My Week of Caffeine and Oversocialization
A party diary—from Ottessa Moshfegh’s auction to the Chelsea Hotel, an erotic reading, recessioncore at the strip club, and a surprise appearance from Candace Bushnell.
In My Year of Rest and Relaxation,
’s disillusioned protagonist drugs herself to sleep for an entire year in hopes of fixing her life. I’ve been feeling a bit stir-crazy lately, so after interviewing Ottessa the other week, I tried the opposite: hitting every party in the city, running entirely on caffeine and dirty martinis.It didn’t fix my problems, but it was entertaining. So, for my paid subscribers, I’ve chronicled a particularly unhinged week in my life: from an X-rated erotic reading to philosophical debates in the strip club to the launch of a new matchmaking service, and a surprise appearance from Candace Bushnell—the original Carrie Bradshaw. Plus, behind-the-scenes gossip from Ottessa’s auction of strange and unexpected items, and a late night partying together at the Chelsea Hotel.
Enjoy!
It’s 10:02am and I’m late to the podcast studio, lugging an absurd assortment of objects—plants, books, candles, and vintage Playboys—meant to outfit my new set: a sexy, ’70s-inspired conversation pit that I’d arranged the night before. When I arrive, the lighting techs are aghast at the transformation; turning a sterile studio into a seductive lair is no small feat, but when my friend Tony Notarberardino offered to help, I knew we were in good hands. He’s a lighting whiz, and his home at the historic Chelsea Hotel was once described as “the lair of a well-traveled, horny Victorian” by the writer Legs McNeil. You get the vibe.
Upon arrival, Ottessa flips through an old Playboy, then says archly that she hates Playboy. She has what the TikTok girls might call “black cat energy”—measured, self-contained, potentially intimidating if you’re insecure. But it’s not personal; she’s just smart, and wasn’t raised to pander. As she once told me: “Do you think I believe my book is a piece of shit? No. I worked extremely hard on it! Why should I be broadcasting insecurity?”
People often conflate authors with their characters, and Ottessa writes the kind of women people love to hate: self-obsessed and self-loathing, convinced they’re both better and worse than everyone around them. It’s easy to assume these thoughts come from her. But as we spend more time together, I’m convinced she’s not confessing, but channeling. She’s always believed that creativity is conjured from something beyond the self—and in her writing, she tries to attend to that belief. “It’s not about me, but about letting the book be extruded through my mortal form,” she says. “I take some responsibility, but I’m not in charge.”
In real life, Ottessa is funny, and disarmingly generous. “There’s nothing I own that I wouldn’t immediately give away to a woman who wanted it,” she says during our podcast episode, and I believe her: When I was profiling her, she sent me a scarf in the mail, and later this week, offers to buy a lost-looking 24-year-old a reading from her own Vedic astrologer.
Of course, people are willing to buy her things, too: that’s the premise of tonight’s Substack auction, which features an array of odd and unexpected items hand-selected by Ottessa and her co-host, Eddie Huang. From a lightly used toothbrush to a signed box of laxatives, a painting she did at age 27, and a martini date at the Chelsea Hotel, there’s something for everyone—but Ottessa urges me not to place any bids, especially on her time. “We can just have drinks,” she says, and I make a mental note to take her up on it.
As I later learn, this is a several-hundred-dollar value—won by a group of girls who didn’t know each other before the auction but, in the heat of the moment, banded together to purchase a martini date with their idol. It’s far from the highest bid: A writing therapy session goes for several grand, and even her toothbrush—“lightly used”—goes for an admirable $110.
If you’re woozy at the thought of these prices, you’re not alone: halfway through the auction, a man passes out, and a hush falls over the crowd as we turn to see him on his back, head lolling on the carpet.
, Substack’s event producer and proud owner of Ottessa’s lightly used toothbrush, nurses him back to health. After a beleaguered thumbs-up, attention shifts back to the auction. The show must go on!The energy is chaotic, but also strangely sweet: All these people crowded together to eat greasy Chinese Food and bid on their favorite writers’ castaways, a form of parasocial proximity akin to Chloe Sevigny’s closet sale. It is, I assume, a driving force behind Ottessa’s thriving Depop—though it’s not to say that people aren’t there for the actual goods. Case in point: The day after the auction, my friend Avery texts me a picture of a package addressed to her by Ottessa: “I never look at names on Depop, so I had no idea who I was buying from!”
The next day, I spend the afternoon writing, then take a walk with a friend and unpack her recent date. She’d had sex with the girl for the first time last night; then, this morning, her dermatologist wrote her to tell her the mole on her nose is actually skin cancer. We decide God is punishing her for being gay.
While we’re on our walk, another friend texts me an invite: X-rated erotic philosophy reading at KGB, hosted by Stella Barey, aka “Anal Princess.” Who am I to say no? When I arrive, it’s already packed. The readings are both filthy and familiar—historic dispatches from literary kinksters like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade, whose names gave us the terms “masochism” and “sadism,” alongside musings from Bataille, Freud, Foucault, and Paglia on everything from desire and disgust to the erotics of discourse, surrender, and vagina dentata.
Afterward, I head to the Chelsea Hotel to meet up with Ottessa after her martini date. Killing time at the bar, I meet an older woman named Dorothy, fresh from a screening of the new show Dying for Sex. “You have to see it,” she says, apropos of nothing. When I tell her I write about sex, she’s delighted. “Who are you, Carrie Bradshaw?” (More on that later.)
