With equal parts delight and frustration, the founders of MSCHF admit what they do can be hard to categorise.

That is partly the point.

The Brooklyn-based collective operate at the intersection of art, pop culture commentary and consumer pranks.

Also: humour, absurdity and critique.

They have a particular penchant for skewering designer fashion, and our curious and often unhealthy relationship with it.

They are perhaps best known for The Big Red Boot, the bright red, bulky and oversized footwear that was a signature of Astro Boy, the Japanese manga and anime character, which became a viral hit after the made them for real, and released them as a limited-edition, wearable art piece in 2023, priced around £400.

There has been other headline-grabbing footwear.

The Jesus Shoes were a pair of Nike Air Max 97 trainers, modified to include holy water from the River Jordan in the soles, a gold crucifix pendant hanging from the laces, and red insoles said to resemble the colour of Christ’s blood. They retailed for $1,425, a reference to Mathew 14.25 in which Jesus walks on water. “And in the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.”

The Jesus Shoes were followed in 2021 by Satan Shoes.

These were another pair of modified Air Max 97s, this time with human blood in the sole, an upside-down cross pendant on the laces and “666” stamped on the side. These retailed for $1,018 – a reference to Luke 10:18. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”.

Sneakers are the tip of the iceberg.

MSCHF’s products/ideas are released in drops, at the rate of one a fortnight.

These have included Puff The Squeaky Chicken, a familiar rubber chicken toy modified to become a bong that squarks when you smoke it. Alexagate, a device that sits on top of an Amazon Echo that may be toggled on and off to shut down Alexa’s always-on listening capability, and hence “stop Jeff Bezos spying on you”. The Free Movie, a frame-for-frame recreation of Jerry Seinfeld’s forgettable 2007 animation The Bee Movie, entirety compromised of crowd-sourced scribbles.

Then there was the Microscopic Handbag, a neon-green 3D-printed take on Louis Vuitton’s OnTheGo tote, that was only visible through a microscope and created for Pharrell Williams – “He loves big hats, so we made him an incredibly small bag”.

And Key4All which flipped the idea of Zipcar on its head, since it was a set of 1,000 identical keys that all unlocked the same car. (To find the vehicle, divers were invited to call MSCHF’s car location hotline, which offered hints to its whereabout in New York City.)

Naturally, there have been lawsuits.

MSCHF’s Birkinstocks were pairs of Birkenstocks’ Arizona sandal made from destroyed Hermés Birkin bags.

It’s Wavy Baby trainers, from 2021, took inspiration from Balenciaga’s Triple S shoes, known for their bulky, exaggerated style, and applied wavy, squiggly contours to the soles and uppers of shoes that were recognisably familiar lines from Adidas, Vans and Reebok.

Nike was understandably displeased about their shoes being associated with both Jesus and Satan.

But those perhaps pale in comparison to the 2020 MSCHF Boston Dynamics controversy.

For this one, the collective released “Spot’s Revenge”, which involved taking the quadruped robot “dog” created by the robotics and artificial intelligence research company, and modifying it with a paintball gun.

The already unsettling droid was then videoed lurching around shooting stuff, a weaponised version of itself, straight out of Robocop.

A “significant” backlash ensured.

None of this has stopped the pranksters from raising a reported $20m in Series A funding, as per 2021, their unique blend of art, marketing and technology, plus their high rate of virality, being catnip to investors.

Quite how said investors hope to get their money back is, you suspect, not MSCHF’s problem.

If getting a handle on precisely what it is that MSCHF do, and why it exists, has proved elusive, a new book, marking its tenth anniversary, provides clues.

As one might expect, Made by MSCHF, published by arthouse book company Phaidon, is a lavish, visually rich almost-400 page doorstop of a book, that surveys the work of the collective, via case studies and thematic essays.

Esquire recently spoke to Kevin Wiesner and Lukas Bentel, chief creative officers at the company, about their work.

The pair were in Tokyo, days away from opening a new exhibition, titled Material Values.

“We’re literally at the back room of a gallery,” Bentel said, as was obvious from the stacks off bubble-wrapped canvases piled up behind them, on the Zoom screen.

“There’s a lot of work ahead of us.”

Esquire: What didn’t you want this book to be?

Kevin Wiesner: We didn’t want it to be a “coffee table book”. Where it’s just pictures and pictures and pictures. Especially because so much of what we’re making are websites – they’re interactive, they’re honestly very hard to print. So, there ends up being quite a lot of writing. Which we hope is sort of describing our working process and how MSCHF approaches executing any of our works. Even internally we’ve always struggled to articulate what makes a MSCHF project. Writing about a dozen projects at significant length was a way to articulate ourselves.

Lukas Bentel: I hope it’s a very educational book. Just in terms of just explaining the thought process, it you read through the projects. Hopefully it leads to other people making work in a similar vein

A number of influential names have contributed essays to the book. The award-winning Pentagram designer Natasha Jen writes about the Satan Shoes, for example. She says: “This endeavour wasn’t merely a dalliance with the absurd, but a meticulously crafted critique of the digital, saturated ethos of our consumer culture and the increasingly fluid boundaries of brand in the contemporary lexicon”. Does that kind of highbrow thinking apply to every MSCHF project? Or do some fall under the category of: “We did this one because it made us laugh?”

LB: I think there needs to be something that brings people in. If it’s humour, or an aesthetic. The thing we often say is “It has to slap in one sentence”. It’s okay to have the fun, as long as there’s some substance to it.

KW: This is something we always navigate. I think people want to look at MSCHF’s work and think that it all can be described in the same way. I don’t think that that’s true. There are things that are primarily meant to be visual. They are things that are intended from the get-go to be specific critiques. And there are things that are much more experiential.

One of the things we have as a pillar of the way MSCHF operates is that we release a lot of things. We hold ourselves to a very strict schedule because we feel like we need to put a gun to our own heads. And that means that… our output varies tremendously. The temptation for people is that as soon as one of them can be analysed as a satire or critique, they go, “Oh, that must be the same for every single project”. But it’s not that homogenous.

But something like Puff The Squeaky Chicken, surely that’s just meant to be funny? There’s no deeper meaning there?

KW: [Laughs] Some of those early ones were us figuring out: “What are we even doing?”

LB: It wasn’t like we had the clearest divisions right from the get-go. It’s been a practice. It’s ever evolving.

KW: The chicken is actually an interesting example. In the context of the rest of the work you can see a thread of sampling specific cultural elements, right? The chicken bong is just stupid and fun, and it was the first physical project that we ever made. We learned a lot from doing it, but it’s derived from the same thought process that gets us to Satan Shoes. We’re looking for things that exist in the world, that we can build other things out of.

The squeaky chicken was culturally ready-made. On the internet, it had a particular connotation. [A meme denoting an embrace of randomness and/ or absurdity]. It was huge at that time, when Vine was still a platform. It was one of these objects that recurred over and over again, in a certain type of content. It was sitting there as something that we could pull from and build on. Would we say it’s one of the 12 case studies that we’re proudest of? Absolutely not. Is it a product of the same process [we used later]? Yeah, I would say, absolutely.

Other ideas, like Key4All, require a crowdsourcing element. You release them, and then its up to other people to figure out what to do with them.

KW: Oh, one hundred per cent. It’s something we do over and over again. We create a set of props or conditions for a performance that’s not going to be done by us. It’s going to be done by as many people who can interact with it as possible.

If you’re keeping up a schedule of a drop every two weeks, how far ahead are you working on ideas?

LB: Generally, a year out. If not longer.

What stops you going cold on something? Ie: A project that got you excited in spring 2024, feeling passé by spring 2025?

LB: There’s been a few times where we’ve “course corrected”.

KW: We make a point not to start working on an idea soon after we have it. You want to put it on a board, and then you let it sit there for six months. And the final test: are we still excited about it? After the initial buzz of coming up with the idea has worn off.

How do you find the people who’ll manufacture all this different stuff? Are you constantly cold-calling companies saying: “Would you be interested in making us an Alexagate?”

KW: The short answer is, basically: yes. But the nice thing is, oftentimes, we’re ringing up manufacturers or companies, and we’re asking them to do something that’s much more fun than what they normally get to do. We have a good hit rate with those with those calls where we say, “Hey, do you want to make…?” Whatever it is.

Is there anything you haven’t been able to get made?

LB: There always is. Or just things that are really hard to do right now.

Can you talk about the process for the Birkinstocks?

KW: The nice thing about Birkenstock, as a sandal company, is they sell every piece of their shoe individually for repairs. Because that’s the kind of company that they are. Hermès does not do that. So, we bought some Birkin bags, and basically, we walked around Brooklyn with the bags. And we went into leather-working shops and asked: “Hey, could you take this apart?” Like, render it back into flat sheets, so we could make stuff? We had several people who point blank refused us. “Get this project out of my shop!” But then, fortunately, we did find someone. We also found a place that was doing small-batch shoe runs. It really was just a matter of coordinating several different suppliers. It took a little bit of convincing. We also did have a bag stolen from the shop.

LB: One person that we worked at the start basically cooked a bag. They did a very bad job.

KW: I think we also had a stack of fake Birkins that we got off [New York souvenir/ counterfeit designer goods mecca] Canal Street, so we could do some test runs on them.

Leaving aside the copyright issues around the actual items you created, you also co opt other elements of a brand’s IP. The Birkinstock product page on your website, for example, is in a font that’s meant to remind people of Hermès. Is all of this protected by the First Amendment rules on free speech? Is that how you get around it?

KW: That’s a good question. We always think it is, right? [Laughs] Pretty much whenever we’re dealing with copyright, we believe that we are operating within our bounds as artists. People who are sampling culture – in the same way that in music there’s a rich sampling culture. I think art history has pretty firmly established that as standard practice. You know, from Warhol onwards, the sort of appropriation of corporate imagery in particular is very – let’s say “normal”.

Now, as far as the law is concerned, that’s a much harder question to answer. And we’ve had to learn more about it than we ever wanted to. And honestly, the thing that was most surprising to us is just how not settled it is. It’s actually incredibly difficult to answer the question you’ve just asked in a way that I feel confident about, because it’s constantly being relitigated. Andy Warhol lost a fair share of these cases. His foundation lost a fair use lawsuit in the last couple of years. Don’t we all feel like he got away with this, several decades ago? Why are we still talking about this?

Apparently, you share a lawyer with Barack Obama.

LB/KW: We do. Yeah.

So, what happens in, say, the Wavy Baby case? Is it a back-and-forth with the shoe companies, until the case is eventually dropped?

LB: I think that one ended up just settled. I think all the lawsuits we’ve had have just settled, ultimately.

Meaning, you had to pay out?

KW: Ultimately, it was decided outside of trial, right? So, we reach an agreement with – in this case – Vans. They do “X”, we do “Y”, and we mutually agree to drop the suit. We don’t have to do a formal resolution.

Is all publicity good publicity?

LB: It’s all been better for us, publicity-wise. I think a lot of people also think that there’s some sort of point with us trying to get sued. But as artists we’re never trying to…

KW: …it’s not like it’s trying to make us look cool, challenging a large brand like that. It’s a huge pain in the ass. It’s not the point of the work. I don’t think any of the major lawsuits that we’ve ever had has come from a project where we were expecting to have them. We’ve been shocked.

What about the Boston Dynamics robot dog?

LB: That never resulted in any lawsuit. Although they did release some statements…

KW: We bought that thing. We can do whatever we want. Honestly, it’s shocking that they could deactivate it. Like, can Apple nuke my laptop right now? Because they don’t like that I’m talking to you?

That was a project with a serious point. It was an anti-war protest.

KW: Yeah. They got their start with military funding. [In its early days, the company received significant funding from the US military, notably the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA). It has since pivoted to commercial sales.]

The Satan Shoes had your blood in them. Did that present manufacturing difficulties?

LB: The blood actually came from all of us [ie: the MSCHF staff]. And it was early on enough that we were personally making all of the shoes ourselves.

You’ve made a point of not repeating yourselves. Except, maybe, in trainers and fine art. What’s the appeal of those categories?

LB: I think fine art is much more understandable [for us]. We’re coming also from more of a fine art background, so it was a way of looking at the world that made sense. And then footwear was something we completely stumbled into by accident. And then, to be honest, because we got sued by Nike, it seemed there was a reason to continue making shoes.

You weren’t at all sure that the Jesus Shoes would sell, is that right?

LB: That was shocking as well. That was only, like, our seventh project.

KW: In no way were we conceiving them as products. No one would ever wear these, right? We were very far outside of the sneaker world at that time. But there was this whole secondary market dynamic to them. This idea that they were these pseudo-investment vehicles. At the time we were working on the Jesus Shoes, we were kind-of like blindsided by it. I think there was a sense that sneakers as an object were in some kind of cultural ascendancy. But we really did not understand the mechanics of it. I also think there was a bit of making fun of that whole space.

The idea being: who would be the ultimate collab? Well, that would be Jesus?

KW: Yeah, exactly.

Do you like it when celebrities wear your stuff? Drake, for example?

KW: I guess, yeah. It’s a good way to get an idea out there.

Do big brands pitch to you now?

KW: Every once in a while. It depends how big we’re talking. It’s rare that a big brand has any idea what it wants.

Would you be open to collaborating, or is it a flat no?

LB: If you have a good idea that needs an outlet, and someone’s approached you that seems could make that idea happen, maybe it makes sense.

KW: If we’re ever going to do stuff like that, usually the way it works is that if we’ve had an idea, and the only way that we could get it done is to work with a partner to execute it, then we figure out how to make that happen. You were talking about the fine art world earlier. That’s actually how we ended up getting gallery representation. We had this idea for an ATM with a leaderboard on top of it, for your bank balance [the MSCHF ATM Leaderboard, from 2022, displayed participants’ photos, plus their accurate bank balances, on a ranked screen above the cashpoint]. We thought that the only space that could really live would be Art Basel in Miami. So, we had to figure out how to get into Art Basel. And it turns out the only way you can is that you have gallery representation.

LB: We tried to do it by contacting the Basel organisation directly. And they were, like, “Do you want to pay us a lot of money for a corporate [space]?” They didn’t understand what we were trying to do. So, then we went and found somebody that would let us show.

How does MSCHF make money?

KW/LB: [Laugh]

Do you actually make money?

LB: Sometimes!

KW: The line that we always use, which is the most accurate, is that at the end of the day, we make and sell objects. And that is how MSCHF makes money. What are those objects? Well, obviously, since we have doubled down on sneakers, that’s a line that has been a recurring vertical with MSCHF. Sometimes it’s, you know, car keys.

Can you talk about the Big Red Boot? Did you have any inkling it would go as nuts as it did?

