Word has gotten around lately that I successfully parallel parked the big bus at work this week. In the interest of saving time and man-hours I thought I would compile a list of the most frequently-asked questions I’ve been receiving here, that future inquirers might be able to acess all the relevant information more conveniently.

QUESTION #1: How long was this decision in the works? Was there a planning committee, and if so, who served on it, did you follow Robert’s Rules of Order, Erskine May’s Parliamentary Procedure, or an alternative decision-making process, etc?

ANSWER: It was entirely unplanned.

QUESTION #2: You mean this was a spur-of-the-moment action — a course was decided upon, committed to, successfully carried out, solely by yourself, all while you were already behind the wheel of what can only be called a very big bus?

ANSWER: The bus is, in fact, so big that it beeps whenever you put it in reverse.

QUESTION #3: That big?

ANSWER: So big that sometimes, when I have pulled up alongside a city bus at a stop light, the city bus driver has glanced out his window at me and offered me the courtesy head nod customary between bus drivers.

QUESTION #4: Surely not.

ANSWER: It has happened on more than one occasion! A deliberate, willful head nod, with conspicuous friendly eye contact. There could have been no mistaking it.

QUESTION #5: An accordion bus?

ANSWER: No, not yet an accordion bus. But a real city bus nevertheless.

QUESTION #6: Remarkable!

ANSWER: Thank you.

QUESTION #7: This was a nose-forward parallel parking job, I assume? With plenty of room — say, a half block or so — between the cars in front and behind?

ANSWER: I parallel parked it in reverse.

QUESTION #8: On a side street?

ANSWER: A busy thoroughfare.

QUESTION #9: And no one honked at you for taking up more than your share of the lane…?

ANSWER: I did not take up more than my share of the lane. I parked it in a single go, with no redundant returns into the flow of traffic to correct my positioning.

QUESTION #10: Successfully parked, in reverse, a 10-passenger van on the spur of the moment, in the middle of heavy traffic?

ANSWER: Let us say moderate traffic. No more than moderate

QUESTION #11: Thank you for your commitment to honesty, even at the moment of your greatest triumph.

ANSWER: Thank you.

QUESTION #12: Close to the curb, and everything?

ANSWER: Less than six inches from the curb. It was textbook. I tell you, it was a textbook parking job on a 10-passenger bus with a nine-foot clearance. And this time a year ago I could not have taken such a bus out of the alley without scraping the dumpster, or the retaining wall!

QUESTION #13: Did anyone see you do it?

ANSWER: Not anyone I know.

QUESTION #14: I’m so sorry.

ANSWER: Please, don’t be. It was nothing. It was nothing.

QUESTION #15: What did you do afterwards?

ANSWER: I called one of the residents on my private cell phone to tell her what I had done. And I knocked on my general manager’s door, interrupting a meeting, to tell her.

QUESTION #16: Only human!

ANSWER: I very nearly called my mother, who I hate, such was my ebullience.

QUESTION #17 [alarmed]: But you didn’t —?

ANSWER: No, I remembered in time why I hate her. But it was a very near thing, I can tell you. And no one is going to be able to say a word of criticism to me for a month at least.

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By all means, ignore my advice — if you are satisfied with the number and quality of favor-rings your king has already bestowed upon you. But if you would be bedecked as I am, if you wish to carry a fly-whisk of carnelian and fine horse-hair, or to wear a cap of maintenance, and costly gold arm-bands, you will not bow too often, nor say “How right you are,” when your liege happens to sneeze.

It just goes to show, you know, that there are two sides to every coin. Perhaps I had better explain what I mean. You might think, as an emperor, that the worst fate that could befall you would be to inherit a scheming vizier (Or viceroy, steward, head chancellor, senior minister, satrap, pasha, administrator, et cet).

You know the type, I think: silver-tongued, or worse honeytongued, and much given to intrigue. If he is not precisely oily, then certainly well-lubricated. The sort of fellow who oozes helpfulness, and surprises you when you come around corners. He may not precisely skulk, but he seems to come together all of a sudden and quite in your way, like a precipice. Thin, top-heavy fellows, whose signet rings are always a vivid and hateful sort of crimson, you know. Not much flesh on them, as a general rule. They must produce them all out of the same assembly-line, or something.

