when words fail

Featuring too many feelings, my parasocial relationship with Chappell Roan, and a love letter to Cat Sebastian books

A newsletter? In this economy?

You may have noticed I’m not using this substack much lately¹.

It’s been kind of a rough year—and yeah, I know it’s only August, but I’ve given up hope on anything turning around until it's over. I have surrendered to 2024; my hands are up, my weapon is on the ground.

Of course, in this analogy, the only weapon I’ve ever had is my words.

My family would tell you that once I started talking, I never stopped. Even before I could read or write I was already a loudmouth, a “Chatty Cathy.” I filled silence like it was my job. I’d get notes home from Kindergarten like, Alex is an excellent student, but distracts the rest of the class. Well, the class is welcome. 

I could wax poetic to you about how words are everything. They’re the magic sounds we make to understand one another, to communicate: I think, I feel, I am. We can use them to lift someone up or tear someone down. In a world where 99% of the capital is held by 1% of the people, words are the most powerful thing most of us will ever have. 

And, right now, they’re not enough. 

Because bombs are being dropped on children. Because people I thought of as friends have turned a cold shoulder to this violence like it’s the right thing to do. Because it turns out words like “defense,” “genocide,” “justice,” and “never again,” can mean very different things to different people².

I have run out of ways to describe my sorrow and my horror. I have run out of ways to beg for empathy, for sympathy, for it all to end. For the bad people to get what they deserve. For the words to come back, and for this story to finally end. 

But it’s not just the words that are failing me. I’m failing me. Every morning—or afternoon, more often than not—I wake up and am overwhelmed by my own silly little problems and I want to scream because it isn’t fair. I should be able to do this. Things could be so much worse. I am alive, I am safe, I am loved and I am supported. So, seriously, what is wrong with me? 

Why can’t I just do the things I used to be able to do? Why is everything suddenly so hard? Will I ever feel like myself again? 

Songs of the summer

Like many other queers with a TikTok account, I was recently introduced to an artist by the name of Chappell Roan. She’s got the Madonna glam and the Dolly charm and is a card-carrying lesbian to boot. Her debut album is track after track of some of the most interesting and innovative pop music I’ve heard in awhile. She’s shaking things up for the better, and she seems to be having the time of her life doing it. When I ask friends if they’ve heard of her, the responses are all along the lines of, “God, yes, and I’m obsessed.” Who wouldn’t be? 

Naturally, I had to Google this goddess’ birthday (yes, I am one of those people who likes to know the astrological information of others. I’m not saying I believe in astrology—I’m just saying science can’t explain why all Cancers like that). It turns out Chappell Roan is exactly one month younger than I am, and I know I shouldn’t let that get in my head, but damn it if it didn’t. Here she was living the dream and making people happy with her art the same year she got kicked off her parents’ health insurance. 

Meanwhile, I have spent more time stress-crying on the phone with my mom trying to figure out the damn health.gov Marketplace this year than I have actually writing. 

You may remember that just over a year ago, I graduated with my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. At that time, I had about 80% of a YA manuscript that had already gotten me some minor prestige in the form of scholarships and writing competitions. I had friends and advisors routing for me at every turn, I had a supportive family, I had professional connections that could help me on my way—and here I am thirteen months later, with an unpublished YA manuscript I’m tired of looking at and an inbox filled with job rejections.

It goes against my programming to admit any of that in a public place. I was raised by a single mother who kept a brave face no matter how tough things got—and they got pretty tough. But I went to Catholic school, with kids in dual-income houses (or worse: stay-at-home moms) who never learned to worry about things like money and stability the way I did. I think that’s why there is a childish part of me that still hates feeling pitied, hates asking for help, hates letting anyone know I have to struggle to reach the things that were handed to them. And I know that’s bullshit, and I wish I could get over it, but even as I type this there is a voice in my head telling me to shut the hell up and go fill out another dozen job applications. Plenty of people had it much worse than I did. So what if I have to work a little harder? It ought to make me tough. Tough enough that I don’t start crying at 2pm on a Tuesday in broad daylight because the song “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” from Lilo and Stitch came on shuffle while I was out for a walk and it reminded me of my childhood. 

The same question has been playing on loop in my head since January: what is wrong with me? 

And sure, it’s easy to argue that it’s not just me. The world has felt upside down lately. Whenever I open my phone, I’m overwhelmed by stories and images from the atrocities happening in Palestine, in Sudan, in the Congo—yet all around me, Americans are acting like it’s business as usual. Like the biggest thing we have to worry about is what box to check come November. Most days, I feel like screaming: Can you see what I’m seeing? How is it not driving you insane? 

