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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Bookshop.org (Paperback or Hardcover)

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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.

Read more

“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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As in the myth of Icarus, what we romanticize can undo us.

The first time I read it I was mystified by the place names. I got the gist — that the characters were visiting World War I battle sites. I’m referring to Chapter Thirteen in Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dick Diver, like Fitzgerald himself, never saw battle on the Western Front, yet he surveys the memorial sites with reverence. It’s just war and death, his friend Abe North countered in so many words. War that’s happened before and will happen again; and death that happens to all of us, eventually. No, Dick argued. This war was different. This one broke us in a different way because all the religion and the hope and the dream and the spirit of a generation, amid the precise “relation that existed between the classes,” was poured into this battle. The Battle of the Somme. The “mill hands and Old Etonians” blown up in the trenches together.

Why, it came down to a “love battle,” Dick said. A love battle “invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine.” Abe mocked him in reproof for handing over the battle to D.H. Lawrence. But Dick persisted: “All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.” And then he turned to Rosemary, imploring her to agree with him. How could she not agree? “You know everything,” she said. She was already in love with him — her steadiness beginning to crack.

The first time I read this chapter, I thought of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I thought, Abe, he’s got to be Hemingway, right? Not just because he drank, but because he knew so much about guns — knowledge exhibited in the duel two chapters before — and because he refused to romanticize war. There was a confident masculinity about him that felt like the poet who knew for whom the bell tolled. The way he hadn’t approved of the dueling business, but took charge of it so that the children wouldn’t screw it up. Alas, the consensus among those who have studied the novel seems to be that Abe was not inspired by Hemingway but rather by another writer of the Lost Generation called Ring Lardner.

I read the chapter again to see if I could understand it better. Far from romanticizing the war himself, Dick Diver was really saying that because it had been romanticized by an entire generation, the normal fracturing that war creates was so much the more devastating. Because the men went into the war believing they were defending civilization as they knew it — its poetry, its manners, its cultivated ease. What was shattered in the trenches was not merely flesh but illusion. There was a century’s worth of “middle-class love” that met its end here. Shattered by grenades. And the red-haired American girl the characters met at the end of the chapter could not even find her brother’s name among the masses. So many names, so many graves.

I feel that’s the analogy Fitzgerald meant to communicate: that war is horrific, but this war was more ruinous by the romance poured into it. The crime is surely worse when the perpetrators believe it’s noble.

Dick sees romance as the force that fractures what he is trying so carefully to build: the beautiful, safe life where Nicole, his wife, is steady and their guests are charmed. Chapter Thirteen makes clear that he already recognizes the pattern. He speaks of love in the language of detonation — of the “silver cord” that’s cut and the “golden bowl” that’s broken. He understands that romance destabilizes structure, yet he cannot imagine life without its voltage.

Earlier, Rosemary overhears him and Nicole at the peak of passion, Dick pressing to return to the hotel so they can release it — as if desire were something that must be discharged before it ruptures the atmosphere. Nicole, instead of rushing back, delays them with a shopping spree. It is a small but telling deferral. Is she already tired of the cycle — perfection, intensity, crack?

She loves him. That is clear. But love, in Dick’s vocabulary, carries consequences. And he must sense it by now, given how he wrestles with his attraction to Rosemary. If Chapter Thirteen foreshadows anything, it is not merely collapse but repetition. The plot is moving toward something explosive.

NOTE ON THE TEXT: All quotations here belong to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tender is the Night. This is a continuation of my journey through his works and the understanding of fracture.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Years later, the Rosenfelds would only remember the week after the storm in fragments. Distant memory took dream-like shape.

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My protagonist, Jeff Griffin, uses the phrase “chasing silhouettes” in The Signal Between Us to describe how he wrote his detective circling the shadows. He sketched the outlines of femmes fatales — shapes familiar but elusive, figures emerging and dissolving before they could fully resolve.

I formed the idea of him firing signals into the dark, trying to describe the obsession he couldn’t quite name. I did not think I was describing myself.

