In October 2025, Hustvedt gave the laureate lecture at Monaco’s Théâtre des Variétés titled “Betweens,”1 a powerful concept for the author of Ghost Stories, her much-discussed memoir of grief after the death of her beloved husband, Paul Auster. It is a simple and profoundly beautiful idea: the emotional territory between grief and what lingers in physical absence.. She cited numerous thinkers across disciplines in her lecture about that interesting state. My mind thinks simply of ice and water, and the melting that occurs between, something both before and after. Hustvedt lingered on the being that is drenched in placenta at birth and the umbilical cord between the mother and the baby.

Earlier this year, she sat down for an interview with Alexandra Hanover, aptly titled “Here and There.” In those pages, she spoke again about that curious place, The Between: between memory and imagination, between one book and the next, between the work already made and the work still forming. When she is between writing books, she says, she is careful about what she reads. If she is working on a novel, for instance, she avoids Henry James because, as she notes, “language is contagious.”2

That made me think of how A.I. is learning to write like us. The fusion creates “a plural being”3 to use Hustvedt’s words. She was talking about writing poems in grad school while also reading the great poets, but I can’t help thinking of the technological revolution we’re witnessing in real time. The interaction creates a compound. Something becomes another. Or an other.

This is Hustvedt’s natural territory: the borderland between things. Her doctorate in English from Columbia focused on Charles Dickens, but her intellectual life has never belonged exclusively to literature. She moves through philosophy, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, feminism, visual art, and fiction with the confidence of someone for whom the borders between fields are real but comfortable to navigate. Porous.

There is also Hustvedt’s own personal history: a woman who grew up between the United States and Norway, and who, as she told Hanover, learned an old-fashioned Norwegian at home in Minnesota, a dialect now extremely rare but preserved for her through literature, family, and memory. It was in circulation in another century, and it came again into the last one through her, existing now too, in a third. She became the passage by which a nearly vanished dialect entered a new expression.4

Such scholarship was once admired under older, imperfect names: Renaissance mind, polymath, generalist, jack of all trades. But those labels do not quite capture what Hustvedt represents. She is not dabbling. The overlap of the psychological, the chemical, the emotional, the physical: the big picture is not a luxury in her work. It is the work.

This is exactly the kind of far-reaching intelligence rewarded by Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco.

Monaco is itself a curious between-place. We associate it easily with France because of the predominance of the French language and culture in its borders. It shares history with France and yet it is not France. An almost but not quite. Another. Closer, perhaps, than my own home, Louisiana, and certainly less divided by geography. The original Monaco was just a Rock—hence, the Rock. It juts out into the sea, supporting its fortress and curving around an ancient port; today it stands between two ports, between old stone and glass towers, between nineteenth-century villas and modern hotels, between baroque terraces and the narrow passageways of Monaco-Ville.

Its superficial reputation is easy enough to understand. Monaco photographs well: sports cars, casinos, yachts, diamonds, glamor, and speed. That Monaco exists. But there is another Monaco, hidden or perhaps not hidden at all. Just quietly sitting off to the side of the Hill of Charles.5 A Monaco with enough self-assurance not to shout. It does not need attention. It gives attention. It listens. If you stand still and look closely, you’ll see it.

It is in that space that Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco operates.

Known informally as PhiloMonaco, the organization was founded in 2015 by Charlotte Casiraghi,6 along with the philosophers Robert Maggiori, Raphaël Zagury-Orly, and Joseph Cohen.7 The original quartet. Maggiori has said that the idea began modestly. At first, it was imagined as a prize. Then came ideas for events, conversations, public meetings organized on the calendar from April to October. One thing led to another.

Today, PhiloMonaco is a large-scale intellectual project: a year-round series of dialogues, workshops, and lectures on a single theme. Love (amour) was the theme for its first year; then, year after year: the body, violence, desire, time, justice, what it means to be human, and so on. Visiting scholars gather, often in the Théâtre Princesse Grace, to examine the chosen theme through multiple lenses. Then in the summer, during Semaine PhiloMonaco (PhiloMonaco Week) those conversations move outward.

The week becomes a kind of culmination, though also a midpoint—a between, if I may. Scholars meet not only with one another but with professionals in medicine, education, journalism, culture, and public life. They meet students, readers, teachers, and members of the general public. The round table steps outside to enter schools, libraries, museums, streets, and civic spaces in Monaco and Paris.

This is philosophy not as abstraction alone, but as public attention. A public forum.

And yet attention is complicated here. With Charlotte Casiraghi at the helm, PhiloMonaco was never likely to remain entirely hidden from the world of fast cars and luxury. Recall the year when PhiloMonaco’s theme was time and acceleration, and Casiraghi interviewed her fellow Monegasque, the F1 champion Charles Leclerc.)8

She carries a glamorous public visibility which she did not exactly choose. She reflects on it with some unease in the preamble to her recent book La Fêlure. But unwanted glamour is still glamour. It attracts the kind of press philosophy does not usually receive.

That could have easily distorted the project. Instead, it may be part of what enhances it by extending its reach. Without Casiraghi, Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco might have remained mainly in the sphere of philosophers in Paris, known certainly to the public in Monaco, to local teachers and students, and to the more rarefied circles of academic fellowship and graduate study around the world. Yet because of her, the field of awareness widens into the fashion and celebrity press. Readers who come for fashion, royalty, elegance, or curiosity may find themselves unexpectedly treated to insights from Boris Cyrulnik on childhood and violence,9 or to one of Maggiori’s lectures on Jacques Derrida.10

There is an irony in this, but also a grace. Casiraghi’s public image may be unwelcome to her in certain ways, but it also serves one of the organization’s central objectives: bringing philosophy beyond its usual rooms. In that sense, privilege works here in a strange direction—not away from egalitarian principles, but toward them.

Casiraghi was appointed in 2024 to Monaco’s Order of Cultural Merit, a modern order of distinction recognizing those—Monegasque citizens and foreigners alike—who have contributed meaningfully to the cultural life of the Principality. It is not merely a decoration for titled dignitaries or visiting monarchs. Among those recognized before her were Jean-Christophe Maillot, director of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and Plácido Domingo.

I do not mean to dwell too long on Casiraghi. It is only that most pieces about her emphasize, above all else, the qualities that, though they are most exhaustively repeated across the media whenever she’s in the news, tend to be the ones that have less to do with her: the heritage, the glamour, the family tree. The royal mother, the Hollywood grandmother, the great-grandfather who knew Marcel Proust. All of it is interesting in its way, but it tells us very little about Casiraghi herself: the writer, the mother, the co-founder of Ever Manifesto,11 the co-author with Maggiori of the treatise Archipel des Passions,12 and finally the philosopher of the crack.13

It also misses the reality of the between in Casiraghi’s own work: the person thinking and writing somewhere between haute couture and ecological reality, between fantasy and emotional confusion; between public image and private inquiry, between inheritance and chosen intellectual labor. She holds a master’s degree in philosophy14 and now stands, in her own way, as a scholar of the fracture.

The fracture is what interests me. Not so much Casiraghi’s personal fragility, but the concept of it as it applies to myself and universally. What lies inside the valley of pain? Fragility, certainly. Sensitivity. The wound that reopens too easily. The part of us that is not broken exactly, but more exposed than the rest.

In La Fêlure, Casiraghi traces this idea across literature, philosophy, music, and psychoanalysis: from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Deleuze, from J.J. Cale to Sigmund Freud. The chapter “Magnolia,” named for the and the iconic Southern flower, is one of the book’s quietest and most beautiful passages. Cale is a legend of understatement, a musician who knew both influence and obscurity, flashes of success and long stretches of difficulty. His way of living through the fracture, as Casiraghi presents it, was not spectacle but endurance. He avoided the limelight. He worked. He made music. He lived without asking the world to look at him.

Like the magnolia, he was not untouched by weather. He endured it. Somewhere between presence and nostalgia.

Her analogy to New Orleans hit me hard: a city of tortured beauty and stubborn perseverance, where beauty does not arrive untouched by suffering, but passes through it and remains.

The “Magnolia” chapter in La Fêlure offers a smooth passage back to Siri Hustvedt, to “Betweens,” and to Ghost Stories. PhiloMonaco and Le Fondation Prince Pierre15 jointly presented Le Prix de la Principauté to Hustvedt. It’s a joint prize from two Monegasque organizations—one philosophical, one literary—to recognize a writer for an entire body of work.(13) In Hustvedt’s case, that body includes seven novels, eight works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, stories, and poems. As part of the laureate program, she delivered her “Betweens” lecture at the Théâtre des Variétés.

She began with a fragment from Heraclitus, moved through Martin Buber’s philosophy of relation and the possibility of a third form of being—Freud’s so-called “analytic third.”16 Through transference between analyst and patient, another space opens—a zone in which thinking can shift. Hustvedt moves from there through biology and physics.

Her lecture does not treat the between as an empty interval. It is not a waiting room between one settled condition and another. It is generative. The between is where birth happens, where language changes hands, where analysis alters both participants, where memory is shaped by imagination, and where grief becomes a continuing relation to the dead.

One of the first books I completed this year was Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, the story of his own cataclysmic between: the passage from the person he was before he was attacked and stabbed to the person he became through the long, circuitous process of recovery. The ordeal was filled with pain, but not only pain. It also brought reminders of love and a renewed appreciation for everything that attached him to life.17

Among the book’s pleasures is Rushdie’s affection for his longtime friend Paul Auster. Auster was still alive when Rushdie visited him at his Brooklyn home. Auster had recently endured the deaths of his son and infant granddaughter and was himself living with lung cancer.18 Rushdie found him capable of joking, still engaged with life despite everything. Dying, but still alive, as we all are. The cancer makes death less abstract, something anticipated, accelerated.

Auster and Hustvedt had taken part in the gathering on the steps of the New York Public Library after Rushdie’s stabbing, an event organized in solidarity with Rushdie and with writers who live under threats to freedom of expression.19 This was shortly before Auster’s cancer diagnosis in early 2023.

In May 2023, Hustvedt and Rushie’s wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, appeared together on the first episode of Les Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon to be recorded in the U.S.20

And almost a year after that, Paul died.

Hustvedt recounts his slow, torturous decline in Ghost Stories. She writes about the “important difference between optimism and hope.” Optimism cheers every piece of good news and predicts a favorable outcome, but it creates emotional swings that cannot be sustained. “Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”21

The optimist rises and falls and eventually burns out. Optimism is a blaze. Hope is an ember that can keep giving sparks.

The review of Ghost Stories in The New York Times—reserved in places, though appreciative overall—observes a book dwelling in some of our darkest and most universal experiences: near misses, devastating illness, death, and the anger and confusion that accompany events we cannot make comprehensible.

The value of philosophical thinking in navigating these territories is difficult to overstate. Philosophy is not essential to life in the way food, water, and oxygen are essential. We can live without consciously exercising that part of the mind. But philosophy can deepen a life. It gives us tools for approaching problems, for examining our assumptions, and for moving through the emotions—the “archipelago of passions” Maggiori and Casiraghi wrote about—without pretending that they are simple or easily resolved.

PhiloMonaco does not simplify philosophy. It makes philosophy inviting. It extends its reach, carrying it into schools, workplaces, theaters, libraries, and public spaces rather than confining it to elite institutions. In doing so, it demonstrates that philosophy does not necessarily require simplification. It requires attention. Attend closely enough and the questions begin to appear. Stay with them and, sometimes, answers follow—though answers have a habit of arriving with more questions. For those who enjoy that endless movement between the two, philosophy is already waiting.

FOOTNOTES

It’s about certainty.

The outside world is full of judgments that arrive without explanation. A bookstore reads your novel and decides not to stock it. A reader stops seventy pages in and quietly walks away. Contest judges deliberate behind closed doors. Reviewers leave stars without context. Emails arrive that begin with phrases like “after careful consideration.”

And none of those things come with footnotes.

