The Show
Modern Love is an Amazon Prime show now, and I’m the target audience, I suppose, as an overeducated, overthinking millennial woman. I couldn’t make it past four episodes, and that, I withstood only because I wanted to make it all the way through to the Tina Fey episode.
As a writer, it’s simply amazing how it has worked. It started off as a crowdsourced New York Times column. Then they made it into a podcast with celebrities reading out the columns, and a ‘where are they now’ interview tacked on about the writers of the piece. And now, it’s a show on Amazon Prime. That is the dream.
The content was low effort (on the part of the publishers), the value add needed for the podcast was minimal too, and selling it to Amazon to make a series out of is a kind of masterstroke I can only wish to make someday. On a smaller scale, it’s like those people who have YouTube channels where they read out the most entertaining comments from AskReddit threads. If there isn’t a Modern Love - The Musical, I’d be very surprised.
I didn’t understand at first, why I hated the series so much, when I had been into this style of storytelling for so long.
Origin Story
I came of age in the mid-to-late 2000s, when blogging was a thing; I maintained one for over a decade, and I saw several fellow bloggers leverage their online presence into newspaper columns, and book deals. While the Indian blogging scene was mostly a few college students and professionals, this style of confessional writing really took off in the West.
(Note: I’m not going to include tech and corporate blogs; those are a completely different discussion. ICYMI, Oracle deleted Jonathan Schwartz’s old blog. But he made a new one.)
It was this mix of influences. First, there was of course, Sex And the City, whose protagonist was a newspaper columnist writing about her and her friends’ sex lives, while also deeply meditating on what it all meant. Then, there was a kind of ‘The Personal Is Political’ approach to writing, where you would link small events in your life to large, political issues. And then there was the confessional style of personal diaries, except you could write your deepest, darkest thoughts under a pseudonym, and random internet strangers could bond with you over it. This particularly was a welcome escape to those of us who didn’t feel like they really belonged anywhere.
It was a heady mix.
The Rise Of The Confessional Essay
While everyone who liked writing in any form had a blog of some sort, I’d notice the better-maintained and better-written ones were usually of those in the writing and publishing industry. They were always smart, clever, and funny women, and we couldn’t get enough of them. Their writing was also very broadly appealing, and they were often psuedonymous rather than attempting full anonymity, and wouldn’t mind their friends referring to them by their IRL name in the comments.
Newspapers and magazines quickly recruited several of them to write for their online sections. As the clicks rolled in, the number of such columnists and pieces skyrocketed. Add in the 2008 crash, and media companies quickly discovered having a dozen of these bloggers onboard was cheaper, while leading to more hits. The biggest example of this trajectory was Emily Gould, who blogged and overshared for Gawker, and then her personal website.
It was a large flood of these pieces. They were everywhere, and you simply couldn’t keep up with them. In particular, I remember The Atlantic and Salon having so many columns full of confessional essays, and XoJane (defunct since 2016) was a website entirely about confessional essays. Jezebel is usually counted in this genre, but it really was full of shorter hit pieces and links to other internet phenomena rather than navel-gazing essays in my memory.
So many other such websites popped up, though. There was The Toast and The Awl, and Refinery29 which takes the confessional to a completely new level by having weekly columns of women sharing their expenses for a week, in essay form no less. But by the time they came along, there were way too many things on the internet, and we looked at the long pieces only when they popped up on our social media.
Modern Love and Me
Apparently, Modern Love started in 2004! It’s fifteen years old! Somehow, through the boom and bust of the confessional essay, this one column has seen it all, and is still going strong.
I hadn’t heard about this column very much, until occasional pieces started showing up on my social media. I suppose it surged in popularity when Lena Dunham made it a plot point in her show Girls.
At first, when I’d only occasionally read Modern Love columns, they seemed like thoughtful, well-written, grounded, truly slice-of-life pieces - they weren’t written on deadline for eyeballs, and each one left me feeling a little happier. But then, they put it out in podcast form, and I began bingeing on them.
When I looked at so many of the pieces together, and follow up interviews with the writers of those pieces, I began noticing patterns. For starters, almost all the writers were white women in the writing/publishing industry, and the pieces were all very — for lack of a better word — New Yorky. Granted, it’s in the New York Times, but I remember only a handful of pieces having a distinct sense of place in locations other than New York city. Everyone seemed to be the sort to have an MA or an MFA or higher. They were predominantly struggling with their love lives, and their stories were all about finding meaning in poor-people things they hadn’t previously considered, or was a story of how they were prompted to leave their horrific desk job and dead relationship and pursue their true passion.
I can point to many things, but between getting married, losing a parent, and getting a mental health disorder diagnosis, I couldn’t really care about issues of Modern Love caliber anymore.
The tipping point was when I tried to make sense of my loss by writing about it, and simply couldn’t. I had been given to believe until then that writing was the catharsis that would get me through everything. But the more I tried to make sense of the loss in words, the less it made sense. And I realized my loss wasn’t just mine, and at some level, claiming ownership of it felt incredibly selfish.
But then, lots of Modern Love pieces are about loss, and they do a great job of finding their peace and catharsis in their 1500 long essays. I’m not faulting them.
But soon after, my friend and I were listening to an episode of the podcast where a woman talked about how she broke up with her partner because she didn’t feel a passion (or some other similar reason involving self discovery and self care). In the follow-up interview, they asked the woman if she had indeed found her true love.
