Anyway, back to logging off. Eighth Grade is a film about the awkwardness of early adolescence, but it is also a film about the internet as a place that simultaneously connects and alienates us. Made before social media was rendered completely unusable by a bunch of evil turbonerds, Eighth Grade reflects what it is like to grow up online, using a variety of social media platforms to attempt to connect with others and fit in (Instagram), express yourself (YouTube), and engage with pop culture (Tumblr), all things that have become increasingly difficult to do online in recent years. Kaylah’s use of social media addresses several contemporary anxieties, like the internet as a harmful extension of high school dynamics, its role in the spread of neoliberal femininity, the damaging effects of a passive consumption of content, and the content creator’s drive to reproduce unoriginal content in an attempt to fit in (and cater to the algorithm).

The film’s attitude towards online spaces is ambivalent at best. While the internet helps Kaylah connect and pass the time, it ultimately does more harm than good. Attempts to connect are often frustrated, and engagement with content she enjoys frequently alienates her from her surroundings or leads her on a doomscrolling spree, both of which prove detrimental to her self-esteem. Does that sound familiar? Anyone? On top of that, her content-creation ventures seem to go completely unnoticed. At the end of the film, Kaylah posts her final video in which she announces that she is going to log off. But not everything is negative. Kaylah may not have reached YouTube stardom or even gained a single follower, but one person has been watching her videos, the same one who reaches out to her on Instagram while she fruitlessly tries to connect with those above her station. The internet does hold some potential for connection, but its power lies in quality rather than quantity, and we may be blind to it. A single follower who shares your passions or likes you the way you are is infinitely better than an anonymous mass who worships your every move. A moment shared with another person holds more meaning than a life shared with everybody you have ever met.

Like the film’s protagonist, I decided to log off for a bit. 2025 was the summer I spent in extremely instagrammable places without sharing a single photo. I didn’t log off social media completely. I doomscrolled on Bluesky (but not on my academic account) and resisted the urge to post a photo of a summery destination with an inane comment like “this makes it all worth it”, “life is made for summer sunsets” or some shit like that. I managed not to be another person shoving their vacation down everybody’s throat and, unlike last year, I didn’t feel the need to pretend I was having an idyllic summer. In the summer of 2024, I shared countless photos of all the picturesque corners and majestic landscapes that I encountered in Ireland, and only those who actually knew me could tell something was definitely off. This time, nothing major was off except for your everyday 21st-century frustrations, like not being able to afford a nice apartment despite having a “good job” and that peculiar feeling that we’re witnessing the end of the world.

Every season has up and downs no matter how hard we try to romanticise it. There were perfect days and there were days when I cried for hours for no reason. I read good books and mediocre books. I got sick on holiday and I didn’t listen to as much music as I would have liked. Going back to work felt abrupt despite the long break—possibly because I was so close to burnout by the time the academic year ended—and I still feel like I need to rest. Yet, there was a lot of joy too. There were perfect summer sunsets, many hours spent looking at the sea, hikes with breathtaking views, picturesque villages, unforgettable meals and memorable ice creams. I’m already nostalgic for it all.

So do I wish I had been sharing it on social media? To be quite honest, the answer is yes and no. I’ve been sharing stuff online since I opened an Open Diary account in the year 2000, and a part of me always longs to document moments. I process my thoughts best through writing, and I enjoy taking pictures and the process of putting together a post. I like going through Instagram stories I posted while on holiday to see what moments I chose to highlight as they were happening, remembering little details that I would have forgotten about had I not posted them there and then. Yet, I have found myself feeling pretty uncomfortable when asked about my summer by people in real life. You know, you go back to work and everybody asks about your summer expecting you to ask about theirs so they can brag about their holiday. You bump into an old acquaintance while running errands and the situation is so awkward the only way of making chit chat is asking about your summer, to which you mutter a half-assed, generic response. Is this a neurodivergent thing? Who knows.

And this combination of wanting to share but not wanting to be perceived brings me to what I find off-putting about modern social media: the fact that everybody you have ever met and will ever meet is on it. My favourite social media moment was when the only people seeing my posts were my two best friends at the time and three nerds I had never met. The nosy thrill of being able to see what people I once knew had made of their lives wore off and now all those people I went to school with are like a stain I can’t seem to get rid of. The same goes for most family members and workmates. Sorry if you’re reading this, but my stomach can only take so many photos of your kids, your back as you ponder the meaning of life while looking at the sunset or, god forbid, your feet or a photo that looks like a meme from 2013. The captions are bad too. And the music. And sometimes I honestly wish I didn’t know so much about you because I would probably like you more if I knew nothing at all.

There are exceptions to all of this, of course. There are people whose kids I can’t get enough of and people who are excellent at documenting their daily life (some are hilarious, some have great taste, others take really good photos and others are always involved in creative projects or have interesting takes to share). Is the answer to this overabundance of contacts to “just delete them”, as Caoilainn Lander says in this post? In some cases, it may be. The statement “If I wouldn’t invite you to my house, then you’re not welcome in my online space either” hits home in many ways, but is it as simple as that? I fear in some cases it isn’t. There are people I would invite over if they promised not to make me look through their Instagram.

So yes, there are people whose updates I have missed, but what I haven’t missed is the compulsion to open the app and scroll until my eyes hurt or the nosy impulse to go through somebody’s follower list even though I haven’t seen or thought about that person in years. I am very aware that one of the solutions to my issues is simply to post stories only friends can see and hide the stories of those whose lives I don’t want to engage with. I am pretty sure, though, that my engagement with the app would take another compulsive turn. A different one, but a compulsive turn nonetheless. As I was writing this I read this post in which the author explains how deleting Instagram made her engage in other compulsions like scrolling down Google News. The same thing happened to me as I found myself craving the constant novelty of the endless scroll on TikTok, Reddit, Bluesky, Substack and various online news sources. My interest shifted from app to app as I installed one and uninstalled another in an attempt to stop craving content. Sometimes I caught myself holding my phone wondering what to do with it.

