The Paris Review

My name wasn’t on the list. When I told her I was with The Paris Review, the woman in charge gave a can’t-be-bothered shrug and stuck me on the red carpet between a correspondent from the socialite party blog Guest of a Guest and a reporter from The New York Daily News. The two were in deep discussion about a monthly gathering for gay men over six foot two.

“The Tall Gay Agenda, you’ve seriously never heard of it?”

“But I would never get in—I’m only 5'9''!

“It’s not just for tall gays, it’s in celebration of. Admirers are welcome!”

I was eavesdropping hard, announcing my dorky heterosexuality by wearing a backpack, revealing my red-carpet naïveté by not carrying a recording device and mumbling the name of my publication.

“Shouldn’t you be, like, hanging out with The Observer or something?”

The occasion was a screening and gala to celebrate Lilyhammer, a quirky new series starring Steven “Little Stevie” Van Zandt (of Sopranos and E Street Band fame). Stevie plays a former New York mobster removed to rural Norway after ratting out his boss and joining the Witness Protection Program. The show, which premiers today through Netflix’s Play at Home streaming service, is the company’s first foray into original programming.

Prophetic bloggers have buzzed about the inevitability of this move for years: Netflix is coming, and the masters of pay cable are terrified. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I streamed the whole thing. Read More »

I’m a Reagan baby, a product of recession, later reared in the economically secure Clinton nineties, in a McMansioned suburb of the Eastern Seaboard. Our athletes—statuesque Celtics and  sinewy Red Sox—were billboarded, televised, and extra-life-sized for us to admire as we turned into populist fist-pumpers in the soft reflection of our screens.

My own sports career ended at fifteen, soon after my discoveries of breasts and marijuana—plus, my post-pubic body’s physiological rejection of the command, “Run laps.” I attended a large public high school known for its high rate of acceptance into Harvard and for its unattractive cheerleaders. Once, at a basketball game, a rival school’s fans chanted “Who Let the Dogs Out” when our Lady-Lions took the court.

Still, one makes do. When it comes to social strata in American public schools, life has no choice but to imitate, if not art, then at least John Hughes movies. Our football players held the top position in the high school hierarchy. They wore jerseys over ties on game day, took Creatine, shotgunned beers, spoke with put-on Boston accents. Sensitive stoners like me hung girl-less at the edge of the party, colluding in the mass self-delusion that this was a football team, that this was a party.

I watched Friday Night Lights for the first time four years ago in my New York apartment, bedridden by the idiocy of avoiding a flu shot. Some cable channel had the first season on marathon so that sick boys like myself could feel the pull of pigskin, forget our ailing, gene-weak bodies amidst the rush of Panther pride and the belief that no woman in a million years will ever out-MILF Ms. Tami Taylor, aka Mrs. Coach, the strong-willed and substantially cleavaged matriarch at the heart of the show.

Which is all to say: When I lie in bed at night and imagine white-bearded God making his earthly presence known at the foot of my futon, he asks, “And what is your deepest desire, young man?” I say, “Lord of all things, king of the universe, purveyor of rain, and pain, and occasional love, would you be so kind as to turn me into Tim Riggins?”

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All teenage girls are at least half-lesbian, always admiring their friends’ still-shifting bodies, their superior wardrobes, their make-up application expertise, their better luck with the opposite sex. Teenage girls curl up together like newborn puppies, painting one another’s toes as if they were licking one another’s ears. If you sit long enough in any Starbucks, or loiter outside any high school, you will see girls climbing onto one another’s laps, kissing on the lips. They aren’t hitting on each other, not precisely, though they are in a constant state of arousal that borders on the insane. No other love is like the love of a teenage girl, all passion and fire and endless devotion—at least for a week.

There are many painful, moving stories about female friendship out there—Amy Hempel’s In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried, Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty, Thelma and Louise—but even the most beautiful stories about teenage girls fail to capture the obsessive, all-encompassing infatuations I remember. That is, all except one: My So-Called Life. It began on the air in August 1994, the summer before my freshman year of high school, and it was as if someone had placed a mirror inside my bedroom and broadcast it on television. I was Angela Chase, more so than everyone else who was sure that they were Angela Chase. I was a freshman in high school and deeply in love with every doe-eyed boy at my school. I parted my hair in the middle and wore a choker made of string. I got pimples, cried for no reason, and (once Angela introduced them to me, I will admit) danced around my room to the Violent Femmes. And like Angela, I had my Rayannes. Because, of course, Jordan Catalano was not the most intoxicating character to roam the halls of Liberty High, no matter how prettily formed his mouth and eyebrows. That distinct honor belonged squarely to Rayanne Graff, Angela’s new best friend and erstwhile corrupter.

