Search Results for: advertising

My So-Called Media: How the Publishing Industry Sells Out Young Women

Sipapre, AP / Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2018 | 10 minutes (2,554 words)

On November 30th, Tavi Gevinson published her last ever editor’s letter at Rookie. The 22-year-old started the site when she was just 15, and in the intervening years it had spawned a pastel-hued community of girlhood, which, if not always sparkly, was always honest. The letter spanned six pages, 5707 words. In Longreads terms, that’s 20 minutes, 20 minutes of Gevinson agonizing over the site she loved so much, the site that was so good, that was now bigger than her, that she couldn’t figure out how to save. “Rookie had been founded, in part, as a response to feeling constantly marketed to in almost all forms of media,” she wrote, “to being seen as a consumer rather than a reader or person.”

The market had won, but Gevinson was fighting to the death. It was hard to read. You could sense her torturing herself. And she was. Because in truth there was nothing Gevinson could have done, because the failure of Rookie was not about her, or even about the poor state of media as a whole. It was about what it has always been about, which is that as much power as women have online — as strong as their voices are, as good as their work is, as valuable as it is to women, especially young women — its intrinsic worth is something capitalism, dominated by men, feels no obligation to understand. This is what ultimately killed Rookie. And The Hairpin. And The Toast. And maybe even Lenny Letter too.

***

In her first ever editor’s letter, Tavi Gevinson explained that she wasn’t interested in the “average teenage girl,” or even in finding out who that was or whether Rookie appealed to her. “It seems that entire industries are based on answering these very questions,” she wrote. “Who is the typical teenage girl? What does she want? (And, a lot of the time, How can we get her allowance?)” She claimed not to have the answer but provided it anyway by not asking the question: by not inquiring, like other young women’s publications, whether her readers would like some lipstick or maybe some blush with that. Instead, Rookie existed in a state of flux, a mood board of art and writing and photography on popular culture and fashion and politics and, just, the reality of being a girl. In an interview with NPR in 2011, Gevinson noted the hypocrisy of other teen magazines’ feminist gestures: “they say something really simple about how you should love your body and be confident or whatever, but then in the actual magazine, there will still be stuff that maybe doesn’t really make you love your body.”

Writer Hazel Cills emailed Gevinson when she was 17 to ask if she could join Rookie. In her eulogy for the site, published in Jezebel, Cills described the magazine’s novel concept: “unlike Teen Vogue or Seventeen, we were overwhelmingly staffed with actual teenagers, and were free to write about our realities as if they were the stuff of serious journalism.” Lena Singer, who was in her 30s when she worked as Rookie’s managing editor, thinks the publication deserves some credit for the fact that adults are now more willing to defer to adolescents than they were when it launched. “Part of my role as an editor there was to help protect the idea — and I still believe it — that the world doesn’t need another adult’s opinion about teen spaces, online or elsewhere,” she says. “Teens say what needs to be known about that.” And when they didn’t have the answers, they chose which adults to consult with video features like “Ask a Grown Man,” where celebrities like Thom Yorke answered readers’ questions. The column would have been familiar to Sassy aficionados, particularly fans of its “Dear Boy” series which had guys like Beck offering advice. Which made sense, because Sassy was basically the OG Rookie.

Named by the 13-year-old daughter of one of the heads of its publishing company, Fairfax, Sassy arrived in 1988 and was the first American magazine that actually spoke the language of adolescence. Teen publications dated back to 1944, the year Seventeen launched, but Sassy was different. “The wink-wink, exasperated, bemused tone was completely unlike the vaguely disguised parental voice of Seventeen,” write Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer in How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine. And unlike Teen or YM, it did not make guys the goal and girls the competition — if it had a goal at all, it was to be smart (and preferably not a conservative). Sassy was launched as the U.S. iteration of the Australian magazine Dolly — they originally shared a publisher — and presented itself as the big sister telling you everything you needed to know about celebrity, fashion, and beauty but also drugs, sex, and politics. “The teen magazines here were like Good Housekeeping for teen-agers,” Dolly co-founder Sandra Yates told the New York Times in 1988, adding, “I’m going to prove that you can run a business with feminist principles and make money.”

