In the battle for Washington, we see Lee break. The film suggests that Sammy’s death finally pierced the armor she’d been wearing her entire career; she cannot unsee the danger she puts herself in every time she goes after a story. She still pulls herself together at several points, her curiosity binding what fear has fractured. She is the one who first senses that the President is cowering in the White House; The Beast having been sent out like a sacrificial lamb. She is the one who leads them through the initial carnage of White House staffers with self-inflicted gunshot wounds cast about like discarded toys.
I am sure lots of people don’t think I look like Kirsten Dunst. She is blonder than me and her face is rounder (I get Cate Blanchette more often). Still, the passing resemblance pulled me into the movie in a particularly sticky way. That’s one reason I’m still writing about it, I suppose. But the feeling of superficial kinship with the character and my sense of parallel experiences blur. I’ve never covered a shooting war (I am aware of the size of that caveat) but I have recently gotten to the point with my career where I’m just not sure if I can do this anymore. Curiosity is pulling me through.
I’ve alluded in various social media spaces to the Life Stuff I’ve faced in the past few years. I got my memoir contract about a year into the chaos and I thought I was going to write my out of it. I sold the publisher on a backward-looking narrative of survival. Well, I had a lot more left to survive. I did not write very much. I am still not writing as much as I used to.
My debut at profit-sharing newsletter Flaming Hydra is the first thing I’ve published explicitly about the biggest Life Stuff that happened last year: I went nuts. I mean, I’ve been open about being crazy—alcoholic, bipolar, neuro-spicy—for some time. But I’ve been functional, or, more-or-less functional since I got sober. In 2023, I stopped being functional for a while.
Last summer, my brain broke so hard that I heard the voice of God. But weeks before God spoke to me, I heard a buzz.
I first heard it late at night, low frequency, almost a purr. I thought it might be the train that runs a few blocks from my house. But no. It didn’t waver or fade. I turned off the ceiling fan, but that only stilled the air. So, it’s the HVAC, running high to keep the Texas heat at bay. Can’t turn that off. I wasn’t worried. I started to notice the whispery static during the day now, too; it faded when I turned my attention to something else.
But at night I was wakeful, agitated. I didn’t know it then, but it would be September before I slept through the night again.
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