Lady M
Maggie Smith, Melissa Broder, Margot Robbie, plus a miraculous hair tool
Sad
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by poet Maggie Smith is a memoir of her divorce. It’s her second book related to her divorce, the first being Keep Moving, a sort of self help book as I understand it, written in Rupi Kaur style Twitter sized bites. Her memoir is also written in short, propulsive sections that can be easily consumed. Smith’s viral poem of 2016, Good Bones, was all I knew of her going into her memoir. The phrase “you could make this place beautiful,” being the closing line of that poem. I have to say, I did not really understand how that line of the poem related to this book except for in a marketing sense. It’s pretty unusual, to say the least, of a poem going so viral it overnight rockets the author into literary stardom but that’s what happened to Smith and it is, in large part, what her memoir addresses, as her success brought down her marriage.
This memoir made me think a lot about how the opportunities fame provides does not always lead to worthwhile creative output. Both Keep Moving and You Could Make This Place Beautiful were written as Smith was going through her divorce, actively addressing the divorce. This has a spilling the tea energy that certainly piques curiosity. Did she want to move on her success and produce work that would keep her career financially viable? Yes, understandably. Was she getting pressure to do that from her agent and publisher? Certainly. Was she simultaneously going through an acrimonious divorce she didn’t have perspective on? Uh, yeah. I wanted to go through this memoir with a big red pen. I wanted to tell her to wait a few years and just focus on living through this crisis without trying to force herself into some pseudo-evolved viewpoint she doesn’t have yet.
The biggest issue, if I can borrow a phrase from the Scots I live amongst, is that her husband is a cunt. There are two sides to every story, blah blah blah, but this is her story and her life and in her life, this man fucking sucks. He cheated on her, undermined and belittled her career at every turn even before she was famous, was jealous and bitter about her success, blew off his children post-divorce, gaslit her. Yet the book drips with an unpalatable attempt on her part to look objective and acknowledge that she wasn’t a perfect wife and that he’s not a bad guy, etc. though it is clear from everything else in the memoir that this is not at all what she believes. It was very irritating! No one reading a memoir believes the memoir is describing anything but a subjective reality. The book would have been much stronger—and more honest— if she had leaned into her anger instead of tip-toeing around it laying daisy petals in her wake.
As someone who has gone through a divorce I know it to be such a disruptive experience that you try on a lot of different hats to get through it, you say pat platitudes to yourself and others, you want to have a “good” divorce, look like a “good” person, be “chill” and not “crazy” or god forbid, angry, announce you want to be friends with your ex, stumble through a bazillion awkward scenarios you can’t understand, unable to admit to yourself what is really going on, worrying what other people think. It’s a big mess and I think mess can be very creatively generative but certainly not in the moment of impact. Additionally, Smith includes a number of sections called “this is not for you” or something to that effect, that have a whiff of moral superiority I felt she was trying to telegraph to her ex to prove something to him, where she mentions, but refuses to further describe certain terrible moments she went through, like when she told her kids or whatever. I did not feel like it did anything for the reader—like, just don’t include it then? Idk, man. Not a memoir at the top of my list.
Melissa Broder is one of my favourite writers and I stay pretty current on whatever it is she’s doing. As a fan of her (now defunct?) podcast Eating Alone in My Car, I felt like I had done the undergrad on the topics covered in her 2023 novel Death Valley, leading to the postgrad of reading Death Valley itself. From her podcast I was acquainted with her thoughts on Best Westerns, the desert, if loved ones give us signs from beyond the grave, her husband’s worsening illness. Death Valley felt like returning to Broder’s Flamin’ Hot Cheeto and Taco Bell wrapper strewn car and going for another ride, albeit this time the car drives into a Dali painting and melts into a dream. I was curious how the book landed for people who did not have the background of the podcast, because for me I couldn’t fully separate the book from that, and was pleased to see Death Valley has been met with widespread acclaim.
Autofiction adjacent and told in first person, winding further and further into surreal fantasy, Death Valley reminded me a lot of Pure Colour by Shiela Heti, a book whose similarities Broder’s unnamed writer protagonist addresses in the book, worrying if a recently published book about a writer whose father is reincarnated into a Montezuma cypress will eclipse her own novel-in-progress (in actuality Heti wrote about her father becoming a leaf). I am so glad that Pure Colour did not stop Broder from pursuing this work because Death Valley succeeds where Pure Colour failed (it took itself too seriously) and is the vastly superior novel. A good reminder that just because someone else has the same idea as you before you do does not mean you aren’t going to execute that idea much better!
Death Valley is told in short sections—minimal, accessible and finely honed. As weird as it gets, it remains grounded in the embarrassment and confusion of being a person. I often stopped to re-read a particularly sharp sentence. Imo, no one does black humour better than Broder. Death Valley is a very funny book about the strange landscape of grief, coming back to some of Broder’s ongoing themes about the loneliness of being ourselves, no matter what else is going on in the wider picture of our lives.
Famous
Since my life and brain got pretty scrambled up in the last couple of years, how and what I watch has changed drastically. There are so many interesting things out there that a me I cannot access would love to watch, but the me I am has to pass on. A consistent way I choose to watch things these days is basically this tepid zone of “non-impactful films that were on cable a lot between 1995-2005 which I saw bc there was no streaming and never really cared about.” Like here’s some movies on my current Amazon Prime watchlist: Prelude to a Kiss (1992), With Honors (1994), Dream a Little Dream (1989), Stepmom (1998). You get the idea. The other area I choose from is vague cultural curiosity about something I otherwise feel disinterest in—this is how I came to watch The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). My area of cultural curiosity was Margot Robbie and how she became this big deal actress thanks to her break in this film.
