Let me be honest: this whole post was inspired by Chaucer’s Retraction. Thank you, ENGL-103. For those who have the pleasure of not knowing what I’m talking about, let me give you a quick rundown:

Chaucer was a famous English poet from the Middle Ages best known for his Canterbury Tales. At the end of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer included a strange “Retraction” in which he basically apologizes for everything he’s ever written. It basically acts as a massive disclaimer. He repents all the sinful, potentially offensive things in his work and prays for God’s forgiveness.

Chaucer lived in a society dominated by the Catholic Church, and his excessively pious tone may have been genuine, or it might have been a covert way to criticize performative Catholic morality. I wouldn’t know—I’m no Chaucer scholar. My only thought while reading it was, “Damn. Medieval notes app apology.” Yes, it’s a gross oversimplification, but my point is: I was struck by how much the church acted as a form of surveillance in the Middle Ages, and by how similarly it acts to the internet’s cancel culture-esque surveillance of today.

In sociologist Ara Norenzayan’s book, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, he suggests that societies grow in tandem with the power of their deities. As civilizations get larger and more complex, their gods become powerful, omniscient, and much more concerned with moral purity. The threat of divine punishment acts as a tool to maintain social order.

However, things have changed. Religion no longer governs general society in many regions of the world, and the number of atheists and agnostics continues to rise. Civilization is complex and godless, and yet, performative morality prevails. So what’s keeping us all in check? It’s not doctrine; it’s the internet.

I hate to use the term “cancel culture” because it gets tossed out a lot as a way to legitimize vile individuals receiving rightful criticism from their audiences. There’s a moral and political charge to it. When I use the term “cancel culture,” I aim to do so in a neutral manner to describe the phenomenon of mass public shame and cultural call-outs, and to discuss its larger implications. Let’s look at a relatively recent example: the Coldplay kiss cam affair.

When a couple’s affair was dramatically revealed over the Coldplay kiss cam, it took the internet less than 24 hours to figure out their names, positions, and partners. They learned that they worked together at a company where he was the CEO and she was the head of HR, and that both had seperate families and children. What unfolded was a massive public shaming. Memes and discourse flooded every social media platform. Even LinkedIn. While the debacle was entertaining to watch, the larger implications of the internet as a tool for moral upkeep became evident. Exodus 20:14 said, “You shall not commit adultery,” and the internet added, “Because, if you do, we’ll literally dox you.”

Listen, I’m not saying I feel bad for the couple; cheating is, in my opinion, pretty unjustifiable. However, I did find the whole thing a little dystopian. It emphasized the era of constant surveillance that we live in today. It made me think about street interviewers on TikTok in which commenters chide participants for acting even a little displeased about a camera in their faces, or the service workers who go viral for being mildly rude to a filming customer. Every clip gets moralised. All context falls away.

Is it any wonder that we’re all paranoid about the way we’re being perceived? We exist with the knowledge that somebody is always watching us. At any moment, a clip of us could go viral in the background of somebody’s vlog or Ring camera, for whatever reason, and it could alter the course of our lives. Not to mention that, as certain governments veer more towards authoritarianism, the prevalence of digital surveillance becomes legitimately dangerous. Could a gay couple holding hands in the background of a Reel get them fired from their jobs? Could it get them exiled from their community?

Voltaire famously wrote, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” and, as religion began to disappear from our general lives, I think we did. What is the internet if not omniscient, powerful, and concerned with the regulation of moral behaviour? What is every kitchen floor apology video if not a confession?

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If you take nothing else away from this ramble, know this: your phone does not love you.

I grew up in the early 2000s, which means I have no idea what it’s like to live without the internet. I have a blurry memory of a time before portable devices dominated our every movement, but I wasn’t old enough to really understand. Still, I imagine it sometimes. The idea that the internet used to be a physical place to enter and exit, that it existed solely inside a family computer, and, when you logged off of it, that was it. It didn’t follow you to work or school, to a coffee date, or to bed.

It seems that the major difference between the old internet and the internet that exists today is authenticity. From what I gather, the old internet was defined by a sense of curiosity: terribly designed, especially niche websites that couldn’t be found unless they were sought out. SEO didn’t exist, nor did algorithmic social media. There was no infinite scroll. When a website was done, it was done. It’s a far cry from the internet of today, which has one goal: to keep you online.

The issue with trying to quit social media is that there really is a beautiful community online. Scrolling mimics social interaction. I remember thinking this first as a lonely teenager, recognizing that spending my time online made me feel like I was among peers—in a sense, of course, I was. Sometimes I stumble across the loveliest, most inspiring TikTok that makes me think: wow, okay, maybe this app is actually fundamentally good. And then I remember that an app cannot be good, because an app is actually just a set of servers hosting algorithms designed by conglomerates. But I digress.

I’m not anti-technology. I’ve actually come to realize that I deeply love technology at its core. I vaguely remember a time when phones had little keyboards and tiny screens and didn't feel like a personal void in each of our pockets, but I wasn’t able to really register it. I wish I were alive in the 90s, when cell phones had unique designs and game consoles were made with translucent plastic shells, and when technology felt like a beautiful, hopeful thing, and not a looming threat.

Over the weekend, I attended a technology symposium at my university. There were about a dozen speakers, each of whom presented their promising new research about machine learning, sharing potential improvements to healthcare, energy efficiency, and general well-being. And, though I often complain about AI, I definitely acknowledge its potential to improve lives on a larger scale.

However, at the end of the event, I spoke with a professor who admitted his hesitancy to adopt AI with open arms. He told me that he remembered when email first became a thing, how unbelievable it seemed at the time, and how its main selling point was how much time it would save everyone. He told me that people were convinced they'd be working three or four-day workweeks in the future, because email would be that transformative.

The conversation made me sad. Sad for everyone back then, who truly believed technology could better their lives, and sad for those of us today who carry our work emails in our pockets constantly.

Like that professor did so many years ago, I too believe that the technological advancements of today will be used to further society—maybe it’s foolish, but I do. I think that good things will come, but so will the bad things. So will the billionaires who see artificial intelligence as an opportunity to eliminate human employees. So will the companies deciding to generate art instead of hiring artists. So will the tech oligarchs feeding further and further into cellphone addictions to further sales.

At the end of the day, the posts and ideas you see online are never organic. They’re controlled entirely by the people funding it, which means that anything unsavoury (socially, politically, or otherwise) can be suppressed. If we continue to treat the new internet with the same naivety that we treated the old one, we’ll become blinder and blinder to those trying to take advantage of it. In 2017, Netflix’s CEO said their biggest competitor was sleep. Not another app. Not physical media. Sleep.

Maybe it’s about time we woke up.

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In the first grade, my class went on a field trip to the local library to meet a children’s book author. The details of the event are blurry now—I don’t remember who the author was, let alone what their book was about—but I vividly remember how excited I was. Even back then, much of my developing personality was grounded in being a “bookworm”. Needless to say, the idea of meeting a real, live author had me pretty starstruck.

The author introduced himself to the class and read a few of his picture books to us. Afterwards, he pulled out a large binder and showed us all his previous drafts and notes, making a point of how writing a children’s book is more difficult than it seems. Finally, he opened the floor to questions. One kid raised her hand right away and asked, “How come none of your books are about girls?”

