This is the type of thing I think is exciting and fun and deeply sad and beautiful; I am a dork, but I’m also a dork who is writing a book about Lincoln, so I guess that’s my excuse for missing some great parties and a cookout.

The drive from Chicago to Springfield takes about three and a half hours, usually. But Juneteenth is a huge citywide day of celebration, and the Obama Presidential Center had opened to great fanfare the previous day. On Juneteenth, it was open to the public, and thousands of ticket holders were in town. Sitting and former heads of state were also here, along with a bevy of celebrities, and with so many road closures, block parties and armored security vehicles, my trip ended up being longer than I’d anticipated.

I should’ve thought of this and left town earlier, but I ended up on a five-hour drive rather than a 3.5-hour drive. I didn’t mind it. What a joyful day full of Chicago families having cookouts, festivals, parties and more. I had regrettably declined an invite to my friend’s family Juneteenth party specifically because I wanted to go do research down in Springfield.

In retrospect, part of me wishes I had stayed in town and eaten her family’s soul food buffet until I felt drunk with joy. I would’ve brought a strawberry pie from a good bakery, because trust and believe I’m not trying to bring MY cooking or baking to anybody’s party. To do so at a Juneteenth party would be some kind of a hate crime.

Anyway, turned out the last museum entrance was at 4:00 p.m., and I realized while sitting in traffic that I was not going to make it. I spent a few hours resting in my $75 hotel room and then turned my rental car back to Chicago. I wanted to sleep in my own bed, and I knew traffic would be better in the middle of the night than the following morning. Plus, I had a tween’s birthday party to attend the next day.

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The upside of all those hours in the car was that I got to spend many hours listening to the audiobook versions of hard copy books I have for research. I am often better able to absorb information by listening rather than by reading. I’ll hear something in the audiobook that I completely missed whilst reading the actual book. I make a note, and go back to the physical book to re-read and then, if necessary, cite in my research.

Primarily, I listened to The 1619 Project, The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner, and An Inconvenient Widow by Lois Romano. These are not upbeat narratives, to say the least, so I took a few breaks to take in the rural farmland scenery and, of course, to stop at McDonald’s (twice. Disgusting. But delicious.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd - not the married couple, but the individual people who eventually came to court one another in the late 1830s and very early 1840s. As I work on my own biography of Lincoln (Abraham Fucking Lincoln, tentatively due out Fall ‘27 from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette), I’ve had to find a personal connection to the main character.

As an author, one typically does need a personal connection of some kind to one’s main character and even one’s main cast of characters. This can be especially true for those cast as villains. If you’re going to spend one or two or more years sitting in a world with particular people, even simply in your own mind, you’d better find them compelling, even if you don’t like them.

I am not writing a biography of Mary Todd, but I think I get her. I am writing a biography of Lincoln, and he’s harder to understand. That attempt to really know the man is, in many ways, what has powered my main creative endeavor for nearly two years.

Like other biographers before me, I’m trying to pull a fully realized human being out of the cardboard cutout sold to the masses for generations.

We try and fail and succeed in our own ways, through books and films and scholarly papers and school reports and art projects and public monuments, to see a man who led a deliberately private life, and who kept his inner self and early life as obscured as possible.

It is easier to buy into the myth of Saint Abraham of America, a kind of human rights Santa Claus, than it is to dive deeper. You’d have to be a little mad to even try. Luckily, I am more than a little mad.

CHICAGO! Tonight at 8 p.m. at Lincoln Lodge I’ve got a comedy show with the legendary Chad the Bird. It’s our final one before summer break so c’mon down! Tickets are $10+ available in advance and at the door. We’ve got some great “guest professors” aka comics lined up to talk to you about SUMMER.

My buddy Nik (born in New Mexico, now here in Chicago) is amazing at massage and their business is called Bondo Pearl Bodywork. Support a local queer-owned small business for Pride or just because your shoulders hurt! Highly recommended by me, a person who sits too much and types a lot. They’re also great with athletes.

Check out the Zinn Education Project’s lessons and info on Juneteenth: Teaching Outside the Textbook.

Take good care of yourselves this weekend. I’ll be doing some research for a biography of Abraham Lincoln, which means I’m missing a cookout to take a solo road trip to be extra nerdy. Feel free to drop suggestions for great audiobooks I should listen to on the way there and back.

Best wishes,

Sara

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It felt good to feel good about the NBA finals. It felt good to see so many people I know and like and love having a fantastic time. It felt good to see my old city explode with elation, time and time again.

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But man, was I confused in my happiness. Like…I am 45.5 years old. Never in my lifetime…til now. Thankfully my buddy , born and raised in NYC, also transplanted to Chicago, was ready to receive texts like this one.

I was Very Online throughout the finals and I had to take Instagram off my phone the morning after Game 5 (that’s me above, hyped and exhausted with an iced espresso.) I barely slept that night. It’s wild to see a team that has just been part of the fabric of your upbringing finally win it all when you’ve not seen that in your lifetime. I’m not even a huge basketball guy, but when you grow up in a family that loves sports you do inherit teams in a de facto way. Maybe you go to Mass four times a year but you’re still Catholic, know what I mean?

I have a lot of memories of falling asleep to the squeak of sneakers on the court on the TV. Basketball is way more exciting than golf, which is the best game to nap to. Baseball is second. Football is third. Basketball is last because, like hockey, it moves fast and it’s inherently exciting. (I have never fallen asleep to a hockey game and cannot imagine it.)

When I was growing up in New Jersey, the Knicks were inescapable - and inescapably disappointing. We had the Nets too, but we never seemed to expect huge things of them, and when I was a young adult they announced plans to move to Brooklyn (I mean, I did the same thing, can’t exactly blame ‘em for wanting to find a fresh new joint and more money, though I find it gross that the Bears claim to be on the verge of moving to Hammond, IN - but that’s another story in my new adopted home city.)

Alright, I gotta do more work and read my editor’s notes on the first few chapters of my next book. Thanks for helping me warm up.

I hope you’re well today. I think Spike Lee, the longtime de facto mayor of my old neighborhood, probably is. And that makes me happy, personally! I’ll always love New York and I always want great things for that great city.

Let the record show: I’ll always love New Jersey more. And where was Jalen Brunson born? That’s right, NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY.

