My Affair with Matthew Gasda – Samuel Forster
October 27, 2025
Intimacy is more plausible with a gifted writer you’ve never met than with an idiot whose body you’ve manhandled a thousand times.
My affair with Matthew Gasda starts in the Berlin airport.
It’s one of those antiseptic European non-places: glass, moving walkways, a pre-dusk stillness that feels rented by the hour.
I’m slumped over a paper cup of coffee, reading the PDF of Writer’s Diary as the brightness sears my eyes. It feels obscene to encounter creative writing this way — like asking for a cigarette break during last rites.
What is a diary in this century? An archive of live combat with the self? Aphorisms? Notations? Small detonations of clarity? A mind making a flank attack on its own habits?
I read faster than I mean to.
I do everything faster than I mean to. Gasda reminds me of that.
His voice is dry heat: skeptical of the internet on structural grounds, not merely moral ones; nostalgic for what institutions once did for artists, unsentimental about what they do now.
I underline on the touchscreen like a man trying to engrave marble with a fingernail.
Around me, Berlin is boarding somewhere else — couples in monochrome neutrals, their luggage as sleek and indifferent as submarines. A child performs that marvel of the age: total, unbroken concentration, feeding candy-coloured enemies to a digital maw.
I think of Gasda’s line about inventing the self by documenting it and feel the familiar sting of guilt.
I’m not so much younger than him. I’ve documented enough to build a city of myself, and still I get lost walking home. The phone is a prosthetic conscience that vibrates only to remind me what I promised to forget.
He keeps circling devotion versus doomscrolling, and I feel the tenderness of being implicated.
The airport makes his point for him. Nowhere amplifies our small betrayals like a gate area. I switch to airplane mode in a performative gesture of faith, then break faith to screenshot a paragraph I “want to remember.”
Remembering has become a file format.
There’s an entry about how theater forces duration on people — how you can’t leave without being seen to leave — and I feel the argument snap into focus.
Reading on a phone is an agreement that can be voided at any second by a stranger’s cleverness. Life in tab culture: every commitment adjacent to its own exit. The diary feels like a defence of rooms where exits cost something — time, money, embarrassment, sweat.
I imagine the Brooklyn room where Gasda’s voice echoes at night: rows of chairs that remember every fidget, an actor’s breath turning into plot, silence living in the walls. The airport is a place designed by an enemy of narrative.
I promise — right here, between a family returning from somewhere warmer and a hedge-funder with a portly gut and evil physiognomy — that I’ll spend less time online.
It’s not a vow to be better, only to be a better witness. I won’t have any internet on the plane. And maybe I can resist the internet for a while once I land in New York.
The phone diminishes the fidelity of my noticing. The PDF reminds me I once had a different instrument.
The gate agent calls boarding. I take my seat by the wing, where the window offers a movie of small decisions made large: flap, light, cloud. In the narrow theater of economy, the phone is the dominant religion.
I watch a row pray in unison to different gods — sports, war, sale, sex — and accept the universality of the posture. I dim my screen until I can almost see my face reflected over the text. I look both solemn and unserious, which is an accurate portrait of my current moral project.
Berlin has been an experiment in order; I’m returning to a city that runs on appetite.
The pretzels come. The cookies. I continue reading.
The wing flexes in a way that terrifies the first-time flyer ahead of me. I find it bracing: the machine admitting its vulnerability as part of its function. I read about the death spiral of attention, theater as the last coercive art form, and feel a small burst of civic faith — not in nations, but in the tiny republic of a room. A place where we might share time in good faith, pay for the privilege, and let the room do what the feed refuses: hold us accountable to our own bodies.
We cruise. Europe bleeds further away.
The diary’s tone — skeptical but not jaded, romantic but not drunk — feels like the only usable mood left.
Fidelity fails
Over the Atlantic now. A few hundred miles off Newfoundland. I’m 150 pages in.