Wikipedia does.

On Wikipedia, every claim requires a source. Every statement can be challenged. Every sentence must survive scrutiny. The rules are visible. The standards are written down. If someone disagrees with you, they have to explain why.

That level of accountability is strangely soothing.

Perhaps that’s why I disappear into it when the noise gets too loud.

Because writing a novel and sending it into the world is an exercise in radical uncertainty. You spend years creating something. Then you release it and discover that other people will decide what it means, whether they finish it, whether they recommend it, whether they connect with it, whether they care.

There is no citation template for any of that.

No reliable source exists for the question that writers secretly ask more than any other:

Was it worth doing?

Wikipedia cannot answer that question.

Neither can Goodreads.

Neither can a bookstore buyer.

Neither can a contest judge.

But when the noise becomes overwhelming, there is comfort in pretending that every problem can be solved the way an encyclopedia solves problems: through verification, precision, and evidence.

Sometimes I think I’m editing articles about Nicolas Mathieu.

Really, I’m hiding from ambiguity. And from all the writers, myself included, spending our sentences on Substack Notes about AI and self-conscious, paranoid writing.

Lately, for reasons I can explain only partly, the tunnel has had Nicolas Mathieu’s name written over the entrance.

Part of it is simple literary hunger. I finished Connemara and wanted more. Then I wanted all the books. Then the lesser-known, shorter works tucked into periodicals. Then the ones that haven’t found their way into translation yet. Then the strange, beautiful tennis dispatches where Roland-Garros becomes a study of endurance, humiliation, class, aging, heat, and desire.

But part of it, I suspect, is that Mathieu writes about exactly the kind of life-noise I am trying to escape: ordinary disappointment, social humiliation, work, class, longing, failure, bodies under pressure, people who carry whole histories inside gestures no one else notices.

In other words, I am hiding from uncertainty inside the work of a writer who understands uncertainty almost too well.

That may be the joke.

I retreat into the encyclopedia to make neat little boxes around a writer whose fiction refuses neat boxes. I organize the bibliography. I verify the awards. I track down the publications. I make the article cleaner, clearer, better sourced.

Meanwhile, outside the cave, my own book is being subjected to the same unmanageable world his characters live in: accepted here, declined there, understood by one reader, abandoned by another.

No wonder I keep editing.

Everything makes sense in the cave, but it is not a home.

Not really.

You can’t relax there. Life doesn’t happen there. It is a silent place, and that is part of the attraction. No one bothers you there. No one asks anything of you. Nothing arrives demanding a response.

But like the Room of Requirement, or the Mirror of Erised, when you come back from it, you find the world is different again.

Or maybe it is not different.

Maybe you are.

The uncertainty is still there, but now it feels sharper because you have sealed yourself away from it temporarily. The cave did not remove the noise outside. It only postponed your return to it.

So reintegration becomes another ordeal.

A vicious cycle.

Or maybe a viscous one: slow, sticky, hard to move through.

It is vicious, yes, but it is also viscous. You come back from the cave covered in something slick and half-alive, like a Stranger Things creature or a newborn baby, dragged back into the world before you are ready to breathe in it.

Yuck.

Why do I do this to myself?

Maybe it’s necessary. Like the cycle that self-help author from the nineties described in the book that seemed to be in everyone’s house back then: retreat to the cave, watch football or tennis, sleep it off, wake up, and face another day of ordinary drudgery.

In my case: let the literary magazine live another day without being fixed. Let When the Wind Turned acquire a little verdigris in the margins. Forget the economy, the stock market, the bank account.

Go add another external link to Nicolas Mathieu’s Wikipedia page.

You know you want to.

I’m kidding.

Sort of.

Oh, by the way, it’s his birthday today. Of course I know that, since I’ve been living in the source code of his Wikipedia page. My birthday is less than a week away.

Birthdays.

One more year from the big one.

I don’t feel fifty. I don’t feel forty-nine, either.

This morning I found myself thinking about all the children’s books people like to write. Why? Why do we need another picture book? Aren’t there enough caterpillars to keep the millions of children who still read reasonably entertained?

I’m being unfair. Children need books. Of course they do.

But whenever people talk about the future, or art, or technology, or AI, the conversation bends almost automatically toward the children. What about the children? What will this do to the children?

It’s a good question.

It’s just not the only question.

Because honestly, of all the creatures in the world, the ones I worry about least are the children. Not because children are safe. Not because childhood is easy. But because, culturally speaking, we at least know we are supposed to care about them.

They have toy stores, video games, summer camps, school libraries, entire wings of public libraries built around tiny tables and bright rugs and little chairs.

Have you seen the children’s section lately?

Trust me: the kids are covered.

The ones who seem less covered to me are the big people.

The ones who still need stories but are embarrassed to admit it. The ones who need beauty but call it self-indulgence. The ones who are tired, lonely, overstimulated, underpaid, overextended, aging, worried about money, worried about relevance, worried about being replaced by software, worried about whether the thing they made matters to anyone at all.

The ones who retreat to caves because the world has become too loud.

Maybe that is who I am writing for.

I guess where I’m going with all this is simply to say that everyone needs attention and care.

But here’s the rub: you won’t find it in the world, at least not in any lasting way.

You’ll find moments of it. Brief flashes. A conversation that lingers. A review that makes you feel seen. A reader who writes to say that something you made mattered. A friend who remembers. A stranger who understands.

But nothing sustainable. Nothing permanent.

An actor gets attention by performing, and then the curtain comes down.

A writer gets attention by putting her work into the world, and then the world goes silent again.

If you’re lucky, you get reviews. Even bad ones are better than none at all. Unfortunately, “none at all” is the default setting. Most people are busy. They are raising children, paying bills, worrying about their health, worrying about their parents, worrying about the future. My book will never be as important to anyone else as it is to me.

Nor should it be.

People have their own lives to live.

Their own caves.

Their own noise.

And maybe that’s the point I keep circling without quite arriving at. The attention we need from the world is always temporary. The care we need from other people is always incomplete. The certainty we want never quite arrives.

So we learn to live in the interval.

The noise, the silence, the noise again.

Another birthday.

Another commute.

Another morning.

And somehow, despite everything, another attempt.

We must remember Finny’s love of games in A Separate Peace. That novel sat on so many high school reading lists—at least it did when I was a student—and its analogies seem newly alive to me now.

I have found myself unexpectedly inspired by sports. The credit for this miracle belongs largely to Nicolas Mathieu, illustrator Pierre-Henry Gomont, and their daily work for Eurosport during Roland-Garros. As writer and artist, they are essentially live-blogging the tournament, though “sports coverage” hardly feels like the right phrase. Their dispatches are literary. Philosophical. Human. Reading them has inspired me to attempt a few transmissions of my own.

But back to Finny.

If you remember A Separate Peace, Finny invents Blitzball, a game whose rules are constantly changing and, indeed, made up as he and his friends play it. In retrospect. The author, John Knowles, framed it as a metaphor for war itself. The boys think on their feet. They adapt. They react to circumstances as they unfold. Nothing follows a script. The game is organized chaos.

Like life.

Like tennis.

I never would have described tennis as chaotic. Yet Mathieu’s writing has made me see it differently. He is not really writing about forehands and backhands. He is writing about endurance. About bodies under pressure. About ordinary people confronting challenges — of age and of weather. The same themes that animate his fiction emerge here on the clay courts of Paris.

This, I am discovering, is how the French do sports commentary.

It is both profound and simple. Intuitive and paradoxical. Victory is not always sweet. Defeat is not always final. The heat at Roland-Garros climbs toward ninety degrees. Shirts cling to backs. Muscles tighten. The body becomes impossible to ignore. Mathieu has always been a physical writer. He makes you feel the sweat.

That quality both fascinates and frightens me.

I picked up a copy of Mathieu’s novella Rose Royal at a bookstore in Uptown New Orleans, but I haven’t opened it yet. I know what it’s about, and I know I’m going to feel every second of Rose’s fear and every suspended breath. I recall so vividly my experience reading The Shining—twice, because apparently I am not always kind to myself—my heart racing, my mind in turmoil on every page.

Some might wonder why we willingly submit ourselves to such things. I don’t have a ready answer. Perhaps the answer lies in the curious relationship between imagination and experience. Neuroscience tells us that the boundary between experience and imagination is more porous than we often assume...

This is where the virtual becomes physical. We are not running, lunging, sweating, or falling. Our knees are not being damaged; our feet are not pounding the court. And yet the body participates. The pulse answers. The breath changes. The muscles imagine motion. A literary life may be virtual, but it is not unreal. We can feel the emotions of characters who do not exist. A tennis match in Paris, even through the writing of a spectator in the stadium can raise the pulse of a reader in Louisiana.

And then there is the sound.

The clunk of the ball on clay. The answering volley from racket to racket. The rhythm begins to work on the body before the mind can explain it. I find it strangely relaxing, that sound—the repeated percussion, the almost-musical exchange. And yet, even as it lulls the mind, the heart beats. There is anticipation in it. Suspense. A kind of metronome for anxiety.

Tennis, seen this way, is not merely a game. It is rhythm and resistance. War and ballet. A ritual of pressure performed by bodies sculpted into aesthetic perfection, moving with a grace that never quite disguises the violence beneath it.

Perhaps that is what Mathieu understands so well. He is not merely describing tennis. He is showing us the strange place where spectator and player, imagination and experience, the virtual and the real begin to converge.

Finny, in A Separate Peace, understood it too.

A game is never just a game. Not when people bring themselves to it. Not when they invest it with hope, fear, desire, endurance, and meaning. Then it becomes something else entirely.

The match goes on. We watch. We imagine. We feel.

And somehow, from the other side of the line, we participate.

Further Reading

Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. 1959.

Mathieu, Nicolas, and Pierre-Henry Gomont. Sur la ligne. Roland-Garros 2026. Eurosport France.

Selected entries:

• Un dernier été avec Novak

• Eros et Garros

• Malédiction des précocités

• J’ai vu Sinner tomber, debout

I started listening to Sam Harris’s interview with Susan Cain, someone I admire enormously as a fellow disciple of quiet living. One of the early topics of discussion between them is the messy, but very prevalent topic of AI writing. Cain tells Harris that sometimes she finds herself engrossed in an article online only to discover along the way one of ‘the tells.’ As you may imagine, this was very interesting to Harris. He wanted to know more: What are ‘the tells’? That is a question that many people are asking. Common replies include the em-dash and the so-called triplet. I became immediately skeptical as she named these ‘tells.’

When people speak about ‘tells’ my brain immediately goes to: oh no, they’re fishing. As someone who is highly neurodivergent, I’m already insecure about everything I do. I try not to compare myself to others, but it’s extremely hard to avoid it. Now we have to worry about writing that is too perfect? Does perfection, or something near it mean it must have been produced by a machine? I thought AI writing was bad. That’s what people used to say. I’ll never forget the librarian who was quoted in American Libraries Magazine in the summer of 2025. She was talking about AI-written books found in the children’s section of the library: “The writing is laughably bad,” she said. Laughably bad! A year ago, that’s what was being said. Now the writing is too perfect?

History is full of moments where intuition hardened into accusation. Moral panics thrive on shifting criteria.

But what about the Em Dash tell? I use the Em Dash a lot. I like it. It breaks up a sentence. It breaks a train of thought. It makes a turn. I’m sure that’s why Virginia Woolf liked it. I’m currently reading Jacob’s Room, and let me tell you, it is full of em dashes! In Woolf, the em dash is not decoration. It marks interruption, hesitation, association, drift. It is part of how thought moves across the page. It signals the flow of consciousness itself. Maybe that’s why it has become an early scapegoat of AI panic.

Underneath the skepticism lies a deeper fear: that the LLM will learn to hesitate like us, to mimic not just performance but faltering.

AI learned to write by reading us. Why are we surprised when it resembles us?

