman Marty knows wants him to get married, and every man Marty knows wants him to waste his time endlessly, like the Terrible Trivium from The Phantom Tollbooth. His friends hang out in bars and the street and back porches reading newspapers, magazines, dime store novels, having pointless, sterile, repetitive, masturbatory (sometimes literally) conversations. A few illustrative pieces of dialogue:

“What happened?”

“The Yanks took two.”

“Any homers?” [No answer.]

and:

[Reading a dirty magazine in public] “They shouldn’t sell magazines like this on a public newsstand.”

Worst of all is a conversation between Marty and his wretched friends that takes place right before the climactic phone call, as he sits sweating in a punishing vision of the sort of future he can look forward to in their company:

Joe: “I always figure a guy oughta marry a girl who’s twenty years younger than he is, so that when he’s forty, his wife is a real nice-lookin’ doll.”

Leo: “That means he’d have to marry the girl when she was one year old.”

Joe: “I never thought of that.”

There’s a sense throughout the movie that Marty becomes increasingly aware that he is living in Hell. It was perhaps more than a little narcissistic of me to respond in this way, but I could not help but take it personal, upon learning that both my brother and my father were pedophiles a little more than a year after I had decided to make a go out of living as a man. Certainly I had not decided to transition solely out of admiration for my male relatives, but the information nevertheless threw a dampener over the scheme for a time. The walls are closing in on Marty. The only train leaving the station is marriage and the only other passenger is Clara.

It’s not a sweet movie, is what I mean. But there’s something bracing and even refreshing about watching people leave the house and visit a lot of “third spaces” and still experience non-stop loneliness, brutality, one-upmanship, and defeated bids for intimacy. The screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky came up with the idea after going to a dance at the “Friendship Club” (!) one night where he saw a sign reading “Girls, Dance With the Man Who Asks You. Men Have Feelings, Too” (!!). That’s exactly the sort of leverage Marty uses on Clara, too; his insecurity and self-pity are so massive, so lit up in neon, so demanding of attention, that there is little room for hers.

“You can’t just walk off on a girl like that,” Marty says to Clara’s date, appalled at the waste. But he’s fascinated by the effects of cruelty on Clara, and watches hungrily as some other stag is willing to take the five bucks and lie to her. It’s a new sort of cuckoldry, where rejection takes the place of sex, and Marty gets to watch it all from the best seat in the house. He sees her unwanted first and crying second; that’s how he knows she’s the girl for him, because of her exquisite sensitivity to deception and cruelty. He sees in Clara the possibility of someone who will recognize his own suffering, and their union a reward for their mutual distress — hers for necer complaining, his for incessant grumbling. She endures distress in silent tears, like the little mermaid, while he endures distress loudly, like the prophet Jonah, or saint Martha, or Christ cursing the fig tree.3 He never shuts up once on their date. Occasionally he will curse himself for talking to me, and promises to stop talking, but he can’t, and she does not seem to mind. His loneliness has always been accompanied by plenty of talk, and he’s used to it; her loneliness, we suspect, has involved a great deal of silence, and she is relieved to be bathed in chatter.

Incidentally, Marty frequently refers to both himself and Clara as “dogs,” not because he thinks she’s ugly but because everyone else claims to. Which is all well and good, communally-mediated attractiveness being an important element of the story, but it makes it all the stranger that no one acknowledges the fact that his sister-in-law Virginia, who plays an important role in the movie’s subplot, is beautiful almost beyond the point of reason.

Frankly, 20-30% of the movie’s dialogue should be given over to this woman’s beauty. People should be talking about it all the time. They should be talking to her like Jon Hamm in 30 Rock’s “The Bubble” episode, but everyone just wants to talk about how ugly Marty and Clara are, as if having an angel’s face were an unremarkable fact of everyday life.

Virginia is married to Marty’s cousin Thomas. Her mother-in-law, Marty’s aunt Catherine, lives with the two of them and their new baby, and Virginia and Catherine fight all the time. Both Virginia and Thomas are desperate for Marty and his mother to invite Catherine to live with him, although as soon as the tradeoff is made, Virginia and Thomas turn on each other, and there is no indication in the script that their lives will improve as a result of being left to their own devices.

Catherine and Mrs. Pilletti have a Death of A Salesman sort of conversation, poignant and embittered by turns, about being forced into early retirement as wives and mothers: “I’m only fifty-six years old,” Catherine says to her sister before begrudgingly accepting her invitation to move in together. “What am I going to do with myself? I have strength in my hands. I want to cook. I want to clean. I want to make dinner for my children. Am I an old dog to lie in front of the fire til my eyes close? These are the terrible years.”

Mrs. Pilletti offers sisterly consolation, tenderness, and understanding in return: “Catherine, you are very dear to me. We have cried many times together. When my husband died, I would have gone insane if it were not for you. I ask you to come to my house, because I can make you happy. Please come to my house.” It makes no dent, it makes no difference. Catherine is not consoled one whit.

Speaking of things you can ignore! Don’t let anybody try to tell you that this movie is about how the midcentury ideal of the nuclear family pushed out older ideals of extended kinship or raising a child with a village, either. I’m sure it did, but Aunt Catherine doesn’t want to be part of a village. She wants to be a vampire king. She exaggerates Virginia’s gestures as potential violence — “That girl was shaking her hand at the the baby. I said, ‘You brute! Don’t you strike that baby! That’s my son’s baby!’” — to which her sister tries to remind her, “Well, it’s her baby, too, you know.”

“That’s my son Thomas’ baby,” Catherine repeats.

“Well, it ain’t your baby,” Mrs. Pilletti says.

An in-law unit would not solve Aunt Catherine’s problems, is what I mean, when what she wants is to kill and eat her daughter-in-law, and never stand aside for anyone. Wonderfully, the Catherine-and-Mrs. Pilletti storyline is never resolved in the slightest. There is not even a gesture towards resolution. Catherine is unhappy, and infects Mrs. Pilletti with her unhappiness; Virginia and Thomas are not cured of their unhappiness by expelling her from their home. Their scenes simply stop showing up on the screen.

