Final File_28

April in review.

April felt bisected for me. There was the part of April that came from March and the part of April that bled into May, a perfect trip to Antigua in between. I have nothing new to say about my emotions, just that I feel myself avoiding the world to maintain sanity or a false sense of safety. Anyway.

A friend reminded me I need to be better about sharing my work and the events I’m doing. So with that said, on May 13th, I’m doing an event at The Center for Fiction with the brilliant Emma Copley Eisenberg to discuss her newest book, Fat Swim, out now. I also wrote a short story called “They’ll Talk About Us Plenty” for Jupiter Magazine, which I’m very proud of. You can read that here.

Another cool thing I saw, the Brooklyn Public Library is putting on a program called The Public Critic where you attend cultural events and then write about them under the tutelage of working critics, including the brilliant Doreen St. Felix. Criticism is sacred! And if you’ve ever thought about getting into writing criticism, this is a very cool opportunity to learn from the best.

Okay, onto the post!

Notes from April

• On the first day of the month I went to dinner with Hannah and Adrienne. We grabbed dinner at a rooftop in Midtown because in picking a place my one request is that it had a view. The food was okay, the company was immaculate. Can’t wait for us to do it all over again soon.

  

• The next day we headed to Jersey. Jade tore her achilles so we made her a meal. By that I mean C cooked and I talked a lot. That night’s menu: crab legs, lobster tail, lamp chops, pearl couscous, and roasted carrots.

• That weekend, I went to an Audre Lorde event at the Schomburg with Crystal. I went into it with no expectations and came out sure that I was existing in the lineage of women who have loved and longed long before I showed up and that I am the end of someone else’s beginning. We all beget each other, ultimately. The work makes more work, and for that I am grateful. While listening to Beverly Guy Sheftall, I wondered if I should be a professor. I also became further convinced that mothering is a radical act, and done properly is the way we get free. I often find myself around people who had to unlearn or negotiate themselves inside of their families. I was fortunate to be taken seriously from the beginning and raised with a liberatory politic. My favorite part of the day was when Lorde’s former students spoke, two were from the last class she taught at Hunter College. One student, the poet Cheryl Boyce Taylor, said that after taking Lorde’s class she wanted to be a poet more than she wanted to be a mother. That cut right through me. The event culminated in Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor reading “Call.” When she started speaking I cried even though I didn’t want to. It was uncontrollable. Eventually I was weeping, Tears stained the long sleeve I was wearing and I kept looking at Crystal and saying what the fuck. It was incredible.

  

• Jet invited me to a screening of Is God Is, which I loved. More on that below. Another thing I loved: that she texted me midday and asked if I could go that night. I love a day-of plan.

• I raided the sale books section at Book Culture on 112th. I got so many good titles, I may need to make a video or something to go through them all.

• I was featured in a campaign for Woodstack, an indie sneaker store with locations around NYC.

• We had another book club meeting. This time, we discussed Kin. More on that in the next send.

• C and I went to the KWN concert. It was fine. I like the music. One thing I noticed: everyone was coupled. I love love!

• The following week I went to Antigua for my sister’s birthday. It was perfect. I bathed in blue water and watched the sun disappear into the ocean. I hollowed out lobster husks with my teeth. I lay on the beach and read until I was sweating. I ate saltfish for breakfast and laughed with my sister until my stomach hurt. By the last day, we promised to return once a year.

• I got dark brown toes as an experiment for the trip. Would not do it again, except maybe I would?

• I spied the perfect office chair in the Antigua airport. it’s the ones the TSA agents sit in—monitor height but with this incredible geometric profile. I didn’t take photos bc i’m a rule follower but just know I need that.

  

  

  

• C, Allie, and I went to the last Sasha Keable show at Blue Note. We arrived two hours early because we wanted a good seat and the line was already halfway down the block. We ran into Sophia in line and ended up sitting together. That was the first of many run-ins (it was lesbian central). The concert itself was very good. Sasha has incredible stage presence and sounds even better live. The best part of the night was a couple getting engaged on stage. I was sobbing! Like I said, I love love. After, we took the LIRR home and stopped by Insomnia Cookies on the way. There’s something about eating Insomnia in the late night hours that feels appropriate. I swear it made them taste better.

• Got dinner with Alex at Roman’s (yum). It was my first time seeing her since her sojourn in Mexico City so I wanted to check on her heart. We giggled and ate some of the best chicken I’ve had in recent memory. She also made me try the fava bean puree, which I ended up really liking.

• Had dinner with my agent Danielle. We went to Sailor, where we split fish and chicken and talked about publishing. I asked her my favorite question, what’s selling? Followed by, what are people writing. Lots of romantasy and horror. And friendship books.

