Much to my personal chagrin, my least favorite book on the Booker Prize shortlist (and the longlist, chile…) won the Booker Prize last evening. What happened after was nothing short of exhausting. In one camp, you have people claiming M. John Harrison shouldn’t have won because of his low Goodreads score. In another camp, you have authors offering completely serious platitudes about never giving up, because if you get a low Goodreads score, you too could win the Booker Prize.

Enough! To paraphrase Jemima Kirke, “I think you guys might be thinking about Goodreads too much.”

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You’ll forgive me if I thought I hallucinated the Democrats actually winning for once, because my brain has been on another planet since NBC announced a procedural adaptation of The Great Gatsby. In this adaptation, Jay Gatsby is “Det. Jay Gatsby, a devilishly charming investigator with a con-man’s gift for reading human behavior,” and Nick Carraway is now Nicky Carraway, “who was born to be a cop but dreams of becoming a writer.” I’m not sure how someone breeds the specific cop gene, but that’s one of the least objectionable things here

I know books are very in right now, but adapting The Great Gatsby into a modern-day crime procedural is such a distortion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s text. For one, Gatsby isn’t particularly charming, he’s just rich. And he has no gift for reading human behavior because he’s an antisocial weirdo. In Nick’s initial encounter with Gatsby, who’s standing alone at his own party: “I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.”

Fitzgerald doesn’t outright state how lonely Gatsby is, however. He uses the classic literary device of indirect characterization, where a writer lets a character’s gestures or behavior reveal something about them. It’s showing, not telling. It’s a common literary device used in magazine profiles. Like the recent Vanity Fair interview with Carrie Coon, where writer Rebecca Ford used indirect characterization to tell us that Coon is not self-aware.

In Friday’s “Carrie Coon is Done With Small Talk,” Vanity Fair meets Coon for tea at the London West Hollywood hotel. There is an immediate mention of the type of tea Coon is drinking:

“I don’t do small talk anymore. I’m not good at it,” says Coon, taking a sip from her own ginger tea—a blend she started having this restaurant make for her after getting hooked on it while filming The White Lotus in Thailand.

The Vanity Fair profile ends with this moment:

She does have one wish for the future: She’d like to do a comedy. “No one’s letting me do that. My family is surprised by my career because it’s just not the way I occurred to them as a person at all. People are expecting to meet a very serious and lugubrious actress that needs a lot of special drinks or something,” she says. While taking another sip from her custom, off-menu ginger tea.

It’s an indirect characterization of Coon as lacking self-awareness, pointing out that she’s very much capable of comedy, in fact. The final line created some backlash online, but I’m sure Coon is the kind of actress who can laugh at herself. And it’s a fantastic moment to include in a profile. You’d be a bad journalist not to juxtapose Coon’s words with her actions.

It’s reminiscent of the most infamous example of indirect characterization IN a celebrity profile: The New York Times’ 2010 profile of M.I.A. NYT reporter Lynn Hirschberg’s profile features this oft-quoted moment:

“I kind of want to be an outsider,” [M.I.A.] said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. “I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”

Was this moment funny? Sure. Is it fair? Not entirely. M.I.A. was being interviewed at a restaurant for a magazine profile, and truffle fries were on the menu. Were they the only fries available? Did she ask for them specifically? The profile doesn’t tell us, but M.I.A posted an audio clip from the interview on Twitter to show that Hirschberg is the one who ordered the fries. Maybe she didn’t want to share, and that’s what pissed her off?

M.I.A. responded to the profile childishly by publishing Hirschberg’s number online, but still the profile does more to indirectly characterize the journalist than it does M.I.A. Like mentioning M.I.A. lives in Brentwood as a means to deflate her authenticity as an artist. Perhaps Hirschberg was right to be skeptical of M.I.A., time has proven her to be correct — M.I.A. did endorse Donald Trump and make a fucking song about it, after all — but still, truffle fries at a New York restaurant? They’re fucking everywhere… sometimes it’s impossible to get classic French fries.

The indirect characterization in Vanity Fair’s Coon profile is funny, but it should’ve been used in its cover story on Sam Altman. While editor Mark Giuducci’s profile has some pointed moments, it lacks bite. Even this moment, which could be read as a harsh framing — “Altman is finding it hard to shake a public image as unknowable, at best, and perhaps delusional about what constitutes an acceptable future” — is kinda weak when you’ve given him a glossy magazine cover. Altman won’t have to find it hard to shake his public image if you help him reframe it.

In an interview on Vanity Fair’s new podcast Fair Game, writer Jeremy O. Harris critiqued Guiducci for giving Altman a cover. Not surprising, since Jeremy admitted to drunkenly calling out Altman at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party earlier this year. Harris said that by allowing Altman and other tech billionaires to infiltrate cultural spaces, Vanity Fair is allowing Altman to change his public image to a respectable one.

It’s similar to the Jesse Plemons character in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, a film that received a lot of critical backlash, but I found it spectacular. In the film, Plemons (light spoiler) portrays Kenny Rockwell, the nephew of Tom Cruise’s Digger Rockwell. But we learn that Cruise isn’t actually Digger; he’s an actor portraying Digger in a play. The play, which lampoons Digger, allows the audience to laugh at the man responsible for plunging them into a global environmental crisis. And in turn, of course, feel good about Kenny Rockwell for spending his billions on a public good. Never mind that he also owns an AI surveillance company and is very likely just as evil as every other tech billionaire!

The film alludes to this, however, by using Bertolt Brecht’s theory of alienation in theater. By making the central story a play, Iñárritu’s film removes the audience’s ability to empathize with Digger. By highlighting the stage, props, and set changes, it makes the audience aware of the artifice of the film. Brecht wanted his audiences to riot in the 1930s and Iñárritu wants similarly of his audiences now. You should fucking hate tech billionaires. Or at the very least, be extremely skeptical of them.

In the profile, Altman claimed that he met Andrew Garfield while Garfield was filming Artificial (where he portrays Altman), and they both waved at each other. In a GQ interview this week, Garfield said the claim was bullshit. “I’ve never waved at Sam. I’ve never seen him.” It would have been far more interesting to include Garfield’s repudiation of Altman’s account in the Vanity Fair profile. It would’ve shown that Altman is a liar who is very concerned with characterizing himself as a person that other celebrities like.

Can a celebrity profile expose a powerful subject when the magazine is also invested in celebrating their power? Let’s talk about indirect characterization once more: the ability to point out contradictions in Carrie Coon’s words and behavior, and the inability to do so with Sam Altman. It says a lot more about Vanity Fair than it does about anyone else.

I’ve always been the type of reader who underlines the hell out of his books and scribbles in the margins. It comes in handy. When I interviewed Marlon James about The Disappearers, I re-read all of the passages I’d underlined and annotated to prepare.

I’ve decided that rather than simply list the books I’ve been reading, I’d rather start sharing what’s been sticking with me each week. Expect The Frank Index now to include passages from novels, essays, and whatever else happens to cross my desk, along with some thoughts about why I marked them up in the first place.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

“What can be avoided / Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?” Lines also from Julius Caesar, quoted to him by his father, and yet only with his father in the grave did Coleman at last bother to hear them — and when he did, instantaneously to aggrandize them. This had been purposed by the mighty gods! Silky’s freedom. The raw I. All the subtlety of being Silky Silk.

At Howard he’d discovered that he wasn’t just a nigger to Washington, D.C. — as if that shock weren’t strong enough, he discovered at Howard that he was a Negro as well. A Howard Negro at that. Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we’s overbearing solidity, and he didn’t want anything to do with it or with the next oppressive we that came along either.” (p. 128)

Whereas in The Ghost Writer, I found that the anxieties Roth wrote about regarding the respectability politics of representing your community were also anxieties I feel as a Black, gay author. In The Human Stain, it became more literal. Roth’s novel has an actual Black protagonist. The Human Stain follows Coleman Silk, a disgraced college classics professor whose career collapses after a misunderstood remark is branded as racist. But he carries a lifelong secret: he is a light-skinned African-American who has spent decades passing as white and Jewish.

