Resistance is futile
The Cut does it again
Oh, how I hoped to return to you, my dear newsletter subscribers, with renewed creative focus and sharp insights about the state of the world. But The Cut had other plans for me, and when it wants to me (and everyone else) to read something and think about it for days, it always succeeds. This week’s brain worm was “The Forever-35 Face” by Bridget Read, a (literal) deep dive into the current medical, financial, and cultural state of the face lift.
[Chloe] Hall had always assumed she would get plastic surgery — “Like, since I was 16.” She just thought that it would come when she was older, as a last resort, when the wind-tunnel look was at least preferable to aging. But at [her friend] Sabina’s direction, Hall started following a few surgeons posting their before and after face-lift pictures on -Instagram. She was surprised to see that the afters didn’t have those classic tight, pulled Palm Beach cheeks or the Joker mouth. Instead, patients of all ages, many of them in their 40s, appeared dewy and youthful, like the women at drop-off. Everyone must be getting face-lifts, Hall suddenly realized. Good face-lifts. Potentially new face-lifts. And she wanted one.
It’s a perfect, classic Cut piece, so gossipy and salacious that its impeccable craft and slow build to a gut-punch of a conclusion sneak up on you. (Pay attention for the word “genetically.”) I also recommend the behind-the-scenes interview with Read in New York’s Dinner Party newsletter, in which she reveals that she fainted while watching a surgeon reach underneath a different patient’s detached face and reposition it “like a Halloween mask.”
But that was this week. What—or should I say who—was consuming my thoughts and crowding out my ideas before that? Elizabeth Gilbert, of course. Before bowling us over with “The Forever-35 Face,” The Cut excerpted her new memoir about the experience of her dying lover Rayya relapsing into cocaine and opioid addiction, and our friend Liz realizing she was just as addicted to the experience of enabling her.
I hated the support meeting for the family and friends of addicts because it didn’t make any sense to me. I went there expecting to hear people share really useful advice about how to get other people clean and sober. But the people in the room were just talking about themselves — about their own issues with anxiety, codependency, and overcontrol. “I have to keep the focus on myself,” I heard several folks say — and that just felt insane to me, given the fact that every single person in that room seemed to be dealing with a loved one who was a deranged drinker or drug fiend. How could anyone keep the focus on themselves when they were surrounded by the chaos of other people’s addictions? Why weren’t they focused instead upon making those drunks and drug addicts stop what they were doing?
Then there was the 12-step meeting for sex and love addicts. I hated that one even more. I hated it because all the people in that room seemed to have super-messed-up histories with romantic dysfunction and sexual degradation — and who wants to hear about that? These people were obviously really sick, and I felt sorry for them.
I also hated that, at the beginning of each meeting, they read from a pamphlet listing the characteristics of sex and love addiction, and I identified so strongly with each and every item on the list that it made me feel exposed — as if I myself were the subject of an intervention. In fact, that list of behaviors described me so perfectly that it could have been my own unauthorized biography.
And The Cut didn’t even end up with what I have to believe will be the most jaw-dropping reveal of the book, which is that at one point Gilbert planned to murder Rayya, and which somehow went to The Guardian instead. Elizabeth Gilbert’s commitment to scorching the earth of her previous public persona in outrageously readable prose remains unparalleled. The book comes out on Tuesday, which doesn’t bode well for my ability to form new thoughts for next week’s newsletter. But I shall try.
