Housekeeping:
Welcome to the first installment of the Famous and Beloved Beach Read Book Club that will be legible to all regardless of engagement with Beach Read. Forthwith you will read the story of how FBBRBC came to pass and a discussion of the first 10 chapters of the book. Next week’s post (July 15) will be about Chapters 11-17. You can still buy the book if you want… or not!
Founder of Frankie’s Bikinis Francesca Aiello has teamed up with Djerf Avenue founder Matilda Djerf for the Banana Cream Shake at Erewhon, made from MALK Organic Unsweetened Almond Milk, Zuma Valley Coconut Whip, two kinds of collagen from Agent Nateur Holi and TOCOS, NOVOS Core Longevity Formula, Zuma Valley Coconut Whip, organic dates, banana, cinnamon, coconut flakes and maple syrup, and Erewhon Scratch Pie Crust. Djerf says Frankie & Djerf’s Banana Cream Shake “smells like banana cream pie.”
Earlier this year, Amazon released the film adaptation of a book called The Idea of You, which is fanfiction written by an actor from the Fifty Shades franchise about Harry Styles falling in love with a woman in her 40s named Solène Marchand. The story isn’t vaguely about One Direction like we all extratextually accept that Fifty Shades is a product of Twilight fan culture; author Robinne Lee has said she started the novel–whose protagonist is the takeaway heartthrob of a 5-person British boy band named “Hayes Campbell” –in 2014, meaning it was written near the height of Direction Infection (carrot moment!).1
Lee, if you would believe it, doesn’t consider the book to be fanfiction “at all,” though, telling Time that calling it fanfiction is actually a “symptom” of a “larger disease in the broader literary world” (oh no!): MISOGYNY. She says we gotta stop wrapping female writers’ books “in pink and tell[ing] readers they’re great for the beach,” because The Idea of You is serious art not any different from any other art ever created by a man (?). She also says one of the funniest things I’ve ever read:
“I didn’t plan on writing something that was revolutionary or controversial. I wanted to write a story about Solène Marchand, a woman on the cusp of 40 who rediscovers and redefines herself through an unexpected love with a much younger man who happens to be a world-famous celebrity.”
I have, regrettably, not read The Idea of You, but I did suffer through the film adaptation. For 2 weeks afterward, I would open a Substack draft titled “Hi, Solène, I’m Gayle” every single day and be truly lost for words. Michael Showalter’s second feature followup to The Eyes of Tammy Faye is neither awful nor at all redeemable, producing little to remember or consider with any critical faculty. Something about the whole thing—the asynchronicity of a 1D fanfic movie, its stilted generic interpretations, Anne Hathaway’s performance—literally kept me up at night, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I hoped something else would soon clarify what I sensed is a contemporary collapse of fanfiction and wish-fulfillment, creating one generic mess that disregards the texts from which it is borne. If Beach Read’s insanity why is it my clarity?
I caught onto One Direction so early in their career (December 2011) that by the time they were at their peak (summer 2013) my interest in Directioner (carrot) culture was as objective as it was fetishistic. My friends all had varying degrees of interest in One Direction but looked to me as kind of a Head Freak, as I was as measured about the political ecology of the band as I was prone to feel emotionally disturbed by every new image of Harry Styles. Fanfiction was an incredibly normalized part of this ecosystem, but something we only engaged with at arm’s length out of anthropological curiosity.
The generic production of this literary mode with the biggest contemporaneous cultural impact and most aesthetic posterity was a fantasy that one or more members of One Direction were mean.2 After was the epitome of this: Tessa is an “18 year old college student with a simple life, excellent grades, and a sweet boyfriend,” until she meets Harry Styles, a man who is corporeally, vocally, and nominally Harry Styles, but not at all famous, or even a musician.3 After Harry has tattoos and piercings and is a violent alcoholic, and he has friends that include non-famous, tattooed Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik–who also falls in love with Tessa… and is a botanist!–but also some characters that are completely made up.4 Harry is mean to Tessa except when they do sex acts, until, through thousands of pages and multiple volumes, she heals his trauma and he is no longer mean. But, then, of course, the story is over.
