I met Margot Steines over Zoom last year, after reading Brutalities, her memoir about pain and survival. But really, I met Margot fifteen years ago, in one of those dives or dim-lit basements where girls like us dragged our hoodies low over our eyes, pretending not to care who was looking. We were messy and sad and in our Saturn Return, just starting to realize the party was over as everyone else’s life was beginning. Babies, weddings, 401(k)s. Milestones we watched from the outside. We were stuck, and being stuck had stopped feeling like poetry, or music, something to brag about at the bar. I think we were both scared. Though neither of us would’ve said it.
For years after, I watched her life unfold in curated squares on Facebook. She’d moved upstate with a handsome man who wore wool sweaters. There were chickens, a red barn, pink-cheeks, raw milk. Sunsets that looked like paintings. It all seemed so wholesome, so resolved. I hated it a little. It wasn’t until much later that I understood what was simmering under that surface.
We reconnected in this new phase — writers, mothers. A little softer. More sag. Scars. For the past year, I’ve worked with Margot on my book Fawn — a story about motherhood, men, fashion, money, power. About cancel culture, and the quiet, relentless violence of trying to raise daughters in a world still designed to hurt them.
Margot is uniquely qualified to handle the hard stuff. She doesn’t flinch. It’s rare to be seen like that. I hope this conversation gives you a glimpse of it, too.
Thanks for stepping into the Soft Core Psychic Storyboarding Creative Séance session. Hope you had fun!
Come back soon — I’ll be here, mapping memory like a crime scene, vomiting muffins on the subway and foraging the narrative underworld one sentence at a time.
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