look at the material! (you can be the judge of it!)

on the new lorde album, the range of feminine archetypes, and how tiffany "new york" pollard made me the woman i am today.

Here’s the thing: if the world had not given me Lorde — as first played on whatever “alt-rock” radio still was in the early 2010s as I sweat and shook in the back of my mom’s ugly Infiniti before she (Lorde, not my mom) had the number one song in the country — I would have had to invent her. I would’ve plucked a frizzy, dark hair from my head which I did not know to maintain and buried it, hoping she would grow from its seed. Frankly, her timing could not have been more perfect.

I was thirteen during the summer when “Royals” began to climb the charts and The Love Club EP, containing five strange and fairly disparate songs, was all we had from this girl who looked like me and maybe sounded like me in a cockeyed, fraternal way. All I cared about was obsessively researching The Beatles (looking back, having all of the information concerning the most written-about, anthologized band in history at my fingertips on my cracked iPod Touch was a lifeline that probably prevented my obsessive personality from taking much more dire measures to combat this whole adolescence thing) and pop girls of a certain strain. Baby fat and the general teenage malaise had fully kicked in.

I generally don’t like writing about the following aspect of that time, because it does not feel like my story to tell, feels like a sad beat slotted in here solely to draw pity from you, and I don’t want my family to be pitied. However, it’s key to my relationship to Lorde, so here goes: this was around the time my brother, who is three years younger than me, was in the full blush of treatment for the tumor they found in his brain after one too many intense headaches. So, most of my middle school years consisted of hospital spells that never quite felt abnormal — it just felt like another place to be ferried off to after my final class period. Only my closest friends, the ones who knew my parents and had me as a frequent enough visitor at their houses, knew about my brother’s treatment. I doubt I was compelling enough at the time for the whole thing to become an issue other people whispered about to each other behind my back.

One day, I rode the bus home from school and started scrounging around for snacks in my parents’ kitchen while my mom and I chatted. I doubt she even remembers this now, and I don’t know what happened to her earlier in the day to prompt this, but after some innocuous conversation about my day, she began shakily apologizing out of nowhere, for supposedly leaving me on my own so she could take care of my brother, for leaving me to deal with things by myself when I might have needed her most. At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about. I just stared into the orange plastic bowl which my Goldfish crackers had been poured into and wished all my guts could be tied up and pulled back against my spine, like I could be a walking, gelatinous vertebrae alone. One of one.

Of course, I know what she meant by all of that now, and I think it drew me nearer to her and further away from another parent once I began to realize. I see now that, though none of it was their fault, it had become the incident my entire pubescent life revolved around. Every agonizing, embarrassing moment happened without someone I needed there — something that, somehow, didn’t really click for me until a few years ago. I retreated further into myself and feigned a level of self-sufficiency that eventually became real. I got my first period (earlier than all my friends) and dug around a hallway closet for pads I couldn’t find — at least my public school sex education to that point had been competent enough to teach me what to look for — before fashioning my own tissue substitute and assuring myself I could ask my mom what to do when she came home from the ICU to sleep in her own bed in a few days. She was always within a few days’ reach.

I remember later on, in middle school, post-Pure Heroine’s release, telling my friend Christine from my bus that “Buzzcut Season” was about me and my brother during those summers. I remember a sense of elation voicing the connection I’d made out loud, like this feral girl only a few years my senior in New Zealand, who I wanted to grow up to be so very badly, knew about my life and hospital food courts and IV drips and a small boy whose hair would take years to grow back, sleeping in an eggshell white room we’d half moved into. That song is the soundtrack of my still-active role as his protector, of the hook chipping away at his fear of a real world I so desperately want to drag him into. I’m an adult with a job now, and I still can’t possibly imagine what else she could have written that song about.

