I fall in love too easily.

The name of this newsletter comes from the French idiom, avoir un cœur d’artichaut.

Sep 26, 2023

The name Artichoke Heart comes from a French idiom I saw in a New Yorker article: avoir un cœur d’artichaut, or “to have an artichoke heart,” meaning “to fall in love too easily.”

This quality may not seem like an obvious one if you know me in real life (which, at this point, it’s a safe assumption that all of my readers know me). I famously care very little for social pretensions, even if they would spare someone’s feelings. I don’t actually consider myself a social person in the least, which might surprise people who have only seen me in social circumstances. I’m an introverted theatre kid, so I learned extroversion as a survival tactic early in life, but my mom explains that when I was very young I wouldn’t talk to people at all.

In fact, when I was a baby, she was wheeling me around the grocery store in my stroller, and some presumptuous stranger approached and tried baby-talking and making moony eyes at me. Apparently I was not amused and just stared back at her. The woman stood back up, disgruntled, and told my mom that I was a “very mean baby.” And my precious mother, probably high on postnatal hormones, bared her mama bear teeth and snapped, “You take that back right now.” She’s always been my fiercest supporter.

I’ve only had one serious relationship. I ended things in part because I fell too hard and too fast, and I wasn’t ready. Maybe that’s a more accurate description: I go deep quickly and recklessly. But even that is functioning as a coping mechanism, I’ve learned. If I share my vulnerabilities early, they lose their power as liabilities—right?

I fall in love too easily with every book at the bookstore, with the color olive green, with the next destination to add to my bucket list. I fall in love with strangers as I imagine their backstories. I’ve harbored crushes for years and across oceans. My love for my kitten Milo has grown so quickly it distracts me near-constantly.

I think my desire (compulsion, really) to write comes from a place of infatuation with the world around me and a grasping fear that it will go unnoticed by anyone but me. If I love something, I want you to share it with me. Selfishly, that is one reason I decided to finally start a Substack, if only to have a place where I can at least pretend to have a shared, sustained appreciation for the things that become precious to me, no matter how quickly they infiltrate my life—or leave it.

Last month, much to my mother’s chagrin, I got my third tattoo. It’s a tiny little bow and arrow inspired by the Taylor Swift song “The Archer.” As a girl who is committed to her independence to the point of self-sabotage, this song feels like an x-ray of my heart (however, in a display of emotional maturity, I will admit here and now that I was wrong on this the first few times I listened to it. It’s so subtle compared to the rest of Lover that I didn’t get it at first.)

I can barely choose which lyrics to highlight here, but I especially love the spiraling nature of the bridge (“They see right through me / Can you see right through me? / I see right through me”) and the couplet, “All of my enemies started out friends / Help me hold on to you.”

But the song took on even greater meaning for me at the Eras Tour in May, watching Taylor sing while standing next to my best friends from childhood, Mary Shannon and Rachel (and Caitlin there in spirit), with our moms only a few rows behind us. We had all coordinated our outfits to correspond to a different era. Mom drove in from Tyler—I, from Austin—and my bonus dad Matt Tompson greeted us with homemade craft cocktails as we got ready for the concert.

Taylor ends the song echoing an earlier refrain: “Who could ever leave me, darling? / But who could stay?” But as the music fades out, she changes the sentence to, “You could stay.” In the live performance, she gestures out at the audience—her fans, who have been there through the ups and downs of her career.

In that moment, I realized, I was standing next to the girls who stayed. Through breakups of family and breakdowns of ego, when we couldn’t see anyone else in the world but our bubble, though I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. In sickness and in health, literally.

So, yes, the tattoo is out of my love for Taylor Swift. She’s the voice of our generation. (I’m just a voice, of a generation.)

But it’s also an ode to the people who made me.

After I broke up with my now-ex-boyfriend, with few other close friends in the city, I had a lot of alone time to take stock of my various relationships (more on that in next week’s newsletter, if I work up the guts to publish it). I realized the full depth of my dedication to and abiding gratitude for these girls. I have never experienced a greater love story than ours.

I haven’t always had the best friends, but the ones I’ve managed to hold on to have changed my life for the better in ways that I don’t know if a romantic relationship ever could match. Maybe I’m just cynical—but I could write a love letter to Nikita’s sense of humor, which overlaps so perfectly with mine, or to my drunken memories third- and fourth-wheeling, respectively, with Charlotte, Holland, and Holland’s boyfriend.

Each of my girl friends and I have built a vocabulary together based on inside jokes, shared hatreds, colloquialisms, hopes, and fervent admiration of each other’s fucked-up brains. These pearls of passion I share with people are what keep me going. They’re also what makes living apart from them so hard. (At least I live in the same city as Nikita, but I’m trying not to be the crusty old alumna who rains on her senior parade.) I have moments where I turn to the person beside me in awed camaraderie only to realize we’re both just sitting in traffic or in line at Trader Joe’s.

And while technology certainly makes moments of instantaneous connection easier, it’s also exacerbated my feelings of ostracism. Because I can act immediately on the impulse to share something with a friend, I often … don’t. There’s too much content to even begin. And another part of me, too, feels ashamed to acknowledge how online I am by sending yet another Instagram Reel of Conrad Fisher set to Olivia Rodrigo’s “making the bed” at 2 a.m., especially if I haven’t returned their texts in days.

