• The podcast A Lesson Before Writing did a very thorough and positive critique of my debut fiction piece, “Selling Vermont.” It starts at the 40 min mark. “Selling Vermont,” a horror piece, is available in issue 10 of Volume 0 or on the magazine’s Substack.

Frank Reads 📚

Everything I Read in July

I skipped New York Pride and the weekend of the 4th this year because in New York that’s just a two-week bender. I opted instead to take my annual London trip for those two weeks, which turned out to be one of my favorite recent vacations. The initial plans for the trip were to finish my novel. Well, that didn’t happen. I actually ended up doing a lot more editing and cutting from the novel than actual writing. Still, I did manage to get a lot of reading done and visit some fantastic bookstores (and spend way too much money on books, but thankfully they’re cheaper in London!).

The first couple of days of July included finishing Marlon James’ The Disappearers, which I reviewed previously: “In these 617 pages is a gorgeous blend of history, language, pop culture, and magic. To say it’s a masterpiece feels like an understatement. This is his Song of Solomon.” The Disappearers has since been longlisted for The Booker Prize! Marlon has previously won for A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I still have not finished1, but The Disappearers immediately became one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. I’m going to document my reading of all the longlisted Booker Prize books, so look forward to that post sometime next month. I am also interviewing Marlon this week for my podcast Feedback (!), so you can also look forward to that next month too. And subscribe to the YouTube channel so you don’t miss it! If you have any questions for him, drop them in the comments!

Get 25% off Frank for the next week!

Anyway, back to London.

The first book I read was Rachel Cusk’s Outline. My friend Satya recommended I listen to the audiobook on my trip, because Kristin Scott Thomas narrates the recent version. Bet. I am not one of those losers who thinks audiobooks aren’t reading. Still, I also get extremely distracted while listening to them (I attempted to listen to Middlemarch earlier this year and failed miserably), so I opted to alternate between reading a chapter and listening to one. I didn’t completely fall in love with it, but I found the book utterly fascinating and bought two other Cusk books immediately2 just because I love her voice. I wrote a bit about Outline already in my review of Madonna’s Confessions II.

I had to get my hands on Fruit Fly by Josh Silver, the book every gay has been talking about this summer. It was finally released in the U.S. last week, but until then it was only available in the UK. I’ll admit, I was worried it might not be good. The description — a YA author looking for her next hit exploits a gay drug addict to write her next hit — sounded fun, but it felt like it could also be a gay Yesteryear (meaning: not good). Thankfully, my worries were unfounded because the book is pretty fab. It’s hilarious, it’s thrilling, and it kinda felt like A Simple Favor in how the protagonist was so comically dumb yet calculating. A24 recently bought the rights to the book, so hopefully we get a really fun, messy TV version. Also, I hung out with Josh recently and showed him around Bed Stuy, and he’s a ki. Get his book; it’s one of my faves this year.

My year-long goal of reading every Toni Morrison book continued with The Bluest Eye. I thought the book was fantastic, but I do think I did myself a disservice by not reading it first. I was more impressed by Morrison’s construction of the novel and how she discussed her mission statement in the afterward than I was personally moved by the story, especially in comparison to Sula and Song of Solomon. I think the narrative distance from Pecola’s inner thoughts kept me from being devastated at the end, which is what happened to me when I reached the end of Sula and Nel and Milkman’s journeys. I plan to reread it soon, however, and maybe it will hit me differently the second time.

The absolute best book I read in July was The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. The hype is definitely real. I’ve always been a Greek mythology obsessive, so I knew the story of Achilles and Patroclus’ queer romance. But this story was rendered so beautifully that it felt like I was discovering it all over again. This book was recommended to me by François Arnaud on Threads (his only post, because he saw how the Heated Rivarly fans act on there and quickly deleted his account 😭). He suggested the book when I asked for romances, to which many people responded that The Song of Achilles isn’t a romance because it doesn’t have a Happy Ever After. Look, the book is devastating, but the ending is the MOST Happy Ever After, if you ask me. Especially if you know Greek myths and know that these two are dead when you start reading the book. You’re already anticipating the incoming trauma. And the way that Madeline Miller manages to subvert that into one of the most gorgeous endings I’ve read in a book? That is fucking romance, baby.

Other books I enjoyed this month:

The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deeshaw Philyaw. This book isn’t out yet, so I don’t want to spoil anything, but Deeshaw is such an exciting writer whose work I’m happy to have discovered this year. If you haven’t read her debut, the short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, you must.

The Living Realm by Jordan Tannahill. It’s a story about a man in Berlin who sees the ghosts of his dead lovers at a cruising site. Jordan is a friend of mine and his writing is so gorgeous and moving here. It’s completely different from the insanity of the play Prince Faggot, his recent Off-Broadway hit, but both left me with the warmest feeling in my heart about being alive in this moment. This book also isn’t out yet, but it is next month!

Flesh by David Szalay. Okay, believe the hype! Last year’s Booker Prize winner is absolutely a fantastic read. I really, really enjoyed this book and its fast pacing and sparse sentences (Hemingway is shaking, sis). For people who claim that MEN are being pushed to the side as writers (they mean white men), give them this book. Because it’s By Men For Men. But also, it’s really great.

Transcription by Ben Lerner. Another book by a MAN. Another straight, white man too. This book wasn’t grabbing me at first, because the three chapters are connected, but not necessarily continuous. By the third chapter, I found myself getting kind of lost until I decided to listen to the audiobook instead (the third chapter is a monologue, essentially). That’s when the book really clicked for me. In a way, this is much better as an audio drama than as a novel, but I really love what’s done with the medium here.

On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward. I am late to the Jesmyn train, I’m aware. Her writing is excellent; I can’t wait to dig into her fiction.

Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst. I think Tembe is such a dope writer. I loved her prose and her language and how this story about a Black woman who gets fired from her writing job actually turns into a story about going back home and how to survive in the places we grew up.

Palaver by Bryan Washington. Bryan’s writing is gorgeous, moving, and tender. This story is about a mother who surprises her gay son by showing up in Tokyo to mend their relationship. The outcome is predictable, and there’s not really much conflict, but it was such a pleasurable read! Although when people discuss “MFA writing,” they’re probably talking about books like this, because describing the son and the mother as just “the son” and “the mother” did annoy me at first. I got used to it about 1/3 of the way through the book, however. I’ve only ever read “Arrivals” by Washington, but I’m excited to dig into more of his work soon.

Book I didn’t love:

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash. This just didn’t vibe with me. It has been described as The Simpsons meets The Corrections, but the humor was only half there for me. And I didn’t like The Corrections! Still, a lot of my friends enjoyed this, and I could tell Madeline had a great time writing this, so I’m eager to see what her second novel brings. The final chapter was actually the most exciting to me, when the book is suddenly narrated by a young boy who has been observing the family. His observations are so interesting that I kinda wish the book had been narrated by him in the first place, rather than bouncing around from family member to family member.

My full July reading list:

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Homebodies by Teme Denton-Hurst

Transcription by Ben Lerner

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deeshaw Philyaw

Flesh by David Szalay

The Living Realm by Jordan Tannahill

Fruit Fly by Josh Silver

On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward

Palaver by Bryan Washington

My favorite bookstores in London

Foyles is a huge megastore, but my favorite part of it was the café on the top floor, which I used to write nearly every day of my trip. There was always a seat there if you popped in early or late enough, and I always grabbed the soup of the day and a glass (or three) of wine.

The Common Press Shoreditch is a cute, tiny queer bookshop. The salesperson working the day I visited was lovely; we had a fun chat, and I overheard them giving extremely helpful (and good!) book recs to other customers.

Daunt Books is very popular right now thanks to their cute tote bags, so I didn’t get one and instead bought a tote from London Review of Books. Both stores have a great selection of books, however, and a stellar collection of recs from their employees.

Gay is the Word is a staple. I always visit when I’m in London. Love their new space, too!

My favorite restaurants in London

The chicken liver agnolotti at Vesper was one of my favorite dishes I had on my trip. I also popped into sister restaurant Below Stone Nest, which is a restaurant and a jazz club

I had a lovely lunch at Funky Noodles with Stephanie Wambugu! If you haven’t read her book Lonely Crowds, it was one of my faves of last year.

Impala is one of my new favorite restaurants. Period. Its menu is a blend of North African, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern food. I truly loved everything I ate, but I have to shout out the white crab wrapped in shiso leaf and the birds tongue pasta, slowly braised with spiced oxtail. I’m still thinking about both of those dishes, weeks later.

My favorite parties in London

I attended the first Club Confessions in London, which had a dope lineup of Horsemeat Disco, Jodie Harsh, and Honey Dijon, who played a two-hour closing set. Madonna came out during Stuart Price’s set, and it was insane seeing the crowd sing along and dance to old Madonna songs and the new singles. The New York one felt more intimate because so many of my friends attended, but for my money, the London one was better because the stage was elevated and we could actually see Madonna.

I discussed New York’s Club Confessions night in last week’s episode of Feedback:

Despite trying to avoid Pride in New York, I was there for London Pride. Two of my fave parties to attend whenever I’m in London are Adonis and Howl. Adonis is very sceney and full of hot, shirtless gays with muscles. Howl has that too, but it’s a little more avant-garde and queer. Both are great times!

Links

Speaking of Rachel Cusk, her new novel Life of M is out in two weeks, and allegedly it’s about Natalie Portman and allegedly Natalie is pissed. I can’t wait to read it.

Caro Claire Burke sold 1.4 million copies of Yesteryear. White women are reading, okay?

The New York Times discovered the DNF craze. I have some thoughts on DNF culture that I plan to write about later this month. In short: everyone is being extremely annoying on both sides.

Recession indicator: Obama is becoming a book influencer.

I’ve been thinking about Frank a lot lately. I started this newsletter because I wanted a place to write about the things I’m obsessed with: books, TV, film, and pop culture. Somewhere along the way, life happened last fall, and I got a little less consistent. It was also hard balancing working on a novel with freelance writing and finding a new home.

But I want to change that! Starting this month, Frank is getting a reset. I’m going back to publishing twice a week. Tuesday’s post will be free. Friday’s will be for paid subscribers.

Here’s what I have planned for the rest of August:

📚 Frank Reads

I’m kicking things off this Tuesday with everything I’ve read in July — the books I loved, hated, or just can’t stop thinking about. I’ll also be doing a deeper dive into one book each month.

📺 Frank Watches

My reality TV reviews are back for paid subscribers. I will also cover other shows and films I’ve enjoyed recently.

As always, there’ll be essays about whatever’s happening in pop culture that I can’t stop thinking about. There’ll also be some surprises along the way, like interviews with some of my fave people, new fiction from me, and more.

If you’ve been around since the beginning, thank you! There’s been a lot of twists and turns in this damn newsletter, chile. If you haven’t opened Frank in a while, consider this your invitation to come back to the ki.

To celebrate Frank’s return, I’m giving former and free subscribers 25% off an annual subscription through Sunday.

Let's Get Frank Again Discount

Laissez les bons temps rouler,

Ira

I launched my new podcast, Feedback, a couple of months ago. So far, I’ve discussed: The current state of comedy with Jay Jurden. Pop culture podcasting with Hunter Harris and Peyton Dix. The art of the interview with Audie Cornish. The state of New York theatre with Juan A. Ramírez and Soraya McDonald. Writing magazine profiles with Anna Peele. How constructing crossword puzzles is like writing fiction Natan Last. How to survive in the current fashion industry with Chrissy Rutherford and John Villa. Fifty years of Days of Our Lives with Deidre Hall. The queer history of New York nightlife with Connie Fleming and Lina Bradford.