  

• Alex left her job—read her gorgeous letter about it, here. To celebrate, she invited a bunch of us to sing karaoke at Up Stairs. It was lots of fun. I revealed my subpar rapping skills to all her friends.

• Soft serve season has officially commenced. I have been celebrating appropriately with weekly cones from Marvel Creamery.

• Went on a book date with a cool writer, but then again everyone I go on a book date with is cool!

• Had a three-event day on the last Wednesday of April. I started out at a panel, thrown by Gran Coramino and moderated Kevin Hart, then jetted to a Diptyque party at the new New Museum. I had some time between events so I stopped into PT Knitwear, where I signed a lone copy of Homebodies and bought two books: Darkology and Lush. Then I took myself to dinner and read by candlelight while eating french fries. I ran into friends at Diptyque so I hung out longer than I meant to before heading to my final event of the night, a tequila tasting with Humano at Gitano. Nicole works for the company that owns the brand so it was really an excuse to see her and Jade and drink a yummy margarita. C was at a work happy hour so we asked her to meet us out. The four of us ended the night at Buddakan and I proposed we do a summer bucket list which is just a ploy for us to hang out a bunch. One of my most-anticipated line items: a sunrise date.

• Spent the last day of the month at Inness for a day of wellness with Necessaire. The brand is launching a detox shampoo (C has already tried it on her locs, she likes it!). We had the entire property to ourselves, so we spent the day getting massages, doing yoga and floating in the pools. I felt my brain sort of reset and was able to be deeply present, a reminder to do stuff like that more often.

• I discovered Lenka bars, which are very good. I texted Alex and she informed me she knew about them already and said nothing because I don’t like Bjorn Corn, her sacred snack food. That yeasty popcorn is not good, I’m sorry! But these seedy granola bars are.

Reading

• Another Country by James Baldwin

  I picked this up because it came highly recommended by a bookseller. Also, Baldwin isn’t a hard sell. It’s about a group of friends who are exploring big questions about life, love, ambition and grief.. It is gorgeously written and incredibly alive. The novel moves between a few perspectives, starting with a Black man, Rufus, and ending with a white gay man, Eric, giving us access to the darkest parts of their fears and imaginations. All of the Black characters are in interracial relationships, which shapes the way they relate to one another. On the Black characters’ side, there’s a base level of suspicion and a rage toward the injustice of how whiteness warps their ability to trust whether their partners love them for them or are trying to work something out. On the white characters side they vacillate between a defensive posture and light introspection. It’s fascinating. I could write a lot about this book and the things it made me meditate on but that’s generally what Baldwin does, turn the novel into a mirror, even if it’s a fragmented one.

• Escape! by Stephen Fishbach

  This was one of five books I brought on vacation. It’s written by a former Survivor contestant and is about a Naked and Afraid-style show where the characters are attempting to escape an island and win a cash prize. The caveat is that they get more money the longer they tough it out. This is mostly besides the point. It’s really about what people are willing to do in the face of mounting pressure and how far one will go to hold onto an identity that’s fraying and crumbling despite every attempt to keep it intact. That said, it lacked catharsis, which made it hard for me to feel that the book successfully did what it set out to do.

• Floodlines by Saleem Haddad

  I also read this on vacation and in the days after. It follows three sisters who are living abroad after fleeing Iraq post-revolution. Their father was an artist, a very famous one, whose work shaped the country’s visual identity and lives on in a monument to the new regime. The novel explores the echoes of his legacy and how it shaped their lives as artists trying to make sense of their individual practices, their relationships to each other, and themselves. It also follows the son of one of the daughters, who is going through a life-altering breakup and grappling with the trauma of being a war reporter. I really liked it. The writing is electric and even though I didn’t love the ending (I have a hard time with endings and maybe assign too much weight to how I feel about the whole thing based on how it lands the plane) I liked the book generally and would recommend it.

• Transcription by Ben Lerner

  I couldn’t be the only person not reading Transcription so I picked it up a day or so after it came out. It opens with a writer who is interviewing his aging mentor. On the way to the interview the writer drops his phone in some water, which prevents him from recording said interview. Inexplicably, he can’t tell the mentor this, so they do a “preliminary,” interview, which is very much a real interview, where one person thinks they’re being recorded and the other is pretending that’s the case. It creates an interesting underlying tension of performance, truth, and fabrication. The whole book is interested in the underlying tension of performance, what happens when this is acted out uninterrupted and when it’s called out. It’s also about the narratives we construct in service of making sense of our lives and whether the truth is important for that work. What I liked most about it is its commitment to showing and not telling. Most of what we learn is told through dialogue. It’s how we learn about the character’s relationships, what they think and how they feel. Still, it doesn’t feel like a lack of interiority or intimacy. I felt very close to the characters’ understanding of themselves, even though on some level I knew it might not be the truth. I went in feeling very meh towards it and left it thinking, I get it, it’s good, but I’m not blown away.

