The beauty of moving this newsletter to Beehiiv is that I don’t have to be confronted with the fact that I’ve probably already written a newsletter titled “on honesty” and it’s easier for me to not check. So I wont!

Even if I have written about something like this before, I’m (likely) approaching it from a different angle, as I’m having what I keep jokingly referring to as “Father John Misty summer.” This, naturally, encompasses listening to quite a lot of Father John Misty, but also thinking about him as an artist, which is… fraught, I suppose. If you’re unfamiliar, Father John Misty is not an actual priest or preacher or anything of the kind, nor is his name actually “John Misty.” He’s an indie (or whatever) musician using a stage name. I’m not Father John Misty, so I can’t speak specifically for what he’s doing, but like many artists with personas I feel like the persona does something interesting: it gives the artist distance from themselves and the audience, which, counterintuitively, can lead to more honest art.

I have long been drawn to art that is honest, even off-puttingly so. I was an emo teenager (so much so that I would have insisted to you, with sources, that I was not emo because I didn’t listen to the right kind of music), which meant listening to a lot of confessional (not necessarily Dashboard) music. This music was… well, some of it was quite good, and some of it was quite bad, but I was drawn to lyricists who spoke the truth even if it was gross or unflattering. If you knew the scene, you can guess: Say Anything. Motion City Soundtrack. Yes, Brand New, but we’ll make that the last mention of them.

I remember “Admit It!!!,” the closing track on Say Anything’s debut album, and how something in it really spoke to me as a sort of artsy-fartsy teenager in a small town. If you’re not familiar, the first two-thirds of the song are an angry, holier-than-thou rant about pretentiousness among hipsters—that they hold themselves above everybody us for their “vaguely leftist doctrine of beliefs” and aiming to “[hog] the intellectual spotlight.” This did mirror some of the experiences I had in high school, where kids who were into grunge and actual punk music were condescending toward me for being into the wrong sort of bands. The thing was—and I did say this—I didn’t like those other bands. I liked what I liked, and it bugged me to no end that they thought I was too stupid or sheltered or whatever to find them on my own.

But there’s a key part to the song where Max Bemis (who, woof, if you’re not familiar is a very complicated person) acknowledges that he himself is nothing more than a faker. He’s obsessed with his hair, how the album will be received, not because he wants to be taken seriously as an artist but because he thinks it’ll impact how much sex he’ll have after its release. It’s, to use a common parlance, a little cringe to say it, even if every other musician on earth was thinking it. It can almost sour the song itself—does sex matter more than art? Does thinking that make you a sellout?

But what struck me about it was not that it made the rest of the song false. It made the whole thing true. Who among us doesn’t have uncharitable, hypocritical thoughts? Who among us doesn’t worry as much about the reception to our creative work as the quality of the work itself? The honesty of the song and its unflattering self-portrait resonated with me, who, as many kids burdened with being called “gifted” as a child did, oscillated between self-confidence and self-loathing as often as the wind changed.

I have always appreciated that honesty. It’s part of what draws me to the deeply flawed characters I like so much—I am not a perfect person, and neither is anybody else. I find flaws captivating, and I find honesty about flaws—which is different from taking pride in flaws, the way some people delight in being “brutally honest” when really they’re just cruel—not just refreshing but invigorating. But that’s an essay for another day, I think.

To return to Father John Misty, I recently watched his Soirée de Poche performance, which is intimate and lovely and hilarious. Midway through, an audience member asks him why he’s so mean, and his response is that he confronts that feeling, that instinct through his music—and, I would argue, through the “Father John Misty” persona. Writing these mean things, exploring them through art, encourages him to be less mean in his life because when he sees the thoughts as words on a page, spoken by some asshole named “Father John Misty,” he can reflect on them.

"It's just human shit,” he says. “There's some meanness in there, but not at the expense of a sense of wonder, occasionally, too."

I don’t think of myself as mean (not anymore! anxiety medication has done wonders!! don’t laugh, my brain is a tyrant!!!) but when I write, my characters are full of flaws, many of which are reflective of my own. They are petty, stubborn, short-sighted. In a way, exploring these traits through fiction helps me understand why and how they manifest in me. It’s like an exorcism. Say the right words, expose the demon to light, watch it shrivel and die. It’s not that I am never petty because I wrote a petty character, but rather that I recognize that urge in myself and can, perhaps, do something about it before it comes spilling out of my mouth like Regan’s pea soup. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just fascinating to let myself explore my worst impulses in a setting with no consequences.

Anyway. I could turn this to be about how we think we know others through the selves we present, or about how the characters I love most are the ones whose flaws mirror my own most destructively, or how sometimes writing, for me, is building a little sty of unflattering traits and impulsiveness and rolling around in it like mud. But really, I think it’s just this: “It’s just human shit. There’s some meanness in there, but not at the expense of a sense of wonder, occasionally, too.” We can be all of this, have all of this, at once.

Paroxysm Volume 5, in which I have a short ghost story called “Haunted, Haunting,” will begin crowdfunding next month! Expect me to remind you about it then, too. The pre-launch page is up now, so sign up for notifications to back it when it goes live! I’ve seen some of the other works that will be included in this volume and you don’t want to miss them!