My classmate, keener than I was, noticed what I hadn’t. Every single one of this author’s books featured little boys, and even the ones that featured animals were about boy animals. The author explained that, while little boys tend to only read books about other little boys, little girls are willing to read books about either gender. Therefore, it just made more sense to write boy characters.

@awesomethugprincess69Is this in relation to that one ‘mlm ships are more popular because women are not written well’ post? Perhaps… 🌝 | #fyp #piss #fandom #fanon #canon #misogynistic #ao3 #fanfic #wlw #mlm

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Even as a kid, I thought that was stupid. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the author had a point. As I got older and became involved in various YA literary fandoms, I noticed that—despite being heavily populated with young women—these spaces tended to hate female characters. I noticed it first with The Mortal Instruments fandom, and how the consensus was that Clary was so annoying, but Jace was perfect, charming, and witty. This pattern of “hated female main character, beloved male love interest” repeated itself with similar series like The Infernal Devices, Divergent, Twilight. However, the male main characters of Percy Jackson or The Maze Runner never suffered that same fate.

If you’re a writer, you’ll have learned about the Mary Sue. The Mary Sue is a character archetype, used to describe a poorly written fictional character with no flaws whatsoever. Generally, a perfect, idealized female character. Think Bella Swan, Rey from Star Wars. Mary Sues get called out a lot in media, and rightfully so, but I’ve always believed that many of the female characters that receive this criticism would be considered likeable protagonists if only they were male. I mean, just think of Harry Potter. None of this is to say that we should be writing bland female characters, but to point out the different standards we hold male and female characters to.

I was reminded of this issue with the newest season of The Summer I Turned Pretty. The show introduces two new female characters: Agnes, one of Conrad’s Stanford friends, and Denise, a coworker and potential love interest of Steven. I found Denise’s character to be a breath of fresh air. She’s clever and career-oriented, and challenges the show’s male characters regularly. Fans immediately distrusted her, which I could write off as the effect of her being the “other woman” in a love triangle, but they also had the same reaction to Agnes’s character, who was clearly established to be nothing more to Conrad than a platonic confidante.

@claireunteed“Theres just something about her” #femalecharacters #antihero

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I saw a post the other day that I can’t find now, but it basically described the different ways in which audiences react to poorly written male and female characters. Whereas poorly written women are discarded, poorly written men get transformed into entirely different characters. Fans create such elaborate backstories and rich inner lives for these male characters that they become synonymous with the canon itself. No wonder it’s “easier to write men”—in some ways, an audience does half the writer’s work.

The difference between men and women—as book characters and as real people—is that audiences always default to a man being innocent, misguided, charming. He could be a serial killer with a specific penchant for pregnant women, and there’d be millions and millions of fans finding ways to justify it. Whereas a female character could so much as make a snide comment a couple of times, and she’s immediately irredeemable. A woman is always guilty; everyone’s just waiting for her to give them a reason why.

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I grew up reading Vuong’s poetry on Tumblr and Pinterest, and while I was never a superfan, I respected his work for what it was—raw, contemporary, and a product of its era. I’ll be honest and say that it’s not my preferred style of writing. Despite that, I never felt conned or betrayed by it. Vuong establishes his narrative experience from the first page—it’s the reader’s choice whether to engage with it or not.

Which is why I was so confused when the Ocean Vuong hate train rolled in. I’m by no means against criticizing a literary darling—you can read my thoughts on Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch here—but the collective anger towards Vuong had seemingly come out of nowhere. Especially considering that his writing has remained extremely consistent. Suddenly, notes accusing him of being pretentious and “fake deep” had taken over my feed. Posts analyzing his poor sentence structure were racking up thousands of views. Even more unsettling, these critics seemed to inhabit some sort of gleeful vindication at the sight of Vuong’s name being dragged through the mud. Has there always existed this well of collective vitriol towards Vuong, just waiting to bubble over?

Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.

— From “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” by Ocean Vuong

I’m hesitant to accept a surface-level critique of “bad writing”. I’ve always thought that even a Nobel Prize-winning sentence could be criticized to bits if anonymously submitted to a freshman writing workshop. With Vuong’s work in particular, critics tend to take a textbook-like approach. For example, I saw one Substack critic analyze a line from Vuong’s novel: “He sucks, the tip intensifying as I watch.” The critic called this line “banally bad” and pointlessly confusing, adding, “This is not a moment where Vuong wants the reader to get confused. This is a simple detail description, something to set the mood."

This criticism in particular blew my mind, because how would you know? It’s disingenuous to assume we know Vuong’s intentions here, or to imply that there’s one correct way to set a scene—after all, Vuong would not be the first writer to create an intentionally ambiguous atmosphere through language. Hell, even if we assume there were no poetic intentions with this line, I would still understand what it means. “He sucks” as in, the character inhales, and “the tip intensifies” as in, the lit end of the cigarette brightens.

I understand that the sentence could be taken in multiple ways, making it a little confusing, but if we’re measuring every piece of writing by how easily understandable it is, we should be handing out Pulitzers to the authors of instruction manuals. Do I think it’s the greatest written line in the history of literature? No. Frankly, I’m not even thrilled to be sitting here and defending it. Still, the argument was so presumptuous that I felt I had no choice.

I must clarify that I’m not anti-critic. I understand the importance of a negative review; art exists to be engaged with. However, the sudden onslaught of keyboard warriors calling Vuong illiterate, smooth-brained, jokingly associating him with Diddy (?) is weird and cheap. I also noticed that, sprinkled alongside the comments lamenting his purple prose, were little snide remarks around Diversity™. Jokes about how a queer POC novel probably has publishers seeing dollar signs, about how every “tenderqueer” must have had a copy. So, yes, I do think that the “fall of Ocean Vuong” has less to do with anything he’s actually done and more to do with politics.

“Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me.”

— Ocean Vuong

So, Ocean Vuong is queer. Ocean Vuong is a POC. Ocean Vuong writes in an indulgently overwrought style. Nothing has changed about Ocean Vuong. His biggest crime, in an era where conservatism and alt-right politics are on the rise, is being kind of cringe. Vuong’s identity-based writing may have been accepted with open arms in 2019, but in 2025, it’s not cool anymore. So it can’t be tolerated.

In a recent interview, Vuong shared his experience with cringe culture from the perspective of a professor, explaining that his students are “more and more self-conscious of trying…. They perform cynicism because cynicism can be misread, as it often is, as intelligence,” Vuong said. “‘You are disaffected, you are too cool, you have seen it all.’ They pull back, but in fact, they are deeply hungry for sincere, earnest effort.”

I’m not here to force you to love Vuong’s writing, but anybody rubbing their hands in anticipation of “the end of Ocean Vuong” should probably take a look at their own biases. Are we misreading cynicism as intelligence? Is our elation at an author’s downfall actually about bad prose, or does it reflect a larger shifting of public values?

Alternatively, just log off and get a hobby.

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The Boyfriend is not a person; he’s a concept. He’s 6’1 and works out but not too much, not in an obsessive way. He’s got an impressive job. He makes a shit ton of money. He wears Doc Martens and probably has a Snoopy tattoo on his ankle. The Boyfriend can be yours, too, if only you write his name fifty-five times every day for a week.

