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WORK TITLE: All the Lives I Want
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.alanakm.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/alana_massey.php
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1986.
EDUCATION:New York University, B.A., 2007, Yale Divinity School, M.A., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Teaches writing classes. Worked formerly in PR, as a stripper, and as a contributing writer at Buzzfeed.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Elle, Atlantic, Guardian, New York Magazine, Vice, New Republic, Pacific Standard, BuzzFeed, and New Inquiry.
SIDELIGHTS
Alana Massey is a writer based out of New York City. She attended high school in San Diego, CA, where her father was a Navy captain. Following graduation, she went to college at New York University, where she graduated with a B.A. in 2007. Following college graduation she lived in New York City and worked in PR as well as working in strip clubs. At the age of 25 she attended Divinity School at Yale. She graduated with a M.A. in religion in 2012. Massey then moved back to NYC.
Massey was offered a full-time position writing lists at Buzzfeed in 2014, after having applied to over 700 jobs. Her breakthrough Buzzfeed article, “Being Winona in a World Made for Gwyneths,” brought her to the attention of Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette imprint. She sold a book proposal to the company in 2015.
In addition to writing novels, Massey continues to contribute articles to periodicals, including to Elle, Atlantic, Guardian, and New York Magazine. She is currently working on another novel, a script for a TV pilot, and she teaches in-person and online writing classes. Massey splits her time between homes in Brooklyn and the Catskills in upstate New York.
Massey’s first book, All The Lives I Want, is a series of short essays focused on female celebrities and Massey’s various feelings about them, society’s judgments of them, and what these responses reveal about us as individuals.
A large number of the essays focus on contemporary pop culture celebrities, including Britney Spears, Winona Ryder, Gwyneth Paltrow, Courtney Love, and the Olsen twins. Massey discusses defining her identity in relation to celebrities, connecting with Winona Ryder’s darkness, and away from Gwyneth Paltrow’s tame self-representation.
In each essay, Massey incorporates her own voice and experience into her assessment. She discusses the media’s portrayal and treatment of Amber Rose and Anna Nicole Smith, both of whom, just like Massey, worked formerly as strippers before rising to fame. In writing about the Olsen twins, she reflects on the ways in which her understanding of their celebrity status changed as the women attended NYU at the same time as Massey.
Other essays take a more academic tone. These include an essay about Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, and the importance of sisterhood in The Virgin Suicides. Annie Bostrom in Booklist wrote: “Part memoir, part social critique, and fully feminist, Massey’s first book will reach a simpatico and appreciative audience.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 2016, Annie Bostrom, review of All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen To Be Famous Strangers, p. 5.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2016, review of All The Lives I Want.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Kaitlin Malixi, review of All the Lives I Want, p. 99.
Publishers Weekly, December 19, 2016, review of All the Lives I Want, p. 113.*
Alana Massey’s journey to being taken seriously
By Danny Funt, CJR
JANUARY 22, 2016
2323 WORDS
Photo courtesy of Alana Massey
FOR 30, ALANA MASSEY LOOKS NEITHER haggard nor old.This was my first thought upon meeting her in a Brooklyn cafe, near the apartment she shares with her cat. It’s hard not to privately log such crass details, having read years of Massey’s strikingly frank mental notes about herself.
Since she began freelancing for digital magazines nearly three years ago, Massey has written about how online harassment made her wonder if “I was the haggard old witch on the outside that I’ve always kind of felt like on the inside”; about body dysmorphia and her resulting insecurity during sex; about a towering and abusive ex-boyfriend who threatened “all 5’2” and 108 pounds of me”; about the physical anxiety she felt working at a Manhattan strip club; about the fear of aging that led her to dye her brown hair blonde; and much more on topics many of us whisper about to confidants, if at all.