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Danny: I enjoyed your recent book report, Some Thoughts About Twilight, very much:

Two Sundays ago, San Francisco being much befogged, and my brain, somewhat, likewise, I thought I would read the copy of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight that my woke PhD student friend had lent me the day before, having never done this at any other point in my life. Interesting read! The first thing that stuck out to me was that after a perfunctory flash forward, in which nothing much interesting is revealed about our narrator (Bella) except that one day she will be in a Situation, we get to the good stuff: this freak LOVES Phoenix, Arizona, as well as . . . canonical literature? From whatever afterlife they put literary scholars in, Wayne C. Booth is surely sobbing tears of joy at this masterclass in unreliable narrator establishment — surgical, ruthless.

Well, after that, we get to high school, where there’s a guy, Edward, who is lowkey kind of different, not like the other boys at the high school, or even very much like the Edward from the movie Twilight, which I have seen, some years ago: I remember thinking at the time that any admiration for this guy at the high school who is not like the other boys at the high school suggested some deep spiritual rot at the heart of American empire, as he is creepy, and I didn’t like him, but in the book things are different: for one, we’re in Bella’s head, and she thinks a lot (this is not so much a feature of the movie); for another, while my main memory of the movie is that Edward is staring at Bella in class and deathgripping the desk as if it is the only thing standing between him and a rapacious, one might even say a well-nigh murderous, lust, in the book he is a little more British, and they understate — interesting, I thought, as I’ve just been introduced to Jacob, the also charming, but this time indigenous boy who is into cars and dopey smiles and so forth, and while I never read Twilight, I was somewhat aware that each of these boys had Teams, and that Bella would soon find herself in another Situation . . . tea, I thought, familiarly, but I was nevertheless experiencing this text as if it had never been read — no one told me it would be allegorical!

Yes, what else is one to think here except that Bella is meant to be a prototypical American novelist, caught between the canonical, Anglophone tradition — charming, sometimes, but also anachronistic, and more than anything, perpetually undead — and the indigenous culture of the land upon which she lives, a crossroads she sees reflected anytime she looks in the mirror of the postcolonial writer, who faces this very same set of paths, only, you know, reflected.

This kicked off a goofy conversation about humidity in the Twilight series:

There’s a conversation Bella has with her father after he picks her up from the airport towards the beginning of the book that I really love, right before she goes into a description of the characteristic greenness of the Pacific Northwest landscape:

“We exchanged a few more comments on the weather, which was wet, and that was pretty much it for conversation. We stared out the windows. It was probably beautiful or something.”

I think of Bella as a character who is incredibly humid, spiritually speaking, because she’s so ready to be saturated and slowed down. She seems born to be waterlogged and subject to microscopic influence.

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Well now, I will say I am pleased. I haven’t had very many day jobs, so I haven’t had very many opportunities to receive a promotion, and I must say I like the feeling very much. No one ever put up a flier in my honor on an elevator before.

And everybody takes the elevators at work. I mean it’s a great way to get the word out about something. It gratifies one, knowing he is the subject of appreciative elevator fliers, is what I mean.

I’ll still get to drive the big bus from time to time — in fact I’ll be driving it tomorrow — in fact I’ll be driving certain residents to a literal pizza party — in fact my life feels rather full, at the moment.

I’ll be off the rest of the week attending my best friend’s wedding. Expect a return to regular Chatner programming next week. Lunch at work today was a veggie burger and a Caesar salad, consumed before I saw all the news about produce and now regretted in the extreme. The movie at work tonight is His Girl Friday.

Last night I watched Young Mr. Lincoln for the first time, and the night before that Midnight, which stars a young Don Ameche and a middle-aged John Barrymore and I can’t recommend highly enough.

Today I showed the baby The Music Man for the first time. He went kicking about the house for hours afterwards.

If you happen to live in the Bay Area and have any interest in performing for senior citizens, won’t you consider emailing me? I have to arrange the calendar now, and one doesn’t want to let the side down.

You might offer me your congratulations in the comments, or request a future topic for the newsletter, if you felt so moved. You don’t have to, of course. Nothing is compulsory, everything is permitted.

