The Beard Issue
The Mutton Chops and Van Dyke of newsletters strokes the ole goatee with Beard author Kelly Foster Lundquist. Plus: These reads are on fire.
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Spreadghouls, ahoy!
We’re excited to talk about Beard, a new memoir that tells the story of a young academic, Kelly, who marries her dreamboat soulmate, Devin, only to find out over the course of years that she’s been roped into—and is to some degree complicit in—a big ole lie: Devin is gay. Real gay. And he’s been sleeping with men right under her nose. In one skimming, Beard could be perceived as an age-old marital horror story—the call coming not just from inside her house but from inside her bed. The twist is that it’s also a tender love story, a warped fairy tale embroidered with cultural history, an edge-of-your-seat caper packed with more pop-culture references than a season of 30 Rock (also, the Liz Lemon classic: “If you’re a gay man looking for a beard, I don’t do that anymore.”), and a wildly self-aware comedy: Author Kelly Foster Lundquist’s area of academic expertise throughout the marriage was literally queer theory. In another twist, Kelly was also once Rachel’s 24-year-old 12th-grade English teacher in Jackson, Mississippi, a period that coincided with the couple’s early marriage and much of the book’s action. (Whenever RB and her high-school buddies would see Devin waiting tables at their favorite local restaurant, they’d squeal over how cute he was; his resemblance to Montgomery Clift—ding ding ding—comes up in the book.) Beard came out (pun intended) today, and the Halloween of it all is also not coincidental: The official holiday of performed identity shows up in significant ways throughout the memoir and was, richly, the very day that Devin’s secret was revealed once and for all. (For the record, Lundquist has remarried and has a precious 12-year-old daughter with her second husband.)
So cue up those chilling asylum cell noises, pop a mini Twizzler, and settle in for their haunting, Southern-fried reunion—after the news, of course!
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. As 40 million Americans lose their SNAP benefits because elected officials who are still getting paychecks cannot get their heads out of their everloving asses, and are also not releasing billions of dollars in contingency funding that could cover the gap, we have it on good authority that the most effective thing any of us can do right now is donate to our local food bank. Find yours here at Feeding America. If you want to donate goods instead of money, here’s a list of what’s most needed. And if you haven’t cleared your schedule and arranged your childcare so you can VOTE next Tuesday, let’s get on that, mkay?
First Up: Behold, Your Weekly Reader!!
Putting the Pieces Back Together
Too many women blithely assume that reconstruction will be the “easy” part of breast cancer—but in many cases, after “expanders,” infections, and follow-up surgeries, it ends up being the most brutal. Bravo to Melissa Dahl for doing real service journalism in the Cut’s “How Far Would You Go for a Breast?” here.
Tricky Trip
Bet you didn’t know we could play the long game. Back in February, we marveled at the supreme oddness with which Vogue teed up an excerpt from Amy Griffin’s The Tell, as if we were all supposed to know who this Amy Griffin woman was. Then, suddenly, it felt like everybody did know who Amy Griffin was. Cut to September’s bombshell investigation of her abuse allegations in the New York Times and, now, to Maggie’s story for Bustle (fermenting lo, these many months) titled “The Substance” (if that’s not a nod to the Spread, we don’t know what is), which asks: Can MDMA help recover memories? And, while we’re at it: Are recovered memories even a thing? Read it here.
Frustrated Inside
Any parent who has thrown up their hands after desperation-paying $279 for Dr. Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside childrearing-advice network, only to find that their little monster responds not at all to so-called “gentle parenting”—and been irrationally annoyed at Becky herself for it—will get some satisfaction out of “Do ‘Deeply Feeling Kids’ Really Exist?” by E.J. Dickson in the Cut. Read it here.
Heart Forward
“Because of the dark and the drugs, I couldn’t, at first, tell the nurses apart, so they became one nurse with changeable tattoos on her muscular arms: octopus, pagoda, fern.” Trust a poet to bring lyricism to the experience of open heart surgery. Read Ben Lerner’s “Cardiography” in the the New York Review of Books—and weep, just because he’s a much better writer than you—here.