How does he inhabit the mind of a Black man who doesn’t want to be part of a Black “monolith” without being Black himself? It’s in part due to his writing about the assimilation of Jewish families in the United States that occurred post-Civil Rights Movement.

In Richard Shur’s academic essay “Dream or Nightmare?: Roth, Morrison, and America,” he writes about the 1997 novels of Roth and Toni Morrison, American Pastoral and Paradise, respectively, and how they deploy postmodernism in their fictional accounts of life after the Civil Rights Movement. And how they both disagree about the extent to which postmodernism can liberate historically marginalized people, because “even though Jews and African-Americans have shared a history of exclusion in the United States, social change since the Civil Rights Movement has caused their experiences to diverge.” Roth, an avid historian, took it upon himself to reconverge the paths of Black and Jewish people in America, in a melodrama set against the backdrop of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. That’s really fucking rad to me, how ballsy a writer Roth is.

I was gagged as I read this book, finding myself copiously annotating on the subway all week. I, along with other writers, was recently asked to nominate five books for The Strand 100, their upcoming list of the 100 best books published in the last 100 years. I might just have to knock one of my selections off that list after reading The Human Stain. I love it that much!

Dead and Alive: Essays by Zadie Smith

“[Roth] was a writer all the way down. It was not diluted with other things as it is — mercifully! — for the rest of us. He was writing taken neat, and everything he did was at the service of writing. At an unusually tender age, he learned not to write to make people think well of him, nor to display to others, through fiction, the right sort of idea, so they could think him the right sort of person. ‘Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest,’ he once said. For Roth, literature was not a tool of any description. It was the venerated thing in itself. He loved fiction and (unlike so many half or three-quarter writers) was never ashamed of it. He loved it in its irresponsibility, in its comedy, in its vulgarity, and its divine independence. He never confused it with other things made of words, like statements of social justice or personal rectitude, journalism or political speeches, all of which are vital and necessary for the lives we live outside of fiction, but none of which are fiction, which is a medium that must always allow itself, as those other forms often can’t, the possibility of expressing intimate and inconvenient truths.” (p. 224)

Dead and Alive is one of the books I selected for Nonfiction November, in part because it features Smith memorializing Roth and also Toni Morrison. I find Roth’s ideas on what fiction should be, on what writers should set out to do, incredibly inspiring. As a writer who got their start in the BuzzFeed era and the height of Twitter, I feel as if I’m always thinking about the response to my work will be when I write anything. I’ve even found myself holding back at times, for fear of internet backlash. Which is no place for a writer’s head to be at. I’ve found recent freedom in essays I’ve published in Frank, knowing that the comments on social media are full of people who strongly and at times aggressively disagree with me. Learning to not give a fuck as a writer is freeing!

“The thwarting of human potential was her great theme, but there was nothing subconscious or accidental about it — she couldn’t afford there to be. In The Bluest Eye, for example, how do you write about self-loathing without submitting to the same? Or demonizing the habit?” (p. 220)

Smith notes that Morrison shared the same fearlessness when it came to her own writing. I believe that Roth, like Morrison in The Bluest Eye with Pecola Breedlove, accomplishes telling the story of someone who has extreme self-loathing, while also making them incredibly human, incredibly relatable, and much more than a cautionary tale: a catharsis for the reader.

“Teaching Philip Roth and Toni Morrison” by Julie Husband

“I focused upon the crafting of the novels, looking at post-modern experimentation in Roth’s The Counterlife and Morrison’s Jazz. We considered the ways in which Morrison builds upon jazz aesthetics by using polyvocality, spontaneity, and lyrics celebrating female masochism. Some narratives reverberate in the stories of other characters, while others abruptly stop, resisting closure. Turning to Roth’s novel, we noticed that the multiple narrators never collectively harmonize as they do in Morrison; they each deconstruct another character’s explanation of the meaning of Jewish experience in the diaspora. Their stories and their political agendas were incompatible with one another. In both novels, the characters hoped to find America, especially the Northeast, to be the promised land where ethnic minorities could find full self-expression, only to discover collective expression fleeting at best.” (The Philip Roth Society Newsletter, Vol. 5 No.2, Fall 2007)

In 1997, The New York Times surveyed a couple hundred writers, critics, and editors, asking them what they considered the best book of American fiction written in the last twenty-five years. Toni Morrison and Philip Roth emerged as the most influential novelists. Beloved topped the list. Six of Roth’s novels were nominated, making him the most cited author.

Frank readers know that I’ve been reading all of Toni Morrison’s works this year, with only her final three left. I’ve always felt like there’s an alchemy in how I select a book to read. My shelves are full of books I have yet to touch or ones I’ve put down because it didn’t feel like the time for me to read them yet. I’d spoken to my friend about diving into Roth next year, after finishing Morrison. But when my friend Teddy Goff1 loaned me his first edition copy of Sabbath’s Theater, I began my Roth journey early. And now, I’m glad I did.

I began this year knowing very few of Morrison’s works and none of Roth’s. I had no idea that their works were even in conversation with one another. But now they are both speaking to me, and I have never had a more fulfilling year of reading.

This hot photo of M. John Harrison rock climbing in the ‘80s made me forgive him for The End of Everything being my least favorite read of the year. Well, almost. But if he wins The Booker Prize on Monday, I’m rioting.

In this week’s FEEDBACK, I was joined by writers (of ) and (of ) to discuss launching writing careers on Substack, whether traditional publishing still matters, Toni Morrison novels that shaped us, and how to critique Black art.

I would greatly appreciate it if my Frank readers could subscribe to Feedback on YouTube, and like and comment on the episode!

In the episode, Tembe and Brendon also shared some of their favorite Substack newsletters: , , , and .

This past week, I celebrated the cast of P-Valley landing the latest cover of Paper with them and creator Katori Hall. Hall, one of my favorite playwrights and artists, also joined me for one of my favorite interviews on Feedback so far. The interview drops in January, ahead of the P-Valley series finale.

This essay includes spoilers for You Can See Everything and Life of M.

In the good old days, a dubious documentary about a celebrity’s life would be followed by a sit-down with Oprah. Like in 2014, when OWN aired the docuseries Lindsay, which followed Lindsay Lohan’s post-rehab recovery. By the series’ third episode, Lohan was chronically late, canceling photo shoots, and refusing to let cameras follow her. This prompted Oprah to fly to New York and confront Lohan on camera. “You need to cut the bullshit. You really do,” during their confrontation. But Lohan maintained she was sober until an interview in the finale, where she revealed to Oprah that she had privately relapsed during filming.

The series was heavily criticized as exploitative given the conflict between maintaining sobriety and participating in reality television. It was also critiqued for a lack of well, reality.

In Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, no such sit-down interview exists to explain to the audience what actually unfolded behind the scenes while the cameras were rolling.

The film was born when Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim attended a show at Hollywood’s Magic Castle. Fielder was already aware that Holmes had approached A24 to shoot a documentary in her home with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two children. Oppenheim told W Magazine in October, “We were in the close-up magic room, and they asked for a celebrity name from the audience. Someone shouted ‘Elizabeth Holmes,’ and we took that as a sign.”

Soon after, Fielder and Oppenheim commenced filming in Holmes’ house. From the jump, Holmes has the upper hand here in a way that Fielder’s usual unsuspecting subjects in series Nathan for You and The Rehearsal have never had. New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, whose 2023 interview with Holmes plays a central role in You Can See Everything, recently addressed the absence of Vanessa, Holmes and Evans’ Salvadoran nanny, in the film: “She was nowhere to be seen. Without her, the couple comes off as harried multitasking parents, Ms. Holmes literally rocking the baby with one foot.”