Only now have I begun to wonder whether those shadows were signals of another kind. While Jeff’s Detective Blackthorn investigates crime, my mission after my medical discharge from the Navy was to discover what, exactly, was wrong with me.

Why I never quite aligned with other people. Why even those who liked me sometimes seemed to tire of me. Why I was bullied as a child. Why I trusted the wrong people and mistrusted the right ones. Why I contributed disproportionately — too much or too little, oversharing or withdrawing. Why I became obsessed with certain interests instead of holding them lightly. Why I noticed patterns others missed — and missed cues they seemed to grasp effortlessly.

Autism was considered. It still hovers in the margins. AD(H)D became the most stable label — an anchor because enough traits justified its inclusion alongside the longstanding diagnoses of anxiety and depression.

There were neurological questions. A seizure that was never fully explained. Imaging that suggested possible birth trauma. Inconclusive. Additions to the file, not consolidation — more fog around what was already diffuse.

Some categories are visible enough to become legible through testing and treatable through established frameworks. Autism, for all its complexity, has language around it. AD(H)D has visibility. But the term Nonverbal Learning Disorder (NVLD) — which first appeared quietly in my record years ago — began to feel less like a marginal note and more like architecture beneath the others.

Anxiety makes sense within it. Depression makes sense within it. Even the overlapping traits that once pointed toward autism or ADHD feel less central than the structural misalignment they were circling.

The structure that has shaped my life has felt at different times like both curse and superpower. The same wiring that allows me to see patterns across years and pages can leave me disoriented in a room. The same verbal intensity that builds worlds can misfire in conversation.

Perhaps what I have been doing all these years — in fiction and in life — is learning to read silhouettes more clearly.

To understand that firing signals into the dark was not evidence of defect, but of orientation in low light.

Some structures are built for bright rooms. Others learn to navigate by outline, by contrast, by the faintest shift in shadow.

If NVLD is the language that best describes that structure for me now, it does not erase what came before. It organizes it.

The detective was always circling something real. I just did not yet know its name.

When the Wind Turned has reached a moment where it needs a brief pause.

Chapter Eleven was scheduled for this Wednesday, but before moving forward, I’m taking a short break in the serial to bring the story under review—to make sure the ground beneath it is as sound as the weather above it. This isn’t a delay born of uncertainty, but of care. The story has earned a closer look.

During this pause, I wanted to gather the journey so far in one place. If you’d like to revisit—or catch details that may land differently now—here are Chapters One through Ten:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Thank you for reading this as a serial—for staying with it in real time. I’ll share an update soon about when the story resumes. For now, consider this a moment to step back, breathe, and look at what’s already been built.

With gratitude,

Ashley

I recently wrote an analytical piece about The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel is unfinished because he died while writing it. The edition I have includes the outlines and notes that he left behind. He was only forty-four when he died suddenly of a heart attack. About a decade prior, he published The Crack-Up, a collection of autobiographical short stories about his breakdown.1 After sending out my analysis of the unfortunately interrupted novel, I started his the short-story collection that was published in 1930. I did not get very far when it came to my attention from the French media — I try to follow the news in France, as I would like to convert a lifelong impulse toward it into fluency, and so I subscribe to a few French magazines and papers through my local library via the libby app. I also follow lots of French media companies and bookstores on Instagram. Anyway, by this means, it came to my attention that there is a new book in France called La Fêlure, written by Charlotte Casiraghi. In France, Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up is translated as La Fêlure. As it happens, Casiraghi’s book is also being alternately translated in English as “The Fracture.” The book is not available in English yet, but some English-language media has mentioned it. Casiraghi says that it was Fitzgerald who inspired her to write these reflections, which amount to sixteen chapters, on the breakdowns that do happen to all of us in some way, whether it’s a nervous break or a mid-life crisis or some other cataclysmic shift. She pulled into the work reflections on other literary works as well — such as: Ingeborg Bachmann, Colette and Marguerite Duras; the poet Anna Akhmatova; the navigator Bernard Moitessier and the singer J. J. Cale.