The book reads fast. The entries are not much longer than tweets — and I’m good at reading tweets.
Perhaps I’d be a better reader of books if authors and editors were more deliberate about chopping large passages into tweet-sized fragments, the way my attention now insists upon.
Without Wi-Fi, I’m a better man. My concentration, normally living in exile, tiptoes back to 27A.
The constant stimulus that we receive would probably
be considered torture by people from another era—people
who aren’t accustomed to it.
We land. I decide I’ll check my texts, but not Twitter.
A close friend has messaged: Have you checked the timeline??? Crazyyyyyy…
Hmmmmmmm
And so I tell myself I’ll open Twitter just to see what he means, then stay offline for the rest of the night.
Of course, I do need to spend less time online. Gasda is right that my phone does have an evil grip on me.
Thirty seconds on the timeline, I tell myself. But no more.
I open Twitter.
And then I see it…..
SHWOOOOOSSSHHHH !!!!!!!!!!!!!
The bullet slicing through the man’s throat.
Then again.
Then again.
Again.
Again.
My timeline floods with the raw video.
CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSINATED
?!?!?!?!?!?
It’s horrific. Pornographic. I can’t stop watching. And I can’t stop reading the commentary.
Millions of ostensibly normal people are gloating as the rigor mortis sets in. It’s all so feral, so rabid.
Another one of Gasda’s entries resurfaces in my mind:
I think whether at macro scale or micro scale, local,
national, global, you see information traveling so fast
that people lose their agency and thus their core
humanness: the ability to think ethically and in a
controlled or rational manner about the choices they make (or
don’t make).
By thinking “ethically,” by the way, I don’t mean people
once were good and now they’re bad—quite the opposite. All
I really mean is the ability to think about the status of one’s
actions in ethical terms is decaying: the ability to feel a sense
of lack in oneself and to test oneself against some kind of ideal.
Anonymity and virality induce strange parasocial behaviors.
The comments ignite faster than comprehension. The digital infrastructure of outrage performs its old trick: tragedy into theatre, theatre into meme.
I tap, enlarge, tap again. The feed multiplies: a hundred versions of the same fifteen seconds — each subtitled, moralized. I should only feel horror, but what I feel first is velocity, the speed at which interpretation metastasizes.
I am glued to my phone for the entire ride from JFK to apartment.
In bed, I tell myself I’ll just confirm the basics — who did it, why, whether it’s real. Then I watch the video again. And again. The footage is already stabilized, colour-graded, looped for clarity.
I scroll.
Midnight. Then two. Then four.
There is a deep, nauseating pressure in my stomach as I read all of the posts celebrating the assassination.
And I can’t help but think about the thousands of similarly gleeful posts that would flood the internet if I were assassinated on camera.
I can’t help but think about the people who only know Sam Forster from the tabloids, and who subsequently have a twisted, tabloid-level view of him.
Would they laugh?
If my head were blown up in broad daylight, would they giggle? Would they post?
It’s sick. Sad. Satanic.
I am, I suppose, watching what Gasda so cogently protests in the diary: the modern impulse to be present at every moral explosion.
9/11
I wake up feeling sullen and ill-tempered.
My brain is itchy, and my nose hurts.
I take the A train to Fulton Street.
I have a meeting with an editor in the World Trade Center. Strange day for it.
I pass through security and take the elevator. The doors open onto a floor of glass and tone neutrality.
I look out at the sea of editors, sub-editors, and sub-sub-editors. I look beyond them, down at the Battery, the Statue of Liberty, and wonder what Gasda would think of this place.
He understands New York’s modern literary terrain quite well:
There are green shoots—some new publications and good
Substacks. But the gravitas and prestige have not flowed into
these vessels. They are not cool. They are earnest.
In a sense, there are two cultural systems in the world of
letters. A decentralized, earnest, and uncool one, made up of
Substackers and alt-magazines (of which I suppose I am a part),
and then the constellation of prestigious magazines—little or
big—whose parties people still want to go to, even if they often
don’t buy the latest issue.