If popular manifestation content is reflective of our collective desires, then it’s clear that women overwhelmingly desire a boyfriend. Every tarot card reading with over 100k views seems to involve a man and promises that he’s about to “feel the connection, too”. Now, I don’t take issue with spirituality content—I have been known to carry the occasional crystal in my bra—nor do I think there’s anything wrong with wanting the strong emotional connection that one might find in a partner. However, the prevalence of these videos makes me wonder what the desire comes down to. If it’s an emotional connection that we want, why wouldn’t we all be manifesting that specifically? Why not seek it in the form of a close friend group? If it’s financial security, why not manifest an abundance of wealth?

There’s this idea that we as women sometimes fall victim to, that every problem in our lives comes down to not having a man. If a woman is single, it’s expected that she’s always striving towards a relationship with a man. In some ways, the Boyfriend acts as a woman’s measure of value. What type of man chose you? How valuable is the man who deems you worthy of him? The Boyfriend is more than his components of emotional connection, financial stability, and good sex. The Boyfriend is symbolic.

I sometimes come across videos by tradwife influencers that epitomize this idea. They typically feature a woman in her early twenties who has adopted traditional gender roles to the extreme, taking on all of her family’s housework and childcare. Usually, her life revolves around her husband. This isn’t an inherent negative—I’m not one to shit on what two people are doing in a consensual relationship—but I do take issue with the promotion of gender roles as morally superior, which is oftentimes what happens. When these sorts of influencers face criticism, or even genuine concern for their well-being, their typical response is to say, “Well, that’s why I have a man and you don’t.” As if not having a man is the worst possible fate that could befall a woman. As if a husband is more valuable than one’s self-identity.

The idea of decentering men can be misconstrued as “abstaining” from men. The term gets used a lot in conjunction with the 4B movement: a feminist movement originating in South Korea, representing the rejection of heterosexual relationships as a way for women to reclaim agency over themselves. But decentering men doesn’t inherently mean boycotting them; it only suggests that you should be content without one. Many of us are the first women in our entire familial lines to have the ability to live alone, to pursue educations and careers, and to move cities or countries of our own volition, and still, our focus is placed on our relationships.

Despite the title of this piece, I don’t really think it’s a crime to manifest love. I just worry that we’re forgetting what it means to exist by ourselves and be content doing it. Media will have you believe that a single woman, or a woman in a non-heteronormative relationship, is a failure, but the fear of being single is dangerous; if we’re so desperate for a male partner, what are we willing to put up with to stay with him? Cheating, emotional abuse, or worse?

If you’re in a relationship with a man already, I’m not suggesting that you abandon it or stop caring about his needs. I only want you to make sure that your feelings are not coming secondary to his. (Assuming he loves you, I’d hope he’s delighted to discover that you’re placing value on your own feelings!) If you do spend an absurd amount of time fretting about whether he’s still attracted to you, it might be nice to dedicate some of that time to yourself. That means discovering who you are: trying on hobbies and lifestyles, going by different identities. You might even find that you have way more creative energy at your disposal when it’s not all going towards a man.

Regardless of whether you’re single or not, I suggest you take a moment to ask yourself the following: If, for whatever reason, you could never enter into a romantic relationship with a man, what would your life look like? What do you fear about that? Feel free to list whatever worries you might have on a piece of paper. Are you afraid that people will call you a crazy cat lady? Are you worried that you’ll be lonely forever? Are you concerned that you’ll never have children?

Once you’ve considered all the negatives, think of the alternative. If you spent the rest of your life single, what’s the best-case scenario? Imagine the most beautiful life possible; For myself, I think of a small home with stained glass windows, multiple cats, and a porch that’s always decorated for Halloween. Maybe a close group of female friends. A thriving book club. And that doesn’t sound too scary. (If you’re interested in a more in-depth exercise, check out ’s mapping exercise, which I learned about from Anna Howard’s video about decentering men.)

Like I said, you can manifest whatever you want; just make sure to put in the same amount of energy towards your own goals and happiness. Determine who you are, and decide that you won’t change that person in order to fit somebody else’s desires. If you're a young woman, your first priority should be self-realization, and if a man is a part of that journey, that’s great! But if not, who cares? You have so much life to live, and none of it should involve stalking the models that your situationship follows on Instagram. For generations, women’s lives have been defined by sacrifice. Don’t let yours be the same.

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The pot is boiling. We live in a landscape where politicians are publicly doing Nazi salutes, alt-right movements are spreading around the world, and major corporations are using the words “great genes” in marketing campaigns. It’s getting weird. It’s getting worrying.

If you haven’t seen the new American Eagle campaign, it features a denim-clad Sydney Sweeney accompanied by the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans”. In one video from the campaign, she says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.”

As you might have expected, the campaign sparked controversy. By using the words “great genes” to describe a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman, American Eagle implies the existence of “bad genes”. Does that, in any way, feel like a callback to your history class? Do the words “Aryan race” come to mind?

@barbiebrainsLet's briefly look at some other "good jeans" ads in history to breakdown how American eagle's recent ad with Sydney Sweeney differs 🧐 #greenscreen

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I get it. It’s only a play on words and, at best, it’s a little tone-deaf. But marketing campaigns are not typically rushed or accidental. They’re long, thought-out, expensive processes that involve multiple teams and multiple rounds of review. I don’t think this campaign, or any of the other changes rolling out slowly across North America, is an unintentional coincidence. I think they’re a betrayal of values in an attempt to cater to an administration that creeps further and further to the right.

So, let’s talk about eugenics.

Eugenics is a discredited science that served as the foundation for Nazi ideology. It suggested that certain traits were positive, and others were negative, encouraging those with positive traits to breed and, at times, preventing those with negative traits from doing the same, therefore “improving” a nation's gene pool. Their determination of what consisted of negative traits was largely influenced by prejudice and IQ tests that were extremely biased against immigrants and people of colour. However, these horrific, and ultimately genocidal, attempts at improving “racial hygiene" didn’t begin in Nazi Germany.

In the early 20th century, North America’s population was changing rapidly due to an increase in immigration, sparking concerns about the erosion of “Anglo-Saxon superiority”. This spurred the adoption of positive eugenics, which encouraged those deemed “fit” to reproduce, and negative eugenics, which allowed for the sterilization of those deemed “unfit”. This forced sterilization targeted those with mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and criminals. It also disproportionally targeted Indigenous peoples. The policies were especially common in America, where, during the 20th century, as many as 70000 people were forcibly sterilized.

As the influence of eugenics grew, more countries applied eugenics-based policies. By 1935, Nazi Germany had taken eugenics to the extreme, using the pseudoscience as justification for the murder of Jewish people, and other “undesirable” individuals such as Roma, homosexuals, and disabled people.

@rachellapointeCue that mfing Mad Men meme of Jon Hamm pitching an ad for Sydney Sweeney somehow sexualizing dv and being a eugenicist I guess #fypage #sydneysweeney #americaneagle #dvawareness

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Despite eugenics being disproven and generally looked down upon after World War II, forced or coerced sterilizations continue to happen to minority groups today.

