I was doing a lot better with my road rage. One day Chris and I were coming back from the store and I hadn’t even called anyone “Fucker” or “Look at that stupid motherfucker” or “Fucking move it buddy.” I wasn’t flipping anybody off or shaking my fist or talking about how the whole earth needed a new extinction. “Who cares about saving the earth. I thought the purpose of life was to destroy it.” I wasn’t making sweeping generalizations about entire groups of people or shouting insane shit. Of course, Chris usually never let me drive when we went someplace, but he seemed to notice how calm I was today.
**THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING** **I AM NOT GOING TO TRY TO MAKE THIS SOUND INTERESTING OR TRY TO MAKE YOU LIKE ME
“…universal and relatable.” That is what Publishers Weekly said about Megan Boyle’s LIVEBLOG (Tyrant, 2018), a raw, genre-defying tome that documents several months of the author’s life in 2013, when she was living with her parents and consuming lots of drugs—a 706-page mental breakdown recorded in real time that Boyle, just now recovering from the haze of making what author Juliet Escoria calls “the Bible for the 21st century,” is finally ready to reflect on.
BRIAN ALAN ELLIS: I remember LIVEBLOG was originally supposed to come out in 2015 but didn’t.
MEGAN BOYLE: Yes, it was supposed to come out November 2015.
BAE: What drugs were you taking?
MB: I was prescribed 10mg Adderall twice a day and quickly worked it up to 30mg twice a day. I rarely used it as prescribed, 2014-2017. But I think the worst of my addiction was in 2014-2015. I would stay awake for days, spending increasingly less time on “actually editing sentences” and more time picking at my skin, which I began to believe had been infected/infiltrated by nanotechnology. I was mostly sleepless and tweaked out, entertaining delusions about what was happening to me, and trying to hold onto my sanity, which began to matter less to me. I stopped responding to texts and emails, and people stopped sending them. One good thing that came from that period is weaning myself off of Xanax, with the help of my psychiatrist. I tried micro (and macro) dosing LSD a few times in 2015, as a substitute for Adderall, which I think didn’t help my mental state other than providing a temporary alternative. I also went on Vyvanse for a couple months in 2015, for the same “temporary alternative” purpose.
Susan Sontag wrote that to photograph people is to violate them, seeing them never as they see themselves; Amanda Bynes tweeted that she would prefer if press only used her selfies.
Rachel White with Marie Calloway on Thought Catalog
“A true understanding and humble estimate of oneself is the highest and most valuable of all lessons. To take no account of oneself, but always to think well and highly of others is the highest wisdom and perfection. Should you see another person openly doing, or carrying out a wicked purpose, do not on that account consider yourself better than him, for you cannot tell how long you will remain in a state of grace. We are all frail; consider none more frail than yourself.”
— Thomas a Kempis
"You know the inspiration for Zou Lei's character was, various people I could cite. People like Joan Jett got into my consciousness. I mean that's absolutely it. You know kind of rebellious figure you know dark hair, physical. You know she's muscular." - Atticus Lish on Joan Jett being an inspiration for his heroine Zou Lei from Preparation for the Next Life. From "Burgers & Books" with George Stephanopoulos for ABC