This is broad; there are exceptions, and there are figures
who move between worlds, as they should.
As a writer, I want to be reviewed and thoughtfully criticized
in depth, pulled apart or praised deservingly. It feels like
I have a little bit of cash in two currencies, but not enough to
buy the item I want, since these two currencies can’t be transferred
or exchanged.
Yeah.
I walk around the office, the global epicentre of legacy print media. I see the fortunate sons and daughters who decide what’s cool, what’s good.
I regret that so few of the old-guard behemoths hire the Gasda’s of the world.
Then again, it probably wouldn’t be a good fit.
Wrestling matches
It’s Sept.12th.
Gasda and I are sitting in a small cafe in Lenox Hill.
The book has convinced me that the man across the table is a very old friend.
I start with a question about the editorial process — about separating the wheat from the chaff. He pays a compliment to his editor, Chelsea Hodson, for her surgical abilities, and for her aesthetic vision.
Then I reference the entry about all ideas being derivative:
There are no original thoughts; you can only arrange the old
things in some kind of way that gives off a gleam of originality,
in the context—the original context—of your life. The way
you place a thought in the constellation of your own existence
is—and the way you use it is—the way you deploy it, and
the way you communicate it, is what gives it aesthetic value,
wisdom-value.
I ask him which of the diary’s revelations is most his own. He pauses.
“The stuff about AI is probably the most original,” he says. He embraces the term “humanist”. He tells me he is trying to find language for things that haven’t been put into print.
I ask about “S”, a woman who is referenced throughout the book.
He tells me she is an ex-fiancé.
I ask him if he is a better writer when he’s single. I invoke the trope of the boxer who abstains from sex during a training camp.
Gasda appears to find that amusing.
“This book was written, a lot of it, in a very happy time in my personal life, not necessarily in the world… It’s a tough thing. In a weird way, domestic happiness lends itself well to novels, reflection, and drama.”
“Because it affords a period of stability?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says.
And still he notes that as a director there is value in the liminal phases of romantic life.
“My plays, I think, benefit from chaos and being single.”
I dwell on this topic — partly because I know how New York works, and partly because I’ve heard so much about the ambitious young director now sitting across the table from me.
“I get a lot from going on dates,” he admits. “When you’re single and you’re going out with people, you do absorb a lot of stories. In New York, at least, where you can go on a date whenever you want … you’re exposed to different slices of life. Even bad dates … you can steal the story …
“I think there are a lot of trade-offs, but … I’ll say this: I would not end a good relationship for the sake of my creativity.”
I ask him if writing serves the same function for men and women.
“Probably not.”
I ask him about the dissimilarities.
“I really do believe in gender. I think, in a beautiful way, men and women are different … I think men are battling to incorporate the feminine into their work, and women, in some ways, are taking up the opposite stance. I think that fundamental antagonism is going to define the trajectory of their work …
“I think ultimately people are writing to please a parent … or both parents in different ways … If you take seriously the idea that a book is an expression of the whole self, [and] if that whole self is highly masculine or highly feminine, the feeling of completing the book will have a different outcome.”
I bring up another entry from the diary:
Imagine if we treated geniuses like we treat OnlyFans stars…
I ask him to elaborate.
“It’s a framing device for how absurd the allocation of personal capital is. In Paris, streets are named after writers. There was a time when writers were central figures in culture, celebrities… It’s a bitterly honest statement about how, even if you think you’ve written a great book, you’re lucky if you can sell 500 copies.
“The internet, the dopamine response to naked bodies, to fucking — you can’t compete with that.”
I point us toward an entry that I feel is tangentially related:
As I get older, and my generation of writers, or those slightly
younger, grow up, I see someone become very proper and professional,
and they start to write the things that are expected
of them—pantomimes of personality—and I think: there goes
another one!
