Everything Is Copy
Hello, since I last wrote I bought a condo, moved, and even got Covid. I also visited my parents and their new puppy in Nantucket, socialized at breweries and brunches and my new pool, and spent redacted amounts on summer tomatoes at the farmers market. The one thing I haven’t been doing is writing—or even thinking really. And it’s bothered me.
It wasn’t just the writing that was gone. I could barely read or even watch more than a TikTok—or 200. I even set my own personal pizza challenge like libraries did when we were kids—read X number of books each month and get an Italian food reward—but almost three months in and I've only hit one of my goals. I was disappointed in myself. This went beyond productivity culture. Who was I without this brain that thinks and connects and creates?
I didn’t fully understand what was going on until I saw B.J. Novak’s directorial debut, Vengeance, which he also wrote and starred in. Novak plays Ben, a New Yorker writer who wants to break into podcasts. Unfortunately, all he has is ideas and no real story, notes his producer Eloise (Issa Rae in a swoon worthy apartment). Then he gets a call from Ty (the seemingly ubiquitous Boyd Holbrook), the brother of a woman named Abilene he hooked up with a few times but she considered her boyfriend. Abilene is dead, and Ty guilt trips Ben into attending the funeral in rural West Texas. Ben learns everyone assumed Abilene overdosed on opioids, but Ty suspects it was a murder and wants Ben to help solve it. This is absurd but also Ben’s shot at making a classic true crime podcast, which he pitches to Eloise as a search for American myths and titles “Dead White Girl.”
Vengeance is, of course, a satire full laugh-out-loud one-liners and a fun mystery at its core. But it’s also a movie about the stories we tell ourselves and the very act of narrative-making that can both make sense of the world and also distance us from it. Ben is a parody of a liberal New York journalist down to the plaid shirts, pour-overs, and pretension. He’s the type of fake intellectual who will give a condescending explanation of the Chekov’s gun theory, which one of Abilene’s sisters contradicts by noting there are rarely guns in Chekov plays, and then admit he’s never read Chekov. Ben knows he is an ideas guy, not a people person. In fact, he brags he is good at connecting disparate concepts and weaving them into a theory. It sounds pompous because it is, but it’s what most of my favorite podcasts do and what anyone who is a writer does. We see the world as a web of ideas only we can explain, but in order to see the web, we can’t be directly in it.
Ben is detached almost as a personality trait, hooking up with women instead of settling down. Of course he is able to drop his whole life to record a podcast across the country for a month. He doesn’t stop to think about how weird that is and just chases the story, pitching it to Eloise with a This American Life–worthy intro just minutes after Ty tells him they must avenge Abilene. He records every "authentic" interaction with Abilene’s family and also contrives them by asking inane questions like why they love Whataburger. Sure, he’s getting great content with some real characters, but it’s all a performance. Having Eloise pull selects from his raw audio shows the storytelling process in action. He’s never just living but creating, and what he creates is always shifting. Is it a story about a dating app addict going to a funeral for a woman he had saved in his phone as “Abilene Texas,” or is it the story of people’s obsession with making up myths like murder instead of admitting the reality of addiction, or maybe it’s an actual murder? Maybe the answer is all the above, and we watch Ben brute force the narrative he wants so hard that he misses some of the most obvious clues.
While watching, my brain got that familiar headachey feeling when I’m starting to connect ideas myself. I knew as I was watching I would write a newsletter about this movie, and my gears were turning on what it would say just like Ben was revising his podcast intros and outros. At one point, I had to remind myself to watch the god damn movie for what it was instead of what I wanted to make it mean. But it was hard to stop once my brain felt turned on, and I left the theater itching to write in a way I hadn’t in months. I take Saturdays off from writing of any kind, but I wrote most of this newsletter on my phone before dinner plans as a way to cheat my creative Shabbat.
It was exciting to feel my synapses firing again with something to say I wouldn’t figure out until I started typing. That feeling is a little addictive, frenzied, and like chasing a comet. It’s why Ben goes from trying to hang up on grieving Ty to moving in with his family just for a story. We're looking for the money quote. If journalists weren’t imbuing their sense of narrative on everything, then robots would conduct our interviews for us; instead I find the idea of someone reading one of my interview transcripts to be one of the most vulnerable things possible because only I can really make sense of how I asked the questions and what structure I see let alone make a coherent point out of it. Even when I’ve produced videos for work, something I know nothing about the technical aspects of editing, I’m still the one that’s turning it into a cohesive narrative. That’s a skill but also a problem sometimes.
I’ve been too busy actually living my life and not processing it as much for once. Because that’s the thing. When you’re really writing, you have to remove yourself from life a bit—both literally as you hide away indoors tapping on your keyboard but also emotionally as you view every moment as inspiration, every joke as a line for your next book, and every experience as something you could maybe write about. As Nora Ephron said, “Everything is copy.”
One of my friends said he couldn’t wait to read my newsletters on the real estate process, but I still don’t know what I’m going to say about that. I’m trying to live my life more in actual moments than thinking of the tweet or Instagram caption that would accompany them. And it’s hard to be that present for your daily life when you’re so used to mining it for stories. But it’s something I’ve actively worked on through therapy, meditation, and Prozac. It’s not a failure I can’t exploit it for content immediately. I know I will eventually. After all, I’m a writer. Just sometimes I have to be a person first.
Air-fried Peaches
I got an air fryer recently and have been enjoying experimenting, like this recipe I found on Good Food Baddie (look, I didn't name this blog; I just did a google) for "grilled peaches" with a delicious cinnamon compound butter. They're a quick, sweet snack that's just decadent enough but not over the top—add ice cream at your own peril. If you don't have an air fryer, remember they're just tiny convection ovens.
Ingredients
1 peach
1 Tbs. butter
1 Tbs. brown sugar
Dash or two of cinnamon
Olive oil
Directions
1. Preheat the air fryer to 350 F for 3 minutes.
2. Combine the butter, cinnamon, and sugar in a small bowl.
3. Cut the peaches in half and remove the pits.
4. Brush the cut side of the peaches with olive oil and place skin side down in the air fryer.
5. Air fry for 5 mins.
6. Add a spoonful of the butter mixture into the peaches.
7. Air fry for an additional 5-6 mins, until the peaches are caramelized on top.
Tess Recommends:
-In case it wasn't obvious, I loved Vengeance. I didn't know much about the film going in other than it was a satire of true crime podcasts, but it's funny yet moving with some fun surprises like a hilarious cameo from John Mayer and a truly fantastic Ashton Kutcher, whose character is like a weaponized form of Father John Misty.