She hadn’t. And she regretted the breakup.
My friend and I burst out laughing, me mostly laughing at how disappointed she was at that revelation; I was already cynical, while she was a still-idealistic new grad.
It really cemented for me how what makes a nice story in a newspaper column doesn’t really work in real life. I mean, I knew that, of course, having been a blogger. But I’d always had rules about never exaggerating more than a tiny bit, and I never tried to give my posts a moralizing edge, or ended them with lessons I learned.
Then, a family member composed a eulogy for the departed that brought many a tear to the eye, and several signs of approval on social media. Unfortunately, this eulogy had very little to do with the truth, and actively glossed over it in several parts. Everyone grieves differently, and I didn’t want to disrupt them, but it added to the massive pile of things that put this confessional style of writing in sharp relief for me.
Of course, this didn’t bring forth a dramatic end to my love for the confessional essay; I still enjoy reading them. But it chipped away, little by little, at the sense of awe, vicarious pleasure, and hope those essays had filled me with.
My focus increasingly turned towards ‘What are they NOT telling us?’. Again, I’ve always leaned towards thinking in that direction, but I noticed I began to do it a lot more after that, and applied it to most confessional, human interest pieces on the Internet, right from Modern Love to Humans of New York.
And that’s where I am, saying You’re a Phony, no, You’re a Phony, wait, You’re All Phonies to everyone who comes my way, Holden Caulfield style. The End.
I’m somewhat done with the confessional essay
JK, while I love me some soul-baring stories, I realize there’s only a few story and protagonist archetypes, and I don’t particularly care about listening to them in a brand new combination. I realize I don’t learn enough from that sort of a think piece; at least Dirty John might teach you the first few red flags of a psychopath in your life.
Trying to navigate life with ADHD, I realize the pointlessness of trying to deal with anxiety and depression by writing. There might be people who benefit from that act, but I’m not one of them, and I didn’t see how it could be healthy to put myself at the mercy of Internet approval.
The confessional essays, triva tidbits, and cocky writing of my twenties are giving way to an interest in more grounded, more useful, more authentic writing. My mind now wants me to ask why, to read between the lines, and figure out if there’s more than just what’s in my head that explains the whys and wherefores of everything that happens around me. I have become more of a seeker of knowledge, than a mindless consumer of opinions. Talk increasingly seems cheap, and it feels like there’s so much to learn about the world, my past, our present, and where this world is headed, that I’m not particularly interested in navel gazing observations.
I know hordes of people have had this opinion about confessional essays, right from the beginning. But typically, they are people who already had a voice and/or felt represented, and felt satisfied with how they could represent themselves. For those of us who were waiting for life to start, all we could do was wring our hands about the apparent futility of whatever wheel-spinning activity we were into. We knew it was all writing about nothing, and we knew we weren’t researching fatal illnesses or anything.
I suppose it is a rite of passage everyone needs to go through as they learn how to speak, how to express themselves, and how to tell the story of their life without having their audience zone out.
But once we’re somewhere near there, it’s time to let go.
The world, too, has moved on. Girls, the show that was about the kind of people who would be into Modern Love, ended almost three years ago. Candace Bushnell, the IRL Carrie of Sex And the City wrote a book recently about turning sixty, dealing with death, and wondering if it was all worth it, neatly bookending the era. Medium has transformed blogging into content marketing, and it’s harder to write about general topics and hope to be known, unless you already have a brand name, like the New York Times.
And I realize I actually have interests and expertise, and I can talk about topics that aren’t about me. Also, getting an ADHD diagnosis means I have figured out ways to extend my attention span. Now I can actually delve deep into things I like; I was getting tired of shallow, surface-level knowledge of facts.
I know I’ll write personal essays, like this one, but I sure as hell want to focus outward more than inward.
The Show, Again
I utterly disliked all episodes of Modern Love, except the Anne Hathaway one. The others were low on closure, unrealistic, and often, didn’t have a good enough payoff, or buildup. When I went back and read the old pieces, as well as the followup interviews, I realized so many of the facts were changed, to make for better TV. My issue really is, they don’t make for better TV, and now the show looks inauthentic and stupid.
The first episode is especially guilty of this. In the episode, the protagonist (Cristin Milioti) is friends with her doorman (Imagine! A resident being friends with the doorman! The doorman!), who disapproves of everyone she dates. When she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, the doorman is who she turns to for support and assistance. When she moves away, and returns for a visit, she brings along her new husband for the doorman’s approval. And he finally approves! But reading the essay and the follow-up, it turns out the protagonist had her parents help with the baby, had the baby in the first place because she was against abortion, and has not dated since she had the child. And the father of the child was Israeli, not British; some accents are considered cooler than others.
When I started writing fiction, I wanted to focus on writing stories where everyone’s a grownup, and where there’s no manufactured conflicts or misunderstandings. I thought the show Easy was it. I rather liked the first season.
But then, when I watched Season 2, I realized it doesn’t make for very engaging storytelling when you expect it to be chilled out and without manufactured conflict. At that point, I wondered why I was supposed to care about these characters at all.
Modern Love suffers from similar issues. Confessional essays without strong characters and conflicts don’t really translate well into the big screen. A lot of what makes it interesting is the exposition and inner thoughts, and it’s boring to watch that on screen.
Even if Tina Fey’s in it.