(I did eventually fall asleep on Sunday, thank goodness.)

Best wishes,

Sara

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CLASS! with Chad the Bird and Sara Benincasa on 6/18/26

An earlier version of this post was shared first on Patreon.

I’ve always loved the rain. Not the long headache-inducing humid gray and cloudy days of my New Jersey youth, which always seemed to arrive on weekends, but a proper rainstorm. Better still if thunder rumbles into a loud growl and zig-zag lightning slashes the sky.

When I lived across the street from Lake Michigan, I marveled at the beautiful storms – electric, haunting, rolling in cerulean and darkening to navy and black. I would sit in my apartment, agog with delight and a little shiver of fear as the winds whipped around my building and rattled the big glass windows.

When I lived in New Mexico, I loved to watch the snowstorms and rainstorms advance along the high desert before they hit our community at the foot of the Organ Mountains. It was incredible to me that I could see a sky so wide that distant patches of land were bathed in total sun, while others were soaked in rain.

Something about the rain excites me and settles me all at once. It resets my energy and my spirit. I wonder if I’d value it so much if I lived on Vancouver Island, where I once dreamed of going to graduate school and where I think it rains a lot more than it does here.

Big storms can be frightening, and I don’t revel in a storm so harsh it destroys homes and lives. A regular thunder and lightning show with pounding raindrops is good enough for me.

Rainstorms make me grateful for something so much bigger than all of us. In these moments I am happy to be small and awed.

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I’m hard at work on a biography of Abraham Lincoln (I put the announcement from last year below.) I’m always interested in your thoughts on Lincoln, your favorite Lincoln books and TV and myths and stories, and the questions YOU want answered, so feel free to leave ‘em below (comments are open.)

I had a real good time at the American Writers Festival this weekend, moderating a conversation between bestselling romantasy babes Naima Simone (born near me in Jersey!!!!) and Jeaniene Frost (a hilarious queen.) Got to sit and chat with Reza Aslan, see my pal Daniel Kraus in conversation with the fantastic Susan Orlean, listen to John Fugelsang in conversation with my friend Annabelle Gurwitch, talk to my pals Sarah Hartshorne and Angela Nissel, and even take a pic with the Chicago Public Library mascot, an owl who kind of looks like a loris and also a bat. More photos on my Instagram.

I’ve got a Patreon where I share way more photos than I do here, and some of the posts are public. I also write a bit more loosely and creatively at times. Thank you for the support there; I work full-time at a nonprofit and the freelance money from Patreon and Substack really help me pay the utility bills!

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I’m co-hosting CLASS! with Chad the Bird at Lincoln Lodge on Thursday, June 18th at 8 p.m. We’re talking VACATION, baby! Your three “assistant professors” will address the topic with their customary comedic ridiculousness. If cost is a factor for you, just LMK and I’m happy to comp you.

My cousin and friend Gia just had a lifesaving hysterectomy after years of dangerous, excessive bleeding and tons of medical debt. We’re trying to raise enough to cover this surgery so she can go back to work and finish cosmetology school. Her GoFundMe is here. I’m happy to have family of choice and glad to support them.

I love you, I like you, I appreciate you, I hope you’re well.

Best wishes from Chicago,

Sara

Sometimes I set a timer for ten minutes and write until the timer goes off, about everything and anything and nothing at all. I welcome you to join me if you need to knock some cobwebs from the corners of your brain or if you just feel like doing something creative for ten minutes.

Here we go…

I’m doing an interview for a podcast in a moment. Even though I know one of the hosts and get to talk about one of my favorite subjects (Sierra Online games from the ‘80s and early ‘90s), I’m still a little anxious. Not about the prospect of the interview, exactly, but about other things that floated through the day like motes of dust, traces of potential panic seeming to hover around me.

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It’s spring. It’s been spring. It’s still spring. Thank God.

I saw somebody asked the very common “What’s your guilty pleasure show/book/film?” question in one of the many celebrity interviews on my YouTubes. And I thought, not for the first time, that I don’t have any guilty pleasures when it comes to art.

I haven’t had a drink in 7 years and 352 days. I take my drugs where I can get ‘em - prescribed by my shrink and poured into my face by America’s own 21st century P.T. Barnum, Mr. Andrew Cohen of Bravo. I’ll read a stupid novel. I’m here to enjoy my life as best I can, when I can, and if that means camp and schlock, camp and schlock it is.

Also, I’ve kept some houseplants alive for a year and need to acknowledge that fact.

There’s no real way to sum up all the things that have gone on in my life or in our collective lives or even on a single episode of Widows Bay recently - nor do you come here for that. (Maybe you do - if so, I am sorry I cannot deliver that specific hat trick of summation.)

So, off the dome, here are a few random thoughts.

1. Real Housewives of Rhode Island and Widows Bay are perfect shows with, essentially, an identical premise: people in coastal New England are fucked up and even their boats can’t save them.

2. If you’re in Chicago and want to come to a FREE LITERARY EVENT WITH AWWWWTHUZZZZ, me and Naima Simone and Jeaniene Frost are gonna chop it up about classic tales retold on June 7 at 11 a.m. at the legendary and beloved Harold Washington Library Center. Here’s a Chicago Tribune article about it with some photos of me and other scrivener type ladies.

3. Here’s the full list of participants in case you wanna come see your crush talk about words and stuff.

4. My friend rescued a kitten and it’s so fucking cute. I get why they made kittens that way, I really do.

5. If you got depressed as fuck in late winter and early spring and that shit lingered, I am waving at you from my perch on this secondhand arm chair.

6. I’m doing a comedy show with a bird puppet and other intellectual legends on June 18 at Lincoln Lodge at 8 p.m. It’s always a great crowd and the topic this time is VACATION or maybe it’s SUMMER, I forget which we picked, but entrance is cheap and so are the drinks, and it’s gonna be stupid and smart and silly.

I wish you the most beautiful day you can possibly have, and if that just means drinking water and going back to bed, I hope that is excellent for you, too. Seriously.

Love,

Sara

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Sometimes your family tree has people you’re proud to claim. Sometimes it’s rotten on every branch. And sometimes, because you’re cut off from your ancestors for one of many reasons, it seems mostly empty. Then you spit into a tube and send it off in the mail, and a few weeks later you learn more about the strangers who made you.

