2015: Things I Loved and Put in the World

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” - Joan fuckin’ Didion

2015 was a year in my writing career that started with a lot of lists, evolved into even more articles and reported stories, and is going to close with a finished book manuscript. I warn you that this Year In Review is long, not because I cannot pick my favorites but because I really loved writing the pieces I am sharing here and I want to make a case for long-windedness when it comes to sharing what we love that we put into the world. We too often demure at mentions of what we’ve created and I think this life is too short and precious and that we are toiling in too deep a kindness deficit for us to we respond to the world with anything but kindness for ourselves. That is why this piece is long.

I kicked off the new year in typical fashion, with a ridiculous tweet:

I wasn’t actually feeling especially mean but I liked the ferret and the concept of an all-girls club and the idea of ruthlessness even if I didn’t practice it quite yet. That same day, I wrote a BuzzFeed list of gifs to help you through your New Year’s hangover and finally got to use this image of a young degenerate Robert Downey Jr. emerging from the bushes in Less Than Zero. He was living the nightmare and he was all of us.

Two weeks later I would publish my second essay on BuzzFeed, a piece called “Being Winona in a World Made for Gwyneths” in which I recounted the parallels between my own romantic and mental health history with my favorite actress, Winona Ryder, in the context of a violent break up. It reads, in short, “It was the episode in which the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was revealed to be the Depressive Witch Nightmare Woman that she was all along.”

The night it published, I was on a first date and I could hear my phone buzzing with notifications as the story was shared dozens and then hundreds of times on social media. It had 150,000K views by morning and was tweeted 660 times and liked over 6,000 times on Facebook.It was my first truly viral essay and the thrill of the climbing numbers combined with the kind emails I received from women in the ensuing days affirmed that I was not just making noise on the internet but that I was reaching people. It was the essay that turned my agent from interested in my work into signing me on as a client. It was the first thing my father ever read that revealed that I used to work in the sex industry and after he read it weeks after it came out he texted, “Got caught up on all your BuzzFeed articles. I had no idea you were so prolific. I’m proud to call you my daughter.”

In March, I got my first taste of the joy and thrill of telling men how to behave for Deadspin’s Adequate Man vertical where I wrote “How To Talk To Your New Girlfriend About Your Ex.” The only thing more thrilling than telling men precisely what is wanted of them from women is seeing those men protest wildly at my benevolence. But I had a taste for dressing dudes down now and so I prepared what would become my anthem, my motto, my call to arms: “Against Chill.”

Published on April 1st, “Against Chill” was my battle cry against our cultural elevation of romantic ambivalence to something virtuous rather than something repugnant. “Chill,” in brief is:

Chill is not the opposite of uptight. It is the opposite of demanding accountability. Chill is a sinister refashioning of “Calm down!” from an enraging and highly gendered command into an admirable attitude. Chill suggests that young love is best expressed as competitive ambivalence. Chill demands that you see a Read receipt followed by a “Hey, was asleep” text three hours later and not proceed to throw your phone into the nearest volcano. Chill asks you to be like, “LOL, what volcano?” Chill presides over the funeral of reasonable expectations. Chill takes and never gives. Chill is pathologically unfeeling but not even interesting enough to kill anyone. Chill is a garbage virtue that will destroy the species. Fuck Chill.

It is by far my most successful story in terms of social media virality and it ushered me into a strange club of people who are introduced by the titles of their work in addition to their names. “This is Alana, you know, Against Chill,” is how I’ve been introduced at more than one party. Just this week, Elena Ferrante said, “I simply believe that today it’s wrong to let one’s person become better known than one’s work.” And while I’m the last woman in New York City to have not read Ferrante, I’m told I can trust her judgment on these things.

The follow up story “The Dickonomics of Tinder” was received well by women who had had it with mediocre dick crawling into their Tinder messages but dude, well, dudes were mad:

Some will read my gleeful rejections on the many faces I encounter on Tinder as evidence of a disturbing uptick in malevolent, anti-male sentiments among single straight women. It is not. It is evidence of us arriving nearer to gender equilibrium where men can no longer happily judge the clear and abundant photos and carefully crafted profiles of women but become incensed when they take the opportunity to do the same.

My hubris had gone too far and Men’s Right Activists and Pick Up Artists got their little hearts all a flutter and started calling me ugly and old on Twitter and one even took it upon himself to find a picture of me and compare it to some sort of ill bird. Iuno, I kinda see it.

Oh I forgot to tell you that since the Winona story, I was working furiously on a book proposal that was sent out to editors in May by my amazing agent, Adriann. She was either low-key genius or low-key cruel but she made the closing date when we had to have a decision June 11th, the day before I turned 30. So I was either going to close out my 20s in the triumph of a book deal or in a pile of my own tears and defeat. I got the call on the 11th that my book sold for four times what I had been hoping it would sell for. Charlotte took this photo of me as we celebrated, don’t I look like a person who could write a book? (Lol, nah but my arm looks hella skinny which is what is important).

The next day, on my 30th birthday, I went wild with both day and night looks. It was fuckin’ great!