Anyway, enough of that. All of it is just to provide context for how perfectly the rise of her jerking, black star collided with a strange and impressionable time in my life. I also just loved those songs, regardless of what backdrop my life provided, and as a result, I think she’s a pop culture figure that’s always existed on the fringe of my writing about my life and the love of my life (pop music). One of the few times I did get the chance to write specifically about her was in my essay honoring the anniversary of Sky Ferreira’s Night Time, My Time, in which I prefaced my thoughts about that album and its ever-winding history with some thoughts on Ferreira’s contemporaries:

There’s a transparent laziness in grouping women who happen to be working in the same medium at similar career stages together, but the years I was in middle and high school wereparticularly good ones if you were interested in young women with a certain visual sense making slightly left-of-center pop music. Younger people now referring to this period as “peak Tumblr days” has been my first experience with feeling like my bones are decaying in real time.

Looking back now, Lorde was probably the most important figure for us on this front. It was a moment when this weird girl who sang about isolation and belonging and consumer fatigue over minimalist backing that felt radically different for the time—all while dancing like she didn’t give a fuck, speaking without a whiff of media training—had the number one song in the country. Even the kids I shared nothing but a lab table with knew who she was. I’ll never forget the boy who sat across from me in class looking the “Tennis Court” video up on his phone, looking back up at me and saying—not unkindly, but with an air of bemusement towards the material—“Well, she’s kind of like you.” Well, yeah. That became the point.

When she made her critically lauded follow-up Melodrama four years later, having matured alongside me, she was still kind of “like me” because we’d gone through those life stages together. Not in the Swiftian sense, where I perceived her to be my best friend, but she’d grabbed onto something visceral and true that most people my age felt and was writing about it as we lived it in real time. When she went off into the weeds a little bit writing about fame and vacations and Laurel Canyon-type psychedelic creative rebirths while I was still at shitty basement shows in college, our paths drifted—but it was allowed to happen, because she’d already struck the nerve at my very core all those years earlier. Forgiveness is easy with artists like that. Once someone has acted as that conduit for you, they’re still yours, even when they stray.

And so, this begs the question of the hour and of the weekend in pop at large: Is Lorde still mine?

A piece of it is that Lorde and I are still growing up together, because it seems, based on profiles I’ve read and what cultural commentators on Twitter have surmised, that Lorde and I are currently living similar enough lives in the same city. I mean, she has free reign to borrow David Byrne’s bikes and is getting papped downtown hanging out with Dev Hynes, so maybe we’re not living the exact same lives. Yet, she’s dealing with the same major life upheavals that come in your mid-to-late twenties, hooking up and fucking things up in the same place and in the same nightlife spots (I want everyone to know I was at Baby’s for maybe the thousandth time in my life this weekend — on Virgin’s release day — and witnessed two forty-somethings also there to see Julie Doiron almost come to blows because one of them wouldn’t stop talking during the set, all while it felt like a sticky 90 degrees in that back room. I suppose there have been plenty of good times too, though — RIP Billy Jones, much love — but it was just funny that this specific day was not one of those for me.)

The issue is that the convergence of our lived experience and the sounds we’re both interested in (no disrespect to Sheryl Crow, but to soak up the sun at the turn of the century and the type of music that came with it is what we call “not my business”) also comes with a deeply annoying press run. Someone jokingly posited that Lorde, once she emerges from her media blackout between projects, speaks about things like an under-socialized, homeschooled kid because she’s from such a remote part of the world — they speak in their own distinct tongue there, even if that tongue is English. And this used to be something I loved about her, as I wrote in the aforementioned piece!

The difficult tightrope act to perform here, before I go into more detail, is not to make this about Lorde as a person, because I obviously do not know her and don’t want to psychoanalyze the person I imagine she is for the sake of a point I’m trying to make here. I also wonder whether some of this is a case of what I might fittingly call “Girl, so confusing” syndrome — when you find yourself slightly annoyed by someone else’s behavior but realize it might only be bothering you because it’s something you might also do, and your brain agonizes over the possibility that you, too, are this annoying. She called herself “an intense bitch” in that one occasionally cringe-worthy Rolling Stone interview, and I think pretty much anyone I’ve been remotely close to or related to or have slept with or worked with would agree that I’m an intense bitch too — with either a grimace or a knowing grin, depending on who it is. So I know that, sometimes, intense bitches don’t know when to shut up, don’t know when to go home. I empathize.

