Summer is over, back to school, back to routines. My friend Marcy Thompson’s Substack captures the Labor Day gestalt so perfectly I need not say another word about it; just read hers. But, I will say another word, because nevertheless she persisted.
In general I have a rash about routines, and at least as far as this Pithy routine goes, I am woefully out of shape. We’re going to do a slow jog around the track this week just to get the blood flowing. Here are a few recommendations.
Two Articles Worth a Click
First one.
Jia Tolentino’s piece about Elizabeth Gilbert. I like Gilbert, but for a variety of reasons, I’ve never been a full-throated fan. I actually couldn’t finish Eat Pray Love, though I really enjoyed listening to Big Magic. It’s not entirely about her writing. It’s because I sometimes find her public persona–on social media and in the press—super cringe, as the young folk say.
Jia Tolentino, on the other hand, regularly blows me away. I love this woman’s brain, and her essay about Gilbert’s new memoir scratches every itch. Tolentino is a bigger fan of Gilbert’s writing than me. She praises many of her books, then outs Gilbert’s performative penchant for oversharing and claiming the emotional high ground. This aspect of Gilbert and most of the women writing in the self-help or self-help-adjacent space makes me squirm. I always feel a little guilty when it does, like I’m too repressed or under the thumb of the patriarchy to not “live out loud” like Gilbert and her ilk. What can I do; I don't like to “hold space” for things and I feel no need to use the word “lived” in front of the word “experience.”
Gilbert’s new memoir is a more detailed rehash of a diligently Instagrammed account of her love affair with her former hairdresser, Rayya, and Rayya’s slow agonizing battle with terminal cancer and addiction. I saw most of these IG posts and regularly felt like an asshole because I found it all sort of mawkish and exploitative. Turns out, at least according to Tolentino, maybe I was onto something.
Take, for instance, Tolentino’s elegant description that captures the very thing that makes me groan when I read most self-helpish memoir social media-esque crap:
“Her temperament is so strong, and her outlook so positive, that she never actually seems broken on the page—when she writes about indecision and confusion, she comes off as clear and decisive. This makes her a particular sort of narrator: always freshly emerging from a dark wood, breathless with revelation that may or may not stick.”
Tolentino goes on to point out that this breathless revelatory tone is endemic online.
“Gilbert may be patient zero for the latter-day memoirist mind-set: so many women—and I would never exclude myself—have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions, whose flaws and failings only make them better heroines in the end.”
If Tolentino isn’t excluding herself, I suppose I can’t either. Gulp.
Second one.
Frank Bruni’s Sept. 1 newsletter, where he reminisces about the good ol’ days when we had a thing called checks and balances. I am sadly aware that nothing comes of it when smart people excoriate the Trump administration in the NYT, but it doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it all the same. Here’s a line of Bruni’s I found particularly satisfying:
“Where two or three gather in Trump’s name, there he is to bask in their obsequiousness, as if he were extending his legs for a pedicure and each of them were calling dibs on a different toe. No checks and no balance there.”
Maybe the reason this is called a newsletter not an opinion piece is because at the end he includes readers’ submissions of great sentences they’ve seen in the media. This entertaining section feels very throwback and homey to me. Like checks and balances.
Two songs worth a listen
We all have our reasons for claiming 2025 to be sort of a lot. One day we can all go toe-to-toe on whose life has been most egregiously extra, but for now, I’d like to suggest a few songs that are getting me through mine.
“Right Back To It,” by Waxahatchie
Playing this song became a daily ritual for me. I can’t even describe what it is about her music that captivates me, which is part of what I love about it. Nearly every song on Tigers Blood gets me in the gut. I highly recommend.
“Just for Fun,” by Beyoncé
The chorus starts with these lyrics: “Here's to hoping I'll fall fast asleep tonight / And I'll just need to get through this.”
Who knew Beyoncé, the goddess sent down from the musical heavens to bestow her gifts upon us, sometimes has trouble sleeping? Celebrities. They’re just like us.
Ok. My lap around the track is finished, and Labor Day is over. Let’s get back to it. 1
That beautiful office in the image is not my own. It’s from this Remodelista article.
I feel validated! Despite my best intentions I rarely get past the first chapter of a self-help book. It’s the tone. And a perversive streak. Give me a bio about a centuries-old royal, a capricious narcissist who couldn’t help being born into their life, and subsequently died by poisoning or the guillotine any day! Also, love Waxahatchee.
Right back to it. 365. Three sisters. Three times through, and then every other song on the album. Again.