But anyway, back to writing. in July I fulfilled a years long dream of writing a One Direction thinkpiece for Racked entitled, “The Absolute Necessity of One Direction” and I meant every word. Specifically, that boy bands construct a “Kingdom of the Girl” that stands in stark contrast to her harsh lived reality:

The girls cling to this fantasy not because they are selfish but because their lived experience of boys and men is so relentlessly disappointing. They wouldn’t need to be worshipped in the fantasy if only they could be seen in reality. But cracks emerge and the ground shakes under a man who has been kept a boy too long, he longs to say and do more than serve.

The piece was later quoted in Zayn Malik’s first major interview in The Fader, convincing me that Zayn now knows my name, my work, and is merely biding his time before proposing marriage. Hi Zayn.

I wrote “Letters To a Young Baby” for The New Inquiry in August as something of a“coming out” as more than just a stripper in my sex industry past. I was merciless and mercenary with sugar daddies as they had been with me:

A big red flag on any sugar daddy’s profile is an expressed predilection for acting as a “mentor.” He wants to be no such thing. Ask any mentoring program in any major metropolitan area in the United States and you will find them absolutely starved of male mentors. What this man wants is an audience that is compelled to listen to him pontificate on topics like evolutionary psychology and American exceptionalism. His opinions are offensive and reliably dull.

An anti-sex work, transphobic feminist called it disgusting but mostly my DMs were flooded with confessions from women you’d never expect revealing their own sugar baby pasts. We are legion. It got new life a few weeks later when a mean-spirited feature on sugar babies appeared in GQ and hurt the feelings of a lot of women I care for. These women shared my piece instead and my friend Charlotte wrote a spirited defense of erotic laborers and for a moment, it felt like writing could be more than creation but also defiance, claiming a seat you weren’t offered at a table where people were just talking about you.

The summer and fall were times when I also started to fuck heavily with science reporting because I am lots of things but a one-trick pony, I am not. So I published this article in The Atlantic about why women don’t need to have their periods and this one on the Motherboard vertical at VICE about how they are essentially giving out speed to eating disorder patients these days. I wondered at Pacific Standard if Mars is a place we should be fucking with and decided we oughta leave that cosmic cadaver alone. But my favorite was “Broken Links,” at Aeon, it is an exploration of what the internet has lost and what is has retained from our digital childhoods in the 1990s. “What we thought were whispers that disappeared into the wind were footprints left behind in soil. That soil was fossilising, preserving a partial archive, hidden until it is not,” I wrote of the future artificacts that I thought was ephemera.

In the fall, I started a new weekly column at New York Magazine’s The Cut vertical writing about dating and love and sex. It is a rare privilege to be a columnist and an even rarer one to be able to write about the bizarre things you want to, like “The Enduring Appeal of a Sk8r Boi.” I will never be able to unwrite the sentence above and only God can be my judge for it. I will also never love a moment of reporting more than my friend Rachel’s casual explanation, “Picking them up is very easy…But then when you get them back to your place … it’s like, what have I done!? Sometimes the dick is great but a lot of times they are too scared to perform at all and they just wanna listen to the Weeknd.”

The two stories that I am most proud of from this year came in the fall as well. The first was “The Monetized Man,” a history of commodifying pain inflicted on me by men and turning it into profit. It felt dangerous to talk about sex and money and womanhood at all once and without apologies but it felt right to do it too because the things I wrote in that essay were entirely true:

Enraptured by the very fact of their own beating hearts, these men’s sprawling existences overwhelm what might have been home to women’s unencumbered declarations of what being in the world is to them…The injuries left by these stories swell like abscesses in the memories of women who have neither the platform nor the institutional trust to speak these truths…Womanhood is still characterized for many as the expectation that we quietly possess the wisdom and wounds of an oppressive world not designed for us but the weight of which we are expected to carry regardless.

The second was “Theological Scars,” in Hazlitt, a confessional piece about what it feels like to live in the absence of belief in God while retaining a belief in sin. It is about the coldness of a world stripped of grace. It was a return to the questions that drove me away from New York City once and that have nearly driven me mad my entire life. I wrote:

But losing belief in God did not unbuild or even destabilize my conception of the shape of a world informed by my belief that grace was the primary particle holding the universe together. I still understand existence as a competition between good and evil. I believe there is a redeemable rottenness at each of our cores and I still call it sin. I find useful the idea that even Heaven cannot escape the terror of war forever. My worldview has all the component parts of a Christian but no God to animate it with purpose. It is an evacuated city, its structures rendered useless because there is no one there to use them.

It is the city devoid of grace in which I dwell and the body devoid of meaning without men’s gaze and approval that I occupy that will take up the bulk of my writing in 2016. I have decided to venture next into fiction writing because 2015 gave me the confidence that I am capable of building a world that people will want to escape into for long stretches of time. I believe I can craft characters that people will want to see live and will mourn when I kill them. These are the things that I look forward to bringing into the world in 2016. I will love them for enough to make them lovable to others, to make them worth reading to the end.