I know it has to be frustrating. Uncertainty rules the world. Nothing is stable. AI comes along and destabilizes it further. That’s unsettling. What’s going to happen to human writing? Will the humanities survive? How will it impact authors and readers and libraries? Are we doomed? What can we do to save humanity?

I worry that our panic (maybe even our best intentions) will drive us to do more harm than good. The moral panics of the past were dangerous. They destroyed reputations. They upended lives. There is the potential for a book that is written by a human to be misidentified as AI-written and, consequently, targeted for a ban. Imagine making a mistake like that? Banning a book you think is written by a machine because you spotted a ‘tell’? Are you ready to assume that kind of responsibility?

I don’t know what the answer is. I’m only certain about uncertainty. These ‘tells’ people are talking about feel dangerously unreliable. They aren’t scientific or quantifiable. They are heuristic, intuitive, and highly subjective. (That sentence is a triplet, isn’t it? That might be AI slithering its way into my article? Who can say?!)

I struggle every day against my own errors of judgement. I endeavor not to write self-consciously but authentically and freely. I know we all have to face criticism. As writers, we have to learn to live with it, to use it, and learn from it. But I don’t see the benefit of writing in an atmosphere of social pressure to be more or less than what I am just because it might be mistaken for AI modality. If my humanness has to become performative, I’m not sure I would know how to do it. I’ve never been a good performer. I’m afraid I would do it very badly.

What is Noir? The nighttime, the darkness, applied to themes that are opaque, pervasive and terrifying. The detective creeps alone through the shadows, wears a trench coat, chain-smokes. The night becomes his companion, or his curse. He knows it well, but never enough. He’s annoyed by it all, but relishes it at the same time. Dread and temptation.

I guess that more or less describes classical noir. Today, there’s neo-noir. Classical noir, essentially, for modern sensibilities. Less about smoke and shadow, more explicit, innuendos brought to the surface.

The 21st century French writer Nicolas Mathieu does something different altogether. His first novel, Aux animaux la guerre (translated into English by Sam Taylor as Of Fangs and Talons),1 follows the template insofar as it’s about despair and desperation, addiction and survival (but survival for what is the question; existential themes abound, unsurprisingly for a French novelist) but instead of fixing the drama around a whodunit, he reveals the system that shaped the characters. That’s where it is less like Raymond Chandler and more like Steinbeck.

I see something of Stephen King in Mathieu as well. The Body, better known for its Rob Reiner-directed adaptation, Stand By Me. Four twelve-year-olds on the cusp of adolescence, when they must go in different directions. Different classes, different levels. The one who is hopeless of the future, the one with a bad reputation but a vastly under-appreciated heart, the one who gets picked on mercilessly and never wants to grow up, and the one who seems to have the brightest future but dreads leaving them all behind. These are the ones perhaps most vulnerable to the vices of life.

Mathieu writes, in his third novel, Connemara:

“Adolescence is premeditated murder, planned long in advance, and the body of their family as it used to be already lies dead by the side of the road. Now they must reinvent roles, accept new distances, to deal with the horror and the sudden kicks. The body is still warm. It twitches. But what used to exist—childhood and its tender moments, the unquestioned reign of adults with the kid at its center, cocooned and protected, vacations … and family Sundays at home—all of this has died.”2

His second and most renowned novel, Leurs enfants après eux (translated into English by William Rodarmor, as And Their Children After Them), isn’t so much about crime at all as it’s about the kids who are likeliest to get mixed up in it, and why. It’s a coming-of-age saga about teens who live in the Vosges mountains of northeastern France, who were born in the late 1970s, and lived through adolescence in the 1990s. The author’s lived experience unfolded in the same region and on the same timeline. He, like his characters, navigated the tough breaks of a life where nothing comes easy. His prose lingers on the pervasive myth that hard work is enough. It’s not. We see again and again that too often only the ruthless make it to the top and at terrible cost.

The novel Leurs enfants après eux won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2018, and the English translation won the Franco-American Albertine Prize in 2021.

The third novel, Connemara, the one I’m currently revisiting, is about the kind of crime that is technically legal, or at least hiding in plain sight, amid flowcharts and fine print. It’s about the kind of corporate insanity that promises dreams but wastes lives. Its own kind of systematic quagmire that no one can beat — not honestly, anyway. He stretches the wheelhouse. We’re not dealing with mafia and gangs anymore. Here it’s all about the lie that capitalism rewards virtue or even merit. No wonder there’s a rumor in the French media that he’s a socialist. But it’s not that simple. He doesn’t find the State to be a haven of virtue either. Both fascism and socialism have their traps.

Essentially, Mathieu doesn’t just write about crime. He writes about the conditions that motivate it. In the first novel, Aux animaux la guerre/Of Fangs and Talons, a factory closes, livelihoods fall apart, a union collapses. In Leurs enfants après eux, Mathieu was inspired by the biblical verse Sirach 44:93 —

“There are some of whom there is no more memory,

They perished as though they had never existed;

They became as though they had never been born,

And so did their children after them.”

Unlike the illustrious men singled out for praise in Sirach 44:1, the “they” in 44:9 are comparable to Mathieu’s characters—the ignored children, the forgotten forebears. No one hears them when they cry, and so it was for those before, and so it will be for those after. Unless there is a collective shift in consciousness, powerful and widespread enough to change human experience.

Connemara4 deals with the ambitions of those children, and the consequences of getting what they want through a selfish social class and a ruthless economy, and the fallout from reversal of fortune. It deals with nostalgia — looking back to what was left behind or lost as relief from one’s problems now.

We first meet Hélène as she lies in bed with her husband, Philippe. With him asleep, she thinks of what she has to wake up and do, the routines, the responsibilities. Get the children to school, do her makeup for work in the car. She thinks of how disappointing everything is. The ennui fills her with disgust. The one thing that motivates her is the thought of meeting Manuel later — a man she’s been interacting with by text ever since they met on Tinder. We see her in work mode later, cold and cynical, forcing herself into a hopeful state of mind. She thinks of the promotion she could finally achieve if she closes on a deal her company is desperate to make with the mayor’s office. And when that deal is sabotaged by a couple of complacent bureaucrats whose only ambition is to maintain the status quo, Mathieu shows us the effects of the humiliation on her body — the heat, the sweat. Anger, frustration, terror. All exhibited in biological response. The relief also comes through the pleasure of the body. She masturbates in the parked car during a torrential rain. A solitary act, hiding in plain sight, aided in its concealment by the rainwater washing over the car.

Her bitterness is over the pointlessness of the whole system. The consulting company she works for endeavors to streamline the expenditure of the mayor’s office, but cuckolded (yes, that’s Mathieu’s analogy)5 by a stagnant bureaucracy that clings tenaciously to the flawed but functional architecture that sustains it. One office holding warring factions — those for change and those who have built their lives around the tolerance of its mediocrity.

The whole episode illustrates how even the relatively powerless, like the functionaries who impede Hélène, manage to manipulate the levers of power.

When we meet Christoph, we see him in action as a dog-food salesman. We learn of his past through the mayor himself, who won’t stop reminding Christoph of his lost glory as a hockey celebrity.

Hélène was a nobody when Christoph was glorified. Now Christoph is the “nobody,” while Hélène got everything she dreamed of, only to find that her dream was all based on a fairy tale. The illusion, the mirage of it. The promise of riches but only if you’re willing to go all the way and lose yourself completely.

There is a striking moment in the interaction between the mayor and Christoph: Christoph is there to deliver dog food. He needs the mayor to sign for the receipt. The mayor asks him to bend down so he can use Christoph’s back as a writing surface. Mathieu uses it to highlight the inequality between them, the power imbalance. Christoph doesn’t like it, but he puts up with it because it’s his job to please the clients. The mayor is aware of Christoph’s dependence. He presses the pen especially hard as he dots the i or crosses the t, producing two sharp sensations “that stung”6 Christoph’s spine. And as Christoph feels the stings, he notices one of the dogs looking at him. There is a silent communication between the dog and Christoph. Two dependent creatures, caught in a social system where importance is determined by cultural norms. Christoph sees cuteness. The dog seems to recognize a sympathetic soul. It’s a scene where humiliation is countered by sweetness.

By now we’ve seen Hélène’s response to corporate humiliation, how the body copes, and Christoph’s response to class humiliation, not internalizing it but letting his attention shift to something else. Dogs, his child, his friends.

Connemara alternates between Hélène and Christoph, their present tense and their memories. What links them is the same small town. She got out via the Bac, university, and Paris. She married well and played the game competently until she suffered a nervous breakdown. She and her family relocated back to the Grand Est region, settling in a designer house in Nancy, able to live well and at a less expense than in Paris. As if we can find wellbeing simply by rearranging external reality. Her external reality doesn’t even shift quite enough, it seems. She’s still working in the same soul-crushing industry of corporate consulting.

Christoph never had Hélène’s ambition to get out or get away. He was ambitious as a hockey player, but now that that’s over, he seems resigned to his life selling dog food — the dullness of traveling by car for sales and deliveries, gaining weight from too much reliance on convenient meals at all-night diners. While we can’t describe him as happy, he seems to find enough satisfaction in fatherhood and time with his two best friends. Things only begin to crack when his son’s mother announces that she’s going to live in another place to take a job that promises a better life for her and their son.

Mathieu gives us variety and contrast. Hélène was desperate in adolescence to get away, then resolved to return (sort of) when the Parisian life became unendurable. Christoph was motivated to be a big hockey star mainly so he could impress Charley, eventually the mother of his son. But when his hockey career fell apart, he seemed content to stay it out and accept his fate — and with a surprisingly decent attitude. We see the opposite reaction from both of his parents and his elder brother, none of whom was able to cope well with lost or denied opportunities. How well one person copes with disappointment or failure may be judged differently. You may, for instance, think Christoph drank too much beer and wasted too much of his time in the company of friends who encouraged bad habits. In general, though, you could say something like that about all of us and, frankly, all things considered, Christoph really doesn’t do too badly. He shows up to work on time, he does his job to the best of his ability. He gets his son to school, feeds him, takes care of him, loves him, plays with him, addresses him as Sweetie.

Hélène and Philippe pay a nanny to look after the kids when they’re at work. The few glimpses we see of her as a parent reveal how fed up she is, her impatience, her lack of resilience. She’s not a bad person. She reminds me of lots of people who don’t cope well when things fall short of expectation. She’s looking for happiness at little cost, a low risk escape. Some form of relief that creates the minimal disruption and discomfort.

For Hélène, Christoph represents the aspiration and the dreams she had as a teenager. When she was a teenager, she longed for the freedom of adulthood, but now she looks back on it and sees only the euphoria she felt from the dream. For Christoph, the affair with Hélène is attractive because it renews, if only for a split second, the rush of being desired again. He’s the handsome, athletic, celebrated hockey player in her eyes. One gets the feeling that both would like to have more than this — more than clandestine meet-ups in seedy hotels, far from acquaintances who might recognize them — but “more” never comes without risk. Commitment requires you to make hard choices.

The easy compensations, the difficult choices we avoid, are not so different from the smoke and shadows of classical noir. Both require lies and deception. Lying to ourselves, lying to others about who we really are. Classical noir imagined corruption hidden beneath society. Mathieu suggests corruption is laced into the structure of society itself, embedded in routines, aspirations, clichés, and the inherited wisdom people rarely stop to question.

The shadows are no longer in alleyways. They’re in office parks, consulting firms, exhausted marriages, regional decline, and the quiet humiliations people absorb into their bodies every day. We don’t need supernatural monsters or cinematic villains to show us what corrodes human beings. Often the real horror is quieter than that, folded into routines and compromises so ordinary we stop noticing them. The entertainment industry anesthetizes it for us, teaches us to make darkness stylish or dismissible. Mathieu asks us to look at it directly instead. That may be uncomfortable, but perhaps that discomfort is also a form of courage.

