This week, we are excited to give Longreads Members exclusive early access to a new story from Matt Siegel, to be published next week on The Awl. Here’s more from The Awl co-founder and editor Choire Sicha:
“Matt Siegel’s very funny nonfiction story of love, deceit and betrayal (oh my God, I know!!!) comes on all unassuming and conversational. Unlike many citizens of the MFA world (Matt’s a recent graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program), he keeps his techniques hidden. We’re really looking forward to publishing this at The Awl, but we’re more thrilled to share it with Longreads Members—like ourselves!—first.”
Siegel (@unabashedqueer) has previously written for The Huffington Post, The Hairpin, Flaunt Magazine, and The Advocate.
This week, we are excited to give Longreads Members exclusive early access to a new story from Matt Siegel, to be published next week on The Awl. Here’s more from The Awl co-founder and editor Choire Sicha:
“Matt Siegel’s very funny nonfiction story of love, deceit and betrayal (oh my God, I know!!!) comes on all unassuming and conversational. Unlike many citizens of the MFA world (Matt’s a recent graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program), he keeps his techniques hidden. We’re really looking forward to publishing this at The Awl, but we’re more thrilled to share it with Longreads Members—like ourselves!—first.”
Siegel (@thatmattsiegel) has previously written for The Huffington Post, The Hairpin, Flaunt Magazine, and The Advocate.
I watched “The X-Files” in a Baltimore house I shared with eight people, at the end of days spent navigating the city’s shaky public transit system, alternating between feeling perfectly in place and wildly lost. That’s how I felt when I watch “The X-Files,” too: One moment I was perfectly attuned to Agents Mulder & Scully’s plan of attack; the next, I was baffled as the agents discovering a farm of clones or a UFO witness who also happens to be a serial killer. Confused? Intrigued? You are not alone. And the truth is out there.
This essay is incendiary and incisive and just didn’t get the play it deserved: maybe because it was in the (excellent) Baffler, maybe because Faludi so handily eviscerated “Lean In” feminism, or maybe Facebook itself was pulling strings behind the curtain and hiding every time someone shared the piece. Feminism has never not been fraught with tensions, but Faludi illuminates, with devastating clarity, the classism and ignorance of “leaning in.”
“It was for a new singer and it was for an Italian TV show called Popcorn, which was a music show. So they rented a flat and I walk in the next morning, and there’s this huge king-sized bed. And there’s Lou Albano and these other wrestlers and Cyndi and her mom. And I’m like, ‘Ugh, Jesus, what am I doing here? Who are these people?’ And then they start playing the song, ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,’ and I’m like, ‘Ohhh, that’s… it.’ I just knew it was gonna be a hit. So I made myself indispensable. I mean, doting, putting her shoes on, everything. I really laid it on thick because I really wanted it. Two months before that, while I was still in school, I was watching MTV one night — which was just a few years old — and I thought that’s what I really want to do. I was telling people — trying to get the word out, put out some feelers — and they were like ‘That’s impossible, it takes years.’ And I wouldn’t hear it. People that I knew knew other artists who were just getting labels or trying to get labels, so I just thought I’d start there. But then I got the call from Cyndi.”
“It always helps to understand what’s happening, and to be able to understand your enemy. It helps you cope and helps you panic less. Now that I know what depression looks like and I know what the general steps are, there’s also a progression I can look at and feel comforted by. I can feel horrible, but I know what’s happening, which takes the fear out of it. You also have that little bit of, ‘Well, this ended before, maybe it will also end this time.’
“But being depressed is still one of the most terrifying things I can imagine. After I saw the movie The Matrix, it was terrifying to imagine waking up from reality and being in this blank room and having nothing to entertain me. That’s sort of what my depression was like, living my worst nightmare of being in this room alone, and complete boredom.”
Clara Bow was the original It girl, so much so that her 1927 film, titled—what else?—“It,” more or less defined the phenomenon. This piece, from Petersen’s Scandals of Classic Hollywood series, offers a perfectly juicy take on Ms. Bow.
2. “Almost Famous” (Katherine Stewart, Santa Barbara Magazine, Oct./Nov. 2006)
Stewart goes beyond the usual Edie clichés and delves into Sedgwick family lore, as well as Edie’s post-Factory return to Santa Barbara.
McInerney’s piece—a semi-seminal take on uber-It girl Chloe Sevigny in the early days of her downtown reign—captures a weird freeze-frame in time: Sevigny pre-Kids fame, and downtown New York in its last gasps of grittiness.
“Perky, pretty, and remarkably plugged-in, a pack of young publicists have become the darlings of New York’s demimonde. But be careful—they bite.” Detail-packed, with deliciously good dialogue and a healthy dollop of fun, this is classic Grigoriadis.
Cory Kennedy was just a regular high school hipster until party photographer Mark “The Cobrasnake” Hunter snapped her picture at an LA club. And then—practically overnight and before her parents had a chance to figure out what was going on—she was everywhere, a club kid, model, and message board fashion icon, with her very own column in Nylon. This is the making of an internet It Girl.
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