Chozik also attacked the idea that she misquoted Holmes in 2023, which becomes a recurring storyline in the film. According to Chozik, “The documentary’s postscript says Mr. Fielder eventually got in touch with me, and that I stood by my story but didn’t provide evidence supporting the quote. That’s not exactly what happened. I never discussed the disputed quote with Mr. Fielder. I referred his inquiry to The Times, which has stood by the reporting.” Chozik isn’t the only person previously involved with Holmes to raise concerns about the veracity of Fielder’s film. On PJ Vogt’s podcast Search Engine, Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz explained how Holmes’ legal team threatened his career and finances.

What he found most troubling about the documentary is that it left people rooting for Holmes. In fact, the very nature of the film’s “big twist” has encouraged many people to “go in blind” to the film so as not to spoil themselves. The film is more interested in crafting a compelling narrative than it is in the truth. Why else would it include riffs on Vertigo, down to recreating its famous car scene and its Bernard Herrmann score?

The Vertigo riff is dialed all the way up when Holmes goes to prison, and Amanda Seyfried appears to assume the role she played in The Dropout and recreate scenes between Fielder and Holmes that he doesn’t have on film. If your mind goes to Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s masterpiece during these scenes, don’t worry, you were supposed to. Why else would Fielder include a moment where he writes in a letter to Holmes that he’s single now, then follow it up with scenes where you almost expect them to kiss? I mean, the lingering on Holmes’ partner Billy Evans’ dick made me wonder if Holmes and Evans downloaded Feeld before they asked Fielder to move in with them.

After the film’s conclusion, you’re left feeling like Fielder’s documentary project failed, and he was duped by Holmes, just like so many men before him. But this is Nathan Fielder. A master manipulator himself. As we’ve seen in The Rehearsal, Fielder doesn’t just document people: he constructs elaborate scenarios where their behavior becomes material for his own narrative. His performances of awkwardness are only possible because of the extraordinary amount of control he has over his constructed scenarios.

Fielder isn’t dissimilar from Rachel Cusk, the literary world’s anointed queen of autofiction, who, if you ask her about it, says she absolutely hates the word autofiction.

In Cusk’s Outline, we follow recently divorced writer Faye as she travels to Greece to teach a writing class. In The New York Times’ review of the novel, Heidi Julavits wrote: “The narrator of Cusk’s lethally intelligent novel is a cipher who inspires other people to confess. In her presence, they divulge stories about their wives and husbands and mistresses, their parents and children and careers. The narrator’s bio, meanwhile, remains faintly sketched.”

To me, Cusk is not a cipher. The narrator makes a deliberate decision to let the people around her speak, listening to their confessions and taking their insults (”you’re a lousy teacher,” a student tells her at one point) or describing them as menacing, like when she describes the neighbor on her plane to Greece, who later holds a knife near her on a yacht. Never mind that this man has expressed romantic interest in Faye, she is not interested, and yet she continues spending an inordinate amount of time with him. Is she toying with him? Is she toying with all of the people she interacts with, letting them ramble on so as to indict themselves? And with Faye being the sole narrator, how can we trust anything that she’s told us?

Similarly, how can we trust anything that Fielder has shown us in You Can See Everything? He didn’t even ask her about the damn fake voice! When Seyfried accuses Fielder of editing the documentary in a way that protects Holmes, is this a genuine concern, or is this part of the narrative Fielder has constructed of “documentarian falls for his subject’s wiles?” As it turns out, You Can See Everything isn’t actually about Holmes. It’s about Fielder. Fielder knows about the public perception of his manipulation tactics. He knows that people find him cruel. That people wonder if he’s on the spectrum or feigning to be. That people wonder if he’s as sexless as he comes off. If anything, You Can See Everything manages to place Fielder in the middle of a thrilling will-they-won’t-they romance. I left the film and wrote in my Letterboxd review, “I wanted Nathan and Liz to kiss 🥺.”

The confusion as to who the protagonist of You Can See Everything is reminds me of Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M. Purported to be a tell-all about her friendship with Natalie Portman, it caused a similar online frenzy to the Holmes documentary. People who’d never read a Cusk novel before were talking about literary fiction this summer! Bitch, I loved it. Even if I didn’t ultimately love the book. But not because the book promised to reveal intimate secrets of Portman and then didn’t. Portman is not the protagonist of Life of M, Rachel Cusk is.

Or rather, the narrator is a stand-in for Cusk. The opening paragraph of Life of M reads:

A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.

Later, when Cusk’s narrator finishes her autobiography, M doesn’t like the results and confronts the narrator:

I don’t like the way you portray me, she said. Actually, it’s hurtful.

But it isn’t you, I said. It isn’t anyone.

She looked at me coldly.

You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity, she said. You’ve made it seem like I’m unable to love.

But you’re just playing a character, I said. The character was invented by me. So if that’s true, then it’s me it’s true of. I haven’t even googled you. I know nothing about you.

The thing that hurts M the most about her depiction is how she’s been portrayed as lacking humanity. Unable to love. It’s not unlike the pranks that Fielder places people in to exploit their emotions. In The Rehearsal, when Angela confronts him, she says, “You’re a liar. Because if this were real, you would have some sort of emotion. Instead of standing there like a rock.”

How fortuitous then, that the story Fielder has crafted in You Can See Everything features him wondering if Holmes and Evans’ odd love story is genuine. No longer a rock, we finally see Fielder as his most empathetic.

In 2020, while in conversation with actress Alexa Demie on The A24 Podcast, Fielder explains to Demie why he’s not a good actor: “I've never been good at doing… you're like a real actor because you, I think, can take… the character you play is not like you, but you can just take it and be so convincing. I'm not as much like that.” Demie responds, “I think you are, though.”

Fielder’s humility with regard to his acting skills is yet another thing he has in common with Cusk. In a 2023 New Yorker article, Cusk says, “I don’t think that I write autofiction, though I admire the people who do, and essentially wish that I did. I think it’s an evolution beyond what I’m doing. I’m perhaps stuck in the past, trying to work out the past. I don’t think I’m in any way as free as the writer of autofiction.”

Cusk says she doesn’t write autofiction. Fielder says he’s not an actor. To quote Oprah, “So, what is the truth?”

I engage with all types of literature, not just Black literature. I understand that for many, it's what they prefer to read and also an intentional way of circumventing the oppressive whiteness of the publishing industry and, well, the world. But now we’re in the midst of an alleged nonfiction crisis, spurred even more by the 2024 election: “People were so emotionally walloped by the outcome that they flocked to genres that clearly offered pleasure and distraction. But despite the critical hit, some branches of the tree continue to thrive.”

The publishing industry is as much to blame for this, of course. The Walrus explains that “Publishers tend to buy nonfiction based on an author’s platform—their expertise and built-in audience. This means any “carefully orchestrated publicity event” relies more on people already caring about the author (or topic) rather than positioning the writer as a must-read wunderkind who bursts out of nowhere.” Obviously, this was positive for me in 2021 when I sold my book Pure Innocent Fun. However, only two years later, despite hitting the bestseller list, Random House passed on my second nonfiction proposal. Another positive: it led me to return to my love of fiction and to work on a new novel that I’m nearly finished with (I had a reading of the novel-in-progress two weeks ago at a friend’s apartment with friends who are writers and avid readers).

However, I’ve become so immersed in fiction that maybe I’m part of the problem! I love talking about shit at parties, but everyone hasn’t read the same books, and sometimes you need to know facts about things like you’re a Jeopardy contestant. Listening to podcasts is nice and all (don’t get your info from TikTok, I beg), but sometimes you need to sit down and READ.

I’ve been thinking of Zadie Smith’s tribute to Philip Roth after his death, where she discussed his love of simply wanting to know things. In 2018, Smith wrote in The New Yorker, “By the time I met Roth, he wasn’t writing anymore; he was reading. Almost exclusively American history, and the subject that seemed to concern him above all was slavery. His coffee table was piled high with books on the subject—canonical, specialist, and obscure—and many slave narratives, some famous and known to me, others I’d never come across before, and which I sometimes borrowed, to bring back a month or two later and discuss. Whenever I mentioned this scholarly reading jag of Roth’s to anybody, they always seemed amazed, but to me it was all of a piece with the man and his work. Roth was an unusually patriotic writer, but his love for his country never outweighed or obscured his curiosity about it. He always wanted to know America, in its beauty and its utter brutality, and to see it in the round: the noble ideals, the bloody reality. A thing did not have to be perfect to engage him, and that went double for people, which, in Roth’s world, always really meant characters.”