DANNY: Hello, Jordy. We are both transsexual men who published novels about difficult older women named Barbara whose sons do not like them this year. To the best of my knowledge this was done without prior coordination on either of our parts.

Your book is called Night Night Fawn and came out in March. My book is called Meeting New People and came out in June. Your Barbara is a Rosenberg; mine is a Foerster. Give us a line or two from your book that you think is representative of your Barbara, won’t you?

JORDY: “Some people, aka “liberals” (which is not a word we ever used until my so-called daughter started uttering it like a slur, and I realized Stephen was one and I was actually just a bigot, but according to students at Wesleyan University both were equally bad!), think relationships in the world can be the embodiment of abstract ideals. Liberals think that living in accordance with these abstract ideals makes them good people, and Marxists think that’s bullshit, and actually this is one thing I really agree with Marxists about.”

DANNY: Mine (from a moderate crisis Barbara undergoes after seeing a woman ten years her senior wearing cap sleeves) is: “The present common sense is something like this: Never wear makeup or dress well when you’re young and attractive, because it’s a pernicious drain of your time and resources, designed to distract you from pursuing your fullest potential. This is supposed to hold until you reach menopause, at which point it becomes a virtue to wear the loudest possible clothes and the most outrageous colors of lipstick in order to prove that you’re fun and don’t care what anybody else thinks. Associating dignity, reserve, or decorum with increasing age is restrictive and demeaning. Noticing what anybody else wears or how they comport themselves in public, unless it’s complimentary, is the equivalent of being a Peeping Tom. Not only are you supposed to only say nice things, you’re only supposed to think them, too.”

Do you think it would enhance our book sales if one of us were to accuse the other of plagiarism? If so, would you like to accuse me, or would you rather I accuse you?

JORDY: It’s worse than that! Both of our Barbaras are also going through an epic friend breakup. And the ex-friends’ names sound suspiciously similar: Susan in yours, Sugar in mine. I think we can skip the plagiarism accusations and go straight to the hypothesis that all trans men are the same man. Either that or one of us hypnotized the other and made some subliminal suggestions. Do you have a more capacious account of how on earth this could have happened?

DANNY: I take it I can safely assume that we both wrote these books at our mothers but didn’t want to use our mothers’ real first names lest we be accused of autofiction or something, so we went with something very nearby on the Social Security Administration list of commonest baby names the years our mothers were born. Nancy and Barbara are only two names apart on the 1955 list.

We’re roughly contemporaries, yes? Late thirties, early forties? So Barb(a)ras loom large in our mothers’ generation; Streisand, Walters, Bush, Stanwyck if you want to push it. The powerful televisual mother who must be killed before we can run free with the wolves, or something.

And my mother had a best friend named Susan, whom she often affectionately called Suzy Q, although I don’t think they ever fell out. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever knew my mother to fall out with anyone. I’m sure she must have. She certainly fell out with me! But it suddenly strikes me that my mother might be an easier person to get along with than I myself am, which isn’t at all a pleasing thought to have.

What are your earliest memories of/associations with the following:

Male transsexuality?

JORDY: I guess it’s me? Identifying very emphatically as “a wolf” in a 3rd grade class assignment.

DANNY: The short-lived Dawson’s Creek summer replacement Young Americans, around 1999/2000. Then I guess things were pretty quiet until Chaz Bono.

Me?

JORDY: Your viral rant about possums from 2016. I had two reactions: total delight but also anxiety. I shaven’t be having these young whippersnappers being this funny and smart.

DANNY: If it helps, having a phrase like “viral rant about possums” associated with my work fills me with dread and anxiety that I’ve never really stylistically exited the long 2014, that I’m hopelessly tied to all the worst and most dated millennial tics, and that I’ll never achieve blogspeak escape velocity, so let that comfort you retroactively.

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Meeting New People, my latest novel, features a woman named Barbara caught off-guard by an unexpected breakup with her best friend Susan, which Barbara handles rather badly. One of her greatest missteps comes in the immediate aftermath of getting dumped, when she fails to employ proper gamesmanship1 while speaking to some of the friends she and Susan had held in common.2

On the subject of retaining non-mutual friends after a friendship breakup we have very little to say. Do your best not to complain too often about the breakup, for if you develop a reputation as a grumbler, a grudge-holder, or a score-settler, you may see some of them begin to drift off, but this holds true the rest of the time, anyhow. Remember, however, the unfortunate social truth that nothing breeds failure like failure. Once you begin to give off the stink of someone who is unlucky in friendship, who does not have the happiness of retaining loyalty in others, you will find it does not wash off easily or quickly. Others may begin to look for a reason to cut you loose. If you do not provide them with one, they may invent one anyways.

