On Gossip and Glossier
October 2023
Other than reading I also like gossip. So gossip about the literary world? Well dang, that’s an irresistible double whammy.
Last year a trusty source recommended to me her new favourite podcast, Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, in which a Vanity Fair journalist picks apart the lives and happenings of now-famous cohort of teenagers in the class of ’86. It’s the experiences of this formative time and place that led three classmates to each produce generation-defining novels, and make revered writers of themselves in the process: Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude. Perhaps you know them?
There must have been something in the water at Bennington back then that it could cultivate such a large volume of artistic prodigy. It’s become late 20th-century literary legend, like Joan Didion and the New Journalists before them, and the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris before that. Stories of this lawless, punk, dark academia miracle created a myth of the pre-internet artist that persists today.
Once is a rich and twisting aural history (a kunstroman if you will!) of that time, told over 14 episodes. It’s essentially a cultural-critique-cum-investigative-exposee masquerading as a podcast, whose central characters remain elusive even when it feels like you’ve gotten as close as possible to their core. The host, Lili Anolik, is fallible. Her enviable beat covering literary glamouresses for a high profile magazine has yielded mixed results – a terrible book about Eve Babitz and an excellent piece about Caroline Calloway – and she is very self conscious about her own laugh. But what she has created is genuinely a new form of storytelling. If you take any recommendation from this issue let it be this.
Bret is a complex and inscrutable main character. Charming, problematic, articulate and self-aware enough to know that controversial opinions keep you relevant in this economy, he anchors the history, guiding us through his adolescence in 1980s LA and the years at Bennington he had a hand in mythologising. He is an unreliable narrator (as many other classmates attest) but his observations are shrewd. As Anolik points out in the opening episode, he might be, technically, cancelled but he is one of the only voices in the public discourse that predicted the Trump era (in a profile on Charlie Sheen of all places). What he lacks in political correctness he seems to make up for in actually being correct.
Donna Tartt, famous recluse, doesn’t agree to be interviewed in the series (her lawyers threatened legal action after it was published), but that only encourages Anolik to escalate her interest in Donna into full scale investigative journalism. Want to know the real Bunny Corcoran, Julian Morrow and Henry Winter? Anolik finds them. What about the people whose personal stories Tartt stole to write The Little Friend? They’re interviewed, and they’re mad. Her childhood boyfriend? He’s there, and he’d been waiting for someone like Anolik to call him for years.
Between Bret’s seedy adolescent demimonde in bratty Hollywood and Donna’s mysterious, gothic Mississippi childhood, the revelations around the lives of the authors are just as riveting as the literature they produced. And then there’s Jonathan Lethem, schlepping away like the dutiful underdog.
Does it overreach occasionally? Yes, what historian doesn’t? Are the bows Anolik draws, at times, too long? Indeed, but is the truth stranger than fiction? In this case, it’s all too similar to tell. It’s delicious from beginning to end.
Listen here, dear bookworms, it’s a treat.
A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie
1950
A picture I stole from the internet because I lost my copy on holiday.
Reading a jolly murder mystery is to me like taking a long draught of a Ventolin inhaler on a particularly cold day is to an asthmatic (also me): curative. If inhaled deeply, your insides prickle and itch as the magical stuff gets deep inside you.
This Agatha Christie novel is one of my all-time favourites. On one innocuous day in the village of Chipping Cleghorn an ad appears in the local newspaper: “A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, 29 October at Little Paddocks at 6:30pm”. Letitia Blackwood, the owner of Little Paddocks, is perplexed to see the ad and even more perplexed when a crowd of busybody neighbours turn up at the appointed time, the lights go out, and a murder does in fact occur. Chilling! Who placed the ad? Who was the intended victim? And who in the room saw the murderer without realising? Luckily, Jane Marple is staying at a nearby spa retreat and is on the case lickity split.
In a recent documentary series about Christie, presenter Lucy Worsley describes the oft-dismissed doyenne of crime fiction as a legendary author in her own right, whose lifelong career chronicled the slow decay of the British empire with nuanced social commentary. After two world wars that turned compassion, reason and the old world order upside down, Agatha (who, as a nurse in the first war gained a suspicion of rude male physicians and a useful knowledge of garden variety poisons) no longer trusted the establishment. In her eyes, the quaint domestic sphere was disturbed and unsafe; murderers were not working class criminals, they were country doctors and respectable war widows. Her heroes – a Belgian refugee and a seemingly nosy little old lady – are subversive figures who expose the incompetence of the British constabulary and the evil disguised in the middle class.
In Chipping Cleghorn, the same is true. Everyone is reinventing themselves after the war: classes are shifting, identities are malleable and people can only be who they say they are. This is what Christie was deft at exploring, how the patterns and expectations of shaky British culture were changing. She also exploited it: a time of flux like this is the perfect setting for a whodunit.
Miss Marple is my personal idol, a perennially overlooked (and therefore usefully invisible) older woman who cracks crimes by looking closely at information no one else recognises as clues. She appears in Christie’s later works at the same time the author herself was grappling with ageing, divorce and the public fallout from her mysterious, short-lived disappearance. Miss Marple uses gossip to find clues, her “feminine intuition” (aka observational prowess) to outsmart bumbling male detectives, and basically ‘leans in’ to underestimations of her in order to solve the case. Sly.