They’ve learned the trick of discarding everything
about themselves that isn’t right and proper and pleasing; they
are now dancing ponies.
I ask him if there are any Gen Z writers who have resisted this impulse. I ask if there is anyone younger than him who he sees as a rising star.
Those questions are followed by a very long silence, and I can see behind his eyes the sweaty wrestling match between diplomacy and candor.
I remind him that “No” is an acceptable response.
“No,” he says, before issuing a few caveats — one about Gen Z being gripped by a crushing sense of anxiety, another about a fashionable literary Zoomette whose debut was “pretty brave”.
We talk about how basically nobody can read anymore.
One way we can mark the differences between generations is
by whether they read or not.
I’m a writer writing for a future that doesn’t read. But it also explains
why I feel… ultimately more assured and… meaningful
as a playwright. Because it’s oral. People listen; they don’t read.
Play, or at least the primary way of experiencing play, is to see
it in that sort of way.
Writing novels feels more like learning calligraphy. A nice archaic
habit. Something only for specialists and hobbyists.
Now, ambitious works of… imagination and… linguistic
invention never had big audiences, but seems even less likely
now that they will have any audience at all: a non-negligible
percentage of people capable of finishing a difficult book.
I also suspect there’s a hidden relationship between the decline
of literacy and reading comprehension across the West… and
the rise of censorship. I think censorship is partially, if not
completely, rooted… in this reduced processing power, this
deadening, dulling… simplifying of the mind, which becomes
more reactive and reactionary the less capable it becomes.
The mind is more easily persuaded and less able to comprehend
and think deeply. The masses are becoming masses
again—illiterate.
I ask him if live theater will become more popular as literacy declines.
“Yeah, I think it’s going to be a very Elizabethan and Jacobian, like where you have some highly educated aristocrats, and then basically iPhone groundlings, semi-literate masses, who might have white-collar jobs but are functionally illiterate.”
We talk about romanticism, about appreciating the sublime.
It’s all very flowery.
But I believe him… and believing him makes me feel good.
I believe him because of how speaks. He is measured, declarative, unhurried. He talks like grammar itself is a romantic act. His cadence has the weight of someone restoring order to a disordered century. Each sentence lands with the quiet authority of a norm being reasserted, not proposed.
I ask him about the bootstrapped theater company he runs out of a small, three-room space in Greenpoint:
“A big part of the fascination with Matthew Gasda is the relatively modest scale of your operations, and your independence. I have always been of the belief that if someone is able to tell you to do something differently then what you’re doing isn’t really art. If a billionaire patron came to you earnestly and said, ‘Mr. Gasda, I’m a tremendous fan of yours. I think you possess a generational artistic talent, and I want to give you $10 million per year to run your theater company,’ would you take the money?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you have any trepidations?” I ask. “Any qualms?”
“Yeah…
My eyebrows rise. His dive down.
…
“It would afford me the ability to see what parts of my brain have gone dormant because I’m in crisis mode all the time. I have to answer every opportunity. Is there a chance that money destroys all the relationships? Yes, of course.
“But I mean at the scale you’re proposing, like $10 million a year could solve all the problems that would create. Now what could destroy the company is like $200,000, where you have just enough to change the situation, but not enough to allow people to leave their day jobs and check out and just focus on the art.”
“Do you think you would take the same artistic risks if you had the money?”
“Well, it depends on your thought experiment … If a billionaire who thinks everything I do is worthwhile is writing me a blank check, of course.
“Now would I take money from an NGO or something? Would I take money tied to a political point of view? No. So I think those are, to me, they’re different questions.”
I bring up the concept of noblesse oblige, which he talks about quite a bit in the diary.
“In a way, I’m waiting for the check. Why don’t my incredibly rich tech acquaintances support this thing that they think is good? I have no idea. I actually have no idea.
“It’s just not in the conceptual lexicon of people with money.”
I ask him about Dimes Square as a cultural phenomenon, and I reflexively apologize midsentence.
