2015.
This was the first message I sent into the void in 2015, and I don’t remember being particularly happy when I wrote it. I was heading back to Brooklyn from one of those New Year’s Eve parties in a Manhattan apartment that is pleasant and has the right bowls of snacks out but also makes you wish you never dared leave the house; on New Year’s eve the party juice is never really worth the squeeze unless you have a designated face to smash your face into and enough petty cash saved up to cover surge pricing. The moment midnight hit, I watched other people kiss, shoved a handful of fun-size candy bars into my bag, and ghosted without fanfare. I walked alone through the West Village in search of a yellow cab for twenty minutes, through throngs of financebois in starchy shirts and women in bandage dresses, shivering and stockingless. I had just broken up with someone, and the solo swim through the drunken maw felt both like a mourning and a release; necessary either way. I held a piece of information close to my heart that bolstered me: I had gotten an email confirming that I would see my first New Yorker piece in print the next week. It was something I had dreamed about — and gunned for (just as every other writer alive does whether or not they admit it) — since I got to the city in 2005 (2015 also marked a decade of me living here and working here) — and it was really happening. I remember refreshing that email over and over in the cab I finally hailed somewhere in Soho; I might have been wandering around alone, but I was definitely going somewhere.
I love going over New York’s bridges in cabs; there is something so expansive about crossing a river with skyscrapers in the background. You feel connected to all the people who have gazed at that skyline before you, wanting everything from it. I am currently writing a book that is partially about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and if I had to pinpoint the reason why, it might be because he wrote that New York has “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,” and because I read that sentence at the right time in my life for it to hit me hard.
But New York can also be a harsh place. My life in the city has been punctuated by its almost inevitable cruelty. All writers here are pursuing a tenuous path in a place where we are overabundant, and therefore easy to pit against each other. But at the beginning of this year, I realized that I had little place left in my heart for battle; I was ready to go into 2015 softer than before, more open-hearted, more open to glittering possibility. I was open to sentiment, to revelation, to caring too much. My favorite good witch Alana Massey wrote about being “Against Chill” and it was like a clarion call coming from inside my own house. Forgoing chill is the choice that defines 2015 for me and marked a pivot into new (and better) terrain. This was the year I found a glorious support system in the form of a group of women who are formidable and brilliant, found a partner who makes me happier than I’ve ever been, and, even though I am still stumbling towards it, began to find out how I want to write (some might call this “a voice” but that word makes my teeth hurt).
What I found out this year, when I opened myself up to the work I really want to do, is that I am at my best when I am writing about women who are navigating the intersection of art, capital, and ambition. My year began with that New Yorker piece, a Talk of the Town about why Christine McVie returned to Fleetwood Mac (reporting it involved staring deeply into Stevie Nicks eyes and I think I might now be immortal?). It continued with profiles, interviews, and investigations into the lives of women who create. I am so, so grateful every time I get the opportunity to talk to one of my heroes. My tape recorder is full now, but I can’t delete anything. Piece by piece, I am slowly building a body of work that I am excited about, and I have zero chill about it.
Some of my favorites:
JANUARY
Play On, The New Yorker: If you told teenage me that I would hang out with Christine McVie in a hotel room, she would have vomited for a straight 24 hours. But it happened. Her description of how bored she got in the country really spoke to me. The thrill of the open road and a full arena can be stronger than any pastoral retreat. No shame in that. McVie has been a rock star for over 40 years. Sometimes when you meet someone with that level of fame they don’t live up to all of the expectations you have heaped upon them. But she did.
I spent four months reporting this profile of Abbi and Ilana for Grantland, and was so happy that I got the time and space to make it what I really wanted it to be, which was, ultimately, a portrait of a working marriage. This was the piece that made me really think that watching creative women at work, watching them make something from scratch (which Abbi and Ilana really do, they are tenacious workaholics who oversee every part of the process), was the beat I really wanted to cover most. So I assigned it to myself. When you are a freelancer, you get to decide every morning what desk you work on (when you aren’t worrying about getting paid and affording insurance LOL). So I thought, you know what, I now head up my own little Bureau of Women Making Culture; where the office always has seltzer and gummy frogs. I also learned, from reporting this piece, how much a good editor matters, and how much editorial freedom matters — Dan Fierman at Grantland (RIP!) encouraged me to go long, let me include the serendipity of finding Ilana’s phone, and gave me room to riff on what Broad City really means to a woman in her 30s who smokes weed and bounces around the city, on what finally having a Wayne and Garth of our very own has meant to all of us.
Also, the quotes A + I gave me were complete 🔥:
Natalie Prass Escapes Nashville, The New Yorker
One of the best things about 2015 was writing a great deal about women who make music. Prass made one of the best records of 2015 and it still lifts me up when I am down. I love that she hustled so hard for so long to make it and was about to quit it all to sell puppy clothes when her record hit. Lesson: you can never, ever, give up. The Best New Music anointment is always right around the bend.
MARCH
Laura Marling Says Goodbye To All That, T Magazine
In February, I flew to London to interview Laura Marling, a singer whose voice seems to echo from some ancient moor and who lives in a mystical little row house in Bethnal Green that smells like smudge sticks and coconut oil. She and I smoked American Spirits in her garden and spoke of the men she sings about, the ones who are (and who aren’t) strong enough to be warriors for us. This was the last reporting trip I took before meeting a man who was strong enough to be soft with me, and I see a peculiar poetry in that timing.