I am writing a biography of a dead stranger, and thus have been researching a family tree that isn’t my own. It belongs to Abraham Lincoln, about whom, as you may imagine, plenty of in-depth research has already been done.

Here are just a few things about Lincoln:

1. Abraham Lincoln’s mother was named Nancy Hanks. She was born out of wedlock to a teen mother, Lucy Hanks, and grew up in what are now the states of Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky. She died in Indiana of poisoning by white snakeroot, colloquially known as MILK SICKNESS (don’t Google it.)

2. Yes, Tom Hanks really is related to Abraham Lincoln through Nancy.

3. So is George Clooney, who (like Lincoln) was born in Kentucky.

4. My adopted home state of Illinois must reckon with the reality that the man was truly not even HERE until his early twenties! In fact, for the past few years, the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park has drawn approximately 250,000 visitors annually to rural Central Kentucky. All this tourism helps pump about $23 million into the local economy.

5. An estimated 15 to 18,000 books have been published about him since he was murdered by a hateful, racist, unfortunately attractive famous actor, John Wilkes Booth, in 1865. Booth, that fucking baggadouche, died with photos of like five or six broads in his pocket.

6. The vast majority of those 15 to 18,000 Lincoln books are by white men, though it is noteworthy that they come from every point on the political spectrum.

I believe that every biographer builds a new Lincoln. I think that’s true of ANYBODY who writes a biography about ANYONE.

When others before you have profiled the same person, giving your spin on their life is a bit like retelling The Odyssey. You’ve got to hit the same beats, not skip over any vital points - but how you tell the story has got to be interesting and a little different.

Unless you’ve uncovered something shocking or fascinating (or both!) in independent research, the thing that’s going to make your book different is your voice.

You’re not reinventing the wheel, but you are cleaning it up and showing folks new angles on it. Maybe your version of the wheel is covered in puffy paint or glitter or, perhaps, projections from your own life and times. This can be helpful, or it can obscure the story you’re trying to tell.

Lincoln is not just Lincoln. He is often a vehicle for talking about race, class, gender, American history and so much more. He is therefore an intimidating subject to tackle, and I spent most of last year doing research and feeling really fucking inadequate. This was clear to me when listening to a couple of early interviews I’ve done about the process of writing the book.

I feel more confident now. You spend enough time in the archives, online or in person, and you begin to get a sense of who you think the subject was. It helps that I’m not trying to pretend to be anything other than a very curious explorer.

Trying to figure out Lincoln is trying to figure out America. I don’t sleep that well, but then, I never did.

I’m wondering if you’ve ever tackled a project or task or relationship that felt like too much, until the moment you decided that you could do it. Maybe the moment happened when you forgave yourself for not being perfect.

Maybe you just had to put your head down and get the fucking thing done. It sounds like a lot of parenting is exactly that.

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Speaking of famiglia, I’ve decided to do one of those DNA tests and pay strangers to analyze my saliva (some say they ought to pay ME!) I’ve done it before, years ago, but I know those tests are updated now and this will be with a different company.

I think the desire to do this yet again after all these years came out of researching Lincoln’s family tree, and seeing how biographers have interpreted what we know about his heritage.

Lincoln was quite curious about his genealogy - we have letters to prove as much. How many of us can relate to wanting to better know where we come from?

In many cases, often due to structural racism in the United States, the written records simply don’t exist, or are too fucking hard to find. But in other cases, family secrets are hidden deliberately, and they remain secrets forever.

His mother was born illegitimate, and apparently Lincoln himself told law partner William Herndon that he felt children born out of wedlock had a stronger innate intelligence and hardiness (I am paraphrasing broadly here.) He also said that his grandmother had been a poor girl, and a wealthy planter (read: enslaver) was responsible for Lucy’s pregnancy with Nancy.

He thought some of his better traits were from his mother, who is described often in the literature as intelligent. And he gave credit, at least in the conversation I’m referencing, to Nancy’s father’s line for her unusual cleverness, and for his own.

Lincoln probably had no idea who his real maternal grandfather was. He heard family rumors, perhaps embellishing them on his own during the toughest parts of his upbringing under his father’s roof.

His intellectual prowess may have been inborn, but it was surely enhanced and encouraged by the loving stepmother who came into his life when he was young and did the real work of raising him.

But we tell ourselves the stories we need to hear.

There is this idea - and Lincoln seems to have had it - that certain non-physical qualities are handed down to you through your lineage. I suppose the modern field of epigenetics and the study of intergenerational trauma seems to, in some measured and real ways, support this theory.

I think Lincoln would’ve liked to learn more about that.

Comedy things

Tickets are going fast for CLASS! at Lincoln Lodge in Chicago on May 21. Get ‘em here! It’s a hilarious semi-educational comedy extravaganza in which Chad the Bird and I are your esteemed professors. This month we’re welcoming Whitney Chitwood, Blender Bluid and another special guest professor! They get health insurance and tenure at our hallucinatory university based solely on how much you laugh and clap, so come support them.

My hilarious buddy Jodie Sweetin is doing Netflix is a Joke Festival with her incredible Smoke Show with Jodie Sweetin May 9 at the Westside Theater in Los Angeles. I just did the show in San Francisco earlier this year. It’s nuts and I love it. And they’ve got my friends Jon Gabrus, Jenny Zigrino and Austin Kress plus another fucking incredible comic TBA. Ticket link is here!

My pal Lane Moore is here in Chicago at the Den Theatre on April 26! She’s doing her long-running variety dating show TINDER LIVE!, which is bonkers and made me feel like I was high when I did it. It’s so high-speed and involves a ton of improvised riffing and truly wild live dating chats. Bring your friends and anyone you know who has experienced the madness of dating apps. Get your tickets here.

Have a great week.

Love,

Sara

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A whole website (with info on how to hire me to teach or act or write, etc.)

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FROM THE BUREAU OF EDITORIAL CORRECTIONS: An earlier version of this post used confusing syntax that may have led the casual reader to believe that Abraham Lincoln died with “photos of five or six broads” in his pocket. Nay! ‘Twas the scoundrel John Wilkes Booth who perished by gunshot wound whilst carrying a veritable fuckbook in his filthy pocket! The author does not regret the error, because it would be kinda cool and weird if Abe were laying all kinds of pipe on pretty ladies in secret. Alas, all signs point to him not having a mistress whilst in the White House.

