One morning on McSweeney’s there was an announcement about a new literary festival in Philadelphia organized by Neal Pollack. It was going to be called the 215 Festival (named after the city’s area code) and would feature readings by Dave and Zadie and Matthew Klam and Neal, as well as other young, McSweeney’s type writers.

Stupidly, I’d packed a suitcase; fleece and Backgammon and lingerie

Brought ingredients to make Bruce’s favorite pecan pie

“He couldn’t decide if he wanted to draw David, fuck him, beat him up or fall in love with him.”

            -Dennis Cooper, Closer

When I first began earnestly wanting to be a writer,

I hadn’t notified Interview magazine abt it
I hadn’t tweeted abt it either
I wasn’t post alt lit
Or a genius

Something about the auto workers strike –

Something abt how & why I was a cunt…

I did become very close to many people in the McSweeney’s universe. A lot of those people were great, and a lot of them were just ambitious people with no integrity whatsoever.

If this was a rap
instead of a poem
i would call it
'Sylvia Plath'

I’m interested in these conversations more than anything else, moments in which we care for and about each other in a world that says nothing’s more important than self-care after a productive day at work, where we’re constantly pit against each other, forced to compete with our peers to earn and preserve the right to exist.

There’s no amount of $$$ you could offer me
            To shut my mouth

I had started doing aerobics and running in place in our townhouse living room when Chad was at the golf shop. I’d found a recipe for whole wheat banana bread and I made a loaf every Sunday and every

Obsession is obsession is obsession, obsession is relatable; I am constantly obsessed with things, more accurately, I am constantly becoming obsessed with people.

Now I don’t care anymore. I’m writing posthumously; I’m invisible now – like an “aging actress”!

Becca, Ernie’s wife, estranged wife most of the novel until finally she is his ex-wife at the end, based on the author’s, based on Aaron’s, ex-wife, Elizabeth Ellen, who is, oddly, metally, writing these words, typing them into a Word doc at nine in the morning

-Editor at a literary journal attempting to be good, moral ppl (see: 1990s Christian Right)

I never wanted to run this ship. Frankly, I’d rather spend my time writing.

What connects people isn’t color or creed or gender or stupid political taxonomies, but the existential despair that comes for us all. How do you respond to that despair once it comes for you? I never feel closer to a person than when they share a piece of their despair with me, and rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with politics or ideology. It’s always about loneliness or heartbreak or loss, etc. It’s about life. The best art reflects that despair we all face back at us; it doesn’t separate us from other people.

Remember when Lena Dunham said

She wished she’d had an abortion?

Whimsy is not as prominently scarred as she imagines herself to be, but this obsession with her face leads her to sabotage her relationships because her insecurity is so destructive.

I think Westerners, and Americans especially, struggle with “autofiction” since their conceptions of self are so fixed.

And then there is the question of motherhood. And how it does or doesn’t fit into the feminist narrative, into our ideas of ourselves as liberated women.

I wrote this book manic, in psychosis, in withdrawal, while feeling like I was overdosing,

“See,” I said. “We’re both nihilists.”

 “I’m not a nihilist,” Matt said. He was at the kitchen sink filling his flask.

I think I give non-important people dignity. I still believe there is magic in this world.

 (Netflix is the opiate of the people!)

i used to write on adderall like a million years ago or when drinking also but thats stopped. like once, last year, i wrote a short story while drinking, and i cant even remember where i saved it so idek if its any good, bc after a while i got distracted and started watching YouTube makeup reviews.

I write about dark things a lot but not without at least some hope…or hope for hope.

I wrote for twenty years without anyone paying me or offering me confirmation or telling me that what I wrote would be welcomed by the world. Quite the contrary. 

"Gary” always felt like a misnomer to me, something I had to put up with to keep the peace.

I think they mean they just don't like a woman going around going "cunt cunt cunt."

When I was younger, if you had a hard time following rules, you became an artist.

Now, if you have a hard time following rules, you become an entrepreneur.

People in the literary world follow rules the most.

"Honestly, I don't care if language overtakes story." 

Maybe ‘white trash American girl’ is a compliment over there?

If you were to sit down and watch an American beer commercial and then a Canadian one, they wouldn't be that different. Replace the eagle with a beaver. 

Trent, and NIN, are way cooler and better. Also Trent is fucking hot.

The great thing about Betty and Rosalynn Carter working together was showing the world how to find common ground even when coming from different political stances. We could use a lot more of that right now.

June 1, 1944 –  Squadron party. Real whiskey, but didn’t get too hi – just happy. Met a W.A.F. (Women Air Force) & we talked English history.

I thought Roger Waters was full of shit, I mean

"I’m always looking for ways to pay more attention. I thought maybe I could be a better writer if I knew what private investigators knew, if I could see a clue for what it was. I’m still learning."  

