SWAG

A couple years ago I wrote the first three sentences of my autobiography: The year was 2006. I was listening to Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds album nonstop. I had never been more lonely in my entire life.

It’s a good start, a fantastic start even, but where to go from there? It isn’t true, either. Yes, I was extremely lonely in 2006 and I did listen to FutureSex/LoveSounds, but mostly just one song over and over: “LoveStoned/I Think She Knows (interlude).” It’s a two part song, the first of which is fast and fun, while the second is slower and prettier. It’s about Justin’s relationship with Cameron Diaz, which lasted from 2003-2007.  

In the first part of the song, Justin says, of Diaz, “She looks like a model/except she’s got a little more ass,” which is a great, accurate description. Later in the song he describes falling in love with her as being lovestoned and at one point he sort of hums, which is one of my favorite things an artist can do in a song.

As you might recall, FutureSex/LoveSounds was a critically acclaimed album, which solidified Justin Timberlake’s transformation from a washed up boy band frontman to a serious solo artist in his own right. It also firmly separated his public image from that of Britney Spears, whom he’d dated for years prior to dating Diaz. The year after FutureSex/LoveSounds’ release, Spears shaved her head in public and was put under her father’s conservatorship.

In  contrast, Justin Timberlake’s career skyrocketed. He released more solo albums, went on multiple tours, and secured leading roles in dozens of major movies, including voiceover roles in Trolls, Trolls World Tour, and Trolls Band Together, all of which my oldest daughter unfortunately loves. As time wore on, though, his public image faltered. He did a really dumb dance at a festival in DC in 2022 and was arrested for a DUI in 2024.  

As the #FreeBritney movement gained steam and Britney was eventually released from the conservatorship, Britney fans resurfaced interview clips of Justin’s behavior during and after their relationship, and everyone decided he was—if not a monster, exactly—at least sort of gross. 

In the post MeToo era there’s nothing novel about a once-charmed male celebrity facing some backlash, but it’s nice all the same. I continue to like “LoveStoned/I Think She Knows (interlude)” but I can separate the art from the artist. I enjoy disliking Justin Timberlake in a lazy, halfhearted way. 

A couple months ago, passing all of the cars and trucks on I-90, the road lined with housing developments and strip malls, I started thinking about overconsumption.  I used to avoid thinking about the subject, not because I didn’t see how bleak and bad American consumption was, but because I couldn’t bear the weight of it, how inextricable it was from the very foundation of life in this country, from capitalism and imperialism and politics and celebrity and environmental collapse. I used to get so sad about all of it. I wanted to go off grid, give away my belongings, return to some imagined old way of being. 

Now I can think about how thrifting has become a hobby. I can look at pictures of mounds of clothing in the Atacama Desert in Chile. I can even be a frequent customer at my local bin store, a place where people sort through piles of deeply discounted returned merchandise that didn’t make it back to one of those huge Amazon shipping facilities. I can recognize that all of this overconsumption is wrong and even deeply sad, but I can’t feel sadness about it in the way I once did. I can’t be gutted by it and what it means for me or my children. 

Back when I listened to FutureSex/LoveSounds with regularity, I was depressed in a highly personal and individualized way that I also can no longer access. I was sad about my lack of friends and my belief that I was stupid and ugly. 

As I matured, my sadness was tied less to my personal failures and more to the failures of the world and my own complicity in those failures. I felt trapped by my work and my mortgage, but also by what bell hooks called the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”  I knew I mostly benefited from those systems and even advanced them, consciously or unconsciously, and all of it made me hate the world and myself in turn. 

Then I got on an antidepressant and I just don’t feel that sad anymore about anything, which is nice even if it is a little upsetting, when examined. The solution to depression caused by the state of the world is, maybe, just something else to buy. 

Anyway, as I learned first with Justin Timberlake, life is good in part because it gives one an ongoing opportunity to observe the rise and fall of male pop stars. For example: Justin Bieber’s album SWAG came out five days after my father-in-law died. The night before his funeral I read a glowing New Yorker review. 

“The record delivers on years of promise and potential,” the reviewer wrote. “It feels, miraculously, like [Justin Bieber’s]  long-awaited magnum opus.”

Of course I felt silly when I realized I was crying reading the review there in the dark bedroom, having just put my toddler to sleep, while my husband and his family talked downstairs. I should have been crying for my father-in-law or my grandma, who died eight days after my father-in-law in a weird, unexpected twist. 

