Bonus Material

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I interviewed Jennifer Percy about her book Demon Camp for the LA Times, which you can read here. And here are more reasons you may want to read it, before it may become a movie. In the right hands, it would make a really good movie. And it’s a little amusing to think of the quick and dirty found footage horror film it could make in the wrong hands. If you need more convincing, an excerpt from the book that ran in Harper’s is up now.

Here are a couple more questions from my interview that got cut for space; and I’m pretty sure not every author is traveling in Afghanistan on the eve of their book’s release:

ED: In the book you write “I can’t help but wonder if the United States is suffering from a form of cultural PTSD,” the persistence of wartime behaviors in peacetime, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that idea.

JP: You don’t have to have direct experience to have PTSD, you can become traumatized vicariously through images, through storytelling, there are theories that you can sort of inherit this trauma. My idea is not just that America has PTSD. Any country that has combat warfare and traumatic experiences, we’re suffering through cultural PTSD that we’re having a hallucination that we’re inured from trauma and warfare on our own soil. Warfare and paranoia is so inherent in our own society. its a kind of delusion that we’re all dealing with. 

ED: Did the book get optioned? It would make a great movie.

JP: It just got optioned this week at Paramount. Luckily, I just talked to the screenwriter, and it will not be a terrible horror flick, like some of the other screenwriters that I talked to. She had a wonderful, subtle, psychological narrative, and it wouldn’t be me – like in the book – but another Jennifer Percy character, whose brother passed in the war and wants to talk to veterans.

And I’d go to his shows and there’d be these little girls around Brandon asking, ‘Is that your sister?’ So I went for a Courtney Love thing. I plan on ruining his band, making him kill himself, and selling his diaries … which I have to find.

A really old piece I wrote on Spin’s own “Ultragrrrl,” or Sarah Lewitinn. She had some delightful quotes. Also, aspiring writer-types? This piece was one of the first I sold to an institution that I was dying to get into, and that’s because I had an angle on “what the kids were doing.” Young writers, that is your power.

Without its silences, this play is a satire, and with its silences it is hopefully a strange little naturalistic mediation on theater and life and death and the passing of time.
— Annie Baker, Circle Mirror Transformation (author’s note).

Some staff critics quit and choose to work flat out again, on other interests and in intermittent pieces. By far the most common tendency, however, is to stay put and simply to inflate, to pretend that each day’s text is after all a crisis—the most, first, best, worst, finest, meanest, deepest, etc.—to take on, since we are dealing in superlatives, one of the first, most unmistakable marks of the hack.
— In taking down Pauline Kael in 1980, Renata Adler also takes down the internet of 2014?

Some things I liked in 2013

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I love being able to sit and take stock at the end of the year, but I’m behind on this, due to broken leg circumstances.

1. Enlightened: I miss Amy Jellicoe. I think Mike White and Laura Dern’s masterpiece was difficult to talk about if you were on its level (and I’ve gone to meditation camp, I am on its level) - since it had this goofy, flawed woman who was trying, so hard to be a better person and to make a difference in the world, and a lot of the writing about Enlightened was dismissive and cruel, at least from the same TV critics, mostly dudes (even if some people fought the good fight), who were like Girls: it’s the future since Emily Nussbaum raved and there are boobs. Enlightened was trying to say something about what it’s like to be a human person today, and Amy Jellicoe could be tin-eared and frustrating but she was trying, trying so hard, and there was a lot of grace in that struggle. Watching it, I felt like I was opening up to other people’s lives. Art that sticks with me feels like it’s working the empathy muscle, like you come out of the room a slightly different person with a bigger heart.

2. Orange Is the New Black: When I saw the preview for this, having been quite disappointed in the book, I felt like the Crazy Eyes character just seemed … well, offensive. And as Crazy Eyes became Suzanne, I realized that I was in sure hands, and something quite radical was happening.

3. The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud: This book feels really misunderstood to me. Unfortunately, the “likable characters” thing going softly viral took it over, when there’s so much more going on otherwise. Nora’s alone, mild, a Cambridge townie amongst the Harvard gentry, laden with grief for her family, vulnerable and subsceptible to this family’s charms and the idea of the life she should’ve or could’ve had. Messud writes like a dream - I love her Henry James-like control, her sentences, her particular words - and the book is a wicked, brilliant, late coming-of-age, but more importantly, it’s a howl of rage at the idea that women are just disposed of after a certain age.

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4. Spending the fourth of July watching Lamorne Morris host the bananas kids show Brainrush where he quizzes tweens on rollercoasters  for money and reading parts of Alissa Nutting’s Tampa aloud and making the Nick Miller turtle face to no end. #NewGirlForever

5. Rectify: Just marathoned this last week, and it’s a beautiful, contemplative southern show that takes an anthropological look at how the release of a man on death row shakes up his community. Abigail Spencer, who was one of Don Draper’s paramours (the schoolteacher), is on fire and brilliant as the man’s feisty sister. 