So she hired Jane Pratt, an associate editor at Teenage magazine, who matched her polka dot skirt with work boots, who donated to a pro-choice organization. Pratt “cast” writers like Dolly did, then went further to reinforce their personalities by publishing more photos and encouraging them to write in the first person, with plenty of self-reference, culminating in a sort of reality TV show-slash-blog before either of those things existed. Sassy became ground zero for indie music coverage thanks largely to Christina Kelly, a fan of Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz who wrote the way teenagers talk. “I don’t know how to say where my voice came from,” she says. “It was just there.” Like the other writers on staff, she offered a proto-Jezebel take on pop culture, a new form of postmodern love-hate criticism.

At its peak, Sassy, which had one of the most successful women’s magazine launches ever (per Jesella and Meltzer), attracted 800,000 readers. But this was the era of the feminist backlash, where politicians were doubling down on good old American family values. The writers and editors at Sassy weren’t activists, per se, but they were the children of second wavers, they went to universities with women’s departments, they knew about the patriarchy. “Sassy was like a Trojan horse,” wrote Jesella and Meltzer, “reaching girls who weren’t necessarily looking for a feminist message.” Realizing that adolescents were more sexually active, receiving letters about the shame around it, Sassy made it a priority to provide realistic accounts of sex without the moralism. They covered homosexuality, abortion, and even abuse, and were the first teen magazine in America to advertise condoms.

In response, right-wing religious groups petitioned to boycott Sassy‘s advertisers; within several months the magazine lost nearly nearly 20 percent of its advertising. After several changes in ownership, including the removal of Sandra Yates and a squarer mandate, the oxymoronic conservative Sassy eventually folded into Teen magazine in 1997, the alternative press devoured once again by the mainstream.

But Sassy left behind a community. A form of analog social media, the magazine united writers with readers, but also readers with each other. Sassy even had its readers conceptualize an issue in 1990 — the “first-ever reader-produced issue of a consumer magazine” — the same year Andi Zeisler secured an internship at Sassy with a hand-illustrated envelope and the straightforward line, “I want to be your intern.” Six years later, she co-created her own magazine, Bitch, a cross between Sassy and Ms. It had the same sort of intimate community where, Zeisler explains, “there’s somehow a collective feeling of ownership that you don’t have with something like Bustle.”

Bustle, a digital media company for millennial women, is often cited as the counter-example to indie sites like Sassy, Bitch, and Rookie. It has more than 50 million monthly uniques (Bustle alone boasts 37 million) and is run by a man named Bryan Goldberg, who upon its 2013 launch wrote, with a straight face, “Maybe we need a destination that is powered by the young women who currently occupy the bottom floors at major publishing houses.” While Sassy had to struggle to be profitable and sustainable in an ad-based and legacy driven industry, now corporate entities like Bustle manspread sites like Rookie into non-existence. “The one thing that has stayed the same,” says Zeisler, “is the fact that alternative presentations of media by and for girls and young women is really overlooked as a cultural force.”

***

Tavi Gevinson was born the year Sassy died, but Lena Dunham arrived just in time. Recalling her predecessor, she described her feminist newsletter, Lenny Letter, which launched in 2015 as “a big sister to young radical women on the Internet.” Delivered to your inbox, Lenny, backed by Hearst, mimicked the intimacy of magazines past, the ones that existed outside Twitter and the comments section. It included an advice column and interviews (the first was with Hillary Clinton) as well as personal essays touching on various sociopolitcal issues. It was more activist than Sassy, more earnest than ironic, more 20-something than adolescent. It even had a Rookie alum, Laia Garcia, as its deputy editor. Lenny’s third issue launched it into mainstream consciousness when Jennifer Lawrence wrote an essay about pay disparity in Hollywood, which provoked an industry-wide conversation. Then three years after launch and without warning, on October 19, a final letter by Dunham and co-creator Jenni Konner claimed “there’s no one reason for our closure” and shut down.