I would love you forever if you could follow the podcast’s YouTube page, subscribe, like, and comment!

This Thursday’s episode features my friend, Gibson Johns (host of Gabbing with Gib), as we discuss how reporting on Bravo turned into his full-time job, the current state of the Real Housewives franchise, and more!

Due to overwhelming demand, I have launched new dates for my Writing for Pop Culture course. You can sign up at iramadison.com/classes.

The Shards has finally arrived on FX.

I can credit Bret East Ellis’ 2023 novel with jumpstarting reading for pleasure again. I’d barely read a book since 2020, opting instead to binge old television shows and classic films on Criterion. But the summer of 2023 was one of the first times that I recalled multiple friends reading the same book. So, I pushed through the 608-page novel and discovered that my once-favorite author (Less Than Zero has been my fave book since college) still had another banger in him. After the rather disappointing Imperial Bedrooms, I was shocked that The Shards was so fucking good. It was my fave book of 2023, and I was stoked for the announced Luca Guadagnino HBO adaptation before that fell apart (will his American Psycho reimagining have the same fate?). I was still somewhat excited for the Kristoffer Borgli version, but that too fell apart. Now, we have Ryan Murphy version. God, help us. Might this possibly be good? Is Murphy still capable of gagging us?

The good news is that so far, Murphy’s TV series is a pretty faithful adaptation of Ellis’ novel. The bad news is that for the first time, I found a Ryan Murphy series… boring? Addictive. Messy. Godawful. Offensive. These are all adjectives I’d use to describe most of Murphy’s television series. But I’ve never been bored. But midway through the two-part premiere of The Shards, I found myself wondering, who cares?

The Shards Special

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Is it still controversial to call Bret Easton Ellis one of your favorite authors? The lovable misanthrope’s Less Than Zero has been my fave novel since college, and I’ve read every other book of his (well, not White, girl).

After the rather disappointing Imperial Bedrooms, I was shocked that The Shards was so fucking good. It was my fave book of 2023, and I was stoked for the announced Luca Guadagnino HBO adaptation before that fell apart (will his American Psycho reimagining have the same fate?). I was still somewhat excited for the Kristoffer Borgli version, but that too fell apart. Now, we’re about to get the Ryan Murphy version. God, help us. Might this possibly be good? Is Murphy still capable of gagging us?

We’ll find out when The Shards debuts on FX on August 5.

Each week, I’ll be recapping the series for paid Frank subscribers, doing a deep dive into the differences between the series and the novel.

For the next week, I’m offering 50% off all new paid subscriptions!

The Shards 50% Discount!

Also, join me on 8/5 at 9 PM EST for a live chat of the premiere!

You spend the weekend in a chilly movie theater, in a chair that reclines juuussst enough to legally be referred to as a “reclining” seat, and you take in a new release. You, presumably a cinephile of some intelligence (you’re reading Frank, after all), feel as if you understood the movie 100%. Then you log online, only to discover someone has bested you in a match of wits you didn’t even know you were playing. You see a post on social media that begins with, “The REAL villain in this film is…” Horrified that you might secretly be a moron, you continue reading… only to discover that the post has described the most surface-level, obvious read of the film you’ve just watched. The person named as the “real villain” by this anonymous social media user is the film’s antagonist, which usually means yes, they are the villain! In 1950, Alan Turing posed the question, “Can machines think?” In 2026, many of us scroll the tiny machines in our hands and pose the daily question, “Can HUMANS think?”

Most recently, I fell to my knees and shouted this question to the heavens after witnessing an extreme amount of posts online sharing the never-before-heard theory that Bear, the lead in Curry Barker’s 2026 smash horror hit Obsession, is the film’s real villain. Yeah, no shit. Granted, it’s not a new phenomenon. The BuzzFeed Era of media churned out daily “The REAL villain in The Devil Wears Prada…” takes. But it’s become an increasingly more common way for someone to mint themselves an “authority” on a piece of media. At this point, on social media, there are too many takes. A generation that grew up on VH1’s I Love the… series now has access to smartphones where they can drop TikToks, Reels, or even just viral Threads sharing information about a film that they’ve either just Googled five seconds ago or made up. The internet’s attention economy rewards takes, but when there are so many takes, people look to someone with credibility on the subject.

This isn’t to say people check credentials before they engage with content online; it just means that those making the content now use phrases that indicate they know what they’re talking about. For instance, one of my favorite Survivor Australia winners, Feras Basal, launched a podcast with his mate Yaz Haddad. Rather than use his platform to, I don’t know, talk about Survivor, I recently came across a half-baked critique of Obsession on Instagram Reels. “Almost every single big scene from Obsession was copied from another horror film,” Haddad says, before sharing a clip of scenes where director Curry Barker paid homage to some of his favorite films. The YouTube-ification of film commentary – which popularized videos like “900 PLOT HOLES IN AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY” or what the fuck ever — has far too many people convinced that a) they know what they’re talking about, or b) taking something that is not a new thing in film at all and pretending they’re the first to discover it. It’s media illiteracy that banks on media illiteracy from their audience.

Does any of this contribute to a real discussion of art? No, it just contributes to everyone wanting to be “right” about a film. It doesn’t matter what you thought of the acting, or the directing, or the writing; you have to find one specific aspect of a film to critique so that you can stake a claim in the broader online conversation. No film had done this more recently than Obsession, when I first started writing this draft. Then Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey debuted.

At lunch the other day, a friend told me they hadn’t seen The Odyssey yet because of “all the backlash.” I had to pause for a minute to think about which backlash they meant. IMAX being elitist? Classicist Emily Wilson eviscerating Nolan for not being faithful to her translation? Nolan’s treatment of female characters? The Odyssey has reached peak discourse.

I was more interested in the critique of The Odyssey that centered around Nolan’s lack of a co-writer for this script. Nolan’s longtime collaborator, his brother Jonathan Nolan, co-wrote each film from Batman Begins to Interstellar. Memento is adapted from “Memento Mori,” a short story written by Jonathan. Insomnia is a remake of a Norwegian film with a script from Hillary Seitz. These films are part of what Nolan fans generally refer to as his golden years. Everything since Dunkirk has been a solo writing-and-directing effort by Nolan.

Some fans genuinely believe he should’ve enlisted Jonathan to work on The Odyssey to make it “better.” It introduces a zero sum to art where the main directive is to get things “right,” rather than any genuine artistic expression. This isn’t a Marvel movie! I loved Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but it’s easier to critique the construction of these films because they are quite literally constructed to create the best possible outcome. Given that the film had the second highest box-office opening in history, it clearly worked.

Nolan’s art form is blockbusters. He works to make films that appeal to a mass audience (“I wanted to make a very accessible movie,” he told The New York Times) while also tackling the psyches of the men in the stories he tells. Nolan has been critiqued for making films about men with scant women in them. This is true. But Nolan as a director is also speaking to men in a more subtle way than getting online and sounding an alarm about the “male loneliness crisis.” Tenet, his best film1, is essentially about male friendship. In interviews, Nolan has acknowledged the similarity between The Odyssey and his previous films. He told The Los Angeles Times, I’ve been telling this story in all my films for years. It’s a family story, a love story, a revenge story, a war story, a coming-of-age story. It’s a very strong foundational text for me.”

I personally love watching an artist progress over the course of their career. It’s something that I’ve enjoyed watching in myself as an artist. I’ve been reading all of Toni Morrison’s work this year, and it’s been fascinating to go from The Bluest Eye to Sula to Love in a matter of months, to see the themes that Morrison revisits and how she chooses to tell stories differently decades later. I love prolific creators. When I discover them, it’s great to have a large body of work to dig into. I can’t wait to read more Percival Everett! I’m glad he doesn’t write one book every ten years. We might’ve never gotten The Trees.

In order for an artist to progress, they should be allowed to follow their own instincts. That means, if they’ve been itching to tell the story in The Odyssey for their entire career, they should do it themselves without needing their brother for an assist. You don’t have to like it! Art is subjective, after all. But it’s not legitimate to critique what doesn’t exist. I had a similar response to critiques of The Drama. Many people lobbied the complaint that Zendaya playing an attempted school shooter wasn’t realistic. Because Black women don’t do that. Yeah, that’s the fucking point of the film. Also, it’s fiction. Whether or not Kristoffer Borgli created a world where Zendaya’s motivations are believable is up for debate, but the very existence of those motivations can’t be outright rejected because it doesn’t match statistics in the real world. I’m beginning to think people don’t actually want art; they just want things to argue about based on pieces of their identity. Arguing “Zendaya wouldn’t shoot up a school because she’s Black” says nothing about the film, but it says everything about what you want to virtue signal to your followers about how “Black” you are. As if being Black were an astrological sign and not an incredibly diverse identity. It’s always "Black people aren’t a monolith,” until you need to prove a point in an argument.

Arguing the work on its own merits also applies to the Emily Wilson critique, by the way. Absolutely, Wilson is allowed to critique the film on how it translates Homer’s epic poem. She is a classicist, after all. But her general disdain for the medium (blockbusters) and Nolan’s interpretation (Homer’s story was written from the perspective of a rising civilization, whereas Nolan made a moral story for a civilization in decline) should’ve been left out of it. Arguing identity is something fellow academics have done in defense of Wilson, or the argument that crediting Nolan with her recent fame is misogynistic. Nolan isn’t responsible for her career. For her recent fame? Absolutely. Renewed interest in her translation (already a bestseller, yes) is for sure because of Nolan’s film. In 2026, notably, domestic sales of Wilson’s translation across all formats surpassed 1,000,000 copies. Let’s not be obtuse. That’s the entire reason authors love their work being adapted: to gain interest from a new audience. Well, not every writer.

I’ve gotten more than a few e-mails lately about writing courses. Teaching is something I’ve been interested in since I attended New York University for my MFA. I took two courses in the past year that I’ve really enjoyed — Writing Art with Katie Kitamura (Grub Street) and Everyday Hauntings: Writing Contemporary Gothic with JD Scott (Center for Fiction) — and they helped me finally construct a writing course that feels authentic to what I do: pop culture writing and personal essays.

For six weeks we’ll focus on developing a voice, writing criticism that feels alive, and finding the intersection of memoir, pop culture, and reporting. Along with weekly writing exercises, you’ll leave with a polished essay to pitch to a publication or include in a book proposal.

The course will also include a copy of my book Pure Innocent Fun and my proposal that sold at auction for six figures.

Writing Pop Culture with Ira Madison III

Weekly, Tuesdays

August 4 - September 8

7-9 PM EST

Cost: $795

Capacity: 10

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

Charli XCX spoke to Nicky Reardon on his podcast, Nicky at Night, about constructing an album: “When I’m making music, it really informs the direction that the music takes. It provides this sort of, like, set of boundaries in which I create. And that can really help the direction of the music itself. When you’re creating in this set of rules, you can get really potent. When I was making Brat, it became really clear early on what was Brat, versus what wasn’t.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about my intentions when it comes to my first novel. I have a wide body of work already: my former podcast Keep It, a decade of cultural criticism, a television writing career, and my essay collection Pure Innocent Fun. How do I want the next chapter (pun not intended) of my life to look creatively? I've become extremely interested in fiction as of late. And not just fiction, but literary fiction. I want that to be reflected in my work.