LB: I don’t think anybody could have ever expected it to go as nuts as it did. Because I don’t think any shoes have really gone as nuts as quickly. It was one of the greatest peaks, and then declines, of any object I’ve ever seen in my life. I think we thought it would do well. I don’t think we had any idea where, how big it was gonna get.

KW: We thought it was an image that could travel. It had a lot going for it. Did we think that people would buy it as a product? I mean, again, no. There’s always a question of how people are going to interact with something like that. One of the things that we have often talked about is the difference between putting images into the world and putting objects into the world. And the Big Red Boot is like a great example of the extra potency of objects. Which is basically: that other people can then make more images of them, right? It’s a pretty interesting case study from that perspective.

Although, for us, it was one of these things that rapidly escaped our control. Like we were talking about with the car keys, and some of these other things. There’s a performance that is done not by us, right? There’s a life to these things that’s in the hands of the crowd. So when Lukas is talking about the incredible peak-to-valley contrast of the Big Red Boot, we were trying to take what was originally, you know, a cartoonish form, and basically execute it at a very high production standard, and position it as a fashion object. And it had this spike where it was sort of being perceived in that vein. And then, as it proliferated everywhere, it became this inescapable meme. It was just so saturated onto Instagram that people really got annoyed by it, and it sort of roughly collapsed back into this jokey thing. It was a real whiplash moment for us, where we were trying to do this context transposition, and it sort of like jumped into a new context and then like slingshotted all the way back to where it started.

LB: It was interesting! You get to try to elevate it, and then it just imploded.

KW: Right. We were sort of upset at the time.

Because people had misunderstood it?

LB: Well, I think at first, they didn’t. As soon as it launched, it had a lot of interest as an image. And was really put on a pedestal. I’ve never seen so many inbound people asking us to give them stuff to take a photo with, and how much they would offer to buy it for. And then the fakes started being made of it. As soon as that happened, it just it devalued the image so much. And people started wearing it in ways that were really bad.

KW: It was very briefly this really highly desirable thing. And then it very quickly became this “avoid at all costs” thing. What’s the opposite of a desirable commodity? Anti desirable?

You can’t honestly be grumbling that someone has bootlegged one of your products?

KW: We do think it’s funny now, actually. Because as we sat down to write about it for the book, the more we came to appreciate its whole life cycle. And now when we come to The Free Movie project, with the hand drawn frames… We initially ran it with Bee Movie with Jerry Seinfeld. And not just because the pun worked with the name, but because this intellectual property that has this second life that has only been shaped by the way the internet relates to it, right?

Like it was a completely forgettable, stupid movie. But the one line where [Seinfeld’s character] Barry B. Benson says “You like jazz?”, out of context, just proliferated so heavily online. Like nobody has seen that movie, but basically everybody knew that one little five-second snippet, right? So, it had this totally crowd-mediated life. So, I think we had a knee-jerk reaction that, we lost control of the Big Red Boot. But it’s also that encapsulation of a particular way that the internet owns things that, generally, we really like. So I do think we came back around to it, when we had some distance.

Is your job as fun as it looks?

LB: Yeah, it probably is.

My favourite MSCHF fact is that one of your employees, Josh Wardle, invented Wordle. It sounds like something you’d make up. But it’s true, right?

LB: He did that before joining MSCHF. Literally, the two weeks before he joined. And then it exploded. And then he worked with us for, like, two years, and then he left. Honestly, he had some pretty big, pretty big things to work on himself. But, yeah, it’s totally true.

Made by MSCHF by Lukas Bentel and Kevin Wiesner with Karen Wong is published by Phaidon priced £59.95.

For the whole time I was reading it, I tried to second-guess Twist, the new novel by the Irish writer Colum McCann. Ah! I said, a chapter or so in, as the narrator, a lost soul, washed up in Cape Town awaiting a summons to an ocean voyage: it’s a re-working of Moby-Dick! (I do have a confirmation bias problem with Moby-Dick sightings I’ll admit.) McCann’s Ishmael was a writer—Anthony Fennell—working on an assignment for an online magazine about the boats that traverse the world to fix ruptures in the fibre-optic cables through which most of our exchanged information is conveyed. Fennell, too, has been told of a mysterious captain, or rather, a chief of mission—John Conway—to whose boat he has been assigned by a press office somewhere in Brussels.

Conway, though, is no Ahab—although his surname does pre-empt some future slipperiness—and makes himself surprisingly available to Fennell before they’ve even stepped offshore. He invites Fennell to his home to meet his partner, Zanele—a glamorous actress and, like Conway himself, an accomplished free-diver—and the two children they’re raising. Later, Conway introduces Fennell to his free-diving friends. (Ahab, by contrast: not a big friends guy.) Something is awry though: Zanele is taking the kids to Brighton while she stars in a play; Conway is heading out to sea. Perhaps Twist isn’t a seafaring adventure, but an ill-fated love story?

There are further twists to come. In Africa there has been a deluge of Biblical proportions and import: rains so heavy they’ve created a gargantuan underwater landslide and a cable has been severed. The internet is slowing—heaven forfend!—and Conway’s crew is assigned to locate the cable and repair it. Fennell is quick to claim his cabin although, in scenes semi-reminiscent of that middle bit in Triangle of Sadness, takes some days to find his sea legs.

McCann, who won the National Book Award for his 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin, partly inspired by the French tightrope-walker Philippe Petit, spent time aboard a French cable boat, the Léon Thévenin, which, like the fictional Georges Lecointe, flies under the flag of Mauritius. He has clearly studied closely the mechanics of such a ship, from its crew to its layout to the exact way the replacement cables are coiled or the frayed ends of the cable recovered. But also he has thought about it deeply too—what it means that we surrender the stuff of our lives, from the profound to the frivolous, to these inconspicuous lines snaking along the ocean floor.

And it is fascinating, really, isn’t it? That we understand so little of how the world works, what the fundamental infrastructure of our lives really is, or how vulnerable to damage we allow ourselves to be. And McCann’s prose has a power and lyrical propulsion that can be quite dazzling: the huge landslip, for example, is “an underwater punch to the back of the brain, rupturing the eardrums of whatever was there to hear it, an eight-hundred-kilometre slide that could have destroyed anything in its path, passing through the underwater gorges, beyond the jagged cliffs, over the drowned ridges, the bluffs, the crags, the caves.” Like the engorged Congo River, his descriptions sweep, unsparingly, across the page.

But just when you think you’ve got it sussed—ah, a semi-philosophical enquiry into the nature of connection and human frailty!—it twists again. We’re back with Conway, and an unexpected denouement that uncoils with page-turning urgency. Having been absent a while, the chief of mission returns, or a fractured version of him anyway—a portrait of a man who, like Petit before him, possesses a singularity of vision and an ability to endure extremes. And the book becomes… something else. A character study? An ecological thriller? Certainly it wasn’t the book I thought it was. But sometimes it’s best to take a breath and follow the line.

Originally published on Esquire UK

Next week, to coincide with a little know art event, The Pineapple Room—Capella Singapore's newest temple to the arts—will partner with TASCHEN for a pop-up bookstore. That's right, now there's a reason for you to read at a bar. The vaunted purveyor of art books will present an array of its coveted titles from its catalogue.

Nearly 70 books from TASCHEN, covering everything from art and fashion to travel and gastronomy, will be gathered under one roof. But not just any roof. This is The Pineapple Room, we are talking about; a space dreamed up by the Matthew Shang Design Office. With an interior filled with Singapore's history told through archival documents like photographs from the 1940s to 1960s and vintage maps that whisper of old-world Singapore, The Pineapple Room is the perfect nest for the TASCHEN's storytelling ethos.

We got a gander at TASCHEN's list of tomes that will be at the pop-up. Like Annie Leibovitz's SUMO; Mick Rock's The Rise of David Bowie, 1972-1973; Hokusai; The Magic Book; and many more. While the digital medium is delightful, there's nothing quite like the physical copy of a book; something you can feel, smell and perfect to spice up the emptiness of your coffee table.

When: Wednesday to Sunday, 15–19 January 2025, 11am to 7pm
Where: The Pineapple Room, Capella Singapore, 1 The Knolls, Sentosa Island, 098297
Admission: Free to the public; especially to anyone willing to travel to Sentosa

When I saw that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was turning 70, I bought myself a new copy. I hadn’t read it for a while—30 years, give or take—and I wondered what its effects would be now that I, unlike the book’s protagonists and most of us when we first read it, am a grown-up. I picked up a recent-ish paperback issued by Faber, the British publishing house that bought the manuscript from Golding in 1954, offering him an advance of £60 for his debut novel, after it had been rejected by at least six others.

The new cover was bright red and featured faux-naïf drawings of naked child warriors scattered at jaunty angles, and surrounded by butterflies, lizards and yellow tulips. Or no, perhaps those were flames. Regardless, it was a cheerier cover than the one I remembered from our bookshelf as a child, which was white and featured a grim image of a pig’s head impaled on a stick, painted in greys, blacks and, for the blood dripping from its eyes, red.

The pig’s head is important, as are the naked child warriors and the flames, as you probably remember if you studied Lord of the Flies at school, which is quite likely: it has consistently been selected as a set text in the UK—at A-level, O-level and GCSE—since its publication. The writer Ian McEwan, in an essay published in a 1986 collection celebrating Golding’s 75th birthday, recalled reading Lord of the Flies at boarding school when he was 13; he was surprised to discover that “Golding knew all about us”.

Nor is it just British children who have studied it: the book has been translated into more than 30 languages. When Golding was presented with the Nobel Prize in 1983 by the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf told him: “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding. I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.” (The cruelty of that “had to”!)

The book has had a long half-life in popular culture, too. It has been turned into one reasonably good film, Peter Brook’s starkly monochrome 1963 adaptation; one criminally cheesy one, Harry Hook’s 1990 take, starring Balthazar Getty; and has inspired numerous other works, from the recent TV drama Yellowjackets, which transposes the dynamic to an all-girls’ football team, to the long-running reality-TV show Survivor.

To celebrate its 70 years this autumn, Faber released a graphic-novel version and, as I write, a new four-part BBC adaptation is filming in Malaysia, written by the British screenwriter Jack Thorne. At the announcement, Thorne said that he’d read the book with his mother as a boy, and that it “left a scar on me like no other”.

In 2018, The Independent included Lord of the Flies in a list of “Seven books our English teachers tortured us with”, but for Golding’s book this was unusually and specifically true. As an English teacher himself, at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, a boys’ grammar in Salisbury—a job he stuck out to support his wife and two children, with undisguised reluctance—Golding often wrote during lessons. He would set work, then scribble away furtively in exercise books under his desk.

Nor was he afraid to experiment on his pupils: John Carey’s 2009 biography, William Golding: the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, describes a school trip to a Neolithic earthworks during which “Scruff”—as Golding was known, owing to his dishevelled jackets and scraggly beard—divided his charges into two groups, one told to defend the earthworks, the other to attack it. “It occurred to more than one boy that Golding stirred up antagonism between them in order to observe their reactions,” Carey notes.

It seems perfectly reasonable that a book about children—or really, though it’s not fashionable to make the distinction, about boys—should be read at a time of life when their characteristics and behaviours, if not their particular circumstances, are most easily recognised in ourselves. Here, on page one, is handsome, fair-haired Ralph, who clambers out of the jungle after part of the plane in which he and other English schoolboys have been travelling—to an unknown destination, while being evacuated from a nuclear war—has crashed on a nameless desert island.

Before the end of this first page there’s another child, a “fat boy” whose grammar betrays the fact that he isn’t as posh as the others. He asks that Ralph does not reveal his hated nickname, “Piggy”, to the other survivors; Ralph immediately calls him Piggy, of course—but so too, with insidious callousness, does the omniscient narrator, making us immediate co-conspirators. (We never find out his real name.) Completing an uneasy triumvirate is haughty head chorister Jack.

The boys are separated from the adult world, though not, importantly, deprived of sustenance: they have fruit, water and as many pigs as they can catch and kill. Golding’s novel is resolutely not concerned with survival in its most basic terms. Rather, it is a thought experiment about how a society might function with, as Ralph enthusiastically observes, “No grown-ups!”

After he’s voted in as leader, Ralph, disdainful yet heedful of Piggy’s sensible counsel, attempts to implement a rules-based system to improve their chances of rescue. Authority is outsourced to a talismanic seashell, a conch, which Ralph uses to summon the other boys and which, it is mutually agreed, gives its bearer the licence to speak.

Jack, as the leader of a quasi-comic pack of choirboys, whom we first encounter staggering up the sun-baked beach in caps, capes and “hambone frills”, is at first compliant, though subservience makes him bristle. Later, as mania, or desperation—or perhaps it is a form of extreme boredom—sets in, Jack will lead a darker, wilder, breakaway faction and the choirboys will swap their hats and cloaks for warpaint and spears.

When we read Lord of the Flies at 12 or 13, we are told it is an allegory about power. If we want to put it bluntly—and we’re 12, so of course we do—we might say that Ralph represents democracy; Piggy is scientific rationalism; Jack, totalitarianism. I haven’t yet mentioned Simon, a small, mystical boy, prone to epileptic fits, whom you may remember (though I’ll admit I’d forgotten all about him). It is Simon who encounters the pig’s head mounted on a stick, which Jack’s choirboys-turned-hunters have left as an offering to a beast they imagine is lurking at the top of a mountain.

It is Simon, or his subconscious, who converses with the pig’s-head demon, whose name, a literal translation of the Hebrew-derived “Beelzebub”, also became that of the book itself (chosen not by Golding but by a canny editor at Faber: Golding’s submitted manuscript bore the far more humdrum title Strangers from Within). Simon, we could think, represents spirituality; naturally, and with Christ-like foresight, he meets a grisly end.

We might also have been asked, as students, to consider the biographical context, to think about how Golding’s life experiences lurk in the pages. The critic Harold Bloom, writing in 2008, called the book “essentially a period piece”, seeing it as a barely digested regurgitation of Golding’s time serving as a lieutenant in the British Navy in World War II, during which he hunted the Atlantic for the Bismarck and took part in the Normandy landings.

Golding himself connected his observations of fascism—that it is an internal force rather than an external one—to the depravities he portrayed in the book: “I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature,” he once wrote. Though Bloom was dismissive of the book’s quality (“no Gulliver’s Travels”, he sniffed), he at least acknowledged its fabulistic power: “Any well-told tale of a reversion to barbarism is a warning against tendencies in many groups that may become violent, and such a warning remains sadly relevant in the early 21st century.”