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My friends and I looked forward to new chapters of After not out of hate or pure anthropological interest, nor out of joy or sexual titillation. Without being able to describe it at 16, we were encountering a completely new (to us) genre, medium, and way of making pornography. It wasn’t necessarily good, bad, or fun, but it was authentic; Anna Todd who, at the time, was only known as “imaginator1d,” was doing this only for personal fulfillment and believed in the project so earnestly. It was palpable that this mess of internet and second-grade-level prose was someone’s art, and that, despite those qualities, it was not bad art. I have been chasing the high of encountering something so frightening and novel ever since.
I’m not sure what mainstream or generational understandings of “fanfiction” are, but would venture to guess that for girls my age After is scripture: celebrity-based heteronormative wish-fulfillment involving the fantasy of getting a guy’s attention whose attention is famously hard to get. It was developed into novels and films (starring Ralph Fiennes’ nephew), which are accurate but not good adaptations of original prose like (verbatim from Chapter 34):
“‘You didn’t [misunderstand], you make me feel things that are unfamiliar to me. I don’t know how to handle these type of feelings Tessa. So I do the only thing I know how to do, which is be an asshole.’ Once again I find myself in a trance.”
This kind of sticcado poetry is typical of fanfiction, adhering to no real grammatical or stylistic tradition and so desperate to get a sense of visceral affect across it loses any kind of syntactic form. Sentences are a means to sex acts, which are incredibly detailed and specific, but still have a kind of syntactic breathiness (I’ll spare the pull quote here–it’s free to read!). So, while fanfiction now seems commonplace and easy to understand, genre, be it romance or children’s literature, is not enough of an explanation: it’s the form that is rich, and you must understand it to understand contemporary wish-fulfillment, more broadly.
I have always wondered if mass-produced girl literature has the same sort of desperate syntax or pornographic bent, as the aesthetic significance of true fanfiction seems to be under-discussed. At some point in the last month I was talked into getting to the bottom of that, and found myself on a half-ironic trek to buy Emily Henry’s first adult-fiction book from the Union Square Barnes & Noble, where I thought I would learn something about how popular books are arranged at conglomerate retailers in relation to real life shoppers. I did, sort of, because it took 20 minutes to find any Emily Henry or Colleen Hoover books, at all; every table was haphazardly arranged to, I guess, guide flâneurs’ attention to Daisy Jones & The Six (still!!!) and More Is More: Get Loose in The Kitchen. I did, eventually, find the book whose cover I had been seeing against my will in airports for years prior and waited in line with children to purchase it. It was $17.
Beach Read: Chapters 1-10
These are what I think are the generic conventions of fanfiction:
The girl is a nerd and/or a prude
The girl is embarrassing when she first meets the love interest, i.e. falling down, mispronouncing a name, etc.
This shame is felt and externalized to spectacular degrees: faces have to get hot and frustrations need to be taken out on the man, who is always perpetuating or delighting in the embarrassing event
Everyone always cares A LOT about:
College
Being “down to earth” and/or “real”
There is sex that is not oral
There is trauma related to parents
There is alcoholism
There is miscommunication that further embarrasses the girl, e.g. she finds out he only started flirting with her on a dare, but doesn’t yet know that he really has developed feelings for her
In Beach Read, January Andrews is a successful romance author who is struggling with her next book because her dad died, after which she learned he had been having a secret affair. She is “out of money,” which hasn’t been explained yet, though I doubt it ever really will be, and was recently dumped by a man named Jacques who “worked in the ER” (doctor? NP?) and made “coq au vin” at their shared apartment in Queens. Because of the poverty and breakup (embarrassing) she has been forced to move to a beach house that she inherited from her father in the fictional town of North Bear Shores, Michigan. She is unhappy about this because the house is where her father conducted his affair (embarrassing). The book’s meet-cute happens by the end of Chapter 1; January’s new neighbor is her college rival in creative writing, Gus Everertt “(though now he went by Augustus, because Serious Man),” who accidentally sees her being a messy drunk from his porch (embarrassing). This man is hot—and mean!—and had some weird grinding-at-party flirtation with January in college, but they otherwise barely know each other. He is more successful than her as a fiction writer (embarrassing), but his books are “serious,” “require research,” and are like “the Great American novel.” By the end of Chapter 8, they challenge each other to write a book in each others’ genres in a flirty competition.
