Hello, I’m accidentally writing about a diary again! I promise it does not involve the New Yorker or very wealthy liberal art college types this time. This time it’s only a “diary.”
I’m also deep in a mania for fall clothes that I can’t wear yet because it’s still 70-something degrees outside most of the time and you are going to hear about it. Unless you stop reading, which is up to you, but I wish you wouldn’t.
— Ashley
let me tell you about this book
This book is more a vibe than a story. I mean that as a compliment, I think, even though it’s not very elegant to describe anything as “a vibe.”
Happy Hour didn’t give me any narrative reasons to keep turning pages, but there I was turning away. I liked inhabiting its world. It was nice to settle into the reasonable 2.5-inch heels of a 21-year-old New York party girl — and even nicer to pull out of it and feel relieved that I’m not a 21-year-old New York party girl (though many of my shoes are reasonable 2.5-inch heels).
Isa Epley “has had a hard life” and traveled the world. She’s just arrived in the city with her Bosnian best friend Gala Novak.
By day, the girls sell clothes on a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave between Brooklyn, the Upper East Side, and the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert social capital into something more lasting than precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models.
There’s something The Beautiful and the Damned-adjacent here, the way young and pretty people do very little but find a lot of meaning in it. I mean this as a compliment. I think you can be both silly and serious, and an author can take her characters seriously while finding them a little silly — maybe especially when we/they are young.
If you’re on the fence about reading Happy Hour, start with this New York magazine profile of Marlowe Granados in which she tells the reporter, with a shrug, “Sometimes men just fly you out.”
let me tell you about this thing
I’m moving into this sweater, it’s my house now.
My house is big. My house is soft. My house is minty green. My house keeps me warm and safe.
┏┓
┃┃╱╲ in
┃╱╱╲╲ this
╱╱╭╮╲╲house
▔▏┗┛▕▔ I
╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲
am both a cool tennis mom
and a grad student who is
late to class
╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲
▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔
It’s from Mango and it’s $59.99.
let me tell you about this cat
If you live in any city, you know a city has its capital-c Characters. They live their lives very publicly or boisterously or both. Everyone knows who they are and where, generally, they might find them. They’re part of the fabric.
Wilson, known to many as the most social cat west of the Mississippi, is a Character of Denver.
Though he doesn’t leave his home with The Carters, he is, like any enigmatic shut-in, quite interested in human interaction. Visitors are greeted with a rub against their leg, or if their presence is really treasured, a little dance whose steps involve a jump, a neck thrust, and a rub. It’s unclear whether this is a habit of his own or a custom learned in a previous life. An avid conversationalist, Wilson has developed several meows in order to better communicate with people — a fact at which some street cats might roll their eyes, though it might benefit them to learn. He is, unfailingly, not only the life of the party but the party’s beating heart and raison d'être.
Please don’t mistake him for a freeloading socialite. Wilson earns his keep by defending the home, keeping watch for and scaring off filthy birds (and their diseases), and once even slaying an intruding mouse. He expects nothing but food and socialization in return and took no offense when The Carters didn’t dine on his conquest. Wilson is gracious.
His zeal for living extends to his meals, and on occasion, Wilson’s stomach is upset by the speed with which he eats, and (he would be embarrassed to know this has been written) the meal comes up. He refers to this weekly disturbance as his “troubles.” He’d much prefer a good, healthy meal to make it to proper digestion, something he believes with great satisfaction that he can feel happening, and when it reaches its natural completion, he is so invigorated that he sprints from the box.
He also has a thing about house plants, but please don’t ask him about that.