I traveled to London for two weeks recently for a writing retreat. I expected to get a good chunk of my book done, but instead, I read my existing pages in both projects and decided that it was time to put the first project away for a bit. It initially existed as an idea for a screenplay when I was working on Uncoupled. My manager at the time really loved this idea, but I couldn’t find a way to make it work as a screenplay. My manager and I parted ways last year. And then, as some of you may know, I lost my apartment and a very close friend later that year. I realized in London that this first project was me still attempting to hold onto things that I need to let go of (at least for now).

Conversely, my second project came to me in a Gothic fiction writing workshop I took in New Orleans. Yes, it’s gothic horror. But also a romance? And in part, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 play Ghosts. It’s messy in a good way. I attempt to make sense of everything that’s happened to me in the past year, and it’s full of anger and sadness and grief. But it’s also my writing that feels the most connected to literary fiction. One thing I’ve always appreciated about my past creative projects is how quick the turnaround is from inception to presentation. Novels are a different beast, but I do think there’s something to getting all of those ideas out as soon as you can without allowing them to simmer for too long. I want to process the last year, and then I want to be able to put it on a shelf and let it be, much like I did when I published Pure Innocent Fun. The three-year time period during which I wrote it was a chaotic time in my life, and it felt therapeutic to leave it all inside a book that I don’t have to reopen again until I choose to.

This is all to say that I’m working towards my goal of finishing this draft this summer, on or around my upcoming 40th (!) birthday. More to come.

What I read in June

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deeshaw Philyaw

Lives of Saints by Nancy Lemann

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Flyboy in the Buttermilk Greg Tate

The Disappearers by Marlon James

Love by Toni Morrison

I am shocked that for the sixth month in a row, a work by Toni Morrison is not my favorite book I’ve read! That honor goes to the forthcoming masterpiece (yeah, that’s right) from Marlon James, The Disappearers. I’ve met Marlon socially a few times through one of our mutual close friends. At that friend’s wedding, he described the plot of his latest novel to me, and I knew this was absolutely gonna be my kinda shit. A queer Jamaican revenge epic that’s also kind of a romance and also set in the late ‘80s and 90s? I was hooked from the moment Less Than Zero and Prince were referenced.

There’s so much more I want to say about this novel, but it’s not out until September, so I will hold off for now. Just know that I took this book to Fire Island and then to London and finished it within a week. When I wasn’t reading it, I was either thinking about it or I was talking to friends about it.

Yes, it’s a Marlon James book, so it’s long as hell. But in these 617 pages is a gorgeous blend of history, language, pop culture, and magic. To say it’s a masterpiece feels like an understatement. This is his Song of Solomon.

I did absolutely adore Love, though. I didn’t know what to expect from this one, given there’s not a lot of writing on Morrison’s later works (this New York Review piece by Raven Leilani is fantastic tho). It’s a slight read compared to her classics, but it still packs a punch. And it feels like a master is taking all the themes she’s explored in her prior work and drawing new conclusions. This book is in conversation with Sula for sure, but it’s also very much a continuation of Recitatif. Christine and Heed carry on Twyla and Roberta’s venomous feud, only to greater, melodramatic heights. I need to know if Morrison watched The Young and the Restless because the climactic skirmish absolutely gives Jill and Katherine’s iconic 1988 attic brawl. Katherine finds Jill snooping through her ex-husband’s mementos, just as Heed finds Christine doing the same.

Sula ends with the realization that friendship is what Nel missed in her life, not her husband. The sentiment in Love is, “All this time, we could’ve been friends?”

There was an article about the “gay lit boom” in the NYT recently, but a quieter boom in queer literature has been coming from well-known Black women writers. I expected I’d enjoy Philyaw’s story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, but I didn’t expect it to have so many delicious queer stories. The same goes for Kin, whose queer romance has gone largely unmentioned on social media and in reviews. There’s also Lonely Crowds from Stephanie Wambugu, which features an unrequited (until it’s not) queer romance. I’ve also heard that Kennedy Ryan’s Score (which I have yet to read but plan to!) features a bisexual lead. It’s not shocking to me that these Black women are telling such bold, exciting sapphic stories.

But it is shocking, I think, that they’re not being discussed more widely as queer lit. Is that the future of queer literature? Is it something that only one demographic is allowed to explore without expressly being labeled as queer lit? Or is it the fact that Black women are writing these stories the reason why the men writing about the current “gay lit boom” haven’t noticed?

As for the other books I read this month, I read Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights because I’ve been working my way through The Brothers Karamazov this year, and I just wanted to finish a Dostoevsky story. I didn’t particularly love it. Lives of Saints has such gorgeous, vivid prose, and it made me feel like I was back in New Orleans again. Flyboy in the Buttermilk is an excellent collection of criticism with a must-read introduction from my MTV News colleague Hanif Abdurraqib. It also includes one of my favorite pieces of music criticism ever, “I’m White!: What’s Wrong with Michael Jackson.” People aren’t writing fire like that anymore!

Another fun thing I did in June? I traveled to Fire Island to guest host Marc MacNamara’s Hot Tub Games, where he pairs a housewife with a porn star for a series of games. This month, his porn star was Rhyheim Shabazz. And the housewife? Nene fucking Leakes. Yes, the inspiration behind the title of my essay collection Pure Innocent Fun. THAT Nene Leakes.

During the game, we played a few rounds of Never Have I Ever at The Tryst Pool. A highlight of the game was when I said, Never have I ever had a lesbian moment like most of my Real Housewives of Atlanta castmates. And would you believe that Nene admitted she HAS had a lesbian moment before? The entire audience screamed in gleeful shock. She wouldn’t divulge any other debates, but that was enough for me.

The best moment of the experience, however, was gifting Nene with a copy of my book and signing it for her. Hilariously, she didn’t recall the quote that inspired the title (it’s not one of the more famous ones!) and thought I was asking her to sign my book. It gave very much, “whatever that means…” And I died. When I first wrote this book, I asked Random House if there was any way to secure a moment with Nene on my book tour. It wasn’t in the cards.

But I’m a firm believer in the universe delivering things to you when it’s time. And one year after the publication of my book, that moment came. One of Nene’s most famous quotes is, “bling bling bling, bitches is mad!” But damn, actually? Bitches is glad!

“Bitches love a summer. Bitches love summer.” This mantra was recently introduced to the pop culture lexicon by The Real Housewives of Rhode Island’s Alicia Carmody. And you know what? I’m bitches. And so is Madonna. It’s a Madonna summer.

I’ve gone on the record declaring this a Madonna summer as early as Coachella weekend 2, when the Queen of Pop made a surprise appearance during Sabrina Carpenter’s set. Witnessing that in person sent me down a Madonna wormhole, and I haven’t stopped playing her music since. In anticipation of her latest album, Confessions II, released last Friday, I’m sure many fans began listening to the original 2005 masterpiece, Confessions on a Dance Floor. Not me. According to my Apple Music Replay, Madonna has been my top artist for the past three months. In April, my top album was Hard Candy. In May, Bedtime Stories knocked Hard Candy to second place.

I have always been a Hard Candy defender. Upon its release, it was slammed by multiple critics and fans. Madonna, usually a pioneer in pop music, was accused of chasing trends and radio-friendly hits by teaming up with The Neptunes, Timbaland, and Kanye West. For Pitchfork, Tom Ewing rated the album a 5.3 and wrote: “Her strengths have always been her authority, and her smart sense of who to work with and when. So even if it’s a summary of where pop’s at rather than where it’s going, Hard Candy should still be excellent. After all, if you’re not going to do your best work for Madonna, who are you going to do it for? But after listening, the question’s still open-- nobody involved in Hard Candy is anywhere near their creative peak.” He also calls my favorite track on the album, “Heartbeat,” the worst of the bunch and a retread of “Into the Groove.” But here’s the thing about pop music. The real arbiter of taste is the dance floor, and Madonna’s link-up with the hottest club music producers of the time has endured. It’s not uncommon to hear a Hard Candy track on a New York dance floor, at a party in Fire Island, or at some gay’s afters in Brooklyn.

At the time, what came across as a retread in a flooded sea of pop music also produced by The Neptunes, Timbaland, and Kanye West has endured. Because she’s fucking Madonna. And who even remembers the other songs she was accused of trying to compete with? At least one critic at the time got it exactly right. For Rolling Stone, Caryn Ganz wrote: “Hard Candy celebrates dance as salvation, but even the euphorically groovy ‘Heartbeat’ and ‘Dance2night’ strike wistful notes.”

Maybe that’s why I’ve always responded to Hard Candy. I’ve always found salvation on the dance floor, along with community. Last year, for Harper’s Bazaar, I wrote about my introduction to rave culture and how it gave me the confidence to love my own body: “MDMA warms up your body. If I didn’t want to die of heat exhaustion, I’d have to do the same. I lifted my own vintage Janet Jackson tour shirt over my head, exposing my body on the dance floor. And the record didn’t scratch. The party didn’t stop. I wasn’t kicked out for not possessing a body that looked like the sea of muscled gay men surrounding me. It would be so much easier to disassociate from the world rather than make the conscious decision to live in your body, embrace every part of it, and connect with your friends and strangers. But the best part about dancing: It’s fun as hell.” When Madonna sings, “Don’t you know? Can’t you see? When I dance, I feel free” on “Heartbeat”? That’s so fucking real.

Madonna hasn’t only looked for salvation in dance: she’s also a bit of a hopeless romantic! My favorite Madonna album is Bedtime Stories, her mid-’90s foray into slinky electronic, trip hop, and R&B. The album also features my favorite Madonna song: “Love Tried to Welcome Me.” When she sings “loneliness has never been a stranger to me,” all of the unrequited loves of my life flash before my eyes. And “ love tried to welcome me, but my soul drew back” speaks exactly to moments when I’ve been unable to accept love into life, instead listening to an inner saboteur. But goddamn it if she’s not gonna love herself despite it all. I’ve never found any Madonna as inspiring as “Survival,” where she sings “I’ll never be an angel. I’ll never be a saint; it’s true. I’m too busy surviving. Whether it’s heaven or hell. I’m gonna be living to tell.”

Madonna has always been revered for her culture-defining singles. When she first dropped “I Feel So Free,” followed by “Bring Love” and “Love Sensation” from Confessions II, a common refrain online was “Where are the singles?” An odd expectation for an artist in this modern era where streaming is shit. I recall the same complaint lobbied at Beyoncé when she released “Break My Soul,” which many fans had to warm up to. Once they heard all of Renaissance, her mission statement was clear. Beyoncé created an album that paid homage to the Black and queer roots of dance music. Upon hearing the completed Confessions II, Madonna’s mission statement became clear, too. She created an album that paid homage to the dance floor, yes, but she was paying homage to the dance floors that played her music. From the career-high track “Danceteria” which cements the lore of Madonna’s New York origins (the Fab Five Freddy mention during a rap breakdown maybe makes this her “Rapture”?), to the sensational “School,” where she sings, “School is in session.” The lesson? She ain’t new to this shit.

