All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers

by Alana Massey

The men who narrate are softened by their surrender to age and hardened to the women they married for having aged into the fullness of living real human lives. They resent these women for forcing them to reckon with the full humanity of women in a way that the dreamy Lisbon sisters never forced them to.

They do not see Lux’s sex rampage as an act of desperation, the frantic search by a young person to find her own pulse. Or so I can hope. The alternative is that they see the desperation of a broken

child with perfect clarity and still find it arousing.

read this and longed to physically disappear from the world so that I might psychically reappear in the male imagination as Lux did, her body defined by its absences rather than its substance.

It is perfect because it is not much of anything at all.

But it didn’t make the idea of gathering the rain with my hunger any less appealing.

The suicides were not individual acts of selfishness but a collective act of grief. They grieved over the death of their youngest sister, Cecilia, but they also grieved for one another, seeing flickers of themselves reflected in each other’s faces and recognizing the pain of inheriting an ungentle world that was second in its torment only to the pain of being cloistered away from it.

They must surrender much of that which bound them to those they first loved so they can contribute to the immortality project of some other name.

went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together,”

Little girls are good until they touch sin, at which point they grow ravenous for the stuff.

What I resent is how her beauty functioned in the film, not as a perk to a memorable and desirable character but as the defining feature that rendered her memorable and desirable.

Because apparently it is impossible to praise a woman’s professional growth without cutting down her previous work. (And for the record, The Virgin Suicides was girly because it was about five girls.)

Watching Full House again as an adult makes her meaning even more clear. Watching them perform with a more mature eye, their acting talent appears primarily rooted in the ability to mimic and obey rather than to improvise or emote. This was the price of not crying.

The life and death of Anna Nicole Smith demonstrate our hatred for anyone who dares to pursue the American Dream using skills from their own class and culture of origin.

We demand that socioeconomic migration be permitted only if the traveler promises to adopt enough white middle-class values to reaffirm that we have chosen virtuous ones.

diversity. Those who argue that Anna Nicole Smith was born in the United States and therefore disqualified from an immigration narrative are willfully unfamiliar with the entirely foreign place that our nation’s poor actually live in. She did not have to physically leave a country, but she did have to arrive in what amounted to a new one.

vocal sympathizers who would acknowledge her brilliance. It is customary instead for them to characterize the life of Anna Nicole Smith as one marred by tragedy. But it is more accurate to call it a life characterized by pain. In childhood she suffered undiagnosed pain and then endured abuse at the hands of her caregivers and, later, her partners. Her plastic surgeries came with their own particular set of agonies.

Since reading the profile, “I won’t invest my power in that” has become my go-to response when refusing to suffer indignities, fools, or bullshit more generally.

Anjelica’s commitment to selfishness, and even to self-indulgence at times, is what draws women like me closer to her despite having none of her breeding, money, or inherent charm.

More than once I’ve been asked what I would say to the many wives and girlfriends whose men I had stripped for if I were faced with them. And though I reject the notion that I owe them any explanation or penance, if I wanted them to know something it would be this: I was taking his money and your side every time.

man. I decided that being called “crazy” by a man was not an insult but a challenge. It gives the woman an opportunity to say, “Crazy? Oh, I’ll show you fucking crazy.”

Instead, I see the phrase and imagine a colon after “bitches,” rendering it a command to other women, a battle cry. It is a way of saying, “We took back ‘bitch’ already. And now we have come for ‘crazy.’”

A knife-wielding nag. A greedy arsonist. A jealous trophy wife losing her shine. A childish, petty country girl. The public consciousness has effectively trapped these women inside their breaking points.

Recognizing Lorena as more than a joke would also require that we acknowledge the reality that rational women can and will do violence to men. We punish such women not because they have crossed the mental border from sanity into madness but because they have crossed a gender barrier from being the object of violence to being the perpetrator of

it.

That Taylor has amassed far more wealth in the process is still another way she has gone insane, turning men into muses that profit her rather than the other way around.

think of these women often when a man calls a woman a crazy ex-girlfriend as an insult, unaware that identifying a woman this way elevates her to a rogue hero of her gender rather than a disgrace to it.

between my first and second years as a graduate student at Yale Divinity School where I was pursuing a Master of Arts in Religion,

The decision to apply to and enroll in divinity school was one of many haphazard attempts to seek the substance of my own suffering

in books, though exploring questions of evil was a secondary benefit to my expensive exercise in self-discovery.

But that day on the beach in 2011 was before all that, or at least before I knew it. Back then, adoring Joan Didion was a private devotion that I could indulge without the attendant self-consciousness that comes with being too caught up in a cultural moment to really enjoy

a superheroine to imitate so that I might replace the effusive, clumsily emotive

woman I was.

mysteries of a destination where everyone has come to escape from someplace else.

From a very young age, I always wanted to find myself among the thinnest and most unceremoniously sad girls.

The realization that my vivid memories of reading this very book to him were not shared by him made me resolute in the decision not to rekindle the relationship.

events and catastrophes to come. At the party I sat stiffly on a patio chair and listened quietly while the men present spoke about the state of their industries and cooked with

fire.

spoke of one-dimensional fathers whom we feared we disappointed and of mothers made almost entirely of love and poorly executed good intentions.

In Los Angeles, the city marches on as a permanent paradise, a facade that requires it to desperately pump water in from other regions to nurture the foreign flora that make it so appealing an imitation of life. It is a city that was literally built to construct lies upon, the old photographs of movie sets of brilliant cities set against the background

of a desert betraying the unreality of its current beauty. It is then that I am grateful for the brutal and increasingly endless New York winters that crack the skin to the point of bleeding, proving the existence of a beating heart below.

my agent, Adriann Ranta,