Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Sparkling Spreadswans,
In the immortal words of Goldie Hawn, “buh buh buh buh buh.”1 Like Cate, above, we have gone Overboard (and perhaps a little bit cuckoo) on the domestic anarchy of summer break. One of us has Covid which, yes, still a thing. The other of us is recovering from a self-tanner mishap. (Whatever, we all have our crosses to bear.) You know you’re in a dark place when an innocent House & Garden headline (“Is there any such thing as a house that feels too ‘lived-in’?”) has you spitting at your iPhone. Anyone who wants to see “too lived-in” is invited on our house tour! Then British Vogue had to go and ask human thigh-gap Dree Hemingway—a woman with the physique (if not the acting chops) to play Daryl Hannah!—to “test drive autumn’s best jeans,” like that’s some kind of service journalism! Absolutely none of which would normally phase us. All to say: Our motors are shot, our senses of humor have evaporated, and our asses sure as sh*t don’t look like Dree’s. Can we trade us in for a new model?
Nevertheless, we still managed to rustle up some enthusiasm for this week’s reads!
Have at it,
Rachel & Maggie
Trump’s “Human Printer”
“He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” After Jon Ossoff’s (arguably sexist but also, sorry, utterly delicious) burn about Trump’s latest one-name-only female acolyte, we were thrilled to see Spread-fave Doreen St. Félix do the deepest dive. Who’s that girl? Slate, WaPo, and the New York Times have already told us that Natalie Harp is the Ivanka-coded executive assistant who left an anchor gig at One America News Network to be paid $150,000 of your tax dollars per year to literally follow Trump around printing out memes for him to read and posting some of his most racist and oddly capitalized rants on Truth Social. In St. Félix’s description she’s also a character from Yesteryear: raised to believe in American exceptionalism, to think (as her own liberal brother puts it) that slavery was normal “back then,” homeschooled, evangelical, and traumatized by the “cardinal sin” of her father’s suicide. A cancer survivor who credits the “Right to Try” act passed under Trump I with saving her life—though the timeline on that doesn’t quite track. And, perhaps most crucially, a religious zealot in the church of Donald J. Trump. In a letter to the president, Harp wrote, “You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.” Well, now you know.
Read “What Natalie Harp Carries” here.
Mother Load
Lindsay Clancy is top of mind as the jury for her case goes into deliberation today. In the New Yorker, Jessica Winter argues that the conspiracy theories surrounding Clancy and the sympathy for her defense come from the same place: anger and grief about how women’s medical and mental-health crises get dismissed. The “she was framed” crowd and the “justice for Lindsay” folks may loathe each other, but they’re twin flames, she maintains, both driven by the sense that doctors, courts, and even husbands failed to listen. In Slate, Shannon Palus widens the lens to include another hot-topic tragedy: the death of Hayden Panettiere. Both women described, in public and in detail, the pain they were in, and the struggle when “maternal instinct” failed to kick in. Panettiere wrote in her memoir that she “felt nothing” holding her newborn daughter; Clancy spent months describing her breakdown to doctors and in Facebook groups. Visibility is an important first step but in itself is not a solution. Even when these women were heard, it didn’t save them.
Read “Why People Want to Believe the Lindsay Clancy Conspiracy Theories” here.
Read “Our Summer of Complicated Mothers” here.
9 to 5? Of course. Steel Magnolias? Yes ma’am. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas? Damn Straight. Joyful Noise? Sure. Now: Justice for Straight Talk!
The tributes to Dolly Parton—actual angel on Earth—have been rightfully pouring in. We especially loved this fly-by-the-seat-of-her-cargo-pants reel from comedian Cameron Esposito; h/t Spreader Annie. And Xochitl Gonzalez’s breastacular ode is just right. In approximately zero of those tributes, however, have we spied a mention of one Dolly role that sits near and dear to our hearts: “Dr.” Shirlee Kenyon in Straight Talk, a 1992 clunker of a film that Rachel watched dozens—hundreds?—of times as a child. Rated PG on the VHS box but extremely adult in spirit (James Woods is the love interest 😬), the movie stars Parton as a talented call-in radio shrink à la Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Except here’s the thing: Shirlee ain’t no doctor—she’s barely got a high-school diploma to her name. Will she be found out? The movie may not be very good on a technical level, but Dolly manages to deliver a performance shiny enough to captivate eight-year-olds from Mississippi and presumably beyond with her Dollyness, zinging lines like “Get down off the cross, honey. Somebody needs the wood.” Don’t believe us? Watch the trailer here, or rent it for $2.99 because as not-a-doctor Shirlee would say, “Money is made to be spent. What good’s it doin’ at the bottom of my panty drawer?”
Divorce Capital-Style
We’ve been on the divorce essay beat for a while now, so take it from us: Congressional reporter Annie Karni’s September Vogue piece about her compulsion to tell everyone in her orbit that she’s getting divorced is a tight little banger of the genre. (And no, we don’t just like it because we are chronic oversharers—what, we’re supposed to just stand there in proximity to other human beings in…silence? We are not Rosey the Robot!) Karni writes movingly—and with restraint, no more than a raised eyebrow toward her ex—about the history of her marriage and its dissolution before getting to the laugh-out-loud stuff: She finds catharsis in telling Chuck Schumer that her summer plans include getting divorced! She blurts out to Steve Bannon that she’s splitting up! She unspools to Nancy Mace! It all adds up to a hopeful story about connection and personal metamorphosis, and feels more like an episode of The West Wing than we’ve experienced in Trump’s Washington thus far. Why not treat yourself to some rose-colored glasses every once in a while.
Read “Some Personal News” here.
