Starting Over

I for one welcome a new age of the Gossip Reading Club...

Hi again.

A few people got in touch with me over the past few weeks to ask if the Gossip Reading Club was still a thing. The short answer was it was on hiatus for financial reasons. I got to the point on Letterdrop where I had reached the maximum number of subscribers for the lowest level of the paid model. Upgrading became prohibitively expensive, and that combined with the increasingly unusable nature of the platform left me feeling pretty disheartened (my newsletter was impossible to Google, for example, and links died on me constantly.) I needed to focus more on paid work so my lovely little side-hustle got sidelined.

I’ve long been hesitant to move into a potentially paid model, largely because I never thought anyone would ever want to pay me for this stuff. Then again, I said that when I started doing this professionally and I’ve managed to make a living from this for over six years, so why not give it a go?

Welcome to the new age of the Gossip Reading Club!

For those who are new to this, the Gossip Reading Club is dedicated to exploring the world of celebrity. We use vintage profiles, interviews, and industry reporting as a means to examine what it means to be famous, how one becomes an A-Lister, and the work that goes into maintaining it. You can learn a lot about the world through how the rich and famous are talked about, and I’ve long held the belief that celebrity is one of our most effective means of understanding ourselves.

Just look at this week alone, where Patrick Dempsey was crowned People’s Sexiest Man Alive of 2023. A weird choice? Not when you’re aware of how that magazine has long crafted an ideal image of masculinity that is safe, white, and palatable to the masses. Why do people keep asking Dwayne Johnson to run for President? Now that the SAG-AFTRA strike is over, how will various actors promote their Oscar-buzzy projects (Bradley Cooper, I’m looking at you!)

So, expect more deep dives into celebrities of the past and present, but I also want to expand the Gossip Reading Club into other areas: more current analyses of ongoing matters, a book club, conversations about classic art, reviews and anniversary pieces on films I love, and so on. I also want a better space for conversations to take place, because Letterdrop sucked in that regard and you were all so much more interesting than I am!

I’m still figuring things out, but want to hear from you about what you’d like this newsletter to be. Are there any articles you’d like me to analyze? Are there stories you can’t get out of your head? Are you as invested in Lily Gladstone’s Oscar chances as I am? Let me know! I’ll have the first issue up by the end of the week.