Ironically, hours before we went to see Whoopi, I texted two friends from my bathtub that I didn’t think I would ever write another essay. It was “too hard.” “People only want to vilify you, so they look for words to use to that end, and ignore the rest of what you’ve said.”

Letterman wore khakis and the camera angled up his crotch. I watched every night or set my VCR to record on the rare occasion I left my apartment.

Kentucky is chill and for the most part, doesn't try to be something it's not. I feel that way abt myself tbh.

In these poems I am using ‘Chelsea Martin’ as a pseudonym for someone who is not Chelsea Martin.

When I stay over at Amelia’s there is a poster of Devils Tower over her bed and we trace the volcanic neck with our fingertips instead of sleeping. I give Amelia a Xanax and floss between each of her teeth.

I finally tore Bluets in half @ 12:50 a.m.
I had had enough of it, of its blueness…
I had begun to loathe its preciousness, its precision
What it represents -
Its fans, the copycats

By the time I arrived at the Phoenix airport the next summer I was thirty pounds heavier. I’d spent the previous nine months eating vending machine moonpies and packaged cookies in my dorm room.

I smile into the mirror. There is lipstick on my front teeth. I don’t rub it off.

I have trouble sleeping in open spaces, I tell Saul. There is a blanket on the floor of my closet.

I remember Ian saying I was not a novelist and I think, as much as it pained me at the time to hear this, he was correct.

“I’m just excited that my first time voting in a presidential election was for a woman,” my daughter said

“yeah,” I said

“that’s so exciting,” I said

You interviewing me for Hobart is pretty much the peak of my hustle. Maybe this is me selling out. Maybe this is growing up. 

Eventually, I turned to memoir because I wanted to stay in scene. I craved space. I believe in the connection between poetry and memoir. It’s no coincidence that some of our best memoirs have come from poets: Mary Karr, Nick Flynn, Lucy Grealy, Mark Doty, Maggie Nelson, and Sarah Manguso—that list could go on-and-on.

According to my parents, I was obedient from birth—I emerged in silence and then slept through the night. I was just never interested in rebelling—even as a “punk,” I got good grades and was always home by curfew.

Are you Beyoncé? My daughter says.

I am holding a pair of Nike kneepads in my hand.

No, I say.

I am not Beyoncé, I say.

And now I am left wondering how The End of the Story might have been different, what more we might have found out, had ‘Vincent’ not been a presence in that flowered armchair, had Lydia not been conscious of him invoking rules: there shouldn’t be any intimate scenes.

My new friend interrupted me to say, “You seem like you live like a real artist.”
My new friend had already been twice published by The New Yorker.
I thought maybe she had confused me with herself.

I hadn’t had any alcohol to drink in forty-two days.
I had told myself I wouldn’t drink for thirty but once you stop doing something it’s hard to start doing it again.

Tanja and I were competing to see who had moved the most as a child.
“I know of at least fourteen places we lived before I was eighteen,” I said.
Tanja started naming places she had lived. She kept naming her grandma’s house over and over, between every place.

I can only remember smoking weed with Steve once.
It was either right before or right after I married my daughter’s father.

“God, dating Drake would be like dating a submissive,” my daughter said.

Nicki Minaj just said, “all my independent women make some noise.”
I didn’t know if she meant me.

Another night we got so high I broke into our next-door neighbor’s house and stole their television so we could watch The Simpsons. I asked Loretta where I should put it. She said on top of the TV, which is how we discovered that we already had a TV.

let’s start with my most pressing question, one you haven’t answered IRL: WHY DID YOU TURN DOWN BRAD LISTI?

To be honest, there were other books that had as great an impact on me, but I don’t have access to those authors (Bret Easton Ellis – Lunar Park, Elizabeth Wurtzel – More, Now, Again, W. Somerset Maugham – Of Human Bondage)..

I sat and bawled for half an hour after finishing Hill William in one swift read through this morning, beginning to end in an hour. 

on page 97, between sections that detail time Paul and Erin spend in Ohio with “Calvin” and “Maggie” (Jordan Castro and Mallory Whitten), I wrote: Manson Family, in large black letters.

Top Ten of 2012

Chelsea Martin is easily one of the sweetest persons I know, as well as one of the funniest. She’s so quiet and seemingly unassuming, you don’t see it coming. It sneaks up on you,

Julia Wertz's first two books are called Fart Party, a great, attention-grabbing title. I remember grabbing the book off the shelf at the comic bookstore, poking my boyfriend and laughing

It takes a lot to get me to read an entire book. I buy, borrow and steal books by the hundreds, but the actual number I read from beginning to end are very few. In the last seven years, I've

Eric Spitznagel didn't always write porn. (And doesn't, it should be noted, anymore.) In fact, for most of his adult life (we can't answer for his teen years... God only knows what he was doing