Sticking the landing
Full disclosure: I’m writing this during commercial breaks while watching the Olympics. I run hot or cold with the Olympics, and with sports in general; sometimes I become fully devoted to, like, the World Cup, and sometimes I simply don’t even know what’s going on. I watched one night of the last Olympics (which, because everything is weird, was last year).
But I have always liked the winter version best, partly, I think, because I have dabbled in more of the sports overall. You grow up in New England, you learn to ski (both kinds) and skate and probably have gotten on a snowboard. I always liked the biathlon, since I was a relatively accomplished cross-country skier as a teenager growing up in the middle of nowhere and not a terrible shot on a rifle range. Combining them seems like an insane but also pretty fun challenge.
Anyhow, I wrote recently about the semi-lie the people who corral the official Olympics story keep trying to sell us (don’t hate me), so I’m not really in the pocket of Big Ice. But there is something undeniably magical about watching people get their big shot on the world stage, even when the arenas are empty-ish and you have to get a swab stuck up your nose every day. Good for them.
I am definitely not athletic, but even when I have been, I think one thing I’ve always realized is that I don’t have the mental stamina required to be a pro athlete. You watch them and you just think, Oh, I would totally choke. I’m not alone, I don’t think, in sort of punting the landing of a lot of things — gritting my teeth super hard to do something well, and then in the last quarter-mile stretch I doubt myself and stumble. (Mixed metaphors, so many mixed metaphors!) I was the student who got perfect scores all semester and then flopped on the final.
I think about this a lot, as a writer; a mentor once told me that people would always read what I wrote, but my challenge would be to find something to say. I’m still not sure if that was encouragement. But as I’m starting to dig into We Tell Ourselves Stories, my next book, which isn’t due for about a year and a half, I’ve been thinking about that — the importance and impossibility when you’re exhausted of writing something new, something you’ve never read somewhere else, instead of just spitting out some pretty words you know will do the job.
It seems like an impossible task.
I guess I’ll keep watching these skaters.
Been writing
A busy week!
As I mentioned above, I watched a whole bunch of Olympics documentaries, which stretch back over a century to the early 1900s — some official, and some considerably less so. And then I wrote about the unreliable narrative they peddle.
I came up with a list of 18 indie movies everyone will be watching this year, harvested from Sundance. (In the end I saw 62 movies at Sundance. Yikes.)
Also, a list of the 15 best documentaries; there are some amazing films in this list.
I wrote about writing your own story and one of the best movies of the year, which is finally out: The Worst Person in the World.
And finally, my proudest moment of the week, somehow: I spent most of Thursday in a movie theater watching all four Jackass movies (including the newly released one, Jackass Forever), and then I wrote about the, uh, experience. (I am always happy when I get the opportunity to kind of flex my writerly muscles a little.)
Been reading and watching
Aside from Jackass, I also saw Moonfall this week, which is not, uh, good, but it’s kind of hilariously and stupidly great? If you want a big theatrical movie where the moon falls, it’s the one you want.
We also started watching the screeners for Inventing Anna, the upcoming Netflix show about the scammer Anna Delvey, and I am not really allowed to talk about it yet but it’s probably going to be a thing. (Out Friday.)
Odds and ends
The ARCs (aka advanced reader copies, aka galleys, aka cheaply printed uncorrected versions of the book that you give to reviewers and other media people) of Salty arrived at my house today, somewhat unexpectedly. The final version will be in hardcover, but it’s still enormously fun to see it on paper. It’s a real book! 196 pages! Illustrations! Recipes! And nine really cool women’s lives. (If you’re interested, please do pre-order; it matters a lot for sales numbers.)