So, I think I’m going to talk about “Lorde” in terms of the character or narrator of Virgin and the press or social media that has sprung up around it, not necessarily “Ella Yelich-O’Connor,” the fully-formed person who has given me so much but whom I do not know personally and will not judge here before you. I will say that, upon my first few listens, Virgin is more of an interesting listen than an enjoyable one — and again, that might just be because I’m too close to what it’s conveying! But it’s true that the first adjective that springs to mind is “awkward,” followed by “disjointed.” There are flashing moments of ecstatic wonder before he music doubles back and snuffs out whatever synth hook or lyric I was excited about, instead fumbling into clumsy couplets that click on and off for me, depending on the verse. A song will build too quickly and too near its end that I leave its runtime unfulfilled. It is not bad, and I think I like it. I just have to wonder how intentional its faultiness is. It’s possible she’s three steps ahead of me and I’m just lagging. It’s happened before.

Before I delve into the content of the album, I need to get into the concept of “Lorde, gender theorist” — which I maybe find more interesting than the actual notes anyone is playing or the production anyone is layering into it. I think the most interesting thing I’ve seen come about relating to the album is her interview on Bella Freud’s podcast “Fashion Neurosis,” a podcast I genuinely adore and which has had Courtney Love as a guest, which means it’s an immediate hall-of-famer for me. Lorde lets several compelling nuggets slip over the course of this interview, but there is exactly one quote that arguably inspired this whole newsletter edition, which I felt compelled to write down the second I heard it.

While discussing the eating disorder she found herself in the throes of while touring Solar Power — an album supposedly focused on finding your inner peace in idyllic isolation, far away from we peasants in the grimy, evil cities — Lorde remembers reading about women who had gone through similar trials with food when she was younger and thinking, oh, that could never happen to me. She says, looking back to this period a few years ago, she would justify it as a form of artistic discipline, as if not eating would bring her closer to truly hearing her body and would deliver her to a level of artistic purity she hadn’t experienced before. It reminded me of a concept I've read about before called “holy anorexia” — where Catholic women, specifically, would starve themselves as an act of devotion, to suffer the way Jesus had suffered. Lorde describes it like this: “It felt like the, sort of, noble ‘women’s work’ or something.”

The other quote I felt compelled to write down was when she was describing her experience seeing her current biking buddy, David Byrne, on the big screen when Stop Making Sense was back in theaters. Fittingly, given the beginning of this whole screed, I went to see it in the nearly-empty AMC near my childhood home thirty minutes outside of Midtown with my brother — who is now at least physically fine and who enjoyed the movie, though he’s not quite a Talking Heads fan. When Lorde saw it, she still had blonde dyed hair that didn’t quite suit her, and found herself in awe of Byrne blown up on the silver screen: “What struck me was his purity. He was radiating out from his own skin. He was very unadorned, like a monk. I remember in the theater, knowing in that moment, ‘You’ve gotta dye your hair back [to be] dark.’”

In theory, Virgin’s mission is to explore the terror of having a body and defining that body and being loved in that body. It is messy and afraid of us, the people who have rewired her brain chemistry since she was a child because we watch her every move. It is afraid of the older men in her life who she always had on tap to “play god,” in her words. This is akin to a concept I’ve explored in this newsletter before — how wanting to be a boy is central to desiring him.

