That Swamp Princess Lifestyle

The Leslie Bibb and Kate Bohr of newsletters is revenge-sharpening our bob (and our nails) and taking big swings at C-sections, lit foursomes, and 💤💤💤.

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!

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Spreadwatchers,

Last week, we came in en fuego with the Spread 100, our ranking of the greatest, Spreadiest movies of the 21st century. The response? Deafening. OK, fine, it was audible. According to Dan A., who has vowed to work his way through the complete list, “The Spread 100 really took some swings! I’m already obsessed.” Helen G. responded that the list made her feel like she and your Spreaditors were, save for a few quibbles, “the same person.” (That’s what we’re here for; to make you feel known.) The occasion even inspired film buff Jesse B. to admit that he’d never seen Laurel Canyon (only the seventh-best film of the century) and would be adding it to his list; Jesse, your satisfaction is our priority. To sum up most of the chatter, we’ll let Molly S. have the last word: “I love how many annoying dude movies are NOT on the Spread 100.” Our work here is done.

But is it? Over the past couple of weeks, we tried to tune out a steady drumbeat of dude-y background noise about one such film literally called F1: The Movie, starring Brad Pitt. It’s now been three weeks since the race-car picture opened in theaters, but the discourse (and lack thereof) around Pitt—and we’re not talking about his blue-velvet jacket (though good try, Pitt machine)—just won’t leave us. This week we are attempting to exorcise, or at least externalize, it by bringing you this heavily edited “conversation” between Bruce Handy (via an, er, handy, in New York Times Opinion) and Angelica Jade Bastién (via a screed in Vulture) that’s been rattling around in our crowded ladybrains. We took some liberties with details such as punctuation and, uh, transitions; you’ll get the idea.

Bruce Handy: God Bless Brad Pitt.

Angelica Jade Bastién: [Are you kidding me?] Brad Pitt Is Fooling You.

Handy: [Not kidding.] Mr. Pitt is one of the rare contemporary movie stars who knows how to be used.

Bastién: The cumulative effect of F1 and its press tour have been a carefully tuned charm offensive meant to obscure, if not outright bury, the alleged violent particulars of his behavior toward ex-wife Angelina Jolie. Pitt has been so successful at this rehabilitation that most of the public doesn’t even understand what he’s trying to rehabilitate himself for.

Handy: [Sure, sure.] Some credit for the new movie’s success might also go to the fact that the chatter around it has largely ignored the abuse allegations.

Bastién: If you need a reminder: Court documents allege that, during a trip on their private plane in 2016, Pitt threw Jolie against a wall, shook her, and poured alcohol on her while she was trying to sleep. When they tried to defend Jolie, Pitt “physically abused one of their children.”

Handy: [Did I mention that Brad Pitt is a movie star!?] He’s content to bathe in the camera’s rapturous gaze, understanding just how much to give and never overdoing it, exuding confidence as both character and performer.

Bastién: The onscreen performance feeds the off-screen persona. The off-screen persona is a performance, too, one that sells ideals and sometimes cashmere sweaters or cell-phone plans. Pitt has always sold a particular vision of American white masculinity, one predicated on charisma, unflappability, and seamless confidence. His deftness in removing the specter of violence from his own narrative is a reminder of the ways violence against women is normalized. It isn’t that people don’t believe in what happened to Jolie on that plane — they just don’t care.

Handy: [But like I was saying, movie stahhhr….] He smiles but rarely grins, mostly keeping his lovely teeth to himself, always just a little bit wary. In opposition, he doesn’t glare, just tilts his head back skeptically. He’s not soft. Rather, he’s got the tensile stillness of Steve McQueen…the epitome of flippant cool.

Bastien: [Did I mention he’s] continuing to work with crisis-management publicist Matthew Hiltzik, who has represented Johnny Depp (and whose protégés went on to represent Justin Baldoni and work in Trump’s White House). Pitt has made a concerted effort to reestablish himself as an emblem of unaffected, undiluted movie-star cool with just a hint of vulnerability.

Handy: Self-reflexiveness, too, is the provenance of a classic movie star. Watching F1, I didn’t for a second believe in Sonny Hayes, the character, but for two and a half hours I sure believed in Brad Pitt, the icon.

Bastién: [Bangs head on desk.]

Well, that settles it.