Her singles are fun, yes, but it’s the deep cuts where Madonna has always provided her most confessional songwriting. In a recent interview with Mel Ottenberg, Madonna described writing the album with former collaborator Stuart Price: “I hadn’t worked with Stuart for a long time. We’d just done the Celebration Tour together, but besides that, I didn’t really see or speak to him for probably 15 years. I was living in New York, and I reached out to him, thinking, What if we tried to make Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II and reenter the world of inspirational dance music? I had a lot of stuff going on in my life personally. My brother was very, very, very ill, and my stepmother, with whom I’d had a very traumatic relationship throughout my entire childhood, had just died. It’s hard for me to write a song about nothing. I have to tell a story. So I wrote about a lot of family trauma, and then we started making dance music.”

To hear Madonna speak so openly about her process and her grief is refreshing in an age where pop stars rarely tell us shit. Charli XCX recently told Rolling Stone why she’s reticent to do interviews: “This isn’t me being a bitch.… I’m just not really that interested in talking about the meaning behind my songs. You never know how it’s going to turn out in text. Honestly, I wasn’t saying that for it to be a big deal. It’s just how I feel. People already think I’m a bitch, so … I’m very much at peace with it. It’s cool, and it’s not drama or anything like that. It’s just me trying to do what’s good for me, because it got to a place where my anxiety was physically affecting me, and I can’t actually proceed in life like that.”

Yet only a few months later, after partying with pop star Madonna in Paris (they’re both Leos, btw, no wonder I love them), XCX seems to have turned a corner on discussing her music. In a BBC Radio Music interview with Nick Grimshaw, she described meeting Madonna: “She’s just so cool and so interested in really talking about the music that she makes, and how and why. I found it very inspiring to hang out with her. There’s a real taste level with her, it’s high. When I become a bit more interested in how music is art.”

In London recently, I started reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline. On the suggestion of a friend, I alternated reading chapters and listening to Kate Lock’s narration while I rode the tube and sat in parks during the city’s heatwave. In the novel, Cusk’s unnamed narrator has conversations with friends and strangers 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, the narrator didn’t seem like 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. Cusk’s writing has a lyrical quality to it. And who else shares lyrics of dubious narrative identity, hoping for you to identify with them, but pop stars? Is this song you’re listening to actually about them? Have they invented the scenario out of thin air? How you respond to it, through your own confessions, will ultimately determine what a song means. Cusk’s work has always been referred to as autofiction, but in 2023 she said to The New Yorker: “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.” If autofiction is defined as working through the vessel of their own self in the present, then what else is Confessions II but autofiction? Madonna has things to say about her past, yes, but her intention is for you to dance. Right now. And feel free.

On the dance floor

I feel so free

Madonna, “I Feel So Free”

What was it that Harvey Dent said in The Dark Knight? “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” That applies to reality television stars, too. Death in this situation means you’ve left the show that made you famous, which is often the only way to keep public opinion of you intact. Ariana Madix discovered this when she became the doyenne of Vanderpump Rules in the wake of Scandoval, then became the show’s villain when producers, her castmates, and the audience were angry she wouldn’t play ball and film with her loser ex, Tom Sandoval. And given his recent antics, thank god for that.

Enter Ciara Miller. The recent breakout star of Summer House, thanks to a cheating scandal of her own. Her ex, West Wilson, had an affair with Amanda Batula, Miller’s friend and fellow castmate Kyle Cooke’s wife. In the aftermath, Miller became pop culture’s heroine, and Summer House finally became a household name. Miller gained an influx of new fans, pushing her to over 1 million followers on Instagram, landing her a slew of brand deals and a hosting gig on Love Island: Aftersun (alongside Tefi Pessoa).

And that’s where the trouble began.

In the recent week of Love Island, the Casa Amor twist ended, and cast member Aniya Harvey found herself dumped by KC Chandler, who returned from Casa with a new partner, Tierra “Titi” Davis. Aniya’s friend, Trinity Tatum, launched a searing read of KC, and Titi ended up being hit by verbal shrapnel in the process. As a result, the internet — particularly Threads, which has grown exponentially as a place to live-post about reality television — exploded into heated debates about the interactions.

A problem has arisen for Love Island that’s not dissimilar to the conversation centered around Summer House. At some point, the reality television show has ceased to be entertainment and instead become a forum for viewers to compare their morality to the cast members and to debate race, gender, and sexuality. Reality television is often derided as cheap entertainment, so discussing how these shows reflect real-life politics is always welcome, but at what point do these shows stop being fun to watch? When the chief reason for watching Love Island has become an opportunity to engage in heated debates, what’s the point of the show? Do the cast members only exist as avatars now and not as three-dimensional human beings?

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Reality television has come a long way since I first tuned into reruns of MTV’s The Real World. Back then, daytime soap operas still had high budgets, and primetime soaps ruled the airwaves. Now, they’ve been replaced by reality television dramas — television just as addictive as Marlena Evans being possessed by the devil on Days of Our Lives — but much cheaper to make. When soap operas practically vanished from the airwaves, Bravo became the new home for fans of high drama, camp, and, of course, sleaze.

Renowned soap fan and cultural critic Camille Paglia wrote about her love of Bravo and The Real Housewives in 2014: “The Real Housewives franchise isn’t entertainment to me—it’s a lifestyle. I watch virtually nothing else on TV now, except for occasional documentaries and Turner Classic Movies. I can see the same Real Housewives episode multiple times with equal enjoyment. I love the frank display of emotion, the intricate interrelationships, and the sharp-elbows jockeying for power and visibility. 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.

To compare reality television to Sirk might seem like an exaggeration, but it’s not. What are storylines like faking cancer, FBI arrests, and affairs besides high melodrama? Soaps were once lauded as “sex and suffering in the afternoon” by TIME magazine in 1976. Is that not what we watch Bravo for? Sure, the wish-fulfillment aspect is part of it; soap operas also gave us a peek into glamorous lives that weren’t our own. But increasingly, Bravo fans have demanded a frictionless viewing experience that is devoid of drama. In the wake of the Summer House scandal, I’ve seen a myriad of suggestions for a show where Ciara Miller and other Black women merely hang out and live fabulous, drama-free lives. Baby, that’s called Instagram stories.

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Some news:

My new podcast, Feedback with Ira Madison III is out now. It’s a weekly pop culture digest unpacking the stories, internet obsessions, and debates lighting up your group chats. Joined by friends and cultural tastemakers, I’ll dive into entertainment, books, politics, media, and the increasingly online world that’s reshaping how we think, argue, and stay relevant. New episodes every Thursday.

You can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever else you get your podcasts.

I. The Yesteryear Itch

Includes spoilers for Yesteryear.

“What a bitch, huh?”

It took me a beat, but I realized the woman speaking to me on the subway platform was referring to the protagonist of Yesteryear, author Caro Claire Burke’s instant #1 NYT best seller, which was propped in my hands as I waited for a 3 train back to Brooklyn. Outside of the Bravo fandom, I was rarely invited to join in the camaraderie of calling another woman a bitch, but this was a fictional woman. And well, she is a bitch.

Yesteryear was on my radar long before its publication, due to a Deadline article in 2024 about Anne Hathaway and Elizabeth Banks bidding for its film rights pre-publication. In a since-deleted Substack note, the very much-in-the-comments Burke clapped back against accusations that Hathaway (who ultimately won the bidding war) “ghost wrote” the book. I’m sure Hathaway offered some ideas on the draft she read, but producers don’t ghostwrite the books they adapt. They just rewrite whatever they don’t like.

But back to the bitch. That would be Natalie Mills, a tradwife influencer who wakes up one morning to find herself trapped in 1855. Or, so she thinks. The draw of this book is its buzzy sci-fi-esque twist. The reality of this book is that there’s nothing sci-fi about it all; she’s not trapped in 1855. The disappointment of this book is that the premise is its worst part.

Though, to take it from the internet, the book is the WORST THING some people have read. When people dragged the previous year’s buzzy white girl books, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs (which I haven’t read yet) or Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth (which I really enjoyed), there was an air of professional jealousy. The internet wanted to know why Cash got so much press for her debut. Answer: a publicist, which you can also hire for your own books! The internet wanted to know why the launch of the Volume 0 issue with my debut short story got shunted into a launch party for Levy’s book, with nary a mention of my story and one good photo of me at the event! Okay, no one but me was wondering that, but the check more than made up for it. But the questions surrounding the quality of Yesteryear have been good old, “Is this book everyone is talking about really that fucking good?”

It’s become discourse akin to a new Taylor Swift album. Does its #1 status denote its quality? If you don’t think so, then it makes you very eager to talk shit about it with like-minded people. My friend and host of the podcast The Stacks, Traci Thomas, famously likes to say, “talking shit is good for books.” Which is perhaps why she immediately told me to text her my thoughts as I dove into Yesteryear.

Much to my surprise, given Burke’s excellent critical mind that I recall from episodes of her podcast Diabolical Lies, the book hardly feels like a novel. It’s no wonder that Yesteryear was quickly snatched up as a movie, because reading it felt like watching a summer blockbuster that lures you in with a shocking premise, and then collapses under its own weight (yes, I’ve been in the backrooms…). What I mean by this is that Yesteryear is less a story about a tradwife influencer who wakes up in 1855, but more so about making the audience believe this tradwife influencer is in 1855. And from the jump, mind you. The book flashes forward to its twist very quickly. Like, chapter one quickly. And then it jumps back and forth from Natalie’s college years, her courtship with rich idiot Caleb, and the formation of her influencer empire. Along the way, Natalie is downright evil to Caleb, her sister, her college roommate, her employees, and her fans. This is why the woman on the subway was so gleeful about Natalie being a bitch who “got what she deserved.”

I believe that Yesteryear has aspirations of exploring religious delusion, gender roles, and how social media turns us into the worst versions of ourselves. But the process of reading this book goes from whiplash at the time jumps, to tediousness once you realize the twist isn’t a sci-fi twist, to anger when you realize that the twist itself is spaced out in flash forwards because there’s not enough material to sustain it for an entire book. The film might be more successful, frankly, because it won’t be told in a first-person POV like Yesteryear, which feels a bit like scamming the reader by the end of the book. The book’s final twist is that Natalie placed herself into Yesteryear, but can’t remember any of it because of the drugs she’s taking. It’s a really exploitative way to tell such a fun premise, not to mention kind of lazy.

It’s a shame, because otherwise, I found Burke’s depiction of a people-pleaser turned diabolical monster turned red-pilled nujob to be pretty damn funny. One particular passage (which I’ve been told loses some of its fun in the audiobook) cracked me up:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.

I leaned across the table and pressed my hand over His. Sorry, I mean his. Caleb’s.

I think most people imagined someone like Nara Smith when they first heard this premise. But Natalie has no interest in becoming a model and walking in a Miu Miu show. She genuinely believes she has a higher calling than most. And she honestly believes most of the shit she preaches online, which is perhaps why her attempts to circumvent the patriarchal fantasy she’s peddling ultimately end in her downfall. I would’ve loved to see more of her assistant’s revenge plot and her Dallas-esque political struggle with her father-in-law. But alas, there’s THE TWIST. Without the twist, this could’ve been an incredibly fun and demented character study, something more akin to Raven Leilani’s Luster. But then again, literary fiction doesn’t create Hollywood bidding wars, does it?