It’s a revelation, when you’re young, to find out that a book might not be exactly about the thing that it’s about. Or at least, not only: that with the right set of contextual keys (and yes, that “right” is highly specious), a story can be further unlocked. But it can also be a thrill to read a book about children, when you are one, that treats their interactions, however extreme the setting, with the same seriousness you do.

“As far as I was concerned, the novel’s blaming finger was pointed at schoolboys like Jack, Piggy, Ralph and me,” wrote McEwan in 1986. “We were manifestly inadequate. We couldn’t think straight, and in sufficiently large groups we were capable of atrocities. In that I took it all so personally, I like to think that I was, in some sense, an ideal reader.” (I don’t have a son, but I gave my new copy to my 11-year-old daughter and, when she’d read it, asked her what she thought its message was. “Um,” she said, “that boys are idiots?”)

In some sense, yes, McEwan is right. In another sense, of course, he’s being facetious. (The same could be said, on both counts, of my daughter.) Describing the passage in which a forlorn Piggy, Ralph and Simon reflect on the mysterious sagacity of adults—“‘Grown-ups know things,’ said Piggy. ‘They ain’t afraid of the dark’”—McEwan writes: “At 13, I too had sufficient faith in adult life to be immune to Golding’s irony.” If you read Lord of the Flies again as an adult, however—and you must!—the irony, and its incumbent horror, are everything.

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In his covering letter to the publisher Jonathan Cape, who expressed interest in taking on Lord of the Flies (though, like most of the others, went on to reject it), Golding referred to it as a book “for grown-ups”. This might have been worth stating explicitly, as he had conceived it as a response to a popular children’s book, The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne, in which the three child protagonists, Ralph, Jack and Peterkin (could Piggy be a secret Peterkin?), are also shipwrecked and alone.

This trio behaves in a civilised—or rather, civilising—manner: fending off cannibals and pirates and even spreading a bit of Christianity while they’re at it. Golding is said to have turned to his wife Ann after reading it as a bedtime story one evening, and asked: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?”

Reading Lord of the Flies when you’re younger, its essential truth is undisputed: as McEwan wrote, he knew all about us. But to an adult readership, “how children really would behave” becomes something of a debate. In 2015, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman sought a peculiarly literal refutation of Golding’s supposition, unearthing a 1966 newspaper story about six Tongan boys who’d been shipwrecked on an islet in the Pacific for a year, but didn’t go mad and kill each other.

“Their days began and ended with song and prayer,” Bregman wrote in The Guardian. It’s a strangely joyless thing to do to a book: yes, yes, children might very well not descend into bloodlust, but the tension comes from our fear, our suspicion—or, if we excavate deep enough—our knowledge, that they could.

Since I’ve been a parent and have had cause to observe children more closely, I’ve seen many a boy—and, only proving the rule, the odd girl—happily thwacking the heads off daffodils or casually squashing ants. In an isolated scene in Lord of the Flies, another young boy, Henry, plays with tiny sea creatures he spots in the encroaching tide, making lines and channels with a stick to determine their route through the sand. “He became absorbed beyond mere happiness,” writes Golding, “as he felt himself exercising control over living things.” Who hasn’t seen, or can’t imagine, a child doing exactly that? What is the brutal conclusion of the book but this same impulse in extremis?

When I read Lord of the Flies this time, it was teeming with things I had been oblivious to, or at least less consciously aware of, as a child. First, the extent to which it simmers with a sublimated sexual energy. The boys are in prepubescence, or early puberty, and forces are operating on them that they do not yet fully understand (nor was this aspect emphasised to me or the rest of my class of equally bewildered pre-teen girls).

They study each other’s bodies, sometimes with a voyeuristic appetite, as when Ralph watches Jack: “His grey shorts were sticking to him with sweat. Ralph glanced at them admiringly.” Towards the end, Ralph thinks of Jack almost like a vengeful lover: “Then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never.”

In fact, the book is full of suggestive imagery, from the “great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly” on which Ralph builds the first meeting place, to the equally phallic “bold, pink bastion” upon which Jack builds his rival fort at the other end of the beach. The conch shell itself is… well, you decide: “In colour the shell was deep cream, touched here and there with fading pink. Between the point, worn away into a little hole, and the pink lips of the mouth, lay 18 inches of shell…” Who can blame Piggy when, overcome, he “paused for breath and stroked the glistening thing that lay in Ralph’s hands”?

The whole island pulsates with the boys’ urges, like a kind of hormonally supercharged enactment of Gaia Theory (it was Golding, in fact, who suggested “Gaia”, the Greek goddess of the Earth, to his friend James Lovelock for the name of his scientific idea of organic unity, clearly having more of a knack for titles that were not his own). Oh! And yes, the Greeks. They’re easier to spot when you’re grown up too, and when you know Golding was a big fan, although the book’s stark structure, adhering to the convention of Greek tragedy by starting in media res, was not his idea at all.

In fact, it was among several improvements made by Golding’s editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, who encouraged the excision of the opening chapters that described the nuclear war from which the boys have escaped, as well as removing a whole heap of commas, “which,” as Monteith later recalled, “studded the pages as thickly as currants in a fruit loaf”. It was also Monteith who got the book published at all, having famously rescued it from the slush pile as a junior editor, after a first reader had already deemed it “rubbish and dull” and “pointless”, and marked it with a circled “R” for “reject”.

But back to those Greeks: Piggy wailing and ignored, is a chubby, doomed Cassandra, the prophetess fated not to be believed; or, as he grasps for his smashed spectacles, now reduced to a single lens, he’s the three Graeae, Gaia’s granddaughters, after Perseus steals their one shared eye. Or how about Jack’s tribe stealing fire from their rivals, like Prometheus; then being condemned, like him, to a rock in the sea?

And what do we make of the boys falling on a mother pig feeding her young and stabbing her with sharpened sticks—one up her anus (how is that explained to schoolkids?)—until she “collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her”? This has echoes of Circe turning Odysseus’s sailors into swine, or Oedipus having sex with his mother, and, reading it now, it’s the book’s most shocking scene.

Particularly shocking if you’re a mother, maybe. Mothers in Lord of the Flies are dispatched, like the sow, with savage coldness. Ralph emerges from the jungle’s “scar”—the gap in the jungle left by the aeroplane’s passenger compartment, which has been swept back out to sea—like a baby from a Caesarean section, “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” as Macduff had it. (If you’ve ever had the pleasure of having a baby extracted directly from your abdomen, “ripped” is very much the word.)

It’s only Piggy—the ill-fated Piggy—who displays any nascent paternal, or maternal, instincts, keeping track of the younger boys, the “littl’uns”, and thinking about their welfare. He is also the only one to refer to a woman, his aunt; one of Ralph’s first questions of him is, “What’s your father?” Naturally Piggy is ignored, causing him to wear “the martyred expression of a parent who has to keep up with the senseless ebullience of children”. (Ah, I know it well!) In a 1985 interview with his biographer Carey, Golding said of his own mother, Mildred, “I gave her a hell of a time.” In what is perhaps the darkest of his sardonic riffs, he dedicated the book to his parents.

I’m not sure I remembered there being jokes in the book at all, to be honest. But Golding, who, despite pronounced depressive episodes, could also be something of a hoot—promoting her own memoir in 2010, his daughter Judy called him “a very warm person, and tremendously funny”—has put in plenty. There’s a peculiar outburst from Ralph about meetings that is painfully recognisable: “Don’t we love meetings? Every day. Twice a day. We talk,” he rants. “Someone would say we ought to build a jet, or a submarine, or a TV set. When the meeting was over they’d work for five minutes, then wander off or go hunting.” One can only be relieved that Golding, who died in 1993 aged 81, was spared the joys of Microsoft Teams.

In the novel, the character who is most obviously comic is Jack, the head chorister who challenges Ralph for authority (in Brook’s film it’s Piggy, played by 11-year-old Hugh Edwards, in his quite deservedly one and only film role, which he got by writing a letter to the director that started, “Dear Sir, I am fat and wear spectacles”). It is Jack who speaks the ingeniously daft line, “After all, we’re not savages. We’re English; and the English are best at everything,” and is there not something inherently hilarious about him suggesting he be chief because he can “sing C sharp”?

But it is also Jack who gets seized with the urge to kill, who initiates the frenzies that lead to the deaths of Simon and Piggy, and nearly to Ralph’s, and proves, when in power, the most dangerous. (Entirely unrelated to Jack’s risibly self-important boast, Donald Trump claims to have won 18 golf-club championships, Vladimir Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great and Kim Jong Il, as we all know, invented the hamburger.)

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Which is how we get to the most frightening aspect of Lord of the Flies. At the end of the book, the boys are rescued by a British Navy cutter, which spots the smoke rising from the island that they have set on fire. At the sight of an adult, a smartly dressed naval officer, just as Golding himself once was, the survivors start to sob, and in Ralph’s case, to weep “for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy”. In a kind of literary crash zoom, the reader is yanked out of the protagonists’ proximity, and they once again become “little boys”. We are back with the adults because this is, after all, “a book for grown-ups”. The naval officer is unable to deal with their outpouring and looks away.

And are we, his fellow grown-ups, any more equipped to make sense of it? Well, we know that there’s a nuclear war happening out beyond the island and that the adults have made no better a fist of things than the children. The stakes have only got higher, and the weapons more devastating. But we also know, from our own lived experience, that being an adult is as much of a construct as being a child; our psychology gets no more complex, our instincts no better. During the pandemic, as those in positions of authority sold contracts to their friends and partied through the funerals, I regularly found myself muttering, like a kind of deranged mantra, “Where are the grown-ups?” as though forgetting that, technically, I was one, too.

In 1974, Golding wrote an entry in his journal suggesting that, as the decades had passed, he’d come to see the book in even bleaker terms. “Twenty years after writing Lord of the Flies, I now see that Ralph who weeps for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, was weeping for an age that is passing,” he wrote. “Seen from the other side, the heart of man is not dark, but flamelit and terrible. Perhaps then Jack and his hunters had the heart of the matter after all.”

The most devastating metaphor for this in the book comes in the form of the monster at the top of the mountain. The possibility of its existence has morphed from a folkloric fear into a mechanism with which Jack can ensure compliance from his subjects (weapons of mass destruction, anyone?). But the monster isn’t really a monster, but a man, or was once: it’s the rotting body of a parachutist who, like the boys, has fallen from the sky. They think he’s a living monster because the wind catches the dead man’s chute every so often, causing his head and torso to lift up and down, “so as the stars moved across the sky, the figure sat on the mountain-top and bowed and sank and bowed again”.

Not only are adults not going to save you, the dead pilot’s terrible dance seems to say, but they’re all but useless, spending their time performing hollow, empty gestures, like brainless marionettes. As a parody of adult civility, it is chilling and grotesque. Perhaps, this is something that, when we’re young, we also fear, suspect, or—if we dare to excavate deep enough—know. But it’s not until later in life that we recognise it as a kind of dreadful truth. Adults, as we might once have imagined them, don’t really exist; we are all no more than scared, confused, vicious children of different sizes. No grown-ups.

Originally published on Esquire UK

I am no arbiter of cool, but I think anyone would have a difficult time denying the title to Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. For everything they had in common as California natives of the same era writing about many of the same places and people, these two writers had just as many stark contrasts. Even their versions of cool operate in different realms. Didion’s is captured in the many black-and-white photos of her that proliferate in the literary world, from tote bags to bookmarks to nearly every single cover of any book written about her. Hers is a severe, sentence-fragment kind of cool. Babitz’s cool is the charmer’s cool: gregarious, seductive, biting, intimidating, hilarious, sexy. Didion’s cool was quiet and physically unassuming, which she used to her advantage in her reportage. Babitz’s cool was boisterous and socially dominating—the kind of cool that would drink you under the table and then go home with you.

Another contrast: Didion has remained a prominent figure, though she’s become almost ubiquitous in the past two decades, whereas Babitz’s career followed a much (much) rockier path. In fact, until 2015, when an article in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik sparked renewed interest in Babitz’s work, many of her books were out of print. Anolik then expanded that piece into Hollywood’s Eve, a hybrid biography of Babitz’s life and career spliced together with Anolik’s reflections on her own relationship with Babitz in the aftermath of the Vanity Fair attention. Then, a few years after Hollywood’s Eve, Babitz passed away (one week before Didion did), and Anolik discovered a box of materials she hadn’t seen before, which included a letter Babitz wrote to Didion, a note so telling and revealing and evocative that Anolik had to return to her subject a third time, only now with a compelling foil. The result is Didion & Babitz, truly the culmination of Anolik’s already excellent work on Babitz as well as a brilliantly cutting examination of the complicated legacy of Didion.

Anolik uses the phrase “a man’s woman” to describe both of her subjects in Didion & Babitz, and it struck me as ironic that these two figures could be, as personalities, so appealing to men and yet, as writers, mostly seem to appeal to women. At the very least, much of the commodification of Didion’s and Babitz’s cool is aimed at women. Didion in particular is so universally known that pretty much any woman embarking on a literary career will inevitably be faced, again and again, with her essays. Katie Roiphe, in In Praise of Messy Lives, puts it this way: “I don’t think I have ever walked into the home of a female writer, aspiring writer, newspaper reporter, or women’s magazine editor and not found, somewhere on the shelves, a row of Joan Didion books.” In Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour puts it a little differently: “I have read Didion my whole life and have been told I should worship Didion my whole life.”

Understandably, many women have a complicated relationship with Didion. But what relationship, if any, do men have with her? And what about Babitz, whose reputation as a “groupie” often discounts her credibility? Is it because of the “Cool Girl” label? Do men think these writers will only reach women? Or are men reluctant to learn the truth about how women think, live, believe? Are they afraid of what they’ll learn? About women? About themselves?

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When Didion and Babitz started out, they entered a hostile literary environment where some men spoke of women writers like this:

At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.

Norman Mailer, ladies and gentlemen. Never mind the fact that he wrote this in 1959, the same year Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House and Lorraine Hansberry premiered A Raisin in the Sun—Mailer manages to toss pretty much any non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-Jewish person into his pool of also-wrotes. This is the secret core of prejudice: It is never isolated. It will always indict more types of people under its purview. In this way, bigotry is all-inclusive.

Let’s start with Didion. Her literary career began officially in 1956, when as a senior at UC Berkeley she won the “Prix de Paris” essay contest administered by Vogue, where she would work as a copywriter until the mid-sixties. Anolik points out that although Didion liked to wax proletariat, as in her claim that “the people with whom I preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations,” she was, as Anolik writes, “every inch the all-American bourgeois girl.” She was also decidedly ambitious. At the end of eighth grade, she gave the graduation speech in front of her classmates and their families. In high school, she sat on the Sophomore Ball committee, worked on the yearbook staff, was elected to the student council, and hobnobbed with the children of elites, such as Nina Warren, the daughter of California’s then-governor Earl Warren (of the Warren Commission fame). At Berkeley, she joined a sorority, where she befriended Barbara Brown, the daughter of Pat Brown, another California governor. Also during this period, she wrote her first short stories, reported for the school’s newspaper (including an interview with the poet W.H. Auden), and won a place in the same guest-editor program at Mademoiselle that Sylvia Plath had won two years before, which she would later immortalise in The Bell Jar.

