pregaming grief review reviewed

trying to beat the nympho scenester allegations

Perhaps naïvely, I assumed that when Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022 that the accomplishment meant women who write about sex would finally be taken seriously. Her 1991 novella Simple Passion serves as one of the most famous books about a woman being down bad for a man—that’s it, that’s the whole plot, and it’s wonderful. Pure yearning. Today a dismissive review of my book Pregaming Grief was published with the rather clickbaity title “Diary of a nympho scenester” (I identify as neither a nympho nor a scenester, for the record) and it’s the most regressive thing I’ve read in a while.

The first snippet I read on the Instagram carousel was the excerpt comparing me to OnlyFans star Lily Phillips, who recently went viral for sleeping with 100 men in one day. I cannot wrap my head around the urge to compare a woman writing about sex to a woman making porn. I genuinely think that it comes from a porn-brained place, because most people know that sex is not porn. The experiences I write about are personal and intimate, and I think that writing about sex can be as cosmic and important as writing about any other intense topic. There are plenty of points in the review that make no sense to me; he says my “two main lovers are objectively bad men,” which I don’t think is true at all. I don’t believe in the idea of “objectively bad” people, and I put a great deal of effort into humanizing those characters who meant a lot to me despite the hurt they caused me.

There are also just factual inaccuracies. “A quick search reveals that Andrew is, in fact, his real name. Why expose only Andrew?” His name is not actually Andrew. It’s a fake name. None of Pregaming Grief is an attempt to “expose” anyone. And then there’s the extremely weird comment that I’m “too caught up in the moment to consider her future marriage—if she ever considers marriage at all.” I don’t believe you are ever going to write a good review in your life if you’re just going to push your morals on everything you consume. It’s a sad way to engage with art. I can’t imagine reading a book and feeling compelled to tell the writer how to live their life. If you really want to know, my art is my life. Writing matters more to me than the idea of marriage. I am still hooking up with strangers and falling in and out of love constantly. It’s quite beautiful. I don’t think there’s one way to live your life. That you should get married and have kids and buy a house. I was never interested in tradition, which I think is common for artists. Artists are outsiders. They’re not interested in convention. I find the trad revival in the literary scene to be awfully boring. I also think following any trend is just boring.

“One day, she may grieve the dignity she forsook at an SLAA meeting.” If any dignity was lost in the making of Pregaming Grief, it was just in the sense that all writing is a humiliation ritual. And I will never grieve/regret that. Publishing Pregaming Grief was one of the best things I’ve done.

He ends the review with saying I might one day experience the joy of love. I have been gripped by the joy of love more times than I can count. Sadly I’m not sure he knows what love really is.

I welcome criticism of my writing gladly; there are plenty of Goodreads reviews that offer interesting points of what could’ve been better. But this entire review is based on a misogynistic premise. It’s why I’ll never stop writing about sex. The more men tell me I should be ashamed for writing about sex, the more I will write about sex. The Pregaming Grief sequel recently reached 100,000 words. I’m working on a horny zine of poems and stories and photos. Charm School published my deranged story kms. Life is beautiful.

Get Pregaming Grief here.