I really didn’t intend to take an eight month hiatus from writing this newsletter. Between revising my manuscript and attending a seemingly endless stream of doctors appointments, I’ve just had zero mental energy left for anything else.
But I’m back now! Hi!
So, since last November, what’s changed? I returned to Philly, where I got to experience the collective joy of a near-disaster with the tap water and the Eagles losing the Superbowl. I finally got caught up on Succession. I started reading again. I saw two cardiologists, a nurse practitioner, and a speech therapist. Actually, I saw the speech therapist a lot. I sat in her office every week for two months while we did exercises originally designed for stroke patients that were supposed to help me manage my brain fog (the cute, fun moniker we’ve given post-viral cognitive impairment/brain damage.) It was nice being independent again, and then it was kind of too much. It started getting hot, and I got sick of the three meals I could manage to cook myself, and my little sibling came to pick me up.
They drove me north, and now I’m back at my parents’ house again. It’s been a weird summer in Maine – unseasonably cold and rainy, with days at a time where we’re so fogged in we can’t see the water. Still, I’ll take it over the record heat and poison smoke in Philly, which I think might actually destroy my sickly little body at this point.
I haven’t really been doing much up here. I spend a lot of time in bed, crocheting or typing in small increments or just listening to music with my eyes closed. I’ve been playing PUP records on repeat, like I did in the summer of 2019 when I wrote the first draft of the novel. (Morbid Stuff and The Dream is Over then, self-titled and The Unraveling of PUPTheBand now.) (My parents have not been enjoying this musical direction.)
I’ve been watching a random combination of stuff – old episodes of The Amazing Race and Leverage with my mom, noirs and premium cable dramas and Ink Master reruns by myself, the entire Mission: Impossible franchise as a family project, a truly bizarre collection of action movies with my dad. I have no idea what his criteria is, but his selections so far have included Salt (the 2010 Angelina Jolie vehicle), Uncharted (do not watch this movie, it is so so bad), Patriot Games (a forgotten, weirdly IRA-centric 1992 thriller starring Harrison Ford), and the original 1963 Pink Panther (god what exquisite costumes).
I finally finished the revisions on my novel, and sent it back to the agent whose revise & resubmit prompted the edits. I used to be a fast writer, but work that probably would’ve taken me 2-3 months before I got sick took me 7 now. And it’s not just that I have to work in small bursts. I can’t totally trust my own mind anymore, which is scary and frustrating and not at all ideal for a writer. I mix up words or leave them out entirely. Ideas that seem to make sense in my head come out jumbled on the page. I’ve found sentences that are written completely out of order. Just working on these few paragraphs here, I’ve had to look up four different words to make sure they meant what I thought they did. I ended up having my mom proofread the manuscript to make sure it wasn’t an incoherent mess. Luckily, I still seem to be able to catch most of my mistakes.
But it’s a weird thing, not knowing if you’re making sense. Staring down the written evidence of my own incoherence freaks me out.
So that’s all a part of why I haven’t written anything here. The other part, though, is that I’m not really sure what this newsletter actually is.
When I started kitsch connoisseur, my intention was to write about kitsch – strange objects, locations, whatever else seemed to fit. And I still want to talk about that, but I find myself increasingly drawn to other topics, too; books and movies, personal essays, more bloggy kinds of posts on occasion. It seems silly to follow an arbitrary set of rules that I made up and haven’t even really stuck to. Like, this substack can be about whatever. Kitsch and other stuff too. I hope that’s cool with you guys.
More soon.
xoxo,
Franny💋☔️
p.s. i would like to join the Barbie conversation, but the movie theater in my parents’ town is only playing The Miracle Club. maybe when it comes to streaming…