In Letter No. 3: J. Law on the gender wage gap in Hollywood, Lena and Jenni’s advice column, and much more.

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Hollywood’s

Wage Gap

Jennifer

Lawrence



Letters to

Lenny

Lena Dunham

& Jenni Konner

Second

Wave Style

Laia

Garcia

Sports Gave

Me Swagger

Gina

Prince-Bythewood

Becoming

Grace Jones

Doreen

St. Félix STORIES Hollywood’s Gender Wage Gap Jennifer Lawrence Letters to Lenny Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner Get That Second Wave Style Laia Garcia How Sports Gave Me Swagger Gina Prince-Bythewood Becoming Grace Jones Doreen St. Félix

My favorite Lennys,



I’m Lenny’s editor in chief, Jess. When I’m not editing this magnificent letter, I am writing novels about yoga cults, running along the East River, and momming a two-year-old girl — known in our office as the Lil’est Lenny. I’m so proud to bring you this week’s issue, which includes many topics near to my heart: the gender wage gap, the importance of high-school athletics, and toking up at baby showers.



First, we have Jennifer Lawrence (yep, the J. Law) writing about how infuriating it was to find out that her male costars made more than she did when Sony’s emails got hacked in 2014. She’s a living argument for using wage transparency to close the gender pay gap. Getting what you’re worth is incredibly important, especially when you first enter the working world. I remember when I was 25 — like Jen is now — I read somewhere that you make the bulk of your lifetime salary in the first decade of your career. It really lit a fire under my ass. I had never asked for a raise before, and I forced myself to start asking. And to keep asking. In my case, the persistence worked: When I left my last full-time job, I found out I was making a nice chunk more than a male coworker who had been there longer than me, after we conducted some informal wage transparency over beers.



Also asking tough questions this issue: our readers, to Lena and Jenni, who write their first installment of Letters to Lenny (in which they answer a question about getting stoned before celebrating a friend’s pregnancy). In addition, we have Gina Prince-Bythewood, the writer and director behind Beyond the Lights, telling us how being an athlete helped her conquer her shyness; editor at large Doreen St. Félix bringing her critical genius to Grace Jones’s new memoir; and associate editor Laia Garcia showing you how to dress like a second-wave feminist circa the Carter administration.



Thank you so much for reading and for all your thoughtful, heartfelt responses to our letters so far. Nothing in this world makes me happier than seeing a rad fiber artist knit a Lenny banner, or seeing you tagging your best friends, your moms, and your sisters in our Instagram comments. We can’t wait to hear more from you.



xx

Jessica Grose Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co‑Stars? By Jennifer Lawrence



(Illustration Credit: Jennifer Williams)



When Lena first brought up the idea of Lenny to me, I was excited. Excited to speak to Lena, who I think is a genius, and excited to start thinking about what to complain about (that’s not what she pitched me, it’s just what I’m gonna do). When it comes to the subject of feminism, I’ve remained ever-so-slightly quiet. I don’t like joining conversations that feel like they’re “trending.” I’m even the asshole who didn’t do anything about the ice-bucket challenge — which was saving lives — because it started to feel more like a “trend” than a cause. I should have written a check, but I fucking forgot, okay? I’m not perfect. But with a lot of talk comes change, so I want to be honest and open and, fingers crossed, not piss anyone off.



It’s hard for me to speak about my experience as a working woman because I can safely say my problems aren’t exactly relatable. When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need. (I told you it wasn’t relatable, don’t hate me).



But if I’m honest with myself, I would be lying if I didn’t say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem “difficult” or “spoiled.” At the time, that seemed like a fine idea, until I saw the payroll on the Internet and realized every man I was working with definitely didn’t worry about being “difficult” or “spoiled.” This could be a young-person thing. It could be a personality thing. I’m sure it’s both. But this is an element of my personality that I’ve been working against for years, and based on the statistics, I don’t think I’m the only woman with this issue. Are we socially conditioned to behave this way? We’ve only been able to vote for what, 90 years? I’m seriously asking — my phone is on the counter and I’m on the couch, so a calculator is obviously out of the question. Could there still be a lingering habit of trying to express our opinions in a certain way that doesn’t “offend” or “scare” men?



A few weeks ago at work, I spoke my mind and gave my opinion in a clear and no-bullshit way; no aggression, just blunt. The man I was working with (actually, he was working for me) said, “Whoa! We’re all on the same team here!” As if I was yelling at him. I was so shocked because nothing that I said was personal, offensive, or, to be honest, wrong. All I hear and see all day are men speaking their opinions, and I give mine in the same exact manner, and you would have thought I had said something offensive.