In fact, I just looked back to find it and I wrote about it two years ago while picking apart Tori Amos’ love of Robert Plant: Sometimes, if you like a boy enough when you’re that young, you more study him than love him. You follow the motions he goes through, his range of movement his god-given right. Soon, you do “him” better than he does, not that anyone can admit it. It’s his right when he does it, it’s lewd when you do. Not your place. In the podcast interview, Lorde talks about female artists I’ve idolized since those years she first came into my life — PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, Sinead O’Connor — who would either dress plainly or hyper-femininely to almost emphasize how naturally unfeminine their movement or music or performance style is. They exist in the in-between purgatory she and I find ourselves bound too so often. They become players in the boys’ game.

In the world of Virgin, “women’s work” is just that — work. It’s the maintenance of a body which she’ll readily admit is that of a cis women, but there is freedom in the purity it claims can be found in the unadorned thrall of masculinity. She has a point, to an extent. When you are seeking so desperately to be free, even if it’s just in the clothes you choose to throw on as armor that day, you are drawn to over-analyzing any piece of that work you struggle to shrug off, especially if it seems easy or effortless to another woman. How does she learn that? How does she know to follow their rules without trying? This — again, for the character or archetype we’re referring to here — leads to the weird comments about getting off birth control and “feeling” yourself ovulate (which is something actual scientists don’t think is real, but I’m not getting into that with all of you here), and this strange fixation on the sex tape that ruined Pamela Anderson’s life and which she has begged people to not go looking for, and commenting on Addison Rae’s posts that it’s “yummy” to see someone “so in their body.” It’s consuming all that you feel has slipped from your natural ability, watching it under a microscope knowing you can never subsume it. Aren’t we free now?

At some point, I will probably write in more depth about Addison Rae — whose album, as a work of pure escapist pop, I like a lot — but regardless of your thoughts on the level of “authenticity” she is able to convey, the key here is that she is a trained dancer, and a studied, textbook pop star. I believe she has control over what she creates, and that it comes from her own experiences, but she has a team of tastemakers around her who have fed these reference points into her work which makes the finished product something that I, a person who loves those reference points, can enjoy without thinking too much about it.

Of course, Lorde has collaborators too, but this project seems to hit up against the fact that she is not (and likely never will be) a textbook pop star. Addison Rae purposely does nothing original. Lorde changed the pop music of an entire decade, and yet, she looks longingly to the easier route that she never could have taken. Sometimes, it becomes exhausting to swim against the tide. Is Addison Rae the pop star of the future, as Lorde referred to her recently? Probably not. Neither is Lorde at this point, but she may still be one of our most fascinating artists working in the genre because, in her words, “when you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” and this whole lead-up to the album has been an act of directing our attention to a side of pop culture at odds with how labored-over life and identity and love can feel when you’re out there on your own, in the in-between. Or at least that’s how it feels to me.

The first musical moment I really love on Virgin is the little cello digs between the verses on “Shapeshifters,” a song I found myself chafing against on my first listen, perhaps because the wallop of “I'll kick you out and pull you in / Swear that you were just a friend / And when it's all over again / Say I'm not affected” is a lot to recover from. Maybe I just wanted the fear of it all to build to something more tearful, more bloody — even if the real experience of it all sounds like this, fury bottled inside a low-octane simmer that might signify nothing in the long haul. Maybe everything I’ve had to say here is “Girl, so confusing” syndrome at work, where I want to see my frustration rendered bombastic, as if that will make it important. It’s something I’m still trying to parse through. I listen to “Current Affairs” and appreciate that little sampled loop that plays through the chorus, but curl up to shield myself from everything else it spits in my face — or in my mouth, rather.

I haven’t written something here since February, and a lot of the time between my last newsletter and this one has been spent trying to experience life in part to have something to say when I came back to writing — reading Anne Carson’s translations of Euripides’ tragedies and compiling lists of my favorite albums of the year so far and drinking too much with my friends from work and going on dates where I come on too strong just for the hell of it. I found no reason to document any of the latter topic in the moment because I find the act of dating uninteresting to write about — other people have done it to great success and are able to express themselves through their recounting of those experiences, and I applaud them.