Rachel & Maggie

P.S. The Emmy noms are in and, just in case our clever display copy didn’t track—you know how we do—Leslie Bibb and her cunty l’il bob have been robbed!

P.P.S. If too much is your definition of just enough, hit that ❤️ button wouldya?

British Vogue teaches us that, with Doechii, we really can have it all. Not only is Florida’s coolest expat the smartest, sexiest, and baddest one of all, she’s also a theater kid. Read the cover story by Jazmine Hughes (great subject-writer pairing!) here, and please pass us a slice of her yucky blucky fruitcake. Photos by Elizaveta Porodina.

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“Cutting someone’s body open and operating when they can feel it: That is not supposed to happen. That’s something from history, or from war.”

We did not think the New York Times + Serial pod series The Retrievals could hit closer to home than it did with Season One—which exposed the long-ignored and even flatly denied pain some women go through with IVF—but then along comes Season Two and one Spreaditor (OK, it’s Maggie) finds herself rocked. It’s been 10 years since your loyal servant was, um, flayed in an urgent C-section, but she will never forget telling the person cutting into her, “Wait, I can feel that!” What followed was chaotic and excruciating and just plain wrong. Not until listening to the first two episodes of The Retrievals did we learn that it is also pretty common: Eight percent of patients (100,000 American women per year) experience significant pain during C-section. They don’t tell you that in childbirthing class. Or, it would seem, in medical school.

Read “The Retrievals’ Second Season Will Upset You” by Nicholas Quah in Vulture here.

Find The Retrievals Season 2 by Susan Burton here.

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Four Friends, Three Books, Two Novels, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree. (Sheesh.)

The lit scene’s favorite (or least favorite? Does it matter if we’re all watching?) reality show is back for a new season. Hannah Pittard—main character of main characters in the alternately titillating and tiresome magazine saga,“Four Friends, Two Marriages, and One Affair—and a Shelf of Books Dissecting It,” which writer Chris Heath published in New York a year ago—is out promoting her latest work: If You Love It, Let It Kill You. The book is a novelized version of her memoir, We Are Too Many (2023). That memoir recounted the dissolution of her marriage to novelist Andrew Ewell, who recounted his side of the split in his novel, Set for Life (2024). If You Love It, Let It Kill You is Pittard’s chance to get at her truth by fictionalizing both the breakup and the publication of his post-breakup novel. Are you still with us? (If not, we don’t blame you; go ahead and ease on down the road to the next item.) The New York Times profile about all of the above is, for Pittard, a great piece of press, adorned with a photoshoot of her looking badass and retaliatory and embroidered with triumphant secondary quotes from poet laureate Ada Limón, a close friend. In combination with breakup warrior in chief Maggie Smith’s full-throated recommendation of Pittard’s novel in Electric Literature, where you’ll also find an excerpt, we may even be inclined to read this one. Though Andrew, if you are reading, do not by any means wallop us with a memoir about the novel that responded to the novel that responded to the memoir. This game stops now.

Read the Pittard profile here.

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The Stories We Tell

At the risk of becoming Winter Weekly, we can’t not shout out New Yorker parenting writer Jessica Winter’s latest banger: While reporting a different story, she learns that her own paternal great-grandparents had been criminals. Specifically, counterfeiters. An investigation of her family tree ensues and—when she finds eerie parallels between her great-grandmother’s story and her own*—unleashes big questions about inherited trauma, attachment theory, memory, and epigenetics. Line by crackling line this story is at once a caper and an excavation of self that could easily be refashioned into a movie by Sarah Polley, the Michael Bay of nonlinear familial and emotional fireworks.

“I came to believe that I was, in some respects, my great-grandmother’s protégée or her doppelgänger. Or her counterfeit. For example, she married a man who revealed himself to be frighteningly unstable and awful with money. So did I. She ‘lived constantly in fear of some violent act.’ So did I, until I got away. (In 2020, my husband was charged with assault. The case was eventually dismissed, and he denies any violence during our marriage.) In working through the Winter case files, I often felt pinpricks of déjà vu: an exact turn of phrase, an absurdly specific expenditure. There were too many rhymes. Perhaps my terrible marriage was merely the stuff of intergenerational habits, imprints, the grooves laid down a hundred and twenty years ago by a lonely, ignorant woman I never knew.”

Read “The Counterfeiters” here.