If humans are characters too, then why shouldn’t I want to engage with nonfiction more, and particularly nonfiction by Black authors who know intimately about the “beauty and utter brutality” of life? So, for Nonfiction November, I’ve created a reading list of nonfiction by Black writers. It includes memoir, cultural criticism, and queer history.

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There are still a few slots left for my fall writing course, Taste is Character, beginning weekly on 11/4, and my One Day Writing Workshop on 11/7. Sign up here.

Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Literature?

Lately, I’ve seen an influx of posts from people who claim to “hate” contemporary literature, or they just don’t read it at all. This is common on Substack, where it’s easier to go viral talking about Austen, Dostoevsky, or other long-dead authors instead of engaging with modern lit. I often find comments like these suspect. You’re not reading any contemporary lit? There are so many great works from Black, queer, and non-American writers being published right now. I love works in translation, and a recent study by The Booker Prize (admittedly a UK study, I’d love a US one!) shows that 51% of translated books are bought by men (they do read!) and 73% of translated fiction is purchased by people under the age of 45.

What I always find suspect about the “I hate contemporary lit” crowd is that it’s always a dead white person they’re extolling. It’s never “man, I really love mid-century books from Black novelists!”

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Robert Dixon has returned to The Real Housewives of Potomac.

No, sorry. ROBYN Dixon has returned to RHOP. Forgive my confusion: many members of the RHOP fandom and even Robyn’s castmates Karen Huger and Wendy Osefo “jokingly” refer to her as Robert or Rob because… it’s funny to them, I guess? I’m far from the joke police, but I struggle to find the humor in the reference other than the fact that it masculinizes Robyn. I hate you so much, I’m gonna call you a dude. You need to roll with the fellas and stay out of women’s business. Etc.

I find the joke annoying and low-key transphobic, but insulting Robyn at least feels earned from her actual castmates that she has beef with before. As for gleeful viewers who love to misgender Robyn for fun, I’ll borrow a phrase from Salt Lake City’s Lisa Barlow and Meredith Marks: it’s hypocrisy and bullshit.

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I had a Rachel Cusk summer. Before Life of M arrived, I began my journey with Cusk’s work by starting the Outline trilogy in June. Soon after, I read Parade and Second Place. Two months after its release, I’ve mostly forgotten about Life of M, but I can’t stop thinking about Second Place: a story narrated by M, a middle-aged writer living on an isolated, swampy coastal marsh with her second husband, Tony. M invites L, a famous, self-centered painter whom she has admired for years, to stay in a guesthouse on their property, and his arrival throws her life into chaos.

Second Place continues her abandonment of the novel’s traditional form (autofiction, absence of character names and time and place, spoken as a monologue) and leans into melodrama — it literally begins with M (not the M from Life of M!) running into THE DEVIL on the train leaving Paris. The story then descends into an obsessive spiral reminiscent of (light spoiler:) Christina Yang’s third season wedding in Grey’s Anatomy. It’s acerbic, nasty, soapy, and has become a major inspiration for my in-progress novel.

Cusk told The Yale Review in 2022: “Okay, you can just say it. You can have the devil in your book. I wanted to introduce the concept of evil in a very melodramatic way that would make it a presence in the book but didn’t have to be too philosophically thought out. It could be a feeling of great vulnerability on the part of the person who’s speaking, something that could replace a moral or a religious sense of vulnerability. That kind of drama or melodrama was very much how I wanted the book to be.”

Next Wednesday, October 21, I’ll be hosting a Substack Live with my friend Satya Bhabha, who first told me to read Outline this summer, to discuss Second Place and Cusk’s work writ large.

Satya is a film and television director, writer, and actor whose directing credits include Shameless, Love Life, Queer as Folk, and Gossip Girl. His short film Cover Up, starring Alison Pill and Jason Ritter, screened at TIFF and Telluride before being acquired by Condé Nast. He sold his original pilot The Dick to Amazon, with himself attached to direct, and is attached to direct the features The Company, starring Sheryl Lee Ralph, and The Rebound, starring Lukas Gage. 

As an actor, Satya is known for his roles as Matthew Patel in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, and Shivrang in New Girl. His television credits also include Sense8, Key & Peele, The Good Wife, and Netflix’s Critics Choice Award-winning Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of Public Assembly, a non-profit community theatre project in Los Angeles that was recently described as an “unlikely cultural phenomenon” by the LA Times. He lives in New York with his husband.

I’ve been enjoying my weekly pop culture writing classes, which mostly involve a lot of writing feedback and workshops. As I’ve mentioned before, teaching is something I’ve been interested in since I attended New York University for my MFA. After some urging, I wanted to offer a class on pop culture writing and personal essays at a lower price point.

For one day, we’ll focus on developing a voice, writing criticism that feels alive, and finding the intersection of memoir, pop culture, and reporting. This will be a larger class, so there won’t be personal feedback or workshopping, but there will be a lecture, generative writing exercises, and also a Q&A at the end where I’ll cover any questions on writing and pitching for media outlets, and writing and selling a book (my book Pure Innocent Fun sold at auction for six figures).

Pop Culture As Craft

Saturday, November 7 via Zoom, 12-3 PM EST

$95 Early Bird till October 30 (E-mail to sign up)

What can pop culture teach us about writing? How can movies, TV, music, books, and celebs become material for our own work? How can writing about the things we love (or love to hate!!) help us develop character and voice?

In this generative workshop, we’ll explore the ways pop culture can function as a creative tool instead of just a subject. Through close reading, discussion, and a series of generative writing exercises, participants will use their own pop culture touchstones and prompts for creating new work. No expertise in creative writing is required! Just have a love for discussing what you’re obsessed with.

E-mail ira@iramadison.com with the headline “Pop Culture As Craft.”

For fans of my recent Feedback interview with Marlon James, be sure to check him out at Pioneer Works this Sunday in Brooklyn. He’ll be in conversation with fellow Jamaican writer Colin Channer.

There are still a few slots left in my Taste is Character: Writing Pop Culture course. I’m also offering a one-day Writing Pop Culture workshop! Find out more info here.

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City has always been the meta franchise. It’s more like wrestling than any of the other series on Bravo. For its first four years, the series always had an antagonist for the women to square up against: Mary Cosby and her church, Jen Shah, Jennie Nguyen, and Monica Garcia. In classic wrestling fashion, Mary went from a heel to a face1, and now she’s not only a fan favorite but a friend to many of her cast members. She’s basically The Rock. If the smell from The Rock’s cooking was hospital.

But unfortunately, if someone can turn from heel to face, then they can also turn from face to heel. And right now, Salt Lake City has a heel problem. And it’s ruining the franchise.

Read more

An excerpt:

“Black people like to ski?”

My boss, Bret DuMonde, asks me this on the deck of the La Mirage Ski Resort.

He sips a hot toddy and wears a pair of matte silver MYKITA sunglasses, which he’s reminded me at least three times is a Berlin-based brand with a store on Crosby Street. Sarah Jessica Parker has several pairs, and she once complimented him on them in the store. I glance to my right, playing off my annoyance as if it’s from catching sunlight in my eyes. I’d bought a new pair of Ray-Bans for the weekend, but they accidentally broke in my years-old North Face jacket when the Delta stewardess forced me to stick it in an overhead bin. No bags, no jackets in the front row of a cabin during take-off always pisses me off. I lock eyes to commiserate with a gorgeous woman across the aisle in Comfort+, whom I know as a former actress in a string of Kevin Hart comedies, now mostly known for The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She smiles at me for a second as if she remembers me. “Kevin?” she mouths. I get that a lot. We look alike. But I’m not that fucking short. Realizing her mistake quickly, she grimaces and puts her headphones in. We don’t make eye contact the rest of the flight, and now I’m here at the La Mirage, being asked if black people ski by my boss.

