This week, we’re breaking teeth, writing books, and going on our own odysseys.
COPING
When food mediates grief
Ella Gray Hickman recounts the days after she lost her home in a fire through the bagels, candy, and frozen pizzas she consumed in the aftermath.
What I Stress Ate After My Apartment Burned Down
—Ella Gray Hickman in Ella Going Gray
I wake up in Rayne’s bed around 9:00am. Her room is always nice to wake up in. For some reason, the sun never feels jarring or intruding when it shines through her windows in the morning. My husband is calling me to come downstairs to let him in, the firefighters have asked him all the questions they needed to and let him pack up some essentials from the smoldering mess of our apartment. I feel a little guilty because I didn’t think to change out of my sooty pajamas when I collapsed into Rayne’s white sheets and I must assume they smell like smoke by now. It is hard for me to tell because everything smells like smoke to me and will for a few days.
Rayne was awake writing at 3:30am and the first person to pick up my call after the firefighters got us out. The restaurant we lived over, a mom and pop sushi place we loyally kept ordering from even after the health department briefly shut them down and our minor cockroach problem coincidentally went away, was, in that early morning hour, still on fire. My husband, Andrew, had wrangled the cat into his crate before the firefighters chopped their way up to our floor. On the street, he rubbed my back as I hacked black snot onto the sidewalk and then ushered me and the cat into a car to Rayne’s. Despite the circumstances, I couldn’t help feeling very romantic about it all. I was getting on him just a day before about never holding doors open for me. It’s not that I’m surprised by how good he is in a crisis nor how good he is to me in general, but I suddenly feel very aware of it. Sometimes in my head, he’s still 19.
Andrew, my knight in flannel pajama pants and a pair of Caterpillar construction boots some sympathetic Belgian raver gave him on their way to after-afters, arrives at Rayne’s with breakfast from Apollo Bagels, which is funny because we’ve never had them before and right now seems like an odd time to follow a staycation tourist-in-my-own-city impulse. Maybe he went because we’re never in Williamsburg this early or maybe it was because he spent all the early morning from about 4am onward waiting around for the fire chief to show up and say nothing, really, of substance and so the long line seemed less daunting. I can’t tell if the toasted bagel is burnt or if my mouth is burnt, but it crackles when I bite into it. The tomato is gorgeously tender, the thin ribbon of skin on the slices doesn’t even catch as I take a sloppy bite. The salt and acid tang of the tomato stings my tongue in odd spots like metal zaps, but the cream cheese is soothing. It isn’t the most generous layer of cream cheese I’ve ever had on a bagel, but the consistency is far more buttery and silky than I’m used to.
After breakfast, we load the cat and the go-bags into Andrew’s car and relocate to the apartment of our best New York friends from college. Gene and Maude have offered up their couch for the weekend. Once Alamo is settled with litter and food, Andrew takes me back to our place to survey the damage. We each gather a laundry bag of clothing to serve as our respective wardrobes for the foreseeable future and decide that opting for wash and fold is completely worth it. After we drop off our smokey clothes to the laundromat, I want to walk around alone for a little while to clear my head and I want to stress eat sugar. I make my way down Knickerbocker stopping into 99 cent stores to buy packs of socks and boxers and white tee shirts we can wear immediately. It begins raining harder and I realize I should have grabbed the umbrella Gene offered me, but that wouldn’t do anything to keep my slippers dry. I am still wearing the clothing I fled the apartment in: Christmas patterned pajama pants, a big tee shirt covered in paint splatter, and rubber bottomed felt clog slippers. I am soaked-through halfway back to Maude and Gene’s.
SEA LIFE
DOCUMENTARIES
Portraying a flying, fleeing subject
After Flaco the owl escaped the Central Park Zoo, he became an overnight sensation. One filmmaker took it upon herself to document the moment.
What Is It Like To Be An Owl?
—Penny Lane in Penny Lane Is My Real Name
In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked a famous question about consciousness: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Nagel chose the bat because, as a fellow mammal, we readily accept that it possesses consciousness, in the sense that it is like something to be a bat. A bat has subjective experience.
But he also chose the bat because it is so weird and alien to us—humans can’t echolocate, for example, or fly—that even if we knew every scientific fact about bat biology, we’d still lack access to what it actually feels like to be one. As Nagel put it, we can rely only on our own experience to provide “the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited.”
Every documentary begins with an impossible ambition: to understand what it is like to be someone—or something—other than yourself. Telling the truth about the experience of any other being is never easy. You never really know if you are getting it right. But at least with human subjects, you can ask them, “What is it like to be you?” You can ask them, “Did I get that right?”
There’s a reason so many people at Q&As will ask a documentarian, “What did [subject of film] think about the film?” They’re looking, in a way, for a fact-check on the whole enterprise of the filmmaker having tried to represent what it is like to be the subject.
With an animal protagonist, the mystery is even more irresolvable. There are no interviews, and no explanations. Just the best available scientific understanding, close observations of behavior, and ultimately, your own imagination.
