November 25, 2025 Rereading On Private Dreams of Public People By Toye Oladinni Andy Warhol, 1967. New York World-Telegram and Sun photograph by Ed Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress collections, public domain. “I keep having horrible nightmares that blood is coming out of my mouth,” Candace Bushnell confessed to the dream analyst Lauren Lawrence in the early 2000s. Bushnell’s column Sex and the City was then the basis for one of prime time’s most popular shows. Through her alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw, Bushnell and her lifestyle were adored by millions. Lawrence didn’t interpret that dream in the way you or I might; her reading may have been colored by her own adulation. Terrifying? No: the dream is “hot and gutsy.” The gore pouring out Bushnell’s mouth is a blessing that means her writing is “pure and true” and, happily for her career, its nightly recurrence implies she will “never be drained of her creative juices.” This is all fantastic news but there’s one issue: The dream is obviously a nightmare. Lawrence never addresses Bushnell’s subconscious horror. As far as she’s concerned it might as well not exist. The dream is one of dozens collected in Lawrence’s 2002 coffee table book, Private Dreams of Public People. There’s a paradox here: once they are mass-published, of course, the dreams are no longer private, but the allure of the exposé is the compilation’s main selling point. Despite its origins in the phantasmagoric, Private Dreams follows a clear format. Each celebrity is placed into a category (“Society Dreamer,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Entrepreneurial Dreamer”). Each dream is followed by Lawrence’s analysis. Lawrence, who has a M.A. in psychology, built a career on public dream interpretation, as the dreams columnist for the New York Daily News and on an A&E show called Celebrity Nightmares Decoded. Lawrence solicited the dream entries directly from stars like Paris Hilton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Cyndi Lauper, Kate Moss, and the vice-presidential runner-up Joseph Lieberman. Donald Trump turned her down. (“I don’t have time to sleep let alone dream,” he says in the Declinations section. “I’m too busy building back my empire.”) To these she adds some dream descriptions clipped from Vogue, Elle, and, for Martin Luther King Jr., the History Channel. I was never quite clear on how Lawrence got close enough to America’s A-list to pull the book off, but a late, casual reference, in an analysis of one of her own dreams, to being “driven around town in my Rolls-Royce” and doing “substantive damage to my husband’s American Express card” fills in some of the blanks. In 2002, the list price of Private Dreams—now out of print—was thirty-five dollars, but in the introduction, Lawrence promises something priceless: The book will surpass the “paparazzi phallic lens … intent on mating with the intangible inner being of fame.” It will actually allow us to “get into bed with the celebrity mind and nestle with its glittery, klieg-lit unconsciousness.” Read More
November 24, 2025 Home Improvements My Illegal Revenge Pool By Lisa Carver Photographs courtesy of the author. I was married to a moody millionaire Parisian and I was trying to stay with him—I still loved certain things about him, and I loved everything about my stepchildren and the French way of life. But it was hard. My husband wanted to be who he was, and he wanted a happy wife. Not easy to have both at once! I did all these things—got on Zoloft, got a dog, went to spas and Belize and the opera—to make me so-o-o happy it would last through his tirades. He knew he was a monster—he was an honest man—so he did things to help too. He built a cabin outside our home in France for me to go be alone in to recover, and he gave me money to put down on a dilapidated hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old house in Pittsburgh for me to go be alone in and recover even farther away from him. Read More
November 20, 2025 First Person Postscript to an Open Marriage: On Lily Allen’s West End Girl By Jean Garnett Lily Allen. Photograph courtesy of Jean Garnett. “Who is Madeline?” asks my daughter. We’ve been singing that new Lily Allen song all morning—“Da da da da da da da who’s Madeline?”; we can’t get it out of our heads. How should I answer? Madeline seems to be a woman with whom the singer’s husband is having an affair? Then I’ll have to explain what an affair is. And wait, affair isn’t the word, since Allen and her husband had an open marriage, though the song tells us he’s “broken the rules” of their arrangement with Madeline … Anyway, I’m not going to try to explain nonmonogamy to a seven-year-old. By a stroke of genius, I hit on the right answer: “I don’t know.” My daughter seems to need no further clarification on the issue, but I’m realizing that I do, actually. That is, I want to understand why for some reason, despite Allen’s deft and amusing sketch of this Madeline person as a vacuous, woo-woo home-wrecker, I feel a certain sympathy with her. I care about Madeline, about her desires and her right to pursue them without being villainized. West End Girl, Lily Allen’s first album in seven years, is a pop marital memoir chronicling the dissolution of Allen’s partnership with the actor David Harbour in the wake of their agreement to try out nonmonogamy. I get why people are in raptures over this record. There’s a certain phoenix-from-the-ashes satisfaction in seeing a romantically wounded, no-longer-young woman artist explode back into the spotlight with a series of sexy, delectable bops: we love that for her. There’s the earworm indelibility of Allen’s tunes that has my kid humming them while brushing her teeth, the charm and humor of her lyrics, and the generosity of her voice, which confides in us like a friend: we love her for that. She’s very lovable. Does it follow that her husband, and his “Madeline,” must be hateable? Because, whether Allen intended it or not, that appears to be one takeaway here. West End Girl has been described approvingly as a revenge album, and the consensus among fans seems to be that Allen sure got Harbour’s ass good, that in the process of transmuting her pain into art she has served him a much-deserved pillorying. Remind me why he deserves this? It does sound from the lyrics like there was dishonesty on his part, but his original sin, in the story of Allen’s record, is that he open-marriaged her. Read More
