a month of bopping around with Sucker Punch, from portland to new york to calgary to turronno. it's been, at all times, heady and exciting and depressing and lonely and connective and pride-filled and joyous and triumphant and isolating and insufficient and humbling and political and personal and exposing and healing and too much and too little and come closer and don't look at me. what i return to, in my quiet overwhelm, is how many of you came to meet me at a bookstore or theatre or library to tell me all the ways you rescued yourselves. what a relief to see you so capable. it reminded me of my own puissance. thanks for seeing me with a brutal clarity that i will spend the rest of my life hiding from; see you soon.🍏🍏🍏
At long last, Sucker Punch is out now. This book is a catalog of my worst days, which then yielded my most powerful. The essays are often sad, frequently funny, sometimes infuriating, and I am not always the good guy therein. Try to stick with me through the whole book; unlike ODWABDANOTWM, this book requires a linear read. Sucker Punch is a story about pain abated, and then intensified, and then abated again, and then intensified, which is a cycle I’ve been stuck in ever since. This will be the pattern forever, I fear: my joy and my pain are equally ephemeral. Alas. For now, rest assured that the devastation has abated again. I tell you this story from the comfortable vantage point of someone who learned a brutalizing lesson.
For years, I worried I'd never be able to talk to you again through a book. After my divorce, I felt robbed of language, of words, of narrative. It is, ironically, an unspeakable relief to meet you here again. I hope you like who I became. (But if you don't, I don't give a shit.) 🍏
today, all three parts of GIRLS GONE WILD: THE UNTOLD STORY is streaming on peacock. a documentary is an unruly living organism, and would have been laughably impossible without nbc and @maxine.productions , namely @_rmaryr_ and @jessicarc.1 's steady hands, and our talented team of freaks, obsessives, and geniuses. @jamilaw and @sangrewnur turned a tremendous amount of unmoored reporting into a righteous and self-evident story, told through an elegant and precise gaze. the effort was herculean, and they did it backwards while riding a horse. and if you ask me, our mvp will always be naz hakim, who doesn’t have instagram, but who i do think will eventually be the president so i’m merely jockeying for a cabinet position.
almost three years ago, after a year of reporting on this story, i called @linacrow from the 2 train because i was having a panic attack. i was wound up about our reporting — every detail we were getting was so ugly, i couldn’t believe our own fact-checking. this is what we called every slash of anxiety we'd experience on this project for the next four years: "i'm in the subway again." if i had to be insane for so long, at least i got to do it with my friend and my EIC.
but every woman we spoke to who encountered girls gone wild — as a subject, as an employee, as a friend to joe — was in the subway too. twenty years later, they were still afraid and still angry and still intimidated. these minutes-long interactions from their late teens had changed their entire lives, and had followed them forever. the truth is the only thing we have, the record is the only thing left that matters — the best we can hope for is to escape the subway and live in the light. i hope you can make some time to hear these women tell their stories with their own voices, their own words, their own autonomies. i'll think about all of them for the rest of my life.
the story is the only thing we get to keep. i feel lucky to get to help tell it. 🦚
Sydney Sweeney is back with another product to help us understand who she is: a lingerie line called Syrn (pronounced “siren.")
And who better to review it for us than @scaachi 👀 Tap the link in bio for more.