Such candor is expected in “the familiar hazing ritual that many women go through when we aren’t ushered into media through more respectable channels,” as Massey once put it. Personal essays are in vogue online, especially for aspiring journalists willing to spill about sex, dating, and body image. The former Gawker editor Emily Gould made waves in 2008 with her confessions about confessional writing. By today’s standards, though, Gould’s indiscreet blogging was rather tame. “The First-Person Industrial Complex,” Laura Bennett explained last fall in Slate, commodifies private lives for easy clicks. These pieces don’t require polished prose or much reporting; their value can derive from salaciousness, not substance. And while personal essays offer a backdoor into journalism, that often leads to a dead end. The challenge is to convert that hazing ritual into a career while maintaining some privacy and enduring the harassment that this sort of writing tends to invite, particularly toward women.
After a trying start in that space, 2015 was a breakout year for Massey. She still specializes in women’s issues, but her writing opportunities now better reflect her interests, which extend far beyond her love life. She’s a worthy exemplar of someone who didn’t just overcome the so-called “pink ghetto” of personal essay writing, but who utilized the virtues of that form to develop a dynamic, engaging style of writing. She describes her work as “writing and reporting that acknowledges the origins of a story for the journalist and the stakes involved in their writing it. It is a way of acknowledging a passion or pain point in their experience and letting that play a role in the narrative arc of a story.”
Of course, that’s not her invention, but she practices it with distinct millennial flare. Her writing voice—confessional, unpretentious, sharp-witted, and forceful—can make readers feel like they know her. She politely insists that they don’t.
Jan 5, 2016
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Nevertheless, readers familiar with her writing across dozens of publications, who follow her delightfully eccentric social media accounts and read her blog, could give a rough sketch of Massey’s 20s. “The thing about candidness,” she notes, “is you can’t really tell how candid something is unless you know what’s being omitted.”
For example, Massey almost never writes about other people in her life (with the exception of Keith, the cat). She went to high school in San Diego, where her father was a Navy captain, then graduated from NYU in 2007. Life post-college was a struggle with alcohol, drugs, bipolar disorder, and unsatisfying jobs—PR mostly, plus stripping and fetish work to cover the bills.
“Really impulsively,” Massey, who wasn’t raised in a religious household, decided to attend Yale Divinity School at age 25. “It was an escape from New York,” she says, “but I was really scared to go any farther than Princeton, New Jersey, or New Haven, Connecticut.” She graduated with a master’s in religion in 2012. It did prompt an awakening of sorts: not to disavow aspects of her past, but to be less ashamed of them.
Seven months after graduating and returning to New York City, a friend suggested Massey write about a life experience they’d discussed for xoJane, a website that calls itself a place “where women go to be their unabashed selves.” The essay, written under the byline “Alana M.,” was headlined: “I’ve Never Had an Orgasm and I’m the Only Person That Doesn’t Care.”
It was a modest attempt at anonymity, but she failed to realize that “Alana M.” would lead Web searchers to her various online profiles. “When I dove in and people were like, You just ruined your Google results, I was like, Ok. It was kind of a manic, compulsive decision.”
Soon, she was writing under her full name. “If you are going to ruin your Google results,” she advises, “ruin them for like 20 pages.”
For many, risqué personal anecdotes are less terrifying in the hands of strangers than under the eyes of mom and dad. While some details in her early writing did come as news to her parents, like that Alana wasn’t having sex in high school but was smoking weed, “I haven’t done anything that I think would violate their concepts of morality,” she says. “I haven’t written anything that’s cruel. And I think they’d be much more upset by something that was cruel to others or myself than something embarrassing.”
Ultra-candid writing can engender devotion and resentment. Emails from readers who’ve experienced similar adversity—be it suicidal ideation, disordered eating, or abusive relationships—can be overwhelming. “It’s unsustainable” to maintain those correspondences, she explained to me. Much as she wants to help, “we’re not penpals now.”
On the other hand, anti-feminist vitriol has a chilling effect. “There are situations that have been very formative that I never want put on trial by internet commentators,” she says. “There’s some stuff going to the grave with me.”
