DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Brandi Homan’s ‘Burn Fortune’, Kristin Garth’s ‘Daddy’, and Danielle Chelosky’s ‘Pregaming Grief’
Paint Your Wagon, the 1969 Western musical starring Jean Seberg, Clint Eastwood, and Lee Marvin, was a historic commercial flop, by turns both mindbogglingly strange, and mind-numbingly dull in its depiction of an anonymous, gold rush era mining camp cycling through the increasingly corruptive stages of insular capitalism. While its atonally sing-songy, borderline nihilistic theme reprises (many, many times over, burrowing into your brain and simply refusing to resolve), we watch as some 400 men invest their lucky-struck earnings into six agreeably trafficked women until their No Name tent City grows into a hedonist boomtown—a collection of 20-some-odd saloons that never sleep, and through which the men’s money can change hot hands in closed-loop perpetuity. Why am I telling you all this, you ask? Well look no further than my 2021 review of Brandi Homan’s Burn Fortune, the first title I ever read from femcel/horror-centric small press darling CLASH Books.Burn Fortune is a small wonder; an exercise in concision that nonetheless contains worlds. Written in tight, punchy bursts of poetic wit and poignantly relatable teen angst, it reads like the highly curated diary of a precocious young woman in a hell of a spot. Through the sharp, tilt-shift lens of the smalltown 1990’s midwest—a place which author Brandi Homan renders painfully (and at times hilariously) authentic via deadpan descriptions of flag corps politics, beer runs to the Kum & Go, and hot summers spent detasseling corn—we get to know June, a girl with the kind of nebulous big dreams that only small-town teenagers know how to have; that sense that there has to be more of something, anything, somewhere out there, and that you’re surely destined for all of it if you could only figure out where to go. It’s not until the local librarian introduces her to the films of Jean Seberg (an Iowa native who escaped to France to become the iconic star of such films as Breathless and Saint Joan) that June begins to think more deeply about what she wants, and how to get it.The sections in which she watches Seberg’s films could almost pass for Live Tweeting sessions, and her by-turns entranced and exasperated commentary injects her increasingly desperate circumstances (abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, unwanted pregnancy) with a brilliant levity that will make you want to watch right along with her (I for one will be checking out Paint Your Wagon ASAP). And while the thing this book maybe does best is depict the ways in which even the smartest people can find themselves hemmed in on all sides by seemingly inescapable circumstance—by a town, or a house, or a family, or even a single destructive person—what June finds in Jean (and specifically in her portrayal of Joan of Arc) is the will to break free of it all. To defy fate, raise high her battle flag, and fly like the prairie wind, because small towns hold on the tightest—to young women most of all—and absolutely no one gets out without a fight.I wrote that short review nearly four years ago, in what now feels like a much simpler time, but upon revisiting Burn Fortune’s blighted, broken heartland for this piece, I found that it hit differently under our present banner of red, white, and blue. For all her determination, the thought of June actually breaking free of all that’s tying her to the stake of smalltown, USA feels like a deeply optimistic reading—an astronomical possibility on par with Seberg’s own selection by Otto Preminger out of 18,000 hopeful young actresses vying to play his Joan (a rescue which, by all accounts, still left her beholden to the whims of a tyrannical male authority). The East is sinking. The West is burning. The government is a kleptocracy, and the economy feels increasingly like a game of three-card monte. Maybe June had a chance back in the DIY riot grrrl ’90s, but the futility of the future we now know waits for her comes through in countless devilish details, from her boyfriend’s hours spent duct-taped to an exercycle, to a perfect, microcosmic chapter in which she and her friends cruise “The Loop” on a routine Saturday night, jockeying for position as they mindlessly circle the main drag of their go-nowhere town. “That’s what being a good American is, right?” June muses on their endless, aimless plight. “Be better! Be better all the time!”Homan’s ending is open to interpretation, and I was certainly feeling better about America in 2021 than I am today, so far be it for me to claim any certainty as to what June can or can’t hope to accomplish. But by the time she sequesters herself in an underground culvert to light candles and recite spells—pictures of Seberg taped to the walls—it’s fair to wonder if she’s built herself a chrysalis, or a tomb. It’ll take more than a still-legal-back-then abortion or a fresh start in the next town over to truly outrun her devastating lot. No matter where you go within the invisible borders of the American patriarchy, there you fucking are. Even Jean took her talents to Europe (and even that only helped for so long). “Around here the only way to speak is to leave and if you leave you burn.”For those looking to truly opt out, allow me to pivot to Kristin Garth’s Daddy (from the ever-pugnacious envelope pushers at