It feels like everybody’s been writing about their social media use (or lack thereof) lately. Katherine May has chosen to see it as a nation state that one is allowed to emigrate from and visit from time to time, a view that I quite like. Kyle Chayka has written and spoken about the death of casual posting. When summer started there were articles about our right to disconnect in every publication. My TikTok algorithm is full of young people ditching subscriptions to streaming platforms and embracing physical media. I haven’t given it as much thought as Ori, but I have also been trying to embrace some aspects of an analogue life. I made a point to bring my film camera on holiday and started going to the library every Friday to casually browse the comic book section without anything specific in mind, to see where my mind—rather than the algorithm—takes me. I would like to stop checking my phone before I leave the bed, but at least I’ve taken to bringing a book with my to read as I sip coffee in the morning (some mornings, that is).

In another attempt to slow down and be more conscious about my internet use, I’ve been writing this post for months. I started writing it in July, added some more in August, and finished it off on the first day of autumn. I’m not exactly offline, but I am not consumed by the need to post stuff or constantly peek into others’ lives either. Going back to Eighth Grade, in his 2016 comedy special Make Happy writer and director Bo Burnham said the market pushes us to “perform to each other, all the time, for no reason” and “watch our life as a satisfied audience member”, concluding that “if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it”.

So who exactly am I doing this for? Like Kaylah in Eighth Grade, I am doing it for myself1. Though her video blogs grant her no followers, they give her room to process complex feelings and life experiences. Her dishonesty in her self-portrayal eventually leads to self-knowledge and, in her case, offline. Will I log off for real like she did? I honestly don’t know. I sometimes long for the quieter corners of the old internet, but I have given up the hope that anything like that will survive without getting ruined by a larger platform. I suppose I will continue visiting from time to time. You’ll probably find me here, posting once every six months and then logging off again. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

🎬 I’ve been watching Long Story Short and I’m so glad it’s getting another season.

👾 Currently enjoying playing Strange Horticulture in the evening and pretending we’re deep into autumn.

🍟 I’ve been eating more melon than I have in years thanks to the recipe in this video.

📖 Manolito Gafotas remains the greatest anti-hero in Spanish literature.

Making lists won’t solve your life, but it may help you make sense of it or, at least, it’ll surely help you pass the time. This is a thought that kept coming back to my mind as 2024 was nearing its end and I hopelessly tried not to reflect back on it too much. I haven’t watched High Fidelity for a couple of years, but the film inevitably popped into my head (as it often does given how much time I’ve spent thinking or writing about it). My relationship with High Fidelity has shifted through the years. My late-adolescent self saw past the protagonist’s toxic traits and identified with his music snobbery and love for lists, while my adultish self sees him for the asshole that he is. I still love the film for many reasons, though, including its way of making the spectator identify with the protagonist before the extent of his idiocy is fully revealed, something that I’ve compared to the cycle of infatuation and disappointment in a relationship elsewhere, but that’s not truly relevant here.

High Fidelity’s protagonist, Rob Gordon, is a proto-hipster record store owner and full-time music snob whose unhappiness pervades both his personal and professional life, so he makes lists. The film begins with Rob’s break-up with his long-term girlfriend Laura. While Laura is preparing to leave, we see Rob listening to music on his headphones as he stares into the camera and wonders: “What came first? The music or the misery?”. While he reflects on this he listens to “You’re Gonna Miss Me Baby” by 13th Floor Elevators and the spectator listens along with him, acknowledging that, yes, there are sad songs that make us sadder and break-ups make us sad too. Who could disagree with that? Once Laura leaves the scene, he dives right into a list of his “desert island, all-time, top five most memorable break-ups, in chronological order”. As he recounts his teenage and twentysomething experiences with what seems like worrying clarity for a man his age and offhandedly calls women “cruel”, he lists his ex Penny’s top recording artists. An immature top-five list within another immature top-five list to show that these lists are Rob’s chosen method to seamlessly organise and classify his lived experience without having to develop emotional maturity.

Soon after this, Rob’s break-up also prompts him to reorganise his record collection into autobiographical order, an intricate web of categorised lived experience made legible only to himself, a metaphor for his emotional unavailability. If his emotions are expressed through the music he listens to yet nobody but him can find a record within his collection, his emotional life makes sense only to himself. Sitting on his apartment’s floor surrounded by piles of records, Rob looks as if he is being drowned by the weight of his own past, which in a way is true.

The protagonist needs to let go of his version of the past, of his interpretation of his past relationships and what may have been the problem in them and of an immature view of what his future may look like, both professionally and personally. If you think about it, lists would theoretically be a great tool to make sense of his in-betweenness and find out what to discard and what to keep as he moves on to real adulthood. Rob, of course, learns nothing from these lists, even after Laura tells him his list of “top 5 dream jobs” is nothing but a list of things he would do “if qualifications and time and history and salary were no object.” Instead of helping him move on, lists anchor him to the past.

So that’s how I found myself thinking about a film about lists but with no desire to make any sort of year-end lists. Two years ago, I pretentiously claimed that “my years of making top-10 lists are over” and that “I no longer quantify my life”. This is not entirely true. I still make lists, I just no longer feel the overwhelming desire to share them on the internet like I did back in my blogging days. Lists seem to come naturally to me. In fact, I typically find it extremely hard not to look back on a year when its end comes. I’ll find myself going through every month even if I am not making any lists, which can be depressing if I’ve had a complicated year like I did in 2024. Without going into too much detail, 2024 brought along death, heartbreak, love, success, anxiety and a new diagnosis, not in equal measures or in that order. Some were expected and some were not. Some were dealt with better than others. Some I still struggle to talk about. Some were carried into 2025 in a good way and some in a bad way. So without the energy to engage with the outgoing year properly, I made a list of lists I could’ve made, an uncategorised, unorganised list that somehow sums up and represents a chaotic year. A list that a few people can read into and connect with certain moments of my life but that only I have all the answers to. A list as opaque and emotionally unavailable as Rob Gordon’s autobiographical record collection.