Lenny’s demise came nine months after that of another site that had a loyal female-driven community: The Hairpin. Founded in 2010 by Edith Zimmerman under The Awl umbrella, the site that had also published writing by Lenny editor-at-large Doreen St. Félix claimed “a natural end” — the same words The Awl used for its closure. NPR’s Glen Weldon suggested more specific reasons for their termination: the decline in ad revenue online, the sites’ unwillingness to compromise, their independence. “The Awl and The Hairpin were breeding grounds for new writers — like The National Lampoon in the ‘70s, Spy Magazine in the ‘80s, Sassy in the ‘90s and McSweeney’s in the aughts,” he explained, adding, “Invariably they would find, waiting for them, a comparatively small, but loyal, sympathetic and (mostly) supportive readership.”

Two years before this, a similar site, The Toast, founded by former Hairpinners Nicole Cliffe and Daniel Ortberg, also closed. The publication was created in 2013 to be an intersectional space for women to write basically whatever they fancied. They even invited Rookie to contribute. The Toast published multiple features a day, stating, “we think there’s value in posting things that we’ve invested time and energy on, even if it comes at the expense of ‘You won’t believe this story about the thing you saw on Twitter and have already believed’ link roundups.” In a lengthy message posted in May 2016, Ortberg broke down the financial circumstances that left them weighing their options. “Most of them would have necessitated turning The Toast into something we didn’t like, or continuing to work ourselves into the ground forever,” Ortberg wrote, adding, “The only regret I have is that Bustle will outlive us and I will never be able to icily reject a million-dollar check from Bryan Goldberg, but that’s pretty much it.”

It says everything about the American media industry that Bustle, a site with an owner who mansplained women’s sites to women, a site which acquired the social justice-oriented publication Mic only after it had laid off almost its entire staff, has outlived the ones that are actually powered by women. If you look closely, you will see that the majority of women’s sites that continue to exist — from SheKnows to Refinery29 — have men in charge. Even HelloGiggles, which was created by three women, is owned by the male-run Meredith Corporation. That means that, fundamentally, these publications are in the hands of a gender that does not historically believe in the inherent value of women’s media. Women, including young women, are valuable as consumers, but if their interests cannot be monetized, they are worthless. Yet the same year The Toast closed, Lauren Duca wrote a Sassy-style essay, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” in Teen Vogue which dominated the news and garnered 1.4 million unique visitors. “Teen girls are so much smarter than anyone gives them credit for,” Phillip Picardi, Teen Vogue’s digital editorial director, reminded us. “We’ve seen an immense resonance of political coverage with our audience.” Seventeen and ELLE have also capitalized on wokeness, their spon-con sharing real estate with social justice reporting, blurring the boundaries between protesting and shopping. “The inner workings of those places are not about feminism,” says Zeisler. “They’re about selling feminism and empowerment as a brand and that’s very different from what you would find at Rookie or at The Toast or The Hairpin.”

It seems fitting that a new print teen magazine launched last year called Teen Boss. On the fact that it had no ads, Jia Tolentino side-eyed in The New Yorker, “unless, of course, it’s all advertising — sponsored content promoting “Shark Tank” and JoJo Siwa (both appear in each of the first three issues) and also the monetizable self.”

***

Teen girls are the “giant piggybank of capitalism,” says Zeisler, and it’s an apt metaphor. Their value is their purchasing power and they are sacrificed, smashed to pieces, to get to it. When Ariana Grande obliterates every sales record known to man, man still asks why she is on the cover of BuzzFeed. Man never seems to ask, however, why sports — literal games — are on the cover of anything. This is the world in which Rookie and Lenny Letter and The Hairpin and The Toast attempt to survive, in which all that is left when they don’t are floating communities of women, because the industry refuses to make room. As Gevinson wrote, “that next iteration of what Rookie stands for — the Rookie spirit, if you will — is already living on in you.” As Dunham wrote, “Lenny IS you: every politician, every journalist, every activist, every illustrator, every athlete who shared her words here.” As The Hairpin wrote, “We hope when you look back on what we did here together it makes you proud and not a little delighted.” As Cliffe and Ortberg wrote, “The Toast was never just a chance for people to tune in to The Mallory and Nicole Show, it was also a true community and it will be missed.”

