Denial Ain’t Just a River in Egypt
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We’re here to reclaim the “women’s magazine.” Every week, two veteran editors read it ALL to bring you everything we believe women’s media should be: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, hot goss, and the odd shopping tip—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
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Spreadertines,
It’s been a long three weeks since we last met, which we mostly spent celebrating Jesus and Maggie (both born on December 25); ranking all parties involved in the Lively-Baldoni atrocity on a ten-point scale of awfulness; and forking over the last of our savings to babysitters so that we could at least embrace the reason for the season: cinema! On Sunday, despite being preoccupied by the fact that two of the year’s biggest films involve A-list actresses fantasizing about being dogs—how is this a thing?—we dutifully suited up (since seeing A Complete Unknown, Rachel has been exclusively dressing like a momified version of early sixties Dylan; she’s even considering a red button-down) and headed to the Beverly Hilton for Hollywood’s second-biggest night.
Once we had settled in at our table, though, we couldn’t shake an…Unsettling Vibe. (And no, Unsettling Vibe is not our new pet name for Kylie Jenner, though now that you say it...) Here was a roomful of women who have liberally partaken of some kinda Substance, who knows, applauding a movie about how women in Hollywood—women in everywhere—have to shoot themselves up with a substance to stay relevant and worthy. With Hollywood’s lack of irony on full display, it was “funny” to look out over that ballroom and realize just how little The Substance’s message had landed (and yes we know Nikki called it, but even that joke produced mild laughter and then… nothingness). We’re all for Demi’s win—one helluva speech—but we couldn’t get over how much she resembled Elisabeth Sparkle in her early “on” weeks: a 62-year-old who looks 42 on her worst day. Somehow the movie that was about the impossibility of Hollywood beauty standards only serves to uphold those same standards, indiscernible from the “popcorn movies” Demi long believed herself relegated to? (To our chagrin, Monstro Elisasue made not even a cameo at the GGs.) Meanwhile, to our left—and blocking our view of the action with that epic strawberry-blonde fall—was Nicole Kidman, who, at 57, has the bod of a prepubescent boy or, perhaps we should say, of a Babygirl. (We’re loathe to disagree with goddess
, but the movie does—admirably—go to great lengths to comment on Nicole’s “youthful” looks, including a syringe-to-the-face scene and a comment from her onscreen daughter—played by a bananas-charismatic Esther McGregor, nepobaby of Ewan—about how she looks like a freaky amphibian. The camera also spends an inordinate amount of time zooming in on her hands. These, at least, look sort of 57.)Good news on the Human Lady Bod Beat™: Two movies this year knocked us out with A-listers who resembled actual human women of their characters’ purported age. The first was Kate Winslet, who onscreen probably looked even a little older than the titular Lee (Miller) would have been when she was reporting on the front lines of WWII in 1939—and just as naked. (That said, while in the bathroom line we did not tell Kate we thought getting nude onscreen at her age is brave—she shut that down in this podcast we reported on a few months back.) Then there was Amy Adams, earning our undying love by Bringing It, with all the crinkled eyes and frizzed-out hair and rounded, rumpled dimensions and six extra nipples that come from years of momposting one’s child’s leftover chicken nuggies. Bless her.
Welcome back, Spreaders. Let’s get to it, shall we?
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. All jokes aside, we are of course glued to coverage of the terrifying California wildfires. Tonight we are thinking of our readers on the best Coast, and their loved ones.
PPS: Shout-out to our friend
whose new, nicely titled Soft Power newsletter is storming the beauty “space.” Check her out.
Pregnant Without Pausing
Has anyone ever assigned
an essay about watching paint dry? We’d read it. For the New York Times, she wrote about a similar experience: being pregnant. We enjoyed every word but not because we saw ourselves in the piece. On the contrary, her experience of pregnancy and your Spreaditors’ experience have only about two percent overlap. (That two percent would be anxiety-induced insomnia and, y’know, the baby part.) Young spent her pregnancy acquiring boatloads of vintage medical pamphlets for expectant mothers and studying hypergraphia, a mania that compels one to write constantly and uncontrollably—and that she to some degree experienced before her baby was born.Read “Pregnant With One Child and 295,233 Words” here.
