On Moderation (or lack thereof)
Handling an overindulgence in Love Island, alcohol, social media—plus the books and movies that are making me giggle and think.
I started writing this around five in the morning, after waking to the dog scratching at the door of my office (his bedroom), wanting to either be let into the (my) bedroom or covered with the blankets he kicks off in the night. The unhappy plight of a creature with apparently poor internal temperature regulation and a lack of opposable thumbs. That was at four A.M. on the dot and after I’d tucked him back in, I returned to bed and lay worrying for half an hour, then scrolled through Instagram for five (twenty) minutes, then finally got up and joined the dog on the couch and read the first pages of Mary Wesley’s Not That Sort of Girl, which my mom told me I’d love and of course I do.
For what feels like a long time but was really just a few days, I’ve been in a reading slump, which is just to say that I had not yet started a new book after finishing the last one. Instead of reading, I have filled my spare time with social media and Love Island. I used to believe myself to be an addictive person. Now I think the more accurate term is habitual, with some moderation issues. I go through phases of listening to the same songs over and over, of making the same kind of oatmeal each morning for breakfast, of working out daily, of reading whenever I get the chance. For me, these all qualify as neutral-to-good habits. Unfortunately, it takes very little to shift my equilibrium, replacing these habits with ones that feel rather less okay.
My job has been particularly intellectually rewarding recently, owing to some article research and a number of interviews I’ve gotten to do with interesting people in the book world and elsewhere. Five of those (with Elif Batuman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Andrew Sean Greer, Elizabeth Strout, and Jennifer Egan) became this piece, from the September issue of Vanity Fair. The rest will roll out in the magazine and online over the next couple months. My other job, which I chip away at early in the morning and on weekends, is called The Mythmakers, and it’s a novel coming out next summer. I finished the very first round of copy edits at the beginning of this week. Like all parts of the editing process it is gratifying because another human being has worked hard to make the book demonstrably better but also terrifying because it’s a step closer to more humans reading and having opinions about a thing I worked on in almost total privacy for seven years.
So that’s all well and good. But for whatever reason, it’s often when I’m most creatively stimulated that I have the hardest time staying asleep and, in an ouroboros of brain cell destruction, when I’m tired that I’m most likely to gambol down the path of least resistance—a road that leads, for me, to hours spent consuming Instagram and Twitter and reality TV.
I started Love Island out of curiosity. One episode, I thought, and I’d get the gist and be done. Instead I watched the entire first season in a frenzy. I watched it on the elliptical, I watched it in bed, I even carried my laptop into the bathroom so that I could perch it on the sink as I showered, scrubbing my scalp and listening to people describe being mugged off and the ways in which they are a typical Essex girl.
This is why I never started watching The Bachelor or Real Housewives, I remembered. I know my own voracious appetite for fluff and worried that if I started I would never be able to stop. I also know that for many people these shows are a source of pure pleasure rather than sturm und drang. Ian Kumamoto, for instance, wrote a great article on finding queer community and harmless escapism in reality TV. I guess I think of it in the same way I think about alcohol. I stopped drinking six-ish years ago because it finally became apparent that, for me, the cons far outweighed the pros. Knowing this, I can still recognize that lots of people have a relationship with alcohol that does not lead to scaling parked semi-trucks, sobbing to strangers, and anxiety attacks. I assume there are also people who use Instagram solely in a way that makes them feel better rather than worse, though nobody has self-described as such to me yet.
I have gotten some good things from Love Island. It’s illuminating to see romantic-esque relationships play out in a petri dish. I have friends who are fans, and it’s nice to talk about a shared interest. Watching grown men attempt to mold to-scale clay models of their own genitalia is genuinely hilarious. But after completing that first season last month I exercised remarkable restraint and did not immediately dive into the next one. I had the interviews to conduct, the copy edits to finish. I missed it, but it felt good not to watch. Then, tired and anxious earlier this week, I let my guard down and pressed play on season two. As of last night I was eleven episodes deep. At episode ten, I’d realized that one of the contestants, a 30-year-old from Newcastle named Sophie Gradon, was one of the three Love Island stars who would go on to commit suicide. I read about the deaths in Anna Peele’s smart and thoughtful article back before I’d ever watched the show. Viewing the first season, I had engaged in another form of escapism, this one from the knowledge that the chirpy, funny host, Caroline Flack, had also killed herself in 2020. The smiling woman on screen seemed incapable of death, let alone on purpose. (Which says something in itself.) But as a contestant Gradon is harder to gloss over. She is increasingly, visibly upset. She cries for a good portion of one episode. To watch the produced manipulations that provoke an obvious downturn in mental health, knowing how her life would end, felt suddenly untenable. Last night I closed the computer. This morning I picked up a book.
It is entirely possible that I’ll use magical thinking to return to Love Island, because this is how my breaks from social media typically occur, too. I’ll already feel queasy about it, and then my Explore page will feed me an ostensibly funny video of an animal that is actually horrible (two young women riling up a caged lion, say). Enough! I think. But then, inevitably, I go crawling back on, thinking I deserve this escape or just five minutes or but this is sort of for work. It becomes habitual to pick up my phone instead of a novel, even though after spending an hour reading (or out in the garden or phoning a friend) the world appears sharply crystalline and my heartbeat thumps more evenly, while after scrolling Instagram reels for the same amount of time I’m inevitably irritable and my brain feels like pond scum.
How do you handle this? If you have a self-control life hack, I’d love to hear it. For now I’m going to try to do more of what feels actually good, less of what feels actually bad, basically live a little more like these sunflowers, tipping their heads to the sun.
Read…
…my newest Anything Good column, where I recommend a couple books about visual art and its milieu—one is nonfiction about Dora Maar and her circle, the other is a novel about art school drama and its aftermath—and solicit recent reads from my colleagues, and also Elif Batuman and Viet Thanh Nguyen!
Watch…
…The Trip (2010) starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as, sort of, themselves. There are Michael Caine and Hugh Grant impressions, and the shot list comprises scenic car rides through the Northern English countryside (sometimes accompanied by Coogan and Brydon singing Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, also my favorite car-belting song); scenic pans of still vistas marred by Coogan attempting to get cell service to call his agent and sort-of girlfriend; British food preparation; British food consumption; and quaint interiors of inns. Try this scene. If you like it, you will like the movie. And if you like that, there are three more installments of The Trip, to Italy, Spain, and Greece. Screen escapism, a total joy.
This is going to make me finally watch Love Island! :) And read NOT THAT SORT OF GIRL. The title alone is delicious.