A God or a Purpose or a Glass of Gin: Danielle Chelosky’s Pregaming Grief – Manuel Marrero
February 3, 2025
There is the word and the body. A person should not approach the table of the body without having first sat at the table of the word. It is closely connected in a single act of worship. Your first love is your 9/11. It doesn’t get any better.
Falling in love used to be something people wanted to go through. It was bigger than the sky. Cosmic, dangerous, alluring enough that everyone wanted to talk about life with someone and go through it with someone, go through it all, but now they’re quick as gravity, they don’t want to commit to risk being disappointed, fuckable but not lovable, shrinking at a quiver of doubt. Love is a communicable disease facing total containment and eradication. A friend of mine returned from a romantic sojourn to say that love is an advanced form of punishment. Chelosky has no issues with “submission.” She wants to “submit” to “someone who could teach” her “how to live” and in this submission to another she is no longer the most important thing in her own life and has someone who is equally important. In this way, she dispenses with irony and is the genuine article. She understands love.
The word and its conjugates abound, the casualties are legion (do I mean love or submission? I can’t remember). Life is unbearable so fuck it out. Life is a rager. It’s an insomnia knocking and hypomanic fixation. I’ve heard it described as “pulp” and think that’s accurate. It breathlessly locomotes through the shape of trauma over and over again to punch you in the face, chips you in the soul somehow. When the time comes everyone wants to be the star of their own death. The movement failed. On this hill it died. Danielle Chelosky wants to be the white Anaïs Nin with a cock so excuse me while I sit my wasian bussy down and read this. Pregaming Grief is an act of shadow work as pagans might call it. “I invested all of my time in writing—an instantly gratifying process, a kind of gushing, like blood. I unleashed an army of words onto the pages about how evil Andrew was, all in the past tense as if he were dead.” In search of a “belief system” “about the way love and hate were becoming increasingly indistinguishable,” it is a fully objectified living moral hell “less like an attempt to move on and more like a form of relapse.” It is “revenge,” “erasure,” “a maze with no exit.” “I liked the comforting familiarity and intensity of a relapse. A place of pain was just another name for a home” for a “masochistic girlfriend.” It’s as debauched and sentimental as Delicious Tacos but feminine, not as funny and a lot more tragic. “the way ecstatic relief follows pain. Any middle ground disappears, everything is life or death, bliss or agony. It’s one or the other but then they keep overlapping and become indistinguishable.” Chest pain. “the way I could never detach myself from tumult.” “I was slowly accepting my alcoholism, which was undeniably in my blood” ceding credence to “language was a big flaw in human development.” A meanspirited self pity, original sin playing like tautology, enmity between the sexes. Girlboss gynocracy, misandry. “So, I abandoned compassion. I tried to accept that cruelty could be inexplicable.” “I wanted to get perpetually drunk so I could be liberated from this prison of insecurity.” “I wondered if he could reverse the trauma in me.” “I knew I lost you when you found God.” It surprises with violence and velocity. An akathisia and emotional exhibitionism underscore the constant sense of fight-or-flight-or-freeze-or-fawn artifacted from this dark era. An effort to violently perceive oneself. You are completely alone and every moment is pulsing infinitely. Your past haunts everything around you. At first I thought misnomer but it is in fact a pointed word choice grief, and by the harrowing flashback finale you come to understand how it’s all of a piece. In this holding pattern overpowering plot there is no WiFi spirit womb for her to crawl into and hide, no egirl nest. This phenomenon of spinning wheels, affairs, flings, one night stands, paramours. If you want to know why love died, look no further than this profanation.
As word-made-flesh as twelve steps. Spiritually honest as numbing agent, unconditional positive regard for its debilitating truth. America is waking up from a long nap, a spiritual depression, washed brand. Theologically, you can only be despondent and abject for so long, programmed to hate what you should like (people used to like things in a way they don’t anymore), symptomatic, facile, a way to age yourself blind, rations, a fix. Humorous levity is achieved near the end where the depths of seething erupt into farcical slapstick. With an awkward date and acrimonious culminations, a bathos coup de grâce. An ugly cry, one feels exhausted and roughed up but the sob is worth it. All that matters is movement lest your muscles atrophy. Take you apart and put you back together. Not sexy or fun like porn but gross like porn. Unerotic harsh truths that make you feel nothing. Sex-rocked sentimental down bad at bottom, a compendium-as-carousel rolodex of pathology washed in the money, from the naked city, leaving Las Vegas. There’s a gestalt that it’s supposed to be fun but I find it sad. Call it a backhanded, earned compliment. As roaring emo vérité, this is what it’s like. Quizzical, contradictory, possibly inadvertent with a killer instinct for comedy and death drive blazing a retarded death spiral into oblivion, narrative layers feeling the full force of its arrival, warm welcoming wet calling back to itself, pistons exhausted between the lines hormonal flooding you with tears and psychical immensity, harmful even if it wants you to think it’s funny. Warring 20s artless pornography with screwball instincts by a proud libertine of a Faustian society. Intoxicating like “two sets of fake flowers.”