People have called the reaction to American Eagle’s campaign dramatic, but it’s easy to ignore alarm bells, and the alarm bells are getting loud. We’ve seen the new administration ban words such as transgender, pregnant people, gender, LGBT, and more. We’ve seen, in the last couple of months, the slow dissolution of regular due process as is constitutionally owed to all illegal immigrants. We’ve seen regular Americans proudly declare themselves as fascists to the world (Thanks, Jubilee!) and then raise ten thousand dollars from supporters. Forget dog whistles. It's happening right in front of us.

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Okay, not everyone. Certainly not you, dear reader, who is definitely subscribed to me already. But hear me out—have you had this experience? You open Substack, scroll for a moment, and come across a post that sounds intelligent but, beneath the elaborate phrases and pretty words, is empty. There's no point, no experience, no thoughts that you haven't seen on LinkedIn or Pinterest a million times. A post that seems to exist solely for the sake of being pretty to read, though packaged to seem writerly and intelligent.

@lelnaworldcall is coming from inside the house tbh🤷🏾‍♀️

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I hate, hate, hate pretentiousness for the sake of it. If the mark of an intellectual is the ability to explain a concept at any level, then Substack misses that mark over and over again. The allure of this platform lies in its ease of access—how a 12 year-old could be publishing their blog on the same website as world-renowned authors—and while accessibility isn't everything, but it is something. However, for whatever reason, this idea doesn't seem to translate to much of the platform's content. And, like so many other things, TikTok is probably somewhat to blame.

Listen, I love TikTok. I love it too much sometimes. If you're interacting with the right content, it can be an amazing source of entertainment and discourse and art and community. I'm glad that videos about Substack are going viral on TikTok (the more the merrier!) but with the good has also come an influx of bizarrely-curated content that has no purpose other than to be elaborate and wordy and intellectual. It reminds me of the time that TikTok users were making videos saying that they were "proud to be pretentious". I know what they were trying to say—that they were proud to have standards, a sense of exclusivity. Of course, it was ironic considering that the word "pretentious" inherently implies that a person is trying to seem more intelligent and important than they actually are.

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@grapiedeltacoIt’s a especially great in reader/bookish circles #booktok #pretentious

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Self-own, right? Sure, maybe, but I fear that this specific brand of irony has been bleeding into Substack as well. It's the thought-daughter effect. It's the things-I-find-unclassy effect. It's the men-performatively-reading-Babitz-on-the-bus effect. And while I'm sure this is all being done without any malicious intent, there's a real danger to associating writing with "classiness". The popularization of certain aesthetics without any critical thinking to accompany them has opened us up to weakness—especially in the context of literature. It's a lot easier to be seduced by conservatism when it's packaged as "soft living", or classism when it's presented as "dark academia". At some point, we need to pause and ask ourselves: are we reinventing discrimination? Or rather, are we just allowing pre-existing social barriers to carry on under the guise of exclusivity?

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These social barriers, however small they might seem, discourage anybody that's not a certain type of person from entering into the literary sphere. Substack is not exempt from this phenomenon. Whether intentionally or not, there seems to be a heavy prevalence of young, White, American voices on this platform. (Side note: am I crazy or is every Substack event in New York? How does everyone live in fucking New York?) I'm not suggesting the diminishing of those voices, but I am expressing the concern that, if we continue to cultivate a culture of exclusivity, we'll end up discouraging diverse voices from being heard at all.

@chsnwhn#intelligence #modernsalon #substack

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The question, though, is how do we strike a balance between critiquing anti-intellectualism and preventing pseudo-intellectualism? I don't have a perfect solution, but my initial thoughts are drop the pretenses. Authenticity, though easier said than done, is crucial. There's a need for real words, thoughts, and opinions from backgrounds. The greatest part of TikTok is its accessibility, how stories can be shared all around the world, how community can be created digitally. With Substack, we have the opportunity to do something similar—possibly even better—but that requires a level of vulnerability that either isn't being done yet or just isn't being well-received.

My conclusion is to write, and write authentically. If you're really into Plath and Didion, write about Plath and Didion. If the purpose of your writing is to create a specific, beautiful atmosphere, then do so. But you don't need to. Inauthenticity shows, and your thoughts, your real thoughts are more interesting than a replica of somebody else's could ever be. In turn, it's our responsibility to read about the experiences that we might not get to interact with otherwise. I want to read about the shitty, middle-of-nowhere town you live in. I want to read about your fascination with isopods! The greatest thing about Substack—and TikTok—is that, no matter what, an audience exists. You just have to find it.

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If you've ever been in a writing workshop or, hell, a high school English class, you'll know that the present progressive tense is basically a cardinal sin. I can't count the number of times I’ve submitted a piece with the line “she is standing” only to have it returned crossed out with the correction “she STOOD” written above it in scratchy red pen. This rule is generally accepted, and realistically, it exists for a reason. The present progressive can lead to awkward turns of phrase and a heavy reliance on weaker, uninteresting “to be” verbs—especially in amateur work—but there comes a point in every workshop when a student finally raises their hand and asks: “What about Rooney?”

International best-selling author Sally Rooney loves the present progressive. Her characters are constantly standing, walking, sitting, thinking. It's a distinguishing aspect of her writing style and, well, look at how well she's doing. From having a novel nominated for the 2018 Man Booker prize, to being named one of the Times’s hundred most influential people at the age of thirty-one, Rooney could be considered the epitome of modern-day literary success.

When the question came up in my writing workshop, my teacher admitted that she had never heard of her. To be fair, Rooney’s target demographic does tend to lean towards emotionally unstable women in their twenties, and I suspect that my teacher doesn't frequent Booktok, but upon our explanation of Rooney’s detached, omniscient, present progressive-laden style, she said, "Well, there are lots of popular, poorly-written novels like that. I call them airport books."

This statement was, of course, met by gasps from my class. International bestseller Normal People? An “airport book”? My teacher clarified that she didn't know whether Rooney herself wrote airport books, but the point was that bad books become bestsellers all the time.

The exchange led me to wonder who gets to define whether a book is written well. Before I started university, I loved how Rooney used the present progressive to conjure a distant, almost translucent voice, and only learned it was “wrong” in the classroom. I wasn't the only one to fall in love with her style—her novels have amassed an almost cult-like reader base.

Though Rooney has garnered critical attention, a box still seems to exist around her novels, preventing the more academic literary community from accepting them the way the general public has. One reviewer, Brandon Taylor, critiques multiple aspects of Rooney's novels—some of which I am inclined to agree with. However, I'm most interested in their critique of Rooney’s prose. They write, “There are writers—Sally Rooney perhaps chief among them—about whom it is said with a gleeful delirium, “They don’t have an MFA!” In response, I’ve started to think, after having read a handful of novels by people like this, “Yeah, you can tell.””

This is where we get into that academic sense of superiority, of technical perfection. Taylor goes on to suggest that Rooney’s writing is lacking in proficiency. They explain, “It’s always bothered me that Rooney deploys present progressive when she should deploy simple present.” They add, “From a technique perspective, the novels feel like drafts, filled with the sorts of tics, bad habits, and dead prose that hopefully get ironed out by an editor or, dare I say, a workshop.”

