straight & neat
In the winter of 2011 I went to see Joan Didion speak at the New York Public Library. Loving Didion is a cliché for girls like me—bangs, glasses, lit degree; whiskey rocks, please— but that’s never stopped me from loving her anyway.
One of the many reasons that Didion has become such an icon among women of my demographic is that she drinks like we do: straight hard alcohol, which makes no apologies about its intention to etherize, to blur our minds until the world seems like a slightly softer place, or maybe we seem to ourselves like slightly softer people. I used to read Slouching Towards Bethlehem when I had the spins in college, actually: lying in bed with one foot on the floor, which I had heard would steady my body, and praying that her prose would steady my mind.
So of course that’s what I asked her about, in the audience Q&A after she spoke: what she drank while she edited. She had mentioned, earlier, that her writing practice was to compose in the morning and then, in the evening, to have a drink and mark up the pages by hand. (It used to be bourbon, she told me, looked me in the eye and pronounced bourbon; what a stupid, stupid thrill. But anyway, she went on, now she was older, and it was usually cold white wine.) That way, she had those changes to type first thing in the morning; that way, she never had to begin with the emptiness of a blank page.
In the spring of 2015 I was starting a draft of my second novel, writing it mostly in a coffee shop across the street from my office for a couple of hours each morning, but sometimes in other, odder places: my childhood bedroom, or waiting to get my oil changed at a Jiffy Lube. I started taking pictures to document this: all of the unlikely spaces that a novel takes shape over the course of its prolonged gestation. When I was finished, I flipped through them, noting the disarray of my bangs, the flinch of my face even when I was turning the camera on myself—and the fact that I was almost always drinking something while I wrote.
Not bourbon, mind you, and not even white wine—I was writing, not editing, and I was doing it largely in the mornings, often before dashing across the street to my day job doing event programming at a local Jewish Community Center. It wasn’t that I was looking for something chemical to take the edge off, but the instinct was not unrelated—the search for something physical and comforting, something that would ground me in my body. I was looking for something writers are always looking for: a structure that will make the unpredictable, unreliable, psychically treacherous and frankly generally foolish thing we do every day seem like an act that can be tied to the mundane world, or controlled by routine. I was doing it to give myself a starter's pistol: tea's ready. Now it's time to get to work.
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Books week here at tinyletter.com/zanopticon! I wrote about my girl Didion's new one, South and West, for The Cut. I also wrote about Alana Massey and Sady Doyle's books and creating a feminist (pop) cultural canon for ourselves for The New Republic.
Fun, small, local, what I believe they used to call service-y: The Best Non-Coffee Drinks at Coffee Shops in Los Angeles.
Also not to call anyone out but the open rates on last week's Tinyletter were so dismal I feel like it might have gotten caught in some spam filters or something? IDK, maybe you'd had enough of me; I published a lot. If you're curious, you can read it here-- it includes links to a piece on Rihanna's personal chef and drinking expensive matcha and imagining the flaneuse, plus thoughts on safety and self-defense.
Lastly, I'm going to link this piece in every Tinyletter I send until we hit seven days without a bomb threat against a Jewish institution in this country. Trump's America, man. What the actual fuck.