The show told the story of Angela Chase, a normal-looking girl from a middle-class family. She had an annoying younger sister who craved attention and parents who cared if she was out too late. Rayanne, her new friend, took drugs and had a bad (and likely well-earned) reputation. The show tried to focus elsewhere—on Angela’s gay friend, Ricky; her dorky neighbor, Brian Krakow; and, most often, on the obscene beauty of Jared Leto as Jordan Catalano—but the camera always came back to the tempestuous, obsessive friendship between Angela and Rayanne. I was riveted.

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Heather Havrilesky’s uniquely endearing voice—always witty, often self-deprecating—has been delighting and enlightening online readers since 1995, when she cocreated the weekly Filler column for Suck.com. At Salon, where she was a television critic for seven years before recently making the jump to new iPad newspaper The Daily, her incisive columns reflected on the ways in which television mirrors its audience—and she managed to be funny. In the recently published essay collection, Disaster Preparedness, Havrilesky takes her own life as the subject, examining scenes of trauma—losing her virginity, her parents' divorce, her father's death—with brutal honesty, a sense of humor, and a willingness to forgive. She spoke to me recently from her home in Los Angeles.

The book is called Disaster Preparedness, and each of the chapters deals with some kind of problem or disaster. How did you decide to organize the book around this particular theme?

I had written an essay for All Things Considered about planning with my sister some way of dealing with catastrophes, probably as a result of seeing too many disaster movies. And I started looking at that essay (which is now my introduction) and saying, What does it mean that we had all this preemptive defensive stance toward the unknown?

I also have an appetite for the most humiliating, sad—to some people depressing—dark stories from my own childhood. Maybe it’s because I’m screwed up, but those are the stories that I love the most, that I think are the most sort of delightful to read in anyone else’s memoir or book of essays. Those were the stories I remembered the best, too. And I had a lot of fun with that kind of dark stuff. Certainly there were times when I leaned into the emotional core of it. I mean, I didn’t want it to be a cavalier take on the past. I really wanted it to be an honest attempt to look at the things that happened to me and how they affected me and how my perspective now is different from what it was when these things happened. I learned a lot through that process.

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The final installment of a five-part story. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

Sometimes my friends tell me I should get high and go on TV. They say it might blow my mind—to reach a twisted reality as I act out a fake me on a made-up television set, looking through altered eyes into a camera that projects me through little boxes into living rooms all over Nashville.

“It’d be a crazy trip, man.”

“Too crazy,” I say. “I don’t think I could handle it.”

I’m content to get high quietly, mostly alone. Lots of my friends are in it for the party, to take their acid and lose their clothes, run around like rednecks, doing cartwheels and staring at tracers.

But I try to take it seriously. I read a little Timothy Leary, feel like I’m some psychedelic pioneer working through important, meaningful, universal things in my own spinning mind. I feel, in fact, like I’m finally reaching the real me, walking through the wardrobe and discovering the acid-drenched Narnia that was there all along. Some nights I feel like I might be the king of the whole damn place.

It's just that the paranoia grows, too. Everywhere I go, every gas station or shopping mall or skate park, people start whispering, "Hey, that’s the Kids Club dude." I’m never sure if they’ll want to fist fight or ask for my autograph.

I project a vivacious, wholesome, ridiculous me to a few hundred thousand viewers every day. And as soon as the cameras click off, I use my earnings to buy a hundred, a thousand chemical portals, highs and trips and all kinds of pills to creep further and further into myself—to the only place where I can close my eyes and feel peace.
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Part four of a five-part story. Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Hillbilly Jim lumbers into the studio wearing sunglasses.

I am on time this time. Early, even. Because I’ve been briefed I say, “Hi Mr. Morris. I’m Josh.”

His hand engulfs mine, pumps up and down. He is massive. Six-foot-seven, broad shouldered, and suspiciously orange.

“Howdy,” he says. “Good to meetcha.”

I am meeting Hillbilly Jim. This is real. I have note cards to tell me which questions I’m supposed to ask. They are stacked up in my hand, which is sweating profusely.

Hillbilly Jim has lost his shirt and is now clothed simply in denim overalls. He sits in a folding chair in front of me. There are lights all around, heat slapping us from a hundred directions, illuminating our faces, Hillbilly’s unnaturally tan, mine ghost white beneath all the makeup.

Action!

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