Hi, thanks for letting me be here. My name is Evana. In addition to being Charlotte’s friend, I’m adding a new badge of honor: her co-author. I hope you enjoy this first essay on friendship, insecurity/jealousy, and letter writing.
Tasting Notes is an exchange between writers. It’s a letter, it’s a conversation, it’s a trade. In it, the authors of arbiter of distaste and Insecure Tea are challenged to speak to one another’s audiences, one another’s themes, and… one another. Well, the last one isn’t actually a challenge.
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Did you get my voice memo? I step out of the restaurant and put my headphones in. Your voice bubbles over the recorded noise of Bourbon Street, then a few weeks later the hustle of the Newark airport, then LA traffic and slamming car doors. You’re about to go to the restaurant I recommended in New Orleans. You’re outside of The Four Horsemen. You’re about to buy a beer at the airport. An airport beer is only second to a shower beer, I respond. You’re on your way to a show. You’re on your way somewhere, though I can’t picture it because I don’t know it yet.
It’s funny how hard it is to write this. A friend jokes as we sit together while I’m trying to write this and hitting a block: what if an assassin followed you around so you would actually write? Well. The assassin would win. It will happen, we keep telling each other about these essays. You’re about to get on the plane to LA. I can’t help but feel like you’re leaving me and taking the sun with you, though you’ll be back soon and the sun hasn’t gone anywhere. I’m so dramatic—you know how I hate to be alone. We haven’t been apart a full twelve hours and I’m sending you unfocused monologue after monologue. I tell you how I won’t burden you with nonsense until it makes sense. Then of course, I spill my guts anyways (though to your relief, not literally like that one night after a spilled drink at Dymphna’s).
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I told you I would write about insecurity. Like most things I try to write about, I can’t write what I planned to. I list words with the -in root. Insufferable, incoherent, incorrigible. All things I could be described as at various points in the last year. Inarticulate—without the words. I’m so often without the words I need. It makes me feel even more insecure. My friend suggested I try to title my document before writing to help me focus, figure out what to write. I blinked at him.
I want to write about us, title or no title. And maybe the ways I was insecure in the beginning of our friendship. When I first sent you a cold DM, I thought: what freaky girl sends another girl a piece of fan mail over social media? After I sent the message, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling fan, sweating in the mid-August heatwave. I worried that it would bother you that I compared our writing. Then I started to panic that my message would go to the DM graveyard. You’d never see it. But somehow you did. You weren’t offended like I might be if someone stepped into my territory uninvited. You were gracious, obviously. We were both curious about what was happening in the downtown scene. You’d been living here longer than me, so my naiveté was fresher. Early on we tried going to these events, but as our friendship grew, we also outgrew our (admittedly tepid) desire to become downtown fixtures.
We took a long break from all that. Then a few weeks ago, we went to a show in the East Village where several downtown-adjacent bands were playing. The basement was crowded. I smelled poppers the second we walked in. Cobrasnake (or someone of his ilk) walked up to us with his self-consciously professional camera. For a second it seemed like he would take our picture, but then he saw two scene-ier girls beside us and took their picture instead. I tried to not let it make me feel horrible. You laughed in the moment. I rolled my eyes and laughed too. I was tipsy enough on free wine to not care. Later, we both admitted how the moment made us feel insecure. There’s something so freeing in being able to talk about insecurity with you. Especially when I look to you as someone who seems so secure. This is our shared language—being able to articulate to each other what seems impossible with other people.
The first time we admitted to each other our FOMO over not trying so hard to break into the scene was on New Year’s Day after we went to the Guggenheim. We walked along the cobblestones framing Central Park’s perimeter. Your red coat was like a lipstick stain on a napkin against all the gray. I don’t remember what I wore. My voice was still hoarse from the flu. Back from the dead, back to New York. We talked about how we felt both repulsion and envy when thinking about the scene. After the conversation, I realized how little I needed to feel that way. Why care about being left out when you could do something better?
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Point of fact: we’re not afraid to admit our pettiest jealousies. It’s incredible. Instead of pretending we’re holier than Deadly Sin Number Four, we admit it. We’re jealous. I think many women have been conditioned to believe jealousy is something to be ashamed of, that it’s ugly to admit how much we envy. That it somehow undermines the entire project of feminism. But everyone is jealous of something. It’s not that deep. It’s jealousy that has pushed me to be better, work harder, play the game. I can admit this now too—my jealousy of you has made me a better writer. When I first found your newsletter, it was because Forever Magazine reposted it on Instagram. My first instinct was to be jealous. Who is this girl, two steps ahead of me? Then I read your essays. I knew then as much as I do now how much I wanted to be your friend and peer. Jealousy has potential. It can be weathered down until its root cause is revealed: admiration.
