sometimes i feel like chappell roan

god, what have we done?

I dedicate this song to my ex. How does it feel to become everything you hated and I became everything I wanted?

––Chappell Roan, “My Kink Is Karma” intro at Bonnaroo

My first book comes out in four months. It’s a collection of fragments and essays addressed to my ex-lovers. I heavily edited and finalized the manuscript this summer, but the pieces in the collection date from 2017-2024. It was really trippy to face the intensity of my seventeen-year-old angst over my first “breakup” (we were only “dating” for about a week) now that I have seven years of active lesbianism behind me. She thought that was bad??? She had no fucking idea what was coming.

I’m proud of myself for finally, once in my life FINISHING a full-length project. As my novel-in-progress stalls like a stick-shift car trying to climb a San Francisco hill, it’s nice to have something else to point to and show the world that I have indeed been working. Busting My Ass, some might say. Until there’s a gorgeous cover and ISBN to prove that it’s real, there’s a cognitive dissonance between being a writer and other people’s experience of you as a writer. How long can you get away with telling people you’re “working on a novel” before they stop believing you? How long can you get away with it before you stop believing in yourself?

In my senior year of college, I asked my former intro to creative writing professor if we could have a Zoom meeting to talk about what the fuck I was going to do next. I was wrapping up four agonizing years as a biology major and knew for a fact that if nothing else, I was never going to be a scientist again. Which meant that in place of the carefully-planned next ten years of my life (two years of lab tech’ing, six years of a microbiology PhD program, two years of a postdoc) was now a wide-open blank space. It was both thrilling and terrifying. I had sent my professor some short stories I’d written in the two years since taking her class. I never said it, but I was looking for someone to tell me I could really do this. And how I could really do it.

Turns out, contrary to what my precocious, pretentious classmates tried to beat into me with their New York War Crimes internships, the path to being a writer can look like anything. There is no predetermined set of steps. You can decide to take a highly academic route if you want and do the whole MFA thing, but I was so burned out from school already. More school was the last thing I wanted. Thankfully, my professor told me that getting an MFA was “clown college.” She advised if I wanted to get the most out of a graduate program in writing, I should take at least a few years off school in between. It’s just as important to live your life so that when you get there, you actually have things to write about, she told me.

I have carried this advice with me through every spell of writer’s block in the three years since, and it has worked wonders to get me to stop hating myself when I am living in a particular time of my life that is so insane I don’t have time to write about it. While I walked through East Boston listening to Lucinda Williams in the early December gloaming, while I stood on the shore of Venice Beach at midnight as sand crept into every crack in my cherry-red Docs, while I shoved a pristine used hardcover of I Must Be Living Twice into the chest of a woman who had just told me she was leaving me, while I threw up all my hope and tequila on the steps of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, while I wore channels into the New Haven dirt with my restless pacing instead of carving them into my wrists, while I let myself be taken in bathroom stalls and icy Hudson Valley hillsides and Subaru backseats and my friend Kate’s living room floor while a documentary about Lynn Margulis was being projected on the ceiling, all that time, all that longing and anguish and desire was writing, too. And it paid off, because now I have a BOOK coming out. The very achievement I’ve worked for my entire life is finally happening, and it is starting to make me very very scared.

I just got back from two weeks on the West Coast. Right before my flight, my friends Madi and Carlos came over. We drank beer in my bedroom and I told them sometimes I feel like Chappell Roan. All my dreams are coming true, and I feel like my life is falling apart.

I keep it together pretty well. I do manage to somehow get most of my micro tasks done. I haven’t been fired from my day job. But I also have a lot of side hustles, none of which I’m particularly good at balancing. I decided at the outset of 2024 that this would be my year of yes – I said yes to literally any opportunity that came my way. I did all the public readings. I took all the freelance gigs. I accepted a fellowship to finish my novel. And now as we near the close of the year, I feel like I’m one strong wind away from dissolving to ashes. At the end of my week there are always still emails to send and doctors’ offices to call and my “retirement” “plan” from the corporate job I worked once upon a time won’t stop sending me physical mail because I’m dreading being on hold with them for hours for something that should only take two seconds so I won’t pick up the phone and just call and I do not know how to meal plan and groceries are one billion dollars and I have so many tabs open with articles I want to read and am never going to read and there is an election in three days where the choices are two enthusiastic genocide enablers and the discourse around it has been almost as unbearable as the horrific world our country worked (and continues to work) so hard to create and it was eighty degrees on fucking Halloween in New York City and I’m starting to get hungover in the morning after three drinks and I keep promising lots of people that I’m going to write and edit things and then I don’t write or edit them (sorry Taylor and Matt) and if my book does well, even middlingly well, I am opening the floodgates to so much criticism of my deepest wounds by total strangers as well as the people I wrote about. Voluntarily.