Virtually all of the people who want to talk about Dimes Square with me are people who I feel sick being around. I suspect he feels the same way.
He immediately brings up his plays. I appreciate that the creative output is the focus.
And then he talks about the more squishy stuff, social climate change …
“We’re truly in this constant panopticon of moral surveillance, all kinds of surveillance, whether it’s Hinge dates canceling men for not being gentleman, or whether it’s rightoids picketing yoga studios for posting something stupid about Charlie Kirk, or whether it’s doxing the Tea app women… or downtown girlies in their own group chats sleeping with Peter Vack or me … obsessing over the Millennial men on the scene.
“It just felt like this summer nobody could have a normal conversation without having this map of who’s who and who’s doing what, in all sorts of senses …
“I felt this really intense anxiety about going downtown this summer, and also kind of realizing that I had become a public figure, especially in a certain zip code. Dimes came out of the summer of 2021, where I felt this really intense anxiety about all this literary competition among men my own age who’d gotten deals and all these magazines were launching in 21.
“So that produced that era, produced Dimes Square, and I think this summer produced a different kind of anxiety — surveillance, decay, violence…
I ask him if Dimes Square would exist without Instagram.
“I don’t know if it exists without Twitter. To me, it’s really a Twitter phenomenon. I think the later derivations became Instagramified, but I think Dimes Square was born on Twitter and Discord and different apps.
“I mean, if you took away all social media, no.”
I think about the diary. He makes a point about Instagram, a platform he is not on.
It’s interesting. I’m always available to talk after plays. I’m
there to defend my work, or at least listen to criticism. Very
rarely do people with criticisms—fake or real—actually talk
to me. In their own words, they’re “not interested.” They go
online or they stay in their little gossipy circles and snipe.
Younger theater kids (technically adults) especially tend
to treat real life like an Instagram comment—something you
leave without consequences (in a disembodied way you are not
responsible for).
Gasda likes the criticism when it’s serious. That’s what he tells me.
I ask a question about friction: “One of the things that you lament in the diary is how we lack a substantive, good-faith attempt at constructive literary conflict. Is there a bit of criticism you’ve received in the past that you found especially strong or clarifying?”
He stumbles…
And I wonder if it’s because he thinks the question is retarded, or if it’s because diplomacy and candor have resumed their wrestling match.
Then I try something more pointed: “Do the internet feuds feel beneath you?”
“They’re not beneath me, because I’ve engaged in them … I mean, very rarely does one get formal criticism. I think there have been some really good Substacks that were written about The Sleepers, which I found really illuminating, and helped me see what I was writing.
“I don’t feel like there’s a ton of that. I think with Dimes, because it got so much attention, there ended up being some really interesting reflections on the piece.
“Yeah, there have been smart people who have responded intelligently to my work.
“Takedowns are almost always politically motivated, and they tend to just be like, ‘This is bad, and it’s bad because it’s infected with something bad.’ And that’s not helpful to me.”
I tap my empty coffee cup on the table. He gazes out the window at the cars on 2nd Avenue, and then I ask a question that I think is more interesting than the others:
“You said that you wish you would’ve adopted a pen name earlier on so that you could keep your anonymity, your freedom. Did you mean that?”
“Unfortunately, I have had to trade on my image. The mythology of Gasda has sold a lot of tickets, and I’ve had to lean into that to survive.
“But I do mean that, I don’t enjoy being —
His sentence tapers off. He looks lost for a moment.
“I enjoy being respected, but I don’t enjoy being known widely or being recognized. And I’d much prefer– I would be a much happier person if I simply had that patron giving me $10 million to make theater, and I could just create a pseudonym. That would be a much happier life.”
“And that’s what you would do?” I ask — struggling to believe him, despite the fact that he is deeply believable, which I suppose says more about Sam Forster than it says about Matthew Gasda.
“Absolutely,” he tells me.
The stabbing
I wake up on September 13th very late in the day.
