Hi! We’re Claire Fallon and Emma Gray: writers, culture obsessives, and generally neurotic 30-somethings. We also co-host the “Here To Make Friends” podcast, a feminist podcast about “The Bachelor” franchise.
We love to consider America’s favorite reality dating franchise as both a guilty pleasure and a complex, layered text full of artifacts that capture our weird social norms. That’s what we want this newsletter to do with, well, everything. Rich Text is a space for the indulgent and the incisive, for witty and wistful explorations of the cultural, the personal, and the political. We’ll be sharing hot and cold takes on pop culture, political calls to action, our thoughts on Bachelor Nation news, book recommendations and reviews, and other stuff we love to love (and love to hate).
Come for the reality TV tea, stay for the scrunchie and loungewear recs. Join us on this ~journey~. We’re already falling for you.
Welcome To 2021
What we’re leaving behind, and what we’re taking with us.
C: On New Year’s Eve, my microwave broke. (E: Claire, my dishwasher broke! What the hell!) We put in cups of coffee, bowls of oatmeal, plates of curry and rice, and hit the proper buttons; the tray would rotate dutifully while the timer counted down and then we’d remove the items to find them exactly the same temperature as they were before.
2020 was a year of breaking things. Our dryer, about six times (babies make a lot of laundry: see below). Our family Christmas plans. Plates and glasses, musical baby toys, my daily full-face-of-makeup habit.
Staying inside our well-stocked apartment for a few months, back in March, felt simple enough. How much did I really go out anyway? Everything I needed was right there in our snug one-bedroom. It was easy for me to forget what went into giving me that illusion -- the option of going out for dinner and taking a break from cooking; the days spent at the office using their toilet paper and microwaves; the grocery store around the corner where they all loved to coo at Max; the people who made and packed and delivered diapers, toys, lightbulbs, and six-packs of socks. Apparently I went out all the time, or relied on my husband or a repairperson or a delivery worker to go out. The infrastructure of our home was not actually built for us to be using it all the time, without respite or repair.
In the grand scheme of things, none of the things I broke in my apartment matters very much. Bigger things were breaking, or being exposed as long broken: Congress, the social safety net, the CDC, capitalism, the concepts of freedom and justice that wealthy white Americans like to imagine underpin our society.
It’s not that having these realizations was worth all the suffering, but that the realizations are there to be had, and we can’t afford to ignore them. We rely on each other, and many of us rely disproportionately on people who have little to rely on. The prepper strain in American culture feels familiar to me, though I’m not one really; it tickles an isolationist fantasy, in which you are comfortable and resourced amid a collapsing, barren world. We like to think we can be alone and thrive, but though 2020 forced us to stay apart, it also revealed how much even the most solitary of us are not really alone.
E: 2020 was the year we were both Too Together and Too Alone. I spent the first month of quarantine -- including the one year anniversary of my romantic relationship (the first serious one I’ve had in years) -- almost completely alone, gripping onto Zoom happy hours to mimic some semblance of the social life I had spent years building. No one should be left to live in total isolation for months on end. Humans crave connection and conversation and touch. All I want for my birthday in 2021 is to be able to hug my friends.
But I’ve also learned this year that too much togetherness can also be painful. Too little space. Too little alone time. Too much emotional care resting on one human’s shoulders. My boyfriend has taken to joking that if we lived together full time in a studio or even my mini one-bedroom during the beginning of the pandemic, we probably would have broken up. I like to think that we are both in it for the long haul, but there is a nugget of truth in that dark joke. We all need room to breathe (both physically and metaphorically); to be apart enough that we crave coming back together.
For all the “Fuck 2020” talk, it’s striking how many lessons from this year are imperative not to leave behind. The conceptual breaking of Big American Things -- the false dream of a nation that offers freedom and opportunity to all -- feels like a necessary step towards untangling our national history of trauma, racial caste and oppression. 2020 was the year that “mutual aid” became common parlance. The year that “Black Lives Matter” reached a majority of Americans. The year that we literally danced in the streets when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. Pain and isolation mixed in with bits of unbridled joy. Mass suffering required to teach the most privileged among us a lesson we should have known all along. Honestly, it all feels so very American.
I hope 2021 is a year that we commit to the lessons of 2020 instead of rushing to collectively forget them.
Happy 2021, loves. Let’s make it count. xx
Things We Love (And Love To Hate)
Claire: I spent 2020 scouring my favorite shopping sites for one seductive phrase: machine washable. Being trapped at home with an infant for the better part of a year will do this. (Before you have kids, when people talk about how slimy, puky, snotty and spitty children are, it sounds like they’re being hyperbolic. They are not.) None of my pretty clothes were half-digested-purée friendly, and none of my sweats made me feel like a person who might one day grab a drink with a friend again. Now, I have a respectable closet of non-dry-clean-only sweaters, soft pants, leggings and tees, but the runaway favorite so far is a Christmas gift from Greg: a cozy-yet-glam Gap duster cardigan that I can simply throw in the wash after half an hour when Max inevitably smears boogers on it. Mine is camel, but I’m pretty sure it’s this style.
Other things I’ve been loving…
Enormous satin scrunchies from Free People
“The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard (new edition with a Lauren Groff introduction coming out this March!)
My household missed a ton of stuff this year but are starting to catch up now that Max is in daycare and we have time to work during the day…. So, if you skipped Hulu’s witty, vicious period comedy “The Great” (featuring Elle Fanning as Catherine the Great) in May, circle back to it!
Emma: There’s something about nearly a year cooped up in my tiny apartment that has made me embrace a cottagecore, lady of leisure aesthetic (that is, whenever I’m not in pajamas and/or workout clothing for 48 consecutive hours). This has culminated with a sudden lust for overpriced hair bows, like this extremely expensive, extremely Instagrammed one by Jennifer Behr. After much searching, I found some very decent, significantly less pricey knockoffs on Etsy. If you too have had a hankering to experiment with a hyper-femme hair accessory, you can buy them at Bardot Bow Gallery.
Other things I’ve been loving…
These shearling-lined slippers from Italic.
I’m late to the party, but “The Flight Attendant” on HBO Max is such a fun ride.
The “Why Are Dads?” podcast, which delves into the ways our culture thinks about, views and shapes fatherhood — via movies like “Dirty Dancing” and “Honey I Shrunk The Kids.”
Get Activated!
It’s go time in Georgia. On Tuesday, voters in the purple state will decide the fate of the balance of the Senate. Rev. Raphael Warnock is running against incumbent Kelly Loeffler (yeah, the lady who did a photo-op with a former KKK leader), and Nice Jewish Boy Jon Ossoff -- does Emma have a tiny crush on him? Perhaps! -- is going up against Sen. David Perdue, who cashed in on COVID-19. To learn more about what’s going on in Georgia, listen to Crooked Media’s “Gaining Ground.” To do some last-minute volunteering, head here.
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