Mrs. Pilletti, who had been so eager for Marty to meet a nice girl, who had been so tentatively warm to Clara when they met briefly in the kitchen, becomes nervous and hateful as soon as Catherine suggests that she too will be crowded out when her last son gets married: “She don’t look Italian to me,” she tells Marty the day after his date. “I don’t like her. Don’t bring her to the house no more — I don’t know. She don’t look Italian to me.”

No one wants Marty to call Clara the day after their date except for Marty. His furious announcement that he likes her despite the general disapproval of his neighborhood is at least an avowal of pleasure (“I had a good time last night. I’m gonna have a good time tonight”):

“Miserable and lonely! Miserable and lonely and stupid! What am I, crazy or something? I got something good here! What am I hanging around with you guys for?…You don’t like her. My mother don’t like her. She’s a dog, and I’m a fat, ugly little man. All I know is I had a good time last night. I’m gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I’m gonna go down on my knees and beg that girl to marry me. If we make a party again this New Year’s, I gotta date for the party. You don’t like her, that’s too bad.”

That he does make the call feels hugely significant. I had been prepared to find the sentiment of Marty grating, but I was on the edge of my seat; it felt as though I was watching a single soul escape Hell at the very last possible second, and for the first time I understood Luke 15:7, “I say unto you that likewise more joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance.”

But it’s important, I think, that our final glimpse of Clara is at home, alone on the couch with her parents, watching television and weeping, because Marty did not call when he said he would, was not willing to avow the pleasure he took from her company until after he had broken the only promise he’s made to her.

It’s fitting that, aside from the conversations between Aunt Catherine and Mrs. Pilletti, the only other time we see two women discussing marriage in Marty it’s between two unnamed Irish women drinking at Marty’s regular bar. They’re discussing a mutual acquaintance who keeps having children, despite her doctor’s admonition that more children will kill her:

“Well, last week Tuesday, she gave birth to the baby in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,” the first woman says, “a big healthy boy of nine pounds.”

“Oh, that’s nice. So the doctor was wrong, wasn’t he?” says the other.

“Oh, no. She died right in the hospital.”

“Oh, that’s a sad story. And her husband is that little fellow, works in Peter Reeves?”

“That’s the one.”

“Oh, that’s a sad story.”

Clara leaves the movie the same way she entered it: weeping, in a high collar. Marriage is no good and will kill you, but the alternative is worse.

Marty at least gets to experience the pleasure of doling out cruelty rather than absorbing it before the credits roll. Just as he slides into the phone booth to call Clara up, utterly secure in the knowledge that she will forgive him, he turns to his best friend and tormenter Angie and repeats what Mrs. Fusari told him at the beginning of the film:

When you gonna get married, Angie? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You’re thirty-three years old. All your kid brothers are married. You oughta be ashamed of yourself.

Then he closes the door to the phone booth, decisively, like Al Neri shutting Kay out of the room at the end of the Godfather. It’s a wonderful, vicious little film, and I felt as though I had been suffocated by the end of it.

Danny: You mentioned new atheism, which was very popular at the time, and maybe all the more so at Christian college for appealing to a very small group of people!

Ella: There was a small group of angry exvangelicals including Andrew and myself who seemed to be the most vocal and militant about it. We sat in the back of Dr. Noble’s Problem of Evil senior seminar, scoffing and being in general rather rude to the entire class. I wrote my thesis on the decline of democracy at the hands of evangelical political power and remember rushing to intervene with Andrew at what looked to be a professor’s last ditch effort to keep you in the fold over coffee. Did you identify with the movement at that time? I found my way to Korean Zen and then added on an identity as an Episcopalian CEO (Christmas and Easter Only), but retain the general skepticism of that era regarding anything metaphysical.

Danny: I don’t remember encountering the “exvangelical” portmanteau, which I’m afraid I find unlovely, until well after college. But I certainly remember that strange combination of anger and motionlessness. I was so resentful over being at APU and so completely unwilling to consider transferring schools. It never even crossed my mind. And I did think of myself as an atheist then, certainly. I probably still do, although in a way that feels a lot more relaxed now. I share your distant affinity with Episcopalians, although Zen practice isn’t for me. Skeptical of metaphysics but very woo-woo and excited about the process of aging and dying.

I remember Dr. Noble! He was terribly kind. To the best of my recollection he seemed desirous of establishing a possible path for me, should I want to remain or re-become a Christian, but not in a way that felt overbearing or officious. I’m afraid that I do remember telling him on at least one occasion that he would have been a terrific lesbian, which was hardly appropriate of me. But for all that it’s a clumsy construction, I think I was trying to make cross-gender identification possible when I would offer the honorary appellation to people I felt some sort of tie with, using language that was somewhat popular at the time.

I did enjoy the occasional bursts of attention I got from faculty and students as a possible lost sheep who might be persuaded back in. It made me feel important. Being at APU flattered my vanity in that way.

Do you remember any other trans students at APU? I don’t remember anyone who was out or had transitioned at the time, of course, but a few of us did so pretty shortly after graduation.

Ella: As for meeting other trans people at APU, many of my friends and one professor ended up being trans but all transitioned after I graduated: Joh C., Jade P., Xio C., and of course, you. The four of you, forged what looked like a feasible path to surviving if not thriving as a trans person so that by 2018 I could take a giant step in transitioning.

Danny: Did you do anything memorable with your gender at APU? I got married as a joke to a friend of my ex-boyfriend’s, and got in a lot of trouble for it. Were you there? I remember that Andrew was, but I was very drunk at the time and I’m not sure who all was present that day.

Ella: I don’t think I, or anyone else, really digested my internal female reading voice or the moniker of “male lesbian” until long after the fact. The bits of gender exploration I did find myself doing in that time were always in secret, either locked in my dorm room or swishing in a mini skirt at Temptation Tuesdays, what was essentially a chaser event held at a gay spa in Hollywood. I recall seeing familiar faces at those events but nothing that was ever acknowledged outside of those dimly lit halls.

