I remember reading this story in Tina Fey’s Bossypants. Amy Poehler was new to SNL and saying something dirty in the writers’ room. Jimmy Fallon, kinda the star of the show at that time, didn’t like it and told her it wasn’t cute. According to Fey, Poehler went “black in the eyes for a second,” and said to him, “I don’t fucking care if you like it,” and then went back to whatever she was saying.
The story resurfaced a few months ago when Fallon’s staff accused him of creating a toxic work environment.
I have thought of it often since reading Bossypants. I also read Amy Poehler’s memoir when it came out, Yes Please, which I didn’t like quite as much as Fey’s, but still enjoyed. I regularly steal Poehler’s co-parenting divorce joke with all divorcing parents, which goes something like, “I hate you. We’re getting a divorce. See you tomorrow.”
“I DON’T FUCKING CARE IF YOU LIKE IT.”
It’s a fun sentence to say out loud. Go ahead. Try it. Preferably really loud. Shout it even.
I thought of this when I read Richard Brody’s review in The New Yorker of the new queer KStew movie, Love Lies Bleeding. He was unimpressed and used it as vehicle to complain about movie characters having no back story anymore. It’s a fair point for movies in general, but have you talked to anyone trying to make anything lately for the marketplace?
I think of this sentence any time Anthony Lane (also at The New Yorker, please will one of them retire so we can have a woman, queer, trans, BIPOC, and/or disabled reviewer, anybody who isn’t a straight white man?) reviews almost any movie I like.
I have thought of it many times when otherwise very smart people tell me that they don’t like The Barbie Movie because it was one big advertisement. Oh really, you don’t say? Try going to that movie on opening day in the West Village with your queer teen and her queer friends and every queerdo you’ve ever dreamed of dressed in Barbie drag and then get back to me. There was some magic there that day, even in the midst of an advertising blitz. Yes, I understand what a slick fucking package that movie is, and I still love it. I’ve loved Greta Gerwig since Frances Ha.
I thought of this sentence when my last boyfriend took one of my novels out from the library (I shit you not, he did not buy his own girlfriend’s book), and then read a page or so once a week maybe during his ten minute subway ride to work. At some point during this diligent reading, he said to me, “It’s kind of meandering.”
Around the same time, he confessed to having ADHD and being off his meds, which hey, I get it, my brain doesn’t quite work either, but I don’t blame books for it.
He could be nice too and he was good at the sexy times, but DUDE.
“I DON’T FUCKING CARE IF YOU LIKE IT.”
Because I didn’t write it for you. Because some of the things we make, aren’t for everyone. Not because I don’t think that novel I wrote doesn’t meander in places. I can meander. I like meandering. Let’s meander all of us. Capitalism hates a wander, but I love getting a little lost.
AND, Hey mans who have never written a novel, but have lots of thoughts about how to do them better, plot is hard, and every novel attempt is a new plot adventure.
When I was a baby novelist, about sixteen years ago, and teaching myself how to write them (I went to school for poetry and then English Education), my plot model was what I called, “Jibberjaw and walkabout,” which meant characters met up and talked and then walked or drove to and around different places together and alone. This novel called Live at Roseland did not find a publishing home, although I still think it’s kinda great. Like many of my books and other books that straddle the commerical and the weird, it got super close to being bought by a big five and then it didn’t. I get a lot of pass notes from editors along the lines of: I couldn’t put it down, but we don’t know how to market it. It’s too commercial for our indie vision. I don’t know any of the people who are in this book. I don’t recognize these characters. We had a huge fight over this book, but ultimately I can’t aquire. I want it, but the editor above me says no.
Still pass notes are pass notes. I was lucky to have the feedback, and editors and agents have all kinds of shorthand. I’ve been lucky to have my work shown around town to so many editors. I’ve been lucky to have four agents, though only one sold a book for me. I don’t blame them. Selling books is incredibly hard, and they are up against powerful financial forces. After this year, I will have published five books! I’m really happy about that, and I’m really exhausted having done it.
Don’t forget that according The New York Times, in 2023, 72.5% of the book business in 2023 is still white and straight. Not that lesbian and gay editors are any more likely to love a bisexual book. Or maybe they are, I don’t know. I only have my own experiences and those of my friends to guide me.
But I digress.
Spoilers ahead.
Love Lies Bleeding, directed by Rose Glass, is for the slutty queers, and it’s very good at being for us. Set in a desert town around a traumatized criminal family and a sweaty gym, the look of it is perfect. It’s the 80s, muscles and steroids are in, and all the clothes and hairstyles were gay even if they were meant to be straight. The mullet I currently sport is not that different than the mullet I had in middle school, except no perm, and also way better haircut.