I was proud of Justin Bieber, is all. He’s had what looks like a terrible life and has been on a very public downward spiral for years. I want him to succeed. He deserves his magnum opus. 

For the last decade of her life my grandma had Alzheimer’s. I helped care for her for a couple of years toward the end of her decline. The job was primarily caring for her body, since her mind was mostly gone. 

My grandma was a prominent local politician and there was lots of local media coverage about her life and legacy after she died. All of it was nice, very nice, but I felt there was a glaring omission. Of course the write ups felt disconnected from the person I’d once known, that’s to be expected as a family member of someone who’d been somewhat of a public figure. Still, none of the coverage mentioned her style.

My grandma always had long fingernails, usually painted in a French manicure. She had a signature color: a bright blue that looked fantastic with her complexion. She had a capsule wardrobe before such things existed, consisting of several iconic skirt suits, along with blouses, sweaters, and scarves she exchanged depending on the season. 

She knew how to make large, elaborate centerpieces. She collected copper pots and pans and displayed them in her kitchen, which she’d renovated in the 1970s using reclaimed barnwood. She traveled extensively, gave thoughtful gifts that were always beautifully and creatively wrapped, and she always knew when animal print was or wasn’t trendy.

After work she’d come home, take off her heels, and put on her suede slippers over her pantyhose. Her favorite cocktail was a bourbon and water. She was an extremely stylish person, which must have been obvious to everyone who wrote about her after her death, but no one mentioned it. Of course I understand the impulse to focus on her achievements, the organizations she started, the laws she passed, etc. But surely her style deserved a half sentence or two, at the very least.

In the days after she died I had a terrible feeling that she would be disappointed in me if she were alive today, by which I mean alive and with her full mental faculties. I thought this because she was sometimes disappointed in her family, it was one way she showed love, believing that all of us could be doing more and achieving more. 

But then, after we flew home across the country, away from the city in which my husband and I were both raised and where we’d just attended the funerals of his dad and my grandma, I received a sign. Walking past the thrift store near my house, I saw a platter in the window. It was a platter from the specific brand of French pottery my grandma collected for many years, Quimper, which I had only ever seen in her kitchen. When I looked the platter up on Ebay it was selling for $145, but the thrift store sold it to me for $3. I brought it home and displayed it in my kitchen in the style of my grandma. It felt like a sign from her, like perhaps she wasn’t disappointed in me, like she might in fact be proud of me, or at least wanted me to have some pottery. 

A funny thing about death is that it does nothing to decrease the weight of expectations. I still believe I know exactly what my grandma would expect of me, and my father-in-law too. I know how my grandma would like me to be in the world, the ways she’d want me to raise my children, or advocate for those less fortunate, or live closer to family, or be engaged in my community. I know my father-in-law would want me to treat my husband with more kindness and love than I sometimes do, that he’d want me to cherish my children and their childhoods even when I’m overwhelmed, that he’d want me to be much, much more patient.

Perhaps if I loved my grandma or my father-in-law less I could let those expectations go, but I love them both quite deeply, so I can’t. I remain well aware of their expectations and the ways in which I’m failing to meet them, which sort of nice, like being held. 

Before we traveled back to Missouri for the funerals of my father-in-law and grandma,  I invented something that I thought would be useful: a necklace that I could wear around my neck containing emergency ibuprofen, like those cyanide capsules spies use to wear. I think that would be very marketable for many situations, especially for people traveling with young children to attend multiple funerals. 

This was my second ibuprofen-related invention. The first one is even better, I think: putting ibuprofen on the McDonald’s dollar menu. I predict that if McDonalds made this one small change to their menu, their revenue would skyrocket. Not that I want McDonald’s revenue to skyrocket, or if I do I want it in the same way I want Justin Bieber to be happy, or Justin Timerblake to fail. 

On some level I know these things are wrong and bad, that they are part and parcel of a machine that is ruining everything, that is eating whatever might have been our future, raising the ocean level, coming to kill us all. But it’s hard to get too worked up about any of it these days, what with all the evil billionaires so publicly doing all of that so much faster. And, anyway, maybe there is life after death, in knowing someone even when they’re no longer here, in remembering who they wanted you to be, or at least in buying a platter they would have liked.