Notes

There is an account I follow on Instagram. It is one of my favorite outputs from the app. The algorithm knows it, of course: my almost involuntary likes and occasional comments make it something the app willingly pushes my way whenever it can.

It’s simple: people on the Paris Metro reading books. If it were a film, I would watch it before bed to relax. Just images of strangers on a train caught in solitary moments. Naturally, I like seeing the books they’re reading. But I also find myself fascinated by the person running the account — the unseen observer taking the video, later editing the book cover back into the frame in post-production. Meta glasses? Concealed iPhone footage?

Disturbing, a little. Especially because the account doesn’t always remember to blur faces.

There is no way I could ever get away with this kind of public voyeurism. I imagine there must be some law of social credit that permits certain people these liberties. Maybe if you live in Paris long enough and ride enough trains, people simply stop noticing you.

I was only in Paris once. My priorities were bookstores, the Louvre, the Luxembourg Gardens, and the Metro — all the places where you see plenty of people and speak to almost none of them except in the ways that count. Like the young man I sat beside in the Luxembourg Gardens while reading the Kierkegaard I’d bought at Shakespeare & Company. In the right place at the right moment, you discover silent languages for which there is no clean translation.

Like the boy in Geometry when you’re fifteen who reappears periodically. Not a love interest. Not a soulmate, but someone you recognize, who in memory becomes a recurring recognition at key moments. Why do we keep meeting in time but never really talking? Maybe because we don’t have to? Because I’m you and you’re me and we did this before and it’s fun to have this little secret, isn’t it? To meet in Geometry of all places. Points in infinity.

Les étrangers dans le train?

The allure of speculation and projection. It may be impossible to look at another person through such a window and not invent a thousand stories in your head.

In real presence with others — not through technology — self-consciousness interferes with observation. Maybe that’s part of why we increasingly choose to remain occupied in public. We are afraid to speak to the stranger beside us because we don’t know what will look back: acceptance, rejection, judgment.

So increasingly we retreat inward. We become more still while the train keeps moving.

The train itself becomes an entity on a track, woven into an infrastructure connecting the points in time that make up a life. All lives. Infinite reality.

Yesterday I was struck by a post showing a man reading Une histoire du théâtre by Philippe Tesson. He looked about a quarter of the way into the book. Leaning forward. Reading glasses sliding slightly down his nose. Probably the after-work commute, if the slouch and subdued exhaustion were any indication.

I clock the details: black walking shoes tightly laced, thin socks losing the war against gravity, a scuffed black briefcase between his feet with brass-colored buckles. Teacher, probably. Someone who walks quickly. Someone accustomed to lectures and meetings and deadlines. The cream denim pants slightly askew at one knee. Married. A real watch with a leather band instead of an Apple Watch counting steps and heartbeats. Valuable technology, certainly — but this man does not seem to need motivation to move. He already has somewhere to be.

Fifty, maybe. Reddish hair. Furrowed concentration. Fit not in the sculpted sense, but in the practical one: walking, breathing, surviving the daily Parisian machinery.

What does he teach? Acting? Stagecraft? Aesthetics? Did he write a dissertation on Chekhov and domestic life? Tennessee Williams and southern manners? Is he even French?

Jorge Luis Borges would have made an entire labyrinth out of this man and his theatre book. The book itself would travel. Change hands. Contain notes in the margins from previous readers. Perhaps a sentence written on one of the blank pages years ago by someone who understood they would never be seen again except through traces.

Oh, no, Borges would have them meet again. Everything happens again. Even parallel lines that never intersect will begin to mirror each other.

Two people at different points in time: one sitting on a train, lost in his reading and his thoughts; the other observing him through an app and inventing a story that perhaps the same man someday reads himself.

Maybe years later he finds it accidentally in a science fiction novel left on a café table. Or maybe the recurrence is smaller than that. Maybe it’s only the shoes that reappear in a secondhand store window. The briefcase at a flea market. The theatre book resold online with unfamiliar handwriting in the margins.

The objects continue the conversation long after the people lose touch.

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You may have guessed it: yes, I’ve been reading a good bit of Borges lately. This is the first time I have put my thoughts about his patterns in a long-form post, but I’ve already made some Notes, embedded below — four different Notes, all connected to each other, because connection is what it’s all about?

I went to the Baton Rouge River Center last night to see 84-year-old Bob Dylan and band belt out the critically acclaimed Rough and Rowdy set.

He sat center stage in a hoodie and did what he’s always done. He played his music. No fuss, no frills.

Just the man and his band.

He worked the keyboard, sometimes standing, stepping out from behind it once or twice. Two harmonica breaks—both of them landing exactly where they needed to, cutting clean through the room.

They started a little rough. Then they found it.
The rhythm came, and once it came, it held.

It’s extraordinary for any octogenarian. More so when you consider that he’s been touring, in one form or another, since 1988—the long arc people call the Never Ending Tour. The pandemic paused it. In that pause, he released his 39th album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. The tour that followed was supposed to end in 2024.

But Bob?

He wanted to keep going.

So he added more shows. And now we’re in 2026 and he is still on the move.

You could say the extension is driven by demand. Of course there’s demand, but it’s more than that. It’s him.

Dylan doesn’t work the stage. He never did. He stands, he plays, he moves when he needs to.

What he wants—what he has always wanted—is to play the music.

And increasingly, he wants to do it without distraction—or being one.

He doesn’t want photographs. He doesn’t want the performance mediated through a thousand small glowing screens. The audience is there for the show, and the show is his. That’s the contract.

At the Baton Rouge event, every phone was locked in a Yondr pouch before the lights went down.

His show, his rules.

A minor inconvenience, maybe. But a meaningful one.

Because the alternative—the one we’ve all come to accept—is a room full of raised arms, lenses pointed forward, attention split between the moment and its documentation. From the stage, that must look like something close to surveillance.

At 84, under stage lights that are unforgiving at any age, I don’t blame him for resisting that.

After the show, I plugged the hoodie question into a search engine. Photos of Dylan on stage in the hoodie are posted on Reddit and TikTok. Not from Baton Rouge, but from other shows on the same tour.

It irritated me more than I expected.

Because it breaks the terms of something that had, for a brief hour and a half, felt intact. A room without phones. A performance that wasn’t immediately flattened into content.

If people don’t like the rules, they don’t have to go.
But if you’re there, you’re there on his terms.

I wish I had been thinking more clearly; I would have downvoted the Reddit post. (I don’t do anything on TikTok.) If people don’t like the measures the tour takes to prevent photos of the performance, too bad. It’s not an arbitrary request.

In my opinion, it’s a an annoyance worth enduring for the privilege of hearing Bob Dylan live. Especially if the sacrifice makes the performance better because the star is unbothered, feels comfortable and happy.

An hour and a half without an iPhone is nothing.
An hour and a half in the room with Dylan, at this point in his life, is not nothing.

It won’t happen again in quite the same way. It can’t.

He keeps adding dates to a tour that has already outlived its original design. That extension isn’t logistical. It’s personal. It’s the expression of a man who still wants—insists—on doing what he loves.

He wants to play the music and let the music breathe in its own way.

Without a phone that has too many superfluous abilities, the mind does what it used to do at concerts—wanders, attaches, drifts, returns—without needing to hold anything up to prove it was there.

I think of the concert scene in Howards End, when Forster dwells on the Schlegel siblings carried along not just by Beethoven, but by their own interior weather as the music moves through them. Tibby’s attention was fractured much as mine was in the Dylan concert, not away from the music but into something the music made possible. Instead of splitting outward, as happens when we record moments with our phones, the music pulls the attention inward.

For all the diligence of the workers of the venue, there is no guarantee that all audience phones will be detected. What I saw on Reddit proves that there is always someone audacious enough to flout the rules.

The hoodie, then, feels like more than a wish to hide.

It feels like a continuation of resistance. A kind of last defense. If the system fails—if a camera slips through—there is still shadow.

There is still some part of him that remains his.

He just wants to do music. He wants to do music badly enough to keep touring in spite of the aggravation.

He has given his heart—to the music, to the world.

But because of the boundaries he has always taken care to establish, there is still some part of him that remains only his.

That feels right.

In the age of algorithms, there is no website that will save us.

I confess, when I turned to Substack in 2022, I thought it might. As a fledgling writer coming from Medium, I recognized the cues: Get out. People are leaving. The algorithms have turned.

They favor influencers. Popularity loops. A kind of performance that feels less and less human.

So I migrated.

I wrote short pieces—because short gets read, right? Bistro theatre, Sartre and the Waiter, Stoicism, indie films, a rant about a bad adaptation, too much enthusiasm about Obi Wan Kenobi. Nothing monumental. Some of it, frankly, embarrassing now.

But those pieces made me happy. And they made me a better writer.

I’m glad I had a place to sharpen my voice when hardly anyone was looking.

There still aren’t many people looking.

That’s part of what I want to write about here—not as a complaint. Truthfully, I’m grateful.

This past year—though part of me still feels stuck in 2025—I’ve been rebelling against what I think of as the validation market.

You’ve heard it called the Attention Economy. But that framing feels too neutral. Too polite.

Attention isn’t just scarce anymore—it’s distorted.

At the individual level, we feel a deficit. But at scale, there’s an overdose. A kind of cultural diabetic coma. Attention is everywhere, but it lacks focus.

It makes me think of an episode of Doctor Who—the one where David Tennant and Billie Piper go back to Coronation Day, June 2, 1953. The first mass television event. Everyone watching. Everyone focused.

An alien hiding in electrical currents uses that attention—millions of people staring at their televisions—to feed itself and escape with stolen energy.

That’s what it feels like scrolling now.

All of us staring into glowing rectangles, feeding something we don’t understand.

Reels of children reacting to other children. Pets being scolded. Endless loops of engineered reaction.

To quote :
“Why has everything become so stupid?”

Because stupidity scales.

That is what wins in the validation race.

It used to be: be sexy.

But sexy became saturated. Then it became frightening.

Now it’s something else—something louder, flatter, more desperate.

And I wonder—quietly, maybe foolishly—if the outcome will be a split:

The people who stay online, competing to out-stupid one another…

…and the people who drift back toward physical spaces. Bookstores. Coffee shops. Conversations.

A girl can dream.

recently wrote about refusal to engage with Substack Notes—the algorithmic layer that pushes high-engagement content outward, flattening everything into sameness.

He’s right.

Why do platforms insist on this?

Why not build systems that surface what we individually value, instead of forcing convergence?

Because sameness is profitable.

Because individuality is harder to scale.

Because, at some level, the system does not want you to be yourself—it wants you to be legible, predictable, and optimizable.

Two years ago, argued for dropping out of the validation race.

Not by leaving platforms entirely—but by disengaging from the need to be seen.

Just write.

Use Notes if you want. Post if you want. But release the expectation of attention.

Because attention-seeking has never worked—not really. Even before algorithms, people resisted it.

Now, with algorithms, it’s simply mechanized.

And yet, we can’t fully leave.

Social media has become a kind of modern calling card. In a world where emails go unanswered, you either exist on these platforms or risk becoming unreachable.

So I’ve made my compromises.

Instagram lives on my iPad, not my phone. I don’t carry it with me.

When I go out, I bring a book.

When I’m standing in line or sitting in a waiting room, I read. While others scroll, I turn pages.

It’s a small act of resistance. But it matters.

(Anthony Marigold is taking algorithm resistance to a seriously heroic level. I regard his as a small ember—steady, alive—in a very dark tunnel.)

I don’t think leaving Substack is the answer either.

New platforms will emerge. They always do. And eventually, the same forces will find them.

It’s not a platform problem. It’s a system problem.

And I would rather spend my time writing than fighting a system I cannot win against.

I’ve been thinking about this constantly—especially since I paid for a press release for The Signal Between Us.

Now the emails come daily.

Marketing consultants. Visibility strategists. Growth experts. Companies like Signal Clarity offering their formulas.