I used to live higher up in a building with an incredible view of Lake Michigan, and taking photos when it stormed was one of my favorite hobbies in the 18-ish months that I lived in that spot.

In my newer place, I love hearing the rain hit the pipes and the windowsill and the porch. I love knowing that green things are growing and that maybe I am, too, albeit painfully at times.

Rainy days are for my favorite foods: matzo ball soup, tea, and maybe a warm cinnamon roll (no icing, thank you.)

Rainy days are for wandering in the park, with or without an umbrella.

I am very lucky to be dry inside my home and to look outside and see the raindrops collecting on the tree branches with their new green buds.

I hope you are having a good day.

Comedy in Chicago and Los Angeles

Tickets are going fast for CLASS! at Lincoln Lodge in Chicago on May 21. Get ‘em here! It’s a hilarious semi-educational comedy extravaganza in which Chad the Bird and I are your esteemed professors. This month we’re welcoming Whitney Chitwood, Blender Bluid and another special guest professor! They get health insurance and tenure at our hallucinatory university based solely on how much you laugh and clap, so come support them.

My hilarious buddy Jodie Sweetin is doing Netflix is a Joke with her incredible Smoke Show with Jodie Sweetin May 9 at the Westside Theater in Los Angeles. I just did the show in San Francisco earlier this year. It’s nuts and I love it. And they’ve got my friends Jon Gabrus, Jenny Zigrino and Austin Kress plus the fucking incredible Irene Tu on the show. Ticket link is here!

My pal Lane Moore is here in Chicago at the Den Theatre on April 26! She’s doing her long-running variety dating show TINDER LIVE!, which is bonkers and made me feel like I was high when I did it. It’s so high-speed and involves a ton of improvised riffing and truly wild live dating chats. Bring your friends and anyone you know who has experienced the madness of dating apps. Get your tickets here.

Have a great week.

Love,

Sara

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Miry’s List

Depression has been up my ass lately, and perhaps also up yours, so I felt it would be a nice idea to make a nice list of nice things in April. Feel free to list some more nice things in the comments. Maybe it will cheer some of us up.

So here is the first thing: a story I wrote for the New York Times Magazine just won the American Society of Magazine Editors Award for Best Illustrated Story! It’s called “An Agoraphobe Goes to the Grocery Store.” Here’s a gift link.

If you’d like to see a teaser reel that I narrated on Instagram, check it out here. It’s animated by Nata Metlukh, who also did the illustrations for the print edition.

Also, should you be in the market for a voiceover artist (or a speaker on mental health awareness, or an actor or writer or person who loves goats etc.) my reps are listed here.

Here we go with some other nice things:

1. The tree outside my office window here in Chicago has buds on it. That’s really the nice part, but as a side note, I think squirrels and/or birds are fucking in or around it. I hope their babies are adorable and healthy. That was your Midwestern arboreal erotica update.

2. There are various free playlists of music available online that purport to be good for those with ADHD and anxiety, and I think they sometimes work! You’ve got to Pavlov yourself into it, but it can work.

3. The Zinn Education Project continues to do incredible work.

4. Cafe Bustelo continues to exist.

5. My friend co-wrote “Bigfoot: The Musical” with America’s sweetheart, Amber Ruffin, and it’s doing very well off-Broadway.

6. Those astronauts made it home and they seem to actually like each other still. I am a lifelong NASA fan due to childhood propaganda (space academy in Alabama) so this brings me much joy for the folks who get paid to make amazing shit like this happen in front of all our eyes.

I hope you’re having a beautiful weekend, or at least one in which you’ve decided to get through whatever needs getting through. It can be hard out there and inside our own brains, and I give you credit for being here, breathing, feeling whatever you need to feel, and doing the best you can with what you have. These may sound like empty words but I mean them.

Love,

Sara

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As a human who mostly stays inside and types, I would love to know what you’re up to this weekend. Please feel free to hop into the comments (which are open to all) and share what you’re looking forward to (or not looking forward to.)

I probably don’t even have to say this, but please be kind to each other if you respond to other people’s posts in the comments section, especially since different folks are gathering with family for different spring holidays these days, and that can make it a tender time.

Here are some things to check out, consider, or merely skim…

A story from Block Club Chicago about a Mexican American enclave and their annual Via Crucis procession

In far less important storytelling news, I will probably watch the season premiere of Bravo’s The Valley

I’m currently (as of publication time!) giving random advice over on Instagram in my stories. It may be gone by the time you check it out. It helps me take a break every hour from work and reminds me to stretch. Also, people will share very interesting questions. I keep them anonymous if I answer them, of course. I just answered somebody’s question about agoraphobia, a topic with which I am intimately familiar (that’s a link to buy my memoir, AGORAFABULOUS!: DISPATCHES FROM MY BEDROOM, on Amazon or Audible. You can find it on Bookshop.org and other places, too.)

I’m interested in this book I bought, It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. It’s by Mark Wolynn and has a nice blurb from Buddhist psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach, whose work I enjoy. Wolynn is a psychologist and he’s also a poet who has been published in The New Yorker, which is pretty neat.

I need style advice, by the way, or at least recommendations for books that help you figure that out. I really am enjoying Law Roach’s book, because I enjoy his voice, personality, and wit.

I’m trying to figure out what clothes I want to wear now, at my grown age, with the body I have and the color preferences I have and the budget I have. I prefer secondhand clothing where possible, and just purchased a secondhand piece on Rachel Antonoff’s Round Trip site.

This winter and early spring, I’ve been indoors in comfy clothes and pajamas so much, and I love that, but there will come a time when I need to be out in front of people more often, telling stories and answering questions and smelling good and hopefully having fun the whole time. I want to dress in a way that pleases me and helps me feel comfortable.

I also think I’m going to re-purchase my old favorite, the late, great Kevyn Aucoin’s Making Faces. What a lovely man he seems to have been, and what a great teacher.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this little ramble. Remember to tell me what you’re up to this weekend. I hope you take very good care of yourself, as there is only one you in this world.