We talk about sex and death, desire and destruction. I pull out my pamphlet of erotic readings, reminded of a line from Bataille: “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life to the point of death.” She cites historian John Boswell, who wrote that in medieval times, people always wanted to fuck after a beheading. “Sex is how we grapple with mortality,” she says. We exchange numbers.
I expect to extract Ottessa from a mob of sycophants, but by the time I arrive, everyone’s giggling like old friends. We exchange notes about Paris, witchcraft, and why losers are always the best in bed (“it’s, like, all they have.”) One girl regales us with the story of her date the night before, casually noting she’d bumped it for a martini date with Ottessa. Power move!
We’re laughing too loud. Other patrons shush us. I meant to whisk Ottessa away, but the girls are cool, so I bring them upstairs to Tony’s apartment, the last bastion of bohemia in NYC. Formerly shared by him and the musician Dee Dee Ramone, it’s dimly lit in a perpetual red light and exudes an old-world romance that’s hard to find anywhere else. “Welcome to what’s left of the Chelsea,” he says, aware, as ever, of the effect his apartment has on people. The girls, predictably, are agog. “I feel like I just entered another world,” one says. “I see why you brought us here,” Ottessa nods.
The conversation turns to astrology, and I learn that Ottessa and I have the same big three: Scorpio, Taurus, and Cancer, with our sun and moon signs reversed. It tracks. One of the girls asks about her Vedic astrologer, and Ottessa offers to buy her a reading. “You seem like you need it,” she says, not unkindly, and puts her in touch with her assistant to schedule.
The vibe is loose and intimate, like drunk girls in a bar bathroom. “If you get martinis with me at the Chelsea, I’ll tell you about the annoying guy I met during my ayahuasca trip,” Ottessa had promised at the auction, but I’m having so much fun I forgot to ask.
The next morning, I wake up with a blinding headache and think of Ottessa, halfway to the West Coast. “Don’t let me stay out too late,” she’d said. Oops!
I’m out of coffee, so I wander to Hungry Ghost and confess my hangover to the barista. “Hair of the dog,” he suggests. I shake my head vehemently. But before I know it, I’m in a bar, Cosmo in hand. Not just any bar, mind you: a spot in Soho that’s officially called Onieals, but is better known as Scout, the bar from Sex and the City. I’m there with
to check out And Then We, a new app that blends the human touch of a matchmaker with the convenience of Hinge or Tinder.After some opening remarks on the state of dating, a surprise guest takes the stage: Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City and the OG Carrie Bradshaw. She gives a speech about the enduring legacy of the show, the real experiences that inspired it, and what it’s like dating in your fifties—but before I can introduce myself, she vanishes. I drink to forget.
Several martinis later, Magdalene and I are taking Myspace-style pics and debating our next move. I want to hit the Substack party at Generation Records. She wants to gauge the state of heterosexuality at Ray’s. As it turns out, the Substack party is too quiet for our ABV levels, while Ray’s is pure chaos—poking elbows, frat party energy, men playing pool. We discuss the fantasy of upstate living, the institution of marriage, and how someone really needs to pay us to write a TV show. Magdalene heads home, and I end up outside The Box with a GQ writer I’ve never met: “One more drink.”
My friend Ronen texts me, inviting me to a party with Stella, who hosted the erotic philosophy reading yesterday. Tonight, she’s celebrating the launch of her new project Hidden, a sex worker-led platform with a TikTok-style interface, designed to reduce the need for adult creators to rely on big tech platforms for social media promo. The only catch? It’s at a strip club, and I’m fading fast. “Is it a true vibe?” I ask Ronen, citing my hangover. “Anywhere we are is technically a true vibe,” he responds, and Venmos me the cover charge. He works in tech, but has an artist’s soul.
At the club, I meet Stella and her collaborator, who recognize me as “the writer behind that bathhouse event in Page Six.” This appears to be my new claim to fame around town—though about half the time, people confuse it with the other bathhouse in Page Six, the luxury wellness spa that recently went viral for giving customers UTIs. Which, to be clear, was not part of my event! I cannot emphasize this enough.
I join Ronen at the table, and we dissect the bizarre heterosexual vibes of strip clubs—a space neither of us frequent, because too many of our friends work there. As it turns out, his friend Katya also used to dance at the club where Anora was filmed, and is featured in the movie; now she runs a reading series called The Sunday Salon. When we tune back in, the group is talking about intermittent reinforcement in relationships: why it’s impossible to resist emotional unavailability, and the etiquette of romantic gestures in noncommittal affairs. “My hookup turned into a two-year relationship, purely because he bought me flowers,” Katya says. “I should have kept the flowers, and left the man.”
Around this point, a box full of money arrives at the table, with fat stacks of hundreds being passed among the crowd. It’s opulent to the nth degree—until I inspect one of the bills and notice they’re fake: “The United States of Flash Dance.” “Dude, are strip clubs passing out monopoly money now?” we laugh in disbelief. “Recession indicator.”
People are filtering in, and I can tell the party’s about to pick up. But I’m exhausted, I slip away before my friends can buy me a lap dance. My Uber arrives and, whipping over the Williamsburg bridge, I look out at the city with fresh eyes—wrung out from a week of working hard and playing harder, but satisfied, too. I root around my bag for my keys, then laugh when I accidentally pull a fake Flashdance dollar instead. For the first time that night, I look at my phone, where I learn the stock market crashed. When I get home, so do I.
This is only the first three days of my crazy week of party-hopping, but it’s already too long for email… Should I do a part II?