These publications did not die by their own hand. Zeisler notes that to this day, she sees people tweeting about missing The Toast. These sites died because their inherent value did not translate into monetary value in a capitalist system run by men who only know how to monetize women by selling them out. As bright and as hungry as young women are today, they are entering a world designed to shut them down. And the future looks bleak. “If media as an industry doesn’t figure out how to value [independent sites for young women] in a way that really reflects and respects the work that goes into them,” says Zeisler, “we’re just going to have a million fucking Bustles.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Blowin’ Up the ‘90s

Mark Terrill, Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | December 2018 | 11 minutes (2,795 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

The 1990s did not end on January 1, 2000. The monumental anti-climax of Y2K — a computer “bug” that was supposed to screech our Earth to a Scooby-Doo foot-cloud halt, but instead did bupkis — was a truly apt expression of the preceding decade. But even discounting Y2K, I’ve got some serious issues with the alleged “turn of the actual millennium” as the endpoint of the most intentionally underwhelming decade of the 20th century. And not just because 2000 (zero-zero) is so obvious and overplayed — though there is, of course, that.

The actual termination point of the ‘90s required an attitudinal shift that would decentralize the role of Generation X as the admittedly-petulant target of all culture and advertising — the thawing of the winter of the bong-ripping couch-slacker’s discontent; the disappearance of gin and juice from house-party bars; the centering of the hot tub on The Real World; the sobering realization that both men and women were from Earth and just sucked; the demise, for that matter, of Suck itself.

In point of incontrovertible fact, the 1990s would not end in the United States until the aughts’ resurgence of aggressive consumerism and even more aggressive vacuity came to dominate all aspects of sociopolitical and popular culture. So the only question is: When was that? There are more potential answers than squiggles on a Fido Dido sweatshirt.

Was it in 2001, when the original Fast and the Furious premiered? 1996, when Blur released that WOO-hoo song? Was it 2010 — you heard me, two thousand and ten — when enough grandparents had shuffled off the mortal coil to make the primary avenue of written news consumption digital rather than paper?

I have spent an unnecessarily and perhaps questionably extensive amount of time researching in this subfield, and I present my findings to you now in a perplexing new format (I believe it is called a “list-cicle”?) that is apparently the only thing young people are able to read.

Read more…

The Fault in Our Stars: On Fake Celebrity Interviews

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,670 words)

“I play with my breasts, not to show off but to demonstrate a kind of revulsion. I simply transform myself into a voice for all the tormented souls of this world.”

That’s Courtney Love in 1996 in SZ, the magazine belonging to one of the largest newspapers in Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung. It sounds a little crazy, but then, she’s a little crazy. And anyway, Tom Kummer, the Swiss journalist who attempted to style himself after Hunter S. Thompson, always filed outlandish exclusives and cover stories like this from Los Angeles — Pamela Anderson on her aching implants, Mike Tyson on eating cockroaches, Bruce Willis on immorality. From the mid-nineties to 2000, he was kind of a celebrity himself. Beloved by editors, he also wrote for the German magazines Der Spiegel and Stern and Switzerland’s Die Weltwoche. In fact, it was in the latter that, roughly two years before the Love interview, he wrote, funnily enough: “She plays with her breasts not to show off but to demonstrate revulsion. She wants to embody the voice of all tormented souls in the world.”