Azealia Banks, Billboard Cover
I entered into this assignment full of adrenaline and jitters: I love Azealia’s work (Wallace is in my forever top 20), but she had just come off of the Playboy cover controversy (she posed in latex and spoke her truths about ignorant white Americans directly to the heart of outrage Twitter). I didn’t want to turn her into a caricature or exploit her openness to speak her mind, and I made that desire clear to my editor; it was my condition for writing this. I found that I had little to worry about when she and I met: she made me a killer chicken soup, talked to me about witchcraft for two hours, and read me an hour-long excerpt from the book she writes at 3am, which tells the “fable of Azealia Banks” in grand mythological prose. Her friend Liz came by and we laughed and ate until midnight. Because Billboard is a trade mag, a lot of the nuance of that night was lost in translation and edits, but I was glad with how it turned out. I fought to depict the woman I had experienced first hand; her ambition and goofiness and drive. This was the piece that taught me that empathy not only has a place in cultural reporting, it should be its backbone.
APRIL
How Carey Mulligan Went From Ingénue to Hollywood Icon, Wall Street Journal Magazine
I profiled Carey Mulligan and found out that a) she has a dirtier mouth than you’d think b) she looks suspiciously flawless at 9am (not to be trusted) and c) her family told her that acting was silly and she had to apply to drama school in secret and defy everyone and this is a sign that no one who tells you that you shouldn’t do something really ever knows what they are talking about.
MAY
Florence Welch, Billboard Cover
Another powerful woman in music, another interview that gave me new #goals. Motto for 2016: BE MORE FERAL AND UNHINGED.
JULY
Lifetime’s ‘UnReal’ Recycles a Producer’s Dark Experiences
This year, UnReal got a raw deal on “Best TV” listicles — it deserved to be in everyone’s top 10. I say this because I was blown away by the intensity and the vision of the woman who created it, who was trapped in a contract producing The Bachelor while the feminist part of her soul withered and died on the vine. UnReal is her way of processing her indentured servitude in the reality TV trenches, but also a delicious soap opera about how women undermine each other at work. WATCH IT.
AUGUST
Letter of Recommendation, New York Times Magazine
I recommended a hulking book about makeup to the readers of the Sunday Times and I have no regrets. It allowed me to work through my teenage angst about my face shape and teach a mini-lesson in how Kim Kardashian applies her contour to many dads with newspaper subscriptions.
OCTOBER
France’s Pansexual Pop Queen Arrives, The New Yorker
The best live show I saw this year was the Christine and the Queens show at Webster Hall. She is electric. Her explorations of her gender made me think so much of Virginia Woolf, and then I found out they were walking around the same shabby neighborhood in search of themselves.
NOVEMBER
Grimes: The Triumph of a Self-Made Oddball
I spent 2015 reporting two big music profiles — one on an iconic girl group (Grantland folded before it could run, but it will come next year, so help me god) and this one. I wanted to write about Claire Boucher because she is an auteur and a unicorn. She writes, records, engineers, and produces her own music. As the year went on, and I read more and more books by strong women, (The Argonauts, King Kong Theory), I become more certain that the shortest distance between female genius and the audience it deserves is the creative oversight of another trusted woman or no oversight at all. Male interventions in our art hold us back, censor us before we even speak and it is happening at the highest levels of cultural production. This year, the numbers aren’t just embarrassing, they are shameful: 1 woman wrote a song in the Top 40 this year, women made 6% of all films. But Grimes is a hero, and does it her own way, and made one of the most fire records of the decade as a result. NME named it #1, Pitchfork put it at #3, and she didn’t let any hands touch it but her own. That is some inspirational shit.
I probably could have made this whole post about Selfie because I spent a lot of my year working on it (or taking long walks while thinking about working on it). Mark Lotto at Matter and I started talking about the idea in the Spring, and it came out in fits and spurts over the next 6 months. My finger lingered over the “Publish” button, as it is the longest sustained piece of writing I have put into the world. Selfie is also a collection of so many of the ideas I’ve been thinking about this year: self-acceptance, body politics, concern trolling, women’s history, the aesthetics of the internet, accusations of narcissism as weapons against women who like themselves, and our own fragile mortality. It was about how selfies are not photos we take of ourselves but death masks with which we preserve ourselves. These themes are most visible in the Sea of Faces: everyone is so beautiful and strong, they are vital and they are infinite.
I wrote a handful of other things this year — Q&As with forces of nature, recaps and deep-dives on Angela Chase, and always, along the way, my book, which will soon be complete — but these are the pieces that define 2015 for me and have made me feel hopeful about the year to come. I’ve seen that one can make a career out of reporting about women you admire, writing about erased women of the past, and exploring the ways that women are made to feel less than, even now, for being ambitious and having the audacity to take up space in the world.
In 2016, I want to push even harder on these ideas, and also find new ways to celebrate writing I admire. I am working on a new project that will give me the chance to sit on the opposite side of the publishing equation and highlight other voices, and I am really ready to do it. I learned over and over in 2015 that we are all so much better when we are connected to one another. I began the year alone, fleeing a party I resented for feeling stale. But I’ve spent the year realizing that it was not the party’s fault; I was just at the wrong party. And if you want to be at the right one, sometimes you have to throw it yourself.