I don’t remember if I was at your joke wedding but that is the downside I suppose of having been constantly on weed and mushrooms. What prompted that for you?

Danny: Very little other than impulse and a desire for attention, I think. A few days beforehand I had gotten dessert at a little Filipino bakery in Duarte with Jamie Noling (one of the co-campus pastors) and a few other students. I don’t know if you remember Duarte – it was that little town next to Irwindale, where they have the big Renaissance fair every summer, about halfway between APU and Pasadena. The strip mall the bakery was in also had a wedding venue called the Amoré Chapel. I was at the Brass Elephant bar in Monrovia a few nights later with my roommate Jen and a few other people. This was right around the Prop 8 referendum. It was very much like the “series of escalating dares” that resulted in Gob’s wedding on Arrested Development.

This guy James – who I didn’t know very well but who was visiting Andrew from Yucaipa – and I kept drinking and saying the sort of things that were popular at the time, you know, How ridiculous that you and I could get married, just because you’re a man and I’m a woman, for no reason at all, we should show them, et cetera. And I called the Amoré Chapel and left them a very drunken voicemail at two in the morning and then we all went back to my apartment and passed out. In the morning I got a call back and they said there was an available timeslot that evening if we could bring a few witnesses and, I think, seventy-five dollars.

I had recently stopped dating my college boyfriend because I felt I wasn’t getting enough attention from him, and started dating my college girlfriend, who gave me plenty of attention but I always felt I could do with more. So I kept saying how funny it would be and we all kept drinking throughout the day and stumbled through the ceremony.

Later that evening my roommate told me, “I didn’t want to say anything at the time, because it was pretty funny, but I think if your parents claim you as a dependent on their tax returns while you’re secretly married, that they could get investigated for tax fraud.” I don’t know if that’s actually true or not but of course it scared the hell out of me at the time.

And of course James’ girlfriend ended up being pretty angry with him when she found out he’d gotten married to someone else during a weekend trip to Los Angeles. I think she broke up with him over it, although I wouldn’t swear to it. My girlfriend hadn’t been there either, and she did not love being left out of the loop, although she otherwise maintained a pretty lighthearted attitude towards the whole affair. We met up a few weeks later at a Starbucks somewhere halfway between Azusa and the High Desert to file for divorce because it turns out it’s very difficult to get an annulment in the state of California.

It cost $500 and the court clerk told us there would be a six-month delay before the divorce could go through, as a sort of mandatory cooling-off period. I had to borrow the money from my friend Maddie because I didn’t want to tell my parents I’d gotten married or divorced, and paid her back over the next year. It was sort of funny, and sort of anxiegenic, and sort of troubling, like a lot of things I did at the time. I still have my divorce papers in a silver folder. Every time I moved in the next ten years, my mother would come to help me pack up, and I would drive myself crazy trying to hide the folder so she wouldn’t see it.

I don’t always think of that wedding as an experience of insufficiently-realized transsexuality, but I do think I tended towards bluster, attention-seeking, bids for control and domination, forced bonhomie, etc, rather than secrecy when it came to unusual expressions of gender. I wanted every man in a fifty-mile radius to be my comrade and my bondservant at the same time, not to mention find me wildly charming, and I was perfectly willing to behave atrociously and drive people away in the pursuit of my goal.

Ella: After graduation I got an interdisciplinary humanities degree at NYU and remember being embarrassed of APU but also woefully unprepared. Part of this is my own fault for majoring in creative writing to avoid Literary Theory, which I ended up having to catch up on rapidly to make sense of Zizek’s endless, mostly unnecessary, sniveling allusions. I quickly learned that most of my very expensive reading lists would never be referred to in class, not even Sartre’s excruciatingly long Critique of Dialectical Reason which was marked an “essential text” in the required reading section of the syllabus. I managed to fake it through to graduation, blaming APU for not properly setting me up for success, having expanded my library but not really having digested much.

Danny: I never took a run at grad school. I don’t think I could hack it. I still don’t. I do think I could have done better than APU for undergrad, but I don’t think there’s any version of me that could have successfully gone to graduate school. Lucky for me there was blogging, I suppose. Not now there isn’t. But for a few shining years, there it was.

How evangelical was your extended network in 2018 when you started transitioning? It’s remarkable how quickly I went from being immersed in an almost-exclusively evangelical culture to almost completely out of it after graduating. Everyone I knew played soccer all the time and had the worst ACL tears you’ve ever heard of in your life and carried around copies of, like, 365 Devotions to Set Your Faith on Fire – evangelicals are always anxious to set their faith on fire, except for the slightly progressive ones, who were into Francis Chan and wanted to be “biblically outrageous” – and then I almost never met that kind of person ever again.

Ella: While I think you could have done well in grad school1, I’m grateful for the blog to book publishing route your life has taken. For one, you gave me my first byline on The Toast, which I still parade in my author bio with deep pride. More importantly, your work and presence has been a needed mirror to so many. For instance, one of my favorite couples - Achu and Michaela - who I love as individuals and as a unit, used your beautiful words to Grace in the acknowledgements of Something That May Shock and Discredit You at their wedding this past December. I just reread it now to ensure accuracy and my eyes are still watery.

Before coming out I had been adjuncting at APU and working with Allbaugh on organizing the Freshmen Writing Program straight out of grad school through the recommendations of Okamoto and Carlson, who I still keep in touch with. I taught Thomas Merton’s New Seeds and Rob Bell’s What We Talk About When We Talk About God as a way of trying to evangelize a more humanist approach to faith to students that seemed to get more fundamentalist and less curious by the year. Then I picked up a day job for a steadier paycheck at an evangelical prep school in Pasadena, which is where I was working when I came out in 2018.

