2015: A Year in Review

At some point over the summer while I was putting an event into the calendar on my phone, I realized that the way Apple does it, an entire year can shrink into the palm of your hand — all twelve months lined up next to each other like dominos.

I’d say that’s when I first realized that time and death would come for us all, but I actually realized that at the end of 2014, when my undergraduate mentor and dear friend Robert Reed died of colon cancer, and again when my grandfather — my most favorite man in the world — passed away a week later. I rang in the first week of 2015 brutally hungover and on my way to a funeral.

The death of someone you love, or two someones you love, has a funny way of pushing things to the surface, like: You really hate your job, and: Don’t forget that you came here to make something beautiful, and: The two people who loved your art the most in the world are dead now and what are you going to do about that?

I have always considered writing an act of great audacity. Beyond that, I am certain that it is also an act of great faith. I’m not religious, if only because I have always found it difficult to believe in anything, but to write — to do the kind of writing I do, and to do the kind of writing I love — requires a genuine faith in one’s self, the unshaking belief that the sentences one writes are true and good and worth being read. It is a faith that can often seem outsize in comparison to the small and bad sentences we all struggle to put down day-to-day.

I’m reminded now of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, one of my favorite books this year: “But somewhere along the line, from my heroes, whose souls were forged in fires infinitely hotter than mine, I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection.”

So at the end of January I quit my terrible copywriting-cum-marketing job and I got a part-time job at a sex shop in Park Slope and I threw myself into writing for money and for love and for the belief that words can be transformative and sharp and illuminating things. Here are some things I wrote last year, not necessarily because they are my favorites but because they were important and I learned from them.

I also wrote a draft of a novel, and I am still trying to figure out if I love it, or if I still believe in fiction — I think I do; I’d like to — so more on that later, maybe.

Showing My Hand — The Hairpin

Sometimes I forget this essay exists. It is probably the most difficult thing I have ever written; it’s probably more difficult for the reader than for me who wrote it. I am still not sure why I wrote it — I think to make sense of the thing that happened, which was rape, and furthermore to complicate the narratives surrounding what happened, including the narrative I told and tell myself. When I was raped, I felt complicit. I felt like a bad victim. And I felt complicated. I’ve never thought that rape is the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone; it is merely another terrible thing and I think by covering it merely as an act with a perpetrator we lose a lot of valuable discussion. “And who makes a list of violations when she knows it could go on and on and on?”

Anyway, this is the essay that gets a lot of people asking me if I’ll contribute to special issues on sexual violence or if I have an opinion on whatever’s happening in the news. This is the essay that I am reminded of, suddenly, while being interviewed on a podcast or when talking to someone I’ve just met. I believe that we are all allowed to tell our stories but it’s true that once that story is in the world we have no control over where it goes. That being said, my wish, I guess, is that once we have shared our story, for whatever reason, selfish or un-, it might be remembered that we contain multitudes.

Courting Death at the Swatch Skier’s Cup — Maxim

Something kind of hilarious happened when I quit my job to freelance more or less full-time, which is that Max Rivlin-Nadler asked if I wanted to go to Switzerland for this thing for Maxim, and I said yes, so then I went to Switzerland for this thing for Maxim, and it was fucking amazing and I had a great time, and also Rory Bushfield and Sven Kueenle and I are definitely best friends now and also, [redacted] [redacted] [redacted].

Anyway, I never thought I would be the kind of jet-setting freelance writer who goes off on press trips, and I’m still not, but I did get to go to Zermatt and then about a month later I went to Venice for the Biennale, and that was truly very cool and I am really grateful for the occasional collisions of culture and capital that allow me to live the weird life I live. I really want to do more travel writing in 2016, not least because it works best when you never say no to things and I am a person who is forever down.

The Two Types of Trans Women You See on Television — Daily Dot

In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t written this piece. I don’t think I fucked it up — it’s really easy to fuck things up, especially writing along intersections of race, class, and gender — but I still wish I hadn’t written it. An editor had reached out to me when Caitlyn (then Bruce) Jenner had announced she was trans, and asked if I wanted to write something about trans women in America. I’d been thinking about the beautiful/beaten dichotomy for a long time, and about how we define “womanness” in media. So I wrote this op-ed about how we — I consider myself culpable, as a cis person in media — represent and depict trans women in media.

