Oh Captain, My Captain
The Han and Chewie of newsletters pledges allegiance to Auntie Eeeeeeeee!
What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal examinations of women’s lives—and none of the advertiser obligations. Welcome to the Spread, where every week two editors read, listen, and watch it all, and deliver only the best to your inbox.
“I couldn’t be more proud to be here.”
Spreaders, that’s what E. Jean Carroll said on the witness stand this morning, April 27, 2023, after being asked what it was like to endure relentless threats and online abuse—not to mention lookism, ageism, and vicious sexism—in the four years since she accused Donald Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Over the past two days, we have found ourselves by turns awed, heartbroken, enraged, inspired, and often in tears, watching E. Jean relive a violation that irrevocably changed her life—one so profound, so confusing, that it took her decades to bring herself to even call it trauma. Faithful Spreaders will know that we often refer to E. Jean here as our fairy godmother; indeed, many of you are reading this today because she sent you our way. We are inordinately proud of being able to say we worked with E. Jean at Elle; we love claiming her as our own. But in truth, she was never ours to claim. In a very real way, she has been a fairy godmother to generations of American women, more than we could possibly count. We once sat at a shmancy Elle event in a ballroom at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills as Jennifer Aniston recalled faithfully having read her Elle column, “Ask E. Jean,” “forever.” Not only was E. a friend to everyone’s favorite Friend, she was apparently a guiding light to legions of power players in the audience, who whooped loudly at the remark. These women came to Elle for E. Jean. Indeed, “Ask E. Jean” is the longest-running advice column in American media. Despite appearances, E. doesn’t spill much ink telling women how to “catch” a man. She tells them how to get a leg up at work, how to navigate a toxic friendship, how to tap into their own self-esteem and sexuality, how to figure out what they hell they want and then go get it. More often than not, she tells women how to shake the dudes who are dragging them down. This one-woman font of gumption and chutzpah and moxie has plenty to spare for her readership. And over the years, even as she doled out romantic advice to the masses, she herself lived alone. We always chalked that up to a swashbuckling independent streak; frankly, we thought she had evolved past men, and loved her all the more for it. So it has been inordinately painful—truly, we cannot write the words without welling up—to read E.’s testimony as it drips out in moment-to-moment court reporting, hitting us anew with the realization that at least some of that fierce independence has in fact been a coping mechanism, a retreat.
The one good thing that has come of the past two days is that the world is finally witnessing the potent force that is Jean herself—her beauty and elan undeniable, her wit occasionally glittering through the pain, her words radiating a truth that feels, even to many one-time skeptics, undeniable. You can see hearts and minds changing in real time. We can’t recall feeling this kind of edge-of-the-seat dread/anticipation since Christine Blasey Ford’s wrenching testimony in 2018. But if anyone has the guts and smarts and sheer survival instinct to make it through to the other side of a process like this, we believe it’s our (and your) Fairy Godmother, the incomparable E. Jean Carroll.
If you stand with E. Jean, now would be a lovely time to tell her so at her Ask E. Jean column, now thriving here on Substack.
💪💪💪
Rachel & Maggie
PS: We had hoped to come back to you full force this week. Instead we’re two days late and one woman down. Maybe we shouldn’t have made that norovirus wisecrack last week: Rachel B. is down for the count and, even now, is receiving fluids—and we don’t mean Grüner Veltliner. Can someone hold her hair please? See you next week, back in our full-fat form.
PPS: Is it weird for adult women to go to Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret without a tween in tow? Don’t answer that. The film adaptation of Judy Blume’s novel lands tomorrow. Judy tells us why it took 43 years to get there on Fresh Air here. Grin with us as Blume (age 85) refers to Terry Gross (72) as “just a child!”
PPPS: Another one bites the dust: Condolences to the staff of Paper magazine. The downtown New York institution since 1984, which remained cool and indie against the odds—is it wrong to call it the Chloë Sevigny of magazines?—was put down today.
PPPPS: Just kidding—who does PPPPSes? OK, let’s get to it.
