Orca Dreams, Boyle Is Back
Mapril 2023
For most of March and April, I dreamt about orcas. I came out of time a bit. I’ve watched each of the following videos five thousand times and the vibe of my Mapril is somehow well-captured by both. Maybe don’t watch them if you, like me, hate seeing whales in captivity or are terrified of underwater attacks or are prone to just wilding out forever at displays of acute human hubris. Just know that somehow this period of time has felt to me like a similar combo of beauty and terror? An exuberance with creepy violence beneath? Haha, who the fuck knows, I’m being cryptic and dramatic, I just watched these videos a lot:
Writing:
A lot of the weirdness in what I wrote above pertains to my writing life these months, so I’ll stick with mostly cryptic for now. But I will say I got my first feedback on what I’ve written of the novel so far, and it was positive, and that’s the exuberance part!
Reading:
Last month I toyed with retiring the Reading section of this thing (thanks to the eight of you who participated in my poll 😘), partly because I feel like all I ever say about authors and books is, “This one is so good!” I actually hate a lot of books I try to read and have some real snarky opinions about some authors who are widely revered, but I’m not one to say so in public. And I guess that sometimes makes me feel weak? Like, not a rigorous studier of texts? Not a “real one”? Something about toxic positivity? But look. Thinking about this, I remembered a few years back I shared what I wrote about Vegan Cheese Summer Camp and my lovely friend Lauren texted me that she “loves a JT enthuse-fest,” JT being me, and I said back to her, “enthuse-fest is my full brand hahaha!” and felt okay inside. So I’ll just own that that’s what I like to do? For now? Whatever!
The point is, this month an opportunity for a major enthuse-fest has presented itself because, drum roll,
is liveblogging again! For real! Right here on Substack! Holy shit! Hagiography ahead!
If you know then you know, but in case you don’t: Megan Boyle is a writer from Baltimore who was popular during the Alt Lit scene of the 2010’s. In 2018, she published Liveblog, the novelized version of her attempt to record as much of her life as possible on Tumblr between March and September of 2013.
Typically I’m not in on the ground floor of anything, so please allow me to gloat this one time: I was reading Megan Boyle long before she got famous. Though I actually completely missed her rise to Alt Lit notoriety, I did read her Diaryland back in approximately 2002 because she and my best friend Maggie followed each other on there.
The summer between the two years of my creative writing MA I had a glorious temp job where there was almost nothing to do except occasionally answer the phone. I spent most of my time reading the Diarylands of all my friends and all their friends and wishing I had the guts to have one, too. Lots of times I tried, thinking surely I should be able to do this. I was the one who wanted to be a writer, had produced a chapbook of travel stories, and given public readings throughout my undergrad years. But the thought of sharing what I wrote right away felt like snakes in my gut. I had to sand my sentences down for days, contend with self doubt and belief that what I’d done was dullsville for days more, by which time any of the spontaneous, realtime spirit I loved about Diaryland was snuffed out. Lots of what I sanded that summer became part of my first novel; I’m not trying to tear down what I do. But I’ve always admired the courage required of immediate sharing. The other day I told my partner David that maybe my work would be a bit like Megan Boyle’s if I actually had the balls.
About seven years younger than us, Boyle was only 16 or 17 when Maggie first found her. We both related hard to Boyle’s acting aspirations, crushes, and yearnings — she reminded us of ourselves when we’d met as teens. She was also, then as now, very hilarious, silly, willing to detail her emotions, be vulnerable and true. If I remember correctly, she was also very hard on herself, and I related to that, too.
Maggie and I followed Boyle through high school graduation, a platform switch to LiveJournal, several boyfriends, and a couple of university stints. We would get excited for each of her romances, discuss if we thought the new university would suit her better, wonder if she should, in fact, pursue her acting dream — a dream both of us had shared and shed, with, in Maggie’s case, no shortage of pain and regret, and in my case a turn to writing (and its attendant pain and regret haha) instead.
I don’t remember if I already understood what Boyle was doing in 2002 as an influence, but I knew I loved reading her, felt a deep connection to the self she presented on the screen, was rooting for her. I even named a character in my first novel for one of Boyle’s boyfriends as an easter egg for Maggie. But by the time the Alt Lit years hit, I had lost track. Of a lot. Scrabbling away on my own obsessive, offline self-narrativization project, I was non-blissfully ignorant of the entire Alt Lit movement and Boyle’s rise to fame within it.