In the past, this kind of righteous fury has been fuel for my pen. Nothing gets me going like injustice, and it’s been that way as long as I can remember. People were telling me I ought to be a lawyer when I grew up since before I knew what a lawyer was—but I didn’t just like to argue. I liked to talk, to question, to puzzle things out. 

But, like I said, the words have been failing me lately. I don’t have the energy to start arguments anymore—and I don’t know who I am if I’m not arguing. That’s like, my whole deal. 

But let’s go back to Chappell Roan for a second. Specifically, her song “California.” The chorus goes like this: 

Come get me out of California
No leaves are brown
I miss the seasons in Missouri
My dying town
Thought I'd be cool in California
I'd make you proud
To think I almost had it going
But I let you down

Now, this certainly is not the only sad or slow song on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, but there is something particularly aching about it. Especially coming after the high of “Pink Pony Club,” a song about joyfully and flagrantly abandoning a midwestern hometown in pursuit of a star-studded lifestyle in Santa Monica. ”California” is mournful, it’s the singer lamenting lost potential and broken dreams and longing for the home she left behind.

'Cause I was never told that I wasn't gonna get
The things I want the most
But people always say, "If it hasn't happened yet
Then maybe you should go"

I love the dichotomy between those two lines—I was never told I wasn’t gonna get the things I want the most is almost self-deprecating, and perhaps a little cheeky. It echoes the participation-trophy-special-snowflake rhetoric that suggests Millennials and Gen Z³ have been spoiled by our parents, that we’re entitled, that we want things to be handed to us. But it also speaks to the same self-empowerment and confidence that echoes through the rest of this album. Fans don’t just love Chappell Roan for her beautiful voice and fun, boppy lyrics—they love her charisma, her confidence, her audacity.

Paired with the line, but people always say . . . calls out the irony inherent to all of us living under capitalistic industry. We’re meant to work hard, to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, to struggle—but if success hasn’t happened yet, you’re probably just kidding yourself.

Earlier this summer, when Chappell was truly blowing up, I came across a TikTok that began, “Chappell Roan is living proof it takes 10 years to be an overnight success.” Remember all that stuff I was saying about “oh woe-is-me, I graduated with so much potential but have nothing to show for it,” blah, blah, blah? Yeah, let’s just say this video caught my attention.

The creator goes on to explain the details of Chappell’s career most of us weren’t aware of—the struggles she faced trying to make it in the music industry for nearly a decade before finally releasing her debut album that has risen to such quick acclaim. She began her career posting covers of songs onto Youtube as young as 14; she was signed to a record label at 17 and released one EP before being immediately and unceremoniously dropped. She spent the next few years working odd jobs to support herself, and even had to move back home to Missouri for awhile. It wasn’t until 2022 when her former producer started his own record label that Chappell was signed again. In September 2023 The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was released, and with all that context, the title of the album makes a lot of sense.

Now, obviously, I don’t know Chappell Roan personally. But I know what failure feels like. Right now, it means a lot to see someone push past failure in the face of adversity and keep trying. To see someone who was able to rise from rock bottom to the top of the pop charts, someone who went on to use all that new power and influence she’d accrued to speak out about issues like Palestine and trans rights (in an industry where all too many artists are comfortable remaining silent—looking at you, Taylor Swift)—well, fuck me if that isn’t inspiring. Fuck me if it doesn’t make me want to keep trying, too.

And now, a book report

Recently, I decided I needed to spend less time doom scrolling and more time doing things that make me happy. I’ve been on a reading kick the likes of which I have not known since I was a child throwing myself into fantasy worlds to avoid the horrific realities of things like middle school and puberty; now, my horrific realities are more like taxes and healthcare, but the point stands.

My MFA program had this phrase, “reading like a writer.” It means reading with a critical, editorial eye. I have completely shut off that part of my brain in pursuit of pure escapism. Because apparently, even when I can’t do anything else, I can read. I can watch my Storygraph streak tick up one number at a time and feel like maybe I’m not a complete waste of space. 

Back in May, I picked up Cat Sebastian’s latest queer historical romance, You Should Be So Lucky, the tale of an art critic who has hardly written a word since the death of his boyfriend and the hotshot new baseball player who suddenly can’t hit the ball to save his life. It’s about grief and slumps and second chances and repressed 20-somethings who need to be kinder to themselves—and so maybe this goes without saying, but it hit me like a freight train. 