Tom Kummer had been flagged for fabrication before, but it wasn’t until an exposé in Focus magazine in 2000 that it was confirmed: he had never interviewed Love, or Brad Pitt or Sharon Stone or Kim Basinger, or anyone really. SZ followed with a breakdown of his deceit, like The New York Times would with Jayson Blair in 2003; it published an apology for the “falsified” stories and fired editors Christian Kämmerling and Ulf Poschardt. You would think Kummer would at least nod at contrition — like Janet Cooke in 1982, like Stephen Glass in 1998 — but he took the Jonah Lehrer route instead and talked boundaries. He even had a name for his approach: borderline journalism. “I wrote impressionistic, creative, literary descriptions of the life of stars in the form of so-called interviews,” he told The Guardian in 2011, adding, “Everybody loved my stuff and I guess they were addicted to some kind of illusion that stars should talk like I made them talk.” He claimed he was never asked for proof, that his editors had approved of his methods. As Stern’s publisher told the Times, they — Kummer and his editors — “appeared to have a different idea of journalism.” Read more…

RomCon: Our Failure to See Black Romantic Comedies

Tyler Perry Studios‎, Homegrown Pictures Screen Gems, New Line Cinema, Sneak Preview Entertainment, FoxSearchlight, Universal Pictures

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,438 words)

When I think romcom, I think white — Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers — white women, white houses, white stories. But I was weaned on white culture. More striking is that Vanity Fair film critic K. Austin Collins, who had a “low-whiteness diet” growing up, thinks the same thing. So does The Undefeated culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald, who attended a predominantly black high school and remembers kids “losing their minds” over Love & Basketball. Yet the first thing that enters her mind when she thinks of romcoms is her favorite, Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s funny because even in my head the movies are segregated,” McDonald says. “I can list off a whole bunch of movies with majority black casts that of course are romcoms, I just didn’t necessarily think of them that way.”

Earlier this week Rebel Wilson, star of next year’s Isn’t it Romantic, was shamed into apologizing for claiming to be “the first ever plus-sized girl to be the star of a romantic comedy” and then blocking the black women on Twitter who reintroduced her to Queen Latifah and Mo’Nique. “To be part of a problem I was hoping I was helping makes it that much more embarrassing & hard to acknowledge,” she tweeted. No kidding. While both my boyfriend (white) and I (half-white) have seen a number of black romcoms, including Queen Latifah’s, we were ashamed to realize that we were as complicit in their erasure as Wilson — we likely would have forgotten them too. For this, Collins has understanding, if not sympathy. While he sides with Rebecca Theodore-Vachon — one of the first to call out Wilson — he also recognizes that the critic is occupying a space of lucidity independent of the white-washed culture that formed Wilson (and me and my whiter boyfriend): “It is true that it would take a mental adjustment for her to think of some of those movies as romcoms because no one advertised them as those things.” Read more…

After World War I, Horror Movies Were Invaded By an Army of Reanimated Corpses

"J'accuse!" 1919.

W. Scott Poole | an excerpt adapted from Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror | Counterpoint | October 2018 | 23 minutes (6,219 words)

The murderous folly of the Great War chilled western Europe to the bone, and the new, gruesome entertainment of the horror film became neither escape nor catharsis but rather a repetition of trauma. Telling these stories sometimes had the effect of ripping the scab from the wound so that it never became healthy, or grieving until grief became an end in itself. At times, the stories included social criticism. In all cases, the horror film included a long, angry procession of unquiet corpses.

Not everyone would agree, or at least believe, that horror films carry so much weight. “You are reading too much into the movies” is a fairly common response to such claims. “They’re just entertainment.” This idea of course has its own history and, paradoxically, it begins with a writer who thought that the films made after the Great War did contain coded messages about the era. He saw in them a dangerous message that explained the path from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to its resurgence as a threatening power twenty years later.