I meet with publicists, with editors.
I feel I am not doing enough.
But the food is good. And everyone is beautiful.
I traipse around SoHo.
I go to a party in the Lower East Side — a lot of people who “work in crypto”, which seems like an oxymoron. I want to jump off the roof.
I leave.
A strange bit of luck muscles me toward Peter Vack, who happens to be out on the town a few blocks away.
Peter Vack is charming in the way fire is charming.
He gives off the impression that something sensational is always about to happen, and that trying to stop it would be a grave mistake.
That impression is immediately validated. Someone in our vicinity gets stabbed. Someone in our group gets arrested for filming the subsequent altercation between stabber and cop.
The scene is grotesquely cinematic, the kind of tableau the internet digests instantly. I watch it all unfold with the numb fascination of a reporter who knows the headline before the event is over.
And then I think of Gasda — the flip phone, the professed aversion to spectacle, the belief that life’s dignity begins where documentation ends.
I feel the fault line between them widen inside me: the artist who wants to be witnessed and the artist who wants to vanish; display versus delicacy. The city feeds both hungers and satisfies neither.
The romantic has a desire to be overlooked as an artist; the
craftsperson cannot even conceive of or understand such a
Desire.
I walk home without music, without distraction, just the rhythm of my shoes against the sidewalk.
My strides alternate between romantic and crafty.
I do regret that nobody is watching me walk.
4:37 AM iPhone note
Earnestness is porn for people who think they are too dignified for porn.
Remember your vitamin water in the mini frudge
Aesthetic scurvy is a real thing; someone ought to carpetbomb Manhattan with Emergen-C packets
Apologize to Cassidy for being so aloof
Demand an apology from the Brazilian trade commissioner for what happened in the Uber
Is Dimes Square a psyop co-engineered by Peter and Matthew to get unlimited Zoomer pussy? And would that really be such a crime?
Poem idea:
She paces in the blue-gold halo of the Sabrett cart,
smoke twisting from her mouth like a secret she refuses to keep.
Her face — sharp, sour, Slavic —
belongs to some vanished century.
Taxis pass like verdicts; the street hums and forgets.
She circles once more, a cigarette saint
lit by the mercy of cheap neon
and the unkillable glamour of being alone.
Tweet idea:
the attributes most proximally associated with literary success are horniness, narcissism, and anxiety
Sunday
Morning arrives as a stern reprimand. I feel awful.
I wake up in the same clothes I wore the night before. There is a box of Advil next to my pillow that looks like it has been clawed open by a raccoon.
I take a two-hour shower. Then I dry off. Then I take another two-hour shower.
And after all that water, I still have doubts about the world … … … which seems unfair.
I wrench on the handle very hard, as if that will somehow widen the diameter of the pipes and increase the flow from the shower head.
I want the entire Hudson River to be in this little box with me — that would leave no space for thoughts.
In the evening, I read a poem at Confessions. The poem is about a woman I once loved who is now dead.
The poem has no punchlines. I don’t try to be cute or funny or ironic. I don’t even try to be compelling.
When I finish, there’s applause. It feels earned but not autonomic. Someone offers to buy me a drink. I decline. My head is pounding. I leave.
As I walk, I remember Gasda telling me about a reading for his new play in Chinatown.
I check the time and realize I might be able to catch the last act.
But when I arrive at the reading, the crowd is already clapping …. autonomically.
I go outside. All of the buildings suddenly seem way taller. The panes of glass seem sharper and colder. I feel tired.
I take out my phone and open the PDF.
Parts of me feel understood.
Writer’s Diary smoothes the world out in small but important ways.
It makes psychic clarity feel urgent in a time and place that is constantly insisting otherwise.
Gasda reminds me that seriousness is still possible, even beautiful — a form of romantic resistance against entropy.
He is one of the last men still living by the temperature of his own thought.
And in his light, even my fatigue feels briefly sanctified.