Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Oct. 20-26

Conclave, Red Rooms, Moo Deng, The Book of Mormon, and Hollywood Christians

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!

One more week til residency

I missed the fourth anniversary of having moved to Brooklyn, which was on October 14th. I’m grateful that in four years of living here, I’m not sick of seeing a beautiful cat at a deli the way I did earlier this week when I left to see Conclave at 8:30 in the morning.

when a beautiful cat is by a bunch of La Croix I am overwhelmed with beauty in the world

This time next week I’ll be out on residency — I’ll plan to take Sunday the 10th off on account of election day/week being a wash — so everything feels a bit like “having finals.” I write to you a few hours before I have to turn myself around to cover the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in Washington Square Park (life is thrilling and strange!). I can barely think ahead to writing fiction or being out of the city. Everything feels immediate and necessary here, and I am trying to pack what I can in before I take off. Once I’m back, it’ll be late November, and then the year might as well be completely over.

I wrote a book review that ran this week that I’ve linked later in the post. The only other piece of note was a blog I wrote about whatever is going on with Meryl Streep and Martin Short (which I think is now some kind of official?). I find this whole relationship very chic and cool, but most of that comes from having spent a week over the summer only watching Jiminy Glick clips.

The mugs are — as I promised Wednesday — all sent out into the world. Here’s the photo my mom sent me of the Fran Magazine altar that now exists in their home. Some of you should be taking notes.

grateful as always to have a place near chia seeds