I’m over trying to find the “adorable” way to state my opinion and still be likable! Fuck that. I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a man in charge who spent time contemplating what angle he should use to have his voice heard. It’s just heard. Jeremy Renner, Christian Bale, and Bradley Cooper all fought and succeeded in negotiating powerful deals for themselves. If anything, I’m sure they were commended for being fierce and tactical, while I was busy worrying about coming across as a brat and not getting my fair share. Again, this might have NOTHING to do with my vagina, but I wasn’t completely wrong when another leaked Sony email revealed a producer referring to a fellow lead actress in a negotiation as a “spoiled brat.” For some reason, I just can’t picture someone saying that about a man.



Jennifer Lawrence is an Academy Award–winning actress. Letters to Lenny: Toking Up at a Baby Shower By Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner





(Illustration Credit: Maria Ines Gul)





Dear Lenny,



One of my close friends is PG with her first kid and pressured me into going to her annoying fucking baby shower. Knowing that it was going to be an air-kissing shit show, I decided to hit a joint in the car in the parking lot outside before I walked into the restaurant. Some stuffy older woman with a bad nose job and veneers two shades too white knocks on my window and says, “There are children here.” So I said, “Not in my car,” and she stormed away.



A few minutes later, I walk into the event and go over to say hello to my friend. She introduces me to her friends and her mother-in-law, who turns out to be the woman who freaked out on me in the parking lot.



Next day, I get a voice mail from my friend telling me how selfish I am for disrespecting her on "her day.”



It’s weed, for fuck’s sake! She’s acting like I did rails of coke off the tray of her unborn baby’s high chair.



She’s a great friend who stayed by my side for 12 hours during a bad acid trip. She also encouraged me to start following my dreams and jump off the corporate treadmill.



I want to save this friendship, but I also don’t think I did anything wrong. I mean, did she think I’d be able to deal with a baby shower straight? She knows me. WTF?





FROM LENA: Listen, I get it. As we grow up, we watch certain friends embrace traditions we all would have mocked a decade ago, and that’s weird, especially if you’re not moving in the same direction. But toking up outside her fancy party to celebrate THE BIRTH OF HER CHILD is not going to turn her back into the person you used to know, and it’s not going to rewind the clock on adulthood. You’re here now, and part of growing with friends is understanding that their boundaries and priorities shift. I’ve known radical punks who covered their tattoos for a white wedding and anti-corporate piss queens who Instagrammed joyfully from Carnival cruise ships. If that kind of change doesn’t work for you, if the pregnant and slightly prissy version of your friend is an issue, then the most loving thing you can do is back away. Otherwise, you both just serve as guilt-inducing hurtful reminders to each other, and that’s the opposite of friendship.



Lena Dunham can take it but she can't dish it out

FROM JENNI: Not to be a dick, but your behavior was bad manners at best and passive aggressive at worst. Lena makes some lovely points, but let’s look at what is really going on here. You seem to have some real hostility toward the fact that your friend is having a child. This is worth exploring. Despite the implication of the name, pregaming before an event generally implies less “sport” and more an attempt to quell social anxiety. The fact that it is pot is irrelevant. You’re asking if you should save the friendship, but, truly, this is not about your friend. This is about your fear of losing your friend when she has her baby. Dude, change is hard. I suggest you look inward and explore what is scaring you about this time in your friend’s life. And then apologize. Because nothing bad can happen if you come clean with your friend.



Jenni Konner is good in a crisis. Get It: Second-Wave Style By Laia Garcia



In her 1977 book Emergence, the photographer Cynthia MacAdams turns her camera lens to the women who make up the nascent women’s-lib scene. These women confront the camera straight on: strong, self-assured, and rocking some insanely incredible looks. The kind of looks that make you go, “Note to self, try out socks with Birkenstocks,” even though your whole life you have told yourself that “socks with Birkenstocks” are “no good.”