Anxiety Press), a physically discomfiting collection liable to make any man who’s browsed PornHub in the last twenty years squirm in his boxer briefs. Wielding the second person voice like a VR empathy trainer, Garth slathers her readers in a child pageant’s-worth of Lolital signifiers—bows and hearts, glitter and gloss, plaid skirts and pigtails—corseting us inside the minds and behind the eyes of female bodies we are almost exclusively accustomed to ogling at a safe and powerful remove. Whether building exquisite, tangled poetry from the inner monologue of a babyfaced sex worker bought and stabled for her ability to cry on command (“The Cry Shot”), or avenging the trauma of twin rollerskating ingenues turned sister-act strippers (“Twinkles”), Daddy cannonballs into the fetishization of girlhood with the no-fucks flagrancy of a trenchcoated pervert crashing the ballpit at a Chuck-E-Cheese, outragedly demanding a deeper examination of the semiotics of smut; of what so many get away with when the lights are lowest, and why.Nowhere is this truer than in Plaything—the novella that makes up the book’s second half—which centers around Melinda, a nominally enslaved young woman who is kept in a state as close to that of a living sex doll as one man can arrange for her. Cloistered in the kind of princess bed, fast fashion, Hello Kitty-print prison one might associate with a “barely legal” OnlyFans feed, Melinda is monitored 24/7, and dresses, speaks, and behaves according to the exacting specifications of her misogynist malefactor, existing in a kind of infantilized stasis for his pleasure alone. It’s a chilling scenario to see spelled out, and the degree to which it mirrors so much familiar content on the X-rated web renders bold, lascivious text any remaining subtext regarding the 21st century porn-poisoned male brain—the desire for both absolute physical control over, and absolute emotional detachment from, the female body.Elsewhere, “The Plan” chronicles a daughter’s lifelong pursuit of physical beauty and runway fame in hopes of someday crossing paths with her deadbeat movie star dad, an unwitting, uncaring lothario who proves all too eager to fail her spectacularly anew. “Con Man” recounts in excruciating detail a Rubicon moment in which an aspiring screenwriter must decide exactly how much of herself she’s willing to give up for a shot at the bigtime, and reckon with the instantaneous, irreversible damage she’ll endure no matter which sliding door she chooses. And taking these casual violations into the spiritual realm, the title story unfolds through a series of e-mails sent by a rape victim from her LDS college to her devout Mormon father back in Florida (where most of the book’s stories take place), an evolution of increasingly unhinged reports which reveal her betrayal and exploitation at the hands of men at every turn. All of these stories take square aim at the impossible power dynamics baked into our socio-sexual bedrock—the master’s tools that will absolutely never dismantle the master’s house—and the thoughtless entitlement with which men at every rung of authority and success can and will view women as their rightful spoils, offering a leg up only if they get to cop a feel along the way.I’ve read Daddy twice now, and I don’t believe there’s a good man to be found anywhere among these cum- and tear-stained pages. Indeed, that Plaything’s Melinda ultimately escapes into a lesbian relationship seems to suggest the possibility that, as far as Garth is concerned, there may well be none left to be found. While we’ve undoubtedly made strides under 3rd wave feminism with the subversive reclamation of stripping and the rise of ethical porn, Daddy raises real and fair questions about the academic nature of this kind of empowerment, and the ways in which it can bounce back to bite real sex workers just trying to survive inside institutional sexism’s echo chamber. For so many of these women, the fact remains, men don’t really care why they sell their bodies, so long as they do it. We can always make it work to our advantage. This may sound like polemic, but I’m not even claiming to be above it. It’s a banal, pushbutton temptation the internet hucks at me every day. As Chuck Klosterman famously noted over a decade ago, “the biggest problem in my life is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.”With all that said, Daddy feels like a true blow against the empire. What Garth has done here, brazenly and without compromise, is overload the whole damn system. Her ruthless commingling of adult and underage imagery, taboo and perversity, wanting to look and knowing you should look away, cumulates to effect a kind of autoerotic short-circuitry; a flaccid self-loathing. Her authorial voice is the literary equivalent of your girlfriend finding your browser history and screaming at you—“So this is what you like, you sick fuck?!”