beach reads for thought daughters
"a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing"
discussed:
👙 what I think you should read on vaycay
🛹 a diamond in the rough (the skatepark)
🧿 scammer girl summer
Hey girls! I’ve been thinking a lot about sincerity recently.
Between writing that mini-essay on Billie Eilish x Jojo Siwa last issue and dealing with summer brainrot by listening to brat on repeat, I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about what makes someone or something sincere. And none of them are all that organized because I spent the past 12 hours crying (thanks, Father’s Day!!!!!!!).
I guess after talking with y’all about Jojo Siwa, it’s interesting to me that a pop star who has all the components of being a camp icon can’t be that because she isn’t real enough about her fakeness. While those who indulge artifice with real love (charli, julia fox, chappell roan) are accepted as good (real? acceptable? ??) pop performers. IDK. Can someone get me to stop writing about/thinking about Jojo Siwa? I feel like I’ve truly been cursed.
Let’s get on with the newsletter.
beach reading: cruel optimism by lauren berlant
If you’ve never read Affect Theory, you really should because THAT SHIT IS WILD. I do not live anywhere near a beach, but if I did, the book I would drag out there would undoubtedly be Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant, which remains my favorite book of all time. The one I think about almost constantly. The only good thing to come out of going to grad school, honestly.
Some background: Lauren Berlant was a feminist media scholar, cultural critic, and Scorpio who taught at UChicago from 1984 until they died in 2021 (RIP to the GOAT). The bulk of their work deals with how identity is shaped out of what we read and watch and emotionally react to (i.e. pop culture), which they saw as becoming increasingly subversive because in America we like to make stuff about the really intimate parts of our lives.
Cruel Optimsim is all about the idea that we form attachments to things (ideas, material objects, people, etc. etc. etc.) that we think will make our lives better in some way but, in reality, they make our lives much, much worse. As Berlant writes in the literal actual first sentence of the book: “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life…It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being.”
In fact, Berlant argues, attaching ourselves to the idea of “having a good life” at all often prevents us from actually having a good life.
I think girls inherently know all of this. Being a girl means that you are always aware of the ways that your desires will eventually undo you. Our situationships make our lives worse but we still desire them. Taco Bell makes our lives worse but we desire it. Vaping. Only eating a bagel and iced coffee. Hanging out on a rooftop with men you don’t know very well until 3 a.m. Pregnancy but also not having kids. I could go on.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that fuck a BookTok, Cruel Optimism is THE BOOK for Thought Daughters. It rests proudly on my shelf right in between the Julia Fox and Britney Spears memoirs. Does anyone wanna start a book club?
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obsessing: beatrice domond
I once was seeing a guy whose primary asset was a collection of skate videos on vhs tapes. Unfortunately, he was also a skateboarder, which should have been a red flag to me at the time, but the year was 2013 and what can you do.
I do not claim to know anything about the sport of skateboarding besides what I’ve learned from playing Tony Hawk Pro-Skater (very badly) and dating several guys with skateboards in my early 20s (which also went very badly). But I do know that I am a huge fan of Beatrice Domond, and not only because she put her elementary school photo on a deck.
Beatrice came up out of South Florida during the 2010s when she was a teenager, and spent the pandemic earning sponsorships from Vans, Supreme, Fucking Awesome, and many more. In addition to being effortlessly cool and retiring, Beatrice is also a fashion icon, a zinemaker, and a historian of her sport, frequently archiving forgotten or overlooked figures in skateboarding on her instagram.
Unfortunately, if you search Beatrice Domond on YouTube to try to find videos of her skateboarding, you’ll mostly get a deluge of shirtless (???) dudes sitting in front of their built-in computer cameras complaining about her. She’s too stylish, too self-assured, too cool for the “YouTube skateboarding commentator community” (which was not a genre of commentator I knew existed until writing this). Of course, many of these commentators think that the most important aspect of Beatrice’s career is the question: “But is she any good?”
I really can’t think of a more boring question.
remembering: The Scammer Girl Summer of 2023
If there’s one thing I love more than anything else, it is a girl grifter. And whenever Caroline Calloway crosses my mind, I am forced to spend 2 to 3 business days staring off into the abyss and thinking about her endless scam and wondering what it says about Our Culture. You know that really bad piece of writing advice women/girls often get: “have the confidence of a mediocre white man?” For me, I aspire to have the confidence of Caroline Calloway. She inspires me!
Caroline Calloway’s full lore is beyond the scope of this little newsletter, but if you’re interested, I highly recommend this nearly three-hour deep-dive courtesy of D’Angelo Wallace.
Here is an incomplete list of things CC has done that have garnered her both attention and derision: decided she wanted to be a memoirist because of Harry Potter; became one of the first writer it girl influencers (no one really gives her credit for this!!!) by documenting her time at Cambridge at length on her instagram; threw away a $500,000 book deal for a memoir that’s either called School Girl or And We Were Like because she couldn’t write it because she was addicted to Adderall (which seems like an addiction that would only help facilitate writing a lot of words); paid back her advance to her publishers via a combination of selling $165 “creative workshops” (dubbed a “one woman Fyre Fest”) and OnlyFans content; has been dubbed the Girl Scammer of our time and has kind of made that her brand, self-publishing a memoir called Scammer which you can only get through her website if you trust her with $65.
For me, CC is iconic because, in an age of debate about who is/what makes a Literary It Girl and whether or not Reading Is Dead (Cuz BookTok Girlies), she is the only writer I know who is famous for Not Writing the book she was supposed to write. And she continues to Not Really Write but make her brand one of Being a Writer Girl while she spends her days living a quieter life in the retiree city of Sarasota, FL “reading” (or having books piled around her condo), taking her cat to the beach, and trying to ensnare her Reddit trolls into heart-felt conversations over her iPhone speaker.
I love CC and I love her foil: her alleged ghostwriter, Natalie Beach. Maybe it’s cuz I myself am a ghostwriter by trade, but these two and their competing tales of who is The Real Caroline Calloway really spark my girly imagination. I love that one of these women is deeply committed to the lifestyle of writing while the other is committed to the idea that there is still truth in the age of social capital and clout. I eat that shit up.
Anyways, does anyone have a copy of Scammer that they want to let me borrow? I’d like to read it! Thought Daughter Book Club.
Ok my sweet angel girls! That’s all I have for you this week. Except that I also made you this brat inspired playlist so you can enjoy your brat summer even more! I love you so much! Thank you for reading!!!!!!!!!!!!
If Substack had existed 10 years ago that’s what Caroline Calloway would have used
here after your caroline calloway notice <3 but brilliant piece as always