I can’t tell if it’s too naively counterintuitive to expand my online presence to ameliorate this condition. Still, I hope writing this newsletter weekly will help me pay closer attention, collecting things that catch my eye like a little kid making a bouquet of wildflowers for his mother on their walk.

I’m also trying to write more of anything, without hiding behind impossibly high standards. I do want a book deal (ideally, several) one day, but I’m not moving any closer to those dreams if I don’t push myself to create and to submit my work to public scrutiny.

Years ago, when I was visiting my friends Sophie and Olivia Cardenas in Madrid, Olivia shared with me a quote about creativity—before we all went down the street to their favorite neighborhood taberna to have one of the best cocktails I’ve ever tasted.

I still think about this quote when I’m in the middle of another “shitty first draft,” to use Anne Lamott’s term (at this stopped-up stage of the creative process, I’m also wishing I had some of that Spanish vermouth):

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners … All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good—it has potential—but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out, or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal. The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work … It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions … It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” —Ira Glass

It is in this spirit that I present Artichoke Heart. Thank you, dear reader, for being a part of the long game, this dream. I hope to delight you and challenge you and keep you intrigued.

Thank you to Charlotte Benes for designing the logo and header for this newsletter, which you might have seen when you subscribed. In honor of her lovely work, here she is carrying an artichoke as her bouquet to senior prom because she’s not like other girls. Clearly we were meant to be friends.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

In keeping with the edible theme, this section will feature the things I’m consuming weekly. First, two quotes that inspired the creation and initial installment of this newsletter:

“You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking … ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: ‘It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.’” —Charles Baudelaire

“When people would ask me—and sometimes they did—to write about them, I’d reply, ‘First, break my heart.’” —Robert Glück for The Paris Review

S1 E13 - “Sectionals” (feat. Eliza Pillsbury)

I had the great honor of being the first guest on The Glee Version, the brain child of my two funniest friends, the aforementioned Mary Shannon Tompson and Caitlin Cooner. We get into family trauma, GUTS, and the golden days of high school theatre (spelled with an “re,” thank you very much). It’s a glimpse, for better or for worse, into how our brains work whenever we’re together.

GUTS

See above for further thoughts.

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess

I am chemically addicted to “HOT TO GO!” and “Casual.” But something that this album has in common with the one directly above is that a guy with whom I matched on Hinge while I was living in Paris in 2022 was a producer on both of them, and he also played bass and sax on some of the best songs off of GUTS. We didn’t end up ever going out because he was in London while I was in Paris, and I was in London while he was in Paris. We do still follow each other on Instagram. Not only is he turning out straight bops, he also has great taste in women.

Sex and the City

After finishing Girls at the request of Mary Shannon and Caitlin, I needed lighter fare, so now I’m paying homage to the “girls in New York” blueprint by starting Sex and the City for the first time. This show goes down like water.

Part of the immediate fun for me in watching this show is being inducted into another classic social categorization tool, like Hogwarts houses for hot girls. In my own friend group, for example, I’m obviously the Carrie, Holland is totally Miranda, and Charlotte is, of course, Charlotte. But before me, my mom (incidentally named Carrie) was the Carrie of her friend group; Valerie is Miranda; Ellen is Samantha; and Pam is Charlotte.

And it compounds, too: Samatha is a Slytherin; Charlotte is a Hufflepuff; Miranda is a Ravenclaw; and Carrie is a Gryffindor. I love these kinds of typing systems because—as an Enneagram 5—they help me shortcut intimate understanding of someone and unlock deeper insights on myself.

The Baby on the Fire Escape: Motherhood, Creativity, and the Mind-Baby Problem

I knew this book would be one of my favorite reads of the year when I was a few pages into my library copy. I went out immediately to pick up my own copy at BookPeople to mark up.

It’s an incredibly ambitious book. Phillips manages to write a collective biography including no less than Audre Lorde, Alice Neel, Shirley Jackson, Penelope Fitzgerald, Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Carter, Louise Bourgeois, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Smart, Gwendolyn Brooks, Susan Sontag—and I’m still only 70% of the way through. In the introduction and conclusion, too, she interweaves her academic project with passages of memoir set off in italics, about her own motherhood and its inspiration for the book. As a memoirist myself, I’m fascinated when the form expands in some new way, and I’m in awe of what this book is able to accomplish.

While I don’t plan on having kids any time soon, I’ve been preoccupied lately—maybe because I’m engaged in the project of building an adult life in the present—with what I can be doing now to prepare for the future. I’ve gotten to speak with some incredible people since starting my new job, whether on staff or on assignment, who are both parents and working artists. I was never even sure I wanted kids because I didn’t know how these two lives could be compatible, but I’m discovering examples all around me, and I am apprenticing myself to them.

To a less profound degree, for sure, I’ve experienced maternal pangs for my kitten—and I don’t even have to worry about affecting his psychological development. He is 3 months old and will appear frequently in these emails. Happy Milo Monday to all who celebrate.

Artichoke Heart