Hello Rabbits.I'm so glad you're here.Kate McKinnon and Mila Kunis to star in spy comedy The CW teases some future surprises coming to its superhero shows Take a sip of yerba mate, the tea-like drink that’s as much ritual as beverage What are you reading in March?No matter what you're going through — whether it's a break-up, confidence issues, or just a general life rut — it's important to feel like you're not alone. These 13 self-help books cover a broad range of topics applicable to women's lives, and offer sage advice on how to rise above it. 10 Books You've Gotta Read Before You See the Movie Here Are 20 Books From Strong Women Who'll Inspire You 25 Must-Read Books to Top Your Reading List This March From Blog to Book: 13 Popular Cookbooks Written by Bloggers 17 Adult Coloring Books to Help Creatively De-Stress 14 Dystopian Novels to Curl Up With at the End of Days George Orwell's Dystopian Novel '1984' Tops Best-Seller List Romance Novels That Are Actually Worth Reading
The 50 Best Books From Oprah's Book Club The Best Diet Books to Lose Weight (and Keep It Off) in 2017PoliticsHow do you think Trump did this week? A co-working space for working writers At the end of a steep driveway, perched above the shops and restaurants of Silver Lake’s Hyperion Avenue, author Janelle Brown stands at the entrance of a cantilevered Midcentury Modern building, its glass walls cross-hatched with metal sash windows like a translucent Rubik’s cube. Sitting in the captain’s chair in the studio at radio station KLOS is Steve Jones. The host of “Jonesy’s Jukebox” chats off air with his guest Val Kilmer while “Vicious,” by Lou Reed, broadcasts on 95.5 FM. The producer and the board operator keep time on how close they are to the end of the song,... Ask Cat Marnell, the former Condé Nast beauty editor who has documented her decades-long drug addiction in shamelessly scandalous columns for Vice and xoJane, whether her new memoir, “How to Murder Your Life,” glorifies drug abuse, and she doesn’t skip a beat.
It’s glorious,” she breezily... The back wall at the Blue Bottle Coffee in downtown Los Angeles is lined from top to bottom with books. The airy coffee destination fills the corner of the historic Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles. Behind plate-glass windows, patrons can be seen drifting to the counter for personalized... Thanks to Pinterest boards and Instagram hashtags, the word “authentic” has passed from buzzword into the realm of parody: think Portlandia-style farm-to-table spreads, mountain-top selfies and any fashion shoot set in Joshua Tree. But in Mark Sundeen’s “The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life... In 1980, I arrived with my family to the U.S.-Mexico border from Michoacán with what little we could bring with us on the three-day journey by bus. Not long after, once more members of our extended family joined the migration, 19 of us moved into a tiny apartment in Thermal, Calif., where we didn’t... “In a lot of ways, a country is like a family,” says Jade Chang.
We’re seated across from one another at a table in her West Hollywood apartment, blithely laying slices of cold butter onto vegan banana bread and discussing her debut, bestselling novel, “The Wangs vs. the World,” which charts one... “Writing novels is so much more satisfying than writing television,” says Sarah Dunn. It’s an expertly tossed-off bon mot that practically defines the aphorism “know your audience.” The author of “The Arrangement,” a novel that won’t be out for months, is seated between two bookstore owners at... Joshua Mohr is no stranger to second chances. In his new memoir, “Sirens” (Two Dollar Radio, $15.99 paper), he recounts not only his journey from addiction to recovery to relapse and back again, but the experience of suffering three strokes in his 30s, the last of which reveals that he has an 8-millimeter... Kevin Starr mastered the stage whisper. At a stiff faculty or committee meeting, and with twinkle in his eye, he’d bring a hand or a book to his mouth, and, thus poorly disguised, offer a thought, a bon mot, an impertinent question, or even a joke.
