No. 27 Always Wanting, Never Full

Media notes for the overstimulated and undernourished

Lately, everything I’ve consumed seems to orbit the same uneasy truth: we are always wanting, and we are always managing that wanting. Not just hunger in the bodily sense but the kind that seeps into every corner of life: for coherence, for attention, for authorship of our own narratives. The works below all prod at that tension between appetite and control, exposure and concealment, public image and private reality.

Reading - Autobiographical Fiction
Liars by Sarah Manguso
So I read this last year (sorry to break the illusion!), but I’ve been rereading bits as some personal parallels arise in my life. Manguso’s latest is a slim, taut novel that feels like reading someone’s diary after they’ve redacted every line twice. The narrator—a writer and mother in L.A.—is grieving and circling an old betrayal, trying to pin down the truth with surgical precision. But the more she tries to master the story, the more you sense the exhaustion of self-surveillance. It’s not so much a novel about lying as it is about the toll of being relentlessly honest in ways that are aesthetically correct. Every sentence is sharp enough to draw blood, but the wound it’s tracing isn’t new—it’s the lifelong training women get in how to package their pain so it looks acceptable on the shelf. Reader: I have talked myself out of anonymously sending this book to more than one friend who is in a shitty-but-they-don’t-realize-it-yet-and-they-are-projecting-shit-on-others marriage. Alas, I’ll never do that because I don’t want the karmic energy around that, so instead I’ll just write it here in my public diary.

Watching
Holland, Michigan (dir. Mimi Cave, starring Nicole Kidman)
On paper, it’s a suburban thriller about a marriage with secrets. On screen, it’s a slow, eerie study in repression so deep it becomes architecture. Kidman’s character discovers her husband’s double life, but instead of unraveling, she seems to sharpen—quietly auditioning for a different role in her own story. The Midwest here is pastel politeness with a seam of dread: church basements, casseroles, clipped hedges, and something feral humming underneath. The violence, when it arrives, doesn’t break the spell; it completes it. You leave wondering how much of your own life has been spent keeping up the performance of safety.

The woman who showed me how to gobble up life.

Reading - Nonfiction
Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball by Stefan Kanfer
Lucille Ball is often remembered as the queen of pratfalls and perfectly timed double-takes, but Kanfer’s biography makes it clear she was running a far more complicated operation. Ball had a ferocious appetite—for work, for control, for not being at the mercy of anyone else’s taste or paycheck. She built Desilu Studios into a production powerhouse, rehearsed comedy beats until they looked like accidents, and treated her public image like a national security asset. The irony, of course, is that the lovable, bumbling Lucy everyone adored was as choreographed as a military parade. The mask gave her power, but it also became permanent. She got everything she wanted—on the condition she keep smiling from inside the machine she’d built. Also, it’s not lost on me that Nicole Kidman (above, in Holland) also portrayed Ball alongside Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos in 2021 - worth a watch! On a personal note, I have watched every episode of I Love Lucy no less than five times each. Lucy was my after-school babysitter, my role model, and my comic relief. Her boisterous onscreen presence entranced me as a child and still to this day.

She really was that b*tch.

Odds & Ends

And Just Like That signs off
The Sex and the City reboot will end with Season 3—a two-part finale officially scheduled (part one aired last night). Its departure feels less like a gentrified send-off and more like a reluctant relief. I hope they let these characters rest. The only one I’m interested in seeing is Sam, of course. The Guardian

Vogue examines how breasts are being reimagined
In fashion’s intellectual trenches (sarcasm), Vogue unpacks how designers are reframing breasts as aesthetic and political statements—melding silicone and symbolism in ways that feel less screened, and a lot sharper. Vogue

A24’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You trailer release

Honestly, I’m just excited to see Conan O’Brien in a dramatic role. The other redhead from my childhood who taught me to view life through a humorous lens. YouTube

Hungry,

Mal