A list of lists I could’ve made but didn’t

• Places around the city where I cried while listening to the same songs on repeat

• Beading styles I learnt making bracelets for the Eras Tour

• Books that I abandoned halfway through upon realising that I wasn’t enjoying them

• Songs that made me cry

• Songs that gave me goosebumps

• Hours spent looking at my phone screen in the dark

• Wildflowers that made me feel glad to be alive

• Lifelong behaviours that I realised can be traced to ADHD

• Parts of my life that are not what I thought they were

• Hours spent writing

• Hours spent thinking about writing

• Big holidays that made me sad

• Small holidays that made me happy

• Idyllic locations where I felt miserable

• Films I meant to watch but didn’t

• Moments during the Waxahatchee shows that almost made me cry

• Social gatherings I left early or made excuses to miss

• Conversations I could not face

• Thoughts that abandoned my brain fully formed despite me not being aware that they were even there

• Hours spent worrying about my loved ones

• Hours spent worrying about whether my loved ones worry about me

• WhatsApp messages I didn’t answer

• Britpop documentaries watched on sweltering summer nights

In 2024 I experienced a lot, which sometimes left me almost paralysed, so I read less and watched fewer films. One of the best things 2024 brought me was that I found myself listening to more new music after a lull. So, in true High Fidelity fashion, here are 10 new releases I enjoyed. I cheated by adding a 2023 release because Former Champ’s Vol. 2 wasn’t available for some reason.

For the first six months of the year, I made a daily 2-second video, which was cool until things imploded and I no longer had the will to document my daily life. If you’re lucky, this time next year you’ll get to see my 2025 video. Until then, I’m leaving you with the last sunset of 2024, which was dramatic yet peaceful and the perfect way to say goodbye to the last day of the year.

📖 Back in February or March a then-student heard I had been to Ireland in the summer and recommended me Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. I didn’t read it till late December, which was perfect because that’s when the action takes place. I’ve since made two additional people read it.

🎬 I am late to the party, but I recently watched and loved The Holdovers.

🎶 Seeing people you love do cool stuff is the best.

You may notice this newsletter has changed its name, moving from teenage films to youth films. The teenage experience is insufficient to reflect on what growing up means today, so I am expanding it to be able to talk about a wider spectrum of films, which I already did a couple of posts back.

Two years ago (almost to the day) I had the chance to introduce a screening of Pilar Palomero’s 2020 film Las Niñas (Schoolgirls) to an audience whose average age was most definitely around 70, if not older. At first sight, this might have seemed like a terrible match, but it reminded me of something that I already knew but had never considered from a perspective further removed than mine: Coming-of-age films are forever. After all, if Beverly Hills 90210 was a source of comfort for my 8-year-old self who lived on the other side of the world and had no experience of adolescence, why wouldn’t older women connect with a film about a pre-teen girl growing up in their own city?

The screening was part of a local neighbourhood’s cultural programming, so I knew to expect a non-academic audience of mixed ages, educational levels and audiovisual literacy skills. To make it accessible to all, my presentation avoided technicalities and niche references while emphasising the role of the protagonist’s mother and the cinematic depiction of the city we live in.

When I arrived, armed with an elaborate chart including over 30 questions for the post-screening debate divided by theme (gender and sexuality, education, adolescence, pop culture and society, Zaragoza), I had a moment of panic and thought “thank god I made that chart, it’s going to be tough to get these people to talk.” Reader, I never even had to use the chart, which remains as a relic of yet another moment when I unnecessarily overprepared for something.

As slightly embarrassing video evidence shows, these ladies were so eager to discuss the film that they needed almost no questions, talked over each other, completely disregarded turn-taking and didn’t wait for the microphone to get to them. One even walked over to me and spoke into it directly. It was messy, endearing and, occasionally, a little bit awkward, just like adolescence itself.

Of course, what they saw in the film was not exactly the same as I saw. Where I saw remnants of my own childhood and adolescence in which messages received through pop culture clashed—often violently—with the supposed morality of the (Catholic) education I was receiving, they were able to ignore the cultural references that firmly set the film in the early 1990s and look back at their days as school girls. They looked back to a time when mainstream culture was as puritanical as their nun-led education, when boys and girls learnt separately and seemed to inhabit completely different worlds. They mourned their lack of opportunities and loss of potential, talking about how little they learnt and how much they could have done had they been allowed to step outside the cages that had been set up for them.

Some of them were so eager to share their stories that I wondered whether anybody had been willing to listen before. It made me think about all the girlhoods that go unwritten, unfilmed and unnoticed, sometimes out of shame, sometimes because memory-making is only available to those with the means and the time to immortalise their lives.

I asked my grandmother and great-grandmother about their girlhood countless times and never received much of an answer. You can see traces of girlhood in their earliest pictures: soft, round features, a certain innocence—and, sometimes, even carelessness—on their faces, hints of shyness and what looks like the imposed seriousness of those behaving like adults for the first time. These are just my impressions, though. I have no way of proving any of this. There are no childhood or teenage photographs, no diary entries remembering the first time they ever went to the cinema on their own or revealing their feelings. One of them couldn’t write and the other probably saw little point in writing about a life lived in the middle of nowhere surrounded by a completely flat horizon. Or maybe she didn’t have anything to write with. Or maybe she was afraid. We’ll never know, and that’s something that will continue to haunt me forever.

