dumb shit
I've been working on two big pieces about the Kardashians for the last few months-- one, which came out last week, is about their relationship to plastic surgery, and how it has and hasn't changed our relationship to plastic surgery; the other, which you can read next week, is about how they've built a billion-dollar empire out of lip kits and contour. It's been really fun, engaging, challenging work, even if sometimes it has moved me to do things like tweet WHY IS WRITING SO FUCKING HARD in order to keep myself from screaming it out loud in a coffee shop.
The only thing I don't like about it is having to talk about it. Because: people say like things like "no offense, but why?" Because people say things like, "They're dumb," and "Thinking about them makes all of us dumber." Because people say a bunch of shit that they're parroting because they read it and it sounded right to them, because they haven't thought about the Kardashians all that much, because why should they.
Fair enough: why should they. But also: I have, and it's exhausting to be continually engaging with people who dismiss something out of hand about a) why they shouldn't do that or b) if they are, they shouldn't engage me, who has actually spent a lot of time with the thing. (See also: young adult literature.)
I get it. We can't all care about everything. Some stuff has to get written off as not important. And at this moment on this planet, there's a lot of stuff that is much more urgently important than the Kardashians.
But, and, also: the Kardashians are happening. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars. They have helped create an industry of "influencers" that's basically driving retail sales in America right now. What's retail? Oh, right, the economy. Retail is the working conditions of people working to sell clothes in brick and mortar stores in disappearing malls, or ship them from warehouses, and people working to make the garments they sell in foreign factories and retail is the environmental conditions that create those garments (remember when I wrote about indigo?).
It's exhausting, the way that actually pretty much everything is important. The thing about everything being important is that none of us can care about all of it. That's one of the reasons I love to read: because, for instance, I'm not gonna track down the guys who are trying to corner the market on legal weed via gene patenting, but, thanks to my pal Amanda's months of intrepid reporting, I can learn about them in fifteen minutes. I don't have to care about weed the way she does, but I can know things about it. You don't have to care about the Kardashians the way I do, but you can know about them, and I think that's important.
Thank god, since it is also my job.
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Anyway if you need proof my "brain" hasn't "rotted" I also wrote two essays about Literature this week-- well, actually, I wrote about genre books, mostly, but at least they were books, right? You can read me on Kristin Cashore's Jane, Unlimited and impractical loves as well as on Marlena and The Hot One and how cultural tropes concerning young women affect the way young women think and write about themselves and their friends.
I also did some reporting for the LA Times on the formerly incarcerated chefs who helped make dinner for the Emmys Governor's Ball on Sunday.
Kaitlin Tiffany, who interviewed me for The Verge when GRACE came out, wrote a fantastic essay about paranoia and girls writing boyband conspiracies for The Hairpin.
If you want to see me talk about the book in person, I'll be at Wordstock in Portland in November!!
I'm also teaching for Writing Workshops LA again this fall.