What sparked it was my ex discovering that her makeup had been used and worrying that I was cheating on her, inviting strangers into the house to use her things. This made me sad enough to come out of the closet to her, which I don’t think I could have done entirely for my own sake, possibly ever. The truth of course wasn’t consoling to her in any way - that it wasn’t any secret affair, but a husband who spent every spare hour alone crossdressing and putting on her makeup - wishing for a life I never thought I could have. She was kind enough to encourage me to push forward regardless of what that meant for our relationship and I came out to my family on Father’s Day (highly do not recommend this) after a service at All Saints Church in which Father Mike Kinman preached on David’s queerness and the God who includes that which has been cast out or devalued. The next step would be to come out at work, which I felt emboldened to do because evangelicals do a really good job at making you feel like you will always belong.

Danny: You came out to your family on Father’s Day! You ought to get back hazard pay for that. I came out to my family after a Thanksgiving weekend where my mother looked critically at my neck and said “You’ve been breaking out a lot lately. Did you start testosterone without telling me?” which I can’t recommend either.

Ella: I thought that I could barter with transition and with the school leadership - my plan was to just be referred to by last name and to dress in male drag while in my roles at school, while I would be free to live as myself outside of school hours [See Let Me Save You Some Time: On Transitioning Like You’re Opening A Candy Bar In A Crowded Movie Theater With A Really Loud Wrapper for a guide to avoiding this phenomenon]. The bargain was of course not struck and I was promptly coerced to resign or be fired, which somehow shocked me. I love my life and the work I do today but I do miss the summer camp feeling of the campus and the deep mentoring I was able to do for so many students, some of which later came out to me as trans and many of which reached out to me to express their continued support including a few of their moms and a few straight boys - which happily surprised me and continues to warm my heart. You never really know where they might be found, the hats they wear, or the identities they hold, but allies are everywhere and love really does abound.

Danny: I’m very proud to know you. Since we’ve been a little hard on Christian college today, I’d like to close with a few things I liked about it: They sold good chicken fingers in the snack cafe. I want to call it Cougar Café? The old-fashioned streetcar trolley that went back and forth between West and East Campus was charming. Pretending my college girlfriend was just my good buddy and then secretly hooking up in the stacks at the library was a transgressive sort of fun that I would never have been able to experience at a regular college.

And I really was fond of quite a few of those earnest longboarders, sailing from class to class, hair blown back from the force of God’s love and the Santa Ana winds.

[Image via]

Ella Baker and I attended the same evangelical Christian college in Greater Los Angeles between the years 2005 and 2009.1 Later we both transitioned, although not at the same time, and a few years ago I was very pleasantly surprised to see her in The People’s Joker. Recently we had a long chat about the experience. You can expect the second part of our conversation later this weekend.

Danny: Hello, Ella! I don’t always think about the fact that I went to evangelical Christian college, but when I do, my mind turns fondly to thoughts of you. I was reminded this week because I was writing at the library and saw a copy of The Advocate with Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig on the cover.2

Our tenure at Azusa Pacific University (“Christ first since 1899”) overlapped with the original run of The L Word, and I remember spending a fair amount of senior year going off-campus with one of the handful of other gay students to go drinking in West Hollywood, where we were forever trying to convince one another that we had “just seen” a cast or crew member around the next corner. I’m sure we never saw anyone from that show, but we kept hyping one another up about it.

Neither of us are evangelical Christians today, and I feel reasonably certain that neither of us were evangelical Christians between 2005 and 2009, either. But we are both transsexuals, and I think “changing sex” and “going to Christian college” are two relatively unusual experiences, and I don’t know many people who have done both.

I don’t intend to merely invite complaints about the experience. It is easy to focus on the elements of evangelicalism one doesn’t like, after all, and there has already been plenty written on the subject.

Do you remember much about deciding to attend APU? Were you prepared to enjoy yourself, or did you already think of it as something you were going to have to get through? Do you remember, incidentally, how and when we first met? I’m not sure I do. I think it must have been in one of Dr. Esselstrom’s English classes, but part of me wonders if you were part of that cigarette-smoking club that met off-campus near the Stater Brothers, since we weren’t allowed to smoke on school grounds. If memory serves, they called themselves the Pirates, and in order to stand around and smoke with them you had to put out a cigarette somewhere on your own arm. I did it four times, to show off, and the scars are barely noticeable now.

Ella: The memories I have of you at APU are equally fond and I remember you as someone who was miles ahead of where I was in terms of self-understanding and the courage to actualize. I was indeed an evangelical for the first year at APU and chose to apply exclusively to the school as I was hellbent on becoming an evangelical pastor. My choice was solidified after attending a preview weekend which painted life at APU like a four-year long Christian summer camp.

Danny: I did enjoy Christian summer camp, even the very extreme one in the Ozarks. I played so much tennis.

Ella: I held multiple perhaps contradictory viewpoints - CS Lewis-loving creationist, Republican Socialist, affirming gay rights but still viewing “homosexual behavior” as sin - which made APU a logical place where I thought I could be a scholar who held deeply committed ideological nonnegotiables.

I very much enjoyed and celebrated my first year until I went to a creationist museum in San Diego (to help me better debate the evolutionists on MySpace) and felt like the rug was pulled from under me, which sent the whole fragile structure tumbling down. It was an exhibit on the second law of thermodynamics which was what pushed me firmly into the rising “new atheism” of that era, at least for my last three years at APU. The exhibit was full of lies and bad faith, I came away fuming and eager to learn what other received ideological commitments were equally false.

As for how we first met, I believe it might have been Eaton’s Film and Lit class? I remember you talking about Nabokov and recommending Pale Fire to me, which I must admit I still have not read (but will!). I remember being instantly intimidated by having met someone who was so vastly more wide read but was quickly charmed by your impish iconoclasm which came out in full force in nearly every class and interaction. I don’t think I ever was cool enough to be part of the Pirates but I did smoke with you and Andrew often (Djarum Blacks that crinkled). It was also either you or Joh C. who deemed me at the time a “male lesbian” which my closeted self grasped with deep pride. By sophomore year I knew there was some weird gender stuff going on, having felt the most joy I’d ever felt two years prior as a cross dressing cheerleader for my high school’s powderpuff game and telling my classmates in Carlson’s Intro to Poetry lecture on voice that the voice I read with and spoke to myself in was female. I took to burying my feelings beneath constant clouds of weed smoke and I’m not sure who sold to who but do remember sharing a bowl with you on a weekly basis, which became the daily bread of our communion.