Siegfried Kracauer left Germany in 1933, emigrating to Paris the same year that Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. After the beginning of World War II and the invasion of France, he fled for the Spanish border with the renegade essayist Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940. Unlike Benjamin, however, Kracauer found a way to make it to the United States, where a Rockefeller Fellowship awaited him in the spring of 1941, thanks to his fellow exile the philosopher Max Horkheimer. New York City’s Museum of Modern Art offered Kracauer a position that involved studying the German films made between 1918 and 1933, a task he hoped might yield some clue as to what had become of his homeland. Read more…

An Inclusive Guide to Lingerie and a New Take on Self-Care

E+ / Getty Images, Ten Speed Press

 

Danielle Jackson | Longreads | September 2018 | 17 minutes (4,454 words)

In 2014, the U.K.-based entrepreneur Ade Hassan launched Nubian Skin, a line of nude hosiery and undergarments especially for darker skin tones, with product photos on Tumblr and Instagram. Hassan told Forbes she’d started the brand out of personal frustration —while working in finance, she couldn’t find lingerie or hosiery that complemented her skin or fit her wardrobe. Within days, audiences flooded Nubian Skin’s social channels. Then a number of new brands followed Hassan’s lead, offering nudes for dark skin in lingerie and other product categories, too, like skin care, cosmetics and swimwear.

Cora Harrington, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lingerie Addict, called Nubian Skin’s launch an “inflection point” in the fashion business. She also said the industry still has far to go on inclusivity. In lingerie, large retailers like Victoria Secret continue  to uphold a thin, white, feminine of center ideal. Harrington is a Black queer woman with a glamorous afro and an expertise in undergarments. Her long running site of product reviews, primers, how-to’s, and delightful fashion editorials that she conceptualizes, art directs, and often models in herself, demystifies the craft and care of lingerie for a wide range of bodies.

In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie, Harrington’s first book, expands and formalizes her approach. It’s both a practical reference guide and a deep, probing history of bras, underwear, shapewear, hosiery, and loungewear — the five core categories of intimate apparel. Harrington dispels advice in a warm, inviting tone. She uses no gendered pronouns, and gorgeous watercolor illustrations by Sandy Wirt adorn the pages instead of photographs of bodies. Special sections give guidance on binding and how commonly used garment components can be difficult for bodies with skin sensitivities and conditions like fibromyalgia.

Dita Von Teese writes in the foreword, “lingerie allows for seduction of self,” that it doesn’t need to have anything to do with sex or partnership.  Harrington believes lingerie can be a place for play and self-exploration, a form of self-care. It is “the first thing you put on in the morning,” before attending to your day, and the last thing you take off at night. It should make you feel good.

My most recent bra fitting was at a shop in Soho a few months after I’d gained a bit of weight. It had been years, quite frankly, since I’d made the time for a proper fitting, and the time, care, and expertise of the shop attendant gave me a break from the body blues. Wearing something new and pretty and well-constructed can do that, of course, but it was especially meaningful in my personal time of transition. It made me feel that my new body wasn’t wrong, just different. I spoke with Harrington on the phone about her path, her expertise in lingerie, what she was going after in writing In Intimate Detail, self-care, and the future of the industry. Read more…

The Gilded Age of (Unpaid) Internet Writing

Apple Computer / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (2,976 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

In 1998, my first real job — at which I was terrible — was as an editorial assistant for a New York book publisher. My breathtakingly privileged days consisted of emailing mean jokes about the assistants I didn’t like to the assistants I did, and slacking off at my desk during my boss’s long lunches. That’s when I discovered these things called “webzines.” My 1993 black-and-white PowerBook had been powerful enough for abysmal college essays on Heinrich von Kleist, but not for something called a browser, so it was not until my entrée to the professional world and its professional-issue Windows 98 that I began “surfing the ‘Net” in earnest.

In the nascent years of online ubiquity — when CHHHHHHHHHH BEEboo BEEboo BEEboo became a household noise, and not just something for extreme nerds — the web was both very big and very small. In 1996 there were only 100,000 websites in the Whole Wide World. (Today there are almost two billion.) Plus, aside from a few early leaders in e-commerce, ’90s sites were usually personal homepages, accessible only to the visitor patient and accurate enough to type the precise address, down to the tilde. Alas, what made the webzines of the late ’90s the best was also what would end up making the internet the worst: anyone could publish anything about anything, and very few people expected to be paid.