Snack Well
“I didn’t talk about my dad a ton in my work life, but he was an incredible and very complicated guy who I loved dearly. So, rather than work through our very colorful array of family baggage privately I made the rather insane decision to do a very public podcast.” So emaileth Sarah Amos, daughter of Wally “Famous” Amos—yes, the cookie guy!—a poor Black kid from the segregated South who became a pop-culture icon, then went bust. Sarah, who produces documentaries for Condé Nast, is processing all that in Tough Cookie, a new pod by Vanity Fair that’s got our mouths watering. Listen on Apple, Spotify, Audible.
Made Ya Look
Is Mickalene Thomas the most famous Black female artist of all time? Could be. Both the woman and her work show up ev-er-y-where, including this Bazaar story from last month and as the cover art of The Wilderness, which we are now reading (book club, anyone?). So while this $14 million lawsuit by Thomas’s former girlfriend (and RHONY cast member) Racquel Chevremont for exploitation and abuse feels deeply Page Six in its trashiness, we’re not gonna lie, our 👀 are peeled. Read it here.
Unlikely to Speak at Career Day
Cheers to the wise Spreadfriend who listened to Anna Martin’s interview with filmmaker Elizabeth Lo, who spent three years following a “mistress dispeller”—a special consultant you can hire in China if your spouse is cheating, whose actual professional paid job is to weasel into that relationship and break it up so convincingly that the cheaters think the split was their idea. “Fascinating,” our reader reported, and yet: “The emotional labor of all the women in this all to allow a man to keep his dignity is too much for me.” Read it here.
Middle Earth
The New York Times can reveal that there is a WhatsApp whisper network in which all the perimenopause answers are revealed, and yet THEY HAVE NOT ADDED US TO THIS CHAT. What gives,
? Read it here.Still Processing
In case you’re wondering: No, we did not miss the Jennifer Lawrence of magazine journalism’s profile of the Jia Tolentino of Hollywood! That piece is a Spreadtastic meal if we’ve ever tasted one, and our very own JLaw Correspondent™ (Maggie) will be back with a proper savoring next week. In the meantime, read it here.
And finally: Rachel’s chat with Beard author Kellyyyyy Fosterrrr Lundquiiiiiiiist!
The Spread aka Rachel Elise Baker: Kind of a technical question but hey, you were my English teacher: From the get-go—from the title—the reader knows that Devin is gay and that there will be a reckoning. But somehow, the book is a page-turner, almost like a suspense-thriller. How do you pull that off?
Kelly Foster Lundquist: Well, one of the best pieces of advice about pacing and structure was from [How to Stay Married author] Harrison Scott Key—he’s from Mississippi, too, and he and I went to college together. I did a writing workshop with him in 2017 and he talked about how in Jurassic Park you don’t see the whole dinosaur. I’m sure he’s not the first to make that analogy, but he was the first person I heard it from, and I loved the idea that people know what it is from the eye, you’ve seen that, but what you want to find out is: How does the rest of it look? How does this happen? Those are still open, compelling questions. And because of the nature of the relationship [in Beard], that was happening in real time, like—oh my god!
I remember Devin so vividly—just darlin’ and so nice to your students.
That’s so funny. It took me 20 years to write the book, and over time there were a bunch of different permutations. But the thing that I figured out I most enjoyed writing, that felt most alive to me, were scenes that were almost novelistic, and as you let those accrue, they do take on a well-what-happens-next kind of quality. I also wanted it to be almost like Romeo and Juliet—not, you know, that I’m like Shakespeare—but in the sense of like, where you want it to work out even though it’s against reason: you know it shouldn’t and it doesn’t.
I’ve been excited to ask you about food. You give the book a sense of place and also a sense of your mental and emotional space with these long, luscious passages about what you’re eating, or when you’re dieting, what you’re not eating. I’m curious about your decision to pack all of that in, and also to bare your soul not just about being married to a gay man but also about your deep, complicated relationship with food. Like, these scenes are sensual!
Yeah, my friend Nellie calls the book “sex writing by way of food writing.” Part of it was just kind of owning what I wanted to write about and what was interesting to me and like, I think about food all the time! It shapes how I travel and all the day-to-day decisions that I make. And—as you know—Devin and I both worked at restaurants, and that was for the first time how I was learning about how food is made. It was on my mind beyond the bodily consumption piece of it. There was a period in my life where I wanted to be a food writer. Giving myself permission to lean into that was really fun. One of the first scenes I wrote that was food-heavy was a scene about the shrimp scampi at Amerigo.
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