Danny: I do think it’s unfair that there are so many vapes now, just anyone can purchase a little vehicle for watermelon-flavored steam, but you can’t get Djarum Blacks anymore, or even Camel Crushes, which had those wonderful little menthol balls in the filter. They tasted pretty bad for regular cigarettes, but absolutely terrific as mentholated cigarettes.

I’m both charmed and a little chagrined to think that I might have been handing out “male lesbian” appellations. I don’t remember if I said it to you, but it certainly sounds like something I would have said. It’s flirtatious, a little controlling, and positions the speaker as an authority on lesbianism, which I certainly wasn’t, but was perfectly happy to let people think I was one at the time.

There’s a sort of rude and Masonic quality to the things I used to say before I transitioned to other people who were also yet to transition. I remember the day I met my wife – I was speaking to a class of graduate students at UC Berkeley at her invitation – and I asked her outright, “So what kind of gay are you?” in front of them. She deflected it admirably, and it took us a few more years to sort out the answer to that question to everyone’s mutual satisfaction. I was often, I fear, astonishingly rude when what I was privately experiencing was flustered interest, but I’m glad that at least some of the time it came across as impish.

You mentioned Lewis and it reminded me of the strange Anglophilic strain running through certain parts of SoCal evangelicalism. We had a surprising number of classmates who wore Rainbow sandals to class and longboarded everywhere, while also being super into Chesterton and Belloc. Of the major evangelical Christian universities in Southern California – I don’t count Pepperdine because they don’t require faculty or students to sign a statement of faith, besides which their chapel requirement is something laughably low, like fourteen hours a semester – I think Westmont and APU skew more scholarly, while California Baptist University and Biola skew more pious, at least in terms of vibe. “Scholarly” being a relative term, as most people don’t go to either San Bernadino County or evangelical school to think deeply. But certainly some did!

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Back in 2024 an editor friend of mine asked me to review the Elaine May biography Miss May Does Not Exist. Unfortunately, I disliked the book so much after reading the first four chapters that I had to back out.1 I don’t mind the idea of writing a pan, but I don’t think I’m very well suited to it, and at a certain degree of intensity, I lose the ability to describe something that irritates me, and am reduced to pointing and trembling.

The upside is that it led me to revisit Elaine May’s first two movies, 1971’s A New Leaf and 1976’s Mikey and Nicky, which more than made up for the time wasted. A New Leaf is a Bluebeard comedy that asks the important question, “What if a vicious would-be wife killer developed the criminal equivalent of erectile dysfunction?” and you should see it at once if you haven’t already. May also co-starred in A New Leaf (which is quite faithfully based on Jack Ritchie’s short story “The Green Heart2) alongside Walter Matthau, who is splendidly, ideally miscast as the world’s oldest playboy.

He both looks and behaves like the Grinch in a screwball comedy about an aging roué named Henry Graham, who upon learning he has outspent his own trust fund, decides to marry and murder the first wealthy woman he finds bearable. He is so old, and so uniquely unsuited to impoverishment, and so attractively petulant that the only way I can think to describe him is if Jude Law’s version of Lord Alfred Douglas in the Stephen Fry Wilde movie suffered from Benjamin Button syndrome.3 I cannot recommend his performance highly enough.

Incidentally, Matthau’s hair is so improbably lush, robust, and twirling, especially when compared with his marvelously eroded, perpetually crestfallen face, I was absolutely convinced he was wearing a hairpiece (and not a very good one). He was 51 in this movie and looked every minute of it. But I was mistaken, and the hair was all his own. Apparently I had fallen prey to the same cruel lack of faith that plagued Pauline Kael:

A few minutes later producer Daniel Melnick and writer-director Buck Henry approach the actor.

“Am I in your next picture?” Mr. Matthau asks the pair.

Mr. Melnick jokes, “First you have to lose the beard.”

“No,” Mr. Matthau replies. “The beard makes me look less clownish, more heroic. Besides, I want Pauline Kael to see that my hair is real. She once accused me of having a bad toupee like John Wayne.”

Walter Matthau’s face in A New Leaf is like the picture of Dorian Gray: cunning, and old as sin, depraved and loveless and sinister, monstrous and melted, withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. He looks like if a very old ventriloquist’s dummy were given the same wardrobe and chance at life as Pinocchio. But Walter Matthau’s hair in A New Leaf looks like Dorian Gray, the man: unfaded, insouciant, youthful, exquisite.

Henry Graham is told that he has no money. He reels onto the street, in an impeccably cut suit — who knew Matthau could wear clothes so well? Not I — while Ketélby’s “In a Monastery Garden” plans, whispering to himself in broken amazement: “I’m poor.” After taking a brief farewell tour of his favorite haunts (his club, the tailor, his other club) he staggers home to take counsel with his valet Harold4, the most devoted and disloyal manservant on the planet. (Perhaps rather than Dorian Gray, the apter comparison is to Hitchcock; A New Leaf is the movie you end up with if you were to drop Bertie Wooster and Jeeves into the plot of Rope.)

Harold first promises to give notice the day Henry runs out of money, and subsequently chides him against giving up:

HENRY: “What will I do?”

HARRY: “What any gentleman of similar breeding and temperament would do in your position, sir.”

HENRY: “Suicide?”

HARRY: “No, sir, I was not going to suggest suicide. I was going to suggest marriage.”

HENRY: “Marriage? You mean to a woman?”

HARRY: “Yes, sir. It’s the only way to acquire property without labor.”

HENRY: “Oh, I can’t, Harold. I couldn’t. I mean — she’d be there, asking where I’d been, talking to me. Talking. I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

HARRY: “Well, it was only a suggestion, sir, but the alternatives are very limited and unspeakably depressing.”

