longevity
One of the things about having been writing on the internet more or less continuously for uhhhhhh eleven years now is that sometimes I have a thought or a feeling and think "I should write about this" and then I remember I already have. For instance, last weekend I watched the Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana and flashed on these paragraphs from when I saw her in concert at Staples in 2015. 
Then I was reading Megan Abbot's Dare Me, because I am obsessed with the USA adaptation (truly, who would have thought? ) and it was this, from when I read The Fever in 2014:
Sometimes, though, what sends me into the archives is external: Emily Books, an independent publishing company, announced it was closing earlier this week, which brought me back to an essay I wrote in 2011. 2011! Which already felt like a lifetime away from when I'd started reading Emily's writing on Gawker and her personal blogs, and thought no one else had ever been as smart and funny and cool. (That would have been circa 2008, when I was still in college.)
I remember sitting alone on the Farm in New Haven waiting for some weekend activity to start-- I think I was supposed to be giving someone a tour and they never showed?-- and reading a printout of Ellen Wills' No More Nice Girls, which Emily had sent me to read and then... write about. And just being like, I cannot believe this is my life. Reading a book? And having an opinion? That's gonna be published on a cool New York website????
Which like, yes yes, very cute, little Zan. But also, reading that book changed my life, or maybe just made me realize my life had changed while I wasn't paying enough attention. I had spent all of college avoiding taking Women's Studies classes and laughing at the saps that did; meanwhile, in the lit classes I did take, every single essay I wrote was about how female characters functioned in the text. At twenty and twenty-two I was still soft enough to think it was a good thing to be malleable, unopinionated; I thought it marked me as a nuanced thinker. By twenty-five, though, I had been roughed up enough to start realizing that it was on me to push back, to claim whatever space I wanted for myself, instead of letting other people tell me where I belonged.
Anyway. Past selves! So many of them! Smart and dumb (often both), setting you onto what they didn't know would be the path of the next nine years of you life: because Look is, in part, about a girl reading some books that make her realize she is a feminist, or wants to be. I can't keep a diary to save my life, so it's nice to have all of this record-- a body of work, I guess you could call it, that runs parallel to my actual body's path through time.
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Speaking of things I've been doing for most of the last decade, I interviewed Miranda about her book for Longreads. (And speaking of my brilliant friends, have you read Amanda Chicago Lewis on vaping yet?)
I also wrote about how David Foster Wallace's writing changed my life, and how we might approach the art of "profoundly compromised men" for LitHub.
Some news about appearances: this spring my third book comes out, which means I am coming soon to some venues near you. First, I'm helping launch Rachel Vorona Cote's book Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today at The Ripped Bodice on Friday, March 6 at 7:00 pm. Rachel and I will be in conversation with Mara Wilson, so it's sure to be a pretty substantial crowd; RSVP here to they know to expect you!
Then I have two book events coming up on opposite coasts: a reading at Skylight Books on Look's release day, Tuesday, March 31, and then a lil party in New York on Friday, April 3. Details and links coming soon, but if you're in either one of those cities, please save the date!
Finally, if you are interested in reading more of my old Tumblr posts (I love backreading people's blogs but I understand this isn't a common hobby somehow??) I'm very grateful to past-Zan for rounding up a bunch of her favorites over the years.