II. Pride Month Reading List

@irathethirdGet into this pride month reading list!!! #booktok #pride #readinglist #fyp #books

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I released my Pride Month reading list on Monday. You can watch the above video for my commentary on each selection, but here’s the full list: Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney. Floodlines by Saleem Haddad. The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. I Think They Love You by Julian Winters. I’m a Fool to Want You by Camila Sosa Villada. Love is a Dangerous Word by Essex Hemphill. No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed. Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III (duh!). Rock My Soul by bell hooks. There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood by Rasheed Newson. The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy.

What I Read in May

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Love in the Afternoon, and Evening: Essays and Conversations on Soap Operas by Charlotte Druckman and Mayukh Sen

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Famesick by Lena Dunham

Phases: A Memoir by Brandy & Gerrick Kennedy

Enter the Villa: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind Love Island by Anna Peele

Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle by Natan Last

Once again, the best book I’ve read this month is from Toni Morrison. This probably isn’t fair to the other books I’m reading, but I’m almost done with my year-long goal of reading every Morrison book, so everything else will stand a fighting chance soon enough. I didn’t think anything could top my love of Sula, which came into my life after the death of a best friend. But many people have claimed Song of Solomon as their favorite Morrison book, with a particular affinity for its final line. That’s a lot to live up to. And I’ll be damned if it didn’t.

I’ve written on here about the long process of decolonizing my mind and my personal literary canon after years of attending predominantly white institutions. I wasn’t expecting Morrison to see me as much as she did in Solomon. What Sula taught me about myself and friendship, Milkman’s journey in Solomon really taught me about myself. It feels like a culmination of everything I’ve been reading and writing since I’ve had to rebuild my life after losing my apartment in a fire last fall1. As Joyce Hope Scott wrote in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, Milkman must be “spiritually reborn” by losing all of his possessions and notions of his identity. Reading Morrison this year hasn’t just given me new literature to love, it has given me a new sense of personal direction in my life and my writing. I’m grateful for this book. And the final line is everything I was promised: “For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”

(Don’t judge me when I get a print of this Amy Sherald painting in the near future, and possibly a new tattoo.)

I also loved Famesick! And to bring things back to my new podcast, I asked Lena Dunham a question for her newsletter, Good Thing Going. She responded by suggesting that the phrase “keep it” was my “voice of a generation” moment. It’s nice to look back fondly on the origins of Keep It, and to know that someone whose writing has meant so much to me as a millennial was even aware of it.

III. Nightmare Baby Press

I attended the PEN America Gala at the National History Museum, which was pretty fun thanks to my friend, FSG editor Jackson Howard, being there. Everyone else I’d asked to be my +1 was either out of town or sick. I spent most of my time hunting for Dua Lipa, but I bailed on the party as soon as co-host Matt Star (of Dream Baby Press) loudly began to read one of his awful poems. About getting fingered at the museum. Chile…

I attended my friend Isaac Fitzgerald’s book launch at Books Are Magic, where he was in conversation with Roxane Gay about his new memoir, American Rambler. I learned that Isaac and I both write our first drafts by hand.

I met Percival Everett during intermission at Ragtime. I have never met an author I love so much since the first time I met Chuck Klosterman in college, so I rambled a congratulations to him for winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, James, except I did not specify what I was congratulating him for and just said “congratulations” a few times, then thanked him for what The Trees meant to me.

I hosted a panel discussion for Love in the Afternoon, and Evening at PT Knitwear, which is an amazing little bookstore in the LES that I’d never visited before. About 14 people showed up, which is more than I assumed would come to a discussion for a book about soap operas on a Thursday night.

Last night, I attended the premiere of The Vampire Lestat. To no one’s surprise, it’s a fucking great premiere. I got to meet star Jacob Anderson IRL after interviewing him in 2024, where he told me he was a Keep It fan. He subscribed to Feedback during our convo, which made him the first person to subscribe to my new podcast! I’ll be buzzing about that for the rest of the month.

Hudson Williams was already my opp for his 1/2 star Letterboxd review of Salt… but now that he’s shared his list of favorite books on Instagram, I feel much better. Stoner (the only book every straight man you know has read this year), two Joan Didion books, two Eve Babitz books, Didion & Babitz for good measure, and Martyr. It’s giving BookTok algorithm down and says very little about his actual personality. Unless it does…

See you next Third,

Ira

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When you call this number, you’ll hear:

“Hey, it’s Ira Madison. The internet has completely rewired our brains, our taste, and honestly, our grip on reality — so I made a podcast about it. It’s called FEEDBACK and every week, I’ll break down the chaos going viral online, rant with my friends about whatever’s taking over the group chat, and talk with guests about their relationship to the art, culture, and the internet. Tune in wherever you watch or listen to podcasts on June 18 for brand new episodes, dropping every Thursday!”

FEEDBACK drops 6/18 from Acast.

It’s good to be back.

It’s the middle of August and I’m already sweating through my Banana Republic linen shirt as I arrive at the Chelsea art gallery. Everyone smells like Blue de Chanel and Chloe by Chloe. The DJ plays mid-2000s electronic trip-hop like Aural Float, with no bassline, and people nod like they get it. I’m wearing secondhand Saint Laurent sunglasses and pretending not to be hungover. I’m here because my boyfriend Fallon’s art is on display. I’d rather be in bed than forcibly social with his nepo baby and crypto tech bro friends. I’d rather my own art be on display, but I’m a college dropout with no art world connections, no Annina Nosei to offer me a basement studio under her SoHo gallery on Prince Street. I instead have a white boyfriend who is also broke, but thanks to a Parsons scholarship, knows all the right people to land him in this gallery for his first showing, and now I’m playing the role of supportive boyfriend. I weave through the crowd of Todd Snyder black jeans, Doc Martens, Aritzia dresses, and brosexuals in Issey Miyake, to find the gallery’s pièce de résistance, my boyfriend’s abstract painting that looks like a police blood splatter analysis. Or formally, abstract impressionism.

It was an art gallery where we first met. Well, an art gallery of sorts. It was at Frevo on West 8th, a clandestine restaurant tucked behind an unassuming storefront art gallery, where three previously unseen Richard Corman portraits of Basquiat from ’84 were on display. You enter the gallery, whisper a password to a bouncer, and you’re whisked into a speakeasy restaurant. I was there on one of the rare writing assignments I’m usually tossed when a staff writer has a conflict. I was mid-interview with Chef Franco when one of his regulars interrupted us. At first, I was annoyed at this rude white boy starting a convo as if I wasn’t even there! Until I saw those bright blue eyes. Piercingly bright blue. “Aquamarine,” he likes to tell people with a grin to assert dominance in a conversation. I was taken by his sharp jaw. His shampoo commercial blonde hair. His surprisingly deep voice when he flashed me a dopey smile and finally said, “Sorry for interrupting.” He offered to buy me a drink and go on the record in my article about the fight Justin and Hailey Bieber had there a couple of weeks prior. “My mom spends too much money here for him to ban me for gossiping about the clientele,” Fallon said, resting his hand on my back as he led me to the bar. We talked for hours. He was unemployed, pursuing a career as a painter, and living in a Lower East Side restaurant with three roommates, nineteen roommates if you counted the number of roaches I’d spotted since we started dating. I’d managed to find the one white, gay artist in New York whose life wasn’t being bankrolled by parents. And my fucking storyline went out the window like that. I wasn’t going to become the most famous person in New York by being the Olivia Pope to his Fitzgerald Grant. We were just a couple of broke, starving artists. Except he had a gallery showing, and I spent my evenings getting stoned, rereading critiques from my classmates during the one semester I attended the Art Institute of Chicago. One referred to my work as an attempt to bring back the abstract painting trend disdainfully referred to as zombie formalism by Times critic Roberta Smith in 2014. At least we were in love. I think. A gay couple fucking monogamously for three years must be love.

An attractive man, dressed oddly in a turtleneck for a hot summer night and wide-rimmed glasses, looking a bit like Michael B. Jordan if he read books, approaches me as I stand in front of my boyfriend’s artwork. “People actually like this Pollock knock-off, shit?” He asks. I like the painting, but I don’t mind the ego boost of someone trashing my boyfriend’s work. I ask this Black Jerry Saltz who his favorite artists are, if not the one on display before us. He responds with Salmon Toor (so I knew he was a faggot), Philemona Williamson, Amy Sherald, and, surprisingly, Edward Hopper, which feels kind of MAGA. He asks for mine, and I say, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Lichtenstein (a white king), and sorry if it makes me basic, but Basquiat. He jokes that he’s going to have to swipe left on me now, because he hates Basquiat. I find that being Black and hating Basquiat is contrarian to the point of attention-seeking, but I press him further. He claims Basquiat is overrated, and he’d be nothing more than an influencer if he were around now, selling art in partnership with Doritos or some shit. That people only like his art because he was Warhol’s pet project. I respond curtly that they were actually friends, which he ignores to continue his diatribe that while Warhol was vapid, he at least had a real POV that Basquiat did not possess, and that his art was mostly simplistic, primitive, scribblings. He insists Basquiat did not engage with pop culture or Black culture in any real, meaningful way, and we should be more interested in real Black artists like Faith Ringgold and Mavis Pusey, who got overshadowed by Warhol elevating his black bestie for clout so people would no longer see the Warhol Factory as barely a bunch of bored, uninteresting white people doing drugs and trying to be famous. I’m quickly bored with his ranting, but I can tell he wants to fuck me, and everyone else at the gallery is paying attention to my boyfriend and not me, so why let this attention go to waste?

I tell him he’s wrong, and he challenges me to offer any instance of Basquiat caring about moving the needle on Black art, so I mention the ’82 Slave Auction and the ’86 Jim Crow paintings. He rolls his eyes and sardonically says, “A black stick figure with the word Jim Crow written above it. Incredibly deep. Subtle too.” I say art isn’t supposed to be subtle. He says it should say SOMETHING. I tell him that there’s no such thing as moral or immoral art, it’s either bad or it’s good, and he scoffs at me, quoting “a dead white man,” which is a rather rude way to describe Oscar Wilde, but I guess it is accurate. I tell him he doesn’t need to conjure a thesis on Basquiat being bad for Black art when all he needs to do is say that he doesn’t like his work. Not everything is a crisis of virtue. He begrudgingly agrees, then says, fine, I don’t like his work. And then he asks me out.

My boyfriend appears at that moment, wrapping his arms around me and kissing my neck. He asks if we could get a photo together in front of his painting after he takes a quick photo with the gay actor from Euphoria. He rushes off as quickly as he appeared. And so, I am left alone with the man who just asked me out after an extended foreplay of art criticism. But now he knows I have a boyfriend. I reflexively begin to apologize, but he cuts me off. He is incensed, but not for the reason I presume. He scoffs, “You’re dating Fallon?” I ask how he knows my boyfriend. The man responds that he and Fallon went to Parsons together, where Fallon pumped out one shitty painting after another and was still the first in their graduating class to land a gallery showing, because his mother owns this gallery.

“You must have the wrong person. My boyfriend went to Parsons on scholarship.”

“Fallon’s dad is the Executive Dean. He wasn’t there on scholarship. And his mom owns this gallery,” he says. He can see the shock on my face. “He lied to you, huh? Don’t worry, he’s been cosplaying as a poor struggling artist for years for the street cred.”