I’ll always feel bummed that I wasn’t following the original liveblog as it happened, but then again, it might have been too painful to bear. Both because it’s dark as hell, chronicling months of deep depression, bad boyfriends, and a startlingly rampant use of drugs from MDMA to kratom to concerta to crack, but also because she was once again doing the thing for all to see in a way that I knew I never could. (Of course that kind of professional jealousy would have been misplaced — Boyle was clearly not well, and has spoken about the work of Liveblog not always being good for her. To be clear, I don’t think it’s a universal good or requirement of artists to be publicly vulnerable. It’s just something that I, for better or worse, admire and enjoy.)
Though I missed its first iteration, when the novel version of Liveblog came out (after the editing process and still more drugs nearly killed the author), it made enough of a splash to hit even my weakly calibrated radar. I excitedly ordered two copies for Maggie and me and we were both frankly shocked when it opened on Boyle snorting heroin before having a bath at her parents’ place. We hadn’t known what to expect! Our fun little drama gal was gone! But I bombed through all 707 pages in warp speed. Sure, the drug content was salacious, the lit world gossip was fun, Boyle’s edgelordy views on feminism were confounding, but what pulled me through that massive volume of text was the same singular sensibility and hilarious voice and earnest attempt at truth-seeking that had been on display since Diaryland.
Since the novel, I’ve followed Boyle more carefully on social media, caught up with some of her juvenilia and video output, and managed to catch a brief stint of her liveblogging, again on Tumblr, in 2020 and 2021. The bulk of it appears to be offline now, but that iteration of the project also spawned some sessions of solidarity liveblogging from Boyle’s friends.
In the current liveblog, Boyle is sober, happily married, companion to a nice dog, and employed as some sort of counsellor. The latter situation means the Substack isn’t really a liveblog at all since she can’t write about the details of her work.
It seems clear she has more boundaries in place for what she will and won’t share. She seems much more profoundly aware of “her shit” than she was in 2013, or even 2020, but still happy to unpack it and face it head-on as it rears its head throughout her days. She currently believes sincerely in the Christian God and the work of Carl Jung, and while it’s those beliefs that now confound me, her writing on both is compelling and strange. She rails often against the meaningless, recycled vernacular and knee-jerk worldview of — to use just such a well-worn phrase — the Extremely Online. I admire her commitment to showing up as only herself, time and again.
While my excitement about Boyle’s work is in part informed by its effect on me as a cumulative project, the pleasure of watching the steady accrual of an attempt to truthfully document a life over many years, there are pleasures to be had in every single entry, too. An example from April 16th:
I was starting to be neurotically fixated on not having nicotine until tomorrow. Didn’t seem like Safeway had Nicorette. No one attended the Guest Services desk, where I just saw cigarettes behind the counter. I went off on my own to ask a young employee stocking eggs, who needed clarification on what Nicorette was and looked almost alarmed when I said “nicotine gum,” like “why would you think a grocery store would have that, that’s something a head shop would have.” A guy appeared at Guest Services to ring up a customer and I asked if he sold Nicorette and he said no, and I said, affecting my nana’s old smoker’s voice, “well gimme a pack a Marlboros instead,” but he didn’t laugh, so I said “okay thanks” and paid for a room temperature water in the self service thing.
You know? I just love the details she clocks, the casual way she frames them, her willingness to share that the Guest Services guy didn’t laugh at her doing her nana’s voice. Here you go, reader. Here’s the whole damn thing. I don’t know how else to say it. When I’m reading Megan Boyle, I’m more attentive to the world around me — how the sky looks; the nuances of my own relationships; what my brain is really, truly saying in there; what it means to write about one’s life; what it means to read about others’. I don’t want to put any pressure on her to do this for a long time, or keep doing it into her old age, or anything she doesn’t want to do. But if she does, I’ll try to be paying attention. For now, I’m just really glad she’s here.
When I started writing this, I told myself “This doesn’t have to be some grandiose thing, the unified theory of Megan Boyle, just say why you like her, share her blog, hit send!” and yet I feel the pull to edit for fourteen more days so I don’t embarrass myself, to sand my sentences for years, to tinker till her liveblog’s gone again. But in honour of Boyle’s enduring courage to just publish, and also somehow in honour of all the years I spent blogging only to myself, I think that’s it for now, I’m hitting send. I can always add more tomorrow if I want.
Eating:
In late March I came upon some extremely large watermelon radishes at a bougie health food store in Toronto’s east end, and basically lost my mind and bought them all. I used them to make nineties-style “tuna” steaks…
I cured some in miso and shio koji, then smoked them on Maggie’s barbecue and they tasted so dang bacon-y and good…
I also made some thicc daikons into “scallops.”
Radishes, man. ✌️