“We do,” I say. “I come here every year with a group of college friends from Princeton.”

“Well, of course, black people from Princeton ski. I meant regular black people.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.” I’m 100% sure what he means.

Read the rest on Volume 0’s Substack!

My 10 Best Shows of the 21st Century

I didn’t fill out an official ballot for the NYT’s latest engagement bait: The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century. But it does give you the option to vote for your 10 favorite shows, which I did, and I’ll present them to you now because why not?

The NYT’s criteria: “The best TV shows that have premiered since Jan. 1, 2000 — define “best” however you want! Shows can be in any format (scripted, reality, documentary, game shows, etc.) and any language.” This immediately takes my favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, out of the running, though some of its best episodes aired in the 21st century. It also disqualifies The Sopranos, which I’m sure caused multiple television critics to fall to their knees.

Here are my 10 in alphabetical order:

30 Rock

The funniest show on TV ever? I’m always finding new jokes I forgot about when I rewatch this show. A show which is endlessly rewatchable, btw.

Desperate Housewives

The GOAT of primetime soaps. Campy, sexy, funny, and really smart at times. This raised so many gays. I hope to create something as iconic as this show someday.

Girls

I mean, Lena Dunham has so many millennial daughters! She even called “Keep It” my “voice of a generation” in her newsletter, and said very kind things about my career. A dream for someone who watched Girls and found themselves inspired every week.

The Good Wife

This shit is so good it had all of us watching a CBS procedural. Are you kidding me? And it’s not only an amazing rewatch, but it gave us The Good Fight and Elsbeth!

Mad Men

The best soap to ever air on television. Yes, it’s a soap. It’s also a novel in television form. If I can succeed at making something as iconic as Desperate Housewives, I’ll try for something as iconic as Mad Men next. This show was my personality for a while, the way white girl writers on Substack make Joan Didion theirs.

The O.C.

For at least two seasons, nobody did it better than The O.C. Straight boys at my high school liked it. Even straight boys who played sports liked it. Also, this show is the reason my first book, Pure Innocent Fun, even exists. When Seth Cohen read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs in an episode, I immediately bought it, and my entire life as a writer changed.

The Real Housewives of Atlanta

Why Atlanta? These women (but Nene Leakes, especially!) gave an entire generation a vocabulary that’s still being used to this day. And still being discovered by younger generations via social media. Put some respect on their names!

Scandal

This is the show that made Shonda Rhimes simply, SHONDA. Have you rewatched Scandal lately? It’s just as addictive. And somehow, more plausible than you remember, given where U.S. politics has gone since.

Succession

Recency bias, probably, but Succession was that girl. We were all talking about this damn show every single week: it Made HBO Great Again. I could’ve picked True Blood, but that show had too many bad seasons…

Survivor

Still the best reality competition series ever. Season 51 debuted last night, and the show managed to reinvent itself with its new Open Era, and it’s maybe the most thrilling that the show has been in years. This show means so much to me and is the basis of so many of my friendships. Thank you, Jeff Probst! I hate you sometimes, but you’re like the dad I never had.

Taste is Character: Writing Pop Culture, Writing Fiction

What does it mean to write critically about pop culture in fiction or creative non-fiction? What happens when a character encounters a song, movie, TV show, or book? How can writing about culture allow us to write more deeply about identity, desire, memory, and the world around us? This won’t be me teaching you how to make pop culture references. It’s about how to make cultural criticism function as fiction. We’ll study short fiction, creative non-fiction, and excerpts from novels.

Six weeks this fall. There will be close reading, generative writing exercises, and peer workshops.

Taste is Character with Ira Madison III

Weekly, Wednesdays

October 28 - December 9, 2026 (no class November 25)

7-9 PM EST

Cost: $7001

E-mail ira@iramadison.com with the headline “Taste is Character.”

Taste is Character: Writing Pop Culture, Writing Fiction: What does it mean to write critically about pop culture in fiction or creative non-fiction? What happens when a character encounters a song, movie, TV show, or book? How can writing about culture allow us to write more deeply about identity, desire, memory, and the world around us? This won’t be me teaching you how to make pop culture references. It’s about how to make cultural criticism function as fiction. We’ll study short fiction, creative non-fiction, and excerpts from novels. Six weeks this fall. More information here.

Last week, President Trump shut down the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for two years, allegedly to turn “a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center” into “the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind.” Built as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy, it opened in 1971 and became a space for theatre, ballet, classical music, jazz, and the residence of the National Symphony Orchestra. Most of this stemmed from the fact that our tacky current President wanted to remake the Center in his own honor, hosting conservative events and performers and even replacing the donated art with art selected by his own patrons. Turning a living memorial of a former President who was assassinated before Charlie Kirk made it cool is the epitome of loser shit.

If we’re being honest, I never cared that much about the Kennedy Center. I’ve attended once, on a trip to Washington, D.C., with an ex-boyfriend to see The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. In a recent conversation with playwright Max Wolf Friedlich on my podcast Feedback, he agreed: “I don’t give a fuck about the Kennedy Center. I wish that our government supported the arts more than it does. It’s such a distraction. We need to create social cache in supporting art.”

During a conversation with the cast and director of Ragtime earlier this year, before its Tony win for Best Revival of a Musical, I even referred to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts as our new national theatre. At least shows there are more accessible and cool than Kennedy Center shows. And they’re in New York, which means Trump can’t get his grubby hands on the programming.

Ragtime is a musical about the promise and failures of the American identity at the dawn of the 20th century, which seems like a pretty apt description for another social institution known as The Real Housewives of New York. The resurgence of one of Bravo’s flagship series has been welcome, but there are still a few kinks to work out. The show might’ve once been described as “the most important anthropological documentation of modern women that we have,” at least in terms of class and upward mobility amongst a sample set of older white women in New York. But as of now, the show is still struggling to depict these women honestly. Or rather, the women are struggling to depict themselves honestly. But maybe that’s a good thing?

First of all, the series has its own living memorial to JFK! Carole Radziwill. Last week, Carole balked at Jessel Taank bringing up the concept of Carolyn Bessette Summer and asking her invasive questions about the Kennedys.

Read more

In 1969, film critic Vincent Canby described the titular character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as “a marvelous mess.” In the film, based on Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel, Maggie Smith portrays a schoolteacher who dedicates her life to molding the lives of several young girls. She often refers to herself as being in her “prime,” the period in which you’re at your intellectual and emotional peak. But she also informs the girls: “One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.”

There’s no better way to describe Carole Radziwill than in her prime. The writer and former star of The Real Housewives of New York has returned to the series, eight years later, and she looks better than ever. In person, not just on screen! I recently met her at a Bravo event for the premiere of RHONY’s 16th season.

Radziwill famously joked on the show that she had “only five good summers left” after she turned 50, but she’s back on Bravo at 63, after an extended rift with friend-cum-boss Andy Cohen that has thankfully been mended. Her memoir, What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love, which depicts her friendship with John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, has returned to the bestseller list thanks to the success of Love Story.

Radziwill was invited back as a Friend Of, but she’s now not only a full-fledged cast member, but she’s holding the center apple. It’s fair to say that this season revolves around her in a way no previous season has. She’s not just driving the story; she is the story in two ways: her life as it is now and whether or not she can help save RHONY.

The series literally returns with our Writer Girl, crossed-legged and typing at her window a la Carrie Bradshaw. She’s the narrator of the pilot, because she’s at the center of the season’s narrative, but also because she’s not actually in the premiere, so they had to add her in some way! But don’t worry, Bravo has a huge guest for the premiere, and it’s Martha Stewart.