Casiraghi is well known in French academia as one of the founders of Les Rencontres Philosophiques2 in Monaco. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and the Catholic University of Paris3 and has co-authored a previous philosophical work with Robert Maggiori, her former teacher and fellow founder at Philo Monaco.4 La Fêlure is Casiraghi’s first solo work.

By accident of birth, she is also a member of the House of Grimaldi. She opens the preamble of La Fêlure with a reflection on the dissonance between her lived reality and the media image projected upon her. Without turning the book into autobiography, she touches lightly on the tension this produced—the kind of crack around which the book itself is premised.

Such a condition does not explain a philosophy, but it marks an early awareness of dissonance that many of us, in less exalted circumstances, may take for granted or not notice as accutely or as early.

Fracture as Meaning

In the preamble to La Fêlure, she stresses that however we may try to live under a mask, concealing our fractures, the cracks will surface in ways we might notice if we are paying attention: a jolt, a quickening of the pulse, some other biological sign. We may feel an impulse to cover it up or dance around it, but these signs and impulses are clues to a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Casiraghi is interested in the formation of the fracture. How is it formed? What is its structure? This posture is visible not only in her writing, but in her curatorial work at Philo Monaco as well as her more visible role as a host of the Chanel Literary Rendezvous.5 In both, she acts as a facilitator of inquiry rather than a lecturer. The emphasis of both organizations is on dialogue rather than doctrine. Her book is written in very much the same vein.

This exploratory approach stems naturally from her French education, where the emphasis lies strongly on the process. American education rewards a strong, confident result. As in a few other things, the French are less hurried than we are. The French intellectual spirit appreciates the question that is allowed to remain unresolved. Later in the book, Casiraghi devotes time to the navigator Bernard Moitessier, a champion sailor who, in 1968, diverted his course to technically lose a race he was sure to have won, letting go of an impulse to win in favor of following his inner compass toward meaning.

This difference—how such fractures are understood on either side of the Atlantic—is crucial. American narratives often treat suffering as something to rise above. Out of pain comes glory. In France, there is a longer tradition of looking for meaning within suffering itself—not only to repair what is broken, but to ask what that brokenness reveals about being.

It is within this tradition that Casiraghi’s work becomes legible and, seen in this light, her curiosity about fracture—about the break, the crack, the point of collapse—appears to be as much of an intellectual reflex shaped by education as it is a personal journey.

Fracture Without Repair

French philosophical training is, at its core, a Deleuzian exercise in breaking concepts open, locating fault lines, and dwelling in contradiction. Meaning is not extracted by smoothing over rupture. In fact, Casiraghi alludes to such a smoothing over as a kind of violence (12) — violating the integrity of what has happened, of what is, and of what is becoming. While she admits the natural instinct to smooth over an emotional dissonance, for fear of being misunderstood or rejected, it’s that very change of the texture that calls for exploration.

This is why Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up resonates so strongly within French intellectual culture. In both, the question is less how to fix what is broken than on what the break reveals about the structure that produced it. Collapse is not a failure of character; it is a moment of lucidity. He writes that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function—to see that things are hopeless, and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

In American culture, we tend to want alignment: if the interior is troubled, we adjust the exterior and expect the interior to follow. We seek the fix, the cure, the visible repair. An American reader encountering a book organized around cracks and breaks is likely to assume there should be an arc of redemption: fracture as the prelude to healing, to self-improvement, to a stronger version of the self.

Fitzgerald’s most famous character is the epitome of the reinvented man who climbed from rags to riches. Yet while the author’s long residence in France did not make him French, it placed him in sustained proximity to a different way of thinking about interior life, one less invested in triumph than in perpetual doubt. Much of his writing bears the imprint of this Franco-American disparity: reinvention as spectacle held in tension with a rigorous and sustained interrogation.