Read more…

The Next Level of Commitment: Revealing our Money Secrets

Christopher Robbins / Getty, Composite by Katie Kosma

Vanessa Golenia | Longreads | September 2018 | 19 minutes (4,692 words)

 

“Should we tell each other how much we make?” I asked Peter, trying to sound casual while in bed enjoying post-coital ice cream. In the late summer of 2016, after 15 months of shuttling back and forth between our apartments in Ubers and exposing our roommates to the nightly soundscape of our sex life, we decided it was time to move in together. We were having fun deciding what colors to paint the walls, and which pieces of furniture to combine, but had so far avoided any discussion of money.

Part of it was my fault. I had no interest in talking about incomes, believing that when you’re in love, you’re in love — fuck the money. Why talk about numbers when you can instead focus on finding out what he thinks about the afterlife, or learn the juicy details of his last breakup, or memorize how he takes his coffee (a shot of espresso with whole milk in a handmade ceramic cup)?

But the main reason we’d avoided talking about money for so long was that there was a significant income gap between us and neither of us felt comfortable finding out just how wide it was.

Peter is a visual artist and it’s common knowledge that unless you have a trust fund or a wildly successful career, artists don’t make a lot of money, especially in a place like New York City where a pastrami sandwich from Katz Deli costs $22 and a parking space in a dimly lit garage costs $600 dollars a month (enough to cover rent in other cities). Most artists are barely scraping by here — constantly making empty promises to each other about banding together and moving to Detroit.

Like most artists, Peter didn’t make enough money to live off sales of his paintings and photographs alone, regardless of how compelling I thought they were. He had a full-time job as a gallery director and took freelance jobs installing art and curating private collections. I had no idea how much that paid, but the more I got to know him, the more I sensed it wasn’t much.

Read more…

Mr. Rogers vs. the Superheroes

Associated Press

Maxwell King | An excerpt adapted from The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers | Abrams | September 2018 | 12 minutes (3,033 words)

It all came together in Hawaii, of all places.

In the late 1970s, David Newell and Fred Rogers were traveling together to Honolulu, where Fred was scheduled to make a speech. David Newell handled public relations for Fred Rogers and his production company, Family Communications, Inc. (FCI), as well as playing Mr. McFeely, the “speedy delivery” mailman character on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers hated traveling by himself — in fact, he hated traveling at all, just as he hated giving speeches. But he was often called on to speak at colleges and universities, as well as to early childhood education groups and broadcasting organizations, and most often it was Newell who traveled with him.

In a taxi to the speaking engagement, Rogers was lost in thought about his upcoming speech. Newell recalls: “In the newspaper, I came across this little blurb that a child had jumped off a roof with a towel — the Superman thing.”

Newell interrupted Rogers’s reverie to tell him the shocking news that a little boy who’d watched Superman on television had decided he would try to fly, and was terribly injured falling from a rooftop. One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was willfully misleading innocent, impressionable children. To him, it was immoral and completely unacceptable. Read more…

Arranging Your Body in Space: Talking Identity, Memoir, and Twins with Leah Dieterich

Getty Images

“One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins,” Leah Dieterich writes in her memoir, “but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.”

This concept of a vanishing twin, a term coined in the year of Dieterich’s birth, frames the author’s fascinating exploration of love, identity, sexuality and relationships. Though she finds her complement in her husband Eric, the twinship that is their marriage starts to diminish, or ‘vanish,’ just as her body had as a ballet dancer in her youth. Dieterich tries to figure out what drives her to fuse so strongly with certain people, what it is about her that fears being alone, and how individuality vanishes in a union. Maybe she lost her twin? Like the great essayists, her probing mind struggles to understand itself, and she makes fascinating connections between a range of subjects from pop culture to psychology to literature to help figure out who she is and what she wants.