For me? I feel strange tying any of those people who didn’t actually want me anyway into anything I have to say to you all, whose time and patience with these rambling posts I cherish. What will my work become if they’re the only thing happening to me? Was it them I even wanted in the first place, or was it the rush of being wanted after years of rarely feeling that at all? Was it the urge to finally find a confidante at this stage in my life — I love my family, but in a freeing way, my self-worth is not tied to their opinion of me or my work, because it’s not for them? It’s for me, but maybe it could be for someone else too, I thought. No wonder I found myself nodding along to “Favourite Daughter,” noting that this is one of the few places Lorde’s experience and mine don’t converge, and listening on.

Anyway, as Morrissey (the most potent source of my most shameful case of “Girl, so confusing” syndrome) has sort of written in song before, I think these months made me realize the work can never be anyone else’s — “and I,” meaning everything I create, “am mine.” All I’m confronted with are men afraid to say no the second I push back, then feel they’re forced to fumble their way out of the proverbial headlock I’ve allegedly trapped them in, when in my mind, I was only fucking around. How could they ever handle me when I’m serious? They would scoff at the sprawl, as is their right. It’s just for the best, then, that it will never be their business.

So yes, maybe my reticence to embrace Virgin fully lies in how near its themes lay beneath my skin. Yet, another part of me wants the bombast — the melodrama, if you’ll excuse the use of the term — that Lorde does not seem to fully grant herself here. I roll my eyes at the use of “trauma” in the lyrics (moratorium on the therapy speak, please) but let out an audibly relieved sigh when “Clearblue” finally let her start weird and maintain it through its short runtime, both in sound and subject matter. I got giddily excited when I actually felt like jumping up and down to the mantra of “Did I cry myself to sleep about that? Cheat about that? Rot teeth about that? Did I sweat hours a week about that? Compete about that? Lose my freak about that?” on “Broken Glass,” as if it might complete the mission “What Was That” fell short on — even if, admittedly, my mind begged for an extra bass note buzzing beneath the whole thing to fill it out more.

I want her to make us bigger, make us god. Maybe we’ve grown too old for me to rely on her for that. Maybe there’s my shame over still living in “Liability” when I’ve been rejected, rather than moving onto where she is now. How can our paths diverge that starkly when we’re mirror images? If we’re still a little much for everyone, why can’t we sound more like that: a little much? Again, I can’t say I know. Maybe we don’t deserve to blow our issues up into something beautiful or not awkward anymore. I guess the schtick is old.

When I started reading Grief Lessons: Four Plays, containing those four Euripides tragedies translated for the modern reader by the brilliant Anne Carson, I didn’t expect going into one of the plays’ introductions that I would leave it thinking, “Oh, it’s like Lorde.” But, sitting in Herbert Von King Park, I furrowed my brow as I worked through Carson’s preface about “Hippolytos,” a play first produced in Athens in 428 BC. The gist of the play is that the Ancient Greek gods toy around with the lives of civilians — namely, that the titular character incurs the wrath of Aphrodite because he refuses to worship at her feet, preferring his more chaste perception of Artemis, as far as goddesses go. Carson writes of his choice:

Her prestige as mistress of the hunt coincides with his favorite activity; he makes it a form of worship. Her epithet parthenos (“virgin, maiden, girl") is used by him as if it named Artemis to a different species than the female race that he denounces (“this counterfeit thing—woman?”). He seems to want to place Artemis, and himself, in a special third gender—the translucent gender—unpolluted by flesh or change.

But, as the chorus remind us in their entrance song, Artemis has much to do with flesh and change. She is, for example, patron goddess of the blood and pain of childbirth, commonly invoked by women in travail. Could Hippolytos admit this aspect of her? Hippolytos’ favorite adjective for the Artemis-atmosphere in which he wishes to exist is akeratos, “uncut, unharvested, untouched, inviolate, pure, perfect.” When he uses akeratos of Artemis’ meadow he means that the grass is literally “uncut” but there is a reference to sexual purity too. For the adjective could connote virgin intactness, and virgins did cut their hair ritually at the time of marriage.