As with anything, there are arguments to be made against Rooney's novels—most notably, her thin, waif-like, "eats half a muffin and throws out the rest" female main characters—but it's clear that her prose isn't one of them. At least, not for readers. This split of opinion between the general public and the literary community is most notable on the Times’s recent “100 Best Books of the Century” lists. When the first list came out, all selected by prominent literary figures, Rooney’s novels were nowhere to be seen. However, when the reader-selected list came out, there she was at number 27.

So what does all this mean? That we toss technique out the window and hail the present progressive as our king? Not necessarily. Like I said, the rules exist for a reason, especially for young, budding writers still figuring out their footing. However, the reception of Rooney’s writing suggests that the rules of literature may not be as clearly cut as we'd like to think they are. It raises a significant question for us as writers—the novelists, but also the essayists, the poets—who are our words for? Our readers or our critics?

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Thanks for reading Trina Keeps Trying! You can find my other posts here, and you can read my poetry here. You can also subscribe to receive written works, made with love, straight to your mailbox every week.

I hesitate to write about racism against South Asians because I don’t think the general public is ready to accept it yet. I do think that, in a couple of years, the dialogue will shift and people will start saying, “Hey, maybe the way we treated brown people back then was kinda fucked up” but until then, I don’t see a reason to waste my breath.

Or I didn’t, until the “Scandinavian scarf” situation finally got me. For those unaware, white influencers have been wearing South Asian cultural clothing online and calling it anything but South Asian. I’m not surprised that people are hesitant to associate their cute new aesthetic with South Asia, at a time when anti-Indian racism is at an all time high. It’s a lot easier to call your top “Ibiza-wear” than to grapple with the fact that South Asia might be more than what it's been reduced to online.

@dhivya.sriihad to post😌 video credits to @Pip Puveendran!! go check his video out! #dupatta #sareeinspo #sareefashion

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I’m also not super surprised that influencers are gravitating towards South Asian clothing. It’s cute. I couldn’t tell you the amount of times I’ve looked at my western outfits and wished I could add a bindi or a dupatta to complete it, ultimately deciding not to for fear of othering myself.

And I guess that’s what it comes down to, right? The white women casually wearing South Asian clothing don’t have to worry about whether a bindi is making them look like an outsider, or if stopping by the supermarket in a sharara is going to get them dirty looks. No amount of beaded embroidery takes away from the fact that they’re white.

I don’t agree that it’s never appropriate for a white person to wear South Asian clothes, but the dupatta conversation online is about more than just clothing. It’s incredibly telling that so many people are unwilling to just admit that their Oh Polly outfit takes inspiration from South Asia, but are happy to incorrectly label it as European instead. It’s not about the dupatta. It’s about the fact that they can’t say “India” unless they’re directly insulting us.

@maddiemonologuesready for normal comments :)

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Racism against South Asians is the worst it's ever been within my lifetime. Just last year, the UK had literal anti-immigrant riots. Anti-Indian content online has surged. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but fashion trends don’t exist in a bubble. This stuff matters, and if it doesn’t matter to you, it definitely matters to the South Asian person experiencing it.

It’s difficult to sum a piece like this up into one, clean conclusion, but here it goes: my point is not to avoid every embroidered top at Winners if you’re not South Asian. My point, I guess, is to stop being vehemently fucking racist to brown people. And then maybe we can go from there.

Also, please just call it a dupatta.

Thanks for reading Trina Keeps Trying! You can find my other posts here, and you can read my poetry here. You can also subscribe to receive written works, made with love, straight to your mailbox every week.

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A few days ago, I picked up Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury for the first time in my life. It seemed appropriate given our current climate. The novel follows Guy Montag, a “firefighter” with the job of burning books in a future where owning them is considered criminal. We watch as he becomes disillusioned with his society and begins to question everything he’s been told, eventually committing himself to the preservation of literature.

Throughout the novel, Bradbury details how the general public willingly gave up literature in favour of short-form media. In his imagination, this came through massive, immersive television screens, though it seems even more apt a description for the era of TikToks and Reels that we live in now.

However, the most interesting part of Fahrenheit 451 came in its defense of banning literature. Captain Beatty, the fire captain and the novel’s representative for its regime, explains that books inevitably create divide and violence. Nobody is going to agree with every philosophy, every political argument, every novel—seriously, check out the 1 star reviews of your favourite book on Goodreads—and so, isn’t it better to get rid of them all? As Beatty says, “If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.”

As readers, we know this argument doesn’t make total sense, though it’s difficult to really articulate why.

The other day, a friend of mine downloaded an app called Blinkist. It’s basically a collection of summarized self-help books, condensed into 15 minutes worth of information. I felt conflicted. On one hand, any amount of knowledge is good and people are busy so, in that sense, the app seems like a great idea. Then again, why not just spend 15 minutes a day actually reading a goddamn book?

My opinion of the app was cemented, however, when I discovered that the free plan only offers one pre-selected summary a day, and to access all of them, you’d need to pay for a Premium subscription that’d cost you $99 CAD a year. (Or $183.73 for a Pro plan, which bizarrely contains the exact same features as the Premium plan, except that it also contains Blinkist AI? Who the fuck is paying an extra $84.73 for the AI?)

In 2023, the average American read for less than 16 minutes a day while screen times skyrocket. While most people are busy—a 9-5 job with an hour commute both ways doesn’t leave a ton of room for leisure—it seems that, even if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be using that time to read. Yet apps like Blinkist exist, and users like my friend do, too. Somehow, despite our unwillingness to pick up actual books, we still see the value in literature.

So where exactly does that value come from? Is a novel only as good as its 15 minute summary? If information is what really matters, shouldn’t we all spend our time reading textbooks instead of paperback?

I—and I’d guess that you, too—don’t believe the purpose of reading is just to consume information. The point, I think, is to take an idea and all its complexities, to flip it over in your mind, to chew it thoroughly. After all, when even children’s books have been challenged and banned, we have to conclude that literature is about more than just its base plotline.

Through the censorship of the written word, we are put at risk of losing our record of human experience or, worse, changing our history entirely. And I know I’ve been rambling on about books, but it’s not really even about them. It’s about what we’re willing to sacrifice for the sake of absentminded pleasure.

The devaluation of literature has less to do with reading and more with complacency. As television got more and more popular, Bradbury recognized a growing complacency in the people around him and today, as short-form media reigns supreme, that complacency exists as a fact of life. Book bans aren’t some dystopian fantasy—they’re happening right now with, frankly, not a lot of notice from the general public. Does our silence not make us complicit? Are we allowing ourselves to be distracted by flashing colours just like the citizens in Fahrenheit 451?

I’ll end on this quote from Faber, the novel’s exiled English professor: “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

TLDR: Read more real books.

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Thanks for reading Trina Keeps Trying! You can find my other posts here, and you can read my poetry here. You can also subscribe to receive written works, made with love, straight to your mailbox every week.

Every other week, a new LinkedIn-esque note makes the rounds from a user claiming that they went viral, gained a thousand paid subscribers in a week and, with these five easy steps, you can too! I understand the appeal: those little notification-induced dopamine hits aren’t easy to come by. The allure of Substack riches, whether it be through copied notes or AI-generated posts, is hard to resist.

