It Still Keeps Her Secrets
An ode to the writer's office
The Sunday Letter #15
“The first time he looked at her he felt: everything will burn!”
— Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love
“Anaïs Nin’s Los Angeles Hideaway Still Keeps Her Secrets,” a 2022 T article, has been making the rounds on Twitter thanks to this tweet.
The whole house is delicious, from the lush magenta carpeting evoking Nin’s propensity for the erotic, to the sparse desk, which is entirely minimal save for a large self-portrait. She really was an icon!
I have a thing for photos of writer’s desks. I collect them like amulets, which might deliver me into a writerly career of my own, in which I too might have enormous bookcases and ashtray-lined desks and velvet armchairs.
In celebration of Nin’s gorgeous hideaway, here are a few other favourites…
Do you have a favourite writer’s desk that I need to see? Please share!
This week’s recommendations
Anna Marie Tendler on saying goodbye to her beloved dog, Petunia. I laughed, I cried, I hugged my own pup close. Oh, the power of a dog to heal and protect us!
She never let me out of her sight. In fact, she watched me intently, as if I was the thing she now needed to guard, though, where guarding once incited her primal rage, she would now guard me with the deepest kind of love I had ever known.
The wonderful E. Alex Jung interviewed Drew Barrymore about her tumultuous upbringing, her relationship with her parents, and her life as a single mother of two young daughters. Her radical honesty is incredibly moving—she mentions that when she divorced the father of her daughters, she took it “so hard, because I was the best I could have ever been.” She’s also still working through a very complicated relationship with her mother, and her quotes in the profile have been stripped of their context and misconstrued in recent headlines, so I’d urge you to read the full profile if you can. When Jung remarked that Barrymore’s closet is covered in affirmations such as “TREAT MYSELF AS THE MOTHER I NEEDED. DO NOT BEAT MYSELF UP,” I choked up. My #1 takeaway from the entire piece is that Drew needs to cut herself a break!
“I’ve been a circus bear my whole life. I swear to God, if the ringmaster left the tent, I would become the ringmaster and start, like, flagellating myself…When will I ever give myself a fucking break?” she continues. “What would it be like to be empathetic toward that little girl?”
For Dirt, Becca Schuh wrote about being both a writer and a server:
Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.
Carmen Maria Machado for Bon Appétit, “Hollywood’s Gruesome, Lurid Obsession with People Eating People”:
Cannibalism stories ask us to wrestle with thorny questions about what it means to eat the things we eat, or what it means to unmake something just like us in service of ourselves. It is a subject impossible to untangle from our human desire to consume, or the vulnerabilities that make us easy to be consumed.
In ArtNews, “Hannah Gadsby’s Disastrous ‘Pablo-matic’ Show at the Brooklyn Museum Has Some ‘Pablo-ms’ of Its Own”: “Most of the works in this show are by Picasso, strangely enough. This in itself constitutes an issue—you can’t re-center art history if you’re still centering Picasso.”
Newly-minted Pulitzer winner Andrea Long Chu on Yellowstone—“How the Cowboy Was Colonized”:
Sheridan has effectively allotted a place for white resentment within a larger critique of settler colonialism: If the show’s white characters fear replacement, this is because they are closely identified with the very people they first replaced; they have co-opted the language of settlement to describe their own mistreatment.
For
, writer on how ‘crip time’ changed her approach to working online:Through the lens of Crip Time, I started to confront how inaccessible the influencer path is. Quick turnarounds and inflexible deadlines ignore the fact that disability and chronic illness consume your energy and time often without notice.
And finally, the irreducible
on her rise as an internet writer: “I love girls on the internet! I think girls on the internet are the most fundamental arbiters of culture, and the most interesting people in the world.”
New word of the week: bugbear (bug·bear) - noun.
A cause of obsessive fear, irritation, or loathing.
(Archaic) - An imaginary being invoked to frighten children, typically a sort of hobgoblin supposed to devour them.
This word comes courtesy of John Early’s The Cut interview: “Early is, at his best, a comedian of manners, whose particular bugbears are cliché and cant; digital-era catchphrases turn to ashes in his mouth.” Early is such a delight in everything (justice for the criminally-underrated Search Party!) and I can’t wait to watch his new HBO special.
I thought bugbear was common! Maybe it’s a Northern thing?