The “training wheels” of personal essay writing, as she describes it, led to freelance gigs at a variety of outlets, with an emerging specialization in faith. In 2014, Massey applied to more than 700 jobs, she told Pacific Standard. Many applications featured ridiculously extravagant tryouts, like this one at a women’s magazine seeking a sex and relationships Web editor:
Candidates are instead asked to produce three sex tips, five “observant” listicle ideas, five news stories I would blog about, two ideas for trend pieces or “newsy reported features,” two personal essays ideas, two ideas that “lend themselves to visual treatments,” five sex or relationship experts I’d use as sources, two new franchises for the brand, three [one-to-three] paragraph blogs about news articles from that day, and a complete listicle about sex problems faced by women. I refrain from buying their print magazine to confirm with certainty that they are actually requesting that I write them a full magazine before I even interview.
She never heard back on that one, she says. But she did land a full-time job writing lists at BuzzFeed at the end of 2014, with the opportunity to contribute reported pieces and longform essays. Her breakthrough was “Being Winona in a World Made for Gwyneths,” about the relatability of Winona Ryder compared to the stiff superficiality of Gwyneth Paltrow. But the piece also became the most important time when Massey broke her rule of not writing about people in her life. She urgently needed to describe an ex, “James.”
Months earlier, when she discovered he had another girlfriend in California and was hiding Massey from her, she dumped James and alerted the woman. He responded by repeatedly threatening to kill her, and by revealing to his new girlfriend that Massey had once been a stripper. That woman grew skeptical of Massey’s motives for communicating.
“The change in tone made it clear in real time how easy it is to dress down a real woman to the vulgar trope of a delusional whore,” Massey writes.
She decided to finally announce in writing that she had worked in the sex industry. James was plotting to tell all sorts of people in her life, even the church where they’d met.
“No one is telling my secrets but me,” Massey remembers thinking. “No one is profiting off of my humiliation but me.”
When her parents read her “Winona” essay online, they learned of her experience as a stripper for the first time. She got an email from her dad: “I never knew you were so prolific,” which Massey read as code for having been through a lot. “I’m really proud you’re my daughter.”
Massey would be disappointed but unsurprised if other journalists overplayed her time as a stripper. She notes that plenty of people in pop culture have been stigmatized and pigeonholed that way. “You sort of feel bad for people who are so obtuse.”
She has blossomed into a generalist, though her commentary off the news can lose some of its liveliness. Her best writing weaves anecdotes into argument, as with a defense of porn for Pacific Standard and an explanation of being a “cultural Christian” for The Washington Post. She’s fearlessly graphic—she’s compared despicable men to “taint sweat” and a “rectal blister”—but not gratuitously vulgar. When addressing tumultuous moments in her life, she doesn’t suggest that these are novel experiences, nor does she use platitudes to belabor their universality.
In first-person writing, overexposure is not an express lane to standing out. “Alana’s earnestness really sets her apart,” says Arianna Rebolini, the editor of Massey’s list-writing team at BuzzFeed. “It’s not just the act of confessing that makes something good and worthwhile.”
Within 24 hours of the “Winona” essay being published, a literary agent offered to represent her. Massey left BuzzFeed last summer after selling a book proposal to Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette imprint.
She drafted the book in just five months. “She’s the fastest writer I’ve ever met in my entire life,” says Mark Lotto, editor in chief of Matter, where Massey began contributing last year. In April, for Matter, she wrote “Against Chill,” her most-shared piece to date. It evokes “Against Irony,” a New York Times Magazine article in 1999 about backlash in response to a perceived culture war against earnestness. Massey’s piece resonated with today’s disenchanted daters.
Chill is a sinister refashioning of “Calm down!” from an enraging and highly gendered command into an admirable attitude. Chill suggests that young love is best expressed as competitive ambivalence. Chill demands that you see a Read receipt followed by a “Hey, was asleep” text three hours later and not proceed to throw your phone into the nearest volcano. Chill asks you to be like, “LOL, what volcano?”
There is a magnetic intensity to Massey’s writing. It’s self-effacing but unapologetic. As Lotto puts it, “There’s something really dangerous about it.”