Love,

Sara

Patreon (a great way to support my art and cats)

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INARA (a wonderful nonprofit supporting children affected by war in Europe, Africa and the Middle East)

It’s Saturday morning in Chicago and I’m enjoying too much espresso with a splash of half-and-half, so that means I have Thoughts on Things. They shall be random and I hope you enjoy along with your mimosas and your psychedelics or whatever it is you have for your weekend breakfasts and brunches.

TV THINGS

I am going to begin PROPERLY watching the entirety of The Gilded Age from the beginning. My sister-in-law, a schoolteacher with a speciality in advocating for the parents of children with developmental disabilities, and my friend Sabrina, a comedy producer in LA, are both watching it and have encouraged me to do so, and Sabrina’s take is very interesting and made me realize it’ll be good viewing for me.

I’ve seen clips and certain episodes, because I like to see bits of anything buddies are in, and I greatly admire Ashlie Atkinson, who plays Mamie Fish.

Ashlie is one of those actors who can do anything - funny, scary, sad, sexy, charming, off-putting, whatever the role calls for. She also really supports theatre and the arts in her homeland of Arkansas. That’s one of the reasons I admire her - for years, I’ve seen her really advocate for different things that raise up the artists in the place she’s from. This bio is a few years old but you can learn more about Ashlie here at Arkansas Cinema Society or on your personal Internet.

Also, my friend Jennifer Ashley Wright wrote a biography of Mamie Fish that I enjoyed very much and was excited to blurb. (“To blurb” is my favorite author verb. “To write” is another story, as it were.)

I like to hear my sister-in-law’s take on these things because she really remembers storylines, episodes, characters, and can talk about the progression of a character throughout different moments and eras within the story.

She is a completist and will watch the entirety of a show, whether it’s her beloved Insecure or Sex and the City, The Gilded Age, or any given Real Housewives franchise (range!) And I know that if I have trouble keeping track of characters (recognizing faces can sometimes be difficult for me, especially when they’re flat on TV and not in three-dimensional human space) she can help me separate them through other characteristics.

My friend Sabrina brings a questioning and inquisitive attitude to a lot of programming, with the critical eye of a longtime cinema fan who has written reviews and analysis over the years. It’s not that her takes are dry or intellectual, but that she can get into the world of the show but also question it in ways that allow others to enter into the world even if they wouldn’t ordinarily see themselves being drawn to such a thing (she is responsible for my gentle obsession with Bravo’s The Valley despite my never having watched Vanderpump Rules.)

Sabrina produces Smoke Show with Jodie Sweetin, one of the great comedy shows I got to be a guest on in January at San Francisco Sketchfest. If you’re in Los Angeles, you can catch the show on April 10 on the East side for their SMOKECHELLA festival of madness, or the following month as part of the Netflix Is A Joke festival on May 9 on the West side.

Now, on to more personal things…

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I enjoy tarot a lot. I pull cards for myself nearly every day. When a friend wants me to pull cards for them, I usually do it, if I’ve got the time and my mind is reasonably settled (this has not been the case lately, but that’s why I have therapy, medication and other tools, thank goodness.)

I think people can be gifted in many ways, but objects are not magical. You, personally, can charge them with meaning and can derive great benefit from carrying them with you or working with them. You may find yourself better able to access the Divine when you’ve made a ritual using them, but I do not believe the Divine is hiding within them.

Objects, including tarot decks, can be given and received in a loving, sacred way that can feel deeply profound and healing. They can also be used as beer coasters or to wipe one’s ass.

Like me, tarot has Italian roots. The whole thing is based in part on a card game developed in Italy during the early Renaissance, and it came from using regular playing cards for divination. There are versions from a little later (or even roughly the same era, depending whom you ask) that came out of what are now the countries of Germany, Austria and France.

Across cultures, there are other divinatory card decks and tools of prognostication and creativity and spell-casting and all that jazz.

As near as we can tell based on genealogical research, genetic testing and family lore, my father’s people are descended from the Irish Catholics, the English Catholics and Protestants, and the Scottish Jewish community of Edinburgh. My mother’s people are descended from Sicilian and Italian Catholics and the Arabs of the charming Greater Jerusalem Metro Area (religious affiliation unknown).

All of these internally diverse groups have their own superstitions, rituals, and divinatory practices that are outside the confines of the major organized religions in which they may or may not have taken part. Sometimes the practices - what we might call folk magic - vary from region to region and village to village.

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The cards are a tool. They’ve got signs and symbols on them, and generally agreed-upon meanings to those signs and symbols. Then individual authors have individual spins on those general signs and symbols.

Personally, I don’t read tarot in a predictive, oooooky-spoooooooky way. I don’t see the future, although like any human, I’m automatically constantly gathering data points and putting together a probable picture of outcomes.

I mean this in the most mundane way - for example, if I know that folks tend to run the red light at a particular intersection in Chicago, I will pause when walking, even when I see that walk signal and hear that auditory cue, and I will look an extra time both ways for speeding vehicles before I proceed.

This happens, too, with people I’ve observed over time. This pattern recognition is also how you and I have learned to identify people and places that make us feel safe. If our safety is disrupted, we adjust expectations along with this new data point.

Sometimes humans can be like speeding vehicles as well. But just because somebody behaves in a pattern doesn’t mean I’m magical for recognizing the pattern. It just means I kept my eyes and ears open, probably because they reminded me of somebody scary from my childhood.

The cards aren’t scary and they aren’t inherently magical. Any deck I own was manufactured by a for-profit publisher here or abroad, designed by humans, and sold for profit in a store or online.

There are plenty of decks other than the popular Rider-Waite-Smith one manufactured en masse and sold for decades here in the United States and abroad. Rider, Waite, and Pamela Colman Smith (the dudes had first names too, I assume) were not made of magic.

A really talented, ethical tarot reader may earn money giving readings, and I think a great storyteller with insight into your human experience ought to be paid well for their services if they wish to earn money for it. A couple of times a year, I’ll pay for a tarot reading. It’s usually with a new person about whom I’ve read some good reviews. I don’t like the reviews where somebody says something like, “CLARITA PREDICTED MY FUTURE HUSBAND EXACTLY,” because that’s creepy and probably false.

