some other apricot

you: wh

me, briskly removing my shoes and shaking fragments of rubble out of them: One Direction is perhaps the first band to exist entirely within the Panopticon, from the very beginning, and yet even that was not enough for us. Can you imagine how difficult it would become to hold onto a “self” when what people want most from you are the moments of your life that specifically are NOT FOR THEM? It wasn’t just what they DID, we wanted to know what they FELT, constantly. We demanded to know but we did not want to be TOLD. The knowledge could only be “authentic” if it was not meant for us

you: why are you in my house

me, climbing into your bed and pulling your blankets up to my chin: The endless “documentaries,” the social media – we had an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly intimate, degree of access to these people, and still what we valued most were secrets and accidents. What we wanted was their interiority, and when we could not have that we invented it. Wouldn’t you resent having to constantly be GRATEFUL for that grasping, rapacious love? I would

you: are you crying?

Episode 210: The RPF Tipping Point

On Episode 210, “The RPF Tipping Point,” Elizabeth and Flourish welcome back Grace and the Fever author Zan Romanoff (@zanopticon) to talk about her new podcast, On the Bleachers, on Taylor Swift, football player Travis Kelce, and the pop-culture firestorm their relationship (???) has sparked. Topics discussed include the backlash against the ripped-from-the-headlines romance novel Roughing the Princess, the fuzziness between RPF, biopics, celebrity profiles, and social-media narratives, and how Zan—who’s written plain old RPF in addition to meta fiction about celebrities and fans—thinks about her own work in light of these thorny boundaries.