“There are a lot of writers who can get reduced to their anecdotes,” he adds. “Writers like Alana expose themselves but also try to elevate it into something much more intellectual and universal.”
When we spoke, Massey recoiled at the notion of being an intellectual. “When I hear that, I hear competitive. And I hear inaccessible knowledge as virtuous.”
She rejects highbrow/lowbrow distinctions and celebrates celebrity. Her forthcoming book, All the Lives I Want, examines women in pop culture and how their public personas relate to Massey’s self-perception. One essay will be about Amber Rose, the stripper-turned-feminist firebrand whom Massey reveres. Publication is scheduled for 2017.
While continuing to write for places like The Cut on nymag.com and The Guardian, Massey is drafting a novel and shopping a script for a TV pilot. Last fall, she wrote copy for a Gucci campaign. She writes less about sex work and “cutesy dating stuff” now, she says, because she isn’t as close to those experiences.
In whatever writing she’s doing, her goal is to “build a world.” “Women aren’t trusted to build a world or know a world beyond their own experience, and even their own experience is questioned all the time,” she tells CJR. Massey doesn’t want to be confined to first-person narratives, but she doesn’t disparage them, either. The goal at the start of her career was to underscore that writing about women’s experiences has value. It’s drawn a range of reactions, including many readers, mostly women, who comment under her essays, “thank you.”
GREETINGS!
Alana Massey Lights
Welcome to my digital homestead. I'm a writer covering identity, culture, virtue, and vice. I'm the author of All The Lives I Want, a collection of essays reimagining the lives and legacies of famous women in a way that makes it easier for us to forgive ourselves. My writing appears in Elle, The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, Vice, The New Republic, Pacific Standard, BuzzFeed, The New Inquiry, and more. I split my time between Brooklyn and my farmhouse in the Catskills where I write, read, drink champagne, listen to pop music, and Photoshop glamorous collages of myself like the one you see here.
My publisher is Grand Central Publishing. My literary agent is Adriann Ranta at Foundry Media. My manager is Keith Massey, who is also my cat and an American hero.
Massey, Alana: ALL THE LIVES I WANT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Massey, Alana ALL THE LIVES I WANT Grand Central Publishing (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 2, 7 ISBN: 978-1-
4555-6588-7
Odd but beguiling short essays about female celebrities toward whom the author has decidedly mixed feelings.In her
first book, essayist Massey collects pieces about Winona Ryder, Gwyneth Paltrow, Britney Spears, Courtney Love,
Anna Nicole Smith, Lana Del Rey, and the Olsen twins, among others. These women--often the subjects of great
scrutiny by celebrity magazines--prompt the author to ponder, with wit and keen self-reflection, what our feelings
about them reveal about us. She muses, for example, about what she felt when she discovered she weighed less than
Spears or why, when she was younger, she identified so strongly with Ryder, that "bottomless well of uncool and
discomfort," and now has begun to see that Paltrow may be more than the sum of her "tasteful but safe" selfpresentation.
Massey also thinks back on her fascination with Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, from their childhood
appearances on Full House through their presence at New York University when she was attending the college, and she
finds herself embracing the fact that "they have become the eccentric millionaires it never occurred to their adoring
public they might become." These tart, original essays are interspersed with others that are less humorous and more
academic in nature--e.g., about the cult of Sylvia Plath and the role of sisterhood in The Virgin Suicides. Massey's
tendency to insert herself into the stories of her subjects is more successful when she's talking about a pop or TV star
than a well-regarded novelist: her attempt to compare an unfortunate romantic relationship to the plot of Joan Didion's
Play It As It Lays is misguided. Though the volume contains a certain amount of filler, Massey's unlikely insights into
how women are shaped by the celebrities we idolize or despise are likely to prompt thought and discussion.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Massey, Alana: ALL THE LIVES I WANT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471901860&it=r&asid=21baee1d19ca90d0f9c949ed2b9643f4.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471901860
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506815929187 2/4
All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best
Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p5.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers.
By Alana Massey.
