May wrap-up :)
bad month for reading, GREAT month for writing
HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!!!!!!!! YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS.
THAT’S RIGHT: It’s time for another Overripe Wrap-up!
I spent the past few days upstate visiting my dad and my friend J, who now works on a farm in the Hudson Valley close to where I grew up. I’m working on a post about how trippy that whole experience was, so stay tuned for that. I also wrote a BUNCH. In the last wrap-up I mentioned having just joined Chelsea Hodson’s Morning Writing Club, and I’m here to report that unfortunately, waking up early and starting your day with two interrupted hours of doing your favorite thing in the world does in fact improve your life in a big way. I know, I know. Developing healthy habits sucks and I hate that it works. But it WORKS, you guys. Best $9 I’ve ever spent.
I feel like I’ve been afraid of my writing since I graduated college. During MWC, I’ve mainly been chipping away at a novella about two summer interns at a West Village art gallery that fall in crazy toxic love. I began writing this book last October, but it was slow going mainly because I was so in my own head about it. It’s heavily autobiographical, and consequently I felt like the entire conceit of the project was too self-indulgent and nobody would care about it. So I only worked on it in brief spurts with weeks in between, only when my emotions overwhelmed me enough that writing the book was slightly less scary than keeping those emotions inside me. Now I still have to write around, or beside, these insecurities while I work on the draft every morning, but forcing myself to face them regularly has started to shrink their power. I also put a hokey little post-it note with affirmations on the wall right above my laptop. I won’t post a photo here, because a lot of it is quite personal, but the very first line says STOP BEING AFRAID. In my journal, I also wrote several times in a row, NOBODY HAS TO READ IT BUT YOU. Reminding myself of this has been the only thing that keeps me locked in the Google doc whenever my brain tries to self-sabotage.
Anyway, as a result of writing all the time, I read less books this month than I’m used to, so my book wrap-up is shorter. But I think it’s a fair exchange. :)
Monthly playlists of 2023 so far: January / February / March / April
My top 10 songs of the last month (courtesy of Receiptify):
Future Lover – Daughter
After seven long years, the darlings of Tumblr users in the early 2010s have returned with a new album. Just in time to put my healing in reverse! 🤩 I used to lay on my twin XL in college blasting “Human” (from their first album, If You Leave) and weeping as I sang along: despite everything I’m still human, but I think I’m dying here. Being nineteen was hell.
Stereo Mind Game is a tinge more upbeat than their previous work, but knowing Daughter, that doesn’t mean much. This song in particular really Got to me. The bridge is compulsively singable, and the dark guitar and bass lines play together so well. Lead vocalist Elena Tonra says of “Future Lover”:
“It’s about longing for someone but there’s a playfulness to it—a little tiny bit of humour. […] It’s just missing someone and feeling like they’re there—the ‘sweet nothings from the ghost in the room’. It’s still very loving towards the person that’s not there. It’s not always in pain.”
Word.
SWEET NOTHINGS FROM YOUR GHOST IN THE ROOM!!! GET SO HEAVY WHEN I THINK OF YOU!!!!!!!!!! 🗣🗣🗣
Permission – Sucre
One of my favorite genres of music could best be described as “Girl Power Anthems”: songs that make you walk faster on the street and kind of sway your hips a little because you know you’re hot shit. Listening to “Permission” while walking to the subway makes me imagine I’m on my way to my hotshot media job in a midtown highrise wearing red-bottomed stilettos. I am not beating the girlboss allegations.
Around U – MUNA
I wrote extensively about what this song means to me in my MUNA manifesto from two weeks ago. Read my post, boy.
Y Control – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
My best friend just moved to New York City, and I went to visit her at her new place in Sunset Park. For context, I live in Queens, so it was basically like traveling to a different city. It rained all day. By 7PM the G train was no longer running, and there was no way I was paying $100 for a Lyft under these conditions, so I slept over. My friend is on an Elizabeth Holmes kick, so we watched two episodes of The Dropout, a Hulu miniseries based on the life and crimes of the disgraced Theranos founder. It is extremely good and Amanda Seyfried puts her whole ***** into the role, down to The Voice.