At Vogue and later Life and The Saturday Evening Post, Didion launched a career as an essayist and journalist, though her true ambition lay in fiction. Indeed, her first book was a novel, Run River, which debuted in 1963, but it wasn’t until the publication of her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem that Didion began to establish herself as a major writer and generational voice. As the sixties gave way to the seventies, she was counted among the ranks of the New Journalists, an umbrella term for magazine writers (from Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson to Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin) who challenged the conventions of journalistic style and form. For decades, she worked as a Hollywood screenwriter with her husband and co-writer, John Gregory Dunne, though few of their screenplays were actually filmed; they were more prolific as script doctors. She was known for her detached style, often referred to as “cool,” which works perfectly in concert with the black-and-white Julian Wasser photos of her that feature on the covers of any book written about her.

From a certain perspective, one might reasonably assume that the Didion so described—native of the West Coast, working in Hollywood, participating in a nonfiction revolution, an epitome of Cool wearing sunglasses in ads for French luxury brands—would lean, or even swing, toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. But although her allegiances changed and evolved throughout her long career, she tended, on the whole, toward the right. Her perspective has been described alternately as “a Goldwater Republican” (Bret Easton Ellis), “a dyed-in-the-wool Republican” (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar), and “among the most fundamentally conservative writers in America” (Thomas Mallon) on the one hand, while on the other she’s been called an “apostate” (along with John Leonard) by her former editor William F. Buckley. Additionally, one of her iconic black-and-white portraits was emblazoned on a tote bag for the website Literary Hub, a decidedly liberal publication. She’s also been described as a feminist by writer Evelyn McDonnell; “not a feminist, my ass,” is how she puts it. Writers as various as the conservative firebrand Christopher Hitchens, the pop culture writer Alana Massey, and The New Yorker critic Hilton Als have considered themselves devotees.

That’s because Didion isn’t so easy to pin down politically. She herself characterised her politics as “pretty straightforward, stay-out-of-our-hair politics,” the “same as they were when I was voting for [Barry] Goldwater.” She dismissed feminism in the seventies, refused to read Virginia Woolf, and once declared, “I agree with every single thing that Norman Mailer puts down on paper” and that he “is one of the few people who can write about sex without embarrassing me.” She could, at times, espouse a by-your-own-bootstraps ideology we still hear right-wingers spout today. Yet she could also accurately diagnose the media’s racist groupthink about the Central Park Five in 1989, see through the Republicans’ mission to impeach Bill Clinton by any means, and generally capture the duplicitous realpolitik of twentieth-century America. During the rise of Ronald Reagan, a disillusioned Didion registered as a Democrat—“the first member of my family (and perhaps in my generation still the only member) to do so”—only to discover that the switch “did not involve taking a markedly different view on any issue.”

In American politics, Didion remained her most pitiless and unforgiving; her repeated mention of Goldwater seems spiked with equal parts nostalgia and resentment. In the foreword to Political Fictions, Didion writes, “It was clear for example by 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.” In 2001, she remarked in an interview with L.A. Weekly, “I don’t know who is represented by the current Democratic Party, or the current Republican Party.” Her disillusionment with the American political system might well be her greatest gift to the men of today: By falling out of line with mainstream conservatism while never fully embracing conventional liberalism, Didion maintained an outsider status that both elevated her analysis and made her career, retrospectively, a benchmark against which to measure the right’s cyclical descent into fascism.

Here is how a contemporary man should approach reading Didion to get the very most out of the experience: One can follow Didion’s trajectory, her merciless observation of American political and cultural life, as a narrative of how American conservatism has radically shifted since the sixties. Not that the Republicans of this era were moral paragons by any stretch, but there is one hell of a contrast between Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex and Donald Trump nakedly trumpeting it. If Didion was a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican” in her early career, how does she compare to our present-day diehards? How do her conclusions (as vague or as lofty as they may be at times) about American power and money, about the futility of our electoral process, the crass, calculated cynicism of it—how do these square with conservative thought now?

Reading Didion, then, is to read through our recent history as much as it is to read about it. Men can read her essays, her reportage, her immaculate nonfiction for Didion’s own perspective, but what’s most productive is to read her against everyone else.

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Eve Babitz is another story altogether. Her Cool is the playful, flamboyant type. Her writing brims with intelligence and insight, but its lessons and insights focus on individual human foibles rather than macro concerns about society as a whole. She was an It Girl, a groupie, a hanger-on, and a legendary charmer. In her writing, which may not possess the same skill as Didion’s, we find a frank and guileless account of a generation from a unique perspective—one that’s usually overlooked, if not downright disdained. It’s most succinctly–albeit grossly–put by Julian Wasser, the photographer behind Didion’s iconic images. Wasser also shot an iconic image featuring Babitz: a photo of artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve. Anolik adroitly uses Wasser’s characterisation of the two experiences to typify the contrast between Didion’s and Babitz’s reputations:

When I asked Wasser if he’d instructed Joan on how to dress or where to stand during their session, he replied, his tone reverent, “With a girl like Joan, you just don’t tell her what to do.” When I asked him why he’d chosen Eve for the Duchamp photo, he replied, his tone contemptuous, “She was a piece of ass.”

“A piece of ass” like Babitz, though, could gain access to areas even unassuming reporters like Didion could not. She didn’t hobnob with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities to get their stories; rather, she told stories about hobnobbing with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities because that’s how she lived. They were her stories.

Babitz had an enormous pool to draw from. Her mother was an artist, and her father was a studio violinist. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. As a child growing up in Hollywood (she would attend Hollywood High), she was exposed to the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Bernard Herrmann, Kenneth Rexroth, and Bertrand Russell. In her early twenties, Babitz wrote, she was “alive with groupie fervour, wanting to fuck my way through rock ‘n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip.” She was, in Anolik’s wonderful phrasing, “a low-high, profane-sublime bohemian-aristocrat.”

Babitz would go on to do things like design the album cover for Buffalo Springfield Again; introduce Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí; appear as an extra in The Godfather Part II; and sleep with the likes of Steve Martin, Glenn Frey, Harrison Ford, Jackson Browne, and Joseph Heller. She chronicled some of these scenes, in her best work, with stunning fluency, despite the fact that she “didn’t want to be a writer; it would scare men.” This line comes from the title story of her collection Black Swans, and she elaborates on her view of writers: “I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most of the men I knew.” A bit of deflection, to be sure, as Babitz cared so deeply about but felt so inadequate for literary creation that minor discouragements delayed her apprenticeship. Her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, didn’t come out until 1974, even though she’d completed a draft of a novel “about being Daisy Miller, only from Hollywood” 10 years earlier, when she was 20.

Her second book, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A., is her best book, as it displays most fully the kind of uncomfortable truths Babitz could so casually wield. The whole book, a brief prefatory note explains, is essentially an attempt by Eve, the narrator, to “get this one I’m in love with” to read her writing by making it all about him. In reality, this was the artist Paul Ruscha; in the book, his name is Shawn. In Didion & Babitz, Anolik describes Slow Days as depicting Los Angeles with “a total lack of interest in approving or disapproving of its characters’ morals.” This, ultimately, is where the great value of Babitz’s work lies. Her stories and essays come without any moralising and without any attempts to mould reality into a recognizable shape. Yet so much of her writing has an air of truth to it, and an authority in its vision. Her assessments of herself and those in her orbit could be brutal, even unkind—but the truth is in the character Eve’s firm belief in them. Babitz’s devastatingly frank voice and savage wit, in life and in prose, still hit you with a pang of recognition, only she doesn’t instruct you what to do with the feeling. For instance, when Anolik’s Vanity Fair piece renewed interest in Babitz’s work, leading to reprints of her books, her line to Anolik was this: “It used to be only men who liked me. Now it’s only girls.”

In her final years (she died in 2021), Babitz veered into right-wing paranoia and delusion, ranting to Anolik on the phone about how she was having an affair with Donald Trump (which obviously wasn’t true). Anolik told me how she worried that Babitz would run into trouble on the streets of West Hollywood, where she lived. She wanted to don one of those bright red MAGA hats, “so I’d buy her Chinese MAGA hats—you know, MAGA in Chinese characters,” Anolik said, in order to obscure her rabid Trumpism without her knowing. “She loved those hats.” She lived in filth, the stench so bad Anolik could barely stand it. “I think there was a dead cat in her place,” she told me, “a dead something.” But despite the tragic nature of where she ended up, Babitz’s record of late-twentieth-century America is a gift from someone canny enough and charming enough to gain entry to its most rarefied spaces.

“If a man is looking for insights and angles into women,” Anolik told me, “I’d recommend Eve, if only because I believe that Eve, at her best—by which I mean, in Slow Days, Fast Company, her one masterpiece—was a better translator of female sensations and stratagems. In Slow Days, Eve offers to readers a study of feminine consciousness that has extraordinary charm and verve, not to mention expansiveness."

In her first book on Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve, Anolik categorized the writer with the New Journalists, which struck me as arguable, perhaps, but not really accurate. When I asked her about it, she was quick to say that she no longer sees it this way. “I’m so glad I got a second crack at Eve,” she said, because for Anolik, Babitz now falls into the tradition of the “artist-adventuress,” an “American Colette.” I completely agree. Her antecedents were figures like the Russian writer Teffi and the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, her contemporaries the art groupies Ultra Violet and Candy Darling, and her descendants Gawker’s Emily Gould and the poet/essayist Kim Addonizio. These writers were best in the short form, didn’t always produce large catalogues of work, and suffered, personally and professionally, from cultures dismissing them as “pieces of ass,” as gossips, as gushing TMI-coded dilettantes.

Neither Didion nor Babitz ever had delusions of swaying men to the side of women.

Here, at last, is the most important lesson Babitz can teach men: Women who live unconventionally, women who drink and do drugs, women who fuck, women who talk, women who reject you at the bar, and women who make art out of all of those things—their inner lives are just as deep as yours, if not deeper. Their perspectives show them a side of society men rarely glimpse: the barrage of dismissal and obstruction and condemnation, and the constant threat of violence and subjugation. Babitz, who was as big a fan of feminism as Didion, was a victim of this herself. She internalized a belief that women shouldn’t write because it might put off men. Can you imagine if one of the twentieth century’s most lively and original chroniclers never wrote a word because of the insecurities of men?

I say these are the lessons from Didion and Babitz that men might learn, but after last week’s election results, I don’t have much faith in American men, no matter how many writers not like them we expose them to. Women have told men about the danger they regularly feel. They’ve written at length about sexism, chauvinism, the patriarchy; they’ve campaigned for suffrage, bodily autonomy, marital agency, sexual freedom, and financial equity. Men know these things. Have known these things. And yet here we are, with a nation of men for whom rampant misogyny and sexual predation are not disqualifying. Neither Didion nor Babitz ever had delusions of swaying men to the side of women. In a 2000 piece on Martha Stewart, Didion remarked that Stewart’s success was not that of “a woman who made the best of traditional skills” but rather “the story that has historically encouraged women, even as it has threatened men.” For all the strides made by women in the past 60 years, we’re still living, sadly, in Norman Mailer’s America.

So men can go ahead and read Didion and Babitz as much as they want, but I can’t help recalling something Babitz, ever the cutting realist, said after she went through a horrifically painful fire accident in the late nineties: “People think this will make me a better person. It won’t.”

Originally published on Esquire US

What's it like to be a second banana? The bit role player? The calefare? We get a peek at the life of the background actors with the Interior Chinatown trailer. In it, Jimmy O Yang plays Willis Wu, who feels that there's more to his station than meets the eye. When Chloe Bennet's Detective Lana Li enlists his help in her case, Willis sees this as an opportunity to break free from his "Generic Asian Man" role.

Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning novel of the same name, the 10-episode series trailer looks like it combines kung fu, noir, police procedural, some romance, and a whole lot of weirdness. Interior Chinatown also stars Ronnie Chieng, Tzi Ma, Archie Kao, and Lisa Gilroy.

While Interior Chinatown is filled with a mostly Asian cast that skewers the stereotypes that Hollywood loves to utilise, it is also about finding one's identity in a sea of tropes. The book was written in a screenplay format, which felt like the normal transition for an adaptation to the big screen... but the novel was perfect on its own. Can this series do it justice?

With the author, Charles Yu, acting as Interior Chinatown's showrunner (Yu was also the story editor for HBO's Westworld) and Taika Waititi directing the pilot, the odds for the show being a runaway hit look really good.

I guess, we'll find out when all episodes of Interior Chinatown are released 19 November on Disney+.

Gillian Anderson isn’t a sex therapist, but for four years, she played one on television. From 2019 to 2023, she starred as Sex Education’s Dr. Jean Milburn, a lusty, complicated, sometimes manipulative (see: human) woman, bumbling and grasping through midlife while single-parenting her teenage son, Otis. But even though the role was pure fiction, something about Milburn’s funny, loving energy made people want to talk to Anderson about sex. For years, her literary agent received inquiries from publishers and editors about interviews she might do, confessions she might write. For a long time, she put them off. But then her editor suggested something more communal: other people, submitting anonymously. Anderson was finally convinced by the idea of a large and varied group. “We had many different versions,” she says. “And then I realised what would be most beautiful and affecting was to hear from as many different women as we could.”

Last year, Anderson’s publisher, Bloomsbury, set up an online portal. The actress posted a call: “Whatever your background, whomever you do or don’t sleep with, whether you’re eighteen or eighty: if you identify as a woman, I want to hear from you.” Eight thousand women started to transcribe their fantasies, each beginning with “Dear Gillian.” Eight hundred pressed submit. The result is Want: 350 pages of anonymous sex fantasies selected and ordered by Anderson.

At 56, Anderson has the ease and grace of a woman who has always been beautiful, used to being wanted, but now she’s perhaps more comfortable than ever in the particularity of her own skin—perhaps, too, her own wants. Her hair pulled back loosely on our Zoom call, she talks emphatically, thoughtfully, leans forward, back, runs her hands wantonly over her face and hair. I ask her about how discussing this topic as a public person who would also like to keep a good amount of her life private could get prickly. “I’m trying for cryptically but honestly,” she says.

