Midnight Omelet Party for 30
The Grubhub and DoorDash of newsletters (sorry, Martha) is binging on divorce divas, nanny contretemps, "sacrificial" motherhood, and one epic meditation on celebrity death
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Spread Vixens,
It’s been a confusing couple of days, what with the appearance of actual, credible bright spots on the political landscape—something we had apparently conditioned ourselves to never again count on or even hope for and now have no idea how to process. And with the arrival of a piece of culture that is so expensive, so star-studded, and yet so spectacularly awful, we found ourselves checking our mental calendar—was this an April fool’s joke?
Yes, we are choosing this week to talk about truly important things: Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair aka Kim Kardashian’s lawyer fantasy. Because your Spreaditors are also the chief curators of the collective women’s magazine archive, we know a lot about the one truly famous divorce attorney in history, Laura Wasser, Esq. Because she has always seemed more like a walking premium-TV character than an actual human, Wasser makes for a rich subject1. More than just about any non-celebrity we can think of, editors like to pretend she has not already been covered six ways to Sunday. So when she was said to have inspired a television series, we expected…more? Or in this case, was it just a liiiiittle less? Wasser has overseen the dissolutions of marriage of everybody from Angelina (from Brad—oh, the billable hours!) to Johnny (from Amber) to Britney (from Kevin and Sam), to Joe still-needs-a-last-name Manganiello (from Sofia Vergara), Ryan Reynolds (from Scarlett Johansson), and Xtina (from someone named Jordan Bratman). And of course, she also captained Kardashian’s divorce doubleheader, from Kris Humphries (made you look!) as well as the artist formerly known as Kanye. ALL OF WHICH SHOULD HAVE MADE FOR SOME VERY, VERY GOOD TV.
Yet even with the truly inspired casting of not just the principals—we’re talking Niecy Nash, Glenn Close(!!), and Teyana Taylor as her Oscar campaign ramps up!—but also the guest stars (Judith Light, Grace Gummer, Elizabeth Showgirls Berkley, and an almost unrecognizable Jessica Simpson as a rockstar wife undone by bad plastic surgery), and the valiant efforts of Murphy-whisperer Sarah Paulson, we got something so far from good it’s not even bad, exactly, but some other rich, vile, seductive third thing. Perhaps what we’re trying to articulate is an entry into post-bad, breaking new ground on the camp scale: In All’s Fair, have we found The Room for the Spread set?
To treat the vertigo, we have taken to the bed in our maribou-trim loungewear until further notice. If you too dare to stare into the eyes of the belly of the AF beast, you’re welcome to crawl on into our ironed silk sheets.
Lights out!
Rachel & Maggie
The Ghosts of Santa Fe Summit
Never change, Harper’s! In the magazine’s November issue, novelist and short-story writer Joy Williams holds forth on the death and life (but mostly death) of Gene Hackman like it’s 2004, going long, employing idiosyncratic capitalization, relishing quirky tangents, and haymaking the tiniest details—fun stuff, even when marinating in the unfortunate death of a Hollywood icon who’d become a shut-in. Williams is 81, equidistant between Hackman, who died at 95, and his 30-years-younger wife, Betsy Arakawa, and capital-T time is a character in the story, which tracks the circumstances under which Gene’s and Betsy’s bodies were found, days after their deaths, in their home in the sleepy Santa Fe Summit community: his in the mudroom, hers in a bathroom alongside their crated dog, Zinna. By then, Gene’s corpse was flirting with mummification. Williams uses the tale to stare Death—to whom she refers as a she—in the face: “Every once in a while…news of Death’s particular methods and attention to detail seizes our attention like the cougar does the clueless rabbit,” Williams writes, “and we suffer some serious confusion and fright.” The result is ultimately part tribute to Hackman, part exorcism of the mind (hers and ours). Favor, please, Joy: Do a less gory but equally deep Diane Keaton meditation next.
Read “One Four Two Five Old Sunset Trail” here.
Julie Andrews would have turned down these parts.