I should be pissed off that I’ve been lied to. But instead, I’m smirking. I don’t have a broke white boyfriend. I have a rich white boyfriend. And a picture to pose for.

I had the opportunity to participate in Quad Cinema’s March Melodrama series, which included the films A Place in the Sun, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Written on the Wind, and All About My Mother.

I gave an introduction to A Place in the Sun, my first time doing this for a film, and I was truly rushing to get through it. I felt like people just wanted to watch the damn movie and not hear me talk, because despite a career of public speaking, it still gives me anxiety. Afterward, in the restroom, a patron told me, “We wanted to hear you talk more!”

I was asked to do another introduction, so this time I wrote out a mini-essay on my favorite Pedro Almodóvar film, All About My Mother. This time went much better, except I still have not perfected the art of not sweating profusely under bright lights. Maybe I need some damn forehead botox.

For those not in attendance at the sold-out screening, here is the introduction:

(The speech has been edited and expanded to include full quotes.)

This is a film I am always reranking in my mind. Each of Almodóvar’s films has a piece of my heart. Still, I’m always swapping out the Almodóvar in my Letterboxd top four with the hilarious Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or the toxically romantic Law of Desire. But I always come back to All About My Mother because it feels so perfectly realised.

The story’s construction, its vibrant colors, its emotional resonance that’s carried all the way to its closing dedication (“To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.”). When I first saw this film, it felt more “adult’ than his previous screwball films of the ‘90s or his ‘80s punk films. But the more I’ve watched, I find that this, in a way, works as a memory play.

It was around this time that Almodóvar said he had to stop his lifestyle of drugs and late nights. In a 2024 interview with The Guardian, he said: “I’d love to go back to those insane nights of the 80s, but I’d need a week to recover,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like it’s all about integrity or some priestly act – I did it because I wanted to. It was for the pleasure of writing and the enormous pleasure of making films.” He even evokes this personal resolution in one of his short stories, “The Mirror Ceremony,” from his collection The Last Dream, where a vampire abandons his nighttime revelry for life in a monastery1. Though are monasteries bastions of sobriety? Nunneries aren’t in his films, as we saw in Dark Habits! Notably, Nina is “hooked on junk,” and Huma is “hooked on Nina.” The film wrestles with addictions.

But Almodóvar doesn’t look back on his younger days with regret. If anything, it has inspired so much of the emotional resonance in his work. In a 1999 interview with Filmmaker, he describes why so much of the film’s action takes place backstage, in Huma’s dressing room: “The dressing room for me is like a center of the female universe. I very much like to see the actresses when they are making up or getting dressed. It’s very intimate. They talk. It seems to me that women can’t lie in a dressing room or in the toilet or in the kitchen. These are spaces in which you can only say the truth. I don’t know why. Like at a party, where women are usually in the kitchen talking about their husbands because they are more drunk than usual and are a little more sincere. And also in the bathroom in many situations, you are more sincere, talking about desires, like ‘I want to do that if possible,’ or ‘I want to sniff that if you invite me,’ or just talk in the bathroom about very important and serious matters. These are places that invite you to talk.”

I think that many of us know what people “sniff” in bathrooms or in kitchens at parties. If not from personal experience, then from witnessing it in an Almodóvar film! It’s how you form, in the words of Quadd Webb, “love, bonding, trust — real friendship.”

This film is about mothers, but it’s also about friendships forged among women and the ones that forged Almodóvar’s gifts as an artist. All About My Mother teaches you how to trust, how to love.

Recent updates:

I interviewed Charles Melton for L’Officiel Homme.

I wrote about the “singular” connection between Joni Mitchell and Princess Peach for Them.

Peyton Dix interviewed me for Them’s new web series, Privacy Please.

@them.usAre “the girls” talking too much? This week, @PEYTON DIX, is joined by @Ira Madison III and the spirit of #ToniMorrison in the Cubbyhole bathroom for a new episode of Privacy Please. #queertiktok #heatedrivalry #substackwriter #buzzfeed

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• Frank is back to bi-weekly posts. Paid subscriptions will be turned back on, so feel free to manage yours if need be.

• For Them, I participated in a Queer TV March Madness bracket (Lafayette was not included, who would be my winner, btw). I tackled Smithers from The Simpsons versus Willow from Buffy. Also, fuck Hulu for canceling the Buffy reboot.

• Stay tuned for some professional updates… something exciting is coming in May! Unrelated to my forthcoming debut novel, of which I’m currently rewriting the first draft.

Notes on adaptation and colorblind casting

I will always remember Diahann Carroll as the grand dame Dominique Deveraux on the 1980s soap opera Dynasty, a series I’ve rewatched at least twice via DVD, since I wasn’t alive for its original ABC run. Dominique was the first Black cast member to join the all-white cast of Dynasty, which was Carroll’s intention. In a 1984 interview from her first day on set, she said, “I wanted to be the first black bitch on TV.” She called her manager and told him to get her a role on the soap. Caroll was known for her historical firsts. In 1968, she was the first African American to lead a TV show that didn’t portray a slave or servant. The show was Julia and Caroll played Nurse Julia Baker.

Despite the landmark nature of the series, it was critiqued for its “evacuation of cultural specificity for racialized characters, also known as racial colorblindness,” according to Kristen J. Warner in her book The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting. Warner shares insights from Emory University Professor Beretta E. Smith-Shomade on how Julia’s sanitized view of the 1960s ignored the systemic racism of post-Jim Crow America: “Julia never alluded explicitly to this phenomenon or to the civil and social unrest raging on American streets. This became one of the most potent criticisms leveled at the show from both the media and outside advocates. The show implied that… harmony could be achieved if we could all just get along.”

Racial equity, rather than harmony, is the main reason colorblind casting exists in the first place, particularly on series like Julia, more recently on Shonda Rhimes fare like Bridgerton, and also in the theatre. In 1965, Sidney Poitier told The New York Times, “I’d hate for my gift–or whatever to be circumscribed by color. I’d like to explore King Lear, for instance. I don’t want to be just an Othello or always linked with A Raisin in the Sun.”

I have to imagine actor Calvin Leon Smith feels similarly, as he currently stars as Haemon in Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) at the Public. In an adaptation for The Public Theatre, Smith gets to portray the doomed fiancé of Antigone. He is the only Black cast member. (Not the only non-white lead, however, Tony Shalhoub portrays newly minted king Creon). I’m not anti-colorblind casting, or at least, I didn’t think I was until I saw this production. Ziegler’s play adapts Sophocles’ 440 BC tragedy into a modern setting, as told by a white woman named Chorus (Celia Keenan-Bolger). In Sophocles’ version, Antigone defies Creon’s laws to bury her brother Polynices, a Traitor to Thebes. In Ziegler’s version, Antigone (portrayed excellently by Susannah Perkins, for whom I’d recommend seeing the play despite my distaste for the adaptation) defies Creon’s laws in order to have an abortion, which he has just outlawed in Thebes.

Within the play are modern pop culture references, technology, and arguments about reproductive rights in place. Ziegler doesn’t refer to it as a “modern adaptation,” however. In an interview with Town & Country, she says, “The language is modern, but the concerns are evergreen. That ambiguity is intentional. It’s not a modern update, so much as a conversation across time, allowing ancient voices to speak directly to us now.”

If this were a production of Sophocles’ play, I wouldn’t have been left so wanting by Smith as Haemon. After all, the Greeks performed with masks so that men could portray the roles of women. Race and gender aren’t particularly important when presenting the classics, but adapting the classics? Race should kinda matter. For an adaptation that has so much to say about our current world and its politics, it’s glaring that race is evacuated from the text. Smith’s Haemon is also presented as queer, which is barely touched upon aside from a single monologue, so strong is his devotion to Antigone, who is secretly plotting to abort his child. At one point, someone says the unborn child would be a “spitting image of Antigone.” Actually, the child would be Black as well. I can suspend my disbelief in the theatre. Recent interest in a stage adaptation of Sinners has centered around solving the “problem” of two twins on stage, as if theatregoers care about that kinda of thing. Lupita Nyong’o and her younger brother, Junior, most recently played twins in The Public’s Twelfth Night. But somehow, we’re only supposed to suspend our disbelief that in a post-racial world, every other societal issue still manages to exist.

I know the IP is centuries old, even older than Wuthering Heights (which is in the public domain, so who cares if Emerald’s movie is bad? It is, but you could make your own version literally today). But I do think that Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) misses the mark as a modern adaptation of a classic. Smith is fantastic in the role, by the way. But it reminded me of what Viola Davis said recently on Sam Fragoso’s Talk Easy podcast about how Juilliard trained her to be a “perfect white actress.” Davis said, “It’s technical training in order to deal with the classics — in order to deal with the Strindbergs, and the O’Neills, and the Chekhovs, and the Shakespeares. I totally understand that, to get your voice … but what it denies is the human being behind all of that.”

According to Ziegler, this adaptation is about “what happens when governing collapses because the body of the state is pitted too bluntly against individual bodies. The play is also interested in how hard governing actually is. In that sense, it’s about competing truths. Antigone isn’t simply right, and Creon isn’t simply wrong—they’re both acting from convictions that cannot coexist.” Perhaps that’s where I’m left in the instance of colorblind casting. It’s not simply the answer, but it’s not always the answer either. When Antigone says “my body is fate” in the closing moments of the play and shows off all of the parts of her body that have been with her since she was born, all I could think about was the body of the Black person behind her, whose race we were supposed to ignore. Yet, there’s no place on this planet where your race is not your fate.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading this year, which has been great. Here are the books I enjoyed reading in January:

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus

Sula, Toni Morrison

Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, bell hooks

Saint, Sierra Simone

The Trees, Percival Everett

Football, Chuck Klosterman

My fave was Sula. I wrote a bit about it in Monday’s newsletter:

I won’t claim to be a Morrison scholar. Before this year, I was only familiar with The Bluest Eye and the film Beloved. I resolved to read all of Morrison’s works this year, beginning with Sula, when I visited New Orleans for a weeks-long writing retreat in January. It took me a week to get through the book at first, rereading passages and notating the book, and consulting The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. I don’t recall ever being moved by a book so much. When I reached the ending, and Nel realized that the love she most missed in her older age was not her husband’s, it was her friendship with Sula. When Nel sees leaves stirring in nearby trees, she calls out, “Sula? All that time, all that time I thought I was missing Jude. We was girls together. O Lord, Sula. Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”

I lost a best friend in October. A few years ago, Ted was in a surfing accident that paralyzed him. He was walking again within a year, defying the odds of doctors. We became even closer after that accident. He made me realize how important it is to cherish the time you have with the people in your life. To tell them you love them. I’m sad that I won’t have any more time with Teddy, but I have no regrets about the time we spent together. I always told him how much I cared about him. He always did the same. In the final moments of Sula, Nel regrets that she never told Sula how much she loved her before she died. But at Sula’s death, we, the readers, know that Sula’s final thoughts are of Nel. Upon dying, Sula thinks: “Well, I’ll be damned. It didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.” Knowing that my friend’s final moments weren’t painful, that they ended on his own terms after five years of pain he couldn’t control, brought me peace in his loss. It brought peace to many of us, his family and friends, at his memorial in January, where many of the eulogies wrestled with Ted’s choice.