Basically, I’m just like Chappell Roan.

I’m Chappell Roan, I’m my own worst enemy, I’m a high femme princess with a poster’s spirit. I’m Chappell Roan, I’m disgusted by the government and I can’t catch a break. I’m Chappell Roan, no matter what I do I’m always letting someone down. I’m Chappell Roan, no matter what I say I’m always making enemies. I’m Chappell Roan, no matter where I go people always feel entitled to a piece of me. I’m Chappell Roan, I refuse to shut my mouth, I tell my truth and the world tears me apart.

I went to Portland, Oregon two weeks ago. I forgot my beanie when leaving for my flight, and I was the only person in the entire city without one. White women with dreads browsed the kombucha at the Whole Foods knockoff where my younger sister and I stopped for cookies. There were weed stores every three blocks. There were no people of color my own age. I read at a friend’s packed book party, and it was incredibly fun, and… aside from myself and another person on the bill, there were maybe one or two people of color in the audience.

After the reading, a few of us went to karaoke. After a tequila shot and a slice of dried mango that Chloé’s not-girlfriend had fetched from the car, I stood up to perform the only song remotely in my range: “You Oughta Know.”

I climbed inside of that song. The beauty of “You Oughta Know” lies in the way anger shakes Morissette’s voice into an emotional timbre that’s nearly impossible to match, and how she maintains steady vocal control over that fury even in the release of the chorus. It reminds me of Chappell’s slight snarl as she belts the bridge to “Good Luck, Babe!”, every single word imbued with the concentrated pain of loving a woman who is too afraid to love you back because of what it would mean for her.

Lyrically, “You Oughta Know” completely bangs. It’s the scorned woman song, and that is energy I am extremely qualified to channel. Like every baby gay with an older lesbian cousin in an alternative rock band, for months after a particularly bad breakup I’d inevitably wake up in the morning and the first thought I’d have would be every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it wELL CAN YOU FEEL IT WELL I’M HEEEEEERE TO REMIND YOUUUUUUUU OF THE MESS YOU LEFT WHEN YOU WENT AWAY

Afterward, I was catching my breath in a chair at my friends’ booth when a girl I vaguely remembered stumble-dancing and cheering during my performance approached with a smile. I quickly turned around to avoid eye contact, hoping to project that I wasn’t interested.

She came up behind me, slid her hand between my arm and rib cage, and quickly grabbed my chest.

I couldn’t move. She must have noticed, because she let go, but moved around to grind on the empty table in front of me. I averted my eyes. Finally, my lack of interest sank in and she returned to her booth, where she immediately began making out with the man sitting there. I stared at my lap, shocked. I’d never been groped before.

In her Rolling Stone profile, while describing some of her worst experiences with fans, Chappell Roan says she was out at a bar for a friend’s birthday when a fan grabbed and kissed her. In that moment, it was all I could think about.

I religiously listen to a podcast called You’re Wrong About, hosted by writer + journalist Sarah Marshall, that revisits events or people from popular culture that have been misremembered or miscast by the American public. She initially started the show to discuss several Maligned Women of history, including Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, Amy Winehouse, and Anna Nicole Smith. I am a loyal Patreon subscriber, so I have also been able to stream their two-part Vicky Morgan episode and four-part Britney Spears saga. The pattern is always the same. A beautiful, talented young woman is elevated to stardom; the public treats her like an object for their entertainment; she lashes out against the invasions of privacy and abuse she is forced to endure as a result of her fame; she is vilified by the people who once venerated her; she feels she has lost everything; and finally, she has some kind of tragic demise.

In Chappell Roan, I can see the tendrils of this ugly pattern starting to take hold. Per the Rolling Stone profile mentioned earlier, she has been stalked, screamed at in public, had panic attacks onstage, and seriously considered suicide. The media leaps on the chance to turn her every word into a headline, opening her up to widespread scrutiny and painting her as an ungrateful drama queen who complains about everything, instead of a 26-year-old who had a meteoric rise to global superstardom in less than a year and is coping with it about as well as I would. I feel a fierce protectiveness over her. I don’t want her to become another Amy Winehouse or Whitney Houston. I want her to make her gay pop bangers for as long as it makes her happy, and I don’t want that happiness to be ripped away by the very people she’s trying to make feel less alone with her art.

I’m so glad I’m in an artistic field where there is a cap to my fame. I’m realistic. I am never going to be so famous that I need to hire security to protect me from my fans. Even if I win a Pulitzer someday, most people won’t recognize me on the street. Thank god. True celebrity seems like actual hell.

Like Chappell, I am a performer at heart. I have no issues reading my extremely personal and intimate fragments in front of crowds of strangers in New York City bookstores and dive bars alike, as I’ve been doing for most of 2024. I love being on stage, I love crowd work, I love all eyes on me, I love gay men audibly gasping when I describe being ghosted after mailing a woman a ginkgo leaf, I love dressing up and shining under the lights and breaking everybody’s hearts when I read about the breaking of my own. Stage fright is not something I understand.