I do like the reviews where somebody writes something like, “CLARITA HELPED ME SEE MY PROBLEM FROM A FEW DIFFERENT ANGLES AND GAVE ME THE CONFIDENCE TO FINALLY CONTACT A GOOD, LICENSED THERAPIST.” Sometimes a tarot reader is a scared person’s first stop before finally going to a psychologist, a medical doctor, or an attorney about something necessary and important. I think that’s perfectly fine!

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Sometimes it is easier to be honest with somebody you don’t know well, somebody to whom you give cash money in exchange for 30 to 60 minutes with some cards and maybe some pretty rocks and candles.

Some of the readers I like have a far more spiritual and magickal approach that is authentic to their abilities and gifts, but still grounded in the reality that we all need healthcare, food, water and some degree of safety. In other words, none of these readers has ever told me just to smile until it’s all better, or tried to sell me some cure for my depression, or anything like that. To me they are artists and interpreters and healers.

If you’re interested, I have greatly enjoyed and benefited from readings by Alisha Ahmed of Scintillae newsletter and The Activist Witch YouTube channel; (also a great tarot author); and other great readers.

I wish you well and hope you are healthy and safe or that you are on your way to it. Lots of love from cold Chicago.

Love,

Sara

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Having been stressed as fuck lately, and also having thought a lot about horticultural therapy and how everybody from veterans of war to friends of mine to Abraham Fucking Lincoln feels or felt better among green growing things, I have determined to give gardening another go.

I have a porch, not a yard, and I have neither the willpower nor the talent to turn it into the flowering paradise of my dreams. However, it is spring, and I can do certain things.

My initial attempt at container gardening last year was successful until it wasn’t. I was supposed to cover certain things in certain ways when it got cold, and I forgot. Maybe they are dead forever. We shall see.

On the upside, I have managed not to kill a few houseplants that live inside my abode to this very day. That brings me no small amount of joy.

I want the type of things that I can have out on my porch in a container year-round. They will blossom at some point and they will appear to die at some point, but they will not be dead, just sleeping. Then they will wake up again and begin anew.

If you can tell me how to do this, I will do this.

If you feel like hibernating, still, I get it and I’m right there with you.

If you are happy and energetic, I aspire to be like you and am making moves to join your culture.

If you would like to read more about my recent adventures and misadventures, check out my Patreon. Our comedy show, CLASS!, is taking off April but you can buy tickets for our May 21 show here.

Sending you all my best from Chicago, here in my writing hobbit hole.

Love,

Sara

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P.S. Congrats to on your impending pub date! I got my advance copy (thank you) and will be reading it in the bathtub soon.

I think it might be my kitten’s first hailstorm. There is thunder and lightning and rain, of course, but then occasional hail. Ice balls raining from the sky can be quite noisy when hitting a chimney, or a windowpane, or a roof. The hail got so loud earlier that the kitten, who is 11 months old and perhaps not quite a baby anymore, looked alarmed.

He wanted to sit near me, but so did the big 13-year-old cat, who does not trust him. Her reasons are entirely justified, as he either does not understand or does not care that she actually never, ever wants to play with him.

I usually take a nap in between my regular work and my book work. I am so fortunate to get to do this. Yesterday, for awhile, each cat slept beside me peacefully. It was adorable. Then at some point he chased her tail or bit her ass and she hissed and swiped and the usual stuff started up again.

I don’t suppose they will ever be friends, but perhaps they will live in more peace as he gets older and settles down a little. Supposedly, he’s basically an adolescent at this point. We all push buttons and boundaries at that stage, don’t we?

I get embarrassed when I think about my different stages of rebellion and experimentation and awkwardness. These are not restricted to my teen years, I assure you. My embarrassment can be a full-bodied experience, so that I physically cringe or wince at an unpleasant memory. If I’m alone, I might say something out loud to interrupt the cycle of thoughts.

I can’t recall talking about it to any friends in recent years, but I get the feeling that some of them do that, too.

Sometimes I am consumed by worry, and at other times I catch myself being free of worries and I get frightened. Who am I if I am not gaming out some potential future danger and working backwards to ward it off?

When it rains and thunders at night, I feel quite pleasantly that I am hiding inside a big dark jacket.

When I first moved to Chicago, I used to live high in the sky and I’d get to look out at the lightning cracking down from Heaven to touch Lake Michigan. The windows would rattle and I’d thrill to see it all and hear it all. There was nothing to anticipate or imagine; it was all here, and it was all beautiful.

This post originally appeared on my Patreon, where I post shorter works-in-progress, photos, and very occasional audio letters. Thanks so much for reading my work, here, there, or wherever books are sold (including garage sales and swap meets.)

There’s this place where I used to eat all the time when I lived in Brooklyn. To be more precise, I guess I ate there all the time during my second and third stays in Brooklyn, when I lived in Clinton Hill for a year and Fort Greene for two years. I bounced back and forth to California and New Jersey in the in-between times.

When I first moved to Brooklyn, I lived with two beautiful artists in a haunted house in Bed-Stuy, but that was a long time ago.

I hadn’t thought of the restaurant, a nice friendly bar and grill in a nineteenth-century building, until I was emptying my spam folder and noticed a promotional email for their new spring menu. I didn’t open it, but the subject line and sender were enough to make me pause.

Why did I go there so often?

It was close, for one thing, and for another, the food was tasty. I went there when I still drank and I went there after I quit, and I enjoyed it every time. I can’t remember a bad meal there. I wrote there and I read there. I dined alone and with others. Mostly alone, though. I am either a very sociable loner or a self-isolating social butterfly.

I started to recall my first friend date with a girl I used to know, but then I remembered that was in Los Angeles, near Beachwood Canyon, at some other spot with good food that cost just a little too much. I think she wore a leather jacket. She was stunning. I believe she stopped being my friend a few years later because I didn’t show up for her when I said I would. That’s fair. I would stop being my friend in that case, too.

It wasn’t malicious on my part. It was a confusing time, and I was very scattered. I think things had gotten pretty heavy in her life, too. I miss talking to her sometimes, but I don’t want to bother her. When people don’t respond to your apology, it’s good to take the hint and respect the message they never sent.

