Summer is here! I feel the sunshine-fueled seasonal change coursing through my veins, and also radiating off my thighs where I got sunburnt over the weekend…
In the car on my way home from the beach, I found myself explaining parts of The Tortured Poets Department to a friend (hi, meg), by which I mean the Matty Healy/Joe Alwin of it all, reciting lyrics from “Fresh Out The Slammer” to illustrate the point—
My friends tried but I wouldn’t hear it
Watched me daily disappearing
For just one glimpse of his smile
I have always been icked out by Taylor’s relationship with Travis because I think he’s a doofus and I hate the Chiefs, but the way he got up on stage with her in London, smiling, performing, lifting her up like she was a feather… I finally have no choice but to stan.
I’ve been watching the docu series America’s Sweethearts: The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on Netflix, and all I can think about are these sweet, young girls with a big dream that has a dark edge they’re not prepared for. Their coach who takes these beautiful, malleable women to a salon to be made over in the Cowboys’ image, and tells them that they need to “fuel” themselves while they’re being vacuum-sealed into these teeny tiny uniforms that they’re told can never be resized.
There’s a twenty-six year old who took a year off to take care of her mental health, but comes back to the team even though she says, “the thing that’s my dream is the thing that hurts me.”
There’s a woman who recently retired from the team, recovering from two surgeries she underwent from the physical toll of the kick line, the jump splits, watching her sister make the team and slot into her old life while she has no idea what she’s doing next.
But it also took me back to cheer camp, to summer practices in the grass at school outside in the heat, the football team practicing on the field behind us. The ease of falling into friendship when you feel like you’re going through trial by fire.When nailing choreography felt like a life or death endeavor.
These women talking about hiding their emotions, painting on smiles because that’s what being a cheerleader is, but isn’t it also just what being a woman is?
Some things that are especially permissible in the summer:
an ice cream cone for lunch
an 11am movie
creating a spectacle over other people’s dogs
making yourself a margarita at home
a glass of rosé at 4pm
long haul beach days
What I’m Reading
Funny Story by Emily Henry - When Daphne’s fiancé, Peter, dumps her for his childhood friend, she’s left without a home, friends or family — everything she had revolved around him. With nowhere else to go, she moves in with Peter’s new girlfriend’s ex, Miles, who is the only other person that understands what she’s going through.
Their tenuous relationship as roommates blooms into a real friendship after a drunken night out together, and when Daphne tells Peter that she and Miles are dating, the two are forced to get even closer.
Can fake dating on the heels of emotional breakups lead to a real relationship??? Probably.
There’s been a lot of Emily Henry fatigue among my friends, but I loved this one (the only one i didn’t love was book lovers)! Fake dating is one of my favorite tropes, and I loved the friendship between Daphne and Miles.
Some Summery Book Recs:
Writers & Lovers by Lily King - Set in Boston in the summer of 1997, Casey is an aspiring novelist who works at a restaurant. Having just lost her mother, she’s emotionally raw and frustrated with her creative life when she meets two men that pull her in different directions.
I love the entire book but the opening lines are like a vivid thesis statement of what’s to come—
I have a pact with myself not to think about money in the morning. I’m like a teenager trying not to think about sex. But I’m also trying not to think about sex. Or Luke. Or death. Which means not thinking about my mother, who died on vacation last winter. There are so many things I can’t think about in order to write in the morning.
The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty - Ellen is a hypnotherapist who starts dating a man whose ex-girlfriend is stalking him. The book is suspenseful and also full of fun characters and their hypnotherapy sessions — told from Ellen’s perspective in third person and the ex-girlfriend’s perspective in first person.
This is not the first line, but it’s within the first few paragraphs—
As I walked in, the light seemed to whoosh through my head, like a brisk breeze, and I could smell old books and the sea.
The smell of old books and the sea IS summer to me!
Olympus Texas by Stacey Swann - I love Greek mythology and this is a family saga set in a small town in Texas that’s a modern retelling of several Greek myths. What more do you need?
What I’m Writing
I’m in this stage where I’m so close to Novel 2 that reading this draft has felt like clawing off my own skin. I’m finding so much vulnerability in the pages that it kind of hurts me to be confronted with it…
I genuinely don’t know if it’s any good. Or how I can summon the confidence to let another person read it so they can let me know.
I’ve been sitting around torturing myself, feeling miserable, and wondering if Amor Towles ever feels physical pain reading his own writing. Which is, to say the least, not helpful, but I was listening to a book podcast the other day where one of the hosts was talking about Amor Towles’s new short story collection Table for Two.
Included in the collection is a novella about one of the characters from his first novel, Rules of Civility, which he initially wrote after he finished writing that book. Upon revisiting it for this new collection, he found it lacking, so he completely rewrote it.
This, honestly, makes me feel so much better about myself.
I finished reading the draft over the weekend, and the dust has now settled enough that I feel less like I want to bury myself alive and more like, okay, this is a book of sorts and I have written it. I’m making a few tweaks, and then will send it off to two very kind and generous friends (hi, erin; hi, alex) for feedback.
Some Draft Notes:
catholic guilt is actually a cocktail of guilt and shame
some spelling/word corrections
an exclamation point next to a stream of consciousness paragraph about what happens when you meet someone on a first date
an underlined sentence about the date going south
a couple places where i just wrote “more”
some logistical/timeline corrections
an underlined sentence displaying the vivid awfulness of a feeling
a note pointing out one place where the MC is lying to us/themselves
i changed trish’s name to allison (thanks, rebecca)
That’s all from me this week — Stay Tuned!