In her introduction to the book, the writer, artist, and feminist activist Kate Millet describes them as “a new kind of woman. You haven’t seen them before. Neither have I.” Even four decades later, we recognize that these women have figured something out, something that maybe we have figured out too, but we’re not strong enough to adopt. The women we are used to seeing staring back at us from movies, magazines, and even art are often glossily perfect. “Those are women seen. Not seeing, seen,” Millet writes. “We are not meant to see ourselves in the other women selected to ‘guide’ us.” The women in Emergence are not just static images waiting for the viewer to define them. They have their own stories. Whether they are posing for the photograph or seemingly caught mid-smoke, they are active women, they are alive. They are not stereotypically beautiful, because they have rendered the stereotypes useless. Who needs stereotypes when you’ve got the real deal staring right at you?



There were many women in the book who I fell in love with immediately: Jeri Chocolate Harris, a lineswoman, photographed wearing her work attire, a tool belt slung low on her hips. I imagine her climbing a telephone pole and feeling the breeze on her face while doing a job that to this day is mostly held by men. Cheryl Swannack, coordinator of the Woman’s Building in LA — a landmark of the feminist art movement in the 1970s that functioned as a nonprofit and art-education space — is caught mid-conversation, her small frame heightened by massive platform shoes that peek out from under her voluminous trousers. Colleen McKay, owner of the Women’s Saloon (a feminist restaurant where everyone got paid the same, waitresses weren’t made to smile or be “perky,” and women could feel comfortable dining alone), sits on a stool, defiantly looking at the camera. She is at ease, but in control. The way we all want to be.



We will never be these women, not exactly, but here’s how we might inject some of their sartorial flair into our wardrobe and, in the process, absorb some of that power.





Jeri Chocolate Harris, lineswoman



(Courtesy of Cynthia MacAdams)

You’d be surprised at what a difference a perfect-fitting pair of trousers can make. High-waist, flared styles, like the one Jeri is wearing, can definitely be found on eBay and Etsy (search for “high-waist vintage jeans” and go from there) and in your local thrift store. If you don’t have time to hunt, Madewell offers some really good options. But that’s not the whole story: are the legs too long? Is there slightly too much fabric around the crotch? Get thee to a tailor, and have them turn the jeans into your dream pair! Sure, it’s a pain, but honestly, it will probably be cheaper than you imagine, and considering how long jeans can last in your closet, definitely worth the investment. After that, pretty much anything you pair with your jeans will look killer, whether a button-down blouse or your most favorite forever-old tee. Consider a multipurpose belt in place of carrying a purse or fanny pack.







Cheryl Swannack, coordinator of the Woman’s Building, LA



(Courtesy of Cynthia MacAdams)

There are a couple of things going on here, and we’re gonna break it down.



1. Power suits are called power suits for a reason, and no one can illustrate that quite as perfectly as Cheryl does. And listen, maybe you don’t need a whole suit — maybe just a jacket is the thing that will up your power factor — but she makes a really good argument for a full look. Topshop usually has some great suits on offer, they’re slightly less stuffy than what one would wear in a corporate setting, but without losing any of its power.



2. The button-down shirt opened all the way to there. This is such an easy way to denote power and pizzazz. Hunting for a ’70s-style wide-lapel vintage shirt is certainly worth it. It just adds a different vibe, whether you’re wearing it with a suit or with a pair of your perfect jeans (see above). A thin scarf wrapped around your neck turns the whole thing into an aphrodisiac. I don’t know what the science behind it is. I just know it does.







Colleen McKay, proprietress of the Women’s Saloon



(Courtesy of Cynthia MacAdams)

She is hands-down the most badass woman in the book. Look at Colleen’s perfect crown of hair; look at her super-chill pose, holding a cigarette in one hand and a drink on the other; look at her woolly socks worn with her Birkenstock sandals. Everything about Colleen says: “I’m in control,” and you know what? We want to be in control too. The button-down shirt is one of those pieces annoyingly touted as a “basic” by every single fashion magazine editor ever, but listen, they’re not wrong! A slightly oversize slouchy blouse automatically brings about a certain relaxed vibe to your look. And honestly, we were on the fence about Birkenstocks until we saw this photograph, but the look is undeniable. Plus, it really allows us to indulge in one of our favorite useless vices, buying funky socks.



Laia Garcia is the associate editor of Lenny. How Sports Gave Me Swagger By Gina Prince-Bythewood





(Gina Prince-Bythewood)



I am shy. I also have a big ego. Practically speaking, that means everyone is looking at me, and it makes me uncomfortable. Actually, “big ego” has a negative connotation. I’ll say “healthy ego.” Which, sadly, for women, still has a negative connotation. We aren’t supposed to have an ego. It’s unseemly. It’s arrogant. It’s not ladylike. Serena Williams was called cocky when she said she wanted to be the best in the world. Well, what the hell is she training so relentlessly for, to be the 37th best in the world? (No disrespect to the 37th best in the world.) A poster of Serena in mid–epic scream should be required on every little girl’s bedroom wall so they can be reminded daily how beautiful it is to be a badass.