6. Foraging for mushrooms and ramps and eating upstate. I spent the spring looking for mushrooms and ramps in the Hudson Valley. My dinner of onions and morels tasted of sweat and effort and it was the best thing I’ve eaten. Save the occasional meal at Blue Hill Stone Barns or Fish &
Game in Hudson, where I had some ham that was transcendent, I can’t even describe it fairly. (NYC-ers, go to Hudson for a weekend, have a fancy meal at Fish and Game for way less than it would be anywhere else.)

7. Parts of Frances Ha: I don’t feel like I have a fair opinion of the film for various reasons, but I did enjoy the cinematography and Frances running to “Modern Love” - cinema magic! - and you could just feel the love that Noah Baumbach has for Greta Gerwig coming off every frame. I wondered has a man ever loved a woman the way that Noah loves Greta, and then I thought about the week before when Stu had to put me to bed after a party and stayed up until 2am and watched me sleep so that I didn’t get sick. Which is not a lovingly framed movie, but it’s pretty analogous. “Modern Love” has felt like a theme song of the year, for me and for the things and the heroines that I loved. “But I try, I try.”

8. James Salter and William Kennedy in Albany. James Salter and William Kennedy are in their 80s and are longtime friends. They both wore sports jackets to the reading. When people asked Salter a question, he would answer with a short, sharp sentence, where Kennedy would have a monologue. It echoed their writing styles. It was a pleasure.

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9. Stories We Tell: Sarah Polley fractures her family history, makes you ask questions about the nature of narrative in the process. Makes the stuff of writings by Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion look easy.

10. The end of Breaking Bad. Brilliant show. And it as a communal watching experience with friends and, somewhat, the internet, was pretty major. I wonder whether the fifth season will age well in people’s minds - as the show became too tightly sealed and hermetic, the new characters like the Nazis felt, to me, like plot devices and not real threats. In some ways the show could’ve ended after Gus’s death, with the promise of the next chapter. I loved the last shot of Jesse driving away in his car, downright 400 Blows-esque, but then there was that preview for Aaron Paul’s stupid film Need For Speed and it was hard not to think of that, something that perhaps encapsulates the good and the slightly meh of BB Season Five.

But the pleasure of watching this last season wasn’t something I’ll forget soon.

11. Okkervil River, The Silver Gymnasium. 2013 was the year that I listened to and got Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, which is another flat-out masterpiece. The Okkervil River album is not up to that form, but it’s a good collection of songs that seem to have meaning and mystery after I broke up with the band, and it had the most New England nostalgia of anything I’ve listened to or read in awhile, save Gilmore Girls repeats. I really liked it.

12. Holistic approaches to social media. This year I pulled back from having a “presence” on sites, at least for now, while I’m doing Secret Projects and need the time to focus. But I think it’s important to figure out the right balance on social media, which is difficult. Words in text can seem colder and crueler than they’re meant; particularly when combined with a deadpan tendency. People can seem more hotheaded. Ever get an errant remark on a Facebook post that seems rude, but it’s somebody trying to be “sarcastic,” badly? Social media is .0006 % of anyone’s life, and there’s a lot of mystery and, well, narrative, left out of this sort of public pleasing imagery.

13. Books written by people that I know that, happily, happen to be fantastic: Dangerous Girls, Abigail Haas, Double Feature, Owen King, Save Yourself, Kelly Braffet. Double Feature made me LOL, for real - and what writing actually makes you laugh? It’s rare - and it’s pinpoint accurate on movie love; Dangerous Girls and Save Yourself would make a good pairing of stories about girls and teens in trouble. 

14. Moving back to New York City. I don’t live in Albany anymore. I miss the reckless beauty I saw every day in Catskill. But now I’m in the concrete jungle that dreams are made of, and I have friends I can see and it doesn’t take me 45 minutes in a car to get anywhere and there’s all this teeming energy: I’m so excited and hopeful for the future, and for today, that’s a really nice feeling.

In 2014, I’m going to get a kitten.

The hardest thing is just the back and forth. Coming down from these trips where I feel like I’m in control and I have the life that I want and then to come to a place where [I] feel powerless. This morning I had to go to the nurse and lie down and just get my head on straight. I had seriously started texting my dad to be like, “I have to finish the rest of the year online!” And you don’t want to say that, because then you have people saying [obnoxious voice] “See, it’s not healthy for her!”
Tavi Gevinson has a double life, with Rookie and “Tavi Gevinson the awesome teen media genius brand” (which, “You as a brand” is you in quotes basically, yes?) and high school, and it would probably make a sort of amazing movie, TV show, or memoir in fifty years. But also it’s kind of like she’s Hannah Montana IRL?