I understand what Lorde means when communicates her wishes to strip everything down to the bone — create monastically and purely, translate herself in uncomfortable ways and make it as direct as possible. She certainly expresses that sense of “flesh or change,” but I worry, too, about using any sense of shame to open myself for people looking for the uncut — a simplicity I can’t see myself in. I struggle to work in the language of archetypal purity, or to even aspire to it. Maybe she’s aiming more for the boldness of Carson’s expansive translation of the Greek word for “shame” too:

Aidos (“shame”) is a vast word in Greek. Its lexical equivalents include “awe, reverence, respect, self-respect, shamefastness, sense of honor, sobriety, moderation, regard for others, regard for the helpless, compassion, shyness, coyness, scandal, dignity, majesty, Majesty.” Shame vibrates with honor and also with disgrace, with what is chaste and with what is erotic, with coldness and also with blushing.

I grew up seeing myself in Lorde and in all of her androgynous north stars she’s cited for the the latest record, but this has led me to think: who, in my mind, encapsulates the traits of excess I find missing from her version of our lived experience — who embodies the emotional and physical spill-over I crave? I’ve decided to present my example of a counterpoint outside of the medium of music.

I’m going to start this last section in a manner that might shock you, but bear with me: I think I first watched VH1’s Flavor of Love when I was in high school, and I found myself changed once I finished it.

I am not the right person to dig into the implications of the misogynoir the show peddled or how it degraded its contestants in ways that surely would not fly now. If you want a true artifact of the mid-aughts, you don’t want what teenagers are wearing now, you want the approach, look and attitude of Flavor of Love.

On this show’s first two seasons, Tiffany “New York” Pollard invented the concept of the reality TV villain — notably, the type of villain you loved more than the story’s heroes. The first moment in the first season of this reality show ostensibly created to find a partner for Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav (it’s still incredible that this concept got greenlit, we were truly in the Wild West of the genre) where I, personally, realized that Flav had his own spotlight stolen right out from under him was when the spotlight-stealer, a girl from Upstate in a white tank top, walked downstairs into the kitchen of the rapper’s gaudy mansion to find her competitors already chowing down.

“Good morning!” she calls out, before going down the line of girls and pointing at each person as she goes: “Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning…”

She pauses, seemingly picking a girl at random. “Not you. You can choke.” Every jaw in the room drops. We cut to this woman’s confessional interview, and she claims that she only said it to this other eligible bachelorette because “I wanted to see if I was powerful enough to twist her mind. She got mind screwed by me. And it worked.” She lets her eyes droop as she speaks, as if her motivations are clear and she’s explaining something to a child who doesn’t deserve clear eye contact.

People in casting rooms have searched for another New York for decades, but she’s yet to be matched. They have a whole show now, called House of Villains, based around the archetype she’s created. I still think she’s the most interesting person who’s ever played themselves on television. It sounds hyperbolic, but I simply don’t know how else to convey what I honestly feel about her to you.

Now, again, returning to the “of its time” aspect: Tiffany is not what the young women online have now termed “a girl’s girl” — she was there to compete, and most of her quotes that are recycled across social media are of her expressing her annoyance with the other women on the show, often in mildly homophobic or… say, not quite “body positive” terms. And yet, there are moments of sheer, unhinged brilliance that seem to embody the very archetype of “too big, too loud, too outrageous” that counteracts all of it. If you have never watched the show, I recommend you put an hour aside to experience the highlight reel they’ll be showing on a loop at my funeral:

In fact, I don’t see the venom New York spews at her adversaries as an attempt to lash out at all other women, and I’m not suggesting people should copy her behavior note-for-note in real life. What we witness, however, when we see her in action, is not only a brash display of enviable self-confidence, but what one astute YouTube commenter refers to as the “full range of emotions with no inhibitions. Anger, Sadness, Happiness.” They continue, “It's like watching life itself.”

