foreword

that's right. this is a fancy substack.

Most forewords are written for novels, and most forewords are written by an individual other than the name on the book jacket. An alien voice whose only vested interest in what lies beyond their introductory pages is whether the ensuing novel does well enough for its’ author to write a foreword for their next work, and so the cycle of tit-for-Booker-Prize-tat continues.

I am breaking with both traditions. This is not a novel (gasp!), this is a Substack. Nor am I asking anyone fancy to introduce me or my writing on my behalf. (Though, Rachel Cusk or Lisa Taddeo, I would absolutely accept a sentence written on a crumpled gum wrapper if you’re offering. No? I digress.)

So why bother, why write a foreword for what is essentially a 90s WorldWideWeb blog with a subscription button? Well, perhaps as a promise to myself. Something in ‘ink’ that will help to streamline my chaotic, and fast-swimming thoughts. Something that will give those thoughts a chance to swim to the surface long enough that I may reel them in and peer inside at the hook that has caught there.

Ideally, this Substack’s purpose is to act as a diaristic catch-all: the literary, online equivalent of a Mary-Poppins-bag. I’m not quite sure what rummaging around in the bottom will reveal, but I am hoping by reaching in, I will pull out something interesting. Perhaps a memento from yesterday or perhaps a vestige from ten years ago, when I moved to New York City.

People have been writing about New York City for centuries. As a kid, I devoured J.D. Salinger’s angst ridden Manhattan, a city that both gave and took away the gifts of “privacy and loneliness.” I envied the lavish parties Fitzgerald brought to life in Gatsby. Parties that reeked of 1920s Manhattan escapist culture, now diluted down to finance bros taking summer Fridays at AirBnbs upstate or rental homes in Southhampton. I still cannot pass a tree growing in an abandoned lot without recalling the hours I spent poring over Frannie’s languid teenage summers in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. What can be said about New York that has not already been catalogued: immortalized in music or poetry, captured on film or canvas. Nothing. And yet, it continues to be a topic of fascination for any person who moves here. It is a city in which it is possible to find and lose yourself over and over again.

I moved here with dreams of becoming a Broadway actress. That dream became a reality. Yet, when I put pen to paper, I didn’t feel interested in excavating those moments. They’ve been captured already: by social media, by press interviews, by my brief affair with vlogs. Instead, I felt drawn to ruminating on the stories of my first years here, the years in which I pummeled pavement trying to carve out a tiny corner for myself. The odd jobs and transient friendships, the quiet epiphanies, the chaotic love affairs and sweaty mistakes no one saw except endlessly patient roommates and college friends who made the cut.

When I was 13 years old, my mother took my to see RENT on Broadway while my sisters and dad attended a U2 concert at Madison Square Garden. A majority of the show’s adult themes were totally lost on me. Having never witnessed what sex even looked like, the “Contact” number alone just felt like a shadow puppetry ballet. I didn’t know what La Vie Boheme was, but a quick Google search at home led me to the word “Bohemia.” Socially unconventional, artistic people and the areas they frequent, viewed collectively.

I didn’t move to New York during the roaring 20s. I didn’t slosh gin from a bathtub, or let men light cigarettes for me in back alleyways. I didn’t move here in the 60s during the counterculture protests and mass caravan trips to Woodstock. And I was still at home trying to flirt with my middle school crushes via AIM during the Wall Street boom when brokers prowled FiDi like feral, cocaine-sniffing gods amongst mortals. I moved to New York, permanently, in 2014. Before the Trump presidency (1.0 and 2.0), before TikTok (also 1.0 and 2.0), before the Paris Climate agreement. The global consciousness was still utangling itself from a deep REM cycle, fumbling for our proverbial glasses and morning Advil. Perhaps this is why I view my early years here through rose colored lenses. The inevitable moments of disappointment that color one’s 20s didn’t feel insignificant and petty the way they do now, when measured up against the world’s greater ills. Rather, they felt seismic. Formative. Moments I was allowed to sink into and reflect on, for what else was a 20 something to do during that final, fleeting Golden Age besides, simply, live?

These are the stories of my Bohemia, the stories that got to develop in the dark room of my first decade in New York City. Unseen and grainy until I took them out into the red light to inspect more clearly. And of course, share with you.

Welcome to Millennial Bohemia….