Everything is Personal: Notes on Now

by Laurie Stone

Everything is Personal, Notes on Now is a collage of hybrid narratives that begin with the stunning events of November 2016 and challenge Stone to feel good when everything is bad. Freely jumping between social commentary, criticism, memoir, and fiction, the pieces are constructed the way dreams and films juxtaposing images, racing along with dolly shots, moving in for close-ups, and pulling back for a sweeping sense of time. Woven throughout are chunks from Stone's Facebook posts that read like tender and funny postcards written to everyone from a time that is unimaginable, even as it's being lived. "Stone is engaging, sharp, funny throughout these pages but no matter how far she ranges, she holds onto the recognition that daily life in the US is being lived under a dark cloud. She makes the stakes very clear. Her Notes on Now are completely illuminating." --Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick , from the Introduction

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays

200 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this is like being with a good friend and talking all the shit you talk with a good friend. I had never read Laurie Stone before but now I have and I really like her. She's a stone cold feminist while not being a hater. She's cool and I really enjoyed reading this.

[Chin-Sun Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blistering, brilliant, and sometimes, surprisingly, tender. Her verve, her feminism, her scathing refusal to be punished or ashamed, is just so damn refreshing. She gives no f**ks and tells it straight. Her writing is loose but never gets lost. Only we do in reading it—and I mean that in the best way.

[Finja Kemski · Rating 3 out of 5]

For sure this book has inspired me to take a new look at journaling, to incorporate more art (from books/plays/movies, whatever cultural medium you can think of) and don‘t let the ordinary day slip on by just like that.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish Laurie Stone had been part of my life before now. Generous. She reads like a new best friend feels.

[minion_luvr · Rating 4 out of 5]

tended and precise and scathing

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

With all the opinions zinging around the internet these days it is so rare to find someone who can assemble facts and history and emotion and context and stir it up into something so fresh and engaging and sane that it gives you hope. At least this book gave me hope, and made me want to follow Laurie Stone around just to hear more of her opinions on everything from politics to bingey tv series.

[Monica Bose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last night I finished Laurie Stone’s book “Everything Is Personal” but my brain is still buzzing from the rush of it. Something between a memoir, a series of Facebook posts, and a feminist analysis of our times (and the last few decades). I haven’t had time to fully process it but enjoyed the ride and highly recommend the book. Laurie’s writing is so fresh, direct, and personal, and her emphatic voice and views are in fact backed up with solid and nuanced reasoning. She is able to beautifully articulate and balance many of the very problematic issues that we feminists have been grappling with. Thank you for this bold work.

[Clifford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything is Personal: Notes on Now by Laurie Stone is a unique book, a collection mini-essays (and some longer ones) that began as Facebook Posts. Stone is an ardent feminist, and I can’t say I agreed with everything she’s saying here, but I love the way she says it. These are strongly held views couched in brilliant language drawing on a wide variety of sources. As a writer for the Village Voice, she observed the cultural landscape of New York for a long time, and so she often had personal interactions with leading artists, writers, and performers, and those relationships also enhance the book.

[Emily Carlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

bit of a slog. some good moments, though.

[Rita]

2020
https://lauriestonewriter.com
"Laurie Stone is author of My Life as an Animal, Stories (TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press), the novel Starting with Serge (Doubleday), and the essay collection Laughing in the Dark (Ecco). She is editor of and contributor to the memoir anthology Close to the Bone (Grove). A longtime writer for the Village Voice (1974-1999), she has been theater critic for The Nation and critic-at-large on Fresh Air." ----must be not much younger than me.

Quote from a book review she wrote in WRB July 2019: "For the most part, when I read the books of men, it doesn't matter what century, I find ***I do not exist in them, nor does anyone like me exist in them***, and it is like reading the literature of a lost civilization." Yes, I often share that feeling!

Laurie Stone, author of 'My Life as an Animal, Stories' and numerous short stories, wrote a ***wonderful essay*** in WRB March 2019 sort of on the MeToo movement. 'Was It Good for You?'

Essay quotes: "The desire to nail whatever bastard you can get your hands on as puny reparation for thousands of years of unpunished male violence has been driving #MeToo usefully and buoyantly since the election of Trump.""But #MeToo risks diverting its momentum with fuzzy thinking.....#MeToo is thrilling when it exposes criminals and predators. It is chilling, however, when the target has committed no crime or readily identifiable harm and has, rather, caused OFFENSE, or rattled some people, or triggered them, or made them feel an emotion they didn't want to feel...""My feeling is this: punish the artist [if found criminally guilty] and leave the art alone. Banning art does not look good on a movement, ever.....Bad people can make good art.""Some argue that a work of art made by a person who does bad things contaminates the culture. This notion is more contaminating of a culture than any work of art could be."
"......the long fissure in the women's movement dividing women who see their role as MORAL reformers and women who advocate for the sexual liberation of all people. I place myself firmly in the second camp. About the matter of redemption, as far as I am concerned human beings don't fall and therefore do not need to be redeemed. We are not on a path with an ideal narrative arc of right living. We are not on a path, period."

[Sabrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

reads with ease and conversation like eve babitz but with more intelligence and groundedness to world - this is not a criticism of eve babitz. that quality made her commentary much more inviting of sympathy and agreement. a woman with a lot of thoughts and i can get behind that

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe more of a 3.5 but we’ll round up due to just her general badassery.