A few weeks ago, you sent me a message telling me how proud you were of us. That despite these fits and starts, the periods when writing seems impossible, we’ve still pushed and made something of ourselves. When so many other people start newsletters, then abandon them shortly after starting, we’ve continued. What we’ve been doing for the past year, in tandem, publishing often coincidentally within seconds or hours of each other, has given us a community. Even if it was jealousy that started it all.
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I send you “Jealous Laughter” by Joanna Biggs published this week on Granta on the makings of a literary friendship between two women. I struggled in grad school to fulfill the promise of finding “my reader.” Biggs writes about her envy of male literary friendships, how these relationships seemed to be another boys’ club she wasn’t allowed to join. I’d felt that way too, on and off, but in a less gendered sense—literary insularity has always sniffed of elitism to me. I just didn’t believe community was truly possible between writers, especially after grad school. How could the jealousy over accomplishments and just a damn good piece of writing ever subside enough to leave room for friendship? How can wanting the same thing leave space for celebration and collaboration? The answer seems obvious now.
In you, I’ve discovered this possibility, similar to the discoveries in Biggs’ friendships. Using an anecdote to show the various ways her friends have supported her, she writes, “[My friend] could not make me see my best qualities, but she could sit with me.” I’ve thought about how this kind of sitting creates community. Talking for hours or silent as our fingers fly over our keyboards. Writing or not writing. Our respective anxieties when we fail to write don’t matter as long as we sit through them together. Biggs writes that this is the very thing a literary friendship should provide–not connections to the next editor, agent or whoever, but accompaniment.
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For a while now I’ve wanted to write about the weird little community of Substack newsletter writers—those of us who are women— I’ve been welcomed into. In the past, I’ve jokingly called my project a silly little girl blog. Deep down I know it’s more than that. It is a community, even if it is at times a community of two. This platform has given me more than I imagine most writing communities could–a common thread. That thread has encouraged me to reach out, to get a drink or coffee, to offer advice and receive it, to make new friends who become cheerleaders and trusted readers the same. There’s no ego-stroking. There is just the joy of devouring a new essay, sending an effusive text quoting sentences, meaning every word.
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I like the central joke of “Jealous Laughter:” female friendship was invented in 2015. It’s true. Back then, I was a college freshman and discovering deep female friendship for the first time. For me, its invention had nothing to do with Elena Ferrante and everything to do with letting myself be open to real care and rescind the jealous impulses I had. I had best friends all of a sudden. Friends who were women. Who would’ve thought. I’d gone and done it—invented female friendship for myself. Yet I didn’t have one single best friend. I still don’t.
There was a long period when I thought this was evidence of some character deficiency. Why can’t I hold onto one friend forever, have that one friend to turn to in every crisis and to share every joy? Why do I have intense closeness then estrangement once we no longer live in the same city? Some friendships fade, as Biggs writes, not out of jealousy but shallowness, circumstance, or timing. Still, I became jealous of my friends’ best friends. I wanted what they had yet I found myself making more best friends and not declaring a single one of them the one.
I shared this with you during the afternoon we had cocktails in a fancy hotel bar famous for its murals. We nibbled judiciously on the complimentary bar snacks because we had not had lunch. It felt like a miracle when you said you hadn’t had a single best friend either. We wondered if it was even possible, and whether it mattered either way. Where the conversation ended, I don’t remember. We were too warm from martinis and manhattans to notice the feeling of revelation. We formed a pact that day. Best friends who don’t believe in best friends.
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Now I am wondering if, for a writer, more often than not your reader will also be your best friend.
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P.S. In the middle of the night, I wake up and write this down. Almost memories, what you think is a memory but isn’t. I’m writing this fiction of us to keep the thread between us tied. I’ll tell you about what you missed while you’re gone: the first stretch of sunny days. My scraped-up knees. Bunches of orchids delivered to the coffee shop you recommended to me. I don’t want to tell you how you’ve missed the sudden gust of spring. The breaths of fresh air. I make muffins and have people over for brunch because you did that for me. Everyone half-clothed in the East Village. We make a bucket list for the summer. Queen of picnics and days at the beach we haven’t had yet. I cut off two inches of my hair one morning. Send you a picture so you don’t forget my face.
I’m dispatching something to you. I want to write you a letter, but I’m afraid you won’t get it in time. Instead I’ll send you a voice memo. I walk through Alphabet City even though you’re not home. The avenue you live on has become an artery to everything I love about New York. Wherever I am, I know yours is the buzzer without the apartment number on it. You once said you didn’t know my address but you could get there by heart. In the river between Brooklyn and the East Village, I’m swimming back. I don’t know how you did it, but you reached in and pulled me back from under a big wave. (If that sounds romantic, then I barely repent – without my friends, I’m hollow). I don’t expect you to always catch me when I fall in, because I don’t want to put expectations on you that I wouldn’t put on myself. Who rescued who? I guess I won’t know. What matters is that I know neither of us is keeping score.
To read how “Charlotte Speaks” in Tasting Notes #1, subscribe and visit arbiter of distaste.