I’ve had a few posts garner enough attention to be considered somewhat Substack viral. It’s strange. Garnering that kind of attention for my work is incredible in many ways but terrible in others. Obviously, cringing when people in my real life bring up my old, embarrassing posts is never fun, and neither is removing weird, racist comments from the incels that inevitably discover my page. What’s harder, though, is the sudden pressure of performance. Suddenly, I was second guessing my posts when, before, I could hit publish on whatever stupid shit I wrote without another thought. And then there was the issue of payment.

Let’s be honest. When people talk about virality, what they’re really talking about is money. Social media success, on whatever platform it may be, has been heralded as a golden ticket since the word “influencer” entered the English lexicon. What was that poll that came out? That something like 30% of school-aged kids want to be Youtubers when they grow up? I couldn’t tell you if those numbers are right, so don’t take my word for it, but I wouldn't be shocked. Hell, every adult I know would quit their 9-5 in data analytics if they could make the same money putting out a couple videos or essays a month. I’m sure there’s a lot more work to it than meets the eye, but come on. It just sounds cushy.

I got my first paid subscriber last year. It was thrilling, of course—it’s every artist’s dream to be paid for their work—but it was also surprisingly stressful. The sudden knowledge that people were putting their money behind my writing, at a time when money doesn’t come easily, terrified me. I fretted over ways to make the investment worthwhile. I read articles and advice posts. Paid comment privileges? (No, I’d like to keep comments as open as possible at the moment.) Extra posts? (Also no, I sometimes struggle just to get out my regular stuff every week.) Paid zoom meetings? (Why the hell would anybody want to talk to me?)

I eventually settled on the simplest option: after two weeks, my posts would be automatically paywalled, thus creating “value” for my paid subscribers. Still, despite removing so much work from my general reader base, it didn’t feel like I had created five whole dollars worth of value. So, the natural next step was to paywall my Discord server.

I made my Discord server last year as a place for literary discussion and, honestly, I put quite a bit of work into it. I created custom roles and specific channels. I even coded my own Writing Prompt Bot that functions as expected a solid 50% of the time! (I’m working on it.)

Being able to discuss literature with people who share my love of the written word has been an absolute joy. Ideally, I’d like this community to be as accessible as possible. And, yet, the paywall. The need for “value”. Reflecting on it, the whole situation was terribly ironic, considering I gained that first paid subscriber when nothing was offered to them at all. It was just my writing-the same writing that they could read for free—and me.

I sometimes forget how unusual our situations are. To be able to write something and have it be read by hundreds of strangers was, historically, impossible for most. Now look at us. The internet–at least to some extent—gives us the ability to share our work in ways never imagined before. No need for industry connections. No need for anyone’s permission.* How great is that?

All this is to say that I’m taking down my paywalls. I couldn’t tell you if my writing is worth anything or if it ever will be—after all, nobody looks back fondly at the shit they wrote at 21—but I don’t feel like creating artificial value by locking it in a box. Paid subs will stay on, and if it suits you to support my Substack financially, then you’re welcome to and I’ll be grateful. It’s not a necessity though. For your sake and for mine.

My honest advice? If you’ve started a Substack with the sole goal of financial profit, you’re probably better off getting a different side hustle. There’s a chance that this platform could make you a full-time salary, but in its current state, there’s a much higher chance that it won’t.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing crazy or unethical about wanting to be paid for your writing. I want to be paid for my writing. That being said, I don’t want my work to be tied to payment and, though the internet is incredible, I don’t want to be forced to write things that will “perform well” at the whim of a constantly changing algorithm. At that point, why write at all?

If you are interested in joining the Discord server, you can do so here.

*As it stands right now. For more on the rising tech oligarchy:

Thanks for reading Trina Keeps Trying! You can find my other posts here, and you can read my poetry here. You can also subscribe to receive written works, made with love, straight to your mailbox every week.

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It’s a strange time for academic institutions everywhere. At the moment, universities all over Canada are projecting massive deficits, leading to jobs being cut and the least profitable programs being placed on the chopping block. At my own school, it was the drama department. I, like so many others, was devastated at the news. I ranted about the shutdown of my university theatre for hours to anybody willing to listen (At what point do universities stop being places of learning and start being degree mills, etcetera, etcetera…) until somebody eventually grabbed my shoulders and said, “Listen, Trina, I get it. It’s terrible. But these universities have to make money somehow.”

Which is true. In Ontario, government funding for post-secondary institutions has been decreasing over the last decade, forcing them to rely on expensive international tuition fees and outrageously priced professional degrees to get by, instead of prioritizing research and academia.

I suppose it’s just a consequence of the society we live in. In today’s economic environment, it feels like the whole world has tossed aside the value of knowledge, with it being standard for a student to get through their entire program with AI-generated solutions and professors who show up just to collect a salary.* Degrees are pursued not for the sake of learning but for the sake of survival. It’s an education by technicality—in the sense that you come out of it with a certification—but not an education in any other manner.

I know I sound like a grumpy old woman, shaking my fist about kids these days, but I swear to God I’m 21 and I swear to God I understand. There are a very specific set of degrees and certifications that will make a person enough money to afford groceries, and I don’t fault anybody for caring more about their financial security than about getting a well-rounded education. It is concerning, however, that our current state of survival has contributed to such a complete devaluation of higher education in all aspects except for how much money it can make you.

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It’s often assumed that arts and crafts are the sort of thing that a person will grow out of or, at least, have the decency to tuck into a box and classify as a hobby. You might manage to get to it once a week but, really, it’s no harm if you don’t. You’ve got more important, adult things to do.

I’ve come to realize that regularly doing something creative is as important to maintain my health as brushing my teeth. I realize this sounds dramatic, but I came to realize sometime last year that a way to subside my terribly touchy depressive episodes was to get out a piece of paper and draw a picture with chalk pastels. To make it clear, these were not good drawings. I remember showing one to my mother, to which she said, “Oh!” in a stiff, taken aback way that made it sound like she’d just seen a bird crash into her window.

Anyway, the pastels worked, and I find that my philosophy of making stupid art has worked for others as well. I encourage everybody I know to try little bouts of crafting. I bought my mother a mini embroidery set from the dollar store–she used to embroider, I’m told and, frankly, she’s a bit of a workaholic. She held it up and, like many others, asked me, “What’s the point of this?”

“The point is to make it, Ma,” I told her.

“Yes,” she said impatiently, “and then what?”

By this, I knew she meant: how will I benefit from this? What’s the ROI? Why in the world would I spend my time on a project that I can’t add to my LinkedIn afterwards? You may be asking yourself this as well. So, to put it simply, the point is to do something without the constraints of productivity or time or finance. The point is to make something stupid. The point is to have fun.

If you feel like you don’t know yourself, make something. It doesn’t have to be good or finished or worthwhile—whatever worthwhile means—it just needs to be finished. Make a horse out of dough. Paint a replica of the Mona Lisa. Write a self-indulgent Dramione fanfic. Fuck if I care. You knew how to be an artist once, without the constraints of time and money and value. The goal is just to remember.