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This Tom Cruise GQ cover1 is bad. Let’s just get it out of the way. It’s dope that Adam Baidawi landed the incredibly elusive actor for a cover story. And a real interview! But wow, this cover isn’t just bad; it’s uncomfortable to look at! The pose is awkward. Cruise looks like he’s cruising at the Eagle, but even if you’re into older guys (and I am!), it won’t be this one, because you know he’s gonna offer you Tina. When Baidawi spoke to The New York Times in February about replacing Will Welch at GQ, he said he wanted to restore the magazine “to its rightful place as the North Star of masculinity. I’m curious to propose a version of masculinity that is yes, progressive, yes, modern, but is also sexier and cooler and more aspirational and more desirable than some of the nihilism or cruelty or vanity that we see out there.” Well, there’s nothing sexy about this cover! Nor is there anything cool about it! It is crazy tho, so it’s got 1/3 of a TLC album going on, at least.

What’s even crazier is that this is the second time this summer GQ has dropped a cover with a box-office star posing weirdly with their arm behind their head. Tom Holland showed pit (I’m not against it) in a trio of covers for The Odyssey, and despite me loving Holland and loving armpits, that cover is also incredibly awkward too!

The cover is too close-up, for one, and the tank top sweater he’s wearing doesn’t exactly scream sexy and cool masculinity, so much as it screams queer New York party. I guess what I’m saying is that both of these covers are very queer-coded, but not in the cool way; they’re gay (derogatory). This was not always a bad thing at Condé Nast. Details magazine, which began in 1982 as a sort of chic downtown alternative to GQ, was basically a magazine for gays. In 2011, Out asked the question, “How Gay is Details Magazine?”

While GQ has the market cornered on the frat-brother-turned-investment-banker market, Details is a bit more elusive with whom, exactly, it's aimed at. The younger brother to Condé Nast's man-glossy just released their November issue, and the cover is a shirtless picture of model David Gandy (left). The issue -- which excuses its liberal exploitation of fleshy torsos by deeming this a fitness edition -- does not simply cause us to lift an arched brow simply because of the heavy, heavy implementation of fit male bodies (starring celebrity appearances from Marky Mark, Marc Jacobs, D'Angelo, David Beckham, and Alexander Skaarsgard). No, there is also lots of actual gay content in the magazine. For example, in the fitness portfolio, there is an entire section titled "Gay is the New Normal." Is that some sort of subliminal message? Then there's a full story about women who settle down with two or more men, called "Modern Family" (though, to be honest, there isn't much gay sex happening in that story -- but still.) And to seal the deal, the back page is an interview with our newly outed brother Zachary Quinto. Let's just say. Details, you're really, really, really gay.

I loved Details. I used to want to work at Details. To me, a closeted Midwestern faggot, it helped fuel my dreams of moving to New York and working at Condé Nast. Eventually, I would fulfill those dreams with a regular column at GQ in 2017. Who knows if I’d still have that column if I hadn’t asked for more than $350 per column and stopped having my emails answered! But nothing about the new GQ seems like it would inspire a young, cool gay writer to want to work there! At least, not via its covers! Which is how you grab their attention in the first place. Having a column at GQ was my dream once upon a time, but now I do the same thing on Substack and make more money than I did in 2017.

I’m especially incensed at this treatment of Cruise. Frank readers know he’s my favorite actor, and I wrote about Cruise’s 2002 Vanity Fair cover that definitely helped me realize I was gay, gay, gay in my book Pure Innocent Fun:

Tom Cruise’s 2002 Vanity Fair spread became my new Bible. The cover, a shirtless Cruise, immediately caught my attention during one of my weekly visits to Barnes & Noble at the May-fair mall. Inside, a spread with two additional photos. In one, he flexes his biceps while gripping his tousled brown hair. In a second, his arm is behind his head, showing off his slightly hairy armpit.

Yes, his hand is behind his head in this photo too, but this shoot makes you wanna drop to your KNEES, not race out of the dark room as fast as you can. And might I reiterate, it’s not the cover! The actual cover photo is sexier. It’s less suggestive and relies on Cruise’s eyes to do all the fucking.

It’s the more grown-up version of his 1990 Rolling Stone cover. Bret Easton Ellis wrote about the cover in his non-fiction book White2, “By July 1990, the summer of that Rolling Stone cover, Cruise was entering the next stage of his power. He’d already done all the stuff necessary to get there: propping up two old-timers (Paul Newman in The Color of Money, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and helping them win Oscars; surviving a fiasco that was a bomb (Legend), and another that became a big hit (Cocktail)… the cover was shot by Herb Ritts and suggests sex, of course, but the image of Cruise emerging from the foamy water also hints at rebirth, a new beginning.”

By contrast, Cruise’s GQ cover suggests nothing of a rebirth (unfortunate for the rebirth of GQ!), but instead a retread. Cruise’s attempt at selling sex here is a failure, maybe because he hasn’t been a sex symbol in his films since… Eyes Wide Shut? Coincidentally, the film he was promoting in Vanity Fair!

The death of the magazine might be vastly exaggerated; there’s a ton of really cool magazines I discover every time I hit Casa Magazines in the West Village. But Condé Nast’s flagship titles have been slowly shuffling off this mortal coil. Baidawi has the right idea when he says he wants GQ to be modern, sexier, cooler, and more aspirational. But nothing about this Tom Cruise cover gives that. If instead, the cover highlighted the Cruise we have now instead of a retrograde version, it might have achieved that goal!

Cruise has stepped into a role as an insane stuntman and elder statesman. When he’s not doing stunts that might kill him in the Mission: Impossible films, he’s sending actors like Glenn Powell a six-hour instructional video on screen acting. Six hours. Cruise told GQ of the video: “It was just very basic. It was something to have people understand, just to have a different concept of lenses and what the lens is and what the frame is. Just the same way as an actor onstage, or in the development of cinema, where it started, and what that frame means and how to understand that frame. There are just different layers of storytelling, of structure, but also: to understand certain things so that you can forget about it.” Whatever that means! Release The Cruise Cut!

Whatever you think of Ryan Murphy’s writing, he should at least be commended for giving roles to older actresses. Do I wish that Angela Bassett, Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, etc. had more people knocking down their doors? Absolutely. But sometimes, when I want to see some of my fave actresses in something new, the only person providing is Murphy. Ironically, this is one of the reasons Murphy was absolutely the wrong person to adapt The Shards. He cares about women too much.

Bret Easton Ellis does not care about women.

This isn’t an accusation of misogyny. Well, not really. Ellis’ books are highly misogynistic, but I won’t use that as an indictment of him as a person. Let’s talk about the text. Ellis’ books have toxic attitudes toward women because his books usually depict the POVs of extremely toxic men or the toxic environments they live in. The Shards is narrated by a closeted Bret who uses his girlfriend Debbie as a beard while moralizing about her hyperactive sex drive. This is juxtaposed with his obsessions with the men in his life, the brutal murders of his high school classmates, and Robert Mallory as the pinnacle of male hotness while also being a headcase. Men on the verge of a nervous breakdown are the point of The Shards.

By contrast, Murphy’s version of The Shards is focused on moving characters around like Barbie dolls. The women, strongly written female characters as some would tell you, are concerned about cocaine, graduation, winning dance competitions, and because the penultimate two-part episode is titled “Homecoming,” they now care about becoming Homecoming Queen! As I said in a previous review of this adaptation, when you have the time to finish the entire product before it airs, some cohesion in the series would be nice. And yet, this once again feels like a random episode of Glee where everyone suddenly cares about Homecoming! Which isn’t to say that Homecoming isn’t important — I was on Homecoming court myself sophomore year of high school — but you don’t start campaigning for the crown the fucking day before voting!

By adding scenes where Debbie and Susan help Rhonda campaign for Homecoming Queen, the show continues hammering nails in the coffin of any relation to the novel. Do any of these girls care that a serial killer is murdering their classmates? Do they care that Rhonda was kidnapped and held hostage by the Trawler? Introducing Rhonda into the series was one thing, but then refusing to do anything with her as a character is a higher crime. Ivy Wolk is actually quite good as Rhonda, but she’s given very little to work with. There’s no attempt to tie Homecoming to Bret’s neuroses and the overall arc of the season. Involving the closeted narrator in this storyline would’ve made sense. One of the boys he’s been fucking (Ryan) is on the Homecoming court, along with the boy he’s obsessed with (Robert), and the best friend he’s maybe in love with (Thom). But Murphy (a gay man btw!!) has abandoned all of the queerness of Ellis’ novel. You’d never even know Bret was supposed to be gay without actor Igby Rigney swishing his hips in every scene like he’s doing the Jailhouse Rock.