Feb. 2017. 256p. Grand Central, $25 (9781455565887). 305.420973.
In what could be research papers for the most fun (and probably, sadly, most nonexistent) graduate course ever, thirtysomething
Massey expounds on the movies, literature, and pop culture that have guided, inspired, or infuriated her. Her
"best friends," female icons well-known by women born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, are a who's-who of the
raised-by-MTV generation: Courtney Love, Lil' Kim, Princess Diana, Scarlett Johansson, and Mary Kate and Ashley
Olsen (who, not incidentally, attended NYU at the same time as the author). Massey discovers the Sylvia Plath who
lives today, voluminously, on Goodreads, Etsy, and Tumblr (the book's title borrows from Plath). She knows a
relationship is doomed when her boyfriend says his celebrity crush is Gwyneth, and Massey considers herself a proud
Winona. Anjelica Huston shows Massey how to suffer indignities with grace. She thinks there's much to learn from the
media's treatment of fellow-former-strippers Amber Rose and Anna Nicole Smith. Part memoir, part social critique,
and fully feminist, Massey's first book will reach a simpatico and appreciative audience.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers."
Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 5. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563390&it=r&asid=d679d124cbf946009606f3bab9b571c5.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476563390
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506815929187 3/4
All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best
Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers
Publishers Weekly.
263.52 (Dec. 19, 2016): p113.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers
Alana Massey. Grand Central, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-1-4555-6588-7
Massey, a columnist for New York magazine's "The Cut," analyzes a number of topics--including female anger,
destructive romances, weight and body issues, and society's treatment of creative intelligent women--through pop
culture in her debut, a collection of essays. Though Massey discusses celebrities she doesn't personally know, she
writes about them with intimacy, drawing connections between their lives and her own: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen
attended NYU at the same time Massey was adjusting to the college's frenetic environment, and the media's sexist
portrayals of Courtney Love reflect Massey's experience with misogyny. The chapter on writer Sylvia Plath seems out
of place in a book focused on rock and roll and reality television celebrity, and more space could have been devoted to
women rappers' artistry as well as their beefs, but this book reminds readers how celebrities' seemingly dazzling lives
can provide insight into their own. Agent: Adriann Ranta, Wolf Literary Services. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers." Publishers Weekly, 19
Dec. 2016, p. 113+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475324326&it=r&asid=f0f68391ab40c2d7abdc531e9695ec6c.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475324326
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506815929187 4/4
Massey, Alana. All the Lives I Want: Essays
About My Best Friends Who Happen To Be
Famous Strangers
Kaitlin Malixi
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p99.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Massey, Alana. All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen To Be Famous Strangers. Grand
Central. Feb. 2017. 256p. notes. ISBN 9781455565887. $25; ebk. ISBN 9781455565870. LIT
Spanning music, film, literature, time, and space, critic Massey's collection of essays strikes a nerve with her poignant
and grittier form of celebrity worship. Focusing on female figures who have suffered or been subjected to unfair
scrutiny for their relationships and public persona, Massey's essays link her own desires, struggles, and triumphs to her
idols in enlightening and powerful ways, raising the question, how far is too far in the public fascination of celebrity?
The gamut of women Massey features is broad and pleasantly surprising, as one might never expect to read about Joan
Didion and Anna Nicole Smith in the same collection. Touching on relationships, mental illness, and sexuality without
being preachy are Massey's strong points. Yet, sometimes the essays feel too much like a college assignment and less
like a heartfelt personal discussion. In a collection in which the author references "the grass is always greener ..." in a
few instances, it can be difficult at times to decipher whether Massey is cautioning against celebrity or championing for
certain women to achieve a more prominent status in the public eye. VERDICT This enjoyable collection has many
shining moments; however, it may not have wide appeal.--Kaitlin Malixi, Bucks Cty. Free Lib., Doylestown, PA
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Malixi, Kaitlin. "Massey, Alana. All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen To Be Famous
Strangers." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 99. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562353&it=r&asid=941569a4a8cfaee8df05022e8b9ca6d0.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562353