{"id":78995,"date":"2022-11-19T12:42:05","date_gmt":"2022-11-19T05:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.princess-it-foundation.org\/pbl\/?p=78995"},"modified":"2022-11-19T12:58:08","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T05:58:08","slug":"for-millennials-in-los-angeles-bad-thoughts-arise-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/?p=78995","title":{"rendered":"For Millennials in Los Angeles, Bad Thoughts Arise"},"content":{"rendered":"For Millennials in Los Angeles, Bad Thoughts Arise<\/title><\/p>\n<p>Throughout Nada Alic’s debut fiction collection, \u201cBad Thoughts,\u201d sunny facades belie strange, dark interiors. The stories feature a privileged millennial milieu in Los Angeles with all its carefully observed trappings – neutral linens at a baby shower, destination bachelorette weekends, social media obsessions, alternative wellness practices and a chic, spare loft \u201cfurnished with gray modular furniture resembling life-size Lego pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Alic’s characters fear environmental catastrophe and freely discuss mental illness, but it’s all casual, often glib. At first, superficial appearances, 280-character missives and quick fixes seem to take precedence over authenticity or real intimacy. \u201cTheir generation had become utilitarian, efficient, machinelike,\u201d Alic writes about a couple in \u201cGhost Baby.\u201d But eventually, each story pushes into weirder, more vulnerable territory as it captures the (usually female) narrator’s borderline perverse thoughts.<\/p>\n<p>Alic depicts contemporary womanhood with a wry, uncensored voice reminiscent of those in Miranda July’s off-kilter SoCal tales.One narrator worries that \u201cmotherhood is contagious, like a parasite or the way cohabitating women synchronize their cycles.\u201d Another fantasizes that a man in a ski mask lies on top of her and kills her. \u201cAs I die, I say goodbye to all the things I love most,\u201d she imagines: \u201cmy niece, coffee and swimming pools.\u201d There’s a woman who joins a kooky support group instead of confronting her crumbling marriage, one who makes it her mission to rub a stranger’s crotch, and one who thinks about her dead cat and an auto-pay subscription she needs to cancel while her boyfriend performs oral sex on her.<!--more--><\/p>\n<h2>Meanwhile, Dani’s \u201csoft\u201d boyfriend and her friend’s hip, dating-app-using dad wander in and out, more demonstrative with their feelings but hopeless with power tools<\/h2>\n<p>\u201cMy mother loved to tell me who had died, who had gone to jail, who had got out of rehab, and I could always hear her smiling with some sick joy about it, as if she were doing me a service, telling me,\u201d Alic writes. Her stories, like this mom’s, similarly revel in seedy detail. At the heart of this, perhaps, is her characters’ fraught need to be seen. In \u201cWatch Me,\u201d Anya contends with living alone while her musician boyfriend goes on tour. \u201cI was tired of impersonating myself,\u201d she says. \u201cI’m always a few degrees off from the real me, but with more smiling and feigned enthusiasm for topics like gear and sync rights and things being derivative.\u201d Yet by the end of the story, Anya fantasizes that her boyfriend is checking in on her via their security camera, whose red light gives her comfort. From then on, \u201ceverything is a performance,\u201d and she becomes \u201ca woman luxuriating in her solitude: self-assured, goal-oriented, effortlessly beautiful.\u201d Like many characters in this collection, Anya can’t seem to reconcile her hope for autonomy with her need for an audience.<\/p>\n<h2>To renovate her crumbling bungalow, Dani enlists her stern, Slavic father, who shows his affection via physical labor (as Alic’s narrators might put it, acts of service are his love language)<\/h2>\n<p>In the collection’s final and most moving story, \u201cDaddy’s Girl <a href=\"https:\/\/datingranking.net\/de\/bhm-dating-de\/\">kostenlose BHM online Dating<\/a>,\u201d Alic juxtaposes the contradictions of female desire with ideas about family and masculinity. When Dani’s father leaves, she finds herself compulsively dismantling her shower tile, compelled to make things ugly again so her father will return to fix them. In a subtle nod to generational angst, Dani notes that she dislikes the \u201csterile purity\u201d of the tile, \u201cthe ghosts of tenants past buried and forgotten under layers of wood and paint.\u201d While her motivations remain messy and a little destructive, Dani is rejecting pristine surfaces to access something more honest – and, ultimately, to connect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For Millennials in Los Angeles, Bad Thoughts Arise Throughout Nada Alic’s debut fiction collection, \u201cBad Thoughts,\u201d sunny facades belie strange, dark interiors. The stories feature a privileged millennial milieu in Los Angeles with all its carefully observed trappings – neutral linens at a baby shower, destination bachelorette weekends, social media …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-form","column","threecol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78996,"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78995\/revisions\/78996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.princess-it.org\/pbl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}