2.3.2022

The 33 Project

Morning! Things are chugging along over here — nothing all that exciting to report. I’ve been enjoying catching up on the seemingly endless supply of good writing from substacks and outlets and Jami Attenberg’s memoir, which is excellent. On to this week’s recs.

1/ The Believer delivered two incredible, unrelated (but maybe kind of related?) postings recently that I want to share. The first is this interview with Andrew Garfield. His portrayal of Jonathan Larson in tick, tick…Boom! is so perfect there’s really not much else to say. In this interview he talks about his family and his outlook on things and it’s just a lovely profile of an artist working at the top of his game.

Here’s a particularly meaningful passage:

I think about a profound moment when my mom was sick with cancer. I was struggling with it, and before she passed, I was, like any person, resistant and angry and having terrible anxiety about it and what it meant and where it was leading. It was a really hard thing to accept, of course. And it still is. I still find it hard to accept that she’s no longer here.

But I remember I was walking along — I was on Fire Island, in New York, prepping for tick, tick… Boom! or Tammy Faye, and I had to take a break because I had this knot in my chest and I just couldn’t get rid of it.

I went for a walk on the beach. The sun was setting and it was freezing. I found I needed to jump, so I just jumped into the ocean. And it’s funny: as soon as my full body…