Vanishing Twins is a powerful, poetic memoir, both emotive and cerebral, that casts new light on the familiar issue of relationships, marriage and storytelling, and vividly articulates some of the most subtle aspects of human relationships in a way many readers will recognize in themselves.

When did you start writing about your relationship with your husband and your own identity?

I started writing Vanishing Twins about six years ago, but before that I’d explored some of the same themes of love, language, and identity in fiction. I’d also started a screenplay for a film about a couple trying to define their individual identities while maintaining their bond, who meet a set of identical twins who are trying to do the same. Sexual entanglements ensue. I was really only at the research phase for this film, interviewing a set of twins that my husband was friends with, and I got so into our correspondence and the other research I was doing about twins (and relationships and sexuality) that I realized I needed to pursue this topic in a more essayistic way.

When I tell people about your book, I emphasize not only the subject matter but the way you approached your story. To me, you turn the memoir on its head by staging the text in a poetic way on the page, and by alternating essayistic diversions with the larger narrative to explore related themes. How did you find your book’s inventive form?

I have writers like Maggie Nelson and Sarah Manguso and many others to thank for the form. I really love the numbered aphorisms in Bluets but knew that felt too academic for my project, though I have always loved the way Nelson can synthesize the ideas of great thinkers into her own personal narrative. I assume it means she’s a great teacher, though I’ve never studied with her. I was a private student of Sarah Manguso’s and learned a lot from her about concision and how it is possible to make something very weighty out of only a few words or paragraphs. I like the term “staging” that you use, as well, because I feel that my writing has been informed by my background as a ballet dancer. In dance, you are constantly arranging and rearranging your body in space. This is how I treated the various sections of the book. I moved them around until they seemed fluid like a dance.

You work in advertising, but did you ever formally study writing?

I haven’t formally studied writing in a degree program. I cobbled my writerly education together from a couple of UCLA extension classes, a week-long workshop in Mexico, and two long-term private student relationships, one with Chris Daley who leads Writing Workshops of Los Angeles with whom I met with weekly for two years while generating the first draft of Vanishing Twins, and the other with Sarah Manguso, who gave me notes on two drafts of the book over the course of the following two years.

How has your ad career informed your literary ventures?

Advertising writing requires a lot of concision, so it has very much informed my inclination toward brevity in my literary work. Being a copywriter and having my headlines or TV scripts rejected (and sometimes accepted, even lauded) by my boss on a daily basis prepared me well for the rejection I’d have to face on the way to publishing a book.

People often describe writing about our lives as “cathartic,” but that isn’t the point of a lot of personal writing. In your book, you’re searching for answers, for a deeper understanding. Do you feel that you’ve achieved a new perspective on your life now?

I definitely gained perspective on the period of my life that I’ve explored in Vanishing Twins. I always write to understand something, whether it’s something about myself or something about the world at large. It’s the way I process my thoughts. When I’m writing or revising with the intent to publish, I’m always doing so with David Foster Wallace’s intention—that the purpose of literature is to connect, challenge, and ultimately make us feel less alone. So while it’s true that writing about one’s life isn’t necessarily “cathartic,” there is a visceral element (connection with other humans) for both reader and writer when it is done successfully.

Sometimes the people who become characters in our stories feel betrayed or mischaracterized, or feel they get should an editorial say in the text. Has writing about the people in your life caused any tensions?

Of course. But these tensions were an important part of the project itself. I had to find a way to honor my autonomy and my individual voice as an artist, while simultaneously respecting the differing opinions, memories, and thoughts of someone I love deeply. In a lot of ways it’s a continuation of the journey begun by the self who narrates the book. Luckily my husband is an artist himself, and a lover of literature and philosophy, which made the process easier. Many of the events in this book happened more than a decade ago. To have the opportunity, though painful, to revisit them has helped us realize how far we have both come together and individually since that time.