—until you die of shame. Even the book’s title and teenybop trapper-keeper cover art were enough to make me feel uncomfortable reading it in public. The fact is, none of this is new. Men have spent the past century building an objectification ecosystem that learns, commodifies, and enables our worst behaviors, and until we take responsibility for dismantling it (a prospect that looks less promising today than it has at any point in my lifetime) it will remain too big to fail. Considering everything that’s working against her, it’s a testament to Garth’s writing that she can still find ways to make us blush.As for those still looking to work within all that the patriarchy hath wrought, I’m not sure any writer has nailed the experience with as much honest, and self-aware precision as Danielle Chelosky, whose diaristic Pregaming Grief (my long-overdue first read from small press bellwether Short Flight/Long Drive) details her coming to terms, at the tender cusp of her twenties, with her own conflicted masochism. Torn between two older men—her manipulatively needy, hopelessly immature, yo-yoing heroin-addict first love (direct-addressed as “You” throughout), and an obdurately withholding, overtly condescending, all-too-familiar brand of “telling it like it is” aspiring comedian (Andrew)—Chelosky offers herself up as the sacrificial embodiment of Carson McCullers’s timeless relational paradigm—that of the lover and the beloved—and makes a strong case for the nature of human desire as little more than a pendular dialectic between the two. It’s strange to write about these presumably very real guys in such judgmental terms, but Chelosky is nothing if not cleareyed about exactly who and what they are, and her own complicated feelings for both of them. After centuries of men reducing all women to mothers and whores, she matter-of-factly flips that dichotomy on its head, making plain as day its unavoidable cognate: that all men must then be children or johns.Whilst ping-ponging back and forth between these two lunkheads, Chelosky forges a fledgling career in music journalism, tests the limits of her alcoholism, and does a lot of driving around with her bestie Quinn, at first trekking to well-known vistas like Joshua Tree and Death Valley (both places already being ravaged by climate change), and once the pandemic descends transitioning to shuttered prisons, defunct amusement parks, and even the faithless remnant of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Heritage USA. The more of these long-distance interstate sojourns she takes, the more she starts to feel like a video game avatar butting up against the invisible boundaries of its world map, looking for some elsewhere that simply isn’t there. Though she has all the freedom she could want—all the practical freedom that June and Melinda long for—she still finds herself always and inevitably returning to the places and people from whence she came.“I felt suffocated by a nameless grief” she notes at one point. “This inexplicable feeling of ending,” and through her trespassing journeys into abandonment and decay, coupled with her dystopian descriptions of New York under Covid lockdown, and her dedicated attachment to outdated media formats, her tone begins to convey a palpable sense of lived-in doom—of an already-gone world that she somehow both misses, and never really knew. It’s in many ways the same grief we see in the black parade of album anniversaries (a trend for which, somewhat amusingly, Chelosky’s chief publisher Stereogum is directly responsible) and celebrity deaths that daily clog our interconnected plexus of screens—the collective, performative mourning of the past that feels communally engineered to continue into the future in perpetuity, like some hellish Oscars In Memoriam eternally regurgitating the nostalgia of how much cooler and realer everything used to be. But when everything becomes nostalgia, then soon enough all of life starts to feel like cosplay—a dissociating from our present reality for fear that there’s nothing left to achieve, or even hope for—that anything worth doing has all already been done.The same could be said for the numerous men she meets around the margins of her two bigtime loves—a string of largely interchangeable music industry bros and app swipes that only serve to reinforce her disinterest in her own generation’s algorithmic romantic compromise. ExPat Press honcho Manuel Marrero observed in his own phenomenal review of this book that “people used to like things in a way they don’t anymore” and in addition to the physical books and albums Chelosky so clearly treasures, those “things” very much include “each other.” While her peers often present as a shallow cavalcade of responsible(ish) drinkers curating themselves through detached, disposable hookups, she repeatedly, and belligerently disingratiates herself from their ranks, determined to chase a more permanent, transcendent attachment through the self-abnegation of submissive, rough sex and the consumptive void of blackout, like some questing, flagellant Mystic. “I writhed in never-ending hysterical fits” she laments, twisting at the ends of all her fraying ropes, “wishing to escape my body, this city, the whole world.”Something the book explores as well as any narrative work I know on the subject, is the necessary tradeoff between trust and danger within a mutual S&M arrangement. Chelosky is generous and fearless when it comes to sharing the details of hers and Andrew’s sex life—a thrilling, and occasionally frightening affair that hews much closer to the reckless violence of Año Bisiesto than the contractual fantasies of something like 50 Shades. Her acceptance of risk—her need for it, even—is part of what makes it work for her. “I regretted everything I did the minute I did it, I deserved a punishment for it, for just existing. I wanted to get perpetually drunk so I could be liberated from this prison