November 19, 2025 History Chateaubriand, Writing of a Worthless Time By François-René de Chateaubriand Antoine-Jean-Baptiste Thomas, Louis XVIII Receiving the Duc d’Angoulême on His Return from the Spanish Campaign, December 2, 1823, 1823, oil on canvas, 30.1 x 42.7″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was born in Saint-Malo, on the northern coast of Brittany, the youngest son of an aristocratic family. After an isolated adolescence spent largely in his father’s castle, he moved to Paris not long before the French Revolution. In 1791, he sailed for America but quickly returned to his home country, where he was wounded as a counterrevolutionary soldier, and then emigrated to England. The novellas Atala and René, published shortly after his return to France in 1800, made him a literary celebrity and brought him to the attention of Napoleon—a leader whom he at first admired and then, once he saw the dark side of his despotism, came to despise and criticize in print. In the excerpts below, from the third volume of his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Chateaubriand recalls the arrival of yet another new political order in the form of the Bourbon Restoration. He had long advocated restoring the Bourbons to power, but the reality of their rule—above all the continued suppression of civil rights and government censorship of the free press—incurred Chateaubriand’s wrath. —Alex Andriesse CHANGING OF THE WORLD Paris, 1839 To descend from Bonaparte and the Empire into what followed is to descend from a mountain into an abyss. Didn’t everything end with Napoleon? Should I even speak of anything else? What character can be as interesting as he? Who and what are worth considering after such a man? Only Dante had the right to associate with the great poets he met in the regions of the other world. How can I be expected to speak of Louis XVIII in lieu of the emperor? I blush to think that I am now obliged to drone on about a throng of scrawny creatures, to whose species I belong—dubious nocturnal beings who played their parts on a stage from which broad daylight had fled. Read More
November 18, 2025 First Person Fights! By Scott McClanahan She was standing in the middle of the crowd. I looked at her once, and then I kept staring. I tried to see the other eyes in the room, green eyes, brown and blue, but I kept looking back at her. I looked, and she looked, and I moved toward her holding a plastic ring above her crooked fingers and hand. I thought, Somehow, I’ve conjured her. Or perhaps she’s conjured me. Then I saw one of her eyes was brown and her other eye was green, like a wild animal. So look into these eyes, and you’ll see what I saw that night. THE NEW WORLD. I pushed the plastic ring on her finger and the strange eyes shined. I saw the future. Read More
November 17, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Naomi Harris on “Telipinu went” By Naomi Harris šalḫanti-/šalḫiyanti- lexical filing card, with this paragraph from the Disappearance of Telipinu in the Chicago Hittite Dictionary. Courtesy of the author. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Naomi Harris’s translations of three Hittite poems appear in our new Fall issue, no. 253. Here, we asked Harris to reflect on her translation “Telipinu went.” The Hittites spoke an Indo-European language and ruled a major empire during the Late Bronze Age, in what is now Turkey. Their capital was multicultural and multilingual. Their language, which we call Hittite, they called Nešili, the language of Neša. “Telipinu went” translates a paragraph from the Hittite text that we call The Disappearance of Telipinu. The text was written in cuneiform script on a clay tablet, found at the Hittite capital Ḫattuša, near modern-day Boğazkale in Çorum, Türkiye. There are several versions, and it was copied again and again over the course of Hittite history; this one dates from about 1450–1350 B.C. “Telipinu went” is an extract from a longer manuscript. Can you tell us about that? In the full manuscript, the god Telipinu, son of the Stormgod, becomes angry and leaves, taking all the good things away with him. Famine and disaster ensue in both the mortal and divine realms. The waters, mountains, and woods dry up. Cows no longer recognize their calves. Ewes no longer recognize their lambs. The world is twisted and out of joint. No one can become pregnant, and those who are pregnant cannot give birth. The Sungod throws a party, and although the gods eat and drink as usual, they find that they are still hungry. When the Stormgod realizes that his son has left, the great gods and the small gods search everywhere for Telipinu but do not find him. The Sungod, host of the party, sends a swiftly flying eagle, but the eagle doesn’t find him. The Stormgod makes a pathetic effort to find his son and gives up far too quickly. Finally, the grandmother goddess, Ḫannaḫanna, sends a bee that finds Telipinu and stings him awake. The bee returns Telipinu, and they perform a ritual brimming with exquisite similes to remove his anger and reconcile him with the world again. Read More