Heterofatalism
Sabrina Carpenter, Sarah Manguso, JLo, Katie Berta and a new Bottom Shelf with Niina Pollari!
Sad
It’s been widely covered that 2024 has been the year of the divorce memoir and/or the midlife crisis sexual re-discovery memoir, as millennial women are hitting their forties. I’ve reviewed a couple of these books, You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Men Have Called Her Crazy. Liars by Sarah Manguso is technically fiction but I would firmly place it in the autofiction category, as it reads as if the only thing fictionalised here are Manguso’s changing of her and her ex-husbands names to Jane and John. It’s the second book of Manguso’s I’ve reviewed, the first being a memoir I didn’t like, but I thought Manguso was an interesting writer and wanted to try her again.
I would actually recommend reading Liars alongside or shortly after reading Men Have Called Her Crazy, as they are inverse books. MHCHC is a book about every relationship expect marriage and Liars is marriage dissected in tight, claustrophobic detail. I could hardly put it down. It oozes with rage, Jane and John’s relationship followed from inception to bitter dissolution. Told in first person bite-sized snippets from Jane’s perspective, it contains a lot of lists. Everything Jane is doing, trying, twisting herself up for to accommodate John’s needs, his career, his time, his ideas of himself. There is less and less space for her with every turn of the page.
By noon I’d showered, dressed, tidied the house of John’s shoes and clothes, put away laundry, swept the floor, watered the garden, moved boxes to the garage, cooked breakfast, eaten, done the dishes, taken out the recycling, handled correspondence, and made the bed. John had gotten up and taken a shit.
Dragged across the country again and again to pursue various start-ups that John is trying to make happen, small child in toe, Jane relays a feeling that I’ve heard from all of my girlfriends and one I have expressed myself in relationships, that of being “in charge of everything and in control of nothing.” I was so angry reading this book at one point that I had to set it down and cry.
By the time Liars gets to the reveal of John’s long hidden infidelity, you are both not surprised and ready to kill him with your bare hands. Or at least one camp of readers will be. There has been a fair amount of criticism of Liars as being too “one sided”, Jane is whinging, unable to accept responsibility that she didn’t marry a better man. That Liars is ‘victim feminism’ at its finest. I don’t know what planet these people live on, but to me this book was a focused, stripped down question—something is wrong with men, every straight woman is being served from the same trough of shit, wtf is going on? The Liars criticism reminds me a bit of the criticism surrounding the 1986 film Heartburn, based on Nora Ephron’s autofiction (or whatever they called it in the 80s) about her divorce. Heartburn is an almost perfect film about the end of a marriage that was panned on release for centring the wife’s side of the story and not telling enough of the husband’s side. Depressing that almost 40 years later, people are still playing this same tiny violin as if men have never had the chance to truly express themselves through art and no one ever takes them seriously.
Where I take some issue with Liars is not in the text itself but in Manguso’s afterward where she thanks Chump Nation for their life saving work. Well, I don’t take issue exactly, but I found it curious. Chump Nation is a blog and community which supports women who have experienced infidelity, run by Tracy Schorn, a cartoonist and journalist. It has a very specific language and aesthetic and believes something that I fundamentally disagree with— that all infidelity is abuse. Do I think infidelity often accompanies abuse? Yes, of course. Do I believe it is abuse in and of itself, no. It’s an awful thing to do to someone but I don’t think it can all be painted with the abuse brush. I knew someone once who was very active in the Chump Nation community and I was troubled by their total commitment of identity to being a ‘chump’ (ie. the person who was cheated on), it seemed to take over her life. When the NYT lightly criticised Liars and its association with Chump Nation in a review, Schorn posted a ballistic, very personal rant against the author of the review that went on at such length that I couldn’t even bother finishing reading it. It’s a fanatical community, I’ll say that much, and it was interesting to me that Manguso chose to so publicly associate with them.
First, I have to address this terrible book cover because I don’t want it to put you off. It’s actually worse in real life, where the shadow is so dark it is hard to tell what the image is even of. I feel bad criticising it because Berta’s partner, who she speaks of often and with so much love in this book, took the picture. But it is an inexplicable image of a field of cactuses mostly in shadow that has nothing to do with the book, or the title, and captures no essence of the poems therein. It makes Retribution Forthcoming look inaccessible, both academic and homemade at the same time. It’s a disservice because Berta’s voice is very accessible, darkly funny, angry, unsparring and contemporary. She casts a critical eye over the emptiness of consumer culture and distance from the self in a conversational tone that pairs well with philosophical discussions of consumerism today. If you are a fan of
’s work, you will respond to the ideas of beauty and shopping as self harm and self abnegation that Berta plays with here (I literally contacted DeFino to tell her to read this book!).Retribution also addresses Berta’s personal history of sexual violence in a unvarnished way that totally captivated me with its directness, Berta holding her past up like a cat’s cradle between her hands, twisting it to try and understand its dimensions. Highly recommend.