(I must clarify: please don’t throw out your antidepressants and buy a box of chalk. I love antidepressants. I just think there’s a chance that we all might be a bit happier if we made a goddamn paper snowflake once in a while.)

Thanks for reading Trina Keeps Trying! You can find my other posts here, and you can read my poetry here. You can also subscribe for free to receive written works, made with love, straight to your mailbox every Tuesday.

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Her thesis explored was a discussion of how smell has been written about in English language texts. Niche, sure, but so is every other PhD topic on the planet. What was it about this thesis that caused such anger within them? It’s evident that some of the hatred was blatant sexism, with rape threats and comments suggesting that Louks should have spent her twenties starting a family. However, along with the misogyny, there was another sentiment being shared: that Dr. Louks’ PhD, and the research she did, was a waste of time.

The disregard of humanities degrees in the career world is not new. Let’s face it: nobody is going to university in pursuit of knowledge. The majority of post-secondary students are getting their degrees as a certification, a way to market themselves and secure a lucrative job. However—through the growing cost-of-living crisis and the internet’s ability to create echo chambers—it seems this disregard of non-STEM fields has made its way into the minds of the general public, resulting in a pervasive attitude that knowledge is only as valuable as the money it can make.

The abandonment of intellectualism in favour of financial profitability is a dangerous societal trend that, as a double major in Computer Science and English Literature, I’ve experienced both sides of. My experience of the two degrees are entirely contrasting, both socially and regarding the quality of my education.

My computing lectures are often fast-paced and information heavy with little discussion or support from professors. By the middle of the semester, classes with enrolment numbers of 150 students will only have about 8 or 9 actually showing up to the lecture because, to put it frankly, there really is no benefit to being there. As a result, students rely entirely on each other to pass. Discord servers are created in which people share YouTube videos that helped them understand the content or answer banks they found online. Using these peer resources and AI-generated code, many students get their degree without ever attending a single lecture.

In contrast, my English classes are always so full that they’re practically spilling over. This is partially, I assume, due to the fact that it’s nearly impossible to pass any exams without being present for the in-class discussions. Still, it feels as though almost all my classmates are truly passionate. They come to class having done every reading, contributing genuinely thought-provoking ideas, and they hold a generally negative attitude towards AI even though they could easily use it to grind out a few papers.

Save for the few students who seem to really love programming, it’s clear that most of my computer science classmates are only doing the program because their parents or their teachers or some tech influencer told them that a career in software development would secure them a comfy six figures.

I don’t fault anyone for this. In the face of economic uncertainty, a profitable degree makes sense. I worry, however, that the pursuit of profitability has caused us to forget the importance of curiosity and general knowledge. Where would we be, as a society, without the study of philosophy, of media literacy, of anthropology? More importantly, where will we be in 50 years time if the general population abandons all those critical thinking skills?

If you are somebody who has spent their entire life in the world of STEM, I’m not suggesting you abandon it for the sake of an English degree. However, I encourage you to do your own, individual research into the humanities in ways that interest and suit you. Watch that art history documentary. Read that history book. You can’t change the world until you understand it.

Dr. Louks, congratulations on your accomplishment, and on handling the influx of weirdos with such grace. If you get a chance, maybe you’d like to check out Substack! There’s a community here who’d love to learn more about your work.

Thanks for reading Trina Keeps Trying! You can find my other posts here, and you can read my poetry here. You can also subscribe for free to receive written works, made with love, straight to your mailbox every Tuesday.

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I was in the seventh grade when Donald Trump first announced he’d be running for President. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, my view of the political landscape was really just starting to form when in he came and smashed it to pieces. A reality TV star with 13 sexual assault accusations, spouting racist rhetoric of which I’d never heard from anybody before, let alone from a presidential candidate. 

At this point in 2015, I was gearing up to participate in my school’s speech competition. I, obnoxious little high-achiever that I was, wrote a detailed opinion piece on how America’s rising far-right sentiments were affecting us, across the river. It was nothing special. Regurgitated talking points mostly, coming from a place of emotion rather than real research. I made it to the finals. My opponent’s speech was titled, “Why You Should Vote For Donald Trump”. Keep in mind that we were 12. And Canadian.

"She does have a very nice figure ... if [she] weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her."

— Donald Trump on his daughter Ivanka Trump

I won the vote of our singular female judge but the other two picked my opponent’s, landing me second place. Emboldened by my youth, I marched right up to the table of judges and asked why my speech, which was, in my humble opinion, significantly better, had lost. One of them, also my gym teacher at the time, gave me a sympathetic look and said, “Honestly, Trina, your speech was great, but we’ve heard it all before. His was something new. Sometimes people just want to hear something new.”

Now, at 21 years-old, Donald Trump is yet again our neighbouring President-elect, with an updated 26 accusations of sexual assault and bearing the new title of “convicted felon”. Though Canada typically doesn’t allow entry to felons, our immigration minister will likely need to grant him special status to be legally allowed into the country. The jokes write themselves, I guess.

@sommertothillgrapist in chief's career is thriving

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Trump’s re-election means that reproductive freedom will not be restored. But beyond that, his win has emboldened the voices of bigots. Recently, demonstrators held signs at Texas State University reading, “HOMO SEX IS SIN” and “WOMEN ARE PROPERTY”. The phrase “your body, my choice” is circulating among far-right influencers on social media, and slowly seeping its way into classrooms full of young boys.

“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

— Donald Trump 

I sometimes think that there are things about the world that, if not looked at through the lenses of familiarity, would stun all of us. Dinosaurs, for one. If I had no prior knowledge of dinosaurs and you tried to tell me that the Earth used to be dominated by giant, reptilian beasts, I’d probably laugh at you and ask if they were buddies with the unicorns. But they were real, and because they were real, we don’t react with shock. We turn them into plush animals and bedsheets for kids. 

The knowledge that there’s never been a female president, I think, would be similar. I’d look around at the world we have today, in which women perform equally within leadership positions and outpace men in post-secondary education, and I’d think that somebody must be messing with me. Yet, when time came to choose between a rapist and a woman, America chose the rapist. And then chose him again. 

@sweeper698Its been a rough week. And I couldn’t figure out why I was SO beartbroken and disappointed over the #election2024 . But now I know. #election2024🇺🇸 #trump

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When I was 12 years old, Americans sent me a message: they’d rather see a man who’s outrageously racist and predatory ascend to power than a woman. Now, in 2024, the same message is being sent to little girls everywhere. So you tell me, America. Was it worth it? The whole world is watching. It’s your turn to answer.

If you've spent even a modicum of time in any online book communities within the past couple of years, you have heard of Donna Tartt. Literary icon, elegant as she is, mysteriously emerges from the ether every 10 years to publish a masterpiece of a novel, and then disappears. The list of accolades following her name is hefty. Beyond that, she's achieved what so few writers have—perhaps a greater feat than any award—social media fame. Seriously, BookTok will not shut up about The Secret History.