This is the challenge I found myself facing when an owl named Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and immediately became the most captivating protagonist I’ve ever encountered in real life. This owl, who had lived in captivity his whole life, was now suddenly free. He had begun writing his own story. My job became to try, however imperfectly, to tell it.
What is it like to be an owl? The question announced itself to anyone who saw him on the sidewalk near the Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue.
But we weren’t just asking it about owls in general—we were asking it about Flaco. An individual, with his own personal history, his own individual temperament, and his own subjective experience. That’s the invitation at the heart of Wild Inside: to get to know one extraordinary individual, on an extraordinary quest… who just happens to be an owl.
That said, the first step in avoiding the mistake of anthropomorphism is remembering Flaco is, in fact, not a human but an owl. One must try to understand the owl’s world: his umwelt. This wonderfully German word refers to the distinct perceptual reality of a species, deriving from their unique biological abilities.
And so, I asked embarrassingly basic questions of esteemed scientists over many months as I learned about owl biology. I was delighted to learn that owls, with their forward-facing eyes fixed inside their sockets and their long-range vision, probably see the world not so differently from a birder with binoculars glued to the face. This parallel vision became a visual motif throughout Wild Inside… especially because it so often seemed Flaco was watching us as much as we were watching him.
MAGIC
FILM REVIEW
“I think I’ve seen this film before”
E.K. Carlisle got the hottest ticket in town—a spot at a screening of The Odyssey—but argues that the plot feels eerily similar to the director’s past work.
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey fails to look camp in the eye
—E. K. Carlisle in E. K. C-mail
Nolan, renowned for high-concept sci-fi and action films such as Interstellar and The Dark Knight, is one of the few modern filmmakers that can reliably drum up packed cinemas whatever he puts out. Oppenheimer, his last feature chronicling the life and times of the guy who built the nuclear bomb, was 180 minutes of boring political machinations and Cillian Murphy looking stressed. It still earned nearly $1 billion worldwide.
The Odyssey will no doubt achieve similar success. As a former student of ancient history, I was interested to see how Big Chris would adapt Homer’s lengthy ancient Greek poem for a modern audience. It hasn’t hurt that he’s roped in an all-star cast: Matt Damon as the wandering warrior Odysseus, and Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland as his patient wife and son waiting for him back home.
I had doubts about how well Nolan’s brooding, clinical style of filmmaking would gel the chaotic, colourful world of ancient epic, and I was justified in having them. His preference for high-contrast neutrals creates scenescapes that are expansive and expensive, but dry. We’ve known for years now that our idea of the classical world as one of white statues and gleaming marble temples is completely inaccurate. Ancient cities would have been full of vibrancy, from the painted icons in shrines to intricate wall paintings. Even going back to the Minoan civilization on Bronze Age Crete we find fragments of art that reflect a playfulness and eclecticism that is nowhere to be found in Nolan’s dusty vision of the Mediterranean.
This cultural levity is mirrored in the Homeric poems: although they contain sombre episodes (Achilles brutalising Hector’s corpse, Odysseus losing all his men, Agamemnon sacrificing his own daughter to ensure safe passage of his ships), there’s also many ridiculous moments that can only be described as camp. The oafish cyclops Odysseus encounters also keeps sheep and makes cheese. Circe turns Odysseus’s men into squeaking little pigs. The famous episode of the Trojan horse is unbelievably absurd and borderline comic. You’re telling me Odysseus’s cunning plan is to build a huge equine structure and stuff it with soldiers, and for some reason the Trojans are stupid enough to accept it as a gift, and the subsequent ambush is enough to end a ten year conflict? Have a day off!
But Christopher Nolan re-enacts the episode with a characteristic po-face. The only time that drops is during the Circe scenes: here, he doesn’t lean into humour, but horror, with the soldiers’ transformation into pigs rendered in genuinely grotesque fashion, to the point where I began to wonder if Robert Eggers had suddenly seized directorial control.
CANINES
ACCIDENTS
Motherhood offers curveballs even competing on Survivor couldn’t prepare you for
Parvati Shallow has been on several seasons of Survivor, where she’s faced every kind of challenge. Still, having an emergency in front of her daughter was new territory.
Who’s Your Emergency Contact?
—Parvati Shallow in The Queendom
“Mommy, did you die?” My daughter’s voice rang out in the blackness.
I felt the cold concrete on my left cheek before I opened my eyes. My tongue brushed against my front tooth and felt a jagged edge.
“No,” I hurried to answer her, with my face still on the ground, my body sprawled out on the gritty cement.
What happened? I was so disoriented.
Opening my eyes, I searched in the dark for my daughter. She was standing about ten feet behind me by a wooden beam. Why was she so far away? My thoughts swirled inside my head while I grasped at understanding my predicament. My mouth tasted of blood and dirt.
Okay. I know some things.
What happened: We were under the Santa Monica pier. We’d been rollerskating. I was holding my daughter’s hand and we’d fallen down. My knee had popped and I’d felt lightheaded. I was scared I’d really fucked up my knee. Would I even be able to walk?