All promising the same thing: attention.

As if attention can be purchased in meaningful quantities.

As if you can spend your way into being read.

My book is at a disadvantage in this economy.

It can’t compete with hot vampires, werewolves, and erotica.

It’s about silence. Memory. Emotional distance. The slow, fragile work of connection.

The people who would love it aren’t being targeted by ads.

They’re not even being shown where to look.

And I don’t believe I can trick an algorithm into changing that.

Not with money. Not with strategy.

Certainly not with Amazon ads.

A book like mine travels differently.

It moves through conversation. Through recommendation. Through moments of recognition between people.

Hand to hand. Eye contact. A quiet “you might like this.”

Which is terrifying for me.

Because I live with Avoidant Personality Disorder. Social anxiety. The whole constellation.

And yet—that is exactly what this kind of work demands.

Not scrollers. Not influencers.

Readers.

So I’m trying.

This Saturday, a Goodreads giveaway goes live: one hundred Kindle copies of The Signal Between Us.

A small gesture. But a meaningful one.

Yes, Goodreads is corporate owned. Yes, it isn’t perfect. And yes, some readers are migrating to decentralized counterparts like StoryGraph.

But my thinking is simple:

If attention is going to exist somewhere, let it at least exist in spaces where people are looking for books.

Because when people find books, there’s still a chance—however small—that they might read them.

And people reading books, these days?

That’s still a bet I’m willing to make.

A girl can dream.

Ashley Rovira is the author of The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story and the founder of Heavy Crown Press, where she writes about neurodivergence, fracture, and the spaces between what is felt and what is said.

There are moments one always remembers.

Tying your shoelaces without help for the first time.
Staying upright on a bicycle without training wheels.
The first time you take the exit ramp off the 405, dazed and slightly out of breath, heart racing.

And then there is the first moment you picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Turned the pages to that unforgettable opening:

Early 2003 or late 2002.
An apartment in Ventura, California.

I’ll never forget the edition—Scholastic, mass market paperback. It quickly became the most precious book I’d opened in a long time.

How long did it take me to read it? A day? Maybe two. No more.

The trip to the bookstore to buy the second book became the most important item on my to-do list. And the sadness, after finishing Book Four—knowing there would be a long wait before Book Five—felt, at the time, like a kind of loss. (Goodness, I still remember the trip to Waldenbooks to get my preordered copy of Book Five, and later, reading Book Six on the tram up to Universal Citywalk where I worked at that time.)

Of course the books were about me.

Harry was me. Hermione was me. Luna, Snape, McGonagall. They were all me in some way or another.

I was no different from any other reader in believing that I belonged on the train to Hogwarts. Recognition. Resonance. It was all there. It was powerful.

Imagine, then, being one of the two boys, in 1999, auditioning for the lead role.

Daniel Radcliffe…

…and the other one.

Numéro Deux.

The novel by David Foenkinos is about that other boy.

Fictionalized, but real in essence. Because of course there was another boy.

Foenkinos names him Martin Hill.

The son of John Hill, of London, and Jeanne, of Paris.

The first chapters recount how John and Jeanne met, how they fell in love on a stroll to a cemetery after making love. The years pass. On her side, love gives way to disillusionment. By the time Martin is ten, he is the child of a broken home, traveling alone between his parents on the Eurostar.

I listened to the audiobook of Second Best, the English-language edition of Numéro Deux. Translated by Megan Jones and read by Joe Thomas.

I hit pause midway through Chapter 30, just after the crushing moment when the rejection lands. That was when I went back to the beginning just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. The analogies are poignant. It’s fiction, but it’s real life too.

A novel like this one doesn’t depend on suspense. There is curiosity, yes—anticipation—but the real question is what happens after.

What happens to Martin once he is not chosen?

How does he cope?

The short answer: about as well as you might expect for a ten-year-old.

Even one already acquainted with disappointment. A child who has learned, early, what it means to be in transit—shuttled back and forth across the Channel between his parents, like an object in motion, not entirely belonging to either side.

Jane Austen once observed—in Sense and Sensibility—that it is the sense of singularity that sharpens suffering.

There is, perhaps, a strange consolation in knowing one is not alone.

Many children experience the fracture of a broken home. That knowledge does not remove the pain, but it places it within a shared condition.

But this—missing the role of Harry Potter by a single decision, a single difference between you and the one who was chosen—this is something else.

We all experience rejection. Even at ten.

Not being picked for the school play. Being passed over in a game of dodgeball.

But the role of Harry Potter—the rarity of it, the magnitude of it—is matched only by the scale of its loss.

It is not only the rejection that stings.

It is the feeling that it is about him—that he failed, that he lacked something essential.

Worsened by the sense that it happened to him alone.

There is only one Numéro Deux.

This line from Chapter 29 is devastating:

For the reader—listener, in my case—the pain is not felt through Martin alone, but through his parents as well.

Foenkinos imagines that John takes it personally. He internalizes the loss, as if the failure could be traced back to him—to something flawed, something insufficient, something passed down.

A problematic inheritance.

As though the difference—the small, elusive difference—has always been there, waiting, long before the audition ever took place.

Small, decisive, impossible-to-articulate differences. That’s what fate or luck comes down to.

Foenkinos reminds us, again and again throughout the book, that great things hinge on small moments.

A producer decides—years earlier—that he will never deliver bad news except in person. A rule born of compassion. And yet, in practice, it makes the blow worse.

A cough, in a throwaway moment.
A chance meeting in a place one does not usually go.

We call it fate. Or luck—if it ends well.

But if it ends badly?

“As luck would have it.”

As though luck were always lucky.

Of course it isn’t. Sometimes it’s rotten.

Bad luck.

What is it, really, but disappointment reduced to something trite? A way of softening the truth?

Your hopes and dreams hinge on small, contingent encounters. A change in trajectory brought about by something as slight as a cough, or one person’s fleeting perception of another’s fragility.

Since my mother joined the MFA program at LSU, I’ve known many actors. One was my stepfather—though not technically so. (I wrote about him here, shortly after his death early in 2023.) I’ve interviewed actors here who well know the pain of rejection after an audition.

Because no matter how successful an actor becomes, that success is built on repeated exposure to that sting.

And yet a role like Harry Potter—that is something else entirely.

The one in a million.

The jackpot. The lottery to end all lotteries.

Harry Potter is not just a role. It is an experience. A universal one.

If you read those books—if you felt them, and returned to them, again and again—then you have a stake in it.

A share in this strange market, where the currency is hope, and the transaction is something like magic.

The second part of the story is difficult to get through. Alarming, triggering physical abuse—an explicit parallel to the abuse Harry Potter suffers at the hands of the Dursleys. That was the most difficult thing for me. I felt rage toward Martin’s mother, Jeanne, for her obliviousness and the absence that allowed the abuse to continue.

Martin’s inner turmoil gets worse as he can’t find the words to articulate his pain. He wants to talk, but he can’t form the words. The words just get stuck somewhere, unreachable.

Withdrawal deepens the pain.

Foenkinos refers to a “hierarchy of pain.” Whenever a new Harry Potter book comes out, that is the pinnacle. The film adaptations are next in degree of pain. There is a devastating moment when Jeanne, a journalist, conspires to confront J.K. Rowling, hoping for some guidance or some kind of sign that might help Martin, only to have J.K. Rowling cancel the interview at the last minute.

Martin notices the parallels between the Harry Potter universe and his own. He feels the likeness between his stepfather and Voldemort, between his stepbrother and Dudley Dursley. It’s as if, on some level, the abusers of Martin sense the fragility inside him and derive pleasure from exposing it. It’s a literal reign of terror, as Martin’s dread of the abuse adds fuel to an already roaring fire and the anticipation of it amounts to “the greatest achievement of a tormenter—to provoke a kind of muted terror without having to do a thing.” (Part II, Chapter XXII.)

There is a fundamental craving in us: to be wanted—not for use, but for value—and to feel that we have been chosen.

To know that what is inside us is not merely acceptable, but good. Worth loving.

At the age of ten, Martin felt all of this but didn’t know how to trace it. It just morphed into pain with no apparent cause, shame with nowhere to go but deeper inside. There’s a dramatic event at the end of the second part that leads into Part III and feels like a slow exhale. It’s a reprieve. As a listener, I literally exhaled at this juncture. I felt my body relax.

At the age of ten, Martin feels all of this without knowing how to name it.

It gathers instead as pain without a clear source. Shame with nowhere to go but inward.

At the end of the second part, something shifts.

A dramatic event—one that opens into Part III—and it feels, quite simply, like an exhale.

As a listener, I felt it physically. My body relaxed.

The abuse is over. Martin finds a measure of peace.

I love that one of his refuges is the Louvre.

The Louvre is so vast, so overwhelming in its beauty, that it becomes more than a sanctuary. It becomes something unreal.

Reality stops at the turnstile. It cannot enter.

Inside, everything is suspended.

Martin notices the painting that hangs opposite the Mona Lisa: The Wedding at Cana, by Paolo Veronese.

And he draws a quiet analogy.

In the presence of the chosen one, everything else recedes.

We know how this works. We gather before the Mona Lisa. We give it our attention, our reverence.

And just across the room—something immense, luminous, extraordinary—remains, for the most part, unseen.

A Numéro Deux.

Not lesser.

But living, always, in the shadow of what has been chosen.

Martin now has one of life’s rarest gifts: space.

Space to simply be.

He works in the Louvre, largely unnoticed. And for once, that is not a curse, but a relief.

Here, he can breathe.

He doesn’t have to speak.

He doesn’t have to perform.

He doesn’t have to pretend that everything is all right.

For once, everything is.

He is all right.

Nothing is resolved. Nothing has been repaired.

But something essential has shifted.

For the first time since early childhood, there is space around him—space around his thoughts, his feelings.

They are no longer pressing in on him from all sides.

They can exist.

And so can he.

We are close to the end.

The space he has found allows something to open. Slowly.

There is movement forward, then retraction. He opens, something triggers him, he closes again. He experiments with ways of coping. There is a brief turn toward alcohol. There are small advances.

And then, something steadier.

At the Louvre, he finds a place that suits him. A promotion. A rhythm. A form of belonging that leads, gradually, to friendship.

It is not transformation. It is not resolution.

But it is movement.

The real beauty comes in the final chapters, in an unexpected meeting between Martin and Daniel Radcliffe.

Here, fiction and reality collide in a way that feels almost impossible—and yet entirely right.

It is a daring choice: to bring a real person into a fictional life.

Foenkinos does it with remarkable care.

Radcliffe enters the story not as a likeness, but as an opposite. Not a reflection, but an alternative.

The life that was chosen.

And what emerges from their encounter is something quietly extraordinary.

Not triumph. Not vindication.

Recognition.

Because Radcliffe, too, has suffered.

He, too, has wondered about the other boy.

The one who was not chosen.

The Numéro Deux.

And he has asked himself a question that unsettles everything:

Would that life have been better?

What if the one who was chosen carries his own version of the loss?

What if the difference—the small, decisive difference—does not lead to a better life, only a different one?

It is a strange gift, to imagine meeting the version of yourself who received what you lost.

To speak with the one who was chosen where you were not.

To see, in that encounter, not superiority or failure, but divergence.

Two lives, shaped by a moment too small to name.

And in that recognition, something loosens.

What once felt suffocating now feels manageable.

Hopeless turns into possibility.

We all want to be Harry. Chosen, valued, validated.

One child got to be him on the screen.

But perhaps being Harry was never the point.

Perhaps the point is to choose ourselves.

Because in our own story, we’re not ‘the other one.’

If you’re interested in reading, I’ve included links below. You can order through Bookshop.org to support independent bookstores, through Barnes & Noble or through Amazon. Paperback and hardcover editions are available across platforms; the ebook is available through Amazon only.