It was his version of sotto voce, but it came... Less than 24 hours after Milo Yiannopoulos’ upcoming book was announced, pre-orders for the controversial young conservative’s “Dangerous” propelled it to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list, knocking the recently deceased Carrie Fisher’s “Princess Diarist” down to No. 2. “I think he has a much... It’s not a great secret that Donald Trump and his incoming administration are not hugely beloved by America’s creative class — the difficulty Trump is having in finding performers for his inauguration is only the most obvious manifestation of this. What’s probably less known is that Trump’s election... The next time you’re stuck in gridlock on the 405 listening to an audiobook, squint past the guard rails and mini malls: There’s a chance that book was recorded mere exits away. Behind a wrought-iron gate in a residential area of Northridge, Deyan Audio Services sits on what looks like a country...116 UnphotoshoppedUnphotoshopped UnashamedBody XojaneUnashamed WomenWomen ProveBeach LovesBody ImageForward116 Unphotoshopped, Unashamed Women Prove Every Body Is A Beach Body - xoJaneSee More116 UnphotoshoppedUnphotoshopped UnashamedBody XojaneUnashamed WomenWomen ProveBeach LovesForward116 Unphotoshopped, Unashamed Women Prove Every Body Is A Beach Body - xoJaneSee More116 UnphotoshoppedUnphotoshopped UnashamedBody XojaneUnashamed WomenWomen ProveBeach LovesForward116 Unphotoshopped, Unashamed Women Prove Every Body Is A Beach Body - xoJaneSee More116 UnphotoshoppedUnphotoshopped UnashamedBody XojaneUnashamed WomenWomen ProveBeach LovesForward116 Unphotoshopped
, Unashamed Women Prove Every Body Is A Beach Body - xoJaneSee MoreBepg BloggingBlogging WritingBlog OblivionProclaimed FatCostume Designer SXojaneWriting BlogsFat GirlsThings To ReadForward28 self-proclaimed "fat girls" rocking some awesome bikinis!See MorePink ScarSimplificationGorgeous BeachFlauntingPressureCongratulationsBikini BodyPuttingVisitingForwardFirst of all congratulations on the wonderful simplification of what a "beach" or "bikini body" means. We put so much pressure on ourselves whenever we are putting on a bikini or visiting a gorgeous beach that we forget to enjoy it all. I love working out and I love flaunting the pink scar along my abdomen. See More116 UnphotoshoppedUnphotoshopped UnashamedBody XojaneUnashamed WomenQuotable ThinkingWomen ProveLove Your BodyBeach BodiesBody PositivityForward116 Unphotoshopped, Unashamed Women Prove Every Body Is A Beach Body | But her Whitney Houston piece was something else. It was haunting and shot through with revelations. Marnell wrote about her own experiences with passing out in the bath after doing drugs, which not only shed light on what might have gone down at the Beverly Hilton but also, for me, brought back memories of my own lost years: coming to consciousness in a tub of cold water at 5 a.m., having previously decided that nothing calmed the fires of two bottles of wine like a leisurely soak.
I must have logged a million hours in bathtubs when I was drunk or hung over. “Why can’t we acknowledge that lots and lots of women abuse drugs?” Marnell wrote in one of those passages in which you can practically hear the frantic clatter of the keyboard as she typed. “Why does a person have to have resolved their drug issues in order to be allowed to write about them? Can’t a writer be conflicted?” When I read her essay, it had been 18 months since alcohol last lighted a match in my veins, but I had to admit she had a point.So, what did I think of this writer? In the following months, I thought a lot of things about her. I thought she was a gifted memoirist and a self-mythologizing poser. I thought she was an addict in love with her own damage and a deeply troubled soul. But mostly what I thought after clicking the link in that e-mail was: Damn, her Whitney Houston piece was better than mine.“Umm, O.K.,” said Cat Marnell, who was an hour and a half late for our scheduled interview last spring.
“I basically overmedicated myself this week.” She explained that she was taking new sleeping pills, although PCP is her drug of choice. “I’m using drugs very heavily this week, O.K.? And it’s screwed up my whole body.” She wore a ratty T-shirt with a picture of her professed idol, the British junkie-musician Pete Doherty, on the front. She sniffled a lot, twisting back and forth in her office chair, which she rarely uses, preferring to work from her East Village apartment, which she described as a flophouse. Did I mention that? Sure, and young — or, at 29, she is at least younger than I am. She is also tiny and platinum blond, with a look of engineered disaster about her, as though some socialite had been tossed into a dryer.My idea was to use Marnell as a jumping-off point for an essay about confessional writing online, a subject of fascination for me, because I write and edit personal essays for Salon. These stories are often difficult and sometimes breathtakingly candid: one I edited was written by a teacher fired for her prostitute past;
another was by a woman who gave birth to a stillborn child and took him home for a short time. I, too, had been wrestling with a maybe-memoir-thing about my own drinking — all of which means I’d been thinking about the potholes of addiction and autobiography more than most. I was interested in the masochism of self-disclosure: how punishing it could be to write about yourself in the age of Internet comments and snarky blogs. Yet people like Cat Marnell still stepped up to their computers and happily popped open a vein.Her prose also had energy. Her best articles — like the one about taking pills during fashion week — displayed a willingness to tell unflattering truths about herself that reminded me of Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of “Prozac Nation.” And Marnell did it all without a net — no editor marking up an early draft, no copy editor using a red pen to flag misspellings before the article went live. The age of instant self-publishing has left so many young writers sitting in the swill of their own typos and bad ideas — although many of Marnell’s ideas were quite good.