Famous
A friend texted to ask if I’d listened to Sabrina Carpenter’s new album Short n’ Sweet yet. She said it was the “most depressing pop album I’ve ever heard” and that the album’s theme was “heterosexuality is a prison and i am dying in it lol." Carpenter, petite, blonde and hyper femme, is another pop star who got a childhood start at Disney, like Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez. Having released five albums for Disney, Short n’ Sweet is the second of what Carpenter refers to as her “big girl” albums, post-Disney and in full creative control, writing all her own songs. Short n’ Sweet could be taken as a thirty-six minute crash course/thesis on heterofatalism (also commonly referred to as heteropessimism). There is some deeply black pilled shit on here, so masterfully covered in such a sugary confection that one might not notice the lyrical nihilism as they were tapping their foot along to the beat.
Short n’ Sweet moves easily back and forth thematically between baldfaced horniness and total disillusionment, without much equilibrium to be found between the two states. Carpenter is loving getting dicked down by boyfriend Barry Keoghan and also profoundly over men on every level. Heterofatalism, as I understand it and have experienced it, is a woman’s sense of total hopelessness about her heterosexual orientation, her inability to change this and her inability to effect any change on the men around her who are entrenched in their own poisoned heterosexual psyches. Carpenter cuts right to the bone of this on ‘Slim Pickins’ as she sings—
All the douchebags in my phone
Play 'em like a slot machine
If they're winnin', I'm just losin'
and then later
Since the good ones call their exes wasted
And since the Lord forgot my gay awakenin'
Even the good ones are bad in Short n’ Sweet. The song ‘Lie to Girls’ literally had me open mouthed—
All of your best excuses
No, they don't stand a chance
Against all the chances I give you
Isn't ideal, but damn
You don't even have to try
Turn you into a good guy
You don't have to lift a finger
It's lucky for you I'm just like
My mother (And my sisters)
All my (All my friends)
I sent this song to a male friend who seemed hurt by it, though I didn’t personally feel men were the targets of this song so much as how women are socially conditioned to forgive and make excuses for men. I can’t think of another song that has put heterosexual women’s psychological nightmare on such effective display— it’s like a three hour of Contrapoints video in a three minute song.
Carpenter has a strong dose of country twang throughout Short n’ Sweet and the artist she reminds me of most is Dolly Patron, big blonde hair, plain spoken, wearing pedal pushers and a pound of makeup. Like Parton she has a gift with smart lyrics smuggled into pink packaging. However Carpenter is certainly more caustic than Parton. Carpenter is more like Parton mixed with Harley Quinn and garnish of Natalie Wynn.
Awhile ago I watched JLo’s attempt at a Lemonade, the unfortunately titled, self financed, This is me…Now: A Love Story, thinking I could maybe write about it here. It was messy and bad and I didn’t have anything interesting to say about it other than it left me feeling sad. The premise of the film is JLo (playing herself essentially) is a famous artist who is in non-stop love affairs and believes true love will save her. Eventually, she winds up in sex and love addiction treatment and accepts that there’s more to life than the quest for “the one” and that she needs to stop and be with herself, and you’re like oh, ok, well, at least there’s that. However, the final scene of the film after her revelation that there’s life beyond love is that she meets Ben Affleck. Implication being, just kidding, she only had to hold on a little bit longer and love WOULD save her!
You’ve probably heard by now that Ben and Jen have since married and split up, rekindling and then dousing the flames of their twenty year old relationship (or have they?) which began with a bad movie no one ever saw (Gigli) and ended with a wedding no one showed up to. Trying to squeeze blood from a lemon, I also attempted to watch JLo’s documentary about the making of This is me…Now: A Love Story, titled The Greatest Love Story Never Told. I bailed on it as Ben and Jen’s weird relationship vibes made me actually uncomfortable. The title “The Greatest Love Story Never Told” was taken from a book of all their love letters sent over the years of their original courtship which Ben gifted Jen with when they got back together. She immediately took the book and showed it to all her back-up dancers and music producers, being like, “we should make something out of this!” without asking him first. They came up with some nickname for him, like ‘Ben the pen’. “I didn’t know she was going to do that!” he says brightly in the documentary, with a frozen smile. I could sense this thing was on the rails from all the way in Scotland.