This is also a thought that occurred to me while reading Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, a book I loved and mentioned in this newsletter before. While reading it, I kept thinking about how rare it is to read about an unprivileged girlhood from a personal perspective rather than from the vantage point of a more privileged outsider (also usually a man). Lately, I have noticed some autobiographical accounts of working-class girlhoods, such as Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn (2019) and Deborah Orr’s Motherwell: A Girlhood (2020). The personal retellings of girlhoods and womanhoods that are long gone, though, remain the domain of life writing scholars. Like the lovely women who were kind enough to share their memories after watching Las Niñas, I wonder what we could have learnt. I wonder what we could have learnt about growing up as girls had a wider spectrum of past girlhoods been available for us to read about or watch. But at least there is some comfort to be found in the knowledge that what is available may also help us make sense of our experiences and create safe spaces to share them, regardless of age. I can’t wait to watch the films that will help us make sense of our millennial girlhoods when we are old ladies.

📓 In love with the concept behind this newsletter and its first post.

🎬 I’ve been rewatching Girls and marveling at how something set in the 2010s now looks almost like a period piece.

👀 My friend Erica has been drawing a daily comic and I love seeing the minutiae of her daily life.

👩🏻‍💻 Speaking of Erica, one of her comics introduced me to record.club and I’ve been using it quite a lot. I particularly enjoy Jose’s reviews of Weezer albums.

🎶 My obsession with Waxahatchee endures even after seeing her twice. A song released in October will probably end up being my #1 song this year.

So I’ve been thinking about bedrooms in teen films a lot (as one does) and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two different kinds of teen rooms: the extremely curated and the stratified ones. While the extremely curated ones look like a trendy time capsule for whatever was in when the film was made, the stratified ones look like layers of sediment that incorporate the owner’s past. Curated rooms look like a who’s-who of 1980s pop culture in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or like a late 2010s Pinterest board in To All the Boys I Loved Before. Stratified rooms retain remnants of a life that was not all that far away even if childhood feels like ancient history to the protagonists. I love a teenage room where I can point and shout out band names looking like Leonardo Dicaprio in that meme, but I also love a now-uncool teddy bear lurking in the background and a room that shows a whole life lived in it. I love Lady Bird’s room.

I started thinking about this the other day after watching a Gilmore Girls episode in which Rory refuses to get rid of an old toy that she had almost forgotten about, and it came back to me today as I gave a final listen to Paul Baribeau’s ‘Grand Ledge’ before sending it on to its next owner, someone called Lindsay from Somerville, Massachusetts.

Listening to that record for the last time brought a flood of discontented twentysomething feelings back. I enjoyed the songs, but I found listening to them rather harrowing. It was like having some of my worst moments being played back at me at full volume. I can imagine Paul Baribeau feels similarly and that’s why he ended up getting rid of all his merch. Or maybe that whole story about him taking his stuff to a thrift store is an urban legend, who knows? All I know is that I do feel the weight of holding on to that which no longer serves a purpose, and this record, while raw and honest, no longer brings me any joy.

Of course, this whole episode reminded me that I am very much not the same person I was at 24 or 25 when I bought this record, which is something that I have been thinking about a lot recently. I turned 40 last week, you see. It is also 10 years since I started teaching at university, 20 since I started my degree, and 20 since I met my now-husband. My former therapist once told me to try not to get too hung up on the past. She could see that making sense of my own journey is important to me and that, unfortunately, this can be counter-productive unless I’m in the right frame of mind. The thing is, I just cannot ignore a succession of round-number anniversaries like this, and while it did bring me down a little bit in the week leading up to my birthday, this reflection turned out to be positive.

The thing nobody tells you about growing up—maybe they do tell us, maybe they told me about it and I just didn’t listen—is that it is in fact pretty cool. On my fortieth birthday, I kept thinking about how I am now much happier than I was when I turned thirty. I am also happier than I was when I turned twenty. I am not happier than I was when I was ten, but that’s okay because children deserve to be as happy as they can be. Funnily enough, as the years go by the sense of continuity between my present and former selves has become stronger. At 18 I felt like everything had changed when I was 14, at 20 I felt that everything had changed when I was 19 and at 30 I felt like everything had changed when I was 25. Now I know that many of those changes I felt so acutely were not really changes at all but, rather, attempts at becoming someone else.

I no longer feel an almost manic energy to find myself, to look for answers, to spend my days—and nights—thinking about being someone else somewhere else. I no longer doubt every single thing that I do and worry that it has no meaning. I don’t stay awake for hours overwhelmed by existential thoughts. I no longer need music to speak for me because I lack the tools to describe my feelings appropriately. I no longer waste time trying to please or impress people I don’t even like. I no longer think I am okay when I am not. I no longer wish I was living another life.

I no longer try to run away from who I was, because who I was is who I am and it is okay to be me. Finding out that I am still the shy child who would rather walk around the playground playing music in her head than play a competitive game was revelatory. Finding out that I don’t find fulfillment in recognition but in the knowledge that I have helped someone finally gave me a sense of purpose. Giving up alcohol forced me to learn not to put myself in situations that make me feel physically uncomfortable. Seeing fewer people and socialising less often actually made me care about more people than I used to, just differently. The single most important thing I did in my thirties was relearn how to be me.

At the end of Lady Bird, we see Lady Bird emptying her room before going to college, putting her belongings in boxes, and painting over the pastel pink that—judging by the layers of stuff on the walls—must have accompanied her for years. I wonder what she let go of, what she kept, and if any of those layers are still a part of her.

📖 I really enjoyed Miki Berenyi’s memoir.

🩷 I tried my best to be there for my favourite people during the hardest time.

🎬 I’ve been rewatching Sex Education for research purposes.

✨ I made a risky choice at work and it ended up being a very joyful experience.

