randomly
or, a brief history of how these things happen:
1. When I was writing GRACE AND THE FEVER, I was thinking a lot about social media and self-presentation: how we create and represent ourselves online versus in out in meatspace, where we are, by necessity, much less curated beings. I was writing about an extreme end of this-- a girl who has a whole secret life on the internet-- but obviously the phenomenon in milder forms is fairly omnipresent.
2. Late in the editing process, I realized that Grace never used Snapchat because I had never used Snapchat. I searched the document for "Instagram" and changed about half of the instances to Snapchat. (In the same pass I changed all of the joints to vapes, because duh, Zan.) (Then Instagram stories happened and the book instantly dated itself, but it was always going to be dated, so whatever. That's a conscious choice I made, to tie myself to a moment in time, culture, technology, etc.)
3. But I was like, I should know how Snapchat works, so I created an account. My first follow was Kylie Jenner, naturally. Just because it seemed like that was who you followed when you had a Snapchat.
4. Which is how I accidentally got obsessed with Kylie Jenner. Around the same time, I think, Catherine started writing her Tinyletter about the Kardashians, so that didn't hurt.
5. Anyway when Kylie announced the opening of her pop up shop in December, I emailed my editor at Racked and was like, "Let me write about it!!!!" What was I going to write about it? GREAT QUESTION. Sometimes I think I bet it would be great to get paid to go to the mall and don't think too hard about what will happen between the mall and the paycheck, the work that will turn the mall into the paycheck. In this case, I wrote a whole version of this piece and then scrapped it and wrote another one. I think it turned out pretty well.
6. Then a few months later an editor reached out to me about writing for her publication and I said sure, but I don't have any ideas right now and she said I do, and it ended up at another outlet, but that was the genesis of the Buzzfeed story on the Kardashians and plastic surgery.
7. Because of all the research I was doing on that, I was very aware of the launch of KKW Beauty. This time, when I emailed my editor at Racked to be like "Let me write about it!!!!" I had a better sense of what I had to say.
8. Anyway, then Racked asked me if I wanted to write a big thing about the Kardashians and makeup and I was like yeah, that sounds good I guess? Having truly no idea what all I was getting myself into.
I mean:
While I was writing the piece, I had to add in updates about a woman who found live ants in her lip kit, and Kim and Jeffree Starr, and then over the weekend, Kylie's potential pregnancy. The Kardashian world multiplies itself infinitely and exponentially. Did you know that right this minute on Twitter, Kim is disputing the veracity of reports that she was upset about Kylie's pregnancy, but not the reports of the pregnancy itself?
"It wouldn't be my family if something didn't happen every single day," Kris told reporters at a Milan fashion show, and I can certainly attest to that.
9. Anyway, that's how you go from not caring about a subject one way or the other to writing 15,000 words about it in a year.
10. It's cool to get to drill down and down and down on why something fascinates you-- to watch an interest morph into an obsession and then become whatever this is now. Writing this paragraph felt like a mission statement. It took me those 15,000 words to get here, but this is why I care about the Kardashians so much:
The suburbs, mall culture, Los Angeles, performed vacuity, conspicuous consumption, sluts: the pentagram you'd use to summon me, the trap you lay to catch me in.
11. But now those big pieces are out and it's like, fuuuuuuck, what am I gonna write next?
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ICYMI in last week's deluge of links, three non-Kardashian pieces:
One about the tropes of female friendships for LitHub
Impractical Loves: On Kristin Cashore's Jane, Unlimited and Fan Fiction for Unbound Worlds
How Patina Teamed With Formerly Incarcerated Cooks to Prepare Food for the Emmys for the LA Times
Also: I'm teaching! I'm talking! And if you're an editor who's been thinking about assigning me something, now would be the time.