In The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald describes the ways a person may crack: in the head, in the body, or in the nerves. In the first case, agency is lost to others; in the second, one is confined and handled in a hospital; in the third—akin to his own—there remains only one thing to do, and it’s a solitary journal: withdrawal. To go inward. To stop dealing with people altogether.

In one exchange, a woman urges him to reframe his despair. Suppose, she says, the crack is not in you but in the Grand Canyon. Fitzgerald resists—“The crack’s in me.” She insists: “The world only exists in your eyes.” If you feel broken, she suggests, it may not be because you are defective, but because the world itself is fractured as you apprehend it. Your alienation may not be a personal failure, but a lucid response to a structure that no longer coheres. Fitzgerald teases her for reading too much Spinoza, but the question lingers. What if the crack is not something to be repaired in the self, but something to be understood about the world? What if meaning lies not in overcoming fracture, whether in the world or in the self, but in attention to it? And lastly, what if the fracture is there to show us not just what has broken but what the break makes room for becoming?

Fragments on the Crack

Fragment #1: The Cracked Plate

Continuation is not preservation. The Cracked Plate that Fitzgerald alludes to is not the same plate that it was before the crack. When I was twenty-one, I broke my right index finger in five places. Although it healed after months of occupational therapy and hydrotherapy, restoring full functionality and movement that belies the change, there is a very subtle misshapen appearance to it. You’ll notice it only by looking very closely. Fitzgerald talks about the Cracked Plate as having different uses and a different configuration in the set. In the same way, my recovered finger won’t hold a ring the same way as before.

Fragment #2: Bypassing

I like to think of the cracked plate analogy in terms of three fictional figures: Fred, Cory, and Melissa.

Fred wants to make a new life for himself. He calls this moving on. Nothing is resolved; the unwanted elements of his life are folded away and placed in drawers he refuses to open. The structure changes, but the contents remain. He steps into a new room and calls it progress.

Cory rejects the idea that there is any fracture at all. He does not want to grow old. Each sign of age—the gray at the temple, the softened jaw, the crease at the brow—is treated as a defect to be corrected. Intervention answers everything: regimen, discipline, optimization. If he feels low, he runs. If he feels anxious, he recalibrates. Distress becomes a problem to solve.

Like Fred, Cory resolves nothing. He maintains.

The crack is not permitted to exist, let alone adapt itself to new use. Cory does not move forward; he folds backward, reconstructing a version of himself that resembles the past and therefore feels invulnerable. He calls this resilience. He calls it health. What he wants is victory.

Melissa wants to get better. She has never felt right. There is a constant interior agitation—a sense of misalignment she answers by trying harder. Everything becomes a test: work, marriage, motherhood, selfhood. Each role carries a silent rubric, and she measures herself relentlessly against it.

She turns to affirmation and encouragement, but only up to the point where reflection becomes too precise. When nurture begins to gesture toward something structural, she stops. Like Fred and Cory, she insists she is not cracked. She declares wholeness as intention.

Fred reinvents.

Cory corrects.

Melissa affirms.

All three avoid the crack.

American society rewards Cory and Melissa most visibly. Fix the exterior and reflect it inward. Perform healing until it feels real. Fred is rewarded less often, which is why he hides what he cannot discard.

Fred changes rooms.

Cory repaints the same one.

Melissa redecorates endlessly.

Each turns away at the moment the fracture asserts itself. The retreat is renamed and they call it “moving on.”

Fragment #3: Reassessment

Reassessment is difficult for many people. We resist changing our ideas. We cling to beliefs formed by uncracked plates. But the cracked plate carries a different weight. It holds temperature differently.

And it knows something the other plates do not.

It knows suffering. It knows both states: pre-crack and cracked.

Pre-crack for Fitzgerald was freshman and sophomore years at Princeton. Junior year, he got sick and had to take time off. He recovered, but on returning to Princeton, he found that he had to redo junior year and he lost his position in extracurriculars as well. He could not longer, for example, be in the Triangle Club, which was essential if you wanted to go onto greatness after Princeton. Devastated, he turned inward. He consoled himself with poetry. He became a writer, the crack having foreclosed one future and led to another.

