I'm Currently Living in An Alternative Fictional Reality. Send Help

Do basic people know they’re basic? Or, if you have some level of self-awareness and irony at your total lack of discernment and originality, are you somehow excused? What is the difference between being basic AF and simply enjoying the occasional ‘guilty pleasure’? Are these all just semantics? I ask because I’ve recently found myself caught up in the web of a fictional work which lacks, shall we say critical kudos. In turns formulaic and clichéd with a bunch of admittedly compelling tropes guaranteed to draw in a basic bitch like me, I have become borderline obsessed with a non-existent band from the 70s, which happens also to be number one in the charts in 2023. Yes, I’m talking about Daisy Jones & The Six, but you all know that. You’re probably listening to Aurora right now. Don’t lie.

This is not my first rodeo in fiction compulsion. Anyone that knew me in my early days as a fashion journalist will remember my neurotic Twilight phase (I once locked myself in a bathroom at the Sunday Times for 40 minutes to finish, I don’t know the third one (?) while one of my editors, famous for throwing things, paced the corridors looking for me. I think I said I was having a fag which was accepted as a reason back then). In my pre-teen days, it was firstly The Babysitter’s Club, swiftly followed by the Making Out books, a series about a group of teenagers living on the fictional Chatham Island off the coast of Maine with titles like, ‘Ben’s in Love’. I was then shortly introduced to Judith Kranz and Jilly Cooper and promptly devoured their extensive catalogues. There were also too many films to mention, but as a guide, I saw Titanic 13 times at the cinema. While I have watched and read many a worthy title, I’ve always leant in hardest to the lowest common denominator variety of fiction. I even read all the 50 Shades books to the end (ostensibly for a review, mostly for you know). There are no limits to how low I can go when I get hooked into a story.

In the Victorian era, a fixation with fiction was seen as a threat to the moral fabric of society and young women were censured for their swoons into imaginary worlds. I absolutely get why people worried; when I am in a fit of fiction, be it a television series, a film or book(s), I am no use to anyone. I spend the time I should be cooking meatballs deep diving into review articles and magazine interviews online. Instead of looking into the eyes of the man I actually love, I’m scrolling actors’ Instagram pages and analyzing how much of so and so’s chemistry was actually real. I basically step out of society until I have churned it up and digested every morsel from my visit to unreality. Psychologists refer to this kind of immersion in fiction as ‘experience-taking’, where you temporarily change your behaviour to reflect the environment of a fictitious character. It doesn’t happen with every story you consume, only when you are able, in a sense, to forget about yourself and your own self-identity while reading or watching.

When it comes to the kind of culture I swim this way with, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve always been a terrible critic, simply because I like a lot of things. I glass half full nearly every form of creative expression. Sure, this or that film was terrible, but I loved the set design! Oh yeah, awful prose, but I loved the twist at the end. While I’m finickity about products for a living, when it comes to entertainment, I can enjoy a very broad scope of dramatically varying quality.

Something about the way I consume this kind of escapism has always reminded me of ‘the feelies’ in Huxley’s Brave New World (published 1932). For the uninitiated, while we’re used to going to the cinema and having our sight and sound sensory organs stimulated, in Huxley’s imaginary theatres, smell and touch were also stirred to both soothe and arouse audiences. As each individual sits in a seat with a range of knobs connecting their nervous systems to the screens, a galvanic experience is created. Simultaneously dropping a tab of soma (described as a ‘hangoverless tranquilliser’, err yes please), cinemagoers achieved a perfectly blissed-out state (as well as peak horniness – prophesying the power that porn would one day have over our culture). These experiences were used to deaden any kind of rebellion or original thought in the population at large—sensorially sublimating them into submission. As Huxley writes, ‘…that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.” Happiness and sedatives every time mate (fine, chamomile for me, but you get the gist).