If you know me well enough to receive my unsolicited book recommendations, than you know I will evangelize the work of Cat Sebastian like it’s my religion. I knew I was going to enjoy this book before I even picked it up—it’s a sequel to last year’s We Could Be So Good⁴ which I’ve already re-read an embarrassing number of times. I love baseball, I love period pieces set in the 1960s, and I love newspaper stories. It’s like this book was made in a lab just for me, and yet I still underestimated how profound an impact it would have.

image i edited immediately after finishing YSBSL, to express my emotional distress to my friends, most of whom had no idea what i was on about

Because while the plot of the book (and I am admittedly using the word ‘plot’ loosely here. It’s a romance novel, people, come prepared with genre expectations) hinges on one character’s batting slump, the story is really about slumps in general—particularly, writing slumps.

“It’s just that when [Mark] tries to figure out what the point is in getting out of bed every morning, he doesn’t have the answer. Even work—which had always been an answer, at least—feels flat and dull, like there’s nothing left in the world worth writing about.” (8)

I’m a dirty annotator, and I mark my books up to hell. That line is underlined, circled, and starred in my battered paperback—because the first time I read it, it kind of took the air out of my lungs. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the term “writer’s block,” because more often than not, there isn’t actually anything blocking me. To be blocked implies forward momentum—you’re trying to go somewhere, and you’ve been stopped. You can’t be blocked if you never start moving in the first place. Perhaps we should call it writer’s apathy or ennui. Or, maybe, like You Should Be So Lucky suggests, it’s simply a slump.

Mark is a character after my own heart. He’s grumpy and curmudgeonly and just wants to be left alone with his maintenance dog and his queer-coded fiction. He struggles to accept the love and support his friends try so desperately to give him because he’s heartbroken and grieving and frankly, stubborn to a fault. He doesn’t set out to make nice with this baseball player he’s been assigned to—in fact, he sort of actively makes a bad first impression.

The baseball player, Eddie, spends a majority of the book in a record breaking batting slump. Mark isn’t much of a sports’ guy, but he’s quick to realize that whatever twists and turns Eddie’s career is about to take, it’s going to make a good story. In the very first chapter, Mark makes it clear that his starting intentions for this article are a little mean-spirited.

“It occurs to Mark that what he’s witnessing is a disaster. This is a shipwreck, a funeral pyre, a crumbling ruin. What’s happening to Eddie O’Leary is an end. That’s something Mark knows about; that’s something Mark can write about.” (11)

But Eddie’s own perspective on his situation isn’t any brighter. When the book shifts into his POV, we’re presented with a man who would absolutely cry along to Chappell Roan’s “California.” Eddie has been traded away from his home in rural Omaha to the strange, bustling city of New York. He had a fit about it on live television, and now his whole team is giving him the silent treatment. To top it all off, he’s epically failing every time he’s up to bat, a situation that’s only made worse by the knowledge that a year ago, Eddie was the rookie to watch. He was meant to be a rising star—instead, he’s crashing and burning.

Eddie’s disappointment with himself and hopelessness in the world is aching; “Maybe if he could remember how to fall asleep, he’d remember how to hit the ball. But things that he’s always counted on are completely out of his grasp.” (25) He was never told he wasn’t gonna get the things he wants the most . . .

Eddie is a social creature, and desperate for a friend in this new, strange place. So even though Mark is literally there to profit off his ruination, Eddie can’t help himself from opening up to the reporter. Their interactions swiftly morph from interviews to fluid conversations, and Eddie starts revealing aspects of his personality off-the-field that endear him to both Mark and his readers.

“But what is there to say, really? I’ve run out of interesting ways to explain that I just don’t know how to hit the ball anymore. My swing is gone, and it’s been gone for nearly a month now. I honestly don’t remember how I ever did it, and I’m not sure if anyone has ever hit a ball with a bat in the history of the world.” (59)

Once Mark starts incorporating Eddie’s real attitude into the fake diary entries he’s writing for the paper (in addition to the longer article, which we’ll circle back to), Eddie starts to notice a shift in his public perception. When he first arrived in New York, baseball fans saw him as cocky or holier-than-thou; but after Mark’s diaries, Eddie is reframed as an underdog. Someone who’s down on his luck, but who hasn’t quit.

This is the first turning point for both Mark and Eddie’s respective slumps, the moment the narrative starts to change. This is no longer a story of failure, or ending—it’s a story of hope. For Eddie, this manifests as a slow but steady improvement in his batting average. For Mark, it comes in the form of inspiration.