But back to me. When I was little, I was pathologically shy. I was so shy I couldn’t even trick-or-treat. My siblings would stand at a neighbor’s door and point to the sad little Raggedy Ann at the curb to get candy for me. In my one and only attempt at acting, I played the sun in an elementary-school play. I begged my mom to make my costume a life-size papier-mâché yellow ball so I could hide inside, but she didn’t have the time, or that much flour and newspaper, to indulge me. Instead, she cut out two large yellow circles from construction paper and tied them to my front and back. I had one line. I was so petrified I forgot it. I just stood there glaring at the audience until Mercury put me out of my misery and said it for me.



So now I’m grown. I’m still shy. I’m the woman at a party standing alone in the corner with a beverage in my hand because it gives me something to do. If I’m introduced to someone, I say, “Hey, how are you?” After that, I got nothing. So how do I control my film sets? How do I stand in front of hundreds of people and give speeches? How do I walk into meetings with the heads of studios to persuade them to give me millions? How did I make it out of adolescence and my high-school years intact? Where does my healthy ego come from?



Sports. As long as I can remember, my parents had me in organized sports. It started with soccer. Back then, there weren’t enough girls to field a girl’s league, so I played with boys. Not all of them were happy about that. I used to get kicked and pushed. And sometimes I would cry. But my parents sent me back out there to keep playing. When I was on the field, I was never told to “slow down.” No one ever said, “Don’t be so aggressive.” I was told to “run faster,” “be more aggressive,” “play harder,” “go after it.” So I did. And it was the most natural thing in the world.



When I got to high school and played basketball, volleyball, tennis, track, cross country, and softball, and later, when I ran track at UCLA, I was told to “go get her,” “don’t let her outwork you,” and “leave it all out on the floor.” Sports instilled in me the desire to be the best. I worked my ass off every practice so I could beat the girl next to me. And I usually did. Sports gave me the belief that I was the baddest chick on the court, on the track, on the field. Sports gave me swagger. On the court, I didn’t have to be cute, or funny, or extroverted. I just had to be good. Being good got me applause. And I needed the applause. I was not cute in high school. I did not know how to dress (contrary to popular belief, espadrilles do not go with everything). I could barely string two words together. And I was a black girl, adopted by white parents, growing up in an all-white area, with no sense of self. In my recent film Beyond the Lights, the lead character, Noni, who was once suicidal, says to the man she loves, “You saw the goodness in me, and that was enough to keep me going until I could finally see it in myself.” That’s what sports gave me. It gave me something good to see in myself. It’s why girls who play sports in high school are less likely to do drugs, engage in abusive relationships, or get pregnant.



I have been asked how one gets swagger if they never played sports. My answer is this: work out. I wish it were sexier. And didn’t involve working out. I actually hate exercising. But I love the feeling after. The sense of accomplishment. Overcoming the pain and fatigue. Pushing yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of. Not giving up. The way you do one thing is the way you will do all things.



At Soul Cycle (my exercise obsession), I am dying by the second to the last song. It’s dark in there, and if I half-ass it to the end, no one will know. But I’ll know. So I take a deep breath, put my head down, dig deep, and race to the finish. On set, I am the same. I go nonstop, ignore obstacles, push past fatigue, and always believe I’m going to get the shot. And when you exercise, you become more in tune with your body. You can feel yourself getting stronger. It affects your posture, your gait. You feel like an athlete, a warrior, powerful. That’s swagger. So start running, do Pilates, try P90X, take a kickboxing or ballet class (shout out to Misty Copeland).



My favorite stat — 90 percent of female CEOs played sports. Swagger is the belief that we belong in any setting. That we can succeed in any setting. That it is okay to want to be the best. To be in charge. To lead. To have say over our own bodies. To demand equal pay. To be president. Talent has no gender. Leadership has no gender. Badass has no gender.



