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The cherry blossoms and daffodils of newsletters made up an Emily Gould drinking game! Chug ’em if you got ’em.
What would make the perfect women’s magazine? Juicy yarns, hot goss, 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.
Spreadalindas,
So much has happened in the week since we last spoke, where to begin? Katie Britt leapt into our nightmares, Kate Middleton faked it, Ryan Gosling Kenoughed his ever-lovin’ heart out, and Donald Trump took the first step in ponying up1.
But somehow, the thing you all want to talk about is…. Anna Marie Tendler. Some of the smartest and Spready-est women we know are screenshotting Tendler’s Instagram post from early this month teasing her forthcoming memoir, the tantalizingly titled Men Have Called Her Crazy. Can they sustain that fervor till August, when the book is out? This is, after all, The Year of the Divorce Memoir, with tomes on the subject by Leslie Jamison and Lyz Lenz, plus Emily Gould’s [DRINK!] much-talked-about recent non-divorce divorce essay in the Cut (all three of those writers, let’s note, are mothers in their early 40s). Tendler is, rather famously, divorced and not a mom: The former makeup artist and her ex-husband, John Mulaney, were vocal about not wanting kids; then she saw him through addiction and rehab; then he up and left, and rapidly produced an heir with intimidatingly hot Olivia Munn (who today revealed in a pitch-perfect post that she’s spent the last year undergoing breast cancer treatment, including a double mastectomy). Everything we know about AMT (do people call her this?) we got from this Emily Gould-written [DRINK!] profile in Bazaar that we directed you to back in 2022, by which time she had become a “multimedia artist” whose work—sorry—wasn’t not being snapped up because of her divorce-related buzz. Given that Mental Health + Divorce + Books is Emily Gould’s [DRINK] exact Venn diagram, we’ll lap up the Gould-penned [DRINK] coverage that’s sure to precede the book. But as for the book itself? We’re feeling unusually… meh. Dear readers, illuminate us on the allure of AMT. Show us the light! Hit us in the comments! Count the ways over email!
Standing outside the fire,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Speaking of books that smart people cannot stop talking about, the paperback of Maggie’s book came out yesterday! That sound you hear is the popping of celebratory corks, underpinned by the dull-roar career angst of knowing it’s now officially been a year since she published The Kingdom of Prep. What now? What next? Ease her mind by ordering a copy from our li’l Spread bookshop!
Help these fine female journalists unseat Joe Rogan!
OG Spreadpals Holly Millea and Justine Harman are breathing new true-crime-fanatic life into an excellent Elle feature that Millea published back in the good old days of fashion magazine features departments, i.e. 2014. Three follows the disappearance of Skylar Neese, “the odd girl out in a vicious teen triangle,” who snuck out of her house one night to meet two girlfriends in 2012 and was never seen again. It’s already vying for the top slot on Apple’s podcast charts! Vote with your ears here.
No sudden moves.
Last week we clickbaited you—yes, fine, we admit it!—by subtly intimating that we had intel on Kate Middleton, and dang, we touched a nerve! Some of you let us know you were none too thrilled with our chipper tone. A week later, with WIRED, Vox, TIME, the L.A. Times, and three of the Cut’s top-performing stories all documenting Middleton’s extended spring break in a manic tone not unlike the one Katie Britt uses to discuss imminent migrant invasion—this thing’s got Harper’s Bazaar foaming about “metadata,” y’all—we’ll just gently drop Helen Lewis’s “QAnon for Wine Moms” here and back away slowly.
The serious business of parenting.
The new issue of New York mag has lobbed a story directly toward Spreadlandia, and we will take the bait: A profile of Dr. Becky Kennedy—the prevailing parenting expert of our time, who goes by just “Dr. Becky”—by Spreadarling Kathryn Jezer-Morton. The piece is straighter than we’d expect from that writer-publication combo, but for the uninitiated, it’s an excellent dip in the waters that most toddler-parents you know are probably swimming in. The idea of re-parenting is particularly salient: “For millennials whose parents were checked out because of divorce or career stress, the act of reparenting promises to be a retroactive fulfillment of the wish for more attentive caregivers. It also suggests that parenting can itself be a form of autotherapy.” Perhaps reason in itself to procreate? Read “Dr. Becky and the Professionalization of Parenthood” here.