Toward the end of the first episode, “Y Control” plays over the scene where Elizabeth creates and presents to her professor and TA the proposal for her now-infamous blood testing device. And unfortunately I have to admit it gave me chills. Syncing a young, ambitious, hopeful woman standing in the empty office space she just bought with her tuition money after recovering from sexual assault with the lyrics “I WISH I COULD BUY BACK THE WOMAN YOU STOLE” did something to my heart. Sue me. (Really not beating the girlboss allegations after this post.) If you’re a “Maps” purist when it comes to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, please give this song a try. I promise you’ll love it.
Everything – MUNA
To quote this text from my distinguished ex, Emma: “this is one of my automatic breakup feelings song it doesn’t matter how i’m feeling in the moment, if i listen to it i feel Broken Up With”
Navy Blue – MUNA
Again, there’s a whole six or so paragraphs about this song in my previous post, so I won’t rehash it here. READ MY POST, BOY.
Be On Your Way – Daughter
The first track off Stereo Mind Game, and the most dangerous. Elena Tonra sings goodbye to a lover only because she suspects they’ll return and they can make something beautiful again: “I have a feeling / that we’ll repeat this evening / so be on your way.” It’s beyond hopeful and I personally cannot be trusted with that emotion so soon after a breakup. So naturally this song has been on repeat all month. Go figure.
Where The Light Used To Lay – Yumi Zouma
This has to be one of my favorite breakup songs. To me at least, it’s about having the strength to end a relationship that you know is bad for you, but you still can’t help feeling soft toward them even after all the ruin. Being tender enough to sort-of-maybe-a-little hope they’ll come back to you changed enough for something to work. Being smart enough to know that they never will: “You're just an underpaid extra that never shows / Just a figment of the plans that I never had / And I hope that the next one won't be so bad.”
Naked In Manhattan – Chappell Roan
Chappell Roan’s songs are glitter, and this might be the queen of them all. It’s just pure queer joy at full saturation. THE TRUE SONG OF EVERY SUMMER. HAPPY PRIDE MONTH.
One That Got Away – MUNA
I did not have any more room to talk about MUNA’s latest single in my previous post, but let me just say these homosexuals have done it again. I don’t know how MUNA is able to time their new songs to be released exactly when I need them most, and to always lyrically apply to exactly the crisis I’m going through, but I’ll never stop being grateful.
One thing about me: I sure am always the one who isn’t scared to dive into love on the deep end!!!
Books I read this month
Tell Me I’m An Artist by Chelsea Martin ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Imagine you took my undergraduate social* experience and put it in a blender with Northern California / Bay Area angst, a bunch of family trauma, and even more art students, then made the narrator a college student struggling with crippling impostor syndrome who’s a bit of a weirdo, has little patience for pretentious bullshit, and knows exactly who she isn’t, but not who she is. Tell Me I’m An Artist was made for me in a lab. It tackles the questions I faced over and over in college: why is it not enough to just want to create something? Why is it so hard to truly break into the art (or literary) world without huge amounts of money and connections? Why do we allow people raised from birth in these worlds to make us feel less than because we weren’t? Chelsea Martin is a genius and I want to give everyone I knew in college (friends and enemies alike) a copy of this book.
*I say “social” because I was a molecular biology major, so academically I was aggressively not surrounded by artists. But the minute my lectures ended, I threw myself into the creative arts scenes and all of their insufferable pretentiousness. Two different hells running parallel to each other, imo.