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Order Hardcover (Ingram Spark)

Bookshop.org (Paperback or Hardcover)

Barnes & Noble (Paperback or Hardcover)

Amazon (Paperback, Hardcover, or Kindle)

Everyone is saying it now. Or if not saying it, then feeling it—somewhere beneath the surface, like pressure before a storm. The sense that something is off. That the world has become harder to read, harder to trust, harder to name.

It shows up in small ways. A hesitation before accepting a fact. A quiet suspicion of expertise. A sense that institutions—once slow, stable, and authoritative—are now either fractured or performing stability rather than embodying it. We move through a landscape saturated with information to the point of vertigo.

It is tempting to try to locate a beginning—to point to moments when there was a turn: an election, a referendum, a crisis. Trump. Brexit. The Tea Party. 9/11. Each offers itself as an origin story, a clean break between before and after.

But the feeling resists that kind of precision. It suggests something older, more gradual. Not a rupture, but an accumulation. A long erosion of shared frameworks for understanding what is real, what is true, what can be trusted.

Go back far enough and the pattern begins to repeat. The language changes, the stakes shift, but the underlying structure remains: competing narratives, institutional strain, a growing distance between lived experience and official explanation. The present does not feel unprecedented—only intensified.

We live inside it.

Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene

Graham Greene didn’t write ordinary noir—whatever that would be. He was totally different from Chandler and Hammett. His spy “entertainments,” as he called them, were less about systems than individuals. Individuals caught up in those systems. People pulled into espionage while trying to do other things.

In Our Man in Havana, the central tension is not simply between truth and lies, or crime and evidence, but between systems and persons.

Religion, nation, ideology—these are systems. They rely on repetition, belief, and loyalty at scale. They offer structure, but they also demand submission.

Against them stands something smaller and far less stable: the individual life lived for a person rather than an idea.

Wormold doesn’t belongs to systems. He is detached from Milly’s Catholicism, unmoved by patriotism, and only loosely attached to capitalism, where even selling vacuum cleaners becomes nearly impossible in a world shaped by Cold War fear—where “atomic” power repels more than it attracts.

He fails within every system he encounters.

So he invents one.

In the absence of success, he fabricates it—agents, networks, intelligence. And yet his fiction somehow folds into reality. It enters the machinery of espionage and operates outside of his control, endangering lives.

Beatrice recognizes the absurdity of the game because she has lived inside it. But she also sees something else in Wormold: a way of moving outside the system, improvising rather than obeying.

Milly, too, appears to belong to a system—Catholic, structured, moral—but her instincts mirror her father’s. She plays the game, but does not fully inhabit it. Beatrice sees this, and comes to love them both.

It is a dangerous love only because it collides with a world organized around systems—espionage, ideology, Cold War logic.

Greene leaves us with a quiet, impossible proposition: that if loyalty to persons replaced loyalty to systems, the world might be less efficient, less coherent—but far less violent.

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The indie bookstore of my Baton Rouge childhood was Elliot’s. It sat in a shopping center that is now a Walmart, just a few doors down from Coffee Call—not the Coffee Call of today, but the one I remember from the 80s and 90s, with its unmistakable art deco style and picturesque facade.

The current location of Coffee Call still carries an echo of that design, but from the outside—with a drive-thru running along the side—it feels like a shadow of what it once was.

That’s life. Nothing stays exactly the same.

Even the most committed “shop local” advocates know how hard it is to resist the gravity of Walmart and Target—prices, convenience, everything under one roof. Still, there was something particular about the old Sunday rhythm: church, then coffee at a locally owned café, then a slow walk through an independent bookstore just a few steps away, and finally a stop at the candy store in that same shopping center.

Local ownership. Local pride. A small ecosystem of books, coffee, and sweets.

Coffee Call survived. I’m pleased about that. It moved, changed, adapted—but it’s still here. Elliot’s is gone, edged out by the Barnes & Noble that opened on Corporate Boulevard. The candy store is gone too.

Years later, living in the Philly suburbs during my time in the Navy, I watched You’ve Got Mail. I’ve loved it ever since. Tom Hanks opens his big-box “Fox Books” around the corner from Meg Ryan’s The Shop Around the Corner. It felt familiar—Elliot’s and Barnes & Noble in different costumes, with Starbucks quietly threading through the background.

A delightful rom-com by Nora Ephron—and a modernization of a Jimmy Stewart classic.

But I never held it against Barnes & Noble.

They had books—so many books—and places to sit, to linger. That mattered. It still does. I’ve always loved reading spaces more or less indiscriminately. Indie, chain, mall store, hole-in-the-wall used emporium—it didn’t matter. If there were books, I was happy.

Then came the Nook.

I bought mine at the Barnes & Noble in Long Beach. I loved it immediately—the lightness, the portability, the idea of carrying an entire library in my hand. I filled it quickly.

And then, sometime around 2013, those ebooks were simply… gone.

The Nook ecosystem shifted. Access changed. Titles disappeared. Whatever the technical explanation, the experience was simple: I had paid for ebooks I could no longer access.

That felt like a breach.

I had already forgiven Barnes & Noble for being the “Fox Books” to Elliot’s. But this—this was different. So I moved to Kindle, like many people did. Convenience won again.

And yet.

🎁🔗 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/barnes-noble-popularity/686369/?gift=DYYBduXa3PZ-B9FJxeofv3dXv8r5r67fIve5OLgc9EQ

There’s a recent piece in The Atlantic by Henry Grabar about the shifting perception of Barnes & Noble—how the old narrative of chain versus indie doesn’t quite hold anymore. The terrain has changed. The real divide now is something else entirely.

Ten years later, there is something different about the book business. Maybe it’s social media, Silicon Valley fatigue. Maybe it’s the weight of too much frictionless everything—the constant availability, the algorithmic sameness, the quiet sense that something human has been flattened in the process.

I still use Amazon. I publish through it. I can’t afford not to.

But I also find myself rooting—for places, for spaces, for something a little less efficient and a little more alive.

Barnes & Noble, of all places, seems to be finding its footing again. A chain, yes. A former disruptor, absolutely. But also—now—something closer to a steward of physical browsing, of discovery, of presence.

Third time’s a charm, maybe.

I emailed the manager at the Perkins Rowe location here in Baton Rouge, asking if they might be interested in carrying my book on consignment.

He said yes.

More than that—he offered me a signing. I didn’t even ask.

So on Saturday, June 27, I’ll be there from 2 to 4.

Not at Elliot’s. That place is gone.

But in a bookstore. A chain, yes—but as that Atlantic piece suggests, the old lines have blurred. It’s no longer simply indie versus corporate. It’s something more fundamental: presence versus frictionless convenience.

A place where you walk in, pick up a book, carry it in your hands. Where you stand in line. Where you wait your turn. Where a person rings you up at a register.

Books in hand. People employed. Time, acknowledged.

The transaction isn’t the point anymore. The encounter is.

It’s not that we don’t value indie stores. I do. My book is also on consignment at Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs—a place that holds exactly the kind of quiet, local magic I grew up with.

But this—this revision of an old economic argument—is part of the same ecosystem too, now. A different branch of it.

So on Saturday, June 27, I’ll be at the Barnes & Noble at Perkins Rowe—from two to four, standing behind a table, in the middle of that exchange. Not nostalgic for what’s gone, but participating in what remains.

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Wake Up Dead Man, the third and latest Knives Out mystery on Netflix, is a hoot—though a darker one than its predecessors. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery finds Daniel Craig returning as private eye Benoit Blanc, this time stepping into a quaint village where Old World and New World sensibilities collide in unsettling ways.

Rian Johnson assembles another impeccable ensemble: Josh O’Connor, Andrew Scott, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Cailee Spaeny, and Daryl McCormack—a transatlantic mix that quietly reinforces the film’s central idea: hypocrisy travels well.

At the center are two priests, played by Brolin and O’Connor. O’Connor, who previously wore the collar as Mr. Elton in the 2020 adaptation of Emma, returns here as a Catholic priest marked by a violent past—reformed, perhaps, but unmistakably burdened. There is nothing more suspicious than a man who insists he has changed.

And yet it isn’t O’Connor who unsettles most—it’s Brolin. His Wicks exudes a controlled menace, the kind that doesn’t need to announce itself. Opposite him, Close (playing Martha) is formidable, operating at the other extreme: composed, knowing, and quietly terrifying. As O’Connor’s character observes, Wicks may be in charge, but Martha is the one who knows where the bodies are buried.

The structure is pure Agatha Christie: a closed circle of suspects, a carefully constructed social microcosm. The village and church feel like they could belong to a Miss Marple story—if Miss Marple wandered into something far more morally volatile.

Because this is where the film sharpens.

Patriarchy has no borders. Hypocrisy is universal. Emotional manipulation transcends culture, language, and even belief. Religion, in Johnson’s hands, becomes less a doctrine than a stage on which power performs itself.

There’s a father–son reveal that leans knowingly into myth—its echo of Star Wars (“we will rule together”) both unsettling and absurd. It’s one of several moments where the film invites you to laugh—and then immediately questions why you did.

That tonal balance is the film’s real achievement.

It is dark, often uncomfortably so. But it is also funny—sharply, deliberately funny. And that humor doesn’t dilute the weight of its subject. If anything, it exposes it. Religion, after all, carries contradictions that resist resolution and leaves behind wounds that don’t easily close. To find humor within that space without trivializing it is no small feat.

Here, the humor works because it feels true.

The absurdity isn’t imposed. It’s revealed.

The laughter cuts through.

Not as relief, exactly—but as release. A loosening of tension just enough to let something else in. The mind opens a fraction, and in that opening, a pattern begins to take shape.

It is not new.

A man formed within a system that protects him, elevates him, names him shepherd—only for him to grow quietly resentful of the very flock that sustains his authority. Their devotion becomes a mirror he cannot bear to look into for too long. Their freedom, however small, becomes intolerable.

Control, then, becomes the answer. Not loudly. Not all at once. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, until it feels like doctrine.

He cannot turn his anger upward—toward the structure that made him—so he redirects it. Sideways. Downward. Toward the one who can be named, isolated, and offered up.

A scapegoat.

A woman, often. The harlot. The witch. The one whose existence can be reframed as disorder. In another story, she might wear a pointed hat and green skin. In this one, she carries the weight of knowledge—of what has been done, and by whom.

What the film understands—quietly, almost too well—is that patriarchy does not depend on geography. It travels. It adapts. It survives translation.

The laughter passes. The story resolves.

But something quieter settles in its place—the recognition of a pattern that does not end when the film does.

Nature and science stand in tension in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. At the beginning of the novel, however, life is still harmonious. That harmony is what will be broken.

In Frankenstein (2025), directed by Guillermo del Toro, there is a significant shift. Victor is not romanticized, nor is his upbringing treated with nostalgia. The film condenses his background into a series of striking visualizations: the silent, gentle mother cloaked in red; the overbearing father pushing science onto Victor; the mother’s death in childbirth; and the father’s preference for the lighter, more carefree William over the brooding elder son.

But it is with the mother’s death, and Victor’s response to it, that sympathy ends. He turns away from life and toward science, becoming cold in the image of the father he resented.

This is part of the film’s composite approach to a central contrast: inherited and taught masculine obsession versus a gentler, intuitive feminine nature. The name “Victor,” imposed on both father and son (a departure from Shelley), signals the will to conquer. He is the one who would conquer nature. The world he builds stands in opposition to the natural world embodied first by the mother and later by Elizabeth.

Another composite appears in Heinrich Harlander, who blends elements of Shelley’s Henry Clerval and his merchant father. He represents industry—the financial and practical force that enables Victor’s ambition. The Harlander combination is interesting because it compresses Henry Clerval’s predilection for the Middle Ages (a more chivalrous, romantic time prior to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment) and his father’s bias against liberal education. It also compresses the story into something where the tension lies chiefly between conquest and intuitive gentleness rather than straightforward good and evil.