🎶 I’ve been obsessed with these two songs:

I bet you thought this newsletter had become yet another one of my abandoned projects. Well, tough luck. If I managed to survive a Ph.D., I can surely keep this alive. Since I last wrote you, I have published a couple of academic articles about teen films. If you enjoyed my last post about nerdy girls and makeovers, you may be interested in this paper about Booksmart, and if you liked what I wrote about Say Anything, I have an article out about that film (and High Fidelity) too. There it is, my secret is revealed for all of you to see: this newsletter really fulfills my overwhelming need to write about my scholarly pursuits in a completely non-academic way.

Film: Your Christmas or Mine? (Jim O’Hanlon, 2022)

Lesson: Christmas is about layering your former, present and future selves

Let me begin this by admitting that I’m cheating. Your Christmas or Mine? is not, strictly speaking, a teen film. The protagonists are in their twenties, but they are teen-like, and that’s good enough for me1. They’re not in high school and they don’t live at home, but they remain unable to assert their independence from their parents and scared of disappointing them if they oppose their wishes. Basically, the two of them—who are, of course, romantically linked—are lying to their parents and to each other, which threatens their relationship when they—separately—end up stuck at the other’s house during a snowstorm and come face to face with the hidden sides of their (relatively new) partner’s life.

In the process, the protagonists are confronted with the Christmas rituals (or lack thereof) of their significant other’s family, and the film ends with the potential of new traditions built together. This made me think about something that’s been on my mind for the past week, when my living room was flooded with boxes containing Christmas decorations bought in six different decades. My grandmother’s kitschy wonderfulness of the 1960s and 1970s gives way to my mother’s red and gold ornaments the early 90s together with the decorations a child would choose: cartoonish Santas and angels, the occassional teddy bear. In the 2000s, alpine motifs make an appearance, souvenirs of my time in Munich. With the 2010s arrived a bunch of shiny red ornaments that I bought for my own tree: metallic hearts, glittery hearts, Dorothy’s red slipper. With the 2020s came new traditions: tiny trees that populate our Christmas village and lights, so many lights that the living room lights don’t even need to be on anymore.

Opening these boxes is always a delight. I make a cup of tea, put on jazzy Christmas music and delight at all those little treasures I had almost forgotten about during the summer months as the memories come flooding back: my grandmother picking up leaves to decorate baby Jesus’ crip, foraging daytrips to find moss for our nativity scene, the excitement of visiting the Christmas section of a big department store for the very first time, lying on the floor with my cousin writing extremely long letters to the three Kings and making sure we could get everything we wanted between the two of us, the warmth of different homes, the excitement of a cinema trip when it was already dark.

Yet, like everyone, I have a complicated relationship with Christmas. Opening those boxes can be extremely painful too. The family dramas that affected us as children even though we weren’t aware of their details. The family member who uses family meetings as an opportunity to bring people down. That Christmas Eve when I said “we have to visit great-grandma tomorrow” only to wake up on Christmas morning to the news that she had died. The ornaments I made while my grandfather was ill in an attempt to cheer myself up. The strange sight of tinsel in a hospital corridor during the worst days of my life. The walk that I would have made much longer had I known it would be our last. Panic attacks in the Alps. Depressing reading material in the Pyrenees. A handful of escape attempts to negate the undeniable.

As I stare at these objects, I reflect on what was, but also on what will be. I choose the parts of me—of us—that I want to carry with me on the next step forwards. I choose to honour instead of grieving, to celebrate what has given me joy and to discard the elements that made me hate Christmas for years. In the film, one of the dads lost his wife at Christmas and chose not to celebrate for years. Like him, I spent years simply wishing for it to be over, trying to escape in any way I could. But now I no longer try to escape. Instead, I retreat, I

For me, Christmas is about layering. Not about layering Uniqlo Heattech garments, but about layering our past, present and future selves. It is a time to honour our past, to remember the children that we were, the warmth of a big family laughing together before anybody was missing. I do this by putting every ornament I loved as a kid on display. My tree houses my grandmother, my mother and me. Layers upon layers of women trying to make the dark months brighter Decorating my house makes me feel connected to who I was and to those who made me who I am today. The Christmas tree my grandfather painted for me in the 1980s, the silly Christmas T-shirt I bought before our honeymoon, my mother’s Pippi Longstocking card and her old 7” carol records, the books I loved as a kid and the ones I love now.

My present self adds layers of ritual year after year: cinnamon rolls for breakfast on Christmas day and chestnut soup for lunch, film nights and hot chocolate with my nieces, a new Louis Armstrong album to listen to while we open presents. There is comfort in these rituals, a sense of stability that ties who I was with who I am.

Girls turns ten years old this year, which means we’re all dangerously close to middle age, but that’s a story for another day. I miss them. I hope they have managed to become who they are.

Lesson: They won’t change, but you will

Film: a variety of teen films with nerd protagonists

I recently wrote an article about Booksmart and the figure of the female nerd, which of course means that I watched a bunch of films with nerd protagonists. Some were good, some were bad, and most were wacky as hell.

Essentially, films about nerds tend to follow a narrative structure that sees the high school/college underclass somehow at the top by the film’s conclusion. This reversal usually involves some sort of romantic conquest and/or physical change that makes popular types realise that nerds are dateable too. So far, so good. Except for one tiny little detail that I am about to bring your attention to, so listen up.

Are you ready?

Only the girls have to change to be deemed worthy of a man’s attention.

Heh.

Just to be clear, this doesn’t only happen to nerd girls, it can happen to any character whose personality seems to deviate from convention. It happened to Alison in The Breakfast Club.

In John Hughes’s universe, you don’t even have to be a teen girl to feel forced to fulfill normative femininity. Pretty in Pink’s Iona goes from punk icon to yuppie trash to remind us that, when you grow up, your heart does die and that change is inevitable as we get older.

