Read an exclusive excerpt below; Cheryl Strayed and Roxane Gay are already fans of the writer’s debut.
Elissa Bassist is not an actor, though she has played one on TV.
Read on for an exclusive excerpt.
Hachette
Must-See Dead-Girl TV
How saps feel about love, I’ve felt about the television.
Joan Didion famously admitted she didn’t want to be a writer.
“I wanted to be an actress.
Mindy Tucker
I didn’t realize it’s the same impulse.
The only diff erence being that a writer can do it alone.”
I was as thirsty for fame as any millennial and thought I might want to be an actress also.
The experiences, like the sets, were antithetical.
The film set was a warehouse party inside a real Brooklyn person’s apartment loft ).
The latter is the usual.
Man created, directed, and edited woman in His own ideal image of her.
Depended on the men.
Men men: men men men men men.
Men men men men men men, men, men!
(Men men men men men.)
White men, ubiquitous, ran the world, and they objectified women for sport.
Unlike a man, a woman objectified herself, since appearance was her primary concern and purpose on earth.
(If she said otherwise, she was lying.)
Women ranged from blindingly beautiful to secretly beautiful, from thin to skinny, from white to tan.
Women stayed girls and sinned by growing up.
Women were 8s or above out of 10, and any woman below an 8 should kindly drown herself.
And women were freezing since they weren’t allowed pants.
I took the screen as Truth.
I was supposed to.
Watching anything, I’d look up at the screen and then look down.Not a temple.
As if I was there and Angel kissing Buffy landed on my tongue.
This is the serrated edge of the feedback loop.
Because girls who grow up sprayed in the retinas by the male gaze become women created in its image.
Because the reality of the white male gaze and ear is our reality.
Excerpted fromHysterical: A Memoirby Elissa Bassist.
Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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