Anderson has made a career out of playing women who inhabit adjectives that might make people wince or cringe, that would almost certainly make a particular type of suitor swipe left instead of right: tough and cold and hard and sharp. Except, on Anderson, they’re hot.

For nine years, starting in her early 20s, she played The X-Files’ Agent Scully. Bristly and cerebral, Scully was the antithesis of her giggly, often teenage female counterparts on other early nineties shows—she hardly ever smiled. In 2000, Anderson portrayed (desperate, angling) Lily Bart in a film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. In 2005, Bleak House’s (proud and furtive) Lady Dedlock, then A Doll's House’s (wily and determined) Nora in London’s West End in 2009. Later, Miss Havisham, Margaret Thatcher, Eleanor Roosevelt. A master of a certain type of subtlety—an eyebrow raise, a shifted lip—Anderson can appear blank and placid on the surface while somehow brimming with life underneath.

In 2013, Anderson took on the role of detective Stella Gibson on The Fall. Steely and brazen, Stella propositions a new coworker and near stranger in the first episode. In Want, Anderson writes about this role as pivotal: “Stella was effortlessly confident physically, intellectually, and sexually.” It felt, she writes, like “stepping into my sexual power in my 40s.”

Want, Anderson says, is all about women stepping into their sexual power. Much like inhabiting a made-up role, the book is filled not with aberrant acts these women are confessing but with imaginings they’ve conjured and have now written down and shared. With the added fact of anonymity, each contribution functions as an opportunity to stretch, play, explore, and create, without the threat or pressure of real-life consequences. “This is fantasy’s ultimate offering,” Anderson writes in the book’s introduction. “The chance to live momentarily outside of reality, where rules and expectations don’t exist, where we can indulge our deepest desires and submit absolutely with unreserved abandon.”

The results, some spanning pages and some a single sentence, are both what you’d expect and not: fingers, fists, cunts, clit, anal. Anderson reports that “threesomes, moresomes and thensomes” were the most prevalent fantasies she received. She says she thought there’d be more violence. But then, she adds, “Who knows what that says about me?”

One woman in Want fantasises about her husband’s brother; another, a colleague, a married man who laid bricks next to her house for months and, on his last day, gave her his sweatshirt; another, a beautiful woman she saw once and never again. Many—often women who are contentedly ensconced in heterosexual marriages or so they say—have fantasies about their female friends.

There are bondage and entrapment fantasies, fantasies of submission, of role-swapping, of risky, public sex. “I am a pleasure station!” one woman writes, ecstatic. Some are particularly invested in setting: “I often imagine it happening near a waterfall in a lush forest,” another writes. One wants to be laid out naked in a medical theatre, to have her vagina examined by a crowd of students. “They are allowed to look and touch whatever they like, all for the purposes of studying the female body,” she writes. ”I reach orgasm with them all watching professionally and taking notes.”

There’s a delight in reading these pages. It’s a woman, many, none of whom you know well, sitting a little bit too close to you. You can smell their sweat, the specific sour of their breath. You want to move away but can’t. Maybe one grabs hold of your upper arm, and then she says something to you, not about her kids, her job, whatever other obligation might prove to you that she’s worthy, prove to you she’s a woman in the way everything in life has told you that she should be, but instead: She tells you what she wants.

The book is broken into twelve sections, including “Rough and Raw,” “The Captive,” “Strangers,” and “Power and Submission.” Anderson introduces each new section and writes at the beginning of “The Watcher and The Watched,” “If I had my druthers, I would move about the world invisibly. And, indeed, at the very heart of all my fantasies, I am the watcher not the watched, or sometimes, I switch between watcher and participant, but I am most definitely the director.” This is what fantasy offers each of these women, what it offers all of us: a chance to completely control both how and who you want, the terms, the setting, the conditions, and also, their willingness to want you back. This feels particularly rich for women, as our yearnings—in sex, but in plenty of other settings as well—have often been contingent on whether we might be wanted first. We are, historically, the objects, not the subjects—desperate to be wanted, often quick to forget that we can (or not) want back.

Halfway through our conversation, Anderson tells me a perfect (awful) story about this: As part of Want’s promotional tour, her team is setting up pink “vox boxes” where women can enter and listen to some of the fantasies from Want, then share their own. One day, a man approached and asked about these boxes. “I’ve never thought about women’s pleasure before,” the man said.

What men—many of them kind and loving partners in other aspects of their lives—haven’t thought about, have failed to ask about, have just never been told, is everywhere inside this book. “My husband isn’t attracted to me sexually,” one woman writes. “Most of the time sex for me is trying to please him with oral and then when he is done, he leaves the room and I finish myself off with a vibrator.” Another says, “I grew up in a sex-positive household, nothing was taboo. But now I’m almost 30 and I cannot seem to express my secret desires to my husband. It feels… embarrassing and scary.”

Anderson made her own anonymous contribution to Want, but she’s mum even on which section it belongs to. She wanted to be wholly folded into what she describes as the “melody” of how each of these contributions moves from one to the next. “I think I did assume so many different things about the act of writing down my own fantasy, how easy it would be, based on how easy I find it to speak about things,” she says, “but the act of writing felt like it was drawing something out, not just the truth of something, but something even more intimate than I’m used to revealing on a daily basis.”

This made her feel that much more impressed by the “courageous act” of these women who shared their fantasies. To have sat down, pulled out something truer maybe than they even knew or could access in their actual lives, and sent it to her: “You felt honoured,” she says, “to read some of these outpourings, and amazed at the level of thought and elegance, and, you know, rawness, not just in terms of close to the skin, close to the surface, but raw in terms of just an outpouring of one’s truth or experience.”

She keeps using the word courage, and it seems clear that the opposite of this word is fear and shame. Those feelings are also everywhere in these letters: women writing anonymously, writing for and to themselves but still couching these outpourings in apology (“it’s embarrassing to admit”; “I’m ashamed to say”; “I can hardly believe I’m writing this”).

“What is very revealing,” says Anderson, “are the areas that we are the same. Where, no matter the fantasy, the takeaway is the need for intimacy, the need to be desired, to be seen, a desire to be held, to be comforted, to be safe.” What felt equally, almost stunningly true, she says, was the prevalence of shame.

In the final section, “gently, gently,” Anderson writes, “we also received a number of letters that spoke of just wanting to feel seen, expressing a desire for romance, affection, and softness, and a longing for a strong connection to another person.”

“Is it crazy that my wildest sexual fantasy is to feel safe?” one woman writes. “I’m almost too scared to write this,” writes another. “An articulation of a need that fills me with embarrassment. An inadequate fantasy. So small and insignificant, pathetic almost, yet writing it down in black and white fills me with terror…I want to be kissed.” It was this section, I told Anderson, that I found the most moving, not only because of how straightforward each fantasy felt but also because it further amplified that one need not have lurid orgiastic desires, to feel shame and terror for wanting at all.

One of the biggest questions Anderson says she had, reading through the 800,000 words of submissions she and her editors received for the project, was why more of these women haven’t shared their fantasies with their partners. And why did so many of those 8,000 women who started their submissions fail to press send? “It’s obvious these women are incredibly powerful, articulate, and capable, but they wouldn’t dream of sharing their fantasies with their long-term partner,” she tells me. She says at those same pink boxes they set up for women to talk about their fantasies, in private if they chose, what most surprised her was “the amount of people who just won’t talk.”

The seed text for Want was Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Gardens, a similar compilation of women’s deepest fantasies about sex and bodies and want. Of course, 1973 was also the year Roe v Wade was decided, while 2022 was the year it was overturned. As Anderson speaks more, both about the power of women sharing their stories and about so many women’s reticence, I can’t help but think of this. Many of us, as women, don’t speak our wants because we have clear memories in our bodies of all those other times when we have stood up and tried to want, when we have perhaps briefly gotten, but then someone has told us never mind, someone has told us to sit the fuck back down.

Anderson talks about how she thinks the collective force of this book is a sort of primal scream of female yearning. But, I ask her, isn’t one of the problems with us screaming just how few people seem willing to listen when we do? In her introduction to “gently, gently,” she quotes her fictional Sex Education son, Otis. “It’s time to stop passively hearing and start actively listening,” Otis said on the show. How, I wonder, does a person actively listen to a woman’s primal screams?

“There is an active platform right now,” she says, “to tell it like it is.”

For years before My Secret Gardens landed in 1973, one of the foundational aspects of the women’s movement was Consciousness Raising meetings: women in groups who got together in living rooms, kitchens, and apartments and talked to one another about their lives and fears and wants. As in all movements, there were different factions and battles, and sometimes these groups broke up. But also, women got together, and for the first time, many began to realise that what felt like their own individual problem, shame, or secret was actually much more widely felt, much more commonly seen and understood. Often, they began to see how their individual shame, secret, or problem was not due to their own shameful failings but was instead a product of the systems under which they lived.

“The act of creating,” says Anderson, “the act of writing these things down, is birthing something. It’s strange and beautiful and wonderful and dark and light and sensuous and dangerous. It’s awakening these things which you can store away and keep to yourself, and not necessarily think of as a creative act until someone hands you the key, and asks you to write it down, be a part of this.”

Often, when women scream, no one listens. Often, people hear but do not listen actively enough to change or give or shift. Want is one of many contributions to the roiling, rumbling primal scream that so many women attempt, then shy away from, then disavow, then, in desperation, return to and try again. It’s a reminder that there’s a different power in screaming that is communal. That in listening actively to what we want ourselves, giving brief private allowance to conjure what might be our most shameful yearnings, collecting and offering them to one another, we might find new ways to seek more control and power in the world.

Originally published on Esquire US

In the fall of 2019, I found myself wandering around Times Square in search of a billboard featuring National Book Award-winner Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel, The Water Dancer. “I’m not sure what street it’s on, but you’ll see it,” the book’s marketer had told me that morning, so there I was, dodging tourists with my head and iPhone turned to the sky. At the time, I ran social media for Random House (Coates’s publisher).

We typically celebrated a book’s publication week on the company’s Instagram account by posting a stylised photograph of the finished book, but whenever Oprah Winfrey got involved, as she did by selecting The Water Dancer for her eponymous book club, the publicity, sales, marketing, and advertising plans expanded exponentially. It’s not every day in publishing you get to see Oprah and Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation at the Apollo Theatre.

In an industry that sees five hundred thousand to a million new titles published each year in the United States alone, there are very few ways to make a book stand out. In recent years, programmatic celebrity book clubs—mainly Oprah’s Book Club (Oprah Winfrey), Reese’s Book Club (Reese Witherspoon via her media empire, Hello Sunshine), and Read With Jenna (Jenna Bush Hager via the Today show)—have exercised significant influence over which books garner buzz both among readers and within publishing companies, elevating sleepy debut novels to best-seller status and making big books even bigger.

First, a disclaimer to any self-important readers expecting a fiery takedown of the celebrity-book-club format: As someone who wants to see more books in the hands of readers, I am wholeheartedly in support of famous people using their immense clout and privilege to promote books instead of the many other products they could be paid handsomely to endorse. An article built on cynicism for something so overwhelmingly positive would be disingenuous click-bait, and you will not find that here.

But just because these book clubs are a net positive doesn’t mean they’re above investigation or critique. Ever since their rise in the late 2010s, the biggest celebrity book clubs have held immense sway over which titles land on the best-seller lists, and their future has an outsize impact on the commercial publishing industry. In order to better understand how these groups operate, I spoke to the teams behind the scenes, as well as to other publishing-industry insiders.

First, let’s address the assumption that these book clubs are just brand extensions with celebrity figureheads who don’t read the books or participate in their selection. Celebrities start book clubs for the same reasons as the rest of us: They love to read and want to discuss what they’re reading with more people. Not once in any of my reporting did I catch a whiff that Witherspoon, Hager, Winfrey, or any of the other celebrities are not die-hard readers, which is obvious when you consider how much work it would take to head up a book club in which you don’t plan to participate.

“If they wanted attention, there’s a thousand ways they can do it without reading books,” said Leigh Newman, director of Oprah’s Book Club. “Oprah is a real reader. She’s always reading. I have spoken to some of the other book clubs, and that seems to be common throughout all of them. I don’t think anyone is doing it as a PR stunt. I think they all love books and they want to talk about books; that’s why these conversations are so comfortable.” Newman even called back after we hung up to tell me she once met Jenna Bush Hager at a party and can attest that she’s a passionate and engaged reader.

Given that all of the major celebrity book clubs are fronted by women, there’s something inherently sexist in one of the most commonly asked questions about celebrity book clubs: “Do they actually read?” As actress Emma Roberts, whose online reading community Belletrist launched in 2017, noted in an interview with author Melissa Febos, “When I’m reading a book on set, some people will come up to me and ask, ‘You read?’ And I say, ‘What part of that is
 surprising? Because I’m an actress? Because I have blonde hair? What is it that literally stopped you in your tracks to be shocked that I can read and do read?’ That’s really crazy.”

Despite their clear love of reading, celebrities aren’t running their public programmatic book clubs in a vacuum. How they operate and make their selections is a subject of much speculation within the publishing industry, which is nearly as clueless as consumers. In our conversations, Hager, Newman, and Karah Preiss (cofounder of Belletrist) all described similar systems reliant on four to eight staff members outside of the named celebrity who make connections within the publishing industry while sourcing books from agents, editors, and publicists—much the same way most book-related media outlets do.

Sarah Harden, CEO of Hello Sunshine—which was sold to a media company backed by private-equity firm Blackstone Group in 2021—told me that Reese’s Book Club doesn’t accept pitches. “We pride ourselves on really trying to be outward about it, because we don’t want to perpetuate the inequities in the industry where if you know someone, if you can get to the right person, you get a leg up,” she said. There are two full-time staffers on Harden’s team and a group of literary scouts at Baker Literary Scouting who “read for Reese to make sure that nothing slips through the net that is worthy of consideration,” she says. In any given month, 100 to 150 books make it onto their long list for consideration.

All of the book clubs claim that there is “no formula” to their selection process, and on many levels, I believe them. While their selections may be intentional, I don’t think there’s any secret contract between Reese Witherspoon and HarperCollins to explain why nine of her book club’s eighty-five non-young-adult picks through June 2024 were published by a single imprint: William Morrow. Rather, these decisions happen in all of the major book clubs in much the same way that most opportunities in the publishing industry happen: through an elusive blend of personal taste, connections, cold pitching, and good old-fashioned luck.

This randomness is reflected in the inconsistent timelines of when authors and publishers are informed about upcoming book-club picks—that can occur anywhere from a year before publication (possibly as a result of a connection) to after a book is already on sale (mostly luck). Sometimes a manuscript arrives nine months early through a shared agent at a big agency like CAA and a deal is locked—perhaps even far enough in advance to adjust the book’s publication date to better fit the book club’s schedule.

