Five Letters
A righteous one, a confused one, a loving one, a devastated one, and a snarky one
Dear Readers,
Thank you for the outpouring of support last week. Every single comment buoyed and affirmed a) my suspicions about The Content Machine and b) my desire to mix things up and de-professionalise. If you’re reading this week thinking what the fuck is she on about and where’s the regular edition, please catch-up here:
So, I woke up this morning, thinking, how can I make today less professional and more fun? How can I get that noodle-in-a-different-way spring back into my step? The obvious answer was to bring Judit to the office. She doubles the length of my commute and reminds me how many nice things there are to sniff in this world. Hello from my sub-editor and I at News & Reviews headquarters today:
Leaning into the loosey-goosey approach, this week’s content takes an epistolary form. Three news items and two personal things happened that gave me strong feelings, so I responded in writing. (Content warning for some of them, by the way.) This may never happen again! Who knows. Something different next week. Maybe something different every week.
I still haven’t re-opened Instagram. I want a concrete plan for how and when to use it—so it doesn’t use me—before I do. But I think people should have received their The Work caps, and probably taken pictures and tagged me, and I am excited to see that. Maybe next week.
A couple of quick things, before we get into the letters:
If you’re in Sydney, please come listen to me interview Caoilinn Hughes at the White Bay Beer Company on Tuesday 6 August. Tickets are available here and Caoilinn’s new novel, The Alternatives, is a masterpiece. She’s doing a Melbourne event too.
As I mentioned last week, I want to do a Zoom where we can discuss the ending of The Work amongst ourselves. A spoiler-heavy zone! That will be on Wednesday 31 July at 6.30pm Sydney time. I’ll send a link out closer to the date. Submit your questions for me here, but we’ll also have an open discussion for more questions on the night.
You need to be eating a new snack I’ve found: Scorched Peanut Bar, alternatively available as Scorched Peanut Bites. Available at Woolworths and IGA. If this product is unavailable where you live, just a friendly reminder that peanut brittle exists and it was sent to us by something with higher powers.
Okay, that’s all for today!
Best wishes and happy reading,
Bri
A Letter to the Biological Father of Maxine, Who Tried to Avoid Child Support Payments by Denying DNA Results, Then Eventually Agreed to $400 a Month After Being Chased by a Lawyer
Hey Dude,
Ha-fucking-ha! Schadenfreude is an understatement!
I write to you on behalf of all the other assholes who flew from Australia to the Philippines with the specific intention of your disproportionate dollar buying you fewer consequences for your actions.
I’m no SWERF. But you didn’t want to visit a sex worker in Australia, did you? You got on an international flight to one of the world’s most Catholic countries, where abortion is illegal and sometimes lethal, where sex work is criminalised and the workers are not protected by the government or the law, and where your dollar would give you the power to refuse to wear protection.
And now your bill has come due. You would have been told that Maxine was in state care, yet you tried to deny what test results had already proven. What was it, exactly, that made you change your mind? The reporter says that sometimes men like you ‘feel for the conditions’ these children are living in, but did you not ‘feel for the conditions’ Maxine’s mother was living in? And how did they find you? Was it through your dank Boomer Facebook posts? Are you like one of the others we saw in the program, tagging yourself in the photos of clubs and bars across South-East Asia? Do you have opinions about why women in that region make better wives?
For $400 a month Maxine’s entire life trajectory will change. I just googled ‘average price of a jet ski’, and I reckon you’d be able to sell yours on Gumtree to pay for Maxine for one or two years. Live long enough to make every payment until Maxine turns 18 then get in the bin.
Yours Truly,
Bri Lee
A Letter To the People Who Like Watching ‘Power Slap’
To Whom it May Concern,
Do you watch other combat sports, like boxing or Taekwondo, and if not, what is it particularly about Power Slap that you enjoy?
Are you the same people who used to like watching Jackass seasons one through three, and the spin-offs, Wildboyz and Viva La Bam, and the film Jackass Number Two, or the film Jackass 3D, or the film Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, or the film Jackass Forever?
When the organisers of this sport talk about ‘keeping it safe’, does that make it more or less appealing to you?
Are there other areas of your life in which you enjoy watching people in pain?
Have you heard of the growing body of research about repetitive concussion injuries, and if so, is that something you care about? Would you support the ticket price for Power Slap events including a surcharge for pre-emptive fundraising for when this organisation is inevitably the subject of a class action lawsuit?
Do you listen to Joe Rogan?
Would you like to take part in a Power Slap amateur league with localised underground venues and where the first rule of entry is that you Don’t talk about Power Slap?
Do you think you would meet like-minded potential friends there who also resent “The Government” and women-in-general?
Are you more likely to consume guarana-infused beverages you have seen endorsed by Power Slap champions?
Thank you for your time, and kind regards,
Bri Lee
A Letter to My Dog When She Wants to Come Up Onto the Bed
Dearest Judit,
You are so beautiful and your velvet flopsies and your happy thumper and your keg-on-pegs proportions are all perfection and now your scruff is coming back after you were so naked before and when you do your little post-nap side stretch it’s a biiig stretch and when your make that tiny howl noise when you yawn it’s a biiig yawn and your soft little tumtum is so perfect for belly rubs and I love you and I love you and I love you, but this is the one place in the entire apartment you are not allowed so don’t give me that look.
Forever and ever,
Mama
A Letter to Alice Munro, Wherever She Is Now
Dear Ms Munro,
I have gone through many emotional waves since learning the news of how profoundly you failed your daughter. High furies alternated with deep sorrows as I read about the aftermath your cowardice wrought. I no longer write about this subject matter because I understand doing so is to volunteer myself for an emotional ultra-marathon, and every time I do it I test my powers of clarity and conviction, but it is difficult to fully ‘recover’.
What I wonder is how you could be so content with developing a famous legacy for your astonishing powers of observation and insight into the interior lives of women and girls, all the while doing this. Then I curl around on myself and ask, yet again, if I am holding a woman to a higher standard than a man. We all do this all the time. It was he alone—Gerald Fremlin—who abused, although that abuse was enabled by you and others for so long, I yet again wonder what comes of headlines blaming a wife for concealing her husband’s crimes. You are famous, of course, and there is the aforementioned irony, but I sense something else. I sense that in our society there lingers a toxic sense that, to some extent, men’s misdeeds are inevitable. That a man’s criminal misconduct is not as much of a shocking transgression as a mother’s failure to protect her child.
And I think: what did he have over you? What tentacles had he so wrapped? What terrors had he so baked-in? That even the mighty Munro would have crawled back to him?
Your name is now besmirched. Another legacy we must sacrifice to the cleansing fires of honesty and truth.
Rest with at least the peace of knowing your daughter is stronger than you,
Brianna Lee
A Letter to the Person Who Brought Copies of Their Own Book to Someone Else’s Event
Dear Idiot,
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