Weight Watchers Anonymous: You have doubtless seen the barrage of press around the book Virginia Sole-Smith released this week, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. The basic facts Sole-Smith puts forward are gutting: Most children, by the time they reach school age, will have absorbed the message that being thin makes them more valued. By middle school, more than one quarter of them will have been put on a diet. Maggie went on her first big diet at age 11, losing 28 pounds the summer before seventh grade. Rachel started calorie counting at age 12. It’s fair to say that neither of us have found much peace with our bodies since. We are also both consciously and unconsciously shaping the body images of the small people who live in our homes at all times—not just girls but also boys who, by eight years old, have declared a desire to attain “abs.” So, yeah, this sh*t feels personal. As in, at least one of your loyal Spreaditors experienced a head-to-toe flush of shame just reading the Cut’s headline: “What if you weren’t scared of your kid being fat?” Order Fat Talk at Bookshop.org here.
It ain’t just a river in Egypt: Is it naive to believe you can make a decent living as a writer? Yes, according to Jennifer Romolini and Anne Helen Petersen—two women who appear to make a pretty sweet living as…writers. We can’t decide if this episode of Petersen’s Work Appropriate podcast, titled “My Industry is Failing: Writing Edition,” is infuriating or if it’s just the kind of hard medicine that states facts in a way that leaves no more room for denial. They argue that most creatives must decouple the work they do for money from the work they do for creative satisfaction—because only unicorns find both in the same place. It’s surprising how hard this is to hear, considering this is exactly the Spread Economy: We both do money jobs to pay for life, and this pay-for-it-if-you’re-nice newsletter for “us.” (Basically, we’re Martin Scorsese.) And yet we have never shelved the dream of making good money doing the thing we love…the way, say, Jen and Anne Helen do? Listen here.
There but for the grace of god: Since we’re not supposed to fret about “empty calories” anymore, allow yourself the mental equivalent of a supersize packet of Peeps: this l’il Vogue tidbit about Hollywood casting change-ups that could have changed, well, basically everything. Wait, Jennifer Lawrence could have been Serena Van der Woodsen? Rachel McAdams could have been Andy Sachs? The laws of human nature guarantee this will end up being the most-clicked link of this newsletter, here.
Kids, Mom Is Going On a Little Trip…In today’s Evil Witches newsletter, Claire Zulkey crowdsources answers to a question Maggie continues to debate—one that, every time it comes up, Rachel rolls her eyes so hard we worry they might get stuck that way: To trip, or not to trip? Mothers who have dabbled in everything from “mushies” to MDMA disclose their psychedelic experiences, philosophies, and practices—how they “unclench the fist of [the] mind”—answering all kinds of useful questions: Where did you get the stuff? Where do you go to “roll”? And the all-important: How did you find other druggie mom friends to do it with? (See: aforementioned eye-rolling.) Read “Going on a trip while the kids are at grandma’s” here.
I’m not crying, you’re crying: We recommended the Hulu joint Tiny Beautiful Things several weeks ago, before it was out—a risk we don’t usually like to take with you Spreaders. Now that we have binged it, we can double down: Do watch this. It’s the first small-screen production from Reese Witherspoon’s prolific yet often over-glossed, juuuust shy of great Lady Content Factory that lives up to our expectations, a fact we attribute to the combined real-ness of author Cheryl Strayed and stars Kathryn Hahn and newcomer Sarah Pidgeon. To deepen the emotional punch of the show—what, you don’t want to drive down the highway crying so hard you risk a head-on collision?—try this August 2022 ep of Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things, in which Strayed describes how she temporarily trashed her own life and body as a misguided tribute to a mother who somehow created “magical moments” in the midst of abuse and poverty. Listen here.
Just curious…do you hobby? Banal question, we know. But increasingly, we notice friends becoming newly passionate in midlife about running, volleyball, tennis. Things that leave us cold, frankly, but seem to provide the people around us diversion, community, fun and, most of all, a thing that is theirs—outside of family and work and the blah blah of adulthood. TIME writes about how to find a hobby to make you happier and healthier. But that wasn’t as motivating as when our five-year-old recently looked over and said, “Shouldn’t you be making lunch right now?” So, seriously, tell us: What’s your hobby?
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Runner here! Also thinking of taking piano lessons. Also have a friend doing zoom paint classes. My POV is hobbies are lifesaving right now.
No comments yet??? OK I'll go first. My new midlife hobby is TikTok. No shame.