It’s difficult to say whether Matthau plays Henry as a homosexual, as such. He is gay in the same way Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins is gay, which is to say that it does not prevent him from developing a single-minded, murderous obsession with giving a perfect, permanent makeover to the one woman who matters to him more than anyone else besides himself.5

“The only difference between us is I am a man and you are a woman,” he tells Henrietta during a strained and uncomfortable proposal, “and we don’t have to let that interfere if we are reasonably careful.” She’s very pleased with him, strained and uncomfortable as he is; who better than a botanist to tolerate a sensitive plant?

It is more strictly correct to say the one girl who matters to him. It’s very important to the story of My Fair Lady that Eliza Doolittle is a girl, not a woman, and even though May was nearly 40 at time of filming, you cannot call Henrietta Lowell (later Henrietta Graham) anything but a girl. The only woman Henry considers courting (they go waterskiing together) is voluptuous, blonde, aware of her own sentimentality, and full of desire, and he flees from her in horror. But Henrietta is a girl, with a girl’s problems; she is awkward and self-conscious, shy and inexperienced, stuck in school (as a teacher rather than a student, but schoolgirlish nevertheless), cheated by her servants, bullied by her lawyer, and not yet alive to herself, and Henry finds her tolerable enough to want to murder. She is a botanist, she is soft-spoken, she startles easily, she never makes demands, only suggestions; she never contradicts Henry, only reroutes him, as gently and as inexorably as water.

Henrietta is such a nonentity, such a wife-shaped vacuum that Henry is forced to become a husband and eventually even a person to make up for her haplessness. At a certain point both he and Harold realize they have become a butler to his wife, and it is rather as if Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering had both married Eliza Doolittle:

HENRY: “Oh, no. I forgot to check her before she went to school this morning. She’ll be walking around all day with price tags dangling from her sleeves.”

HAROLD: “I took the liberty, sir.”

HENRY: “Thank you, Harold. Was she free of crumbs?”

HAROLD: “Only a slight sprinkling, sir.”

Henry has enormous contempt for his wife, but nothing about her does not matter to him, which is why I think his repeated half-hearted attempts at uxoricide still come across as funny rather than depressing. Henrietta is never beneath her husband’s attention.6 It helps too that she never once realizes she is in any danger, and is never once hurt by anything he says. She’s like Pepe Le Pew in that way — shielded from all harm, bounding with unending vitality from crisis to crisis, never once breaking a sweat. From Henrietta’s perspective, she meets a very nice, slightly odd old man who marries her, improves her domestic life, helps her discover a new kind of fern on their honeymoon, and eventually agrees to come to work with her every day. Imagine a slapstick version of When A Stranger Calls, about a woman so hapless that she is safely inoculated against male violence — the “you don’t know you’re beautiful, and that’s what makes you beautiful” principle applied instead to vulnerability.

Moreover, his attempts to kill her are constantly being derailed by his indefatigable efforts at improving her life. Everyone else in her life is also trying to take advantage of her, and after they are married Henry cannot stand the idea of Henrietta’s life being any less gracious than his own. He fires, threatens, blackmails, and bullies them all out of her life until her home is filled with competent, respectful servants and beautiful floral arrangements.

Henry fails as utterly in transforming his wife as he does in murdering her. She becomes no more stylish, no tidier, no less accident-prone. In spite of his best attempts to improve her he manages only to make her happy. Two nonenties cannot coexist in proximity; one or both of them is going to have to become a person. Eventually he sinks so much energy into thwarting his wife that he finds she has become necessary to his happiness, and he is defeated at last. Splendid narcissist that he is, he cannot fail to fall in love with the blustering chivalric hero he has pretended to be in order to lull her into a false sense of security; loving himself in this new light, how can he bear to destroy the reflecting pool that shows his new face to him? You simply must see it at once.

[Image via]

Eli and Max are two guys I know from the internet.

The three of us most recently discussed gooning and sexual kayfabe back in October, after Harper’s Magazine published a very silly piece on the same subject.

Eli: It seems like he thinks he’s doing an authoritative study on a swelling group of internet-poisoned young men (the scale of which always seems somewhat foggy), but doesn’t see himself as caught up in the performance. He picks up the fact that getting swept away in sex for 8-12 hours is a fantasy that is very rarely achieved, but I don’t think he really understands why it’s a fantasy. He’s just like, It would feel good I guess, like drugs, or TikTok.

Max: Yeah, he doesn’t seem to totally grasp that it’s a fantasy of degradation specifically, a variant of bimbofication. Kolitz seems to harbor the fear that instant gratification rots your brain and fucks up your life, but that’s the explicit point of the fetish…

Eli: I feel so crazy about how people are responding to this article, specifically the sort of florid tone of Doom (a tone that Kolitz also slips in and out of). Like, I fear the extremely online, particularly extremely online men who frequent Discord, but I haven’t seen any particular reason to fear the gooners. I don’t think the subculture is very big and I think the people engaging in it are directly incentivised to lie that they definitely do it all the time, and it’s definitely melting their brains.

I’ve brought the band back together this week after The Cut published an article by E. Alex Jung (“Girls Who Love Boys Who Love Boys”: When did everyone start fujoing out?) about women1 who read and write slash fiction2, particularly as it relates to the recently popular Heated Rivalry book and TV series.

Danny: Hello again, fellas. In our last conversation, Max said he wished Kolitz had intervewed female gooners for the Harper’s piece:

“There’s a subreddit with 555k subscribers called “Goonette Hub” where only women are allowed to post. I’m sure a lot of the subscribers are horny men, and a lot of the posters are sex workers essentially doing business, but I imagine there’s at least some proportion of women that are sincerely into the fetish. The effect of internet pornography on women seems totally underexplored, beyond anxieties about it affecting what men expect of them and their bodies.

I think a lot of people still quietly believe that women don’t watch porn and don’t have fetishes. And I think this piece would’ve been improved by any attempt to investigate or potentially challenge that underlying assumption.”