I don’t care about Wall Street guys and Wall Street movies, the only thing about that life and sphere of “success” that is further removed from me is sports, but honestly even sports makes more sense to me than this shit does. I remember when The Wolf of Wall Street came out hearing that while it was ostensibly a critique of Wall Street, all it did was make people want to live the ghoulish life of American excess and I was like, I’ll pass. It’s the true story of Jordan Belfort, a Wall Street crook, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s weird in the sense that it is essentially the same story as Goodfellas, but not as compelling, so it’s like Martin Scorsese made a grainy xerox of something he already did. Does Jordan Belfort’s life of money/drugs/fucking really deserve to be examined in detail over three hours of film, the same run time as 1982’s Gandhi? That’s the main question I walked away from The Wolf of Wall Street with. The best thing about the movie is DiCaprio, who I never realised until this film is a very funny physical actor, essentially playing Belfort as a clown.
This brings us to Margot. I don’t dislike Robbie, I’ve seen her in several things and thought she was fine. But what about this role pushed her star into ascendance? And the answer I came to is it’s not really her performance, it’s that she plays the ultimate blonde trophy wife fantasy. And that really depressed me! In The Wolf of Wall Street she’s Naomi, Belfort’s second wife he acquires after he gets super rich. She conforms to every conventional beauty standard— long blonde hair, blue eyes, tall, thin, hairless, big tits, tan. She has scenes of full frontal nudity. She’s naked or in some kind of explicit sexual act or context for much of the film. Naomi is feisty, sure, but only exists in relation to Belfort’s desires and her ability to conform to them. I don’t think every film is for everybody, nor should it be. I don’t require every depiction of a woman in cinema to be a fully fleshed out feminist study. But for a film that created arguably the biggest star in Hollywood, I expected a little more from the role than pin up girl gets nailed to the wall. Especially considering that Naomi is based on a real person.
In the scene where Belfort first meets Naomi, they are at a raucous party. She comes in on the arm of some guy when Belfort spots her. Jonah Hill, playing Belfort’s stooge Donnie, spots her too. Donnie, though surrounded by throngs of people, begins openly jerking off at the sight of Naomi, so thunderstruck by her unreal hotness (seriously?). As Belfort chats up Naomi, Donnie is still going to town, muttering about how hot she is, and is eventually noticed by everyone and laughed at. Including Naomi, she just laughs and heads off with Belfort. Like, what? How would that not confuse and upset and disgust you no matter how sexy you are? I suppose because in this universe Naomi has simply accepted her principal role in life as jerk off material, she literally just takes it with a smile. Naomi is a stand in for what woman men must imagine is waiting for them at the apex of stereotypical success and masculinity—note perfect to all beauty conformity, not a centimetre on her body that could be criticised by another man as out of place, there to have her brains fucked out, spend your money, bear your children while looking “perfect”, but the second your star starts to wane, she leaves, still conforming, but now to the flip side of the fantasy, confirming your suspicion that at the end of the day all women are simply whores.
Belfort gives a rousing speech to his employees at one point, asking them if they are going to reach for the dream, which he describes as driving a luxury car with a woman like Naomi sitting beside them, or if they are going to drive an unimpressive car, in the company of a woman in a muumuu who has three days worth of stubble on her legs. I thought, three days worth stubble on my legs is all it takes for a man in this context to feel like his life has failed? How powerful yet dehumanising! If the film had been more successful as a critique these scenes might have come across as empty and freakish, Naomi as at least a person with interiority, instead of a shell cresting the wave of conventional beauty. I feel like Robbie became famous because she was singled out as a highly valuable prize in a film that doesn’t really come off as satire, both by Scorsese (a Hollywood king) and DiCaprio (another Hollywood king, and eternal party boy model acquirer) as Belfort, rather than because Naomi was some once in a lifetime role.
A Not Bullshit Instagram Ad Purchase!
Instagram ads are like a drug— they know what they’re doing, they know where you’re vulnerable, they’re out to get you hooked. So of course a lot of ads I get are about hair, as my hair is my most important ongoing personal quest. And I have made some Instagram ad purchases before— total disasters, impulse buy garbage, like a bra I had an allergic reaction to and leggings that were such poor quality when they arrived I felt ashamed of my dupability. I was like, never again. So when I started seeing the Tymo Ring straightening comb ads I ignored it, even though the results looked ridiculously amazing and easy. But I had bought a hot hairbrush once before, it didn’t do shit, I would not be fooled.
However, Instagram kept bombarding me, refusing to be deterred. It knew all my power and self esteem is stored in my hair! So I started to do independent research, I read review sites, I watched YouTube videos and TikTok reviews. I thought, Jesus Christ lord, it looks like it is actually legit. It had a 30 day money back guarantee and I was like, ok. I will try it. I essentially have lion’s hair and the Tymo Ring Plus gave me sleek blow out hair in five minutes of silence sitting on the floor of my bedroom. An almost religious experience. It takes a professional a half hour just to normal blow dry my hair, forget about the time to straighten it. I texted a friend about it and she wrote back, knowing of my hair obsession, “I’m like on cloud 9 for you ☁️ ✨”, as if I had achieved a huge personal milestone like a longed for pregnancy. It was the first time in a long time that I felt moved by technological advancements and grateful I live in the post-modern dystopia—so I can have access to this product. Here’s a unloved note I wrote on Substack earlier this year. Looks like the angels heard me!
running, nay SPRINTING, to this smith memoir bc i love mess
How are you so consistently good at this?! The analysis keeps getting sharper and more interesting. And yes, now I'm curious about the f***ing hair tool. THANKS