Anyway, it’s sad that JLo has come so close to realising that sex and love addiction treatment could help her, only to double down that true love will save her, get back together with an ex, make a huge deal out of it with movies and songs and tattoos, only for it to fall apart less than two years later. We go to crazy lengths sometimes to insulate ourselves from our own psychological liberation.
The Bottom Shelf
The Bottom Shelf is a feature about what skin/face products people “just like us” are using, loving, considering, buying repeatedly and depending on. No celebs in this section! If you’re interested in being the next Bottom Shelf, please reach out and lmk, I’d love to feature you. Today we have the bottom shelf of Niina Pollari, not only one of my favourite writers but also one of the funniest people I know.
I have the driest skin on earth, so my focus is always to retain moisture and, to a lesser extent, to block out the sun because we all know what that guy's capable of.
In the morning, I typically put on a serum, and this Haruharu is the one in rotation now because I've been kind of dipping my feet into Korean beauty products (not literally my feet tbh). I'm not sure how much this product does, but I like the way it smells -- vaguely medicinal -- and it seems hydrating. Then I put on moisturizer, usually this one from the Ordinary which I've repurchased many times. If I'm going outside at all, I put on sunblock in anticipation. The Trader Joe's one is SPF 40 and goes on totally matte. It's a dupe for Supergoop, only it's $8 instead of $40. The Joseon one SPF 50, and mercifully creamy and scent-free. If I'm going to be in the sun for more than a few minutes, I choose a mineral sunscreen because I like the idea of a physical barrier. For my face I use another Haruharu one and for my body I put on my children's sticky Neutrogena Baby stuff. I don't easily burn, but I still try to take that big ball o' fire seriously.
In the evening I put on either the Ordinary or the CeraVe, and then a facial oil at the end as an occlusive. Again, the objective here is to keep in as much moisture as possible (cue the guy from Dr. Strangelove screaming about his precious bodily fluids). This particular face oil was from a hippie store in Burnsville, NC, and when it runs out I will probably switch to a different one because the store closed down. But I like carrot seed oil as an ingredient, and one oil I've repurchased multiple times is the Miracle Oil from Flower and Bone Supply.
I don't wash my face with any kind of product! I just keep adding various greases. Maybe one day when I wear makeup again this will be an issue. If that day comes, I'll be sure to update.
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I was recently looking at some old essays I had posted in my former newsletter, which has since been taken down. There’s some good stuff in there and I was like, it would be great if people could still read these. These are personal essays and are not focused on reviews or fame and celebrity. They are more serious pieces of writing, and don’t necessarily “fit” with what I do here. I really enjoy creative non-fiction writing and would like to do it more and subscribers of S&F are made up of some of my most loyal readers, many of you have been with me for years and years (thank you! 😭), and maybe wouldn’t mind me blending in some personal essays here? which I’ve done a bit already.
And I was like, well, why not ask people what they think. I also don’t expect to ever make any serious money from this newsletter and don’t write it with that aim. I often feel inundated with requests from newsletters to become a paying subscriber and then when I do subscribe it often feels like further elements of that newsletter get paywalled or that the writer ends up just linking to places they are publishing elsewhere and not making content for readership anymore and it is frustrating. I also don’t love getting constant emails from writers, I’m more excited when it comes on occasion. On the other hand, I do subscribe to a couple newsletters because I genuinely love what the writer does and want them to continue and want to thank them for what their work which I value, and I wish I could subscribe to more just to support good writers, but I can only afford to subscribe to a few, so I get it, each person cannot support like 40 different writers. Why has publishing become this? ANYWAY. If I did turn on paying subscriptions, the vast majority of what I do would still be free and occasional, with maybe just the extra personal essay here and there behind a paywall? Idk. I also might just leave it all free and turn on paying subscriptions so there’s an option for people if they want to just support what I do? Anyway, I will wait to hear from you guys. Also, there is a strong possibility I will not do anything extra or new because I am tired and sick all the time and cannae be arsed— as they say here in Scotland— so there’s always that!
I have tentatively started using Instagram for the first time. It will mainly be pictures of flowers, lipstick reviews and probably pics of my dachshund? Here I am.
i was OBSESSED with 300 arguments but now i'm afraid to read more manguso! and thank you for helping me put my finger on what felt off about short n sweet. as soon as i saw the first few sentences i was hoping you'd include the "the lord forgot my gay awakening" line -- so much about it made me feel icky!!!
Now all I can see is the unblended contouring. What on earth???