I’m a curious person, but my appetite for high art has waned more than it has waxed over the years. As a teenager I used terrible literature to soothe my anxiety (I didn’t realize this was what I was doing at the time). During my first marriage I used it to bolt from my mistakes. Now it provides a tonic for the mundane nature of many of my days. Since becoming a parent, the call of low culture has become even more attractive because my sentimentality and emotive reactions to anything remotely ‘triggering’ have gone off the deep end. My girlfriends in L.A would call me an empath, whereas my mates in London would tell me to get a grip. Either way, there is zero way I could get through A Little Life. I can’t watch true crime or indeed anything with a remote physical threat if I want to be able to sleep without a knife under my pillow (I actually did this through my Uni career; I have always been suggestible). Nothing about any kind of harm to children. Or the death of a parent. If a film is particularly intense, it can make me feel paranoid to walk down the street on my own. There are stories which feel traumatically imprinted in my consciousness, stories I consumed years, even decades ago—Se7en, The Road, Into the Wild—that continue to inform my feeling about certain things (mushrooms, tinned goods, heads in boxes). I think about them so bloody often, I wish I had never crossed their path.  I know, I know. You don’t have to tell me how dramatic this sounds.

My more recent binge-watching habits have definitely greased the slide down the rabbit hole. While watching for five, six, seven, ok, twelve hours in a row, our brains become so saturated with dopamine that it’s said we develop a pseudo-addiction to whatever we’re watching. We literally crave more, which explains the compulsion, as well as the epilogue of online research to continue scratching the itch. As an ex-smoker, who tried to quit a minimum of 400 times unsuccessfully, I know addiction and the way I get about made up stories on pages and screens feels very similar. That extends through to the secretiveness and shame about how I’m spending my time. I guess that’s the real problem, if basic ignorance is bliss, I am painfully self-aware of how much I’m wasting my life with this shit.

Back to Daisy and there is literally no surprise that it has reanimated the crap culture monkey on my back. During the most strung-out period of my life, I spent a lot of time in L.A. on nights I kinda thought were gonna last forever and I was weaned on the music and fashions of the Strip. Where my fiancé is Mr 90s minimalism, I’ve always been Gold Dust woman. Doomed romance, artistic torture and toxic relationships are my kryptonite. Add in a dose of nostalgia (or alternatively a multi-generational historical epic sweep) and I’m a goner.

What’s funny is that when I emerge from the fray, I honestly cannot reconnect with how I got there. I’m over it as quickly as I was under it. I don’t even think I own a Twilight book now even though I’m pretty sure I read them all at least five times. I was an actual adult at the time. It’s fricking embarrassing, literally get a life. Without also stating the obvious, I also write for a living. Sure, I specialise in non-fiction, but the whole not-reading-much-of-quality is preeeety awks. But then have you ever considered how irrational our emotional response to fiction truly is? We know it is all make believe and yet we cry for characters and we can be stirred for their causes; we can also feel spine tingling fear. Equally we may find ourselves buying 1970s kaftans on a miserable Spring Tuesday in London. The paradigm is inherently even more bonkers than me, no matter what you’re reading.

Thinking deeply about it this week, what I think that this kind of fiction allows me is space to harmlessly flirt with doing things that would totally trash my life and everything I hold dear. During those times where I lose myself in characters, I get to feed the den of inequity which lives quietly inside with no real consequence. While I can never predict when these experiences are going to come, perhaps they actually keep me on the straight and narrow. For someone so fascinated with going off the rails, I’ve kept magnetically attached to them for most of my life and that’s really what I think the whole thing is about for me personally. Low culture keeps me stable because it lets me experiment with getting in trouble in a safe, sanitised environment.

It’s entirely possible that I am intellectualising my passion for an ersatz 70s band to let myself off the hook. That I’m seeking a way to justify the amounts of time I’ve spent this week looking at flights to LAX I won’t book and wondering how much the Camels I won’t smoke cost these days. My brother (who subedits for me every week and will have rolled his eyes so far back in his head he may in fact, never see again after reading these paragraphs) has always absolutely rinsed me for my mainstream entertainment tastes. He is the least basic person I know, the chalkiest chalk to my pongiest cheese. He would 100% tell me to a) stop pretending that I lived in Laurel Canyon and b) to stop starting shit that I know is shit. But I probably won’t. I’ll probably keep using stories to take a holiday from my day to to day. Overall, I don’t really think it’s harming anyone, and judging by the state of the Amazon charts, I’m clearly not the only one stepping out of my skin into a fuzzy fictional fantasy. Potentially the only thing I really need to do is stop feeling so damn guilty about my basic pleasures.