Sometimes, there’s so much cool stuff happening close to home, that a girl has to give in to Rumpus self-referentiality:
1) This has been Cheryl Strayed week, pretty much. If you’ve been down with dysentary since before Valentine’s Day, you may not have heard that Cheryl is Dear Sugar. You can read every single thing your heart desires about that freaking awesome news, here.
Cheryl’s memoir, Wild, scared the hell out of me. In it, a much-younger-and-more-fucked-up Cheryl hikes the PCT solo. If you’re like me, and would have been the first member of the Donner party the others sacrificed because of your wilderness uselessness, you will read this book on the edge of your seat. You may emerge thinking Cheryl is a little bit crazy, even. Which is, of course, where she gets the immense, bottomless heart necessary for a gig like Sugar.
Cheryl and I have had a few interesting exchanges about the fact that Sugar is “nicer” than Cheryl is. I’ve been a fan of Sugar’s for a long time, predating knowing her true identity, but my favorite thing lately has been Cheryl’s self-awareness about the differences between a created persona and a real self, and her ability to maintain these differences while being consistent and authentic in both spaces. Sugar wouldn’t have such a following if she were inconsistent–if she weren’t very much a Real Person. And yet, Sugar isn’t “Cheryl,” precisely. It’s cool.
Cheryl and I talk about this and a bunch of other stuff in an upcoming Bookslut interview–I’ll keep you posted.
2) The first Sugar–who turns out to be Steve Almond–also continues to rock it in these parts with his new, hybrid fiction/historical essay column. Steve is required reading for humanity. That’s my final word on the matter.
3) Rumpus editor, Roxane Gay, also knocked it out of the park yet again this week. Nothing slips by Roxane. (Me, on the other hand: I didn’t even know who Chris Brown was when I first read this.) But the thing is, you don’t have to know jack about Chris Brown, or keep up with music celebs for this piece to be pertinent. The glorification of violence is everywhere in our culture, of course. It’s not just in the way dating/domestic abuse is romanticized, or in young girls’ hunger for any form of attention, or the way “famous” can get away with anything . . . Roxane calls us all out, in a good way, to pay more attention.
Happy Sunday.
