I've Never Felt Like That About A GIRL Before

PLUS: At long last, some major newsletter changes

A Note For You, If You’re Having A Bad Gay. I Mean Day.

Dear Friend,

Hello! It is June: a month of rainbows and corporations making stuff I shouldn’t buy but totally do.

Not to be too hierarchical about it, but probably definitely the best thing about me is that I am queer! AND I remain shocked — truly amazed — that there are people I have met in the last three years who are openly threatened (?) or disgusted (!?) with my particular brand of queerness — so much so that I have changed my name so that the parents of my daughter’s friends can’t easily figure out who I am online.

It feels a little cringe to write about queerness in the midst of June just because it is in the midst of June, but on the other hand, I have been scaling back this kind of writing since I had my daughter, and so why not?

It also feels like a good opportunity to share some of my last book, Dear Sophie, Love Sophie with you. My next one is really different (there are only ten pictures, and they’re diagrams; and it’s less about me than it is about you), but I still have a soft spot in my heart for this one. It came out at the height of COVID lockdowns, so it never got to have a party or a tour. It only got one official review, and the review wasn’t glowing. I learned that having a professional person in the real world write a not-glowing review about an intensely personal book is, uh, kinda traumatizing? Like, “Here is my heart on a page!” And the professional person says, “Too earnest. Too didactic. Too much.” So, transitive property: “Your heart is too much. NEVER SHOW IT AGAIN.”

But you’ve been very accepting of my unabashed earnestness, and so, if you’ve been on the fence about reading this, I thought a little slice (and it truly is such a small one) would be a nice little offering for mid-June.

Some things to note: The premise of this book is that these are actual diary entries I actually wrote when I was an actual pre-teen. We aren’t trying to pretend like these are good or even necessarily relatable. They are, merely, true. I couldn’t find the final draft PDF anywhere on my person, so this is the first draft PDF, which means there are minor errors, which I corrected with the crude tools available to me in Adobe Acrobat. I decided you would not mind, and if you did, you could just go get the real thing from a bookstore! This comes straight out of the middle of the book with no pretext. And Joe, mentioned liberally here, dated Cole Escola in high school — which is why I got to go to prom with Cole, and we all ate spinach pies at a Greek restaurant before boarding the boat (!!!!!) where our prom took place. So that’s another reason to bring this up now: Just this week, Cole made history.

Alright, no more ado. See you on the other side.

I’ll be honest: when I published Many Love in 2018, I thought we were on the precipice of being much more accepting of different relationship styles. That’s not proven to be the case. Most heartbreaking for me was meeting a new mom friend who was funny and cool and liked birds — then revealing that I’d written a book about polyamory and receiving a text message that said, “I think, given our value differences, it would be better if we were casual acquaintances.” And maybe she was right! I don’t really want to spend my energy on a person who considers any type of love a “value difference.”

On the other hand, a lot of things have changed since 2001 when I was writing in a shiny pink diary. We have so many children’s books in our house that are about queerness and being welcoming to all kinds of people. My daughter loves them because she loves rainbows.

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

Housekeeping

• OK! I finally have some fun, newsletter-related housekeeping. For the first time in a long time, I’ve changed up the offerings of the paid newsletter tier, and I’m excited to test it out over the coming year. Paid subscribers will now receive the following:

  • Monthly Ask Anything newsletters, with an advice column element that will mine the wisdom of the group to triangulate the best answers

  • Monthly Recommendations newsletters

  • Monthly Photos and Diaries newsletters

  • Monthly Check-ins

  • Zoom Book Club

  • Music League

  • Monthly webinar access: I’ll be offering a calendar of weekend webinars beginning this month. Topics will include: basic cartooning, watercolor skills, humor writing, gag comics, art box materials, grown-up play, how to Substack, book writing, and more. Paid subscribers may attend for free, and will receive access to video recordings of each class. Regular subscribers can pay $40 to attend a single webinar — but why do that when you can go to all of them for the price of a coffee table book?

  • Monthly PDF checklists for what to read, watch, listen to, and do that month

  • Subscribers-only chat

  • An extra 7 things in my weekly recommendations emails

  • As always: the library to all bird watercolor classes of yore (there are 20 videos in all!)

And since this is all new and exciting and shiny and I want as many people as possible to be a part of it, you can take 20% off any subscription plan for the rest of the month.

• KIN: The Future of Family is available for pre-order!

Loose Thoughts

• I officially dislike eggs. When did this happen!? I have chickens, and so eggs are around — and they’re kind eggs, filled with love and hugs and chicken joy. Nevertheless, I find I don’t want them. Instead, I give them to my neighbors who like the chickens. Does this make you want to be my neighbor? Well then. COME BE MY NEIGHBOR.

• It’s taking everything in me to not write a newsletter just about my garden, which I succumb and do eventually every summer. How long will it be until I do it this summer? Only time will tell.

• T says she doesn’t like Uranus because she dislikes “anyone who thinks they’re cooler than everyone else.”

• Also, her drawings of Glinda and Elphaba continue to really floor me:

  

  I DID NOT HELP. Especially impressed with Glinda’s eyebrow-nose combo, which looks uncannily like the ones I draw, having learned this method at the age of THIRTY SEVEN.

• Farmers market season is here. Do you go every week? When you go, do you always overspend?

• The other day at dinner, I apparently told everyone at the table that I did not buy morels at the Farmer’s Market that week, when, in fact, I HAD. I have ABSOLUTELY NO MEMORY OF SAYING THIS and cannot fathom why I said it. I truly can’t. It makes me feel insane. Like my body was snatched momentarily, only to tell six people that I did NOT buy morels. How could this have happened? Serious responses only, please.

• When I brought this story up with my friend, she said, “This is interesting to me for two reasons,” and now I forget what, exactly the reasons were, but they were something about how I “fire from the hip” (DO I DO THIS?!) and also how I write a lot while firing from said hip; and also about how I keep a lot of journals. I get the sense that maybe she was trying to tell me that I shouldn’t, in good conscience, be writing anything at all. Like, if I can’t trust my own experience, why am I recording it? And anyway, this really threw me for a loop. It made me have a secret cry in the bathroom later. And I don’t even know if that was what she was trying to say! But… am I irresponsible to be writing a newsletter!?

• Please tell me where you put your good stickers.