The film, then, is a modern retelling that frames the creator much more clearly as the villain. Where the novel leaves moral judgment ambiguous, the film sharpens it: the creator fails his creature. He seeks forgiveness. The creature grants it and endures—“brokenly,” to borrow the line from Lord Byron on which the film closes.

The world of science, war, and destruction is presented as masculine—Victor’s domain—perpetually at odds with nature. This is made visual in the wolves, in weapons, and in the cold laboratory space. In contrast, butterflies—symbols of beauty and innocence—are associated with Elizabeth and the feminine.

The creature comes to understand violence as inevitable in the world man has made. “Nature calms, knowledge unhinges.” The butterfly becomes a haunting symbol of transformation: a being that simply lives on, with “three hearts, multiple eyes, and white blood,” and, as Elizabeth observes, a “fascinating lack of choice.”

Choice, she says, is uniquely human—“the seat of the soul,” a gift of the creator. Elizabeth, who does not belong to the harsh masculine world, chooses life. Victor chooses its corruption.

One of the most critical changes the film makes is moral. The creature is less a perversion of life than a miraculous assemblage of the “discarded dead” of endless wars driven by human ambition. And yet, in spite of this origin, Elizabeth recognizes in him something she herself has long sought but could not name: love. She echoes the allusions drawn by Shelley to Milton. “To be lost and found: that is the lifespan of love,” she says, invoking the ideal.

The creature’s instinct is kindness, seen in his care for the cottagers and his bond with the blind old man. The novel leaves open the question of whether the creature is good or evil. The film makes a clearer choice: the creature is good, and he is wronged—abandoned and denied.

The head of Medusa looms over the creation process in Victor’s laboratory. The image reinforces the film’s central inversion: what is created is not inherently monstrous, but made so by the gaze that fears and rejects it. It is one of many visual symbols that compliments the technical achievements of the film at the 98th Academy Awards: production design, costume design, and makeup and hairstyling. These are not merely aesthetic or atmospheric, but acknowledgments of how deeply the visual language supports the story’s argument. From the recurring red of blood and life, to the stark contrast between the cold laboratory and the living world of nature, every detail is constructed to reflect a world out of balance—a world in which creation has been severed from responsibility.

The creature is made unhappy in isolation. His rage emerges as a response to rejection and the fearful attitude from others that pushes them to violence. He is also envious of the companionship that is denied him. Victor refuses to give him a mate, fearing the creation of a new race. And so the film raises, without resolving, its central question:

What gives man the right to play God—to decide who lives and who must remain alone?

The creature, like the butterfly—and like women in Shelley’s world—is denied choice. He must go on alone.

And yet there is a moment of transformation. After forgiving Victor, the creature saves the sailors. In that act, he becomes something more than what was made of him.

Shelley’s novel has often been read as a warning about scientific progress and its consequences—from industrialization to climate change. The film extends that warning into the present. If the creature represents what humanity creates, then the true question is not whether creation is monstrous.

It is whether the creator will act with responsibility.

Man has created artificial intelligence. The test now may be the same: whether we guide what we create ethically, or abandon it. That choice may determine whether our creations destroy us—or expand our understanding of what it means to be human.

Nobody loses an Oscar. There is winning, and there is not winning. You cannot lose what you never possessed. A nomination is already the honor; the winner is simply the artist the Academy chooses to recognize for that work in that year.

Which is why the speeches often matter more than the statues. When Michael B. Jordan accepted his award for The Sinners, he spoke about the people who believed in him early—the ones who bet on him—and promised he would keep showing up for them. It was a reminder that the real engine behind great work is never ego. It’s the heart.

That idea stayed with me as I wrote this analysis and review of Marty Supreme, a film that appears at first to be about ambition and narcissism, but gradually reveals something very different.

One of the nominees who did not win an Oscar this year is an actor who has captured extraordinary attention in recent years: Timothée Chalamet. His performance as Bob Dylan was so convincing that it permanently fused actor and legend in the mind of the audience. I remember a line from Joan Baez describing Dylan as someone who seemed to arrive already a legend. Chalamet’s rise carries something of that same aura, and that kind of ascent always carries danger. A man cannot survive it unless he finds a way to carve out a space where he remembers who he is. Dylan famously retreated to Woodstock, New York for precisely that reason.

After the Dylan performance, expectations for Marty Supreme were high. Chalamet did not disappoint. On the contrary, he did exactly what Michael B. Jordan described in his speech: he showed up and gave everything he had.

On the surface, Marty Supreme looks like a film about a narcissist. That’s certainly how I saw it through the first half—maybe even three quarters—of the story. But somewhere along the way I began to realize that Marty is not a narcissist at all. He is the product of narcissism. He has been formed inside a narcissistic culture and forced to survive it. He strives to rise above it, but in the end the miracle of his story is simpler: he survives it without becoming it.

I’m going to discuss the film with spoilers. I want to show you the story as I experienced it, because the film ultimately circles around something fundamental. It circles around the moment when a person cracks. Some of us experience that moment the way Marty does—if we’re lucky. That may sound strange if you think of the film as a tragedy. On the surface it certainly appears that way: failed ambition, humiliations, relentless curveballs in a brutal world.

But when you understand life through the lens of the crack-up, the story changes. You begin to recognize that moment of fracture in every narrative worth telling.

Some critics have complained about the frenetic pacing of the film. I understand that reaction. Fifteen minutes into it I felt the same vertigo. In fact, the movie deserves a warning label: may cause dizziness. At first I resented the stylistic choice by director Josh Safdie. I resented being thrown into a world that felt like the living hell moralists describe when they try to scare people into righteousness—a world dominated by ruthless masculine competition, where greed and humiliation rule and everyone, especially women, is expected to know their place.

But gradually something remarkable becomes clear. The filmmakers have taken the interior life of their protagonist and made it visible. The chaos we see—the relentless hustling, the naked greed, the cutthroat ambition—is not simply the environment Marty inhabits. It is the landscape of his mind.

The opening credits show conception. Here is where life begins.

The film then shows us what Marty was born into: a culture of hustling, manipulation, and instability. The floor can literally collapse beneath you—sometimes in the form of a bathtub crashing through the ceiling. The dream of climbing out of that world drives him forward.

Table tennis becomes the vehicle of that escape.

The true turning point comes when Marty is forced into humiliation he cannot escape. He cannot charm his way out of it. He cannot hustle the room. He cannot lie—to anyone, including himself. In that moment he is laid bare.

The crack appears.

And that crack becomes the beginning of something else.

By the end of the film the closing image mirrors the opening. If the opening was conception, the ending is birth—this time a moral one.

Marty walks into the hospital and says quietly, “I’m the father.” There is no performance in the line, no drama, just a simple admission of reality. Around him we hear the crying of newborns. Tears run down his face as the song “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” begins to play.

The book closes.

This is not the triumph of ambition. It is the recognition that life cannot be hustled into meaning. The crack-up has revealed what matters.

Perhaps that is why the Academy gave the film nothing. It is not a film anyone can comfortably love. It shows us what the world often is: a corrupt system that must be survived. It shows the cost of remaining intact inside a narcissistic culture. If you remain intact in such a system, you become part of it. That is not overcoming. That is surrender.

Marty’s story suggests something harder and stranger: that the real act of survival is to crack.

Only then can you begin to live honestly.

From here the film’s technical achievements come into focus. The editing creates the vertigo we experience throughout the story, mirroring Marty’s unstable interior world. We feel breathless as Marty feels energized by the adrenaline that never stops pumping. The score swells precisely at the moments when his illusions fracture. Even the horrific bathtub scene functions as a visual metaphor for the instability of the life he is trying to escape. It’s in those moments—when the bottom falls out—that Marty must calculate another plan of escape.

The film appears chaotic, but the truth is that it is perfectly synchronized. From literal conception to symbolic rebirth through his child, the story unfolds within the span of a nearly full-term pregnancy. It is a process Marty resists at every turn, even calling the baby his nephew because the idea of becoming a father introduces an intolerable disruption. He cannot allow anything to interfere with his heroic escape.

This is where the theory that he is a narcissist fails, in my opinion. A true narcissist (and the film presents many of those) does not pause in pursuit of his desire. But Marty pauses and changes course three times with Rachel. Each time he doubles down in denial, prioritizing his escape over her and the child, only to stop suddenly and shift tone. It is the pause and the turn that mark recognition of something he cannot yet name.

Through it all there is one character who sees Marty clearly from the beginning: the woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who understands the culture he struggles against because she lives inside it too. Why he is drawn to Kay in the first place—and why she reciprocates—is one of the film’s most fascinating psychological arcs. In her—a former movie star trapped in a miserable marriage to a pen tycoon—Marty sees the achievement of greatness he so hungrily desires. In him, she sees herself reflected back.

He believes she escaped.

She knows she did not.

Helping Marty becomes, for her, a chance to witness something she has come to believe impossible: someone surviving that world not by remaining intact, but by cracking—and emerging, finally, as someone new.

In the final match, old Mr. Rockwell, Kay’s husband (Kevin O’Leary), explains the system with brutal honesty. He compares himself to a vampire who has lived for centuries, meeting men like Marty again and again. The ones who stay, he says, are the ones who stopped being honest. They are still here, but they are not alive in any meaningful sense. “You’ll never be happy,” he warns Marty. It is the clearest description of the culture the film has been exposing all along: a system that rewards survival but destroys the soul. Marty’s refusal to play by these rules is exactly what saves him. This moment becomes the hinge of the film, because it is where Marty finally stares into the crack—and, in spite of his fear, dives straight through it.

“Memories are all we have,” said Ryan Coogler as he accepted the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Sinners. As he thanked his family in closing the speech, he reminded them that his purpose in life is to leave as many good memories as he can.

This is the kind of legacy Marty begins to glimpse at the close of Marty Supreme—a life in which he is truly alive. In allowing the vampires of his world to break the destructive path he was on, he becomes someone capable of leaving memories not of chaos, but of the happiness they believed he would never achieve.

In a world run by vampires, the only real victory is not escaping the system, but emerging from it still capable of love.

A similar theme appears in another film — King of Herrings (2013) — which I wrote about here. In that story, the men live in quiet misery inside a system they never question. They endure it because they cannot imagine that anything better exists. They never crack. They simply survive inside the structure that diminishes them. In that sense they resemble the vampire Mr. Rockwell describes—beings who persist indefinitely but are never truly alive. Marty’s story takes the opposite path. His crack-up becomes the moment that finally frees him.

Self-knowledge does not arrive to the preserved surface.

In the first essay, I wrote four fragments that were, in effect, a conversation with La Fêlure by Charlotte Casiraghi and The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Casiraghi’s book is itself a conversation with many literary works, including Fitzgerald’s, about the meaning of human fracture and how we deal with it. She draws on writers from Colette to Maya Angelou, women who wrote about emotional exhaustion, the masking of pain, and the quiet costs of carrying on.

Fitzgerald, writing nearly a century earlier, approached the same territory from another direction. He confesses. The short stories are outpourings in which he describes the slow recognition of inner collapse. He comes to understand himself better by examining the breakdown.

Self-knowledge arrives through the crack.

We like to say that suffering makes us stronger. Perhaps it does. But whether or not it strengthens us, it certainly expands our view of ourselves.

Fitzgerald understood this clearly: cracking gives us clarity. That awareness rarely arrives without the break that makes it visible.

Unfortunately—and tragically—many people shrink from the crack. Feeling it somewhere beneath the surface, they resist the possibility of change.

Pride intervenes. Ego intervenes. Shame intrudes.

“I am who I am and I will not change.”

But cracking is changing, and it may be the hardest thing a human being ever does.

In his reflections on the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald observed how prosperity and excess preceded the economic collapse of 1929. But before the financial crash came another kind of fracture: social unrest, political turbulence, and the slow erosion of confidence beneath the glittering surface of the Roaring Twenties.

