Abe Beame is in search of some other hobbies he can build his personality around, and is open to suggestions.
The Follow is an interview series I plan on putting out occasionally, or frequently, or maybe never again, in which I basically just talk to the people I enjoy following online who are willing to talk to me for a while. It will be about what they come to Twitter for, how they cultivate their online personas, the things they feel passionate enough to contribute to the infinite discourse on this app, and why they feel the need to do it. And on a basic level, it will be two people on Zoom shooting the shit.
The first time I read Jeff Weiss’ Waiting for Britney Spears, it was January 2023, towards the “end” of COVID and on the cusp of another American nightmare. I remember it well, because it was the first time in 15 years writing would flow in the other direction, the tables were turned and I got to “edit” Jeff, or at least pass back some gut reactions and observations on the first draft of his first novel..
This is why despite having what I assume most editors would consider pretty unique access to the author of a book many publications have deemed one of the best reads of this summer (Author’s Note: It’s not non-fiction!), even as a schmuck freelancer who lives from idea to idea, I didn’t try to pitch any kind of formal review or interview with Jeff elsewhere. I felt it wouldn’t be ethical to even play at objectivity in discussing a work I read in its early stages two years ago, written by the person I’ve worked with in any capacity longer than anyone else on Earth. Instead, because of the book’s meta relationship to media and its inner workings, I suggested we bring back the silly interview series I’ve sporadically put together for this site.
Miraculously, Jeff was into it, and the result was an in depth, three-hour conversation about his book and celebrity and the state of fiction and the state of culture and the nature of fiction and the end of our country and our hopes and dreams, and will read far less professionally or restrained than this already deeply unprofessional, unrestrained, ridiculous project has in the past.
The second time I read Waiting For Britney Spears I found the novel greatly changed. It had never been a traditional “First Novel” from a young author, and the finished manuscript is even further from the crutches and foibles we typically associate with that genre. It is bold and experimental, a genre mutant, pink noir tracing the murder of the American dream. Jeff seamlessly bends tabloid history and what feels like lived in experience to show us how the celebrity sausage industry cranked its forcemeat in the aughts, focused on the prodigal pop starlet, anointed as both our TRL era-defining celebrity and America’s sin eater.
We throw around the phrase “destroyed by fame” but this book tapes the reader’s eyelids open and forces a slow, agonizing watch as the wunderkind plaid sex symbol is forcibly transformed from Goddess incarnate to mascara smeared husk. Waiting For Britney Spears won’t allow misremembering or conflation of the ephemeral moments of this both relatively recent and impossibly ancient story. It is a patient march down Golgotha, presented as Fury Road and paved with lip gloss and glitter. The stations of the cross are recast around regrettable marriages and disastrous awards show performances and bad haircuts, until the devastation is complete and the bones of our ersatz child bride are picked clean.
It is Weiss- a washed up college baseball player’s- swing from the heels for the latest iteration of the great American novel, yes fine in the shadow of Hunter S. Thompson and Nightcrawler but also Martin Amis and The King of Comedy, delivered here at the very end of media and public literacy. No matter what pragmatic, reasonable, lucrative projects you have going or on the horizon, Waiting for Britney Spears will make you want to drop them immediately to write the one great book you have in you, as Jeff has.
The great Donna-Claire and I handled the edit for this ourselves, to maintain the thinnest veneer of integrity, but as I’ve intimated, if you’ve come here looking for an objective review of the novel and a provocative showdown interview, I’d go elsewhere, because I am not here today as a journalist but a fan who is unabashedly proud of their friend. So read on if you want an unfiltered, extremely privileged conversation exploring the process that went into writing the book of the season. And do remember, Waiting for Britney Spears is out now.
(Author’s Note: This interview has been HEAVILY edited and condensed to make me sound like less of an asshole)
(Second Author’s Note: We are joining media res, 10 minutes into the “Interview,” following an hour and a half of off-the-record conversation)
And when I interviewed Diane Di Prima, her husband at the time said, “Don’t ask Diane about Memoirs of a Beatnik because a lot of that book isn’t true.” She was a phenomenal writer, but Memoirs of a Beatnik was like erotic fiction her publisher paid her double to put her name on. It’s just like stories about her hanging out with Jack Kerouac and stuff in the village, and I think parts were true and parts were fiction, and I thought that was so interesting. And that’s when it started.
Have you ever read John Rechy’s City of Night?
And he’s not unremembered, if you know about John Rechy, you have the highest esteem for John Rechy, but I think he didn’t get the acclaim he deserved, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that he was gay, he was Mexican American, and he was in Los Angeles in a homophobic, xenophobic, East Coast centric world.
Then during the pandemic, I did a piece for The Ringer about Britney, and a really wonderful editor from a small boutique publishing house reached out to me and was like, hey, I love this, are you interested in doing a book about Britney Spears and the 2000s and celebrity culture? And I said, “Well, have I got a story for you.” So I sent her the 60 pages and, you know, by the grace of God, she somehow liked it, and she said, it’s great, but I need a book proposal. So I wrote one, her company rejected it, and then when I shopped it, 24 of 25 publishers rejected me. The only one that accepted it was FSG.
It seems absurd to say but I was going for, “What if Nick Carraway was Doc Sportello, but filtered through Eve Babitz, but it’s 2005 L.A., chasing Britney Spears.”
So let’s say February 2022 is when I started. I finished the first draft in January of 2023. That’s what you read. And then I waited seven or eight months for notes. And then I got notes from my editor and started writing again in November 2023. And then I thought, oh, I can just do this in like two months, six weeks.