I remember sitting outside Mike DeLuca’s office at New Line, waiting to go in to pitch Love and Basketball. I was literally shaking — I’d never directed a film before. Why would he ever give me millions of dollars? Biggest moment of my life, and I was gonna choke. Finally, I took a deep breath and told myself to just walk into the room like I used to walk onto the court: eyes up, smirk on my face, mad confident in my abilities. I left that meeting with $14 million to make my first film. Without swagger, I’m just that shy girl who can’t find her voice. With it, I am the baddest chick in the room. So go find your swagger. Run faster, be aggressive, go after it. And leave it all out on the floor.



Gina Prince-Bythewood is a writer-director who loves making movies and loves playing ball with her two boys, but after two C-sections, her body no longer obeys her mind, and her ego can't take losing to children, no matter how good they are, so she now just cheers them on from the sidelines.

Becoming Grace Jones By Doreen St. Félix



(Illustration by Elise Peterson)



Grace Jones and her older brother Chris, recently moved from their grandmother’s watch in Pentecostal Jamaica to their parents’ home in the blank suburbia of 1960s Syracuse, New York, discover they are soul mates. Specifically, inversions of each other. The teenage siblings make this discovery in gay bars in the center of the town. The flip is social: Chris plays custodian of her then-clandestine masculinity; she the keeper of his femme. “We easily passed ourselves off as twins and I wonder if we were somehow tangled up inside my mother,” she writes. “I was born a little masculine, a girl with some of the boyness Chris lacked. And he had some of the girliness I didn’t have.” Nowhere else in Grace Jones’s exhaustive and replenishing memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, will such an expression of foundational identity surface.



Rather, the primary mode of Jones’s memoir is a surrealist attempt to put forth yet another version of herself. In her 40-plus years in the public eye, Jones has had many. She has been a model, a disco singer, an actor, a performance artist, and an art subject, but she has remained uninterested in the career boundaries such titles imply. Jones prefers the uncategorizable. If one constant exists in Jones’s career, it is the ephemerality of her artistic and personal selves.



Take the memoir’s title. On the “Art Groupie” track of her fifth studio album, Nightclubbing, which came out in 1981, she sang defiantly above the metallic, staccato beat: “I’ll never write my memoirs.” There’s nothing in my book, the song continues. In her memoir’s introduction, Jones acknowledges breaking the decades-old promise, not as a mea culpa but as a rejection of permanency itself. “I’ve changed,” she says. About outside perception of her apathy toward marketable truth, she quips, “I’m not worried about what people think, because I think people think what they want to think anyway.” From the mouth of Jones, this tautology makes perfect sense.





* * * * *



The memoir opens on Jones’s fantastical narration of her own birth. Beverly Grace Jones was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, sometime after the Second World War. (The public thinks it knows her age; “I like to keep the mystery,” she demurs.) She was the third child of young Marjorie and Robert (“In my own uprooted newborn way, I probably cursed,” she recounts, impossibly). When her parents moved to America, she and her siblings went to live in the foothills with their grandmother, whom she never names, and their step-grandfather, the God-fearing, fear-inducing Mas P. Grotesque faith compels Mas P to beat the children regularly; still, young Beverly Jones finds secret moments to practice her running and her now-trademark Hula-Hooping. “I kept the hoop moving around my whole upper body without it falling down, spinning it around and around like it was a form of protection.”



When she joins her parents in New York, at age 14, Beverly begins to go by Grace. This was a nominal change, but it fits chronologically to mark these adolescent years as the time she became Grace Jones as history recognizes her. With the blessing of her lenient mother, she plays in the Maybelline her austere father abhorred: “I was doing my own makeup. I was trying to dress stylishly. I would wear two pairs of false eyelashes. Like the Supremes, whose lashes were very heavy, like feathers brushing their cheeks.”



Jones’s earliest experiments with makeup and masquerade drew from the prima-donna sweep of Diana Ross and the other ’60s Ebony fixtures. Those were the girls available to her in her small town upstate. A few years later, she descends on New York City. Dutch supermodel and businesswoman Wilhelmina Cooper discovers her at 18, slick with onyx beauty that even Paris hadn’t yet colonized. Jones’s career as a couture model, a kind of template for the imaginations of designers like Kenzo Takada and Claude Montana, provides her the arena to extend her mask-play from makeup to garments.