Sometimes a books editor or producer thinks the celebrity will enjoy the galley from the strength of a pitch email. Other times it’s pure luck: For example, Winfrey selected The Many Lives of Mama Love after finding a random manuscript in her living room with no idea where it came from. (That sound you hear is the sound of a thousand publicists fainting.)

“It isn’t like a political game of chess at all,” said Hager. “We have found that because we have a specific mission to highlight debuts and diverse books, and because we’ve worked really hard working with every agent and publisher and editor, we’ve created a pretty efficient and incredible pipeline.”

While I fully believe that celebrities aren’t playing some nefarious game of imprint chess to benefit themselves, the pieces are still visible on the board. Of the two hundred combined books selected until June 2024 by Witherspoon since 2017, Hager since 2019, and Winfrey since 2012, thirteen were from a publisher outside of the Big Five (the five largest publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette).

More than 40 percent of those books were published by Penguin Random House alone. That doesn’t happen without a lot of people playing chess to make sure it happens, even if the people behind the book clubs aren’t intentionally participating in the game.

Every book club adamantly denies that imprints or agents are a determining factor in the book-selection process, but only a publishing rookie in an industry built on connections would take that at face value. Kelly (whose name has been changed), a book marketer who has worked on multiple celebrity-book-club campaigns, told me how much easier it was for one imprint she worked for to secure Witherspoon’s book-club seal for future books after landing its first one.

“It meant we had an ‘in’ to Reese,” she explained. “We were able to get the next book directly to the person who actually makes the decision, instead of the assistant of the assistant of the assistant slowly going up the chain.” Despite their best intentions, it’s clear that celebrity book clubs are influenced by the same ouroboros of nepotism that affects the rest of the business, just like blurbs or review coverage. Even if the book club itself is imprint agonistic, you still get the same distorted result.

Although every book-club representative I spoke to confirmed that they actively solicit and feature books from independent publishers, the outcomes speak for themselves. Around half the books picked by Oprah’s Book Club since it relaunched in 2012, arguably the most reliable New York Times best-seller maker in the industry, were published by Penguin Random House, whose authors are already miles ahead of so many others—simply because of their backing from the world’s most powerful publishing house.

“I feel bad for smaller imprints who don’t work with bigger agents,” said Kelly. “That’s the beauty of what celebrity book clubs have done, right? There’s no rubric. There’s no specificity at all, so no one can be like, ‘What the fuck?’ They’re just picking books they connect with. But what does that mean?”

To be clear, it’s not Reese Witherspoon’s, Oprah Winfrey’s, or Jenna Bush Hager’s job to feature independent publishers and make sure they’re spreading their sales power more equally across imprints. That their pet projects have a tremendous influence on a complex and vital industry isn’t really their problem, but they also claim to care immensely about authors and the industry whose waters they’re playing in, so it would be worthwhile for them to pay more attention to this one element. If celebrity book clubs committed to selecting authors outside of the Big Five, it could have an enormous impact on smaller houses and their authors.

There’s a lot of speculation that the “meaning” behind all of this is a front for celebrities to source new onscreen projects. In recent years, Hello Sunshine has produced several buzzy book-to-screen adaptations, such as Where the Crawdads Sing, Big Little Lies, and Daisy Jones & the Six. Winfrey has the well-known Harpo Productions, while Hager signed a first-look production deal with Universal Studio Group and created her own production company, Thousand Voices, in 2022.

The women at the helm of these book clubs are far too smart for anyone to claim that optioning isn’t factored into their decisions, but it’s important to note that I found no formal links between book-club selections and a book’s film or television rights. As an example, Andrea Bartz confirmed that the film rights for her thriller We Were Never Here were already committed to Netflix before Witherspoon ever expressed interest.

The book was still selected as a Hello Sunshine pick in August 2021. “Two or three times a year, I hope there’s going to be books that we make into films and TV shows, but we’ve always got to manage that with a really high level of integrity as well, because the minute the book club feels like we’re only picking stuff that we’re making into film and TV, we’re done,” said Harden.

“You would really cut yourself off to make a club that is solely dedicated to finding intellectual property,” explained Preiss, whose own book-club offshoot, Belletrist Productions, focuses on literary adaptations not exclusive to Belletrist’s book-club picks. “There are very specific types of books that make for good television shows, and in this TV market where limited series are not selling in the same way, most literary fiction does not make good television. When it works, that’s wonderful, but it’s not what we’re doing.”

Even if screen rights are not technically part of the book-club deal, several people I spoke to pointed out how celebrity book clubs can still play a role in the negotiations. “It is understood that it goes hand in hand with a lot of things,” said Kelly. “The author may not be getting what they want on one side of things, but they’re going to sell a shit ton of books. So it’s like, what do you want? What are you willing to give for that?”

It’s critical to understand the role that publishers, editors, and agents play in determining which books are selected for the book clubs. Publishers can’t promote every title equally, so much like deciding which authors to send on book tours or who to pitch for the national morning shows, they tend to push hardest for the books to which they gave the largest advance, in the interest of recouping their investments. “If they paid high six-figures for a commercial women’s fiction book that seems it would fit well with one of the celebrity book clubs, obviously they’re going to make a push for it in that way,” said Kathleen Schmidt, founder and CEO of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations.

So what is the impact of these book clubs, and why do authors and publishers care so much about landing those few coveted spots? Publicist Sam Mitchell explained: “There’s really the sense with fiction, especially with a debut novelist, that you’re just running with your hand on your head if you don’t get into one of these book clubs. There’s just no way up toward whatever measure of success you want—usually the New York Times best-seller list, but really any kind of big buzz—unless you get into the sanctified hall of one of those three big book clubs. And that can be really depressing and off-putting, especially for the first-time authors.”

Desperation for recognition from celebrity book clubs is no doubt connected to the decline of books coverage at traditional media outlets. Not only do national outlets like NPR no longer pack the promotional punch they once did, but due to continued layoffs across the industry, from glossy magazines to local newspapers, there’s also simply less traditional media coverage to go around. “It’s interesting to hear even these massive names in publishing say, ‘If Reese could just pick my book, it would change things even for me,’ ” said Kelly.

Even without access to every single book’s lifetime sales data, it’s clear that these book clubs have a major impact on reader behaviour as well. Forty-eight of Hager’s sixty-eight picks have appeared on the best-seller list, as have sixty-eight of Witherspoon’s ninety-seven. All twenty-seven titles selected by Winfrey that were published on the same day they were announced as book-club picks went on to become best-sellers. I can tell you from a decade of working in the book-publishing industry that these success rates are incredibly rare.

But while Reese’s Book Club, Read With Jenna, and Oprah’s Book Club continue to offer a one-way ticket out of potential obscurity, there’s no denying that they hold less brand equity than they once did, especially among younger readers. Members of Gen Z remember their moms buying Oprah Book Club picks before they could even read, but they don’t watch morning television. Reese Witherspoon may get my heart racing as a middle-millennial who saw Legally Blonde in theatres twice, but readers a decade or two younger than me aren’t likely to care what her book club’s commercial-fiction pick is—at least not in the same way major publishers do.

“Because you now have people like Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber doing their own book clubs, it makes the other ones look kind of stale in a way,” said Schmidt. “There just isn’t as much brand equity in book clubs as there used to be. How many people are listening to what’s being said on morning shows anymore? It’s TikTok’s world, and we live in it.”

It’s too early to know whether Dua Lipa’s Service95, Kaia Gerber’s Library Science, or even Dakota Johnson’s brand-new TeaTime Book Club will have a significant impact on book sales, but I heard anecdotally that publishers are starting to pay attention.

The viral rise of Gen Z and BookTok is something that came up in every conversation I had with publishing employees. Whereas celebrity book clubs offer a model of positioning books that are powerful and often universally appealing, the idea that a book is for everyone can actually be a turnoff. “It’s not cool anymore to have that book-club sticker on there,” Schmidt said. “It’s cooler to say, ‘I saw this on BookTok’ or ‘This is being discussed all over BookTok.’ I feel like Gen Z especially does not want the sticker on the book.”

Those on the publishing side also pointed out how many of the most popular books on TikTok are radically different from what the celebrity book clubs select. “What we’re worried about in publishing right now is ‘Do we have enough romantasy?’ That’s not their picks,” said Kelly.

“Iron Flame—you couldn’t get that book off the best-seller list if you paid The New York Times to take it off. That’s not what they’re looking at. To some extent, they’re talking to an audience that makes sense for them right now, but that audience is growing older. They’re going to stop paying attention, because they’re going to get bored. And instead of adding to the audience with younger people who are reading these big TikTok books, they’re missing it.”

Preiss, whose Instagram book club is less influential than the Big Three but still holds weight within the industry, echoed this point. “Gen Z is more focused on genre, and Reese doesn’t do genre,” she said. “Romantasy and romance are really the future of books. I love literary fiction, [but] to what extent are you actually talking to readers? To what extent are you asking readers, ‘What the f*ck are you reading?’ They’re reading Taylor Jenkins Reid. People are reading Colleen Hoover.”

For years, the signals that mattered most in publishing came from the highest of highbrow sources. Anyone who worked in the industry prior to the 2010s will tell you about the glory days when a rave New York Times review and one national NPR segment led to a spot on the best-seller list. For many, it was hard to accept that Reese Witherspoon holding your book could do more for it than ten NPR interviews. Now BookTok may be the next bitter pill industry insiders need to swallow. The literary quality of the books selected by celebrity book clubs is miles above that of many of the titles amplified through BookTok—and for that matter, BookTok is even harder to predict than the media or the celebrity book clubs.

Aside from Winfrey finding a manuscript in her living room or Roberts discovering a book in an obscure literary magazine (which she does), most of these book clubs are making selections based on what publishers, agents, and editors are placing in their direct line of vision. Publishers are trying to do the same with BookTok, but their efforts to influence the algorithm are a drop in the bucket compared with the authentic power of readers on the platform. “It’s getting much harder for publishers to send that signal out, because it’s really consumers that are sending the signal now,” Schmidt said.

Whether or not the book clubs continue to carry weight for actual book sales in a rapidly changing industry remains to be seen. I, for one, see the solution to the potential (and potentially inevitable) waning power of these major celebrity book clubs as more (and more diverse) celebrity book clubs. That rising tide could lift countless boats in a struggling industry. As author and professor Clayton Childress said in a previous article on book blurbs, “There’s no middle class in publishing,” and anyone on the inside will tell you that a small group of massive best-sellers tends to fund the rest of the business.

Sometimes celebrity book clubs annoyingly make a big book bigger (The Nightingale as a Reese’s Book Club pick in 2023—why?), but a lot of the time, these celebrities are creating best-sellers out of thin air, which then drive major revenue for publishers. The words “Taylor Swift Book Club” probably keep a lot of people up at night, but it’s mind-boggling to think about how much money a Taylor Swift Book Club pick would generate to fund smaller projects.

Because of the popularity of BookTok, I expect to see more Gen Z celebrities launching book clubs in the near future, and I’d appreciate it if we could skip the “Do they even read?” discourse that’s already come for a new generation. Case in point: Kelly told me the sales team at her imprint recently tied the sales spike of an extremely literary novel to Kaia Gerber’s book club, which caused shock waves throughout the room. “It was a meeting of a hundred people, and they were like, ‘I can’t believe Kaia Gerber can understand this book,’ ” she recounted. In reality, Kaia Gerber and her team have great taste in books.

We need more communities that inspire readers to pick up a new book, not fewer, and ones led by a more intersectionally diverse group of celebrities with different reading styles than what’s currently on display. The male celebrity-book-club market is practically untapped, as is the potential for a big name to build a community around a certain niche genre.

In our conversation, Harden mentioned how Witherspoon typically picks lighter, easier Hello Sunshine titles in May and December because those months are busy times for moms. It’s great that Hello Sunshine is able to fulfil that need for a key demographic of readers, and it makes me ache for more celebrity book clubs that speak to specific communities and their unique reading preferences.

“What’s the problem with a bunch of people with big profiles having book clubs?” said Preiss. “I think everybody wants to find something sinister about it; they want to look for the ulterior motive. Even if there was an ulterior motive, who gives a shit? The context is key. It’s really hard to sell books, and it’s incredibly hard to compete with various forms of media. Nobody is Doctors Without Borders over here running a celebrity book club, but if you can let go of the earnestness, I do think it’s still worth doing. What’s the alternative? That celebrities don’t have book clubs?”

That’s not an alternative any of us should want to explore.

Originally published on Esquire US

If books are windows to another world then get ready for a world tour. Embark on a journey around the globe with two new Louis Vuitton books. Offering sensorial experiences (aside from its chocolate shoppe) from different corners of the planet that are depicted through a photographer's lens and an artists’ watercolour works. Synonymous with the art of travelling, the trunk maker continues to capture the essence of new experiences and adventure through documentation.

Fashion Eye United Kingdom by Martin Parr

As 2024 begins, Éditions Louis Vuitton extends another invitation to travel with Martin Parr’s United Kingdom. From shores to villages, the latest addition to the Fashion Eye collection paints a bittersweet portrait of the island nation.

The book records the ordinary life of the working class and the aristocracy. With about a hundred pictures in its contents, some never before published, it documents real life and real people in the four corners of the UK between 1998 and today.

Throughout, Parr maintains the same mischievous tone established in his first cult series and films like Bad Weather (1982); The Last Resort (1982-1985); The Cost of Living (1989); Signs of the Times (1992). Forty years later, he observes his peers the way his father observed birds: tirelessly. 

Altogether, Parr's works transcends boundaries imposed by distance and space, offering an anthropological look at life in the UK to the world. Sharing many mixed emotions he feels towards his homeland, Parr presents his subjects as they are, flaws and all. Instead of imposing a specific perspective, he simply shows them as they truly are. As to its interpretation? Well, the best works are the ones that the viewers have to come up with their own.

Fashion Eye United Kingdom by Martin Parr will be available in Louis Vuitton stores, online and through select booksellers from 5 April 2024.

A Perfume Atlas

With the release of A Perfume Atlas, Louis Vuitton reveals the tedious processes that go into perfume making. Orchestrated by Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, master perfumer of Louis Vuitton, the book invites readers to trail the creator in his search for exceptional ingredients. Opening the door to a sensorial world filled with discoveries through the words of Lionel Paillès—an author renowned for his expertise in perfumery—coupled with paintings of Aurore de la Morinerie and photography by Sébastien Zanella.

A Perfume Atlas offers an extremely rare glimpse inside the savoir-faire of Belletrud. Through 200 watercolour depictions, it unveils the secrets of the house's perfume production process. Each page follows the master perfumer circling the globe in search of materials and his relationships with farmers in remote locales. Readers will be drawn by an evocative energy enhanced by age-old folklore.