It seems like we got our wish! I’ve neither read nor seen HR, but I’m very interested in online subcultures that spring up around shared sexual fantasies, so I’m having a great time following the conversation. Part of me wishes we could throw a party to introduce some of the gooners and the fujoshis to one another. I think they’d have a really fun time comparing notes!

I apologize if that sounds like a fantasy of heterosexual reconstruction. I don’t mean that they ought to pair off. But I think there is a a fun overlap between certain popular fantasies like cuckolding, gooning, and fujoshis – a really intense sexual fantasy that involves a certain level of detachment and non-involvement.

None of them are quite pillow princesses, but they’re perhaps all pillow-princess adjacent? Let me lie back in a comfortable position [the cuck chair, the goon cave, the, I suppose, fujoshi futon?] and watch some hot people who aren’t me do all of the work.

I wonder if you both think, as I do, that the overlap between the gooning and the fujoshi subcultures is significant. I realize there are differences between watching pornography and writing/reading smut, but it seems to me that both are communities that exist primarily so people with similar sexual fantasies can share erotic material with their fellow masturbators.

Max: The press about why women like yaoi is driving me crazy. Imagine if there were a blitz of articles asking “Why do so many men like lesbian porn?” Who can say. World’s biggest mystery. People are so confused and scared by the idea that women could have a sex drive and a sexual imaginary.

There are also women who enjoy yaoi for different, more complex personal reasons. “It’s sexy” is an oversimplification. But I don’t really see that as a mystery that needs to be solved, either. Women like art about men all the time. That’s one of the most mainstream types of art that there is. We accept that it’s normal for women to enjoy art about straight men, including art that deals with their sexual and romantic lives, because straight men are “normal” and everyone is supposed to relate to them.

Must Masturbatory Material Be Liberating? Is It Not Enough To See Two Beautiful Faces, Masculine?

Danny: The article acknowledges that it’s not only women who produce and share this sort of thing, but it is primarily interested in the women who do it because there’s no identity-category justification for it. Which sometimes leads to a weird attempt to cobble together an after-the-fact justification like “It’s actually feminist of me” or “Stories about men having sex is an escape from misogyny,” which doesn’t make much sense to me. I suppose part of that has to do with the question of Well, what is this? Is it a hobby, is it a creative community, is it a sexual subculture? It’s hard to imagine gooners trying to furnish virtuous explanations for their own kinks in the same way, for example.

Max: “Edging for a long time is actually more respectful than busting right away, because of all the hard work performers put into doing porn.”

I think it does bug me inasmuch as I don’t think we need to explain why women get horny. It feels like it feeds into the stereotype that women naturally hate sex, that their fantasies are or should be romantic in nature, and revolve around heterosexual dating and marriage.

Danny: Yeah, a lot of my sexual fantasies over the years have looked really different from the kind of sex I’ve had in person. I’m not sure why it’s important for a person’s sexual fantasies to always align with the real or even the possible. Part of the fun of having an imagination is using it, no?

I agree that sort of justification often feels protective. Like it’s easier to say “I can only get off to stories of closeted men having intense sex and feelings for one another in order to escape sexism” than “I’m a pervert.”

And depending on how a person feels about this phenomenon, that’s how they’ll categorize the kind of women who participate in it. If they want to be mad about it, it’s straight women (who are therefore committing objectification, fetishization, appropriation), and if they want to defend it, it’s queer women (and therefore responding to trauma, surviving a sexist world, subverting something). But I don’t really see how having this sort of sexual fantasy is suspect if you’re straight but virtuous if you’re gay or bisexual.

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I’ve been rereading Julius Caesar this week in a fit of nostalgia.1 Two things have struck me on this go-round which did not always stick out to me before:

1. Brutus and Cassius are incredibly concerned with whether the other thinks of him as a really good friend or just a work friend,

2. For all Cassius’ reputation for being a conniving, subtle, behind-the-scenes manipulator, his number-one go-to strategy for trying to get people on side is to mention how willing he is to commit suicide. He does it right away, and all the time, and it’s wonderfully off-putting. I realize Romans had their own set of values around suicide, but even by their standards he really front-loads the conversation. Trying to encourage your work friends into doing something very risky with you by mentioning your extreme willingness to engage in risky behavior seems complicated!

The second scene of the first act could almost word-for-word be replicated at any number of uncomfortable sleepovers I attended in the year 2000, especially if Katie F. and Monica K. were both present.2 No one wants to be the first to admit they’re not having a good time, so instead they have this highly uncomfortably and obviously-charged back-and-forth about whether or not they look tired.

I don’t mean to suggest it’s in any way surprising that a text about Roman conspirators could involve cattiness, merely that the breadth and detail of the cattiness on display is rich and delightful:

CASSIUS: Are you having a good time?

BRUTUS: I’m not sure. Are you having a good time?

CASSIUS [Carefully]: You should go have a good time with everybody else. Unless you’re tired! You do look a little tired.

BRUTUS [Diplomatic]: I’m not as much fun as some of our other friends. Antony, for example. He’s a lot of fun. I hope I’m not keeping you from having fun.

CASSIUS: No, not at all.

BRUTUS: Should I go? I can go. I don’t want to spoil your fun.

CASSIUS: I hope this doesn’t sound like a criticism. But you’ve been a lot less gentle lately. Everyone’s been talking about it. Because ordinarily you’re a very gentle and demonstrative person, and there’s this quality of love that’s very visible and very warm in your eyes. It’s gone lately. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, or if anyone’s told you, but it’s very distinctly vanished from your eyes, that light.

BRUTUS: You sound like you have something to say.

CASSIUS: I don’t have anything to say. Do you have something to say?

BRUTUS: If I had anything to say, I would say it. I don’t like talking about people behind their backs; I’m very direct. I’ve always been a very direct person.

CASSIUS: Oh, I know. That’s something I’ve always admired about you.