Throwback Thursday: Gilmore Girls Season 6

Here’s a piece I wrote for The Boston Phoenix in 2005, when Gilmore Girls season six was premiering and I was excited about where they would go with Bad Rory. Putting it here since things can disappear on the internet at any moment. I remember at the time thinking that GG was going somewhere interesting and kinda real with Rory’s “caz” relationship with Logan but then it kinda resolved itself TV-listically, like when she got into Harvard, Princeton, & Yale.

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Life after high school
Rory Gilmore’s early-20s crisis
BY ELISABETH DONNELLY

For the past five seasons, Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) of the WB’s Gilmore Girls (Tuesdays at 8 pm) has been that TV rarity: the realistically drawn smart girl. She’s an indie-rocking reader who wants to be the next Christiane Amanpour, and her plot lines revolve around school, with boys a distant second. There are some chinks in the good-girl armor, however, and as Rory has floundered at Yale, Girls creator Amy Sherman Palladino has shown us a young woman becoming unmoored in the throes of an early-20s crisis.

Girls premiered in 2000 on the fledgling, critically maligned WB and established itself as a reason to watch. Rory and her hot thirtysomething mom, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), are more like best friends, trading quips and coffee in bucolic small-town Connecticut. Runaway Lorelai had Rory at 16, and she’s trying to reconcile with her snobby society parents while her daughter tries to figure out her own relationship with them.

Last season ended with Lorelai proposing to her diner-owner boyfriend, Luke. The season-six premiere, “The New and Improved Lorelai” (airs this Tuesday, September 13), gives us the answer. But the more complex issues revolve around Rory. No longer the self-possessed teen who in the second season told off her meddlesome headmaster, Rory has been adrift, adopting various personae. The Rory who for three seasons had had a steady boyfriend lost her virginity to a married ex and then entered a “modern” relationship with freewheeling philandering rich kid Logan Huntzberger; it culminated in a drunken night on the bathroom floor in her mother’s home, with Rory crying “Why doesn’t he like me?” over Logan’s He’s Just Not That into You snubs. Even as Rory insisted she was fine with Logan, the audience saw her coming apart at the seams. The lives of lovable TV dramedy heroines don’t often get this messy.

Rory’s experimenting with a “casual” relationship and its emotional cost evolved into something more serious with Logan. But other parts of her life have also become muddled. Despite having grown up with egalitarian values instilled in her by the strong-willed Lorelai, she’s drawn to the upper-crust society represented by her grandparents and Logan’s rich dilettante friends. Yet when she’s handed a swanky internship from Logan’s Rupert Murdoch–like mogul dad, she learns she doesn’t have what it takes to pursue her dream career, journalism.

Having decided to drop out of Yale, Rory gets arrested for stealing a yacht, which she justifies by citing Moby-Dick (She feels like “knocking people’s hats off” and wants to “take to sea.”)Despite Lorelai’s plans to get her back into school, the grandparents end up siding with Rory, and they put her up in their palatial pool house. The once-self aware Rory announces in the season premiere, “I’m a grown-up, I’m independent,” but her grandparents are supporting her, and she’s no longer speaking with her mother.

The smart TV teen’s life usually ends when she enters college. Palladino anticipated the logistical challenge of extending Gilmore Girls by drawing Rory’s life out in familiar and not-so-clear-cut terms. Yes, the show has been guilty of sloppy plotting, with characters changing according to actor availability, and Rory’s relationship with Logan takes an unbelievable turn when he decides he wants to be her boyfriend. But shows like Felicity tried and failed to address early-20s uncertainty by exploring depression. Gilmore Girls is taking a gratifying run at young-adult confusion through Rory’s missteps. Smart girls flounder too.

Issue Date: September 9 - 15, 2005

But then one night this spring my husband pointed out that lately every time I had a review to work on I got really really grousy and cranky about it. He said it seemed like maybe I wasn’t enjoying myself. And very quickly I recognized that he was correct. I was not enjoying myself. I was opposite of enjoying myself. And as soon as I realized this everything about “music writing” started seeming repellant to me, like a room you have spent too much time in or a sandwich you have packed too many times for lunch.
This lovely piece by my friend Rachael Maddux is very on point about what it’s like to dream about something like culture writing and the particular sort of burnout it inspires; it is relatable in so many ways. These days, the keeping up with the Joneses it requires, like a good, charming, and well-followed Twitter presence, I mean, it’s exhausting, isn’t it?