On the one hand, her words are refreshingly real. She writes, “New York had encouraged a desire, already hard-wired, to be generally desired -by jobs and men and girls whose Instagram feeds made me sick with envy-while at the same time concealing what it was I desired.” (The cowboy husband even rubs the friend’s feet beneath a taxidermied elk head.) She realizes she doesn’t know exactly what she wants. Last year in New York magazine she wrote about a solo road trip, on which she hoped to learn a new kind of freedom and to shake off the persistent condition of “wanting to be wanted -accepted.” Instead, she was forced to confront a radiantly happy old friend who’d traded in life in East Coast publishing for a burly husband and a ranch in Wyoming. She’s been pursued by the question she asks in “All the Time I’ve Wasted:” “ Why not me?” I of course ended up Internet stalking her and found that she has, like me and like so many of us, long been dogged by the more anguished side of ambition: resentment, discontent. I don’t want to compete with Popkey, because in most ways my life is, in the parlance of the day, “blessed,” but also because I really love her writing. And that makes it hard to read articles like Popkey’s, and endless tweets by similar millennial women writers and creatives who seem mired in minor miseries.
#POPKEY SHUT DOWN FULL#
The commute and the full time job and the freelance jobs and the burdens of domesticity -well, they feel like a handicap. Via Quartz, I learned last week that motherhood is actually an “ efficiency hack” (which -whatthefuckever), so maybe that shouldn’t be a big deal. I also don’t have a husband-Popkey has written recently about her decision to don a bridal veil and, quite brilliantly, through a couple old novels newly reprinted by The New York Review Books, about the complicated stakes of being financially supported by her new spouse.īut I do have a couple of kids. I’m surely older than Popkey, and I don’t have bylines in any of the places she does: The New Yorker, The New Inquiry, the New Republic. After all, I’m in California, where (unless you’re Joan Didion) writerly endeavors go to die-or, more accurately, to become media startups, then “pivot,” then die. And I say it with what I feel to be a more compelling claim to envy than Popkey’s. Naturally, I say that from my own petty, envious, spiteful, self-doubting, nail-biting perch. In this piece, Miranda Popkey is a writer who’s kind of pretending not to be a writer.
#POPKEY SHUT DOWN MOVIE#
She’s not actually ugly -she’s a movie star pretending to be not a movie star. Most importantly, it’s one she’ll profit from. Then again, that enactment of ugliness is one she herself engineered, or was complicit in engineering. Yes, in so doing, she allows herself to be represented in an unflattering light, and submits herself in that unflattering light to public scrutiny. It feels almost like the quote-unquote-bravery of the ingenue who’s willing to gain weight or go without makeup for a role. It’s also brave, although I’d put that quality in quotations. It’s sad, but it’s one of those unflinching, self-deprecating, and really funny pieces that make you smirk and issue micro-exhalations of over-identification every third line or so. It’s an honest, disconcerting dispatch from the hot bundle of synapses in our brains where it seems we exist only to hate each other, and of course, by constant comparison, ourselves. It’s about how difficult it is to metabolize their success, their beauty, their Instagram feeds, and the pain of reckoning not only with the fact that other writers are publishing better things (though she says that’s also true), but that “whatever I publish, I remain the person whose dresser is covered in dust and detritus and whose jeans are coming apart at the crotch, the person who writes in bed and bites her fingernails and hasn’t showered in days.” Popkey’s essay is about envy -specifically of other writers, but more generally of other women. I wrote “stop what you’re doing and read this.” Ninety seconds later my bff wrote back “oh shit but i’m working on my book proposal. I hadn’t even finished reading Miranda Popkey’s piece, “All the Time I’ve Wasted Watching the Better Versions of Me,” when I copied and pasted the link into a text to my best friend.
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