Sunday Shit Talk: Some Great Reads

When creatively constipated, the best laxative is a little inspo from your peers.

Happy Equinox/Mabon/Sunday, bitchez!

Did you get a look at that full moon this week? As the kids are wont to say, it was, “fire!”

When I’m feeling creatively constipated (it happens to the best of us!), or the demands of everyday life FCK with my writing time, I take the hint and just bask in the work of other writers. We are all receptive and active, right? We are all yin and yang. In the quest for feeling some semblance of balance in this wily, wild world, I find it helps to toggle between the offerings we make and the offerings we consume. It’s one thing to be a human content farm, (I’ve earned my living as one for a very, very, very long time) it’s quite another to dig deep and use your own unique voice in channeling a universal truth about the human condition that will resonate with others. The way a writer learns best is by reading, with the goal of honing each skill to the point that one inspires—but doesn’t inform—the other.

And man, was this week a treasure trove of delights! Here are a just few. Let me know which of these plucked on the ol’ heartstrings in the comments.

“The Prince We Never Knew,” an exhaustively written and painstakingly reported (it took a year and a half!) New York Times Magazine feature by Sasha Weiss, digs deep into Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — “a cursed masterpiece that the public may never be allowed to see.” He’s depicted objectively—not just as a musical deity but as a flawed human being, a byproduct of how hurt people hurt people. For all the arpeggios he coated in purple glitter, Prince was an indisputably brilliant artist who channelled both the emotional pain of a very difficult upbringing, and the physical pain of FCKNG up his hips (I’ll never understand why he didn’t just get the damn hip replacement—it really wasn’t so bad) into art that really should live on forever.

Here’s a snippet:

“Like most Americans who grew up in the 1980s, I had an image of Prince emblazoned in my mind: wonderfully strange; a gender-bending, dreamy master of funk. He flouted and floated above all categories and gave permission to generations of kids to do the same. Edelman’s film deepened those impressions, while at the same time removing Prince’s many veils. This creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity, I now saw, was also dark, vindictive and sad. This artist who liberated so many could be pathologically controlled and controlling. The film is sometimes uncomfortable to watch. But then, always, there is relief: the miracle of Prince’s music — a release for me and a release, above all, for Prince.”

BOOM.

My pal, the essayist Tara Ellison, wrote a brutally honest essay about her tumultuous, competitive relationship with her mom for The Cut. Her mother, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, is on the wane and, in the writing, Ellison successfully grapples with their dysfunctional dynamic and how it deeply affected her.

A little taste: “The thing is, I still want my mother. Inside I’m still that 14-year-old girl trying to get her to love me. I long to experience a mother-daughter bond and, unreasonably, keep trying to construct it. I know it doesn’t exist. The sort of reckoning or acceptance I’m yearning for can never happen. But it’s clear that I have to let her go now, and my mother-hunger has to go, too.”

AMEN.

In music reverence writing,

Robert Burke Warren

’s Showfolk Substack offers readers a rich tapestry of artist-on-artist meditations, with many examples of how to write lovingly about your heroes. His most recent post, “On This Broken Hill…” goes deep into why he considers Leonard Cohen his hero and rabbi, examining his stamina as a performer, and how Cohen’s dedication to his artistry still serves as a floodlight for us all.

“As my life has played out, Leonard’s work has helped me with excruciating loss, feeling mean, being betrayed, betraying, making amends, and, if not making peace, recognizing the road to reconciliation. His ability to crystallize moments of beauty improved my ability to do the same. He made me less afraid of death, but more importantly, intermittently less afraid of getting older.

He was always the coolest guy in the room, age be damned.”

WORD.

To end, writer Lauren DePino wrote a gorgeous essay about singing at funerals and what that taught her about grief in the New York Times Letter of Recommendation column. So many passages in this piece beautifully articulated so many things I’ve felt about the catharsis of singing, myself. I was blown away:

“But as I grew older, I better understood how singing empowers us, at least fleetingly, to ease the terror of loss. The more I sang at funerals, the performances reinforced the notion that grief is an energy that wants to move through the body, and in our loss-avoidant culture, we’re prone to fight against it. Singing not only helps allow for this process but it alchemizes what grief can become. Who hasn’t felt a shiver of cosmic belonging when standing among other grievers crooning “Amazing Grace”? While singing, it’s as if that vague, amorphous homesickness we bear ebbs away.”

BRA-VO.

On the tip of reading some excellent material, keep your eyes peeled on MUTHR, FCKD for some powerful author interviews to come super soon. Free subscribers always get to savor the tip but supporting my work here with a paid subscription (less than a New York latte!) will give you access to the full monty, monthly playlists, and comme de juste, my undying gratitude.

xx

MF