The act of retaining more mutual friends than one’s former friend requires a very careful touch. One must behave shrewdly at every moment, while all the time appearing to behave naturally, as one moved solely by instinct. The lack of self-consciousness3 must be both perfect and complete. You will be beset by danger on every side. To fail to behave convincingly even once may spell the ruin of the entire project; as Christ says to his disciples in Matthew 10:16, be ye cunning as serpents, and yet harmless as doves.

The Chatner has most recently covered gamesmanship in respect to transitioning by family committee, addressing popular games such as Did Everyone Sign the Card?, All Of A Sudden You’re Mother’s Darling, But I Was Going To Run Errands Today, When Were You Going To Tell Us?, and Old As The Hills:

Barbara is in an especially tricky position because she cannot claim the moral high ground in her breakup with Susan. Susan established a strong lead over Barbara from the very beginning of their final fight:

1. She initiated the breakup

2. She got her claims in writing

3. She established her side of the story with mutual friends first

A better gameswoman in Barbara’s case might have chosen to

1. Brazen it out — Kay might have respected Barbara more had she chosen never to broach the subject at all.

2. Approach Kay in person, and more directly (this would have required extraordinary levels of cunning, however, as engineering a plausibly accidental in-person meeting after a known dumping is extremely unlikely)

3. Split the difference: made an attractive offer like, “I’m not going to discuss this with you, and I’ll never ask you to discuss it with me,” which goes over well with a certain type of person who dislikes conflict to such a degree that they will prioritize whichever member of the friendship breakup promises a smoother ride in the aftermath, regardless of how they might have otherwise apportioned blame)

It is not necessary (indeed it can sometimes be a hindrance) to have the moral high ground in a friendship breakup. People will feel obligated to assure you of your rightness, but this very obligation may set the groundwork enabling them to decamp for the other side; when it comes to social ties, “who seems more fun/less work for me” often wins out over “who seems right.”

Above all else you must never say “Of course I don’t expect you to choose sides.” You must give off the impression that you believe this (even though of course you are angling for everyone to choose sides, and for your side to win), but you must never say it. (Because if you said it, it would only imply that part of you did feel as though other people ought to choose sides, and that you had the right to release them from such an expectation. The “look who thinks he’s nothing” problem.)

You can see for yourself where Barbara begins to go wrong in her approach:

Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the last time Kay and I had gone on a walk together…Kay and Susan had been friends for years before I came into the picture, too.

It would be no use calling Kay now, not so freshly and transparently in the aftermath of a breakup. Sounding innocent would be impossible, to say nothing of sounding casual, and I started to worry I was going to have to leave a message (has anyone ever left a message where they didn’t sound guilty of something?). I had just resigned myself to it, in fact, when she suddenly answered after the fifth ring:

“Hello?”

“Hello—Kay?—I was just about to leave you a voice message—”

“Oh?”

“I had just been thinking to myself how nice it’s been lately, how uncharacteristically nice really, and that we really are overdue for a good brisk walk. I know I am.”

“I’m not in town.”

“Oh! You’re out of town? Somewhere nice, I hope.”

This was bad, and getting worse. Short, clipped answers, plus she was going on trips without telling me, or worse, lying to avoid seeing me. Did this call for a change in tactics, or was it safer to continue to pretend ignorance?

“Anywhere nice? I mean, are you anywhere nice?”

“So I won’t be able to go walking with you.”

Damn! Might as well go for broke.

“Kay, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but it sounds like you may have talked to Susan recently—”

“I talk to Susan often. We talk all the time.”

“Then I’m sure she’s already told you about our fight the other day. And I don’t want you to feel like this puts you in the middle of anything. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think this has to affect our friendship.”

“Don’t you? I can see why it would.”

