The PleasureOf

Dear readers, Perhaps the pleasure was always the problem? While I still believe deeply in the subversive power of pursuing our pleasure, especially as women, and especially in the face of so many assaults on our bodies and liberties, it has felt harder and harder, over the years, to keep this notion front of mind. To lead with it in this newsletter, without caveats or asterisks or parentheticals (three of my many, many writerly tics*) *as you (of course) know. So, I’m shaking it up.

The Paris grey set in on Tuesday, and it didn’t lift, even a glimmer, until the weekend. No rain, no sun, just a sullen weight, the world huddled in brace position. Pathetic fallacy. My kid is coughing at night like a tubercular heiress, but all the 4am Googles tell me it’s probably fine, and anyway, we can take him to the doctor without waiting for weeks or paying some unspecified amount of money. Small mercies.

It’s already too chilly for t-shirts but I can’t remember where I stashed the kid’s sweaters, or if any still fit: welcome to September, the too-late-and-too-soon month. Welcome, readers—new and seasoned, expectant and jaded, strangers and friends—to a sporadic (but optimistic) newsletter that fiercely resists actual news but will occasionally share ~important updates~ like, it’s time to make the New York Times’s Plum Torte, posthaste. Forthwith.

Dear friends, I'm writing from London, where we're staying with my family until the new year. After that, we're moving (to Paris!!!), the enormous logistical challenge of which is one major reason I've let this letter slide. But new years are new starts, and I am excited to be back with a regular schedule in 2023, including what I hope is a truly grotesque array of croissant and architecture content.

Dear friends, Did I mention I wrote a book? In case you hadn’t heard, Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism is out in the world—and a bookstore near you—today, June 7.

It is hard to talk about pleasures this howling week. You don’t need me to be yet another person urging you (Americans) to call your senators and sign petitions and send money to Everytown and Sandy Hook Promise. Do this, of course, if you can. But in between crying jags in the kitchen I have needed this week to remind myself that devoting attention to horror is not, by itself, a moral act.

First up! Two EVENTS on the horizon! If you are in New York, I would be delighted to see you at either one. On Tuesday June 7, the day the book comes out, a launch party at Astoria Bookshop with Sarah Gordon, my dear friend and co-conspirator for the OG Hotbed, the exhibition that inspired the book. On Tuesday June 14, I’m in conversation with the brilliant historian Alexis Coe at McNally Jackson (Seaport branch). 7pm start for both.

It’s been a week of extremes, celebrations and exhaustion. Sunday was Mother’s Day, followed by the ten-year anniversary of our legal wedding, which we marked with pulled-pork sandwiches and daytime margaritas at a cute Hawaiian place in our neighborhood, plus the arrival of a box of finished books. Here I am pulling a silly face while showing off the truly excellent spine. Don’t you want THIS on your shelf?

Friends, it has been a long, long road. It appears I last wrote to you in December 2020, then allegedly there was a year 2021, and now, damn, it’s May. You know because it’s raining. Actually that’s a little unfair, we’ve had some blazingly beautiful days, including last weekend when we took the little peanut—who is now a vocal toddler stretching out into a kid before our eyes—over to Hoboken.