À la carte (March 25, 2025)

On migraines, "In Bed," a podcast, a Bechdel test-failing movie, and a memoir

This edition of Turtleneck Season is late because, as of the time of writing on Monday morning, I’ve had a migraine for over 48 hours¹. I’m despondent. The throbbing that has colonized the left side of my head since Saturday morning has made it harder to maintain a functional level of buoyancy in the face of what is happening to my country. Whether to blame the second glass of white wine I drank on Friday night at dinner or the onslaught of disturbing headlines (which perhaps led to the second glass of white wine) for the migraine, I’m not sure. But both the migraine and the political mood can be blamed for the fact that initially, I drew a blank on recommendations this week.

I’ve consumed a lot of troubling coverage and analysis of the current moment in the last two weeks (including Nathan Heller on Harvard/the fight for the soul of higher education in The New Yorker, Christopher Browning on Trump, Antisemitism, and Academia in The New York Review of Books, Ezra Klein on his abundance agenda and the liberal answer to Elon Musk). But I feel like I’ve made an implicit promise to offer you a different sort of cultural diet on Turtleneck Season—one comprised of offerings that uplift in some way, in the fact of their mere existence as cultural objects if nothing else. And after digging deep into the annals of my last two weeks, I remembered that there really were some objects of note, even if they were obscured by the cloud of migraine and dwindling civil liberties.

An essay

For obvious reasons, I’ve returned to Joan Didion’s classic essay on migraines this weekend, In Bed. I was introduced to it recently in a class on personal essays with

Amanda Montei

, and read it for the first time in the week of my last migraine, three and a half weeks ago. I can’t believe I had never read this essay before. (If I did, it was before I had ever a migraine and so it left no impression on me.) I love the beginning of In Bed, Didion’s articulation of the shameful secret that is frequent invisible physical incapacitation. But I have trouble with the ending. In class, I said that I found the ending too neat, too resolved. There is something annoying and moralizing about someone who insists on a learning a lesson from migraines. But a few weeks later, I think it’s just that I find the ending unbelievable. It strains Didion’s credibility; it suggests a willingness to privilege an essay’s artful resolution over ugly ambiguous truth. But maybe it’s just impossible to analyze your relationship with a migraine when you’re not in the middle of one.

When I am weeks out from my last migraine, the pain is as distant as the pain of childbirth. I can remember being in pain, but I cannot summon its sensations. The memory of the pain has been overlaid by the relief of its departure. And so it seems for Didion, who is writing in the euphoric aftermath of the migraine, when it is easy to say that the “imposed yoga” of the migraine pain has a utility—a lesson in gratitude. And while its true that every day I don’t have a migraine I am grateful to not have a migraine, I have not yet made peace with the pain itself, pain which, unlike the pain of childbirth, is thoroughly useless. It serves no apparent purpose, threatens my ability to take care of myself and others in all meaningful ways, and arrives without any indication of how long it will stay. Thank you, Didion, and also, no thanks.

I gave AI the prompt “stuck in bed with migraine” and this is what it came up with - a glowing woman, with a slight smile and full face of makeup, who is pretending to be asleep while a light shines on her face. UM?

A podcast

After taking a hiatus for a few years from Supreme Court culture, I’m back to listening to Strict Scrutiny. It’s not that I have much (or any) faith that the Supreme Court can or will save us from Donald Trump. But there is a lot riding on SCOTUS, and when I have a moment when I feel capable of handling the news out of the courts (which is not today), I listen to Strict Scrutiny, hosted by coven of witty young law professors, Leah Litman, Kate Shaw, and Melissa Murray. What began as a scrappy side project in 2019 was acquired by the Crooked Media empire in 2022. We knew you when, Strict Scrutiny! While I’ve found the hosts to exhibit the sort of reflexive deference to the Court that is typical of those with backgrounds as SCOTUS clerks, I’ve been pleased to find the show becoming increasingly irreverent. I keep coming back because I find the hosts devastatingly brilliant and humorous, and because it feels easier to digest the horribles when in the company of such friends. I enjoyed (appreciated?) last week’s episode with Elie Mystal, on the release of Mystal’s new book, Bad Laws: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. In some alternate universe, I pray that Mystal’s argument regarding the illegitimacy of any law passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act is gaining traction.

A movie

I watched Conclave last Saturday night over the course of a six hour flight delay at Newark Airport. (Needless to say, I was not traveling with the kid.) Conclave is the rare Bechdel Test-failing film that I actually liked (there are only two women characters in the film, though I’m not sure one of them, who appears only in one scene, ever actually speaks). Despite being a big, ambitious kind of movie, it’s a quiet movie, somewhat of a thriller, and I actually got a kick out of the cardinal characters and their relationships with one another. I would have liked to see this in theaters rather than broken up over the course of an evening. As someone who does not harbor any warm feelings toward the Catholic Church, I was surprised how moved I felt watching the ancient ritual of preparing the Sistine Chapel prepared for conclave.

A memoir

Do not let the fact that I didn’t immediately think of

Priyanka Mattoo

’smemoir, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, when I started writing this post dissuade you from picking it up! Blame the migraine! I loved this book—I loved Mattoo’s voice, I loved her story, I loved the memoir-in-essays form. Mattoo, who is now a writer-producer in Hollywood, spends a lovely chunk of the book chronicling her childhood, from her birth in Kashmir to her family’s departure for London, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. At the heart of the memoir is Mattoo’s family home in Kashmir, which is lost to the violence that pushed Kashmiri Hindus out of the province in the 1990s. Mattoo’s Kashmir is mythical in her memory; she left me longing to visit this place in the foothills of the Himalayas with its alpine lakes and ice cream shops, to catch a glimpse of her grandparents’ ramshackle house. There is something enchanting about reading about the places preserved in memory through the eyes of a child—so much of what Mattoo remembers about her family’s time in Saudi Arabia, for example, are the swimming pools of its expat subdivisions. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” goes the famous opening line by L.P. Hartley. Her essays recreate the sensation of memory—some details remembered, some details lost, some moments frozen through a childhood lens. The adult writer is left to make sense of the fragments that remain, which Mattoo does with a degree of compassion and humor towards her younger self.

Mattoo’s family landed in the United States when she was a teenager, and while Mattoo’s writing remains warm and funny and reflective in the essays of the book that comprise her adulthood, these are written through a different lens. She’s not writing fully from memory in the same way she is in her childhood essays and so her gaze has changed. Place is a little less dazzling. (Or maybe it’s just the American suburbs that are themselves less dazzling.) But the preoccupation with home, the centrality of family, and Mattoo’s sense of self remain unchanged. And these chapters of her life were less foreign to me—law school, abandoning a high-pressure job in the entertainment industry, dating in LA—so much so that I was a little bit surprised at the end of the book to remember that Mattoo and I are not friends in real life. It’s the kind of memoir that leaves the reader with a sense of warm intimacy with the narrator and her family.

1. To my mother, who is going to be very worried when she reads this, the migraine is lifting as of Monday evening.