When I read the final page of Sula, I put the book down and cried. My intention for my trip to New Orleans was to finish the novel I’d begun after my apartment burned down in September. But I learned that the real reason I’d ended up in New Orleans was to grieve. Serendipitously, Sula opens with a quote from Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, a play written for his lover Frank Melo, who lived with him in New Orleans. Sorry for being into woo woo shit, but it felt as if I was meant to read this book at this particular time in my life. I read the book again the next day. Every time I mentioned reading it at a party, there was always someone excited to discuss how much it moved them, also. In a moment when illiteracy is the weapon of our oppressors, how inspiring it is to be able to discuss literature! At parties!

A personal goal of mine is to read all of Morrison’s works this year. I began the year with Playing in the Dark: Whitness and the Literary Imagination. I’m currently reading a first edition of Tar Baby that I tracked down at a used bookstore.

Here are the books I read in February:

Oreo, Fran Ross

Flat Earth, Anika Jade Levy

By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño

Jazz, Toni Morrison

A Good Person, Kirsten King

So Old, So Young, Grant Ginder

Kirsten and Grant are both friends, and I highly recommend their books!

I am introducing screenings of two favorite films this month at Quad Cinema, for their March Melodrama series.

Tickets available here.

Tickets available here.

When Viola Davis shouted, “You are shining, Harold Loomis!” upon seeing that Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor at the SAG Awards (Idk what the fuck the Actor Awards are, I’m not calling it that) on Sunday, it sent many people to the internet to search for the meaning.

For the uninitiated, this was a reference to the 1984 August Wilson play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. If you’re Black and you’ve done theatre, you’re very likely aware of Wilson, one of the greatest American playwrights to ever do it. And you’ve probably been involved in one of his plays. Davis’ first professional acting gig was Mattie in Joe Turner. Jordan’s Sinners co-star Delroy Lindo earned a Tony nomination for the role of Loomis in the 1988 Broadway production. Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer star in a new Broadway revival that opens on March 30. We produced Joe Turner at my undergraduate alma mater, Loyola Chicago, directed by Professor Jonathan Wilson. Professor Wilson was a personal friend of Wilson’s, having produced many of his works, including Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Seven Guitars, and Fences. Sadly, Wilson passed away a month before our 2005 production, and I never got the chance to meet one of my favorite playwrights.

In the play, Loomis arrives at a boardinghouse in 1911 Pittsburgh with his daughter, in search of his missing wife. Loomis was kidnapped by Joe Turner and enslaved on a chain gang for nearly a decade. Due to his enslavement, he’s lost his “song,” and needs to find it again to start life anew. One’s song is a metaphor for their spiritual essence and personal identity, something that the descendants of enslaved Africans all possess, according to the play’s conjure man, Bynum. According to Bynum, African Americans’ embrace of a conservative, white Christianity is responsible for the loss of their songs.

In bell hooks’ 2004 essay collection, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, she addressed this phenomenon: “Using the Bible as a source for self-esteem, Black folks were able to counter the white supremacist insistence that they were less than human … since the intent of colonization and slavery was to strip the slave of all agency, religious experience that enabled Black people to identify with enduring the suffering of bondage while mainting one’s hope was life-sustaining.” hooks followed this with a warning: “In the world beyond slavery the radical relgiion of the slave began to change. As the Black church became in time an organized corporate institution, the religion of African Americans shifted from the liberation theology that had been so necessary for survival and settled in a conservative faith, one that relied on more fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.” In his 1954 sermon, “Transformed Noncomformist,” Martin Luther King Jr. said of then-African American religious experience: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. Nowhere is the tragic tendency to conform more evident than in church, an institution which has often served to crystallize, conserve, and even bless the patterns of majority opinion. The erstwhile sanction by the church of slavery, racial segregation, war, and economic exploitation is testimony to the fact that the church has hearkened more to the authority of the world than to the authority of God.”

At the conclusion of Joe Turner, Loomis renounces the Christianity he embraced in enslavement and finds his song. Wilson’s stage directions of this moment read: “Having found his song, the song of self-sufficiency, fully resurrected, cleansed and given breath, free from any encumbrance other than the workings of his own heart and the bonds of the flesh, having accepted the responsibility for his own presence in the world, he is free to soar above the environs that weighed and pushed his spirit into terrifying contractions.” As he exits the stage, Bynum calls out to him, “Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!”

Davis’s reference to Joe Turner appeared more instinctive than intentional, but that doesn’t strip away its meaning. A week after the word “nigger” was hurled at Jordan and Lindo during the BAFTA Awards. The slur, uttered by John Davidson, a Tourette syndrome activist, launched a week of intense debates online and in the media, which I am not going to wade into, except to note that the BAFTA Awards were not televised live, and while Davidson was placed in the back so his uncontrollable outbursts could not be heard, the BAFTAs chose to place a mic near him. He uttered a homophobic slur during the show that was edited out of the aired broadcast. Akinola Davies Jr.’s cry of “Free Palestine” was also edited out. The slur against Jordan and Lindo was left in. Clearly, somebody felt that niggas say nigga all the time, so why bother editing it out? Never mind the context in which Black people have reclaimed the word involves artistic use and colloquial speech, not when you’re some of the only Black people standing on stage surrounded by the OG colonizers. I’m used to seeing white people use rap music as a defense of why Black people shouldn’t care when non-Black people use the n-word, but it was surreal to see people suddenly claim that because the word was used in the film Sinners, then Jordan and Lindo should’ve kept calm and carried on.

It’s why the existence of award shows like the NAACP Impact Awards matters, because it’s a celebration of Black art and artists in a space where they can exist without the spectre of racial abuse. The BAFTAs’ choice to air the slur unedited is why so many people are protective of Black creatives, from championing Sinners all awards season — after Variety published a critical headline about the film’s box office in April (”profitability remains a ways away”) that garnered backlash, even from white actors like Ben Stiller: “In what universe does a 60 million dollar opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?” — to criticism of our lionized artists like Toni Morrison.

This week, The New York Times podcast Cannonball with Wesley Morris elicited backlash from an episode titled, “Don’t Make a Saint Out of Toni Morrison.”

The majority of the criticism lobbied was at the exclusion of a Black woman’s POV in the conversation, which included Morris, Parul Sehgal, and their editor, Sasha Weiss. Would Morrison herself be upset with this? In Claudia Tate’s 1985 book Black Women Writers at Work, Morrison says of white critics, “A woman wrote a book on women writers, and she has an apology in the preface in which she explains why the book doesn’t include any Black women writers. She says she doesn’t feel qualified to criticize their work. I think that’s dishonest scholarship. I may be wrong, but I think so, and I took the trouble to tell her that. I feel perfectly qualified to discuss Emily Dickinson, anybody for that matter, because I assume what Jane Austen and all those people have to say has something to do with life and being human in the world.” In theory, no, Morrison wouldn’t be upset with the idea of a Black woman not being involved. If the criticism itself was good, it wouldn’t particularly matter who gave it.

Unfortunately, the criticism in the podcast is poor and at times, vexing. From jump, Morris compares Beloved to the work of two white male writers: “It’s a hard book! Like James Joyce hard, like William Faulkner hard.” In that same Tate interview where Morrison encourages white critics to engage with her work, she also tells them to step their game up. She says, “It’s not a question of my not liking white criticism. I don’t like most of Black criticism either. Most criticism by Blacks only respond to the impetus of the criticism we were all taught in college. It justifies itself by identifying Black writers with some already accepted white writer. If someone says I write like Joyce, that’s giving me a sense of credibility I find offensive. It has nothing to do with my liking Joyce. I do, but the comparison has to do with nothing out of which I write. The criticism may read well, in fact very well, but it’s not about the book at hand. It’s merely trying to place the book into an already established literary tradition.”

The inclusion of a Black woman’s POV would’ve probably elicited some Black writers to compare Morrison to, instead of Joyce. I know it’s The NY Times, but is any potential new reader of Morrison gonna pick up Beloved because it reads like Joyce? Finnegan is no longer awake; he’s gone to bed. What else is going on!

Where the criticism of the alleged “sainthood” that has been heaped on Morrison offends is that it doesn’t engage with where the recent criticism of Morrison arose from. It came from people calling her “mean,” which led to defenses of a Black woman’s right to be prickly with her readers. It felt less like a bestowment of sainthood and instinct to protect a Black woman whose lionization feels long overdue, given the disrespect she endured in her lifetime. In January 1988, an open letter was published in The NY Times protesting that Morrison had yet to receive a major literary award. Months later, Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Beloved. A novel, by the way, that Black critic Stanley Crouch referred to as “a blackface holocaust novel” in The New Republic. He continued: “It seems to have been written in order to enter American slavery into the big-time martyr ratings contest, a contest usually won by references to, and works about, the experience of Jews at the hands of Nazis.”

Crouch is referenced in the podcast episode for his critiques of Morrison, but there’s no mention of the fact that Crouch is generally regarded as a hater. He had incredibly conservative views in regard to Black art and also loathed Miles Davis’ fusion records (Bitches Brew is a masterpiece; he was tripping), gangsta rap music, and jazz’s shift to the avant-garde post Coltrane. Mentioning Crouch’s critique of Beloved, completely devoid of context, felt like cherry-picking criticism to support the podcast’s ultimate thesis.

The thesis being that Morrison’s books are traumatic and hard to read, apparently. When Weiss discusses Sula, she focuses on the fact that Eva burns her son Plum alive in the novel. Weiss says, “It’s not at all clear why, and it’s perplexing.” But Morrison explains Plum’s affliction clearly: “He began to steal from them then, take trips to Cincinnati and sleep for days in his room with the record player going. He got even thinner, since he ate only snatches of things at beginnings, or endings of meals. It was Hannah who found the bent spoon black from steady cooking.” Plum returned from the war deeply traumatized, much like Shadrack earlier in the novel, and had become addicted to heroin. Eva’s actions are out of love, yes, but they’re also selfish. The thin line between selfless and horrid, selfish love is what Sula explores.

I won’t claim to be a Morrison scholar. Before this year, I was only familiar with The Bluest Eye and the film Beloved. I resolved to read all of Morrison’s works this year, beginning with Sula, when I visited New Orleans for a weeks-long writing retreat in January. It took me a week to get through the book at first, rereading passages and notating the book, and consulting The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. I don’t recall ever being moved by a book so much. When I reached the ending, and Nel realized that the love she most missed in her older age was not her husband’s, it was her friendship with Sula. When Nel sees leaves stirring in nearby trees, she calls out, “Sula? All that time, all that time I thought I was missing Jude. We was girls together. O Lord, Sula. Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”

I lost a best friend in October. A few years ago, Ted was in a surfing accident that paralyzed him. He was walking again within a year, defying the odds of doctors. We became even closer after that accident. He made me realize how important it is to cherish the time you have with the people in your life. To tell them you love them. I’m sad that I won’t have any more time with Teddy, but I have no regrets about the time we spent together. I always told him how much I cared about him. He always did the same. In the final moments of Sula, Nel regrets that she never told Sula how much she loved her before she died. But at Sula’s death, we, the readers, know that Sula’s final thoughts are of Nel. Upon dying, Sula thinks: “Well, I’ll be damned. It didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.” Knowing that my friend’s final moments weren’t painful, that they ended on his own terms after five years of pain he couldn’t control, brought me peace in his loss. It brought peace to many of us, his family and friends, at his memorial in January, where many of the eulogies wrestled with Ted’s choice.

