Girls Can Kiss Now
A pop culture wonder from one of the funniest people on the internet.
I became obsessed with Jill Gutowitz like a lot of people, via her scream-lol inducing daily golden nuggets of 140 perfectly constructed characters on Twitter — remember those heady days? Obvs, this was a while ago.
Let me start by saying that Jill, first and foremost, is an exemplary journalist (she’ll be furious that I didn’t write lesbian there) but her specialty is Popular Culture. She’s a writer of extraordinary talent that I think often doesn’t get the credit she deserves because of what she is predominantly commissioned to write about, but her writing is reflective of our times in a way that feels essential and generation specific — and therefore contains insights others, through no fault of their own, would simply miss. It also always feels like you are in an epically intimate conversation with her, huddled in the corner booth of a dive bar, drinks hugged close, eye-spy surveying a room full of celebrity mishaps and weird dating scenarios, and yet the conversation is still somehow deeply intellectual. You feel cleverer and better informed after spending time drunk on her words regardless of the subject matter, you are also guaranteed to have laughed a lot, that’s Jill.
Her version of Pop Culture is one of those magnifying mirrors held up close, daring to look at who we are through a lens of which one of the famouses we are currently obsessed with. And all of it done with deft, obliterating humour.
I’m thrilled to say I’m on IRL first name terms with Jill I’m not just being grossly overly-familiar for no good reason, but when she told me over a deeply vegan Mexican brunch in LA that she wanted to write a collection of essays about the experience of discovering that she was gay through this same lens, I also screamed but this time I did not lol because I knew she was dead serious and that the book itself would be a left-field, side-swipe, sneak up on you, triumph.
And it is. It is unapologetically rigorous, dangerously articulate, effortlessly acerbic and hilariously sapphic as only she can be and yet of course, it reads as speed-easy as your fave writer on Substack’s easy-read Sunday offering. (Absolutely not referring to myself here, btw.) I devoured it in two sittings.
It acts as both a historical record and a landmark document of cultural significance, tracking the gigantic cultural shifts we have all been subject to over the course of the past twenty years — how pop culture both feeds into and feeds off that and how that impacts all of our lives. From the invention of the internet, to being door-stopped by the FBI as a result of one of her tweets. Yes, actually. She shares deeply personal, heartfelt and blindingly self-aware observations, alongside nuanced zeitgeist commentary which is adroitly threaded all the way through. I learnt a ton about the queer experience - or at least, hers - as well as being reminded of the painful if beautiful fragility of being human. I also LOL-ed a lot.
I was showing the book to a friend at lunch earlier this week and the lovely person serving us caught sight of its gorgeous deep cobalt blue cover and gasped, “Oh my god, my friend is OBSESSED with that book.” I smiled winningly back at her, thrilled for my pal back in LA none-the-wiser, “Yeah,” I said, “you should get it, it’s a truly exceptional piece of work.”