I used to go to restaurants a lot because it was a way to be around people without having to engage too much. The background noise of all the chatter helped me write. I wouldn’t tune into individual conversations, at least not if I could help it. I preferred to let all the voices coalesce into one multi-tongued, many-souled benevolent beast with excellent boundaries and other priorities. It never focused on me, but it was always there, all around me.

I have been alone in so many restaurants, spending too much money just to be near enough to people without ever having to know them.

I love comfortable old things that have been worn before, mended and washed and dried with care and passed on to a new owner. I’m very pleased to have obtained a sweater in very nice condition that I’m guessing comes to us from ye old 1980s.

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My fondness for vintage clothing dates to the 1990s, when thrift store shopping was very much in vogue. I loved Night Owl, a vintage shop in New Hope, Pennsylvania, just across the Delaware River from New Jersey. I bought corduroy bell bottoms from the ‘70s and old Boy Scout button-down shirts and colorful used bowling shoes and men’s V-neck cardigans with chunky buttons, and it all smelled like patchouli and dust and strange memories I’d never understand.

An idealistic person might wonder why this trend didn’t stave off the early ‘00s influx of fast fashion, which has only increased in the decades since, but alas, nay.

Fast fashion is cheap and easy and, well, fast, while thrift store shopping requires time and energy and the willingness to try things on or to take a chance. The fancier vintage stores are quite pricey, but the low-cost thrift places are quite affordable - yet they all still require one to have patience, time, and an eye for exactly what works.

I’d guess that the biggest issue with all of that is time. But I have to also note the fact that thrift and vintage shops are typically not great places to find an abundance of plus-size clothing. Even good mid-size stuff can be hard to source, especially at the aforementioned fancier shops.

I’m glad that certain vintage businesses specialize in bigger clothing, as every body deserves to be swathed in something gorgeous and vaguely haunted.There’s something very tender and sweet about wearing a comfortable piece of old clothing and wondering who may have worn it before.

As I get older, and somehow simultaneously more politically progressive and more generally practical, I find myself paring down my wardrobe to simpler things that simply suit me, don’t require a lot of extra care, and are likely to work, season in and season out, for years to come. The rest can be sold at a deep discount or passed on via donation, and I hope my old clothes find their way to people who feel safe and beautiful in them.

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With Katie Rich and Corrbette Pasko at Spacetime Chicago

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Fri. 3/27

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Thanks for reading, everybody. I wish you a beautiful month.

Love,

Sara

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As I prepare to eat pretzels and work on my book project, I have decided to make a list of ten good little moments in the past month. I am inclined to focus on fear and anxiety, so hopefully this will unbreak my brain and warm me up for a writing session. You are welcome to join me by doing a few of your own in the comments, and I thank you for being here.

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I foolishly thought that I had the wherewithal to work on the presidential biography I’m writing, but I’m sick and took a sick day from my full-time job as a result, which is not a signal that it’s time to work on one’s OTHER job.

The book is called ABRAHAM FUCKING LINCOLN, which means I spend a lot of my time reading federal slave schedules and looking at crisp, clear portraits of wide-eyed corpses on battlefields. I look at blueprints of the forced labor camps called plantations. I try to read handwriting of a sort long out of fashion.

I sneeze. I cough. I am time traveling in my mind but my body aches and lives here and now. I can forget it until the body shouts at me so loud I can’t ignore where I am and who I am.

Today I drank tea with honey and lemon and tried to discern the line items on the inventory of the estate of a Virginia enslaver who owned over 11,000 acres and several humans. He was the friend and business colleague of the future father of Abraham Lincoln’s best friend (and, some would say, lover.) For a brief time, he was also Thomas Jefferson’s legal guardian.

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This is not the type of work one ought to do while tired, but we are all adults in 2026, aren’t we? And that means we are tired and we do work. The kind person at the University of Virginia who dug into the archives and very gingerly scanned that 1796 document with modern technology at my request (for free - my God, for free) may have been quite tired when she did it, but she did it. (Thank you, Sabrina in Charlottesville, on the off-chance that you are reading this.)

My brain won’t focus on Lincoln’s life right now - not on 1809, 1865, or any of the decades, years, months, days, hours or minutes in between. So instead, I thought I’d just set a timer for five minutes and do a freewrite, an activity that I invite you to do also if you need a break.

This is different from automatic writing, the practice that became popular in the United States during the post-Civil War spiritualism craze. An unprecedented number of Americans died in that war through battle, disease, starvation and accidents. That meant an unprecedented number of Americans were walking around grieving a recently-dead loved one.

No wonder people found the idea of mediumship attractive, and began to believe that perhaps they, too, could channel the words of a lost loved one by inducing an altered state of consciousness and allowed that loved one - or hell, any ghost or spirit - to temporarily take over their body and write things. In a sense, the Ouija (TM) Board is the mass-produced capitalist souvenir of that era of divination (the trademark, by the way, belongs to Hasbro.)

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Freewriting is different. You just type or scribble a bunch of words onto the page and don’t worry about where they came from or why they’re there. Sometimes it results in the spark of an idea that becomes a separate piece of writing; more often it’s just a pleasant stretch for one’s brain. And since there are reasons to stretch before and after physical activity, I think a freewrite can be a warmup or a cooldown from mental activity.

So I’ll set the timer for five minutes, and share my results with you below…not because it’ll be “good,” but because it’ll be done.

It’ll probably also be rather weird.

***

I wake up anxious all the time. Most days, in fact. My brain is going, going, going. I’m generating scenarios that haven’t happened, and sometimes they’re fanciful and sometimes they’re grounded in a very plausible reality. I’m figuring out how to deal with those scenarios. I’m creating different characters with different strategies to deal with those issues. Sometimes the characters are me, or versions of me. I suppose they’re all versions of me, really, even when I’m imagining a public figure or a mythological figure or a dead historical figure.

I’m time-traveling to the future, yes, but I’m also time-traveling to the past. I’m pretending I have some control over that which did not occur.

My perspective determines most of what I think and believe and feel in any given moment. At other times it is purely outside circumstances that act upon me or upon you. This is why I don’t feel at all comfortable declaring that one’s perspective changes EVERYTHING. It doesn’t. Sometimes shit is shit and stress is stress and abuse is abuse, and it won’t be ameliorated or fixed or softened or improved by having a sunnier disposition or even a more grounded and centered one.

