Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Aug. 11-17

No one is mad at me for sending this out 40 minutes late.

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Adult sunburn is gone

The way things go these days is I tend to have one week of relentless freelance and then one week where I only have a few things due, where I can really focus on the nitty gritty of my life outside of the computer. The past week was the latter, the days blurring into stretches of sun. I got gelato almost every day this week; I saw a movie by myself. Stuff like that can make a difference. August is usually a horrible month, and while I wouldn’t say this one is especially good (see: last week’s Dispatch), there is a bit more breathing room. Maybe it’s just because the heat broke. Maybe it’s because the AC was so turned up at the Regal that it hurt my fingers to fire off a bunch of texts afterwards. Clare was here, and then two friends from Michigan have been in town. I miss Michigan — haven’t been in two years — and it’s starting to feel medically necessary to make my way out to the west side of the state as the nights start to get longer.

My review of Anna Marie Tendler’s memoir came out on Monday ahead of her release on Tuesday. I tried to be generous to someone who clearly endured a lot, but I found it an extremely cynical and unstructured exercise in self-victimization. It’s one thing to write about something that happened to you as something that happened to you, and it’s another to couch what happened to you within a system without really investigating the system itself. There’s a broad implication of gender essentialism — men = bad, (most) women = good unless they are friends with bad men — that renders the whole thing quite dated and childish. I was depressed to see Tendler said something on her Instagram story that she never would have been able to write the book had she not processed “what had happened” to her; I’d argue it is more than evident that “what happened” is still being processed. Genuine heartbreak can transcend most systems — it’s not really easy to blame it on scare quote catch-alls like “patriarchy” and “capitalism,” or whatever. I find myself increasingly eager to discuss this book and all the other divorce memoirs of late, which feel to me like remnants of the 2010s and years of “realizing stuff.” I suspect the maybe unexpected box office success of It Ends With Us falls into that as well.

Okay! Too much on that. If you read the AMT book, I’d love to know your thoughts. I’m mostly surprised at how aligned everyone is — feels like a kind of bizarre turning point — but I am maybe in a bubble on that one.

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