It takes Beach Read less than 2 pages to get here, “It started when I was twelve. My parents sat me down to tell me the news. Mom had gotten her first diagnosis— suspicious cells in her left breast,” and less than 4 more pages for the protagonist to drink gin from the handle. All this seems to follow my conventions, but they quickly fold in on themselves in an almost explicit preemption of Robinne Lee’s comments about genre:
“And then there were the people who acted like we were in on some secret joke together when, after a conversation about Art or Politics, they found out I wrote upbeat women's fiction: Whatever pays the bills, right? they'd say, practically begging me to confirm I didn't want to write books about women or love.”
Last week I wrote about how, to have the “it” factor, wish-fulfillment needs to be authentic. Based and entirely reliant on the fantasy of becoming famous, Hannah Montana isn’t all that fun because Miley Stewart isn’t perfect enough and there is no central romantic element: more a cloying impersonation of lots of wishes and fulfillments–the sublimity of cool pop stars of the 90s/00s and preceding Disney sitcoms about being pretty–than an emphatic embrace of indulgence. The Cheetah Girls and Hannah Montana seem like the same genre, in other words, but upon closer inspection one is a forced impersonation of something more authentic. Likewise, Charli xcx’s frantic impersonation of The Dare’s shamelessness comes across as an alien impersonation of humanness or the Google translation of product.
Emily Henry, I would argue, is impersonating Anna Todd. When the latter writes about Harry’s alcoholism, it reads not an insecure impression of a foreign milieu but a flippant guess; it’s plausible the author has never even seen alcohol in real life, but she’s not pretending she has so much as creating a world of substance abuse with its own rules. Likewise, every character’s underdeveloped and rudimentary over-investment in “college” sounds bizarre because it is; it's not exploitation of a prudish trope but an invention of a new kind of dork mirroring its author’s conviction that a BA is the pinnacle of intellectual development. When Emily Henry attempts to illustrate the machinations of labor and sex, we get this:
“‘Besides, you know how scheduling off is in the [restaurant] industry. I'm lucky my boss said I could have Fourth of July. For all I know, he's expecting a blow job now.’
‘No way. Blow jobs are for major holidays. What you've got on your hands is a good old-fashioned foot job quid pro quo.’”
Or this:
“People like to imagine their favorite male authors sitting down at a typewriter with a taste of the strongest whiskey and a hunger for knowledge. I wouldn't be surprised if the rumpled man sitting beside me, the one who'd mocked my career, was wearing dirty day-of-the-week underwear inside out and living on Meijer-brand cheese puffs… He could show up looking like a college junior's backup pot dealer (for when the first one was in Myrtle Beach) and still get taken more seriously than I would in my stuffy Michael Kors dress… I could get author photos taken by the senior photo editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and he could use his mom's digital camera from 2002 to snap a shot of himself scowling on his deck and still garner more respect than me… He might as well have just sent in a dick pic… They would've printed it on the cover flap, right over that two-line bio they'd let him shit out.”
This performance of understanding adult themes is signaled by something else I introduced last week: a deluge of random nouns. When the theatrical normalcy becomes particularly panicked, nouns are used as a substitute for putting words together in a way that makes meaning.
“[she’s like] Miss Honey, the sweet teacher from Matilda, mashed together with a sexy witch.”
“I pulled on a somber black-and-white Joni Mitchell, stuffed my booze-bloated body into the denim cutoffs, and put on my floral-embroidered ankle boots.”
It is in all these ways that Beach Read seems a sort of impression of After and fanfiction in general, i.e. wish-fulfillment without feeling. To return to Robinne Lee’s implication that both the former and The Idea of You are serious art only framed as trash by a culture that “undervalues” all fiction about women, I am also reminded of Fran’s pan of the eponymous film for Vulture; “On its face, the film projects a shiny, absurd fantasy,” which is killed by a “weepy vérité” that “sucks the laughs out of the film.” Maybe because Lee is so desperate to be taken seriously, or because neither Michael Showalter nor Anne Hathaway understand what makes fanfiction a specific, successful kind of wish-fulfillment (Galitzine might…), The Idea of You is more conversations about emotional intimacy than set pieces of the 40-year-old woman and Harry Styles having sex or relishing in Harry Styles’ celebrity. Likewise, Beach Read has begun as a series of internal monologues and overwrought descriptions of context meant to convince us that this is, in fact, a novel written by a real, adult woman who naturally understands what is cool and fun. There is no real sex or indulgence of grandeur in sight—only liberal feminist handwringing.