When Donna Tartt really resurged in popularity a few years ago, I was unbelievably excited to get my hands on one of her novels. I went out of my way to purchase a physical copy of The Goldfinch despite usually sticking to library books. That's how sure I was that I'd love it. And, for the first few chapters, I did. The whirlwind of beautiful descriptions were written so masterfully, so effortlessly. I was hooked. And then, I got to this scene, in chapter three, when the main character and his mother get in a taxi:

It smelled like someone had been changing dirty diapers back there or maybe even taken an actual shit, and then tried to cover it up with a bunch of coconut air freshener that smelled like suntan lotion. The seats were greasy, and patched with duct tape, and the shocks were nearly gone. Whenever we struck a bump, my teeth rattled, and so did the religious claptrap dangling from the rear view mirror: medallions, a curved sword in miniature dancing on a plastic chain, and a turbaned, bearded guru who gazed into the back seat with piercing eyes, palm raised in benediction.

— The Goldfinch

This offhanded description snapped me out of the novel immediately. More than anything, I was confused. Immediately, I Googled, “Sikh cab driver the goldfinch,” convinced that I was missing something, that there was some reason for the presence of this comedically racist caricature. Maybe he comes back later? Has some justifiable arc in the story as a side character? I mean, everyone online loves this book. Surely people aren't just skimming over this, right?

My frantic Googling confirmed that people were, in fact, just skimming over this. Skimming over quite a few parts of the novel, actually. Frequent mentions of Asian culture, but only in relation to things like meat from Chinatown that had gone bad, a Korean social worker with breath that smelled like garlic, and a dead, Asian man described as looking small and "pathetic in his tan windbreaker". Incredibly one-dimensional portrayals of working-class POC as doormen and housekeepers. The abundant use of slurs. Hell, even Boris' character is steeped in stereotypes.

Certainly I didn’t miss him much, and my mother didn’t seem to miss him either, though it was sad when she had to let our housekeeper, Cinzia, go because we couldn’t afford to pay her (Cinzia had cried, and offered to stay and work for free; but my mother had found her a part time job in the building, working for a couple with a baby; once a week or so, she stopped in to visit my mother for a cup of coffee, still in the smock she wore over her clothes when she cleaned.)

— The Goldfinch

It stunned me that, amidst all the praise online, nobody had mentioned any of this. I re-read that paragraph describing the cab driver about 20 times. I mean, “religious claptrap”? I had to verify that the meaning of the word hadn’t changed, that it was, in fact, still defined as “pretentious nonsense, trash”. It’s almost like Tartt was trying to fit as many South Asian stereotypes as possible into one character. She may as well have thrown in that he works part-time at a gas station.

To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I'm not sure if a piece of media has ever made you feel like you don't belong, but I can only liken it to a strange sense of betrayal. A sinking realization of: Oh. I was not the intended audience for this. A bit dramatic? Yes, obviously. But I was 18. I was excited. Give me a break.

When concerns about Tartt's writing do get brought up, they're often shut down by the argument that "a character's beliefs do not represent an author's". With this, I couldn't agree more. I do not, in any way, think that racism in literature is a determining factor of whether or not an author is actually racist. Nor does every novel need to have entirely non-confrontational themes. I mean, Tartt’s main characters are two white 13-year-olds in New York City, so having them hold immaturely stereotypical views is, arguably, kind of realistic.

Up close he smelled unwashed and raunchy, with a strong, dusty import-shop odor like the inside of a Chinese box.

— The Goldfinch

However—and this is big—I don’t think that Tartt’s use of these stereotypes always, or even regularly, does anything to serve the characterization of Boris and Theo. To justify all of the novel’s caricatures, seemingly random and pointless as they often are, simply as poorly conveyed character building would be disingenuous and, honestly, a discredit to Tartt’s skill as a writer. And please don’t try to tell me that The Goldfinch is a product of its time. It was published in 2013. We’re talking about a post-One Direction world here.

In my opinion, a novel that holds so many questionable points, while being revered as it is, needs to at least be talked about. No matter how much one might love an author’s writing, it would be a disservice to them and their readers not to approach their work without bias. It’s perfectly fair, if not crucial, to question whether the setting that Donna Tartt created, filled with these ethnic stereotypes, is actually important to the development of her plot or characters.

Let's take that paragraph about the cab driver as an example. The description of the car’s greasy plexiglass, its Bollywood music, and its smell of shit were all entirely physical, laying these stereotypes out as a simple fact and leaving little room for them to be interpreted as Theo’s own, distorted thought process. How did that, in any substantial way, serve the story? Remember, these are made-up traits for made-up people that were consciously chosen and written by the author.

“Tell me,” said my mother—fingertips at her temple—“was it just me, or was that cab unbelievably—”

“Nasty? Hawaiian Tropic and baby poo?”

— The Goldfinch

To those of you who love Tartt’s writing, please know that this is not an attack on your beliefs or morals. I think the reason those stereotypes are rarely mentioned is because they’re so covert, so casual, that they might be easy to skip over if you’re not aware of them. However, I implore you to consider this with an open mind. You’re perfectly within your rights to completely disagree and, if you do, I’d love to hear your thoughts on why. Ultimately, my opinion is that Tartt’s representation of POC is unsettling at best and directly harmful at worst. It begs the question: at what point do we stop ignoring racial caricatures for the sake of academic aesthetics and gorgeous prose?

Thanks for reading Trina Keeps Trying! You can find my past essays here, and you can read my poetry here. Subscribe for free to receive written works, made with love, straight to your mailbox every Tuesday.

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We’ve all seen them: those vague, bite-sized bits of advice broken up into separate lines and accompanied by an aesthetically pleasing illustration. Though claiming to be a poem, it looks more like a dissected tweet, a digital knickknack designed specifically to complement someone’s Pinterest board. If you’re a somewhat-pretentious-and-highly-individualistic writer like me, you may have just scrolled by and scoffed about the work’s lack of substance.

It’s likelier, though, that you read the poem and enjoyed it. That you found its directness impactful and its illustration charming, maybe to the point where you reshared it yourself. You wouldn’t be alone. The subgenre, dubbed “Instapoetry” from its origin on Instagram, is one of the most successful forms of poetry today.

@alizagrace__book: how love tasted link in bio #poetry #poetrybook #alizagrace #quotes #booktok #alizagracepoetry

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Instapoetry’s short, visual nature allowed for its wildfire spread across various social media sites, but most recently TikTok. Though the subgenre may have began on Instagram and Tumblr, it has cemented its place in the literary world with its slew of published poetry books and handful of prestigious awards. 

For as much success as the genre has enjoyed, it’s received even more criticism. The poems, often free verse and rarely longer than one or two sentences, have been called shallow and lazy. The style of writing itself is easily parodied, to the point where I was struggling to decipher which Instapoems were legitimate and which were a mockery when looking them up. Though, the critique most frequently tossed out tends to be “this is not a poem.”

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t agree, at least partially. As a self-proclaimed poetry enthusiast, I can’t help but find Instapoems to be uninspired and lacking in any real poetic qualities. They’re often just a few words long and rarely contain the use of rhythm or meter or creative wordplay. But, then again, poems don’t necessarily need rhythm or meter–the entire subgenre of prose poetry is testament to this. Neither do poems need to span multiple pages–haikus and cinquains are just a few universally recognised forms of poetry that are never longer than a few lines.

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