The Most Incredible (Not Edible) Eggs
In an ASME-bait package if ever we’ve seen one, Bloomberg Businessweek tackles the global human-egg industry. It’s a 31-part behemoth full of wildly intimate profiles of women—mostly “donors” who sell their eggs for a range of sums and reasons, and one woman whose eggs were stolen and sold—from around the world, plus explainers that get into the weeds on the technology and the business. The reporting is, at times, jaw-dropping and leaves no stone (follicle?) unturned. We winced, we cried, we sighed.
Read “The Egg” here and via AppleNews here.
“The problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be.”
Romantasy, it turns out, is not just the name for the he’s-just-not-that-into-you situationships of our twenties—or something Ben Affleck shouts when he orgasms—but rather a monster publishing genre that solidified during the pandemic. Its basic formula: YA tropes plus explicit sex. Its two biggest stars, Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses) and Rebecca Yarros (The Fourth Wing), between them, wrote five of the ten top-selling books of 2024. Yes, you read that right. Katy Waldman introduces us to an unpublished author, Lynne Freeman, who has spent several hundred thousand dollars suing Crave series author Tracy Wolff1—and Freeman’s own former literary agent—for copycatting a manuscript she tried to publish 10 years ago, a crime that is exceedingly hard to prove in a genre in which everything is intentionally a whole lot like everything else. Waldman’s story is really a deeply reported and juicy portrait of a very odd industry, one in which the “lightly transgressive” vampires and werewolves and tormented teens of Twilight are still hot sellers, and where “werewolf sex” is but a broad subgenre that includes sundry micro-tropes. Maybe it’s bounty-hunter werewolves that really get you going? Or perhaps you’re more of a space werewolf gal? This thing is packed with great info but, Katy, one follow-up: How much dough are these writers raking in? Asking for a friend with a beginner’s knowledge of ChaptGPT.
Read “Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?” here.
Self-Improvement Is So Last Century
It’s time for another favorite Spread subgenre: anti-“new year, new you” stories that subvert the fix-it ethos (often about diet, but also cooking! Style! Organization!) that long dominated women’s media come January. Call these don’t-fix-it stories or, in the current Oprah/Mel parlance, “let them!” articles: “Struggle care” therapist/author/TikTok-er KC Davis isn’t the only newfangled influencer to question our Marie Kondo mentality, but inviting a New York Times photographer into your home to prove that “My House is Messy and I Don’t Feel Bad About It” does take it to a new level.2 Does Davis’ “don’t sweat the small stuff” ethos (small meaning crumbs, socks, art supplies…) spark joy? Or does it make your eyelid twitch? Less spiritually taxing and, we’re betting, almost universally relatable—especially to those in the swath of the country who, like Rachel, are on SNOW DAY #THREE—is Rachel Sugar in the Atlantic, calling BS on meal kits and the like: The daily dinner slog is a hopeless, unsolvable, mind-numbing task that will never, ever get better. Stop looking for a solution. We found the honesty bracing.
Check out KC’s crib here. Then tell us how it really makes you feel in the comments below.
Read “You’ll Never Get off the Dinner Treadmill” here.
“Memories of my 4-year stint working the strip club in 6-inch heels and string bikinis come flooding back.”
In Angel Food Magazine, Marla Cruz attempts to answer a question that occurred to us while watching Mikey Madison flick her Demi-esque mane (and little else) in Sean Baker’s Anora: What do real strippers and sex workers think of this? The movie got props for hiring some IRL sex workers as actors. Still, Cruz is not a fan. Her complaint is less with the realism of the world Baker portrays than with Ani’s seemingly unconflicted relationship with her job and her customers: stripping, Cruz writes, is not something a woman does as “herself,” but as a persona—with a pseudonym. Anora misses an essential tension “between the laborer and the consumer.” Cruz raises questions about a detail that mostly bypassed us (perhaps because we are heavily pro-Madison Better Things-ers around here): For those keeping count, this is Baker’s fourth film in ten years that revolves around sex workers. Huh. Chew on that with Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson, who dove into the topic here, back in October.
Read “Romance Labor” here.
Will the real beauty influencers please stand up?
Maybe it’s the Golden Globes of it all, but we spent some quality time staring at Fast Company’s portraits of the women who made your 11-year-old niece beg for that $89 anti-aging cream for Christmas—i.e., the female leadership team of Sephora North America. Think about it: While these execs have clearly chosen not to make themselves look insane, they do have Planet Earth’s full anti-aging arsenal at their disposal. Try to pretend you’re not curious what that could do for a “real” non-celebrity human. The article reveals the lengths to which beauty brands go to woo and appease these queenmakers—shaping and reshaping new product launches, taglines, social media campaigns, packaging, ads, and even the whole top-to-bottom identity of their brand around Sephora’s data-driven directives.