Rather than confront that fracture directly, the culture anesthetized itself. Alcohol, dancing, travel, endless parties. The spectacle of abundance kept despair temporarily out of sight.

His most famous character lives entirely inside that illusion.

Jay Gatsby believes that Daisy Buchanan can be recovered exactly as she once was. But Daisy is no longer the Daisy of Gatsby’s memory. Nor is Gatsby the man who first fell in love with her.

Rather than accept the crack, he tries to erase it—to wipe the slate clean and begin again.

But life does not work that way.

You change whether you accept the fissure or not. The only real choice is whether you accept evolution, or resist it and cling to a paradigm that has already shifted.

There is a character created by Julian Fellowes who demonstrates the hard work of evolving through the crack in his entire arc over fifty-two episodes.

I believe with all my heart that Allen Leech deserved more than ensemble recognition for his portrayal of Tom Branson on Downton Abbey. But award distribution aside, I cannot help asking a different question:

Is there anything finer than a character who compels us to take stock of our own report card in goodness?

And is there any actor more impressive than one who portrays such a man without a shred of self-righteousness?

“I don’t believe in types; I believe in people.”

So says Tom Branson after he had remained long enough inside the Downton ecosystem—after he had suffered fracture without running or hiding.

This is the same Tom Branson who once believed passionately in the politics of the greater good, the young Irish republican who believed the cause justified the means. A man who once attempted to embarrass a British officer as a gesture against imperial humiliation.

And consider the distance traveled between that young radical and the man he became.

“I was wrong about many things.”

For anyone to admit such a thing is rare. For a man formed by ideology and exile, it is extraordinary.

At one point, Tom confesses something even more unsettling:

“I’m not sure I belong anywhere now.”

To risk the loss of belonging—to risk perhaps never belonging anywhere again—is among the deepest human fears.

But Tom braves it.

He becomes the only person in Downton Abbey who moves easily upstairs and downstairs. Speaking to Robert Crawley with the same integrity he shows to Charles Carson.

He might soften his language for their sake. But he never compromises himself.

In doing so, he quietly becomes the moral hinge of the entire household.

To Matthew Crawley, he demonstrates something subtle but crucial: fairness only works when the conditions are truly equal.

The lesson becomes clear when Matthew refuses the inheritance left by Reggie Swire, believing it dishonorable to benefit from a misunderstanding surrounding Lavinia Swire.

Matthew’s instinct is noble. His sense of fairness is acquired from his career practicing law and he holds it dearly.

But Tom sees a wider reality.

The estate is failing. Tenants depend on it. Workers depend on it. Families depend on it.

Matthew is asking whether accepting the money preserves his honor.

Tom asks a different question:

What choice allows life to continue?

The distinction matters.

Fairness depends on truth. And truth includes consequences.

Tom understands this because fracture has already altered him. Exile from Ireland, the death of Sybil Crawley, the painful uncertainty of belonging—all of it has forced him to abandon abstraction in favor of reality.

Principle that never falters eventually breaks.

Tom trusted the progress of life.

He fractured. And instead of fighting the fracture, he stayed with it. He let it change him.

He chose life over shadow. In fantastic irony, he is akin to Violet Crawley, the Victorian dowager who fights not for obstinacy but for continuation.

Fragment V

Emotional Bankruptcy

“Love is not based solely on intentions, but on actions and evidence.”

Casiraghi, pp.23–24

She writes about emotional bankruptcy: the moment when the intention to love remains but the energy does not.

Depletion creates a fracture between who we believe we are and what we can actually give.

Fitzgerald compared the economic crash of 1929 to his own mental collapse. No one wakes up bankrupt. Bankruptcy is erosion.

We track finances more diligently than emotional reserves.

We borrow against ourselves.

A drink to break inertia.

Momentum to outrun boredom.

Performance to mask fatigue.

Love may be inexhaustible currency but the act of loving needs a bank account that’s not overdrawn.

Emotional bankruptcy arrives when intention survives but energy disappears.

And self-knowledge, Fitzgerald observed, tends to arrive only after collapse.

Collapse, like bankruptcy, is rarely sudden. It accumulates quietly—until something breaks.

Fragment VI

Borrowed Time

Avoiding the fracture does not eliminate it.

It simply waits beneath the surface.

We do not drink for taste.

We drink for effect.

Alcohol suspends the unbearable moment.

It produces the illusion of borrowed time.

But the fracture never disappears. It waits.

When it returns, it charges interest.

Fragment VII

Refuge

“A refuge for the broken.”

Tender Is The Night, p.154

Society does not like visible cracks. So it hides them.

The clinic in the Alps in Tender Is the Night becomes a refuge for the incomplete—those who disturb the world by revealing what everyone else works to conceal.

But what society calls broken may simply be what refuses disguise.

Fragment VIII

Lack of Proportion

“I think one thing today and another tomorrow.”

Nicole Diver in Tender Is The Night, p.159-160

We call this instability.

We call it lack of proportion.

But perhaps it is simply refusal to harden into certainty.

The world prefers proportion.

The crack disturbs it.

Fragment IX

Naming the Crack

In The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald reached the moment when denial became impossible.

The dysfunction could no longer masquerade as function.

So he wrote.

He gave the crack language.

Once the rupture becomes visible, the escape hatch reveals itself as a trap.

Fragment X

Intactness is Incompleteness

People call a life that remains intact a success and a life that cracks a failure.

But only one of those paths leads to transformation—and it isn’t intactness.

“He knew that the price of his intactness was incompleteness.” — Tender Is the Night, p.149.

We admire the intact.

The composed.

The one who never cracks.

But self-knowledge does not arrive to the preserved surface.

It arrives to what has been altered.

Imagine a life that never cracks.

Fragment XI: What Must Bend

Which brings us back to Tom Branson.

Matthew Crawley’s refusal of the Swire inheritance would have preserved his personal honor. His principles would have remained intact.

But an entire ecosystem—families, tenants, livelihoods—would have fractured around him.

Fairness, detached from reality, risks becoming a form of moral vanity.

Tom understood something simpler.

Principle must bend when its consequences become unjust.

What can change will crack and give way.

What must remain intact is simpler and deeper:

Life.

Continuation.

The courage to change so that aliveness may endure.

References

Casiraghi, Charlotte. La Fêlure. Éditions Julliard, Kindle Edition, 2026.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up. New Directions, Kindle Edition.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender Is the Night. Scribner hardcover edition, 2020.

Downton Abbey. Created by Julian Fellowes. ITV, 2010–2015.

Author’s Note: When the Wind Turned is part of the paid subscriber library here at Heavy Crown Press. Free subscribers see a preview each Wednesday when new chapters drop.

After Chapter Fourteen, serialization will pause while the manuscript moves into its next stage of development. I have completed much of the story and drafted several additional chapters, and I will be exploring publication opportunities for the full novel.

Thank you to everyone who has been reading along and supporting the project.

Learn more about the full archive and subscriber benefits at

www.heavycrownpress.com

Chapter Fourteen

The Latin workbook lies open between them at the kitchen table.

Frankie has already gone upstairs. Jacob’s door is closed. Eve hums softly in the living room.

Jeremy adjusts his reading glasses.

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Chapter Thirteen

Classes. Friends.

All soon fall into place.

Tutors don’t become a necessity. Eve finds the after-school extra sessions with her pre-algebra teacher sufficient. Noah integrates smoothly. Jacob’s main concern becomes choosing a topic for his senior project.

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“The AI boom has turned reality into a sort of fun house.” — Matteo Wong

Source 🎁 🔗

This is not a warning and not a defense. It is a note on how I am learning to stand upright inside the mirrors.

Matteo Wong has been writing extensively about AI chatbots and the way they are reshaping ordinary life. In one recent piece, he examines AI-associated mental health deterioration — a phenomenon that feels both emergent and difficult to measure.

I don’t think anyone fully understands what this era has introduced into an already unstable cultural moment. I’m forty-eight. I doubt we will see its psychological implications neatly resolved in my lifetime.

That’s not fatalism. It’s humility.

Mental health is complicated. Technology has always altered cognition — from television to smartphones to social media. We know about dopamine loops. We know about the emotional flattening that can come from too much time online. Shopping, banking, ordering food, ride sharing. We know that convenience often arrives hand-in-hand with isolation.

AI feels like amplification.

Faster. More responsive. More frictionless than any tool I have used before.

From my own experience, Wong’s “fun house” analogy is apt. I began using ChatGPT last summer without fully understanding what it was. I had a vague sense of “talking to a computer.” Like playing chess against software — except now the software was speaking back in full paragraphs.

Recently, I listened to David Frum on Tim Miller’s podcast. He offered a caution for chatbot use: remember that you are basically talking to yourself. That framing steadied me. The system reflects and recombines what we feed it. It is pattern prediction, not consciousness. If we remember that chatbots are referring our own inputs, they can become tools for clarifying thought.

But the danger is subtle.

Confiding in a chatbot can feel easier than confiding in a person. There is no visible judgment. It reformulates what you say and hands it back in clean sentences. It feels safe because it is not human. Human relationships carry risk — misinterpretation, gossip, misunderstanding. A chatbot feels neutral.

But neutral is not the same thing as safe.

This is where the fun house metaphor becomes more than clever. A fun house distorts what is already there. The mirrors stretch and compress. They do not invent your reflection — they exaggerate it.

I think of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, when Ginny Weasley poured her loneliness into Tom Riddle’s diary. Her father later admonished her: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

The seduction lies in the invisibility. It’s mystery. We are imaginative creatures. As children, we invented imaginary friends. As adults, we narrate ourselves constantly. A chatbot enters that interior monologue and gives it structure.

And structure is powerful.

If you ask it to find information, it retrieves it instantly. It sharpens passive sentences. Consolidates repetition. Optimizes clarity. It doesn’t just echo — it refines.

That is intoxicating.

I live with ADHD, for which I take medication, and Nonverbal Learning Disorder. My brain already processes space, tone, and social cues differently. I have spent my life learning how to interpret distortion — how to slow down perception, how to check assumptions, how to steady my pace.

Because of that, I try to be extra attentive to shifts in mental balance.

I have used ChatGPT playfully. Writing has always been therapeutic for me. Seeing language externalized is stabilizing. The chatbot did not invent that process. It accelerated it. Organized it. But using chatbots as therapy is risky. Not unheard of. This book I read recently (not about AI overall, but mentioning it) made the suggestion that some people are using chatbots to process grief and even communicate with the dead. A mental health professional is the appropriate person to consult as to the wisdom of doing that.

There is a strange vertigo in speaking to a tool that feels conversational. An author speaking to her character. A character answering back. A mirror that edits.

The only safeguard I’ve found is openness. Presence — and naming the experience in real time.

Admit when it feels clarifying and when it feels confusing. Step back and remember what is happening technically: pattern prediction, language modeling, probabilistic sequencing. Not consciousness. Not companionship.

Self-awareness is the ballast.

We learned — awkwardly — how to live with social media. Remember when “tweeting” was the cultural anxiety? Public figures undone by drunk tweets. Careers shaken by impulsive posts. Over time, we redeveloped norms. Not perfect ones — but norms. New assessments based on new landscapes.

AI will require the same maturity.

Like driving, these tools should probably be used sober — cognitively and emotionally. When grounded. When aware of what you are doing and why.

The fun house is not evil.

But it is a hall of mirrors. And it can definitely feel like a circus.

And if we cross the threshold without remembering who we were before we entered, we risk mistaking distortion for identity.

Previously on When The Wind Turned: Chapter 11 (with full previous chapter list)

Chapter Twelve

By the time they cross into New Hampshire, the light has thinned to blue.

Jeremy drives the final stretch in silence. The rental car hums steadily along a narrowing road bordered by stone walls half-swallowed by tall grass. The trees are different here — narrower trunks, leaves just beginning to turn at the edges. September has sharpened the air.

No one says it, but they all feel it.

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