I will say that when I ground and center, I am likelier to have a decent attitude. Or at least to feel less mad (mad meaning nuts, not mad meaning angry, although I suppose that applies too.)

My best friend and I talk about a death a lot. Not about bringing it upon ourselves, just about the idea of death and the reality of it. What it is to know that this will all end and that no one gets out of here alive. We were raised Catholic, from different ethnic backgrounds that sometimes take a cultural pride in reveling in the crumbling bones of sacred ancestors. Sometimes we look our newly dead loved ones right in the face, putting their bodies on display, painting them and dressing them and preserving them temporarily so that everyone else can enjoy their visage, denuded of all true personality, a body bereft of breath.

My mother spoke of death a lot, too. She is still here, but her death has always been a pleasant topic for her.

“We bought each other our cemetery plots!” she said excitedly the other day. “We’re in the same row as these relatives, and very close to these relatives, and not far from these relatives.”

We don't talk about what happens afterwards. A funeral is a party and the repast a grand occasion. One should be sad, but savor it all. The theatre of the bereaved is not unpleasant, really.

***

And that’s that. Thanks for reading. I wish you as many breaths as you want in this lifetime, and maybe more than you want, since other people may really like for you to stick around a bit longer than you’d prefer. I wish you as many breaths as you need, and all the peace you can muster while you’re still here.

Love,

Sara

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For the past few days, a gigantic 13-year-old cat has been my primary care practitioner. She sits on my head and on my chest a lot, which is something of a challenge to my respiratory system but which warms my heart. Last night she sat on my head silently until I began to pet her, and then she rumbled to life like a vintage motorcycle. She is approximately the size of one, which added to the effect.

I’ve spent the past few days mostly sleeping, listening to Agatha Christie stories, mostly in decent spirits, but occasionally sliding into an overwrought sadness. When I came down with a fever last week, I did something that would’ve felt unimaginable back in my 20s and early 30s when I was doing stand-up like it was my job (it was, or at least it was one of my jobs): without too much guilt and shame (that’s the unimaginable part) I told my team that I couldn’t make our monthly show at Lincoln Lodge here in Chicago, and asked them to find a fill-in (which they did, in the form of charming, exotic Irishman Adam Burke.)

Back in the day, pre-pandemic, I would’ve still canceled out of respect for the health of those assembled, but I would’ve felt horrible about it. The show must go on, after all, and how dare I bail? Also, I derived a great deal of my identity and self-worth from my ability to stand onstage and make people laugh.

But now that I lead a much quieter life and am confident I’m not the biggest piece of shit the world ever revolved around, I’m more relaxed about such things.

I was disappointed, though. I’d been looking forward to it, after all, and I didn’t like creating an inconvenience. But nobody I work with really seemed to be worried or upset about it, and if my co-host had needed to cancel, I would’ve reacted just as calmly and kindly.

Thanks to the fogginess of the sickness, that blessed strange floating type of feeling, I got a few days’ reprieve from the way I usually wake up - full of worries, running disaster scenarios through my head and working backwards to see how to fix them.

But today I woke up doing risk assessment, crisis PR and disaster preparedness planning for imagined future and real historic situations in my head, so I guess I’m getting back to my old self.

The other day, quoted another writer in her newsletter talking about the way a cold can really make one feel a bit mad (I’m paraphrasing, go read for yourself) and I must say, this is accurate.

I’ve been hanging out with this sickness, which induces both strange fits of dizziness and headache interspersed with fatigue and fogginess, for a minute now. Despite early promise, it has repeatedly proven to not be COVID, and instead is just sort of bizarre.

Should I be attempting to collect tax documents and 2025 expenses under such conditions? No. But tonight I did the thing I so often do when I’ve started to feel like myself again, but still feel like shit, which is: try to get back to normal stuff ASAP. I am not normal and cannot get back to normal stuff yet. I took Monday off from my full-time job.

This leads me to tell you the following things…

A.) When my brain works, I am working hard on my next book, and also at my full-time job.

B.) I am now offering two free Substack posts per month as well as two exclusive posts just for paid subscribers. They will be published irregularly as per usual.

C.) I also have a Patreon.

D.) I am grateful you are here, reading these ramblings.

Be well, you marvelous creatures. I’m drinking water, I’m guzzling lentil soup, I’m hanging with Nurse Cat and then also the kitten, who mostly just does comedy routines and parkour, I’m watching the snow outside my window, I’m sending you all my best.

Love,

Sara

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I’ve been away from my desk, as it were, traveling and doing comedy and working on a book and having some very happy moments amidst some very sad ones. A conversation that comes up among comedians and humor writers during times of widespread struggle is this: Can I even be funny today? Should we even do this show? Do we mention the horrible thing that we just saw in the news, or do we ignore it under the assumption the audience wants to escape?

If we ignore it, do we do our audience a horrible disservice by implying that what has harmed them does not matter?

There is a lot to mourn today, and there are people we’ve lost to state-sponsored violence whose names are blasted across headlines and protest signs, and then there are the people we know privately who are gone too soon, or even at the exact right time but fuck, it still hurts to say goodbye.

And then there are people we never knew, but whose work lit up our lives, and this is a moment for one of those people.

I don’t know how Catherine O’Hara felt about any of what I mentioned above, if she wondered whether the show should go on no matter what, but I do know that she was a comedic luminary who generated a kind of magic that seemed to cut across barriers. Her work, even in more conventional roles, seemed to be animated by a buoyant, joyful weirdness.

She never seemed normal or average to me. I don’t imagine she did to anyone else, either, though I did read in her Second City bio that the then-director at Second City Toronto told her she ought to keep her day job as a waitress when she unsuccessfully auditioned for the main cast. Not long after, she replaced Gilda Radner when Gilda left for SNL.

Catherine’s performances brought me joy in all kinds of seasons, including times of personal loss, depression, anxiety, fear and illness, as well as during national and international times of mourning and sickness. I think she did that for a lot of people.

She was, genuinely, one of the best to ever do it, and an endless inspiration. I always appreciated the gentleness, kindness and clarity with which she spoke in interviews.

Her life was a blessing and may her memory be one, as well.

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I hope you are taking as good care of yourselves as possible right now. This link will take you to some ways to help folks in Minnesota and beyond.

Love,

Sara