I will gladly chip in for Tiffany’s tombstone on the day we sadly, inevitably lose her, and I do believe the inscription should read: “Watching her was like watching life itself.”

To simply write down quotes I still use on a daily basis would be one way of tackling this, but to tie it back to the whole “amateur gender theory” approach we’re taking here, I think about how Lorde described David Byrne — paired down, unadorned, how masculinity meant to subtract. Archetypically, I suppose Tiffany stands in for femaleness — leaking histrionics, excess — but the supposed reason for her being kicked off the show in its finale (TWICE! In two different seasons!) is always that she is “too masculine,” according to Flavor Flav. She wants to be the “man of the house,” and he can’t accept that. I’m not saying Lorde’s vision of masculinity is incorrect (and I’m not using this analogy to invalidate the reasons for which trans people need to transition, or the experiences of nonbinary people, because that’s a different, less theoretical conversation), but maybe we always just code the undesirable in a given situation as feminine. The moment the world’s scrutiny becomes unbearable for the pop star, she wants the simplicity of male dress, of male movement. The moment the bride-to-be is too commanding, she’s too much like a man, she’s as complex as he might be. It would just be simpler if she was not she. Wouldn’t we be free then?

Jokes are made about how New York eats too much, how much weight she’s gained while on the show. Everyone bemoans the volume, the theatrics — and, more fairly, her cruelty. In what is perhaps her most famous moment during Flavor of Love’s first season, she gets into it with another “villain” of sorts on the show, nicknamed Hottie, who claims all of her friends tell her she looks like Beyoncé. Before New York lets out her now-legendary howl of disbelief (“BEYONCÉ??? BEYONCÉ??? BEYONCÉ????”), she tells Hottie why she has no time for her seemingly calm demeanor, which she feels hides something more sinister: “You know what? I might be a fucking bitch to the heart, but at least I don’t smile in all these girls’ faces. Because you fucking are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’m not, I’m a fucking wolf, you see me COMING!”

Before she attacks her primary adversary on the season, nicknamed Pumpkin, after she spits in New York’s face as she was leaving, Pumpkin calls her a “transvestite.” This is an attack which comes up at one of the reunions too, where someone says she “looks like a damn drag queen.” Given the time and tenor of the show, I’ve always remembered that New York responded, without missing a beat, “And I look fabulous! I look better than you making your exit right now!”

At the finale of Drag Race’s eighth season, about a decade later, Tiffany is asked why she identifies with drag queens, perhaps referencing those jabs meant to be insults which she brushed off. “A lot of us were born women,” she says, “but we feel like we have to be [minimalists]. We have to minimize our makeup application, we have to minimize our hair. Fuck all that. Be extra, bitch, because you only go around this motherfucker one time, and I’m gonna be extra, because I’m a drag queen to my heart.” Perhaps it’s worth noting that I’ve never met a straight man who’s watched Flavor of Love after it’s aired, and maybe that’s because reality television has now been codified as lowbrow “feminine” entertainment, in the lineage of daytime soaps before the turn of the century. But any plan they might have had for a Bachelor-esque show where beautiful tears flow and the words “journey” and “process” are repeated a million times flew out the window the second New York walked in the door.

Her greatest performance as shit-stirrer might be her first episode of the second season, where she’s presented solely as a guest and goes in wrecking havoc (by the time she’s reached the finale and the other final contender, Deelishis, calls her and Flav together “Whitney and Bobby,” New York ignores the implication and responds, “Kudos to Whitney, I love her!” before muttering the line which I want engraved into my tombstone: “Call me a crazy-ass psychotic lunatic from hell! I don’t give a damn!”). Yet, it is in the final moments of that season where New York is informed that she has not been chosen again where she finally cements the show has hers. The relationships it wrought have fallen away in the public consciousness — people mostly only talk about Flav now when they talk about his love of the Olympics, and he’s certainly not with any of the “winners” of the show anymore — but New York remains eternal.