It’s a tough news week for professional childcare providers and those who employ them. First, in the Cut, Bindu Bansinath spins a hell of a yarn that we hope nabs her a limited series TV deal stat: A wealthy 30-something New York couple move with their baby to upstate New York and win the nanny lottery in the form of an experienced, high-end, German-speaking, 50-something former model. Once she moves into the guest house located mere feet from their home, however, she transforms into a menace, wrecking the property and refusing to leave. The couple is understandably freaked. Good story, right? That’s just the half of it! Bansinath then treats us to the nanny’s side—she got an interview with the lady! Together it’s a she-said, she-said thriller that kept us on the edge of our seats until the very end. (We then proceeded to spend some OT in the comments section, which earned every minute.) The second story of this twofer is equally well-told, but should come with a warning label, so here’s ours: infant death. In Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy delivers a true-crime tale that’s as riveting as it is upsetting (we’re still not sure whether we’re glad we read it), about Marian Fraser: Once Waco’s most sought-after in-home daycare owner, she was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the murder of a four-month-old baby girl. Hardy, who tells the story as carefully and as tastefully as possible for this kind of subject, is convincingly skeptical of Fraser’s conviction. Regardless of where you land, it’s a hard one to shake.
Read “The Nanny Squatter” here.
Read “The Baby Whisperer” here.
Double the Pleasure
Not sure why our beloved women’s magazines are sleeping on the couples’ profile as a subgenre, but in the meantime GQ has cornered the market. Even without booking big fish like Paul Thomas Anderson and Maya Rudolph (your Spreaditors’ dream couple’s profile), they’ve scored by going after shiny little guppies like Nara and Lucky Smith, Livvy Dunne and Paul Skenes, and, now, Morgan Riddle and Taylor Fritz. Spread-favored writer Carrie Battan’s double portrait may have even made us briefly think we cared about a floppy tennis player and a blonde WAG—and, huh, maybe we actually do now?? Like, apparently Riddle has changed the game of tennis with her never-before-seen expert combo of girlfriending and TikToking? Either way, this is the kind of sum-of-their-parts magic trick that we’ll read as fast as they can pump them out.
Read “Inside the Modern Courtship of Taylor Fritz and Morgan Riddle” here.
One Lady, 15 Babies
The New York Times Magazine continues its hot streak as the best ladymag out there this week, though this time around it’s not another hormone-heavy, Susan Dominus story that has us crashing our cymbals (though we’ll take another one of those any day of the week). Rather, it’s a bonkers and compulsive read about a woman who’s taken baby fever to unprecedented heights. MaryBeth Lewis was obsessed with—perhaps addicted to—having children: First, she birthed a batch of five in quick succession. Then she birthed another eight, the last of whom she delivered at 62. At 65, Lewis wanted even more, but no one thought that could be a good idea for infinite reasons, including the fact that her doctor said carrying another child would kill her. So ole MaryBeth got crafty, and with a little sleight of hand hired a surrogate, who gave birth to twins. What happened to babies 14 and 15—and the rest of MaryBeth’s family—still has us reeling.
Read “She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges” by David Gauvey Herbert here.
So you don’t like sleep either?
May we point you to the rabbit hole that is Margaret Qualley’s big sister Rainey’s hipster “Hall-o-wedding,” as covered by Vogue and replete with lingerie, costuming, reverse-anthropomorphised infants, and more of that specific, quirky pretty-baby Qualley-family sex appeal that makes your Spreaditors feel like actual sticks in the actual mud—and which will inevitably lead you down deep Instagram scrolls of all its players. This is time that you will never get back; don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Read it here.
Split the Diff
Note to selves: Next time we hear about a new “it” therapy—and especially if it’s been endorsed by Gwyneth Doc Hollywood Paltrow—we shall proceed with caution. The first time we gave much thought to Internal Family Systems, it was courtesy of Esther Perel’s 2024 Where Should We Begin? interview with Dick Schwartz, who originated the idea that each individual has multiple selves, or parts. “A part isn’t a metaphor. It’s a literal personality with its own identity, age, feelings, even body,” writes Rachel Corbett in the Cut, who has arrived, perhaps inevitably, to deliver the cautionary tale—the story of a teen girl sent to a retreat for an eating disorder, who emerged convinced her father had sexually abused her and never had a relationship with him again. Turns out, scientists aren’t so sure it’s a good idea to tell people with complex PTSD or psychosis to split apart and chat up their various internal components. On the contrary, it can lead them to, say, “switch ages, genders, even species,” in a matter of moments—and come out believing fictitious traumas. For Maggie, who spent the past few months immersed in the science of MDMA and retrieved memory for this Bustle story about rich lady memoirist Amy Griffin, which came out last week, it all sounds eerily familiar, a reminder about the suggestibility of our own minds—and why we should be careful who we’re letting tinker around up there.
Read “The Therapy That Can Break You” here.
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