Instead, the series is focused on the women and not the men. Which is great for an ensemble show, but makes no fucking sense for Bret’s narrative. Ellis has always infused his characters with a dash of misogyny and a quagmire of queer identity. Back in 1990, he came under the ire of Gloria Steinem and the National Organization of Women for American Psycho1. Tammy Bruce, a coordinator of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, created a hotline (how ‘90s!) so people could listen to an excerpt of American Psycho and see how misogynistic the book was. Bruce called the novel “the most misogynistic communication we have ever come across. The book is…in effect, a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women.”

At the time, many people with only a passing knowledge of Ellis assumed he was straight. And they hadn’t read the book, so they didn’t know that it was a satire and that Patrick Bateman is a faggot! As I said, I won’t hypothesize about Ellis as a person, but you can point to American Psycho and The Shards, where spoiler alert: Bret is most likely the Trawler, and conclude that he thinks being closeted and conforming to society can turn you into a serial killer.

Which is to say, the gay shit in The Shards is the fucking point of the novel. Without it, you’re not watching an adaptation of Ellis’ novel. You’re just watching… well, Ryan Murphy’s The Shards.

I’ve never been accused of performative reading. Okay, there was the time my friend joked about me bringing The Brothers Karamazov to a club, but it was in my tote bag, and I’d been reading it in the park. And yes, I do leave the dust jackets on hardcovers when I read in public, but that’s because I love checking out what other people are reading (especially on the subway), and it’s easier when you can see the cover. While reading Life of M on the subway recently, I saw several other people reading either the same or a different Rachel Cusk novel. (Is it Cusktember?) But I’ve never found the argument of “performative reading” to be serious. Maybe the dudes who read Infinite Jest or Gravity’s Rainbow in public are being performative. But we live in an era where people are severely lacking in independent thought and love being told what to do. It’s why the most popular newsletters on Substack are often just link round-ups. People don’t merely want to know what’s cool; they want to be told what to do. And if a man sees another man reading a book in public with a cool cover, chances are, they’ll buy the book as well. That’s not being performative; that’s marketing.

The need to be part of a cultural conversation will always trump the fear of being performative. It’s why some people feel that they have to finish a book if they’ve started it. Or, they’ll take to social media midway through a book and ask people to convince them to finish it. Is it worth it? Does it get better? How about you just… don’t keep reading it? Enter DNF.

DNF is shorthand for “did not finish” and has primarily been a BookTok term until Goodreads added a shelf to its app where users could add books they didn’t finish. Already an option on other book tracking apps, in theory this should make people less ashamed to abandon a book. I’m often asked how I read so many books (thirteen this past month; the list will be at the end of this post). On a recent episode of Feedback, I responded to Vulture’s “How 20 Well-Read People Make Time for Books,” with my own methods.

Generally, I wake up around sunrise each morning to read with my morning coffee before I write. I also live in Brooklyn, where my commute to and from Manhattan is on average an hour each direction. That’s where the bulk of my reading gets done. I’ve also recently begun alternating reading a chapter and listening to the audiobook if I’m a fan of the narrator or the book is dialogue-heavy (Cusk novels, for instance). Another thing I do? I abandon books I’m not reading very quickly.

My friend John Paul Brammer’s recent advice for reading more addresses how you should feed your curiosity at all times when reading: “It’s difficult to pursue anything you don’t have a genuine appetite for. Absent appetite, some other incentive (a salary, necessity) has to compensate. The benefits of literature are abstract enough that reading is almost exclusively a leisure activity. “Make reading fun” sounds too simple, because it is an oversimplification. Some of the most worthwhile books are not, strictly speaking, fun, and those are exactly the books we have in mind when we imagine a more serious reading life. But fun is a wonderful starting point because fun and play lend themselves to curiosity. Curiosity is an attention multiplier.”

Finishing a book for book club might be an incentive, but that’s the reason my previous book clubs often failed: people struggled to finish books they wanted to quit. (I now prefer impromptu book clubs, where I find out which friends have read the same novel as me, and we get together to talk about it.) A book is a lot harder than sitting down to watch a film or television show. It takes effort. But this is perhaps why many people have turned DNF into a performance.

In the absence of performative reading, many people on social media are now performatively not reading. Traditionally, the way I’ve kept track of the books I didn’t finish is by sticking them back on my shelf or leaving them in a pile with other books I’ve abandoned. The idea isn’t that they’ve been abandoned forever, but that they don’t currently hold my interest and I’d rather move on to something I’ll actually enjoy reading. But it is the very fact that reading does take effort that people still want credit for a book they haven’t actually read.

Yesteryear is the biggest book of the year. At over 1.4 million copies sold, Caro Claire Burke’s novel isn’t just being bought by habitual readers; it’s being bought by casual readers or people who haven’t picked up a book in years. It’s the book to talk about this summer. People love to hate the protagonist, but they love to hate Burke as well. I know plenty of writers who’ve also grabbed the book to see what the fuss is about or just so that they can feel justified dragging it after they’ve read it. I love it. I love reading a book so I can join in on dinner party conversations or argue online about it. But if I haven’t read the book, I’d shut up about it.

Similarly, if you haven’t seen The Drama or Obsession, why would you join a debate about the films? It’s more common than you think. Increasingly, I’ve argued about a film with someone only to discover that they haven’t even watched the fucking film. They just want to be part of the conversation. The same thing has begun to happen with books. Except you look silly trying to join a conversation about a book you’ve never read. You can’t just watch the trailer and form an opinion. You have to actually open up the book and look at the words! Well, what if you’ve opened up the book and read the first forty pages?

If performative reading is virtue signaling that you’re a cultured individual, then what does performative not reading signal? It accomplishes the same thing, but you don’t actually have to do any of the work. The fact that you haven’t finished a book is rarely pertinent unless someone directly asks, “Have you read [insert book]?” But how will someone know that you did attempt to read a book, but your superior tastes prevented you from finishing it? You can make a public post about your DNF shelf. You can make TikToks about your DNF shelf. You can drive up engagement on Threads by asking, “What books did you DNF recently?”

Michelle Goldberg’s essay “We Should All Know Less About Each Other” is often used as a meme when someone overshares online. It’s because the constant need to share every aspect of our lives has led to social media addiction. But sharing something you actually accomplished is at least understandable. Sharing something you did not do… who is that for, if not to collect accolades you haven’t actually earned? What’s next, a list of travel destinations you haven’t gone to?

It’s not uncommon when someone is canceled online for people to ring a chorus of “Well, I never liked them in the first place.” As if we should congratulate your soothsaying abilities. It’s a new form of narcissism that only social media could create. Imagine Narcissus at a party, informing his friends that he gazed upon his reflection in a pool of water, but didn’t drown by attempting to kiss his reflection. So, you didn’t die. Congrats. Now, what else is going on?

Earnestly, all of this is understandable as a human need for connection. As social media rhetoric becomes increasingly hostile, it’s harder to build genuine connections with other humans in the way the internet was first sold to us. People are prone to misinterpretation, aggression, or just straight-up misanthropic discourse. People want to discuss Yesteryear with others because it feels good to share commonalities with other people. But are you owed a connection with another human without doing the work? A participation trophy for not reading something isn’t dissimilar from wanting credit for something you didn’t write. Something you asked ChatGPT or Claude to finish for you. Reading takes work. Making friends takes work. When salons were first formed in 16th-century Italy, it began the Age of Conversation. A conversation is defined as “an informal talk or back-and-forth exchange of thoughts, ideas, feelings, or information between two or more people.” The thoughts, the ideas, and the feelings are necessary, but the most vital is information. Millennials grew up on the popular Nickelodeon sketch show All That, where Lori Beth Denberg hosted a segment called “Vital Information for Your Everyday Life.” The joke was that the information was often silly and wrong. Increasingly, the joke has become the norm.