Fragment #4:

Fitzgerald was fractured by money in a way that never resolved. He never felt secure around it, never trusted its presence, and never stopped measuring himself against those for whom it was effortless. Early rejection, delayed marriage, and professional compromise all bore its mark.

When he asked Zelda to marry him, she made him wait until he had proven he could earn enough as a writer, which he finally did with his first published novel, This Side of Paradise. The fracture here was not simply financial; it was existential. Money became permission—entry into love, legitimacy, and adulthood.

That logic echoes throughout his fiction. Gatsby amasses wealth because he believes it will make Daisy choose him. In The Last Tycoon, money consolidates itself quietly, while those without it learn accommodation, deference, and strategic admiration.

Fitzgerald’s final compromise followed the same fault line. He agreed to become a Hollywood screenwriter not out of ambition, but necessity—for the promise of steady income in a life otherwise defined by precarity. He hated the work. The fracture remained.

I don’t have my own fractures around money resolved, nor do I know anyone who seems particularly resolved on the issue. What I do notice is how impressionable we are to the stories we tell ourselves about it—stories that shift depending on where we stand in relation to it, and how precarious that position feels.

Money is rarely just money. It arrives already burdened with meaning. Safety, we tell ourselves. Freedom. Power. But safety from what? Freedom from whom? Power to do what, exactly?

For Fitzgerald, money seemed bound up with self-respect—proof that he could stand independently in the world without being diminished by need. It promised choice: the ability to say yes, the ability to say no, the ability to refuse. Its absence, by contrast, was experienced not simply as lack, but as exposure. To want was to be vulnerable; to need was to be beholden. Money, then, was not only a means of living but a shield against humiliation.

For me, the story has been more diffuse, and perhaps because of that, harder to interrogate. Money has meant safety from being taken advantage of, autonomy to do what I like, and freedom of situation—the ability to leave when something turns coercive, the ability to remain when something feels right. It has rarely been about accumulation. It has almost always been about leverage against precarity.

What strikes me is how easily money becomes a proxy for worth, even when we know better. How quickly it slides from tool to verdict. How effortlessly it absorbs our fears about dependency, our anxieties about choice, our unease with needing anything at all. The fracture appears when the story collapses—when money fails to deliver the dignity or security it promised, or when its pursuit begins to hollow out the very autonomy it was meant to secure.

Perhaps this is why money fractures so many lives without ever announcing itself as the cause. It disguises itself as pragmatism, as responsibility, as realism. It presents itself as neutral while quietly shaping the boundaries of what feels possible. Like other cracks, it resists clean moral accounting. There are no villains here, only stories that harden into structures, and structures that quietly govern how freely we believe we are allowed to live.

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This essay begins a series of inquiries into fracture, formation, and lucidity across French and American traditions. Later pieces will return to Fitzgerald and Casiraghi after the works have been fully read. I consider this to be a deeply personal journey where I may resemble the aforementioned navigator who broke from convention to chart his own course.

I had to take a road trip this week. Not a pleasant one. Of course, for me, time in the car is rarely pleasant. It’s just not something I ever relished. When I lived in California, I abstained from driving altogether and used public transportation, which in Los Angeles I found to be very good—and, frankly, relaxing. I started driving again in 2013, after moving back to Louisiana. Being stuck in a car has a way of forcing you to stay with thoughts—and voices—you’d normally abandon.

Well, this week’s road trip took me into Texas, where the first thing you notice, coming out of Louisiana, is how good the roads are. On the drive back to Baton Rouge, I listened to one of the audiobooks in my Libby app—Cassidy Hutchinson’s Enough. I had started it a few weeks ago and took a break out of frustration. Well, I mean, come on, the girl chose to become a Republican, and then she chose to work in the Donald Trump White House, and then she planned to work for his post-presidential team in Palm Beach. And it took what seemed like forever for her to finally ditch MAGA world (“the family”) and fully cooperate with the January 6 Committee. There were so many parts to her story that truly tried my patience. And yet….on the road, I kept listening—until I had to take a break and treat myself to Bob Dylan—and then I continued on Cassidy’s journey, and you know, I started to get it.