At least, it wasn’t.

Now, as I gear up to start planning my very first book tour, I have to admit the shakes are starting. I am about to be my own headliner. I'm about to tour with my own real actual book. If everything comes to fruition, I will be traveling to Boston, Philadelphia, DC, LA, San Francisco, and Portland, and of course multiple NYC events. I’m not worried that nobody will show up – not in an egotistical way, but more like if that does happen, then me and the one or two people who stumbled into the bookstore will just queen out for an hour. That’s fine with me. I do not feel entitled to wide readership or a massive adoring audience – these things take time, and I need to earn them. But I am worried about someone interrupting me Kanye West-2009-VMAs-style to boo me, confront me, accuse me of violating their privacy, or tell me I’ll never make it big or whatever. I am releasing a small collection of experimental nonfiction about lesbian heartbreak through an independent publishing collective; I am well aware I am not the next Sally Rooney. I just don’t know if I can deal with physical confrontation.

It’s on me for making a career out of writing about real people who I assume are still alive, and this book will just be out there in the world, and they can read it if they want. Everyone I have dated has either asked me to write about them or explicitly said they were okay with me doing so, but when I actually go through with it, they become furious. This rejection hurts far worse than the relationships themselves ending. My writing is me. It’s the most me I ever am. Everyone I have loved knows this – it is often the first thing they know about me before we meet in person. This reaction as though I’ve betrayed them in some way for doing the very thing they used to love me for always baffles as much as it saddens me. Dodie Bellamy writes in The Buddhist: This guy must have some self-destructive streak. He’s read my writing, what was he possibly thinking?

By drawing so deeply from my own life to write this book, and the novel to come, I’ve turned my universe into a minefield of memory. No matter where I am in the world, I can still identify Ariana Grande’s Cloud perfume from just a millisecond inhale as I brush past the offender on the street. My heart breaks when I see a crumpled light blue pack of American Spirits in the gutter or pass the Mama Pho on the corner of Grand and Lorimer. Last week, Sandra Diaz-Twine endorsed Kamala Harris and I desperately wanted to text the person I spent seven months watching every episode of Survivor after sex with to ask if they can believe it. There is pain embedded in these flashes, reminders of the tenderness we destroyed together, with our avoidance and ambition and delusion and desire. I’m trying to find the joy, though, or I’ll straight up die. Because there was joy. It existed. For spans of time, I felt held, I felt loved, and I’m working on trying to cobble together a sense of gratitude for those spans and those people. Thanks to them, I got to experience the thrill of falling, over and over and over again.

That said, I can also be a petty bitch.

I appreciate this about Chappell. I rarely see her own words in context, only the outsized public reaction to something she said off the cuff. The media has successfully stoked the flames by working overtime to create a diva narrative around her. She’s starting to lean into it. She made headlines earlier this year by telling a paparazzo who swore at her to “Shut the fuck up,” and there’s this bit she did on the recently-concluded Midwest Princess tour that I absolutely love. I’ve been pretty unlucky and didn’t get to see her live on this tour (though I saw her once at a strange little show at the Black Cat in DC in 2023. Someone in the crowd kept screaming at the top of their lungs trying to sell shrooms. “Hot To Go” was half speed). But the internet is overflowing with videos, so I’ve been able to experience a bit of the magic secondhand. Before performing “My Kink Is Karma” at music festivals, she looks right in the camera and addresses a few words to her ex. Her intro is different every time. I’ve seen three versions of it, and they are all my favorite. I love the inherent drama of it, the turning over of ancient stones, the refusal to let go, the transformation of the pathetic into the badass. And of course the humanness of it, the desire to publicly punish someone who did you wrong no matter how long ago they wronged you, no matter how the world will paint you, just because you can. Society reserves a special hatred for women who dare to make art about their romantic life, but it’s easy to let this archival misogyny slide off your back when you’re rubbing your success in your terrible ex’s face at the largest Lollapalooza crowd in history. She’s reclaiming her narrative and her power in a huge gay fuck you and it’s fucking cool. I’m sorry, it just is.

Anyway, here’s my book cover! Designed by the incredible Rachel Ake Kuech of Detransition, Baby, The Undocumented Americans, and Sour Heart fame! How is this real?

Preorders are open now and I hope you will consider sliding me $19.99 (includes shipping) in exchange for seven years of my life. I hope you will also consider joining me at one of my tour events once they have been finalized. And I hope, if you are one of the subjects in these fragments, you spare me the pig’s blood. After all, as the saying goes, if you didn’t want to be written about, you should’ve acted better.

xoxo,

Mia 💋

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Meme corner