Because change is inevitable as we age, isn’t it? Teen films constantly remind us of that. They take place during the last summer before everything changes. They teach us to challenge the rules of the group and go our own way, to treasure our individuality and not care about what others say, to value people for what they are like and not by what they look like. Unless you’re Laney, or Allison, or Josie Grossie, or the Princess of Genovia. If you’re smart, unusual, or unique you probably need to be tamed, and if you’re extremely ambitious like Kathryn in Space Camp, you need to tone it down.

Granted, in some makeover movies the makeover is temporary and the characters are finally allowed to go back to their true selves. Only that, well… they always end up looking more put together than before. Take Tai for example, she goes from slob, to Cher clone, to a more feminine version of her past self. Although her post-makeover outfit falls in line with her original sense of style, the colours are lighter, the T-shirt is tighter, a belt accentuates her waist, she has learnt how to do her hair and she is wearing make-up. In fact, in the wedding scene, her outfit is very similar to Cher’s. Instead of dressing like a boy, Tai now plays with her femininity, adjusting it to each occasion.

Guys, on the other hand, always get by with minimum effort. In Can’t Buy Me Love, the protagonist wears the same (astronomy) T-shirt in the opening and closing scenes. He begins the film ignored by the popular girl he likes but finishes riding into the sunset with her. Even though he does go through a makeover, all changes are reversed by the end of the film except for his glasses, which have disappeared.

Grease’s Danny Zucko is another one who begins to change but doesn’t have to. Girls like guys the way they are, regardless of whether they’re nerdy types basically asking them to become teenage prostitutes (seriously, read the plot of Can’t Buy Me Love) or cocky, rebellious types. And yes, they also learn to love them if they’re rapists. In Revenge of the Nerds, Lewis rapes a girl and she magically falls for him because she loved it. .

Whenever I think about these films, I cannot help but visualise a woman in a great outfit who has clearly spent at least an hour getting ready holding hands with a guy in a football shirt, shorts and trainers who has made zero effort. I think of all the pressure we put ourselves through to look a certain way, all the time and money spent, all the mind space that we devote to how others might perceive us and how strong that pull can be. I think about all those times when looking after ourselves wasn’t empowering or fun, but a mere chore done with others in mind, and it makes me really mad. All the hours we spent being told to scrutinise our bodies, measuring them up to impossible standards and learning to become our own worst enemy. Every single time that someone criticised what we wore or what we didn’t wear, made a comment about our roots, our eyebrows, our white hairs, our body hair. Every time we were told we were showing too much or not enough, that our body was the wrong fruit shape for that dress or that we were meant to have a stupid thigh gap. Every time a dirty man gave us a lecherous look and every time a so-called girlfriend looked at us in disapproval. We were told we were not enough. Not feminine enough, not skinny enough, not curvy enough, not agreeable enough. We were told we were too much. Too fat, too thin, too slutty, too loud, too aggressive. It pains me to know that I do not know a single woman who hasn’t faced this sort of criticism and it pains me to know that many times it came from the kind of people who, like the boys in these films, were incapable of change.

I have faith in the young and I hope that they are learning to be kinder to themselves. I am happy that they have strong characters to look up to. Girls who, despite the genre’s obvious problems, are clever and charming and don’t have to change to please anybody other than themselves.

🎬 I’ve been watching (and loving) Hacks.

📖 I’ve been reading Flora Thompson’s A Country Calendar and it’s such a treat if you enjoy reading about nature.

🎶 Like everybody else, I’ve been listening to Kate Bush. I really enjoyed this podcast episode about ‘Running up That Hill’ and its use in Stranger Things.

🌺 I grew roses for the very first time.

Film: Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)

Is Licorice Pizza a teenage film? I like to think it is, purely because that would make a lot of people angry. Yes, I’m thinking about all those guys who think teenage films are .:* ☆:*:. dumb .:*:.☆*:. and about all the pretentious cinephiles who claim they never watch any films made after some arbitrary year. I’m thinking about everybody who thinks that drama is art and comedy is just entertainment. I’m thinking about every single person who believes that teenage films are irrelevant because they don’t talk about important issues, despite the fact that GROWING UP IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING WE ARE EVER GOING TO DO, YOU GUYS.

I would love to tell you those who see teenage films in this light are old, out of touch with their younger selves, jaded, let down by the reality of adult life. I’m afraid that’s not how it works, though. Whenever I am lucky enough to teach a film studies class, on the first day of class I explain the point of film analysis and then I ask my students what films they think would be good or terrible to analyse. They almost always mention a teenage film or two as an example of a film that wouldn’t be a good subject of analysis. So the idea that teen films are dumb runs so deep that even 19-year-olds think so.

So, back to Licorice Pizza. Is it a teenage film? Well, it is a film about growing up, it features a teenage protagonist and I couldn’t help but think of American Graffiti or Fast Times at Ridgemont High while watching it. That’s a resounding yes in my book. So, if you felt attacked while reading the first paragraph, sorry but you like teen films just like the rest of us. Glad we got that out of the way. Now, let’s move on.

Licorice Pizza’s protagonist, Gary Valentine, is 15 going on 35. He’s an aging child actor who fancies himself an entrepreneur. Too old to be cute on telly but too young to be taken seriously. Gary Valentine is the kind of Boomer who will rule the 80s and ruin things for the rest of us.

So Gary does what every kid who fancies themselves older than their years and is struggling to find their place does: he develops an unrelenting crush on an older woman. Alana is 25 going on 15, which definitely meant more in 1973 when American women married, on average, at the age of 21.8. Alana lives with her parents and has a job that is going nowhere. She doesn’t know what she wants to do in the future and, just like a teenager, she claims that she doesn’t know what she likes. Even her listless walk down an empty high school courtyard makes it clear that she is in no hurry to leave that stage behind.