Mark’s initial idea for his article starts to pivot when he sees the changing tide the diary entries have caused. When Mark’s TV breaks, he goes to a sports bar to watch the next game. There, Mark witnesses strangers coming together to root for Eddie while he’s at bat, and he is surprised to realize they’re all watching Eddie with something like hope.

“Mark knows what it feels like to have the rug pulled out from under you, for the things you count on to disappear in the blink of an eye, and he wants something else for Eddie. He wants proof that something else exists on the other side of what looks for all the world like an ending.” (117)

And just like that, Mark is no longer writing an article about the rise and fall of one man’s career. He’s writing a love letter to the art of failure and the promise that, no matter how dark the night may get, a new day will dawn.

My mom likes to insist with every job rejection I’ve received, I’m one step closer to something better. That the universe has a plan for me, and all will work out in the end. That’s a tough pill for me to swallow—I’m a natural-born hater, and optimism does not come easy to me. Especially after the year we’ve had. Especially after the decade we’ve had.

But with You Should Be So Lucky, Cat Sebastian handed me a different lens through which to view my mother’s annoying optimism. Maybe there’s a sweet spot between being deluded and defeatist; maybe accepting the things we cannot change is the first step to regaining control of the things we can. Maybe we all have highs and lows—slumps and successes—and maybe they really are entirely random. And maybe, that’s okay.

Reading this book felt like being guided, gently, through a pretty dark period of my life. All that shit I wrote at the beginning of this newsletter is still true; I still don’t have a job, I’m still not published, I’m still powerless to combat the horrors I witness every day on my tiny screen. I resent being told everything will work out okay because, fuck, could it hurry up already? But watching characters as stubborn as Mark Bailey and as down-on-himself as Eddie O’Leary transform over the course of this book, it was like some magic switch flipped in my brain. Suddenly, I could see my way through the woods again.

Because maybe, if I find a way to keep creating, my art will go on to inspire change in others, like Chappell’s music or Mark’s articles. Maybe one voice really can become one thousand. Maybe failure is not the end; maybe endings are fake.

Because, really—nothing ends. I’ve known this since I was a toddler, since Mufasa explained to Simba that when their bodies died, they’d become the grass. Life is a cycle, and it spins on and on⁵.

And that’s that on the restorative power of art and fiction. For more sappy and saccharine book reviews, like and subscribe!

Ha-ha. Ok, sorry. But Substack really does yell at me if I don’t put that button^ somewhere on the page.

There’s a lot else that happens in You Should Be So Lucky that I didn’t touch on—the entire romance, for one—and I don’t want to spoil any more than I have, but there is one last quote I want to share. It comes about halfway through the novel, after two strangers at a bar celebrated Eddie as a “symbol of failure.” This incident has allowed Eddie to finally come to terms with the reality of his slump—and in doing so, start to forgive himself.

“Who gets to decide what losing even is? I mean, I know that who wins and who loses is pretty cut-and-dried in baseball. But this is a game where hitting the ball a third of the time is a job well done, and hitting it half the time is practically unheard of . . . I know some things are just bad. I’m not saying things happen for a reason—I hate that. I’m saying that things happen. And it doesn’t have to mean anything except what it means to you. Nobody else gets to decide.” (178)

So, here’s a toast to failure! And to making our own meaning out of all that befalls us, for better or worse.

Until next time, my doves. Much love,

Alex

1. Or maybe you didn’t notice at all. Maybe you completely forgot you ever subscribed to this newsletter until this very email hit your inbox. In which case, I sure hope it was a happy surprise and not an, “oh fuck, this guy again??”

2. Silly me, for thinking we were on the same page. Silly me, for expecting better of people to begin with.

3. Another thing I love about Chappell Roan—I think she serves as the voice for the cuspers like me, born between the debated cut-off of Gens Y and Z. Whenever I talk to my Millennial friends, they insist I’m Gen Z—but when I talk to my younger sister and her peers, they’re certain I must be a Millennial (I’m so old! 26 and on death’s door, according to the 7th graders). Because I’m pedantic and enjoy controversy, here’s a list of six different agencies and how they define the span of “Generation Y.” For context, Miss Chappell and myself were born in 1998.

• Beresford Research: 1981–1996

• Pew Research Center: 1981–1996

• Population Reference Bureau: 1981–1999

• Resolution Foundation: 1981–2000

• U.S. Government Accountability Office: 1982–2000

• William Strauss and Neil Howe: 1982–2004

4. Which Dahlia Adler billed as “Newsies fanfic;” it’s like they knew I was coming!

5. Great, now you’ve got me sounding just as woo-woo as my mom