I saw the structure of her story. The frustration is the design. The book makes you inhabit the delay.

She wrote it linearly, so of course you’re going to be frustrated and annoyed for three quarters of it. You’re not going to understand, until the last act, just how deeply she was duped by the cult of Trumpism. Even while she started to wake up, she found herself tethered to it in ways that are frankly terrifying and creepy. She was smart enough to read the shady writing on the wall; she saw Mark Meadows burning documents, even saw him carrying classified material out of the White House. Yet she hung on—still planning to accept Trump’s offer to work for his team post-presidency at Mar-a-Lago. She justified it as him needing her. “He needs good people.” As if it was her job to save him. Trapped by obligation disguised as loyalty.

She felt in her gut that something was wrong, and she knew she was (initially) committing perjury to the House committee investigating January 6, 2021, yet the tether held. What finally broke the spell? It was a phone call she had with her friend Sam. He told her to look at herself in the mirror. Did she like who she was looking at? Could she live with that person for the rest of her life?

It’s been hard (and frustrating and annoying) to watch good people get roped and used by Donald Trump. That whole anti-establishment kick he was on about in 2016—the politically incorrect, the rebel, the “drain the swamp” rhetoric—seduced a lot of people. I remember this guy I saw on YouTube—late in 2016. He talked about his experience freeing himself from a cult, and then he confessed that he thought the Democratic Party had become a cult. He got pulled into the MAGA movement believing that he was escaping a cult. These are real people. You can say they’re dumb, and maybe some of them are, but a lot of them just seem to be emotionally broken. I say that with compassion.

The guy on YouTube misread MAGA for freedom. Cassidy is smart. Exceptionally smart. The thing about Trump is that, however uneducated and crude, he is clever. He knows how to manipulate people. Even as he was plotting to hang onto power, he got Cassidy to feel sorry for him. She thought proximity to power was responsibility.

I noticed a similar dynamic between Cassidy and her dad. Her dad clearly has mental health issues. His behavior in her story is often inexplicable and baffling. But he’s her dad. She loves him. More to the point, she longs to be loved by him. Even as he was hurting her, it pained her to have to stand up to him. She also felt responsibility to help him, inverting the parent-child contract as so many children in dysfunctional families do.

Elizabeth Grey’s article, “Cassidy Hutchinson and Swearing Off Daddy,” is excellent and I agree with her analysis.

By the time I finished the book, ’s analysis felt inevitable.

I recognize how strong and natural the tether was to her dad, how painful it must be to watch helplessly while someone you love self-destructs; and I also recognize how Mark Meadows and President Trump played on her emotions. Constantly. Every time she expressed doubts, she was appealed to for loyalty and aid. At one point, her mother begs her to stop thinking she can fix Trump or even that it’s her responsibility to fix him.

We can’t fix someone else. We can’t fix our parents. We can’t fix the hubris-blinded characters in our lives. We can only fix one person—the Woman in the Mirror.

There was another moment in her story that mattered just as much as the mirror. Hutchinson found her historical counterpart. Reading about Watergate, she recognized herself not in the presidents or the power brokers, but in Alexander Butterfield—the aide who revealed the existence of the Nixon tapes. Butterfield wasn’t a crusader. He wasn’t a rebel. He was an institutional figure who answered a question honestly, and in doing so made history intelligible. Cassidy read the story of Butterfield in Bob Woodward’s 2015 book, The Last of the President’s Men. She read it in one sitting. Then she reread it. The recognition of her place in the structure mattered. It placed her fear, her delay, and her eventual testimony inside a lineage. She wasn’t alone, and she wasn’t unprecedented.