Then it’s that first proper monologue of Cassius’ that really lets loose. It’s remarkable how quickly he falls from the subject of honor to cattiness about who can swim the fastest and how sniffly Caesar gets when he has a cold:

I know that virtue [honor] to be in you, Brutus,
As well as I do know your outward favor.
Well, honor is the subject of my story.
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but, for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
I was born free as Caesar; so were you;
We both have fed as well, and we can both
Endure the winter’s cold as well as he.

For once, upon a raw and gusty day,
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me “Dar’st thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me into this angry flood
And swim to yonder point?” Upon the word,
Accoutered as I was, I plungèd in
And bade him follow; so indeed he did.
The torrent roared, and we did buffet it

And stemming it with hearts of controversy.
But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried “Help me, Cassius, or I sink!”
I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar. And this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature and must bend his body
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake. ’Tis true, this god did shake.
His coward lips did from their color fly,
And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world
Did lose his luster. I did hear him groan.
Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans
Mark him and write his speeches in their books,
“Alas,” it cried “Give me some drink, Titinius”
As a sick girl. You gods, it doth amaze me
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world
And bear the palm alone…

“Brutus” and “Caesar”—what should be in that
“Caesar”?
Why should that name be sounded more than
yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with ’em,
“Brutus” will start a spirit as soon as “Caesar.”

1. I know honor is important to you. I love honor!

2. Honor is actually what I came here to talk about today.

3. I would have zero problem committing suicide if I felt the situation called for it.

4. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I just want you to know, before we get into anything else, that I am ready to die, right now.

5. While we are on the subject of honor: when it comes to Julius Caesar, in the winter — not that it’s a contest, but when it comes to winter weather, his coats are warmer and my shorts are shorter. Do you know what I mean? Like he has to get very bundled up in this very precious way, and isn’t Gaul supposed to be cold? Shouldn’t he be used to it by now?

6. I can swim faster than him too

7. Again I realize this is not a contest but it has to count for something, no? We both eat dinner, we both put on our sandals one foot at a time in the morning,

8. When he gets sick it’s a mess

9. [Remembering this conversation was supposed to be about honor] And I guess I just don’t think that’s right. Because of Rome. Who deserves better.

10. [Remembering that this conversation should be about Brutus] And I’m sure you could outswim him too

11. Your name has the same number of syllables in it, even, we wouldn’t have to work that hard to change all the signs

[Caesar returns onstage]

BRUTUS: And he looks weird, right? Weirder than usual. And his wife and all his friends look weird too, right?

CASSIUS: I’m so glad you said something. I didn’t want to say anything, because I was worried it would sound catty, but he and his wife and his close friends have been looking so weird lately.

CAESAR [pointedly]: I don’t like the way Cassius looks. [Even louder] I DON’T LIKE HIS WEIGHT

In Scene Three, Cassius once again tries to impress his friends by announcing how ready he is to kill himself:

CASSIUS: Sorry if I look wet. I’ve just been walking in a rainstorm WITHOUT A SHIRT ON because I don’t care if I get struck by lightning…If the senators offer Caesar a crown tomorrow I’ll stab myself. The best thing about life is that you can always kill yourself. If nothing else.

He suggests it again in Act 3, scene 1, so prematurely that Brutus has to tell him “Cassius, be constant.”

Brutus has the sort of relationship to death I’d expect from a history play – “If it comes, it comes; I hope it doesn’t, but we’re playing a high-stakes game and I’m prepared for whatever outcome,” whereas it’s Cassius’ first and seemingly only card in the pocket.3

Luckily everything works out for the best in the end.

[Image via]

Every year in the late fall I become tremendously insane for anywhere between 18 to 45 days. I remember each September that my annual fit of madness is approaching, and intend to prepare for it, but by November I forget, and happily, involuntarily descend. On this date last year…on this date four years ago…on this date eight years ago, my brother came to my house and spoke to me in a reassuring, sensible voice to tell me that he was a pedophile, and that he and the rest of our family had a marvelous plan for keeping it a secret from everyone else in the world, and that they expected me to join in this confederacy. And so I go mad again.

I resume smoking cigarettes, I avoid all things friendly and wholesome, I tremble, I begin telling small and inconsequential lies, I pick quarrels, and generally grow worse and worse until clarity and sanity are both returned to me in the same terrible instant, and I come back to my own mind like Seneca’s Hercules, asking,

“What place is this? What quarter of the world? Where am I? ‘Neath the rising sun, or where the frozen Bear wheels slowly overhead? Or in that farthest land whose shores are washed by the Hesperian sea? What air is this I breathe? What soil supports my weary frame? For surely have I come again to earth…I speak with shame: I am afraid.”

It’s not all bad, this season. My partners Grace and Lily are particularly kind to me around this time of year, speaking slowly, making no sudden movements, and holding very little against me. I sometimes emerge with a new hobby or acquisition that I still like after I have recovered my reason, or to find that I have moved to New York City. Afterwards, during the tidying-up phase, I sometimes find I wish to reintegrate this new acquisition into the remaining eleven months of my yearly life, which serves as a reassuring little project.

Sometimes I suspect I unconsciously put off certain decisions for November on purpose, trusting that I will act more boldly under the veil, and leaving my more timid self to make any necessary adjustments and arrangements afterwards. Last year, for example, I began sleeping with men again for the first time in almost a decade. There was no reason for me to make a production out of it. It’s perfectly legal to sleep with men, if you’d like to. Nobody really frowns on it. No one had any interest in trying to stop me from doing it.1 I have two wonderful partners, both closer to lesbians than otherwise, who have always encouraged my interest in men in the same way I might encourage our dogs Bon-Bon and Gogo at the dog park: lightly baffled, affectionate, pleased at the alien pleasures of someone you love. That’s not how I might choose to spend a free afternoon, but as long as you’re having a good time and clean off before you come back inside the house, then go crazy.

After some time had passed I began to do the work of finding a non-insane way to sleep with men while also maintaining a family, a day job, a writing career, in keeping up with my correspondence, et cetera. There are only so many hours in a day, after all, and I also wanted to continue sleeping with men in a relatively ordered, right-minded fashion.

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