A Perfume Atlas is also available in a limited edition set: the Perfume Atlas exclusive set. It includes 45 phials containing extractions of raw materials specially selected and presented by Belletrud.

It is a celebration of High Perfumery that is both poetic and scientific. This publication will delight lovers of nature, travel and beauty.

Available from 2 April 2024, A Perfume Atlas will be on sale at all Louis Vuitton stores. The limited edition box set will be on sale in selected stores.

Twenty years ago, I stumbled across a copy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods at a Barnes & Noble in Chattanooga, Tennessee. At first, I was only drawn to the cover, where lightning illuminated a distinctly Midwestern highway. But as I devoured the book over the next three nights, I knew I was reading an instant classic that people would be talking about for decades. I say all of this because since then, I've only felt this way about a handful of books—and Kelly Link’s first novel, The Book of Love, is one of them. I honestly think it’s a masterpiece.

Set in the fictional town of Lovesend, Massachusetts, where “toffee Victorians” and “single-family Capes” line the leafy streets alongside “chicken coops and soccer nets in the backyard, ”The Book of Love tells the story of four high school students investigating why three of them died, only to be resurrected nearly a year later by their music teacher, who may be more god than human. Over a few days, Lovesend becomes the battleground for a cold war between otherworldly deities, ghosts, witches, and creatures. Meanwhile, the human characters search for a way to avoid returning to the realm of the dead, where they only remember “a lot of trees,” the smell of roses, “and under the roses, something burning.” Along the way, Link interrogates the nature of love between friends, lovers, siblings, parents, grandparents, teenagers, and even animals.

The small-town world Link conjures in The Book of Love—one full of nuanced relationships between a large cast of characters, local history and cosmic mythology, and magic hiding in plain sight—is among the most detailed and immersive ever put to paper. It also makes for an extraordinary comfort read, and an emotional reminder of what we lose and gain as we age.

After establishing herself as a singular voice in science fiction and fantasy with five short story collections—including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble—Link’s 600-page novel is one of 2024’s biggest literary events. From Link's home in the hilltowns of Massachusetts where she and her husband run an independent bookstore, Book Moon Books, Link spoke with me over Zoom about whether she believes in ghosts or afterlives, nighttime logic in literature, adolescence as a liminal space, and what she’s writing next. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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ESQUIRE: When and where did this book begin for you?

KELLY LINK: I’m a writer who finds it very useful to have a deadline, so when I sold Get in Trouble to Random House, I sold them a novel as well, on the grounds that it would make me actually write one. My plan was to write a very short haunted house novel, but I just could not come up with the thing that gave that book a heart. So I fell back on [The Book of Love] because I had a sense of the characters, and unlike the haunted house project, I could see why it would be different from a short story. And then of course it took eight years from that point to turn it in.

Why did The Book of Love need to be a novel instead of a short story?

Honestly, it seemed like it could be a trilogy. But I like compression. Believe it or not, this is a very compressed story as a single novel as opposed to if it were a series of books. There is space to imagine what might happen to these characters at the end, but the only thing I removed when I cut it down to one book was a loving pastiche of Regency romance novels. I was going to move the characters into that space for a whole book, and it would have been fun, but I don't think it was necessary.

How important was it for you to capture a sense of place? How much of Lovesend was inspired by Northampton or real towns on the Massachusetts coast?

The setting is a combination of lived experience and wish fulfilment. Easthampton and Northampton and all of the hilltowns up here have a really distinct vibe and a strong commitment to supporting quirky local businesses. When you live in a town that isn’t too big, that place begins to feel as if it’s a distinct living organism. If you live somewhere long enough, you mourn the ways in which a community changes. But when you write a book, you get to make things last in a way that they don't in the real world. Lovesend is an idealised version of that. There are people who have lived there for a long time who can still afford to live there. Climate change is not yet impressing upon this place in the way that it will very soon.

Why set this story at Christmastime in 2014?

The question of where in the contemporary moment to set it was a real issue, both in terms of music—because these are all characters with strong feelings about music—but also in terms of how the real world impinges on the characters. 2014 is the period when I began thinking about this project. So part of the tonal quality of the novel comes directly from a particular historical moment which is receding swiftly from us. I did think about what setting it at Christmastime would do to the tone. It was fun to take a holiday that wasn't Halloween—my favourite—and try to Halloween-ify it a bit. I also hope it provides a certain amount of solace and comfort.

"When you write a book, you get to make things last in a way that they don't in the real world."

Why did you set the main characters in The Book of Love in high school? Why not a college or adulthood?

I did think about making them much older, but adolescence is a liminal space. It’s a period in which you’re experiencing enormous change. You’re figuring things out about yourself, but you’re also more likely to make leaps into the wild. For me, these characters needed to be people whose impulsivity or decision-making felt more unpredictable, with fewer guard rails.

The first half of the book is written in a maximalist style that zooms in on small moments, memories, and details. Why did you take that approach?

Since this is a book about people coming back from the dead, the granular aspects of life—both the things that are irritating but also the things that give us delight—seem important. Because those are the things that keep us alive, right? If you lose joy or interest in those things, it gets hard to keep on going.

These characters have to make a decision about how badly they want to stay alive. It seemed important to me that they have a hypersensitivity to pieces of their lives that feel very minor. Like the noise that somebody makes when they're vacuuming. Also, to quote a meme, like a “bitch eating crackers.” When you’re so irritated by every single thing that they do. That kind of intensity seemed true to the characters within this narrative space.

How do you get inside so many different fictional people's heads with that level of intimacy?

If I'm going to care about the things that happen to somebody, I need to care about how they see the world in granular detail. The job of the writer is to make those details as interesting as possible. Or as propulsive and connected to the events in the book as possible. I'm not going to succeed at doing that for every reader. But I have to feel I’ve at least made them connective and interesting to me. The readers are willing to go along with it.

You’ve spoken about “nighttime logic” in fantasy fiction before. What does that term mean to you and how did you use it in The Book of Love?

Nighttime logic versus daytime logic is a way of thinking that Howard Waldrop came up with to talk about how narrative logic holds together for the reader as much as for the writer. With daytime logic, there is an explanation for things that happen. Clocks tell time in the way you would expect. Even if strange or fantastical things happen, there's a rule book by which they work that will be explained to you. A lot of realistic fiction, science fiction and fantasy, rely on daytime logic. Here's something startling, but I'm going to explain how it functions in the world. Often rooted in the inexplicable, even ghost stories have a kind of daytime logic to them. Somebody did something wrong and the consequence is that they are haunted.

Nighttime logic is more like carnival logic. Normal roles are upended. In James Theraper's book, The 13 Clocks, things are happening which will not be explained. It signals that the world has become a very strange place. It's not quite the same as dream logic, where first you're in one setting and then you're in another. Or you’re holding a cup of tea and then suddenly it becomes something else. We know dream logic. But nighttime logic is when you have a sense that there is an organising principle behind the world that belongs to the writer. The writer may not explain it, but there is a kind of coherence to it, even if it feels unnerving.

David Lynch is a great example of nighttime logic—there's an estranging quality to his work. A lot of horror operates in nighttime logic. Frankly, a lot of realistic fiction does, too—Joy Williams is great at that, and Barbara Comyns.

Do you often write at night to help you get in the right mindset?

I do my best work between 3:00 pm and 1:00 am. My writing brain gets sharper the farther we get into the afternoon. If I could organize my life so that I push that window further, I would be quite happy! If I'm on a retreat, I can work until three or four o'clock in the morning. I can write pretty much anywhere. I have an office. But I like being closer to other people when I work, so mostly I write down in our dining room. Ideally, I work in a room with other writers. I’ve gotten more writing done if I can see other people engaged in the same work, either having a great time or floundering.

Death plays a large role in this novel, as it does in many of your short stories. Has writing about it so often changed your perspective on mortality?

I saw somebody—maybe Nick Harkaway?—say that writers are generally catastrophists. You get on a plane and if you're a writer, you immediately start thinking about what happens if the plane crashes. You think about the most dramatic possibilities.

I was always somebody who was drawn to ghost stories. And death is always going to be part of a ghost story. I was the child of a pastor who then became a psychologist. Those are the professions where you're dealing with heavy, confusing things. I don't know why writers end up with the material that they draw from over and over again. You end up with a range of interests that you have an emotional connection to as a writer that you’re going to explore. For me, it's the fantastic—and monsters, and loss, and death. It's also about how people see the world and what they celebrate.

I don't think writing about death has changed how I see the world, but I do think it gives me a framework for thinking about the way I want to live. The pandemic has been a hard thing to go through. We had to close the press that my husband and I have run for over 20 years because my husband has long COVID. We have to be very careful about going out into the world because of the chance of exposing him to something that could make his health even worse. When you write fiction, you’re in charge of the things that happen. But you also get to work through the emotional costs and realities of dealing with very heavy stuff.

"I collect other people's ghost stories."

Do you believe in ghosts?

A few years ago, a good friend of mine—Holly Black, the author of The Spiderwick Chronicles—got a letter from a kid that said, “Dear Miss Black, I need you to tell me if fairies are real, and don't lie to me like the other adults.” She wrote back, “I've never seen a fairy, but I know people who say that they have.” That's how I feel about ghosts. I collect other people's ghost stories. There are many that I find either persuasive or troubling. I've never seen one, but I fully believe that some people just don't have the antenna or the radar. I am bad at telling if somebody was drunk. So maybe I do see ghosts. We could be seeing ghosts all the time but we just don't know it.

Do you believe in an afterlife of some kind?

I think I do. A childhood spent in a lot of churches with a father who was a Presbyterian minister, maybe some of that is a holdover But I'm agnostic. I would very much like to believe that there is something after death. But I find the fact that I don't know kind of exhilarating—that there is a mystery to which we all either do or don't find out the answer. That seems kind of cool, that maybe there's something interesting aside from the process of dying. That maybe you get to find out.

I have a hard time at the moment with a lot of things that are happening in the world. Not knowing becomes troubling when you see so much suffering and so much needless cruelty and death. It seems wrong to think there's life after death. And maybe it will be better there because that's just a reason not to fix things. But at the same time, the idea that there's nothing past death makes watching suffering that you can't do anything about feel even harder.

If The Book of Love is a standalone novel, what are you writing next?

[Another] novel, which is a haunted house story. I want it to be economical. Small. More experimental. If a novel is a large boulder the size of a large boulder, the next thing I want to work on is a small boulder. The size of a large boulder—a classic 50,000-word ghost story novel that feels like a short story.

Originally published on Esquire US

If you like movies – and by movies, we mean stories that make you think – then you’ve undoubtedly heard of A24, a name that (arguably) singlehandedly brought original storytelling back to the people, and did it without the backing of big Hollywood studios who would have resorted to referring to filmmaking as ‘the content industry’ (barf).

From Uncut Gems and Ex Machina, to 2022’s Oscar winner The Whale, and now, more recently, the lauded Korean tearjerker, Past Lives, A24 produces movies that are cool. But as Alfred Hitchcock once said, “There are three things that make a good film: the script, the script and the script.”

So, if you’ve ever wanted to get your hands on not just a slew of the original screenplays brought to life by the minds at A24, but also want to plant a cultural flag on your coffee table, then we have the gift for you.

Consisting of not only the original screenplay, but a slew of original and BTS images, details about the film, crosswords, and more, this is the perfect addition to any cinephile or aspiring screenwriter’s living room.

“We started developing the first screenplay books in 2018 as we were expanding our merch offerings,” says the head of brand at A24. “We wanted to create something collectible, like a coffee-table book, that showcased how a filmmaker’s vision gets translated from script to screen.”

To remind you of A24’s excellent cinematic library, here’s a scene of Oscar Isaac tearing up the dancefloor in the eerily prescient, Ex Machina (which, obviously, is available as a screenplay in the collection).

Cop one here and follow A24 on Instagram.

Originally published on Esquire ME

After the monumental success of Avengers: Endgame, I remember wondering, like many people, what Marvel could possibly do to follow up such a cultural juggernaut. How could they raise the stakes or stage bigger battles? What else was left to explore?

Then, in the trailer for Spiderman: Far From Home, after Tom Holland’s Peter Parker learns from Nick Fury that Quentin Beck is “from Earth, just not ours,” Peter asks with nervous excitement, “You’re saying there’s a multiverse?”

Yes, Peter, there is—well, I’m not sure if there are actually parallel worlds adjacent to ours, but in terms of contemporary storytelling? There are multiverses everywhere. There is, if you will, a multiverse of multiverses.

To name just a few, there’s the Academy Award-sweeping film Everything Everywhere All at Once, the popular sci-fi cartoon Rick & Morty, Amazon’s Philip K. Dick adaptation of The Man in the High Castle, Apple’s space race alternate history For All Mankind, the sprawling DC and Marvel franchises, and even onward to novels like Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, Lauren Beukes’s Bridge, Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, and Iain Pears’ Arcadia. In recent years, tales of adjacent realms and alternate timelines have become more and more pervasive in popular culture.

Of course, stories involving alternate timelines, what-ifs, and speculative histories are nothing new (in fact, as we’ll see, they long predate the scientific theories that explain them). What, after all, is Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Future but a glimpse into a multiverse? Because Scrooge heeded the three ghosts’ warnings, the vision shown to him by that ghost wouldn’t come to pass, meaning that this dark timeline is either an illusion conjured by the spirit or an alternate version of Scrooge’s life. The same can be said of It’s a Wonderful Life, the multiple finales to the film adaptation of Clue, the Gwyneth Paltrow romance Sliding Doors (and its precursor, the Polish film Blind Chance), and the ‘90s cult show Sliders.

But the cluster of multiverse narratives of the past decade has not just technically been multiverse stories. They’ve been explicitly multiverse stories—as in, they employ the scientific language that originated with the theory. They are directly inspired by the Many Worlds Interpretation, not merely tapping into the kinds of emotional desires that the multiverse offers.

For God’s sake, Marvel’s recent spate of ten films, eleven shows, and two shorts (and many more on the way) are collectively referred to as the Multiverse Saga. Even more significant, though, is how, much like time travel, the multiverse as a storytelling device began as a nifty concept and eventually deepened into a fruitful (and quickly overused) tool to explore things deeper and closer to home. What began as an esoteric theory and a heady narrative device has become as mainstream and emotionally resonant as any cinematic trope.