She smiles, silently, before stepping up to him: “Why the fuck did you bring me back?” The two engage in a screaming match as thunder and lightning crackle and spark behind them, with Flav claiming her “ways” prevent them from being together: “How can I let you in my life when you tell me you wanna take charge? And you wanna take over? I do what you say?” Deelishis stands dourly, watching as her moment is swiftly pulled out from under her. New York moons him before storming off into the rain, while Flav yells back that she’s just like her mother — the semi-abusive, very strong-willed Sister Patterson, who had made an enemy of Flav from the start. There is something very “I am my mother’s child / I’ll love you ‘til my breathing stops / I’ll love you ‘til you call the cops on me” in the way Tiffany defiantly yells back, “I AM MY MOM!!!!!” before she disappears under the black curtain of night and into the waiting limousine.

A lot of my time worrying about these types of things involves me worrying that I’m more like my father — that our personalities are shaped similarly but point steadfastly in opposite directions, meaning we’re bound to butt heads as long as we’re in the same house for an extended period of time. My mom even said it to me once: “You don’t want me to say this, but you’re a lot like Dad.” She must've seen my face drop, because she amended it with, “The good things about Dad, I mean. The things that I love about him.” I guess my fear, especially when I was younger, was that he could get away with being that way and not be denied anything, where I would resign myself to loneliness, to rejection, if I was that version of myself. I would have to starve myself to be good, to exist as simply as he did — which is to say loudly, confidently, without anyone pushing back on him. I don’t think he cares much about my writing, which is a concern I’ve freed myself of at this point. I guess I can understand why he feels too close to it. Maybe he sees too much of himself in it, but in a shape he finds distasteful. Maybe I’m easier to love when he only has to face me head-on with horse blinders, not outside of the context of our relationship, where I exist too much.

I write about the things that make me bigger, that make me god — if only to survive everything that minimizes me in this strange in-between world, where I’m a woman, but where women exist in a reactionary culture that I’ve written about several times: one packed to the brim with “girl math,” “falling back” into your femininity once you find “the right man,” suddenly becoming an inhuman creature the second you think you might be ovulating, speaking about the cult of women’s knowledge, which feels TERF-y and only alienates us further from the men who already hate us.

Women younger than me believe we suffer for our “women’s work” and will emerge on the other end of it fulfilled and trapped and with an owner tightening a leash around your neck. It’s not in the search for fulfillment though, it’s for an easy way out in a terrifying world that would rather us dead than with autonomy. Adriana Smith was declared brain-dead in February, but her family was forced to keep her on life support to act as an incubator for the fetus inside her due to abortion law — and I’m supposed to think this world will give me anything easily? My trans friends have to fear that they will lose the healthcare they need everyday, and I’m supposed to believe…”reclaiming pink” is my answer?

I’m not suggesting Lorde believes in any of that — and she even admits in that one interview that she knows she sounds like she’s peddling right-wing conspiracy theories about birth control. In a way, she’ll always be mine, and I’ll always be hers, and we’ll always be connected as we ebb and flow in our joining forged in the back of a school bus where a girl is going to the hospital and is not allowed to explode. I can still see her puffy cheeks ballooning, holding her breath with her frizzy half-curls circling her head like a wreath, dreaming of a day she can express the full range of emotions, be worthy of Greek tragedy that contains all the definitions of shame, the full breadth of shamelessness and the noise it makes.

Sometimes the noise it makes is of you standing up in front of your prospective significant other’s children and telling them know you are the “H.B.I.C.: the head bitch in charge.” I can sprawl endlessly in that mode. It’s all just our mess, and I think Lorde’s mess and mine are more alike than I feel they are while I read what she has to say about it, pressing desperately at the walls of a confined space closing in on us. It’s all just flesh and change, after all. We’re bound to meet back in the middle, the fragile cobwebs of our shared skin regenerating to attach us in time. In the meantime, we beat on against the tide.