Tonight I'm Someone Else
Essays
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"I had a real romance with this book." —Miranda July
A highly anticipated collection, from the writer Maggie Nelson has called, “bracingly good…refreshing and welcome,” that explores the myriad ways in which desire and commodification intersect.
From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.
Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre—including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission— Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship. Both tender and jarring, this collection is relevant to anyone who’s ever searched for what the self is worth.
Hodson’s accumulation within each piece is purposeful, and her prose vivid, clear, and sometimes even shocking, as she explores the wonderful and strange forms of desire. Tonight I'm Someone Else is a fresh, poetic debut from an exciting emerging voice, in which Hodson asks, “How much can a body endure?” And the resounding answer: "Almost everything."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this mixed debut collection, Hodson explores "the possibility of ruin, which is always present," in romance, art, and consumerism. Skillful description often takes the place of emotion in her writing, resulting in affectless exercises that reveal her fearless and sometime reckless curiosity, but don't analyze it. Hodson's best essays are those that are most narratively cohesive. "Pity the Animal" finds a relationship between bodily commodification and alienation by documenting Hodson's experience with fashion modeling and flirtation with working as an escort for a "sugar daddy" website that was "quite clearly, a loophole for prostitution." "I'm Only a Thousand Miles Away" observes obsession through her adolescent experience of being a boy-band fan and being the object of a stalker. "Small Crimes" details a platonic summer fling at age 13 with the cool girl at camp, a friendship that only existed because it had an "expiration date we both silently agreed to." These essays offer emotional heft and immersive storytelling. It's difficult to invest in other selections, though, particularly those about her relationships in later adolescence and in adulthood, since they tend to rely on opacity in place of specificity. Though even in the weakest entries Hodson produces some insight and humor, she is at her best working in more disciplined, narrative forms an approach she embraces too rarely.