When I read the final page of Sula, I put the book down and cried. My intention for my trip to New Orleans was to finish the novel I’d begun after my apartment burned down in September. But I learned that the real reason I’d ended up in New Orleans was to grieve. Serendipitously, Sula opens with a quote from Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, a play written for his lover Frank Melo, who lived with him in New Orleans. Sorry for being into woo woo shit, but it felt as if I was meant to read this book at this particular time in my life. I read the book again the next day. Every time I mentioned reading it at a party, there was always someone excited to discuss how much it moved them, also. In a moment when illiteracy is the weapon of our oppressors, how inspiring it is to be able to discuss literature! At parties!

That kind of emotional reaction to Morrison’s novels is what champions of her work want to protect. Morrison, like Wilson, took their duty as Black artists very seriously. Morrison in how she depicted African American life from slavery to the present, and Wilson in how his Pittsburgh Cycle, which chronicles the African-American life in the 20th century. They cared very deeply about Black people, and it’s why Black people care very deeply about them. It’s why their work is used to uplift the work of other Black artists, like celebrating Michael B. Jordan’s award win on the road to the Oscars, when he’d just endured a very public and embarrassing moment of racism. The alternate title of the Cannonball episode is, “If We Worship Morrison, What Do We Lose?” My question is, if you seek to discredit people’s relationship with her, what do you gain?

In early December, my friend Shahmir recently sent me a WhatsApp voice message from London: “Trying my very hardest to organize a group thing of The Artist’s Way where we go through a chapter every week. I thought of you.” I, like most of you, have been inundated with TAW recently. Peyton Dix is the TAW Supreme if you are queer and live in Brooklyn. Seeing as I was already committing myself to a renewed focus on my writing in 2026 (This week, I begin a solo writers’ retreat and will remain there until I finish the first draft of Ski Trip).

I said yes to Shahmir without giving myself reasons to decline. I asked Frank subscribers if they’d be interested in following along with my journey, and many of you said yes. One of my group chats of LA friends was also interested in how I’d fare. “I’d love to know your experience,” my friend Carder said. “Bc if it works for u…” Which, fair! I certainly wouldn’t finish it on my own.

I purchased the book and had our first meeting on Sunday, 12/28. The group is filled with writers, musicians, painters, and other artists across New York, Los Angeles, London, Brazil, and Pakistan. The energy in the group was very much “let’s give a real try,” and many of the participants have either finished it before or attempted it and quit.

The process of The Artist’s Way involves writing your Morning Pages every day. Three pages in a journal by hand. Free flow, whatever’s on your mind. This proved a problem for me early on, given that we began the week of New Year’s Eve and I was in the club. I abandoned my Morning Pages by 1/1 and felt incredibly guilty about it. But as it turns out, several other people in the group did too! I felt like less of a failure and resumed my morning pages this morning, confident that I will have fewer late nights that turn into me sleeping in and forgetting to do my pages because I will be nowhere near New York for the next few weeks.

You are also supposed to take yourself on a solo date each week. My date last week was dinner at Cafe Chelsea, where I read Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. I did not enjoy the novel (good thing I’m not on the Book Prize jury), and the room was too dark and noisy for it to be truly relaxing. Dinners are not a good solo date idea!

There are also tasks you’re supposed to complete each week. I did not complete those. They are lost to the world with my post-New Year’s Morning Pages. But I will forge ahead with the second week’s tasks!

Along with my writers’ retreat, this week I also begin an online course in short story writing via the Center for Fiction. I’ve found myself missing the structure that my MFA Dramatic Writing program gave me, and I’ve never properly taken a Creative Writing course. I’ve been self-taught through reading books, writing for television, working in theatre, and vibes. I’m intrigued by what I’ll take from the class and this entire next few weeks of immersing myself in nothing but cultivating my creative side.

📚 Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I began this before New Year’s, and I’m reading along with two other friends. This book was one of the first added to my Ski Trip reading list pile, as my novel is also a thriller involving a group of college friends.

🎧 Ella and Louis. I’ve been listening to this (and follow-up, Ella and Louis Again) while writing and reading the past month. Recently, after a mention in The Secret History, I’ve added some Josephine Baker albums to the mix. I’ve enjoyed the break from modern pop music for the moment.

📺 Industry; in anticipation of the new season. I previously watched with an ex-boyfriend and stopped around mid-season 2.

🎥 The films of Ira Sachs. Aside from Heated Rivalry, the sexiest depiction of a gay relationship in recent memory is Passages. I plan to rewatch it and also fill in my Sachs’ blind spots. I’m beginning with Keep the Lights On, which depicts Sachs’ former relationship with literary agent Bill Clegg. Clegg was recently the subject of a gaggy Substack post from Helen DeWitt, who describes her tumultuous 20-year journey to publishing Your Name Here.

I published my first book this year. The thing about selling a good before you write it is that it feels like you have a gun pointed at your head until you finish it. Those first few months of excitement from friends and strangers will soon turn into “how’s the book going?” questions that you don’t want to answer and shady insinuations that you might never finish it. Well, I did. Behind schedule, but I’ve learned that book deadlines are quite malleable. My release date was pushed back even without my procrastinating, due to 2024 being an election year. Non-fiction that’s not a political book in an election cycle is a death wish, I was told. I’d never get booked on any late-night shows! I didn’t get booked on any late-night shows regardless, lol. I thought I might return to the Colbert Show, where I once promoted Keep It in 2019, but those e-mails to my publicists went unanswered after a few correspondences.

At times, I wondered if I should have shelled out several thousand dollars a month for a celebrity publicist. I'm glad I did not waste the money. James Faccinto, my publicist, was a fantastic partner on my book release, and he kept me sane when I learned that a big advance from one of the big publishers does not mean they will be spending a lot of money to promote it. In fact, because you got a big advance, you will be expected to use all your “connections” to promote the book yourself, or to hire an outside publicist. At any rate, I enjoyed my book tour! And I loved my editor, Jamia Wilson. She helped shape my book into something incredibly meaningful to me.

I wish I had read my book aloud more to catch some of the typos that copyediting didn’t catch. I discovered those typos while recording my audiobook, when it was too late.

I’m incredibly happy with what I put out into the world this year. These are my own insecurities, but I’d never felt like a “real” writer until this book was published. Sure, I’d had a few pieces in print before, like celebrity profiles, but it wasn’t until this book that I’d even had an essay published in a U.S. print magazine! A piece (“What I Found on the Dance Floor”) for Harper’s Bazaar1. The rest of my writing has been for websites that no longer exist. I don’t foresee a collection of my previous work being published anytime soon.

I pitched a 2010s follow-up to Pure Innocent Fun that Random House declined to buy. (I should’ve been a NYT best-seller instead of merely a USA Today national best-seller!) I could’ve taken it elsewhere, but I decided that I’m no longer interested in being solely an essayist. I wrote a short story after the rejection, which was published in Volume 0. That story is also the most popular on their Substack.

My apartment burned down in the fall, and I retreated to Connecticut to stay at a friend’s family home. Invigorated by selling my first short story, I dove into an idea for a book that had been banging around in my brain for years. In 2022, I was a writer and producer on the Netflix series Uncoupled. We shot my episode in the Catskills at a ski lodge. One night after shooting, I looked around at the snow and said aloud, “I wonder what a Friday the 13th would look like set here.” I conceived of that idea as a screenplay initially. I had some interest, but I would have to write it on spec first. I couldn’t figure out how to make it work beyond “slasher set in the snow.”

Years later, in Connecticut, the story finally fell into place. The characters clicked. And it became a lot more than “Friday the 13th in the snow.” And I dove into writing it as a novel. I was reminded of when I first fell in love with Goosebumps and Christopher Pike novels. When I told my Grandad I was working on a horror novel, he excitedly said, “You’ve wanted to do that since you were a kid.” To be honest, it was an ordeal writing my first book. I just wanted it done. But writing this novel, which I have tentatively titled Ski Trip, has been the most fun writing I’ve ever had in my life. I am going on a writing retreat in January, where I plan to finish the final third of the novel. I’ll return to New York once it’s done.

According to one of my favorite astrologers, Chani Nicholas, next year is supposed to be a big year for Leos. I also turn 40 next year. I used to be anxious about the fact that I hadn’t achieved the career success I’ve always wanted. But sometimes, you have to spend a little time in the woods to figure out your actual destination. I’m proud of the culture writing, podcasting, television writing, and everything else I’ve accomplished till now. But I’m even more excited about what’s next.

I also rediscovered my love of reading this year. I read 33 books this year. Here they are in order of finish date:

• Frankie by Graham Norton

• Good Girl by Aria Arber

• Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman (re-read)

• No Fault by Haley Mlotek

• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

• How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

• Matriarch by Tina Knowles

• Ecstasy by Alex Dimitrov

• Universality by Natasha Brown

• There Are Reasons for This by Nini Berndt

• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

• Nocturnes for the King of Naples by Edmund White

• Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson by Tourmaline

• Love in Exile by Shon Faye

• Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Will Arbey

• I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire by Samantha Hurley

• Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

• Audition by Katie Kitamura

• Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott

• Better Living Through Criticism by A.O. Scott

• Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

• Luster by Raven Leilani

• Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück

• Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu

• Game Changer by Rachel Reid

• Perverts by Kay Gabriel

• Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte

• Best Woman by Rose Dommu

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

• No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed

• Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

My favorite books this year were Audition and Jack the Modernist. Both taught me new things about how to structure a novel. I began and ended the year with two fantastic debut novels from Afghan writers who also wrote exceptionally about nightlife — Good Girl and No God But Us. My most unexpected fave of the year was my first read, Frankie. I read it because we were interviewing Graham Norton on Keep It. And it ended up being a beautiful story about love, friendship, the art world of ‘60s New York, and the AIDS crisis. I remember Graham being shocked that I actually read the damn thing; most interviewers don’t. He surprised me by leaving a voicemail for my final episode of Keep It, congratulating me on an eight-year run. I read many friends’ debut books — Rose Dommu, Haley Mlotek, Bobuq Sayed, Stephanie Wambugu — and enjoyed them immensely. Love in Exile is a must-read for anyone who has ever fallen in love, thought they’d fallen in love, or hopes to fall in love.

I have other friends’ books in my to-read pile that I will get to in 2026. My 2026 pile has already started to grow. My friend Brendon Holder and I are starting the year with The Secret History. I just got the rest of the Heated Rivalry books in the mail. I resolve to read more Toni Morrison. I hope to tackle Divine Days and The Brothers Karamazov. I hope to read more philosophy. I hope to expand my short story, “Try the Priest,” later in the year, and so I will be reading Sierra Simone’s Saint and Louisa May Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase.

I went shopping with my best friend, Blair, in Manhattan today and needed a book to read on the subway. I grabbed John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat from the pile, since it seemed short enough to finish in a day. I didn’t expect to read a book about a house burning down, and friendship being born from the ashes. I was reminded of how my friends have made this year, despite being one of my hardest, an incredibly hopeful one as well. If you saw me reading Tortilla Flat and sniffling on the 5 train this afternoon, I’m sorry about that! At least I remembered to bring tissues with me, thanks to the cold weather.

Thank you all for reading this year, through all its ups and downs. For now and always, this newsletter will be Frank2.