Everything I Read in August

I began this month with The Sealey Challenge, which challenges you to read a book of poetry each day for a month. I failed miserably at that. I’m also reading everything on the Booker Prize 2026 Longlist, so clearly something had to give. Thankfully, the challenge is just about introducing poetry into your everyday life. You can also accomplish it by reading a single poem each day, which is what I switched to after my first week.

The poetry books I read from:

The Book of Alice by Diamond Forde

Love is a Dangerous Word by Essex Hemphill

Party Line by Kyle Carrero Lopez

Scrap Book by Nick Martino

Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt by Brontez Purnell

I’ll document my thoughts on The Booker Prize Longlist at a future date (though I’ve been ranking them on my Instagram feed), but as of now my favorite has been Marlon James’ The Disappearers. It’s been called a masterpiece. I agree. My interview with James will air on my podcast Feedback on 9/24. The others I’ve read:

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

The Renovation by Ken Orhan

All Them Dogs by Djamel White1

The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams

Other books I read this month include:

Back by Lauren Michele Jackson (I’m a huge fan of Jackson’s writing and loved her previous collection, White Negroes)

Beloved by Toni Morrison (my ninth Morrison this year, and yeah, this is THEE American novel)

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James (incredible, a perfect back-to-back read with Beloved or The Disappearers)

Two Rachel Cusk novels, Life of M and Second Place

I love Second Place the most; it’s my favorite Cusk I’ve read so far. It’s so nasty and soapy. Everything I love in a novel! My review of Life of M is forthcoming on next week’s Feedback2, but it’s my least favorite novel of Cusk’s I’ve read so far.

Did you know that The Shards is about a serial killer tormenting the students at Buckley School and writ large, the city of Los Angeles? You might be hard-pressed to remember this while watching “Murder on the Dancefloor,” the fifth episode of Ryan Murphy’s “adaptation” of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel. Adaptation is used extremely loosely here. Actually, no, the pretense of adaptation has been completely abandoned by the series’ midway point because this show no longer has anything to do with the aforementioned book and everything to do with Murphy’s desire to direct a show with dance sequences and people snorting lines of cocaine and being vaguely threatening to one another, not in a red herring-for-murder kind of way, but in an I-want-to-steal-your-girlfriend kind of way, or an I-want-to-fuck-this-high-schooler kind of way.

The reviews of Murphy’s series have gone from morbid curiosity to utter disdain as the weeks progress, which is a stark contrast to Ellis’ novel, which most reviews panned for its length, but still, “as the story proceeds, it also becomes easier to admire Ellis' ability to sustain the mood,” as Kirkus Reviews wrote. Reader sentiment is even higher! It has a 4 on Goodreads. The reviews of the series are more in line with this review of a different Ellis book from 1994. Liza Schwarzbaum, reviewing Ellis’ only collection of short stories, The Informers, for Entertainment Weekly, wrote: “I finally figured out the best way to finish The Informers, the fourth novel by the willfully enervating Bret Easton Ellis: Do 10 pages, take a nap. Do another 10, watch a Mary Tyler Moore rerun. Finish a chapter, celebrate with a Snickers bar. Don’t, for God’s sake, touch any alcohol, not if you want to make it to the end of this soul-dead collection of poorly drawn sketches stitched together as a novel. Do remember that Ellis’ work does not represent the state of hip fiction today.”

Generally, I’m more fond of The Informers than critics in ‘94 were. But I’ll admit, not every story works! And most of them seem like they were written in one coked-out night. But that’s exactly how Murphy’s version of The Shards feels. We’ve abandoned the Trawler storyline for an entire episode about a dance competition show. Inexplicably, the main cast members all attend. Even more inexplicably, adults Terry, Steven, and Liz are either on set or watching at home. It’s Glee logic, where everyone in the cast gives a fuck about McKinley High’s glee club, when realistically, if there’s a club you’re not part of in school, it would never be on your radar.

The novel’s central mystery has been abandoned for us to watch: Bret teach Thom how to dance (doing some really gay wiggling for someone closeted), Thom freak out about not being able to dance while Robert moves in on Susan, Debbie compete against Cha Cha on Dance Off!, Terry attempt to manipulate the votes for Debbie to win, Steven attempt to blackmail Ryan for starring in porn, and Cha Cha plead with Anthony Ramos, guest-starring as the host of Dance Off!, to leave his wife for her. None of this is in the fucking book, but even beyond that, why the fuck would we care about any of this when we’ve been watching a murder mystery up till now?

Famously, Ellis didn’t plan on releasing The Informers. But he was late on finishing Glamorama and had a bunch of leftover material from when he’d written Less Than Zero in high school. According to The New York Times, “[Ellis’] latest novel began instead as a series of sketches — whose only function was to distract him from the book he was supposed to be writing. Begun in 1983, the sketches grew to fill "four or five big notebooks" over the ensuing decade, Mr. Ellis, 30, recalled in a telephone interview from his summer residence in Amagansett, L.I. Last year, when he seemed irretrievably stuck on the book he was under contract for — a novel about supermodels and celebrity1 — he offered the notebooks to his publisher instead. Pared down from 32 chapters, the finished book comprises 13 interconnected tales of dissolute, moneyed Angelenos and their disaffected children.”

Interconnected tales of dissolute, moneyed Angelenos is essentially what Murphy’s television series is. It’s as if adapting The Shards was just a pretense to make a show set in the ‘80s about whatever the fuck he wanted. There was a bad film adaptation of The Informers in 2008 that I’m sure no one remembers. Maybe Murphy should’ve just adapted that. The Informers even has vampires. He would’ve loved that shit! But then again, this is Murphy we’re talking about. Who’s to say vampires won’t just randomly pop up in this TV show just because Murphy thinks they’re cool?

Smart people watch Real Housewives. But does that make Real Housewives smart?

“The Real Housewives franchise is the most important anthropological documentation of modern women that we have,” was a recent take on the internet series Subway Takes. No offense to the guest with this take, but this is far from a hot take. It’s not even a lukewarm one at this point. Real Housewives has been discussed seriously by critics for over two decades. In 2014, academic and critic Camille Paglia compared the franchise to the work of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder: “Cohen has so altered and redeemed the pop culture landscape—which had been suffering for years from snide snark and pseudo-hip cynicism—that he should be acknowledged as a genuine auteur, like maverick film directors. His tastes, instincts, and sensibility now suffuse a staggering number of highly successful TV projects. Not since the radical gay German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder revived and recast Douglas Sirk’s ‘women’s pictures’ during the 1970s has a single individual so boldly rescued a waning genre and given it such splendid new life.”

In 2024, professor of sociology Laura Grindstaff referred to the series as a bit of accidental anthropology: “The predictability of the format – strong women characters in luxurious settings navigating life events that generate conflict and drama – coexists with the unpredictability of exactly how each character instigates, responds to and manages these conflicts. Viewers enjoy parsing out those moments when authentic or 'real' emotion breaks through, in seeing the blend of 'scriptedness' and spontaneity unfold, in vicariously enjoying glamour and opulence, in following the arc of a favourite character.”

Real Housewives, while unscripted, has too many formulaic beats to be considered a genuine “anthropological documentation of modern women.” At least, the women on television. The real anthropological study related to the housewives lies directly with the audience. The women, gay men, and now a small minority of straight men who watch the series as it has exploded into mainstream relevance1. If future civilizations2 want to study society in 2026, looking at Real Housewives would be useless. But studying the fans of Bravo? Studying how friend groups deal with conflict after years of consuming Bravo? Studying how celebrity culture has changed due to our proximity to Housewives and their overwhelming desire to perform for our favor? Studying how fans describe Real Housewives as an “anthropological documentation” to justify their obsessive interest in being entertained by women like they’re spectators at the Colosseum? That would be a much more compelling case study.

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