Jones goes further; she chases disembodiment recreationally too. Andre, the hairdresser on 57th and Madison, fucks her so creatively that she considers dying. “We swallowed each other up inside the body of love.” With Christ, at the Hippopotamus “a 54 before 54 on 60th and Lex,” she takes acid that leaves her tripping for two weeks. Somewhere near sober, she lands in Paris for a number of modeling gigs with photographers who are invariably friends with Helmut Lang. Lang’s friend Hans Feurer takes intense close-ups of her lips and teeth for Vogue Homme, achieving another kind of disembodiment that Jones ponders might be humiliating when designed by a white man. Granted, as you can probably guess, she is too proud to be rightly humiliated, a fact Simon Cowell and Jack Nicholson and other equally proud men in her celebrity-framed world find out, hilariously.



Grace Jones is quite funny, a little morbid. I believe every outrageous, nonchalant anecdote she offers and am swayed by her paranoias. I could go on forever if I shared each of her wild stories, but here are my favorites: in 1979, Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol threw her a baby shower at a nightclub called Garage. In the ’80s, she saw the same therapist as Nancy Reagan. Maria Shriver gave her the death stare because she was late to Shriver’s wedding to Arnold Schwarzenegger. She fucks any man she likes while simultaneously arguing that the feminist sexual liberation of the ’70s was male heterosexual conspiracy. She regards most white feminist movements as a smoke screen for male insurgency. She cannot divorce the much younger man she married at her parents’ Syracuse home, Atila, because he disappeared not long after their wedding. She’s still legally married to the guy. What I can’t believe is her claim that Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Kanye, et al. are emulating her; I don’t think any of her lives are plain enough to be successfully tracked.





* * * * *



Since Jones ascended into the diva canon, her relationships with her three main artistic collaborators — the photographer Jean-Paul Goude, the music producer Chris Blackwell, and the artist Andy Warhol — have had a racist and sexist interpretative hold on the public’s idea of her career, in each instance relegating her to a vessel for their production. That understanding had always seemed weirdly Victorian, which the book confirms. It’s delightful, really, to read Jones writing of the time she spent with these three men with no more import than any other person in her life. Their male hysteria is well-documented — Goude’s demonstrated desire to break her body in photos during postproduction; Blackwell’s loving, pushy insistence that recording engineers allow her to do whatever she wanted on her tracks even when she didn’t exactly care; Warhol’s employing Dolph Lundgren as his sex surrogate. The book, however, runs and runs quickly on the current of Grace Jones’s ego.



There is one pivot point, however, when the text slows down. Jamaica. Beyond famous, now l’infâme, Jones goes back home to deal with the ghosts of her childhood. The death of the religious and religiously abusive Mas P clears the vistas of Kingston and Spanish Town of the ugliness he wrought. She writes, “My god. It is not that fearful, awful place that we fled.” It is ganja, jackfruit, açaí, and saltfish. Jones’s return and subsequent embrace of her home island stands out, starkly beautiful, from the vaguely wry tone of the rest of the book. The homecoming provides Jones, whose physical blackness had rendered her exotic in Western cultural space, with a new, ancestral way of sourcing her idiosyncrasy. Like her theory that her androgyny comes from her brother Chris, not Vogue Homme, Jones’s reunion with what she calls “her Jamaican side” helps her understand her form and her thoughts outside of a white industry’s appraisal of those phenomena.





* * * * *



In the months preceding the publication of I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, Jones went on a publicity blitz. On one hand, the interviews were largely promotional, meant to establish Jones as a progenitor of 21st-century ambient, androgynous, amorphous performance pop. On the other hand, they were extensions of this provocation the book puts into the celebrity ether: “What follows is the me that I have made up.” Though the 379-page tome follows a strict chronology, a sense of spontaneity freights the narration. The impeccable attention to detail, to rendering geography and feeling, might read like Jones’s reliability. Really, it’s her penchant for designing personal history, as if it were a mask rather than a ledger.



Memoir is an entirely strange genre for a surrealist at heart. Memoirs are complicated, usually conservative gestures. Politicians write them as civilizing bids before the inevitable vanity of running for office; celebrities write them to repudiate their vanities; now, every famous woman is writing one to prove her identity as a feminist. Jones balks at those categories. And individual artists, the ones Jones calls out and many more, are also attempting to crawl out of pop culture’s idealist, isolate slots into that broad career called Artist. It is a lawless space, a lawless identity, in which Grace Jones has been sovereign since the early ’70s. I’ll Never Write My Memoirs comes at a critical time in the renegotiation of stars, then, and you might read the book like it is a reminder or a threat. But Jones didn’t write it for anyone else. She wrote it for herself — at least one of her selves.



Doreen St. Félix is the editor at large of Lenny.



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