Then there was an awful silence for a while. I thought she was going to say more on the subject, since it sounded like a prelude to something, but apparently she thought it was more than enough, because all I could hear was the occasional faint sound of breathing on the other line.

“Well, I don’t expect you to take sides, is all I meant,” I said.

“I’m perfectly happy to take Susan’s side,” she said. “I think you’ve acted really disgracefully.”

As in all acts of gamesmanship, the only rule is to break the flow of your opponent’s play. If your opponent behaves messily, you must appear respectful, forbearing, possibly even as though you are harboring a profound secret that would change the opinion of all who knew you both, but that you will never share due to deeply-held principles, etc. If, on the other hand, your opponent appears to take the high road, you go ahead and share confidances, make digs, and generally go racketing in the direction of pleasure.

If your opponent attempts to analyze your character with others to your discredit, and this information makes it back to you, do not attempt to do the same: a well-timed, slightly world-weary, “Ah. I’m sorry to hear he ended up doing that after all. I wish he might have spared you that at least,” will do nicely. Appearing to have anticipated their every move will always serve you well.

Or if she continues to complain about your bad behavior (even if your behavior has been very bad indeed, you need not despair) to others, and these complaints make it back to you, never complain about her complaints, or attempt to counter with complaints of your own: Say instead that “I do think it’s hard for people, when two of their friends break up, and they feel roped into hearing all of the messy details, or in getting involved. I won’t ask you to do that.”

People may bristle when they hear the expression “choosing sides,” because it sounds presumptuous, but they delight in being told you don’t want them to have to “get involved,” particularly if you are dealing with the conflict-avoidant. You may have killed someone, but promise that you’ll never require them to “get involved” and they’ll still end up taking your part nine times out of ten.

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Managing intrusive anxious thoughts can be challenging for anyone, but it’s doubly difficult for the arsonist, who often has to flee the scene of his or her latest attempts at fire-starting before being sure of its successful ignition. “Hang on — did I forget to leave the stove on before I left the house?” has tormented many an arsonist halfway through the morning commute.

Insated of trying to suppress these thoughts1 most experts recommend acknowledging, detaching, and refocusing.

Begin with acknowledgement

The thought is simply that — a thought. Remind yourself it is unconscious, involuntary, and cannot predict the future of whatever fires you have started or may start later today.

Ground yourself

Interrupt anxious thought patterns by focusing on the here and now. A common technique is the 3-3-3 rule: Name three things you can set on fire in the room with you, look for three fire sources close at hand (no matches? no problem! a 9-volt battery and fine-grade steel wool will work just fine), and improvise three stacks of kindling, such as sawdust or dry dead leaves.

Disengage

Observe the thought without judgment or action. Watch it drift past you, like you would a small brush fire.

Refocus your energy

Calmly return your attention to whatever fire you were starting before the intrusive thought occurred.

If the unwelcome thought should later again return, repeat the cycle as many times as necessary. The key is to interrupt the negative loop of automatic secondary thoughts that follow the intial intrusive thought (“This deadwood is too soft and unseasoned. All I’ll be getting out of this is a lot of smoke,” “That looks like chipwood. I’ll never find anything untreated here”), getting stuck or dwelling over fires we have failed to sustain in the past.

Remember, the only fire that matters is the fire you’re starting right now.

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It’s a bit of a mishmash from me this week, with a few recommendations straight from the senior living movie calendar and book club schedule, as well as some deadly-earnest writing advice (and I never give writing advice) for paid subscribers. As always, if you would like a paid subscription but can’t spare the money, just reply to this email and ask; I’ll get you a year’s paid subscription for free straightaway.

This week has:

• A highly detailed writing suggestion if you’re aiming, like me, for reliable middlebrow success of the sort the twentieth century once easily supported (which doubles as a highly specific reading suggestion if you have no interest in writing novels)

• My favorite Michael Roemer film

• A few suggestions for being genuinely helpful in a hospitality job

• A terrifically funny documentary (that’s seemingly never going to be released) about an extraordinarily stressed-out monk working in a gift shop

• The best writing drills from Gregg Speed Studies, a 1929 shorthand instruction manual I picked up in Duncan Mills (“the most interesting strip mall in California”) this weekend

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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.”

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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.”

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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:

Read more

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.

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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.