Jackie, a crazy bisexual wanders into town (I know, I know, I was scared about this trope too, but the movie lets this go), and it turns out everyone is kinda nuts. She meets KStew (Lou), they quickly fall into bed, and then she moves in the next day. There’s a lot of murder, exercise, and some truly fantastical footage of our bisexual hero Jackie (yes, I think the bisexual and not the lesbian is the star of this movie) becoming an actual giant and protecting Lou.
You also haven’t lived until you’ve seen a slimy KStew get barfed out of her girlfriend Jackie’s mouth in a puddle of gooey ectoplasm, while Jackie poses on a Vegas stage for the Women’s Body Building Championships. Lavinia, Emily Dickinson’s little sister in Dickinson—one of the best shows ever made according to Amy Shearn and me—is also in it, and she’s a rotten-toothed delight. Hey, I just found out she’s Mikhail Baryshnikov’s daughter.
The sex scenes are also for us. No scissoring and humping for hours and hours. If you can come from scissoring you are so lucky. No endless looking at each other from across the room and never fucking (yes, I’m talking about Portraits of Ladies Burning a Hole in My Pants). There’s penetration and pussy eating and it’s so fun and hot to see it on screen because we hardly ever get queer mainstream movie sex. I kinda couldn’t believe I was watching it in a movie theater. Thank you Megan Milks for always being my queer movie buddy. We have seen some epic films together haven’t we?
There are beautiful, desperate, desert driving shots that remind me of Thelma and Louise and a tiny bit of Desert Hearts (wild bisexual comes to town is a good plot for a book that I currently can’t sell, lol). I also thought of The Incredible Hulk and The Incredible Shrinking Women—rage and powerlessness bottled into bodies that were too big and small for their own clothes.
What is the bisexual filmic and literary canon? A question I will only answer a little bit now. Bottoms, Saltwater, and All of Us Strangers gave me this good queer feeling of like oh this twisted, sweet, sad, mad thing is for me. There is so much horror that does this, and my kid often finds her way to these long before me. Pearl for sure. Wednesday. Pee-Wee Herman. The B-52s. This is super random.
McNally Editions has been reprinting a lot of weird queer stuff that feels very bi/pan/poly to me. The Girls, A Green Equinox, The Ex-Wife to name a few. Who are the editors behind this series? I must meet you and thank you for curating just for me.
Big Swiss. Dykette (technically not bi, but feels like it). Melissa Broder. Sam Cohen. Michelle Tea forever and always Michelle Tea. Anna Castillo. I am looking around at my book shelves and feeling like I always do when I try to gather and list. Where is everything? Why is there not more? Where are all of the books I’ve read and loved? Anaïs Nin. Freddy Mercury. Nella Larsen. Tomas Muniz. Alice Walker. All the hidden, closeted, and unrecognized bisexual writers.
Relatedly, but jumping here. What to do when you are making things that a small group of people want, but not really a big group? Not yet anyway. Or maybe not ever. How do you not get grouchy, arrogant, entitled, and awful-sounding when some things you made a while back and couldn’t sell, are now seemingly more sellable but in a straighter way? Straight women are getting divorced and writing a lot of books about it. This is good!
But what about the queer books that came before the straight books? They feel lost to me, or unrecognized maybe. I wrote one of those books. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I am happy it found a home, and most of us smaller indie writers have our big dreams, don’t we? It’s called The Not Wives and if you’re looking for divorce, sexual exploration, and politics, give a lady a purchase.
What about all the queer poly people that have been being poly forever, but now suddenly straight people are poly and there are big book deals?
I’m no dummy, I know this is how subculture works. Somewhat ignored or downright hated and then co-opted and called new.
And what do you do when you know that even if you were to try to make your things less weird, they always get weird anyway because the unconscious is a powerful force? Who gets to weird in the big five and who has to stay small and weird in the indies?
These are genuine questions. I think the answer is nobody knows how publishing really works, and a lot of it is kind of arbitrary. Maybe.
My dad has been writing me some okay, kinda nice emails lately and my thing with my family is when someone is being nice, I just go with it, because mostly everyone is not so nice. In his last one, he was like maybe as you’re getting older, you are mellowing out, and will hit that kind of sweet spot of being intense but not too intense, like more marketable. His example was Bukowski who I happen to have loved quite a lot for many years.
I haven’t written back yet, and I know he’s afraid the email will make me mad, but it doesn’t. I get it. I can’t do it, but I get it.
I think it’s super hard to write something that a ton of people go crazy for, like it might be the hardest thing of all.
But sometimes also to make your thing, you have to not fucking care if people like it. Paradoxically, you also have to care about the reader because readers are so important. I love my readers so much. I want to give you pleasure and thinking and story and connections and hard things and all of it.
Okay, enjoy the typos. My brain says go to bed now.
xoxoxo
Carley
I like it 🥰
Can't wait to dive into some of these movies and books!