The tunnel was black as midnight but just beyond it the sun was blazing bright, making it hard for my eyes to adjust. I remembered sitting on the ground for a bit to stabilize, but my head just kept spinning. Beyond me, people were buzzing through the tunnel on motorized scooters, their screams echoing off the walls and corners.
This was hell.
Before I found myself belly down on the boardwalk, I’d been sitting up, trying to ground myself. I’d been aware of my daughter watching me, her eyes heavy with worry. An urgent energy pulsing off her tiny body, waiting for me—willing me—to stand up.
[. . .]
Now that I had a grasp on the sequence of events I’d just experienced, I had another thought, one that struck me with horror—did I lose a tooth?
Oh my God.
I’d played five seasons of Survivor and had competed as an amateur boxer. I’d sliced my thumb with a machete on Survivor Cook Islands, gotten a fat lip on Survivor Micronesia, and broken my wrist in a quad bike accident while hosting a travel show, but I had NEVER. Lost. A. Tooth.
Sound the alarm!!
All of a sudden, this was a very real emergency, and my head was back on my shoulders right where it belonged.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said assertively to my daughter. She was scooping up my skates which had rolled away when I fell. I watched her face soften in relief when she heard my strong voice, but her eyes still looked worried.
“I’m okay. We have to get out of this tunnel,” I said again to reassure her.
A minute later, we were out in the brightest sunshine under an expansive cloudless blue sky. Hallelujah. We’d been resurrected.
Plopping down on the sand, I called my dentist to make an emergency appointment. They scheduled me for 9am the next day. Then I called my emergency contact.
COWORKING
THE PROCESS
Selling a novel is one thing. Actually sitting down to write it is another.
Tyler McCall divulges what she’s learned while working on her debut book.
How I Wrote a Book
—Tyler McCall in Voted Most Talkative
Whenever I tell someone that I sold a novel, the most common response I get—by a lot—is some variation of, “I could never write a book!”
To that, I say: Not with that attitude!
In all seriousness, I get why books are intimidating. Staring at a blank document and knowing you need to come up with somewhere between 75,000-95,000 words to fill it is like standing at the bottom of a mountain and knowing you gotta make it to the top. And that’s provided you have an idea for a book in the first place!
Having chatted with author friends of mine, I know that every writer has a different approach to turning that blank document into a shiny novel for people to read, so I can’t tell you exactly how to write a book. Finding your process is part of the fun, imo! But I can tell you how I wrote a book and maybe de-mystify that process a little bit, in case you’ve got an idea rumbling around inside your head.
First, my credentials, in case you don’t know me: Hi, my name is Tyler McCall, and my debut novel PEOPLE LIKE YOU comes out in spring 2027! Soon I’ll have a cover and a preorder link and all that fun stuff, but until then, you can follow me over on Goodreads to stay updated.
For some, the very concept of coming up with an idea for a novel is foreign, and I get it. I definitely couldn’t open up a blank document and force myself to come up with ideas. Explaining the way I get ideas for stories actually makes me sound a bit nuts, I think, because the way it has always happened is that I’ll be in the middle of something—showering, reading, out on a walk—and a scene or a bit of dialogue will pop into my head. The characters are already there and they’re real, even if they’re still pretty fuzzy to me.
That’s what happened with PEOPLE LIKE YOU. The initial idea came to me in 2022; it’s funny, actually, how specifically I can remember the moment it happened, because it was January and I was at my in-laws for a delayed Christmas celebration. It was late at night, I was reading because I couldn’t sleep, and the image of Jacob and Charlotte—my two main characters—arguing in a private library sprung into my head fully formed. I could see their dynamic so clearly, that even while they were at odds with each other, they wanted each other desperately. (I really can’t wait until the book is out so I can discuss which scene this is!)
Whenever I have a scene pop into my head that I find interesting, I try to imagine those characters in a few different scenarios. If I can’t put together maybe another five to ten snippets, it usually dies (or, if I like the scene enough, gets absorbed into a different story). But usually, while I’m pulling on those threads, a fuller picture starts to come together and that’s when I know I’m cooking.
ART
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography: evelyn tan, Nikka Carolina, Pineapple Street, katie tan, Begum Karan
Writing: Ella Gray Hickman, Joy Sullivan, Penny Lane, E. K. Carlisle, Parvati Shallow, Tyler McCall
Recently launched
Pierpaolo Piccioli, the creative director at Balenciaga, is now on Substack. His first post is an inside look into the making of the fashion house’s most recent couture collection.
Author and speaker Simon Sinek is now on Substack, where he’ll be sharing life lessons and philosophy.
Internet fixture Henry Smith has published his first Substack post, an exploration into the phrase “of course.”
The San Francisco Chronicle’s former sports columnist, Scott Ostler, is now on Substack.
Hunter Harris, a Team USA luge athlete, is documenting his journey as a hopeful for the 2030 Winter Olympics on Substack.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Danya Issawi out of Substack’s New York office.
Thank you so much for the feature!
thank you for the feature