Violation: Collected Essays by Sallie Tisdale ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I have been reading this book since FEBRUARY!!!! FEBRUARY!!!!!!!!!!!! Not because I didn’t like it, but because the text is really small and the pages are really tall and the book is way longer than I gave it credit for at first. Also, for several months it was exclusively my subway read, so I only read it while commuting. Given that I work from home, that was pretty unproductive. But I finally finished it, and wow was I blown away. I think Sallie Tisdale might be my favorite person who writes about science. I say this and not “science writer” for a reason. I don’t think her essays can really be constrained by genre in that way, and that’s a good thing. They err on the side of explorational rather than explanatory, and weave in so much personal and psychological power in a way that most contemporary science writing does not. I also learned so much about craft, some directly from her words but most from my own brain trying to puzzle out how she put these essays together, because they’re just that good.
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z. Z. Packer ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I’ve read a few stories from this collection in undergrad writing classes and loved them, especially the title story. So I finally picked up the full collection, and my god it did not disappoint. These stories are strange and disturbing and quietly powerful. Z. Z. Packer is not afraid to confront the most difficult, ugly topics, and does so with such care and graceful prose. If I give anything else away it’ll dilute the reading experience, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one.
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This book made me cry on the subway. Sabrina Imbler is a ridiculously talented science writer and memoirist who has put together a powerhouse of an essay collection. Each essay discusses a different deep-sea creature as a metaphor for a part of the author’s life, often involving their development as a queer person in the world. This is exactly the book I needed when I was a closeted, self-hating teenager, but I’m glad it’s here now. Reading it genuinely healed several ancient wounds in me. Gaysians, amateur ichthyologists, lapsed biology majors: this one’s for you. Just kidding, it’s for everyone. Run, don’t walk!!!
The Pisces by Melissa Broder ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
WHO KNEW I WOULD LOVE A BOOK THAT IS MOSTLY GRAPHIC STRAIGHT SEX SCENES SO MUCH. But it’s also about love addiction, depression, the pointlessness and joy of the human condition, and merman biology, narrated by a deliciously, hilariously awful woman. One of the strongest voices I’ve read in a while, and despite her cruelty I was actively rooting for (and often making excuses for) Lucy to the very end. Maybe some straight women do deserve rights
Other writing life updates and miscellany:
In two weeks, I’m attending a writing retreat upstate called “Writing The Obsession” led by favorite-author-turned-friend Chloe Caldwell. For the first time, I will be sharing the first 20 pages of the novella to be workshopped by other human beings. SCREAM. But I’m so excited — I attended a life-changing workshop in Paris with Chloe last fall and absolutely adore her teaching style. Plus, her workshops are usually mostly composed of middle-aged women, which is the demographic I get along with best. Chalk it up to effectively growing up as an only child.
My writing sample for Tin House is due on June 11, so I have to hard pivot from my book about toxic lesbians to… another book about toxic lesbians. 🤡 But you know what? It’s pride month. If anyone has anything negative to say about the expansion of this niche genre, I have news for you: YOU ARE HOMOPHOBIC.
So many books I’m so excited for have either just come out or will be coming out soon. It’s a horrible year to try to institute a personal book-buying ban. As soon as my next paycheck hits, THE LATE AMERICANS BY BRANDON TAYLOR I AM COMING FOR YOU.
Some people have DM’d me asking about the Morning Writing Club. You can learn more at Chelsea’s Patreon, but as you probably guessed from my raving earlier in this post, I can’t recommend it enough. Join me! Write with me! Drink way too much coffee and destroy your digestive tract for the rest of the day with me!
Lastly, this blog is and will always be free. However, if you’d like to support me, you can upgrade to a paid subscription for $5 a month or $50 a year if you pay annually — that’s a 16% discount! I couldn’t set the monthly minimum any lower, or I would. Paid subscribers do not get access to any exclusive content, but you do get the moral satisfaction of maybe getting me to federal (definitely not New York State) minimum wage for every post I write. I refuse to do the math on that.
Thanks for reading, and see you soon.
XOXO, Mia 💋
Meme corner
Hi Peanut!!!
Also, another of our Paris friends and I LOVE Melissa Broder. I’m a Pisces moon.