Gary is besotted with Alana because he sees her as what he’s not: an adult. But, is she really an adult?1 Evidence suggests the contrary. Far from the cooler, older woman that Gary thinks he loves, Alana is portrayed as childish and immature, which finally brings me to my point (I swear I heard the collective sigh of relief): the older people we have a crush on when we’re teenagers were probably lame.

When I was 15, a group of guys in their mid-twenties approached us in a bar2 and one of my friends ended up dating one of them (and later marrying him and having a child with him, but that’s not my story to tell). The thing is, our relationship began to fade when they started dating. Not because she was so invested in her relationship that she stopped hanging out with her friends, but because hanging out with her often implied being around a bunch of 24-year-old guys. I was that age when being told you look older is a compliment, but the whole thing seemed a bit creepy to me even if I then lacked the vocabulary to articulate my thoughts on the matter.

So I wasn’t the kind of teenager who lusts after older guys. I would occasionally admire someone from a safe distance, but never up close. Older guys never had a personality to me, they were empty vessels onto which I could project my desires. Pretty much like a walking poster of a minor celebrity that nobody else liked. The only difference between them and the second ugliest member from a third-rate boyband was that they were there, so we could stalk them.

Stalking was always a group activity carried out together with other girls who had become obsessed with an average-looking boy they had never even spoken to. In fact, the object of our affection obsession was the least important element in the equation, what mattered was the act itself, not the stalking, but the communal longing for someone who existed in the same conditions as ourselves. Although, like celebrities, these boys were mostly out of our reach, they inhabited the same world we did. They weren’t rich, their clothes were average, their hair was often greasy, they lived with their mum and dad and didn’t have sleepovers with their creepy manager3. They weren’t dating us, but they dated people like us, which seemed to be good enough for the sort of 14-year-olds who watched Titanic at the cinema multiple times4.

I have talked to some people about the older guys they liked when they were teenagers and this seems to be commonplace. Nobody even attempted to develop a friendship or a relationship of any kind with their crush unless they were only one or two years older. In most cases, our attempts to get close to them were ridiculous. We would stare at them so much that our gaze would inevitably meet at some point, which we would obviously take as a sign that they liked us. We would change our usual route home to walk past their bus stop or their house, showing the kind of behaviour that can get people arrested. We’d read their horoscope and ours every day, looking for clues that our future romance was written in the stars. We would commit their phone number to memory and call them pretending to be telemarketers until our giggling gave us away. We would go to places we knew they frequented, even if they were dirty bars where we didn’t know any of the songs and nobody danced. We would always locate ourselves where we could be seen, sometimes trying to make them notice us by speaking loud enough for them to hear. We would try to get their attention by aggressively playing basketball next to them, wiping sweat off our faces in a way that we thought looked sexy but didn’t. We would take photos with them in the background, never learning from the fact that they always came out too dark or out of focus. We would sit behind them in the school bus and eavesdrop, trying to decypher the code of what we then thought was coolness but wasn’t. We would buy a cassette tape of a band whose T-Shirt they wore and convince ourselves that we liked it. We would recruit other people to join our cause: friends, siblings and even parents were often made to find out stuff about them, to pursue a relationship with somebody close to them in what we thought would bring us together for good but never did. We would sit in the café opposite their flat, hoping that they would come out and see us. We would write our initials and theirs inside a heart in every single surface we could think of, especially if they might be able to see it. We thought we were cool, but we were just hopeless 14-year-olds with raging hormones who watched too many rom-coms.

We idolised these boys to the same extreme that we would Leo DiCaprio, Taylor Hanson and any minor celebrity who had slightly feminine features and that 90s hairstyle. To us, they were perfect, but the truth is that they were as average as we were. We picked the ones that we thought might fall into the trap, never the best looking ones. We got obsessed with teenage boys who were average even if we claimed they look just like our favourite Backstreet Boy. We might have been annoying and borderline dangerous, but at least we weren’t punching above our weight. We sometimes wonder what became of them, and we’re always disappointed when we find out that they are the kind of people who leave petty reviews on websites that look like Yelp but aren’t, who run marathons and post their running photos, who write long twitter threads for their 40 followers. Some of them may hold on to the 90s haircut, unaware of the fact that it ages them terribly. Others have sad eyes, which makes us wonder whether they always had them but we were distracted by the hair. There isn’t really a lot to see other than a bunch of bad opinions. For the most part, they are a succession of almost indistinguishable Linkedin headshots of average looking guys entering middle age. We wouldn’t want to know them but, then again, we never really did.

🔥Look at this awesome Licorice Pizza illustration by Nada Hayek

🎥 I’ve been watching Pam & Tomy and I need more films starring: a) Tommy Lee’s dog b) Seth Rogen and Nick Offerman.

☠️ Apparently Clueless crocs exist. And they are as ugly as you would expect. Cher would never!

✨ I listened to an episode of Rob Lowe’s podcast in which he talks to Molly Ringwald and was delighted to find out that Molly is obsessed with Bo Burnham’s Inside just like the rest of us.

🍽️ I cooked (or, rather, I made my husband cook) Nigella’s meatballs with orzo and it was delicious.

🎵After listening to a podcast episode on Blink182 I went on a little Blink binge that included playing “Josie” on the piano and going down a YouTube rabbit hole that has made me 100% convinced that the “First Date” music video and Licorice Pizza are part of the same universe.

Film: Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989)

Lesson: Stick with the guy who makes sure you don’t step on things

When we’re walking around town, sometimes my partner will give me a little nudge to prevent me from treading on dog shit1. He says I need to watch where I’m going, but I grew up being told to stand tall while I walk, so I guess I’ll continue to walk on whatever crosses my path. This seems to be happening more and more often lately, which makes me wonder: are the streets dirtier or are dog owners more careless these days? But that’s not what I’m here to talk about, I’ll leave that for my other newsletter, What I learnt from middle age.