The Fawn by Magda Szabo
1959 (translated by Len Rix, 2022)
There is a moment in this novel, on page 81, which I dogeared and underlined when I read it on holiday. The protagonist, a famous Hungarian actress, is describing her housekeeper, who does not like her:
“She could never understand why I had her work for me when I could clean and dust just as well as she could, and I was quicker and stronger than she was anyway: there must have been some terrible earlier poverty in my life, or how would I know all those secret little tricks that only the really poor are wise to?”
This passage captures many things that are magical about Szabo’s writing (secret community codes, loaded female power dynamics, the suspicion that characterised life under the Iron Curtain). But in particular it exposes a class tension, a complication between someone who remains in service and someone who clearly escaped it. It’s unclear if either are jealous of the other’s position or defensive of their own. All that is evident is that they used to be similar and now they are not, and that fragment of shared experience separates them further rather than binding them together.
Set in newly communist 1950s Hungary, the story revolves around Eszter the famous actress and the cast of people who surround her in childhood, adolescence and as an adult. There is her sickly lawyer father who refuses to work for money despite his family’s increasing destitution; her mother who rejects her aristocratic parents in order to marry the man she loves; Bela, baker’s apprentice and Eszter’s thwarted teenage fiance; and Emil, the radical, wayward son of the local judge. But mostly there is Angela: rich, likeable and do-gooding who believes they are friends but whom Eszter despises. The story concerns the formation of Eszter’s identity at the same time Hungary was casting its own image as a new Soviet state. It’s got a whiff of Elena Ferrante about it: two women from volatile European regions - one talented, one beloved - hold a tumultuous fascination with the other.
It’s not as tight as Szabo’s most famous novel, The Door, but it contains her characteristic world-building techniques: dropping the reader right into a vexed regional milieu without any context to its history or specific social order, and moving back and forth in time to slowly untangle the story. The chronology is compiled like an inside-out club sandwich, in which the ends are revealed before the beginnings and the rest of the page count is spent retracing the steps in between. It’s slightly disorienting at first, but one can’t help but feel that’s the point. And it works marvellously to build suspense, wherein fresh morsels of information supercede the most recent ending with a newer one. Each b-plot has an increasingly starring role as its pile of denouements gets higher, and each character relationship bears new relevance the more historical detail is unearthed. I felt at the mercy of Szabo’s pen, tearing through each page in anticipation of what she might reveal on the next.
There is a list of characters at the beginning for the reader to refer to in case they get lost in the village of traditional Hungarian names, which is always a good sign that the realism will be immediate and magnifique.
Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier by Marisa Meltzer
2023
Of course my interest was piqued by a “bombshell exposee” about a brand that captured the virtual heart of digital natives, arguably invented millennial pink, and started the skincare monoculture with a founder who had a guest role on The Hills and has been billed as The Last Girlboss left standing (after her friends Leandra Medine and Audrey Gelman - i.e. the “real” Marnie from Girls - were cancelled online).
Was that opening sentence too niche, or do I know my audience? If a lot of that didn’t make sense to you, you might not be interested in this book. Or maybe you like learning new things! In which case, sally forth. But I gobbled this (audio)book in a day, drinking in the cautionary tale of hyper-productivity and venture capital in the 2010s like the story of Icarus it truly is.
A preppy, precocious Connecticut babysitter works her way into the New York fashion industry from age 17, gaining an obnoxious resume of designer, magazine and reality TV experience before starting her own successful beauty news website at the height of the blog bubble when she was 25. From there, she launches an explosively popular product line that ‘harnessed the power of social media’ in an era when people still thought that was a good thing, tried to pivot to a tech business and ultimately burnt out. Attempted internal coups and a botched glamour eyeliner launch are buttressed by passages of interesting analysis about the misogynistic etymology of ‘girlboss’, the historical symbolism of cosmetics concession stands as places of knowledge and power, and the intersection of beauty and commerce.
Coded underneath it all seems to be an emperor’s-new-clothes parable about the dangers of trusting a brand to be your community rather than just selling you a product that works. Glossier sold “no-makeup” make-up, which became proxies for the real product: Instagrammable retail outlets and pink bubble wrap pouches with cultural capital. They were successful at selling an image people wanted to be associated with, rather than products people were devoted to using. And isn’t that really the story of contemporary life?
I suspect Glossier customers will know a lot of the pre-tread plot, it exists in many forms on the internet already and hey, they lived it. And though Emily Weiss is a person protective of her privacy (as the author will tell you numerous times) her voice is dominant in early Into The Gloss posts. She is a familiar but inarticulate character, garbled by too much media training and start-up culture indoctrination to ever form a clear picture of herself, or allow others to try. She is not an enigma to anyone who has followed the brand from the beginning, but the image Meltzer crafts of her is more nuanced than anything we’ve seen so far. Does Weiss owe the public any more than that?
The writing itself seems to embody the persistently ‘high-low’ tenor most millennials adopt to justify their love of pop culture. Quotes from Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola and Zadie Smith are relevant but they feel defensive, as though beauty and lifestyle journalism needs parallels with the work of artistes to be considered smart cultural criticism. But I guess everyone should take that world more seriously and they wouldn’t have to. Maybe that’s the problem.
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