But as soon as an idea enters the zeitgeist and then the upper echelons of corporate IP, it gets flattened by the cynical and crass exploitation of pandering and profit hunting. The seven Oscars awarded to Everything Everywhere All at Once probably mark the apex of our current multiverse saga, now that the DC and Marvel films lashed to this subject have become increasingly unsuccessful, bombing at the box office and engendering some heavy animosity from fans. The multiverse has gone from an obscure theory to a sci-fi trope to a popular mainstream conceit to an underwhelming excuse for fan service of the crassest kind.

Paul Halpern’s new book, The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions, Other Worlds, and Parallel Universes, regales us with the history of the concept—from Pythagorean cosmology to quantum mechanics—in scientific terms. With his insight and expertise, perhaps we can illuminate the social side of the story. Why has the multiverse emerged so ubiquitously in the past decade? What mode of contemporary life does it capture? Why did it catch on so infectiously? And why does it seem to be crashing just as dramatically?

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The multiverse as a theoretical concept fittingly has numerous origins. Science—particularly high-level physics—relies on brilliant thinkers intertwining each other’s ideas into a cosmic braid of impenetrable complexity. As The Allure of the Multiverse makes clear, radical and counterintuitive theories like the multiverse—also called the Many Worlds Interpretation, parallel realities, etc.—arise out of a series of breakthroughs, insights, discoveries, and audacious leaps of logic. It typifies, in many ways, the highest level of human thought.

But the multiverse as a metaphoric concept has been nestled inside our ponderous and rueful psychology for as long as humanity has possessed a psychology. Our unique self-awareness, responsible for our physically fragile species’ global dominance, also causes our unique melancholy: we know that we have only one life. And what a precious life it is. The more exposure a person has to the bewildering and intricate enormity of existence, the more one is keenly attuned to the infinitesimal capriciousness of one’s place in it. As Richard Dawkins elegantly put it in the opening of Unweaving the Rainbow:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Imagine, then, knowing how much it has taken for us to be born and how easily it may not have happened. The pressure this awareness places on our one precious life! It is miraculous to even draw breath at all—now what are we going to do with this gift?

Mostly, not a whole lot. Remember, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We can’t all be winners, kid.

And so we’re left, at the end of our days, with regrets and musings about alternative paths, convinced our benighted fate was not inevitable, but rather the result of a misstep, a wrong door, a left instead of a right. Who might we have been? What other choices might we have made? Could we have lived a better, more fulfilling life? Or might our circumstances have been worse? The hypothetical versions of ourselves we invent in our minds may not outnumber the sand grains of Arabia, but maybe, like, Cocoa Beach?

The multiverse, then, in addition to attesting to human ingenuity, also represents the most fundamental aspect of the human condition. The multiverse lives in the depths of our minds and our hearts.

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In the preface to the revised edition of his 1969 novel The Eternal Champion, legendary sci-fi author Michael Moorcock claims to have coined the word multiverse in his first novel, The Sundered Worlds (1965). He didn’t. That distinction belongs to William James, the philosopher, psychologist, and brother to novelist Henry James, who invented the term to characterise the ambivalence of existence. “A moral multiverse,” he wrote in his 1895 essay “Is Life Worth Living?”, “and not a moral universe.” What Moorcock did was provide the word with the meaning we’ve become so familiar with: “an infinite number of slightly different versions of reality,” as he puts it.

Before Moorcock’s influential usage, the theory languished in the physics world under many different names. Attempts by sci-fi writers to christen the multiverse were similarly unsuccessful, though not always because their entries were inferior. Take Philip Jose Farmer’s The Maker of Universes (1965), published the same year as Moorcock’s debut, in which a man uses a magic horn to travel between “tiers,” or “world upon world piled upon each other like the landings of a sky-piercing mountain.” The novel’s front cover declares it “the many-levelled cosmos,” which is a lovely phrase I quite enjoy. As wonderful as it is, it’s not quite portable enough. Perhaps in another universe…

The contexts for the two origins of the word “multiverse” are worth a brief detour, as they afford some convenient insights into the heart of the concept itself. The subject of the essay in which William James coined the word multiverse was optimism and pessimism. Optimism here does not refer to a generally positive outlook, as we mean today, but rather a philosophy championed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his 1710 work Theodicy and popularised by Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man.

This optimism addresses the problem of evil in theology by arguing that our reality has been chosen by God from a selection of “all possible worlds.” Our reality may contain evil and sin and suffering, but according to Leibniz, realities without the bad stuff are not any better. Ours is, in an infamous phrase, “the best of all possible worlds.” This is an early example of the multiverse, albeit one that exists only in the mind of God. The notion of alternate realms can be found all over philosophical and theological thought.

On the other hand, when Moorcock discusses his use of the multiverse in his novels, he waxes giddy about its storytelling utility. He can narratively “deal in non-linear terms with versions of perception” and create “simplified models of ideal worlds (for which large numbers of people in Western society yearn so nostalgically),” allowing him to consider “by what particular injustices they might be maintained.” Right away, Moorcock saw the treasure trove of metaphoric largesse the multiverse granted a novelist—how the vast expanse of the cosmos could be used to explore the innermost depths of the human soul.

Comic books, those precocious nieces and nephews of genre fiction, similarly grasped the potential of the multiverse. Consider, for instance, the origin of DC’s Barry Allen, a “police scientist” who becomes the second iteration of the Flash (the first being Jay Garrick from the 1940s comics). Barry Allen’s introduction occurred in Showcase #4 from October 1956; in it, Barry is shown reading a comic book featuring his idol, the Jay Garrick Flash (referred to as the Golden Age Flash). So when he’s quite coincidentally struck by lightning and also doused with chemicals, gaining superhuman speed, he names himself after his hero.

DC cleverly incorporated their earlier era into their new one. But in 1961, Garner Fox wrote an issue of The Flash called “Flash of Two Worlds.” In his wonderfully informative book The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios explores this story as an introduction to quantum mechanics; he writes, “it was revealed that the Silver Age Flash [Barry] and the Golden Age Flash both existed, but on parallel Earths, separated by a ‘vibrational barrier.’” The explanation is that Barry “accidentally vibrated at superspeed at the exact frequency necessary to cross over” to what they refer to as Earth-2.

“Flash of Two Worlds” was a hit, and as companies are wont to do, DC repeated the formula over and over, increasing the number of Earths each time, now with Earth-3, Earth-S, Earth-X, and Earth-Prime (our reality), culminating finally in 1985’s massive crossover “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” which, like Moorcock, emphasised the utility of the multiverse for the practicalities of narrative.

The major comic event was orchestrated, as Kakalios puts it, to “normalise the multiverse,” a “vast housecleaning of continuity… to weed out poor sellers from many of the less-popular worlds and bring all the heroes from the best-selling titles together on one Earth.” Executive editor Dick Giordano wrote a memo listing the fallen characters (which included Barry Allen), commanding, mafioso-like, “they should never be seen again, nor should they be referred to in story.”

What unites DC’s coldblooded housecleaning and Moorcock’s pragmatism is their sense of testing out the utility of multiversal plots. Each had found a new mode of narrative and were keen to stretch its limitations. But in the scientific community, the theory of the multiverse remained a subject of much derision; it wouldn’t become an accepted mainstream notion until the ‘90s. Thus these stories, which incorporated a version of the actual physics concept rather than merely a hypothetical, had niche audiences.

For all their innovations with the multiverse, from coining the term to crafting it into novels and expanding the world of superheroes, none of these figures fully realised the notion of infinite realities as an avenue to richly scrutinise the pitiful and helpless exercise of wondering what might have been.

If you wanted to explore the emotional possibilities of the multiverse before the 21st century, you did so without mention of any quantum mechanics or general relativity. Instead, you severed the idea from any esoteric mumbo-jumbo that might catapult your novel or film into nerdy territory. Because anything nerdy, for a long time, wasn’t considered emotionally evocative or even representative of typical human experience. Nerds, like the multiverse, existed on the fringes.

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The multiverse was born for me when, as an early 20-something reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, I was startled by the famous passage about the fig tree. Esther, the protagonist, a 19-year-old aspiring writer, contemplates the innumerable choices that lay before her by comparing them to figs falling from a tree she’s sitting under, each one representing “a wonderful future [that] beckoned and winked.”

“One fig,” she writes, “was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor.” Other figs are exotic places she could travel, lovers she might take, ambitions she may pursue. And while this seems like a particularly envious position for a young kid to be in (each of her hypotheticals is a good scenario), Esther is instead filled with prophetic fear:

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

As a young adult, I couldn’t have understood the pangs of remorse given off by older people looking back on an imperfect life. But I could absolutely fathom the frightening prospect of future remorse. Plath’s evocation of paralyzing choices and the many lives those choices might lead to struck a chord with me. For the first time, I grasped the insane caprice of the human condition: how every YES inherently implies a NO to everything else. As the priest says in Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York, “There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose.”

While we’re on the subject of Synecdoche, New York, isn’t the central conceit of that film that the obsessive recreation of life into art leads to a concerning inability to tell the difference between the two? When we make art, don’t we effectively create multiverses in which we make a different decision or kiss a different person or move to a different city or pursue another career?

Art allows us a peek into the multiverse. Take poetry, for example—it abounds with the mournful, melancholic, and mopey among us pondering the possibilities of passed-over paths. A.E. Housman laments “the land of lost content” made up of “blue remembered hills” in a lyric in A Shropshire Lad (1896), which employs landscapes as its metaphorical terrain, as does Robert Frost’s infamous poem “The Road Not Taken,” from Mountain Interval (1916) twenty years later.

Neither Housman’s blue hills nor Frost’s forking roads feature any suppositions about their might-have-beens—only the utterly human tragedy of regret, our tendency to agonise over our decisions and blame the caprice of causality for all of our problems. The multiverse, in its most basic sense, is about our perpetual unhappiness.

The multiverse, in its most basic sense, is about our perpetual unhappiness.

This is why the multiverse is an immensely appealing device in fiction. But it's also why it’s ultimately unsatisfactory as a means of narrative self-exploration. The multiverse is too multi. Human beings can’t accommodate notions like infinity. Moreover, our lives don’t hinge on endless possibilities but rather on starker binaries like Frost’s splitting roads. Our regrets are small, in the grand scheme of things. And any attempt to extend our regrets into cosmic proportions tilts the realm of human meaning somewhere bewilderingly distant from what we understand.

This accounts for why an otherwise uninspired romantic comedy that was a minor hit in 1998 can coin a phrase that’s persisted in culture for much longer than any of the details of the film itself. Sliding Doors articulated and named humanity’s relationship to the multiverse. We obsess over missed connections, either/or scenarios, door #1 or #2, yes or no, stay or go.

Tales of two outcomes of the same moment entice us, but more options added to the menu tend to overwhelm us emotionally, leaving only our intellectual side intact. Ricky & Morty succeeds because it aims at our brains, revelling in cleverness. But a version of Sliding Doors with three, four, 10, Gwyneth Paltrows would undercut the personal stakes for us.

Multiverse stories can, in fact, diminish their own narrative stakes, particularly in franchises. Corporate studios see the multiverse as an opportunity to expand the scope of their IP. They bring in characters from past cinematic universes, as in Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, The Flash, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. In this last example, the Spider-Man films featuring Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield are now MCU canon. As film critic Clarisse Loughrey observed, the multiverse, for major studios, doesn’t lie in its “creative potential,” but “its cameos.”

More significantly: an endless series of universes means that any character’s death is impermanent, that all dire circumstances are reparable, and that all possibilities tend to equate to no possibilities. This last idea can be summarised by a line from a superhero movie: the recurring theme of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (2004) is if everyone is special, then specialness loses its specialness and thus no one is special. Specialness is defined by contrast to regularity, just as the weight of our life choices is tied to the limited amount of alternatives we perceive.

Of course, it’s true that at any moment, we can radically change our lives. This means that for any given scenario in which we see only two options, there are in truth many paths we could take. Gwyneth Paltrow could have been hit by the train, too. Our minds ignore these possibilities because we aren’t fully aware of them (who, after all, thinks, Well, I could have turned left at that light or I could have done doughnuts in the intersection until the cops showed?). Just as we aren’t conscious of the millions of coincidences that don’t happen, only the rare ones that do.

What we’re less inclined to enjoy are multiverses with many scenarios where we lose our cosmic footing. Ironically, the MCU’s move to the multiverse—which seemed like such an inspired way to up the ante from Thanos’s threat to half of one universe to a vast war involving infinite ones—had the opposite effect: it flattened the stakes, making them more representative of corporate mergers than insightful explorations of personal potential.

In physics, the multiverse is a fascinating concept that lends theoretical support to other unexplained phenomena of existence. But in our daily lives, a multiverse is mostly meaningless. We cannot consider every possibility, or even many of them; indeed, keeping mental tabs on a single branch (which itself branches again and again) is pretty much impossible. If the multiverse were proven to be real, our natural proclivity for minor regrets would render the world more suited to the scope of our tiny, insignificant lives, which are also—to us—the most important in the universe.

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Theories explain; metaphors reflect.

The multiverse, as a theory, emerged because of some as-yet-unexplained problems resolving Einstein’s general relativity with the mysteries of quantum mechanics, not because our hearts are filled with longing and regret. It seeks to account for certain aspects of reality. Whatever emotional implications it also evokes are beside the point. Relativity, quantum physics, infinities—these are beyond our capacities.

But the chance to investigate the many ways our lives could have gone by vivisecting seemingly arbitrary decisions? That is as appealing to people as pondering the ability to stop time, to fly, or to make the right choice in the first place. But these multiverse fictions are not legitimate attempts to explain our current state. Instead, they represent our feelings about our current state. When you’re at your most joyful, you don’t waste time relitigating past choices—unless it’s to marvel over how lucky you’ve been.

Rather, you bathe in the present moment, content that in all the infinite possibilities of this vast, eternal, and relentlessly enigmatic universe, that out of the millions of strings attached to every action, that in the teeth of such stupefying odds, you’ve managed to eke out a sliver of life that gives you purpose and pleasure. Those mired in miserable circumstances are much more likely to sift through their timelines to locate potential missteps. The multiverse, then, explains more about our self-regard than it does the vagaries of light and gravity and particles and waves.

People are filled with regret and weighted by creativity. So we can conjure up invented selves with a magician’s ease, but only for so long. Very quickly our ideas run their course, mostly because we aren’t personally invested in worlds where we’re made of paint or have hot dog fingers or are controlled by the Nazis. These are too far-fetched to be anything but thought experiments, emotionally inert and pragmatically irrelevant.

But give us a missed train or an unrequited love or an untaken journey, and we’ll dedicate much of our lives to concocting stories in which we got things right, found our passions, and chased our dreams, as if it were possible for us to say, as E. E. Cummings once wrote, “there’s a hell / of a good universe next door; lets go.”

Originally published on Esquire US