Watching

• The Drama - Boring and unbrave. There’s a level of cowardice involved with using identity for shock value and refusing to contend with that. I really liked Angelica Jade Bastien’s review of it for Vulture.

• Is God Is - After watching Is God Is I posted a photo of the movie’s poster on my story and said, “If Toni Morrison made a movie, it would be this.” The film has a similar magical quality without losing its verisimilitude. It is both real and unreal, human and divine. It’s about twins who are burned in different places and experiencing the world differently as a result. Abandoned by their mother and burned by their daddy, they have carved out a life together, circling the question of what comes next. We get the sense that there’s a wound pulsing between them, an unanswered question. Then, a letter from their mother arrives and it kicks off a journey that changes everything. I really loved this film. It was effective in the way a Morrison novel is. It doesn’t require lots of laboring to make its point but is satisfying all the same. The movie is adapted from a play with the same name by Aleshea Harris and you can sense that origin point on the screen. What good plays do well is pull at eternal threads while transporting us into the very specific ailments of the characters on stage. The movie does this deftly all while being highly entertaining and funny too. It’s out on May 14, I hope everyone sees it.

• Love Overboard - If Love Island and Below Deck had a baby, it would be Love Overboard. It is deliciously messy and the participants have some sense. I really enjoyed it and kept recommending it to everyone I know.

• Mr. Loverman - Adapted from a novel by Bernadine Evaristo, Mr. Loverman follows a closeted, elderly man who decides to live in his truth after decades of secrecy. I didn’t make it very far with this because I got distracted but what I did see, I liked a lot. Funnily enough, my in-laws are watching this and they really enjoyed it too.

• Imperfect Women - A diabolical friend group unravels when one of them dies under mysterious circumstances. It’s an easy watch and very middle-of-the-pack as far as these shows go. It’s no Presumed Innocent or Big Little Lies but it’s not as incoherent as say, His & Hers or 56 Days. Do with that information what you will.

• Is This Thing On? - I think Andra Day is contractually obligated to sing in whatever film she’s cast in. And I get it, a voice is a terrible thing to waste. That said, I didn’t love Is This Thing On, a movie about a middle-aged man whose marriage is falling apart. He turns to standup on a whim and ends up finding his voice along the way. This was a hard one for me to get into, mostly because there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of character development or characterization more generally. They don’t see each other, which feels obvious and thin. I needed more.

• Temptation Island - I made it three episodes and couldn’t finish. I ended up asking Jade for the cliffnotes.

• Margo’s Got Money Troubles - underwhelmed!

• The Dark Wizard - I care very little about rock climbing but love character driven stories, which is why I’ve been watching Born to Bowl with great interest and why I stayed up past my bedtime watching The Dark Wizard. It chronicles the life of Dean Potter, a climber who revolutionized the sport. He was complicated—egotistical, passionate and troubled. He inspired deep loyalty and later incredible amounts of contempt from the people who once venerated him because he could be really really terrible to the people that loved him. I was really moved by this portrait of him, which is unflinching in its depiction of his struggles with mental health and the use of extreme sports as a source of dopamine and adrenaline. He was so clearly fighting himself and for much of the documentary (there’s one episode left), he wins by just staying alive. It’s a fascinating and often anxiety-inducing watch.

• The Unchosen - The show is well plotted but not very good, which I didn’t realize was possible until this. It’s a fictionalized show about a cult that unravels when a newcomer saves one of the members. It was fine!

• Funny AF- I love stand up comedy and I loved Netflix’s other competition show, Rhythm and Flow. If you like both of those things, it’s likely you’ll enjoy this too.

On my wishlist

The thin, super sheer top in question

• For the manuscript (thanks Erin!!)

• I love a thin, super sheer top

• A silver anklet, preferably a snake chain

• These slip-on Pumas

• Curious about barefoot shoes because I have wide feet, specifically these from Alohas

• This necklace from Hernan Herdez

Expense Report

• Lots of all-cotton underwear for a testing story at work (Natori makes some excellent ones , as does Jockey)

• An incredible amount of books

• More car stuff (boo tomato tomato)

• Those sold out heels from Topshop

• Vibram v-souls. I’ve been holding out but they big ugly shoe got me y’all. Will report back.

How was y’all’s month?