She understood that writing about a tired subject like beauty products (her official beat) required creative framing. She understood the Internet was crazy, and so you had to be a little bit crazier to get some heat. My favorite Cat Marnell headline: “I Loathe My Scary Dad but I Love My Black Eyes: My Three Favorite Liners of All Time.” It’s about how her shrink father put her on Adderall when she was a teenager, which she said led her to become a pillhead. It then segued into an instructional on how get her smudge-eyed look. I hated that story and adored it in equal measure. Her readers often feel the same way. Comments sections on her articles have ballooned to 900 responses, a battleground of haters vs. fangirls with too much leisure time and too many exclamation points. I could spend hours watching the pitchforks fly. It must have given her a gratifying sense of infamy to be the most interesting writer on a site, even if it was a site most people had never heard of. If attention is a drug, she was hooked up to an IV drip.
I would get these funny zaps of envy reading her prose. I should have done more drugs, I would stupidly think. I should have fallen deeper in the hole. I was just a garden-variety lush, so enamored of booze I didn’t even bother with hard drugs. And I saw in her drug use and her writing an abandon I never allowed myself, and it gave her articles that unmistakable thrill of things breaking apart. But I was concerned about her too. She seemed very alone in the world, even as she bragged to me about graffiti artists and friends crashing on a mattress on the floor. She talked about never having been in love. She talked about being estranged from her family. She took that post about her father down, her one real regret in a long history of potential overshares. “I don’t need to sell that out to get traffic,” she told me. “You’ll never see me writing about my family online again.” Every personal-essay writer struggles with this line, and I don’t know one of us who hasn’t bungled it big time.
I tried to protect the writers I worked with. On other first-person sites — sites where I flattered myself that the editors weren’t as careful as I was — I saw too much exposure. I would find myself excising the grimmest parts of personal essays, torn between my desire to protect the human being and my knowledge that such unforgettable detail would boost a story’s click-through rate.“This feels a little unprocessed,” I told writers who shared their tales of date rape and eating disorders, but it was hard to deny that the internal chaos, that fog of confusion, could make for compelling reading, like dispatches from inside a siege. Yet “unprocessed” was exactly what Marnell’s pieces were, and damned if I couldn’t stop devouring them. People often complain about the narcissism of our moment, how everyone is posting and writing and talking about themselves. I worry about that, too, not only because such constant self-regard must surely mangle the soul but also because writing and talking about myself is a career for me.
My experience with alcohol and private pain has given me a near-religious fervor for how first-person storytelling can illuminate the human experience: through your story, I come to see my own.Yet sometimes, I feel as if we’ve tipped the scales too far. Way too much skin on display. People are too readily encouraged to hurl their secrets into the void. Maybe it’s how old-school feminists feel when they see half-naked girls grinding on a pole in a dark bar: Really? A month after our interview, Marnell announced via a profile in New York magazine that she was entering rehab at the insistence of xoJane’s publisher. When she came back, her next post was nonsense. A few weeks after that, she announced via New York Post’s Page Six that she was leaving xoJane.“Look,” she told Page Six, “I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next.”
It was a Keith Richards exit. She must have been very pleased. And she quickly found a new outlet at another publication, Vice magazine, where her bio refers to her as the “pills and narcissism” correspondent. I have no idea if she’ll write a book, of course. I’m skeptical, not just because there’s a dearth of great PCP-inspired literature but because writing a book is a mountain that is easy to start and tremendously difficult to finish. It requires ripping out the IV drip of a thousand Facebook likes, the instant comfort of “update now.” It requires patience and hard work and closing yourself off in a quiet, hateful room. People think you can’t write while you’re high, but I’m sure that’s not true. I loved the tippy-tap of a four-beer drunk, because your self-doubt melts away, and the hounds stop howling, and it almost feels as if you are taking dictation from the universe. After I quit drinking, I spent months unable to write. I would literally spend hours staring at a blank screen — typing phrases only to erase them again — and I would long for the late nights in a smoke-clogged apartment in Williamsburg, when I would be up at 3 a.m. writing so fast that my laptop nearly levitated.