In the piece, I state where I’m coming from and how I’m part of the system that must take responsibility, and I do think that’s important. But I think that, as in all issues, coverage from well-intentioned majority voices only does so much, and it’s much more important to amplify the voices of those directly affected by something, which in this case is trans women of color. If I could do it again, I would have simply said that I don’t feel like the right person for the piece, and I would have suggested a trans woman writer. That’s something I’ve done since writing this piece, and it’s always a good practice to remember.

A Brief History of Name Fuckery — Full Stop

When things make me angry I usually try to give it at least a week before I write about them, but Hudson’s pen-name debacle got me so incensed that I scrawled off this relatively hot take within a day. I could talk a lot about personal essays and their use — a great number of them are wonderful and a great number are terrible — but there’s no denying that a blazing, immensely personal rage against white male patriarchal fuckery makes for a powerful piece of writing.

It also got me on this list, which is probably the first and last time I will ever be on a list with Claudia Rankine and Roxane Gay.

The Architecture of Racism at Yale — Guernica Magazine

This is without a doubt the best piece of journalism I did all year; perhaps ever. During the media shitstorm surrounding the protests at Yale and Mizzou, I wanted to do what (at the time I pitched the piece) no other news org was doing: interviewing students, in-depth, about their experiences with racism in college. I’m a Yale alum. I love the place so much it’s disgusting. But I also experienced a kind of shattering, subtle systemic racism there — the kind that is difficult to pin down and prove — and I wanted, more than anything, to do my classmates and peers justice by accurately representing their experience, the experience that, boiling over, erupted into protest and organizing.

I interviewed about ten students and recent alums for the article. Each of my sources spoke with a candor and eloquence that you hardly ever see, especially on topics as thorny as systemic racism, and I thank them so much for it. I worked my ass off reporting and writing this piece and I’m so fucking proud of it. As for my own experience with systemic racism publishing it… I have a tweetstorm about that, so you can read it at your leisure. Rest assured that the publishing industry is just as racist as the Ivy League.

Cum Shots — Nerve

This project started because Nerve was resurrecting itself this summer and Ana Cecilia Alvarez, who was then at the helm, asked me if I’d like to contribute regularly to the fledgling site. I pitched her a “J/O journal” — a sex diary, essentially — and we thought it’d be nice to test it out as a TinyLetter, since that would give it a more intimate feel.

I’d wanted to write a sex column for a while, at least a year or two; not quite in the vein of New York Magazine’s sex diaries which I honestly find pretty inane, but something where I could roam around and flex ideas in the topic of my choice (boning). If you’ve read me at all you’ll know that sex is the place from which all my other ideas begin to flow — it’s the thing that yields most when you touch it — and by the time Ana reached out to me, I finally felt mature enough as a writer to give it a shot.

I wasn’t expecting much, but over the last seven months I’ve been writing weekly, Cum Shots has blossomed into something much larger than the sum of its parts. It’s been mentioned in the Guardian twice. Every week I meet a stranger or hear about a friend-of-a-friend who’s subscribed. I’ve written about bondage and road trips and object permanence and tattoos. I’ve quoted from Aristotle and Maggie Nelson and William Carlos Williams. I’ve written about giving head and talking to exes and how it feels to begin a long-distance relationship and most recently I wrote about depression and the feeling of unworthiness it creates.

But I think what’s been most wonderful and most startling about the project is that around 4800 people have seen me, week by week, fall in love, or whatever you might call that particular feeling. In one letter, I wrote: “I have always endeavored to tell you the truth, which here is even more true than I have lived it.” And that’s how I feel about the project, which I am so delighted I get to work on with the support of Nerve, and which I will continue to write until they stop paying me or I get a book deal, whichever comes first, and if it’s the latter I’ll continue to work on it but it’ll just be more of a surprise when it finally gets to you.

Anyway. This is the year that I tried to do the whole writing thing for real and I think I mostly succeeded. I started reporting again. I started writing a TinyLetter that turned out to be not as tiny as I thought. I made some good decisions and also some questionable ones. I wrote a lot of copy which isn’t linked to here. I made some money and I spent most of it. And I learned a lot about what I love and what I want to do more of and I expanded the range of what I thought I could do and so in the future here’s to more reporting, more travel writing, and — if I get my shit together — a good manuscript or two.

xoxo,
LP