I’m here to talk about Lloyd Dobler. Lloyd Dobler is the reason why nobody watches John Cusack’s recent films. We just can’t handle the disappointment of seeing Cusack as anything but a romantic anti-hero2. If you’re not familiar with the film, I honestly don’t know why you’re reading this, but I’ll just tell you that Say Anything is a film about teenage John Cusack being the perfect boyfriend to a girl who manages to graduate from high school with zero friends.

But let me get back to the issue at hand. Diane and Lloyd’s first date happens the night after graduation, when he takes her to her first and last high school party. When LLoyd walks her home after making sure that everybody in the party got home safe (a literal angel), he interrupts her walk to kick broken glass out of her way. When I rewatched this film last week, I thought “wait a minute, that is what my husband does! This is how you know someone’s good for you!” And that’s the thought that sparked the idea for this newsletter, so we have Cameron Crowe to thank for that.

There are multiple signs through the film that show you how wholesome Lloyd is:

• He makes sure everybody gets home safe

• That moment when he calls Diane’s house and he says to her dad: “She’s pretty great, isn’t she?”

• He’s not pushy and he doesn’t try to get Diane drunk

• He loses his virginity and doesn’t run to tell his friends about it

• His friends are not a bunch of dudes. All his friends are cool girls that I wish I was friends with

• He makes fun of a bunch of sexist losers

• He teaches Diane to drive a manual car

• He sees Diane as an individual and seems to genuinely admire her

And that’s without getting into the boombox moment. That’s a story for another time because, trust me, there is a lesson there.

So this whole thing about treading on poo/glass made me think about how weird it is that Diane doesn’t leave Lloyd for some asshole. And, after giving it a lot of thought3, I have come to the conclusion that the reason why Diane sticks with Lloyd is because she doesn’t have any friends. Diane’s only friend is her dad, and her dad does indeed break them up, but the problem is gone after she realises her dad is not the nice guy she thinks he is (Lloyd is the nice guy). This wouldn’t have happened if she had had friends.

If Diane Court had had any real friends, they would have sat in their bedrooms chatting about Lloyd, which would have inevitably made her question a few aspects of her relationship. As a consequence, Diane would have used any stupid superficial excuse to dump Lloyd, like:

• His car is not cool enough.

• His jacket makes him look like he spends his afternoons at the school gates offering kids candy.

• He doesn’t read.

• He likes a stupid sport.

• He likes ska.

Diane would have ended up dating a series of guys that are wrong for her, more specifically these guys:

1. A guy who is more like her. Diane is a nerd without the glasses and the frumpy clothes. An academically ambitious guy would never follow her anywhere. Instead, she would probably have to adapt to his life plan, taking the Sunday bus replacement service route to success. After college, this guy would suddenly expect her to give up all her goals and look after him because the time he devotes to whatever science he graduated in doesn’t leave him enough time to learn to fry an egg4, so now he needs a substitute mother who will slave away for him while he focuses on his career.

2. The guy who thinks that dating a clever girl makes him clever. This guy hides his dumbness under a cloak of pretentiousness. He seeks out the smartest girl in the group to make himself believe that he is intelligent, but he isn’t. He pursues obscure interests because, if nobody else knows anything about the topic, nobody can tell him that he is wrong. He loves correcting people’s mistakes, but he hates it when they correct his. This guy’s feeling of insecurity would eventually make him psychologically abusive. He would try to demean Diane, exploiting all her weakest points to try to crush her self-confidence. This would make Diane so weak that she would stay in the relationship for years, unable to build up the courage to leave and believing herself undeserving of somebody better. The therapy bill would cost her almost all her savings, but it would be worth every penny. This guy is the worst guy.

3. The guy in his twenties who threw the graduation party. Having gone through high school in almost complete anonymity, Diane would feel flattered than an older, more popular guy noticed her. This, of course, is a trap. The only reasons why a twentysomething guy would throw graduation parties for local teens are a) to try to bang underage girls and b) to buy himself the illusion of popularity by letting kids get drunk at his place. This guy would get her drunk, fuck her and ghost her.

4. Whatever guy her father chose for her. Diane’s dad is the epitome of 80s materialism and immorality, and taking one look at the guy you just know that the kind of guy he’d choose for his daughter would be one who looks like he’s ready to play golf at any given moment and, frankly, Diane deserves someone cooler than that. This guy would make her sit through neverending dinners with his golf friends and leave her for a younger woman as soon as she hit 40, claiming that he “never felt so young,” which is understandable if you consider that he has dressed like an old dude his whole life.

None of these guys, NONE of them, would make sure Diane doesn’t step on glass. The first one would be too busy watching his own path to notice, the second one would probably put glass in her path and then tell her it’s her fault she stepped on it, the third one lives in a house whose floor is full of shattered glass and the fourth one is too busy playing golf to walk anywhere with his girlfriend.

So, if you’re wondering whether your significant other is good enough, why not place unwanted objects in your path and see if they make sure you don’t step on them?

🎶 I really enjoyed this podcast episode on To Die For, which I think may have become one of my favourite films.

🍳 This easy pho recipe never fails to cheer me up. The comments on the website make me think that this is the equivalent of foreigners posting photos of “rice with things” and calling it paella, but I honestly couldn’t care less.

✨ Looking at old newspapers and magazines is a recurrent obsession and, now that I think about it, something that I’ve enjoyed doing ever since I was a little kid browsing through whatever old mags my grandparents refused to throw away. Lately, I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit on the Internet Archive’s magazine rack. How else would I have come across this wonderful cover featuring Linda Darnell?

🎶 I was a massive Bright Eyes fan in my late teens and early twenties, and I am loving the new recordings of some of their old songs. I always feel like I am at the brink of another Bright Eyes phase, but I think this may be it.