“Anne Hathaway is Starring in the Olivia Wilde Biopic”
In a delicious Hung Up write-up on The Idea of You, a sezzy upcoming streamer about, ahem, a 40-year-old successful single mother who gets it on with a twentysomething international popstar,
is calling BS:“Do you look at this picture and think, alright, international award-winning talent shaping the dreams of a generation of teen girls on the left, and a mousy gallery owner on the right? Exactly. That is Anne Hathaway and her assistant. That is Anne Hathaway and the 2nd 2nd AD. That is Anne Hathaway and her child’s guitar teacher. This is Anne Hathaway and that one apartment-obsessed TikToker you call when you can’t book an Architectural Digest home tour. I cannot suspend disbelief for one single moment that this is a regular woman and not Anne Hathaway, who is Anne Hathaway.”
Maybe we shouldn’t admit this, but AMT isn’t the only woman who has us scratching our heads…
Lauren Oyler’s 2023 Harper’s cover story, “I Really Didn’t Want to Go”—a kinda-sorta meditation on a Goop cruise and a definitely-100-percent skewering of David Foster Wallace’s 1996 story “Shipping Out”—is a thing of beauty, Spread canon. But after all these years of fearing her on Twitter, we’re still not sure what to make of the critic, novelist, and all-around literary shock jock. For its weekend essay the New Yorker ran an excerpt of her new book. “My Anxiety” offers a twisty catalog of Oyler’s own neuroses and their effects on her life and bod. Because she’s a good writer of sentences and feelings, the whole thing—thousands of words of hand-wringing and navel-gazing and hand-wringing about navel-gazing—is kind of painful… but also maybe kind of a joke? We are still unsure! This being the New Yorker, it can’t just be a little weekend experiment with a writer who has a book to promote? Or can it! We can’t hard-recommend this one, but if you’ve got time to kill and care about staying literary-darling-savvy, go for it here. Also Spreaders, as with AMT, we’d love to be recruited to Team Oyler—please enlighten us!

Daddy support.
On Sunday night, we found ourselves distracted even from Emma Stone’s broken-dress schtick—Emma is officially the new Anne Hathaway, you heard it here first—by the mere existence of Robert De Niro, 80, and his girlfriend, Tiffany Chen, who is a tight thirty-five years his junior and mother of their one-year-old. Then in wandered Al Pacino, 83, a man we all know still loves to sire, and we blacked out. And THEN Bess Kalb reached deep into our psyches to give us what we didn’t know we needed.2 Read “3AM Phone Call Between New Dads Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro” here.
Yes, we will Tea Time with you, Dakota.
Ready? Emily Gould [BIG DRINK] delivers the latest installment of her new New York mag gig, this time about the proliferation of celebrity book clubs. It’s not just Reese anymore, it’s Dua Lipa, Florence Welch, Hermione Granger, and Julia Roberts’s apparently not-so-dead-behind-the-eyes-after-all niece (who, wait for it, counts among her picks the collected stories of Shirley Hazzard!). Now joining the fray is that lovable “agent of chaotic good” and Madame Web disavower Dakota Johnson. Gould [you know what to do] makes delightful hay out of this cottage industry, revealing who really moves the needle for publishers: Kendall Jenner? Bookfluencer! Kaia Gerber? Not so much. But what comes through loud and clear is the white-knuckled desperation of publishing types. Says one agent, “We are all so desperate for people to give a shit about books that honestly we’ll take all we can get.” Read it here.
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What happened: Trump posted a $91.6 million bond to cover his judgment if (when) his attempt to appeal the ruling fails. “Though the illustrious Robbie Kaplan is strong enough to yank a golden toilet out of the floor at Trump Tower and toss it through the window, this bond saves Robbie the trouble of showing up with U.S. marshals on Monday to do so,” E. Jean wrote. Meanwhile, Trump continues to flap his damn gums. Will E. Jean take him to the cleaners yet again?
“I’m Al fucking Pacino. I want the Dôen ErgoBaby, I get the Dôen ErgoBaby.”
Swear to gawd, Grrrrrrrlz, this is your best SPREAD yet!!
I love how you lassoed, saddled-up, and road that galloping phrase from the 20th Century---"pony up"---into your opening!
Spreaditrixes, I am so relieved that you were as confused by that anxiety story as I was. When I started to feel anxious about being the only person not in on the--WAS it a joke?--I put it down. Thanks for your support! xo