The lack of spectacle in The Idea of You makes it boring, but, to me, that isn’t the case for Beach Read. In chasing the high of encountering novel media form in After, I have found only a facsimile of pornography for the contemporary woman with a second-grade reading level, and yet, am experiencing the same sort of thrill: Beach Read is difficult to understand. Every few pages I stop to record prose like this:
“‘I refuse to believe anyone would cheapen the greatest love story involving Mandy Moore ever told by letting a teenage Gus Everett cop a feel.’
‘Believe whatever you want, January Andrews,’ he said. ‘Jack Reacher risks his life every day to guarantee you that freedom.’”
When I—and my friends who grew up to have weddings and babies—were 16 years old, we were reading detailed descriptions about what it might feel like for Harry Styles to do hand stuff to you on the ground next to a lake. Beach Read is utterly sexless so far, choosing to frenetically defend its own existence as a “romance novel” instead of exploring what these characters even look like. In the first 10 chapters, January obsessively narrates why Gus’s criticism of her books is anti-woman because “romance novels” made her feel better when her mom was dying, and whenever something happens in the diegetic world of Beach Read, she will wonder if it “will be in [her new] book.” Then, Gus isn’t even mean anymore.
This compression of text and genre, and preference for compulsory feminism over shameless sexiness, is fascinating to witness. Choosing to be a heroic scold instead of a fun, honest person is something I witness citizens and artists make each day, and is the conundrum which most consistently motivates my intellectual production. In the shadow of popularized fanfiction, it seems this trend has specifically made it hard for wish-fulfillment authors to embrace the very premise of what they do. If you can’t admit wanting attention from a mean guy is the currency, what exactly am I buying?
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Because this post was so context-heavy, I will focus on other fascinating elements of the text next week, like chapter titles and the nickname “Sexy Evil Gus.” While Chapter 10 ended with “heat in [January’s] hips…curling around [her] thighs like kudzu,” I anticipate there being marginally more sexy behavior in the next 8 chapters, which I look forward to unpacking (Gus will hopefully “press into” January). Whether or not you are actually engaging with Beach Read, please let me know if there is anything else you would like me to discuss: cover art? Emily Henry bio? Fancasts of the movie adaptation?
Firstly: if you somehow are not aware, Fifty Shades of Grey was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series called Master of the Universe with the names of characters changed. Secondly: “carrot” is a derogatory term in the One Direction fandom used to describe new, basic, childish, or otherwise embarrassing fans. My invocation of “One Direction Infection” is carrot behavior, because this was widely popularized terminology by parents and media, not something used internally by real fans.
I can guarantee there is existing scholarship about the lineage of these kinds of sexual tropes in fanfiction before and after One Direction, but I can only write what I know: I watched One Direction transform a fringe practice of pornographically writing about fictionalized versions of celebrities into a mainstream cultural production, chiefly through fantasies about Harry Styles simultaneously bullying (to varying degrees of alarm) and sexually pursuing monogamous, heteronormative partners.
The original Wattpad with original character names is gone, but it seems to survive in a pretty original form, albeit with name changes, on Todd’s original profile.
If I recall correctly, Liam Payne is in After but isn’t tattooed because he works for Harry’s dad at the publishing house where Tessa also works. He is also in love with Tessa.
the name January Andrews conjures the image of Julie Andrews as the lead almost without any conscious thought on my part - is this intended or am i homosexual?
a few thoughts I had... I am only on chapter 8 btw
- she has a "pizza print" sweatshirt (?)
- references to the pirates of the caribbean movies make sense when it's clare talking about captain salazar but not so much here - neither of these characters act like they've seen a movie before
- is this set in 2014?
i'm broadly curious/sympathetic to the premise of running into someone from college with whom you've had an antagonistic relationship to as this DID happen to me at my college five year and left me wondering "should i have sex with my enemy?" (i didn't - but i did wonder!) for all that these two did share some memories they also seem to not have a clue towards a context in which they exist. big state school, sure, maybe they didn't know each other as intimately as ppl at, say, "hope college" would, but there is a startling lack of mutual reference building that is not semi dated pop culture stuff and not, like, places they would both know in the state of michigan
all of which is to say this is the least "formerly queens-based" character of all time... january andrews is regretfully and painfully chicago in a number of ways