Read it here.
What if mouthing the words from the green room just comes naturally!?
If there’s such a thing as a nutritious dessert, that’s the metaphor we’re reaching for to describe writer Lauren Hilgers’s delicious-yet-wise New York story about parenting from within New York City’s competitive kid-theater scene. You’ve read versions of this story before; they’re usually about ambitious parents with ambitious kids who aim their shared drive toward competitive sports or, in some cases, mastering a musical instrument. But here we’re talking Broadway, baby! Which makes this one all the more fun—funny, too. It’s also extremely on the money about what it’s like to be an “intentional” millennial parent who believes in supporting your children’s passions (and believes they shouldn’t spend their days on screens). “The stage parents of our popular imagination are people who have lost something, somewhere, and are striving to regrasp it through their children,” Hilgers writes. “But where the stage parent might, in past generations, have been considered a little too striving, the logic of modern parenting offers a kind of permission unavailable to Ethel Gumm. Millennial parents are constantly assessing our children to find the shape of them, gauging their passions for gymnastics, art, or, say, personal finance. We exist in the long tail of helicopter parenting and are practiced experience givers, doling out memories and skills as mindfully as possible.” Hilgers reports the story at the same time that she herself is getting swept up in the kiddie corner of the acting world, which lends a hilarious, wide-eyed humility to the piece. The kicker may even make you cheer.
Read “Life As a Millennial Stage Mom” here.
She’s Starting With the Woman in the Mirror (Oh)
Noted teen sage Mary Anne Spier—best friend to Kristy Thomas, eventual stepsister to Dawn Schafer, sweetheart of Logan Bruno—once marveled at how one can memorize one’s friends’ faces, but can never fully know what her own face looks like, unless she’s looking directly in the mirror. (We would quote this august text but it was not easily surfaced upon a quick Google; thanks for taking our word for it.) In “My Face,” Melissa Febos, author of the award-winning blockbuster Girlhood, reckons with the same concept—from the perch of middle age, and in the significantly higher-brow venue of the Yale Review. In a tight 1,000 words, she analyzes her use of snail mucin, Botox, and red light masks, against the vanity of her past and present. Melissa: Welcome to the wide world of beauty writing! We’re so glad you’re here.
Read it here.
Did we somehow miss the Georgina Chapman rehabilitation press tour?
In New York’s topless cover story on Adrien Brody (somebody get that man some chicken nuggies!) writer E. Alex Jung gets some solid secondary quotes from Brody’s girlfriend Georgina Chapman, who also got a major shoutout from Brody after his Golden Globes win.3 Georgina Chapman? Yes, that Georgina Chapman. Harvey Weinstein’s ex-wife Georgina Chapman. Half of Marchesa Georgina Chapman. Jung describes her simply as “fashion designer Georgina Chapman.” Look, we believe in second chances. We just prefer second chances that are accompanied by a cozy tell-some in Vanity Fair or similar! Where is the Georgina profile we need? And what kind of PR mishegoss went into barely ID’ing her in New York?
Really don’t care do u?
We leave you with this: Amazon Prime is producing a Melania Trump documentary. You’ll never guess who’s gonna be a producer? Oh, yeah, you guessed right: Melania. Brett Ratner is on deck to direct. Can’t wait to read the WaPo review!
You thought Molly Young was prolific? Between 2007 and 2018, “romantasy writer” Tracy Wolff published—wait for it—“more than sixty romance, urban-fantasy, and young-adult novels.” Sorry, what?
David does keep her mess somewhat in check: every room in her house has a trash can, a laundry basket, and a “this belongs in another room” bin.
For those who want to know more about director Brady Corbet, whose two GG acceptance speeches warmed nary of a cockle of these two Spreaditor hearts (OK, except in regards to his very cute daughter, whose sparkly dress we stan) here is Alexandra Schwartz’s December profile. Let’s be honest, the more times Corbet repeated “a three-and-a-half-hour movie”—while reading from his iPhone—the less likely it became that we would see it.
Also, you have the best Christmas cards, Maggie!!!
Dear God, I LOVED this one!All of it! Thank you!