Introducing No One Asked

The newsletter about all the stuff no one asked me to talk about

I’ve always been an easily obsessed person. For better or worse (and mostly it’s worse), I don’t really get interested in things halfway. Why simply watch movies when I could make my way through a list of the 52 essential movies? Why just try to cook easy dinners at home when I could instead plan to make my family elaborate meals from a new vegetarian cookbook and then get irritated when no one cares about my three bean chili? Why bake one pie when I can make it into a hashtag and bake a lot of pies? Why read a book if I’m not going to then find every single interview with the author available online and then text quotes to friends who, to be clear, do not care at all? Why nurture a casual love of romantic comedies when I can start an entire blog about them and then build a book/career around that love?

I don’t know why I’m like this! The number of times in my life that I’ve heard someone ask some variation of the question, “Wow, why are you…so into this?” is…well, it’s a lot. But what makes for awkward conversations can actually have benefits. Like writing, for example! I always say I don’t like to do research, but the truth is that I’m always inadvertently doing research for topics that end up in my book. Pies, rom-coms, yacht rock…truly just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my obsessions that have then become character obsessions.

But the flip side is that I’m often getting really into things that no one wants to talk about. It feels like I’m always watching some movie from the 1980s that no one I know has seen and I can’t stop thinking about. It would be great if this was something I could apply to current pop culture trends. Maybe I could write some fiery takes and post them on Twitter and convince people to argue about them for a few hours until something even fierier comes along!

But the thing is…I don’t like that. Actually, there’s nothing that ruins a piece of entertainment for me more than seeing 100 opinions about it. The entire process: the initial praise, the backlash, the backlash to the backlash, the phrase “don’t yuck someone’s yum” (sorry, that’s so gross I blacked out for a moment!)…it makes me want to cancel all my streaming services and never watch anything but my boxed set of the complete Three’s Company series. I would never say an ill word about Ted Lasso on Twitter (do you think I feel like taking my life in my hands??) but seeing so many opinions about it almost completely ruined the second season for me. When everyone’s in the praise/backlash/backlash-to-backlash cycle, it muddies my brain and makes me unsure of what I think. I don’t like living like this! I don’t want to be part of the discourse! I don’t even understand the discourse!

Hence, this newsletter. It’s called No One Asked because these are all the things no one asked me to talk about. These aren’t hot takes about current shows that everyone’s sharing their thoughts on. These are, like, cold takes. Frigid takes.

Because something I’ve always liked is writing about movies, whether that was on my blog A Year of Rom-Coms or on Instagram, where I do a weekly feature called Underrated Rom-Com Wednesday. I like recommending movies to people and talking about them and having a fun conversation, one that doesn’t revolve around trying to figure out whether everyone on the internet loves or hates whatever I’m talking about.

For the most part, I’m going to be talking about things I like, because I do tend to like things. I won’t only write about romantic comedies because, I don’t know, I guess I don’t understand how to fully commit to a personal brand. But I’m a human being, and sometimes human beings want to scream “fuck having a personal brand!!!” This is my “for fun” project, because I like writing about movies and I’ve been looking for another way to do that. And sometimes the movies I want to talk about just don’t fit into an instagram story. Also, I promise you that I won’t be giving you takedowns of old movies. I’m not going to be like, “Ferris Bueller was a toxic gaslighter!!!” Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but that movie was made in 1986 and I’m not going to spend one second of my wild and precious life attempting to psychoanalyze the fictional characters.

Here’s what you can look forward to if you subscribe:

-a discussion of the 1986 romantic drama Children of a Lesser God, which is sincerely one of the weirdest romances I’ve ever seen in my entire life and which I haven’t been able to discuss with a single other person.

-a look at the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy years after the rest of the world has moved on, and a warning that embarking on this odyssey may turn you into an unrepentant Dakota Johnson fan (it could happen to you!).

-WHY don’t men look/dress like they did in movies from the 1970s/1980s/even the 1990s, as seen through the lens of The Big Chill and Kevin Kline’s obscenely short running shorts.

Does this sound like something you’d be into? I’m gonna be real with you…it might not. Do you want to read my thoughts about frequently obscure/forgotten/not at all trendy movies on a weekly basis? Personally, I hope you do. But I’m well aware that I called this newsletter No One Asked for a reason, and that reason is that here, I’m sharing all the things no one asked me to talk about.

I brought that around full circle, didn’t I? A satisfying ending! See you next week.

This newsletter is free, but if you’d like to support me, please consider buying my books.