of insecurity, no longer having to be aware of or responsible for myself and my inevitable mistakes” confesses one passage in this relentlessly quotable book (I must have copied down at least 50 while making notes for this article, often snapping pictures of whole pages for reference). “I felt ashamed of the videos I watched when I was alone. The degradation I desired felt so antithetical to the feminist beliefs I held” admits another. Where Daddy adamantly refuses to allow for this kind of counterintuitive ecstasy, Chelosky’s journey of abject self-discovery argues for a different kind of personal and ideological freedom. Andrew exhibits, pretty inarguably, an unapologetic chauvinism (I’ll never forget the anecdote in which he mansplains why her choice of favorite Beatles song is wrong), but he also proves capable of tenderness and affection and, most importantly, seems to get what it is she needs from him, even if he’s not always willing to give it. Regardless of all she ostensibly knows and feels to the contrary, for her “A place of pain [is] just another name for a home.”There is so much resignation here, for an author so young—so much hard-won truth and understanding of the limits of human relationships, and the very real possibility that to fully love anyone is to spend your whole life overcorrecting for how you first loved, or failed to love someone else. I’ve barely touched on “You” so far, but his presence in, and influence upon her worldview is pervasive, bordering on omnipresent. For anyone who’s ever held onto someone too hard, for too long—or conversely, had someone refuse to let them go—Pregaming Grief will carry a visceral weight. The neurotic ghosts of memory and regret. The constant replaying and reimagining and repenting of all that might have been. “I’d learned the hard way that getting older only made things worse” begins my favorite line in the book. “I was an expert at waiting out my problems until they ruined my life.” If you know, you know, and Danielle Chelosky knows.Indeed, for as much as I wanted to examine Pregaming Grief within the same feminist framework as the two books above, it ultimately forced me to expand my thinking. For as much as I kneejerk loathed Andrew and “You” and felt depressed by the tired, ubiquitous tropes of modern manhood they represent, I was also regularly mortified by moments of recognition in them both—in Andrew’s pop culture didacticism and dogged resistance to vulnerability, and in “You”’s willful naivete and cowardly, druggy self-sabotage. And for as much as I wanted better for Chelosky (whatever judgy, paternalistic vision for her that might entail—yet another blindspot writing this piece made me confront), even more relatable were her own patterns of rejection and subsumption—of the contradictory desires to be someone’s “nothing” and their “everything at the same time”—the lover, and the beloved. I can sit here wanting these guys to do better, but Chelosky herself might well contend that they’re both already doing their best (frustrating as it might be). In the end it’s clearly far more than just these two privileged, flawed men, or even the patriarchy under which they were forged, that’s hemming her in. It’s the pain of existence itself.So where do we go from here? What do we do with all this baggage piling up between us, and around us, and upon us—saturating our brains and our neural net of feeds—filling our country up to its glass ceiling, sandbagging its invisible walls, and spilling over its eroding edges from sea to shining sea? If Paint Your Wagon is any indicator, we may be out of good options; decamping from this No Name City and these rigged systemic structures may simply not be in those three Monte cards. For plucky Jean Seberg, after two hours of subpar musical numbers and chemistry-free love triangulations, the gold dries up, and the entire settlement literally sinks into the Earth—destabilized by an elaborate system of tunnels the male protagonists have dug in order to rob their fellow workers blind (how’s that for metacommentary?) Her cabin still stands, and Clint Eastwood sticks dutifully by, but as the rest of the prospectors pull up stakes and the principles bid their farewells, the film leaves an existential taste in the mouth—the nagging suspicion that, stay or go, there’s really nothing else to do but the same things they just did all over again—the master’s tools just waiting to rebuild in the next town over, and the next, and the next.So yes, it’s hard to feel as hopeful for June as I did four years ago. And yes, the U.S. is feeling more every day like a place we may need to escape (though Europe today is hardly the expat safe haven it once was). As she herself puts it, heartbreakingly, near the end of Burn Fortune, “It isn’t that I don’t want this it’s that what I want is something else and that is not this”—as shifty and vaguely tautological a summation as you’re likely to find of our National sexual politics in 2025. If she wriggles her way off the pyre, it’ll be a miracle deserving of Sainthood. I’d like to think she could find a friend like Melinda, someone to help her break free of men’s possessive, binary bindings. Or else one like Chelosky with whom she could roam the dying countryside, blasting cassettes and CD’s and chasing her own tortured version of peace; standing in the flames and “learn[ing] independence because [she] had no other choice.”
