It’s often said that we don’t own our possessions, our possessions own us, but I also feel owned by things I don’t possess yet and maybe never will. Ask me about my devotion to the Reddit page r/buyitforlife, for instance, or the profound guilt I feel returning online purchases, knowing they’ll just be bundled up and dumped in a landfill somewhere. When I set out to shop, I carry with me my parents, who both grew up in poverty, and my future children, who might not have a planet because of consumption happening today. At the grocery store, I put a case of artisanal seltzer in my cart, walk around with it for a while, and put it back.
American Bulk, a new collection of essays by Emily Mester, explores the big feelings that accompany buying stuff and spending money in America. The titular bulk refers to the guilt, shame, and generational trauma that underpin our shopping habits, but also the joy and pleasure of consumption. Like be honest: who doesn’t have a beautiful life memory in an Applebee’s or been comforted by the reliable uniformity of a big box store? What if Olive Garden isn’t good or bad, it’s just Olive Garden? As the back of this book asks: “What if we explored our relationship to consumption with the same depth and feeling we use to tell stories of great loves and losses?“ There’s no judgement in American Bulk, just close examination.
I spoke to Emily about her new book, as well as the midwestern Facebook culture, frozen pizza, and the iconic YouTube video, “I MIGHT Boycott Bath & Body Works Rant.“ Emily is so smart and funny, just like her writing, and I hope this queer author interview inspires you to pick up a copy of American Bulk today.
Maddy: In American Bulk, you write about your tendency to go deep in the customer reviews section. One really strange thing about publishing a book, I think, is watching your manuscript transform from a work of art into a product that’s sold on Amazon.com and can be rated and reviewed by anyone on the internet. What was that experience like for you? Do you read your own Goodreads reviews?
Emily: In the reviews essay, I am—or I was, anyway—a seasoned reviewer who relished the opportunity to describe if and how and why I liked anything at all. The whole world could be reviewed: a dish towel, a movie, your boss, the ocean. But then an Airbnb host got mad at me for leaving crumbs in the bed (true). One of my undergrads was mad that she got a B+ and basically called me an incompetent slut on her anonymous professor review (half true). My Uber rating went down by a fraction of a star after I talked about Young Ma’s strap-on collection on the way to Ginger’s.
It terrified me, this notion that I could, at any time, be assessed. It was different from being graded, which occurs under a specific rubric and, crucially, is still a social exchange, if an asymmetrical one. Online reviews, on the other hand, are the pulsating collective id of thousands of strangers, all their joys and frustrations, inconsequential to them but everything to you.
For a while I was reading my Goodreads reviews daily. I was looking either for rhapsodic praise, or my own harshest self-critiques echoed back to me with military precision. What I got was mostly measured praise and measured critique, and the difference between them wasn’t as vast as I’d imagined. People noticed a lot of the same things—the book is memoiristic rather than researched, observational rather than argumentative, and the first half is funnier than the second half. Whether or not people like those things is, I’m so sorry to report this, a matter of taste. A part of me still believed that if you just make something good enough, it will be universally loved. I was forced to do that thing where you grudgingly stumble into a cliche you’ve heard all your life but never absorbed. Nothing is for everyone.
A few years ago I visited Bryce Canyon and was, for the first time in my life, literally awed by beauty. I just stood before this alien landscape that simultaneously looks like space and the bottom of the ocean with my mouth agape, capable only of murmuring wow and what the fuck over and over again. Bryce Canyon has hundreds of one-star reviews on Google. The delta between the Goodreads ratings of the absolute worst and the best books you’ve ever read is probably like, 0.4 max.
M: Right now, a lot of women are talking about “underconsumption core” or “no buy 2025” on TikTok. What do you think is going on there?
E: What’s happening is we’re all addicted to shopping (-_-;) I’m also on a no buy. It goes for 3 months, and I’m keeping a list of everything I’ve wanted. At 3 months, I’ll assess whether I can buy one or two things off the list.¹ And then I renew for 3 more months. I’ve failed at these before, so this time I’ve given myself more grace, more honest concessions. For example, I’m going to Brazil² in March and will definitely want to buy new stuff. Instead of complete abstinence, I’ve allowed for a pair of shorts and a pair of sandals, to be monitored and approved by Sky, my gf and also my seal trainer.
I think people wanna curb their shopping for different reasons. Sometimes it’s simply money and space: they don’t have enough of it. Sometimes the drain is less material, and that’s harder to diagnose. What is the spiritual cost of shopping? For me, it crystallized on New Year's Eve. Or, it was technically 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day, when my no-buy was set to begin. I’d arrived home with Sky. I was spooning her and we were both beginning to drift off to sleep, but a part of my brain was like No, stay awake. Once you sleep the no-buy begins. I was calculating when I could roll away from her to buy a few final bullshits. So rarely do our circadian rhythms align such that we can fall asleep this tenderly, and that was the first place my head went. I’ve had periods of problematic drinking or smoking or, decades ago, playing Scorchy Slots on Neopets, but that moment was the most addicted to something I’ve ever felt. I fell asleep despite myself.
M: You named your exes in the acknowledgements section, which is very culturally lesbian of you…
E: Their pets too. I do what I can for the culture.
M: I recognized so many of the dysfunctional relationships to money and shopping in American Bulk in my own family, as well as myself. Do you think anyone has a “normal” relationship to money and shopping? What would that even look like?
E: I think it’s possible to have a normal relationship to buying stuff in the same way it’s possible to have a normal relationship to eating stuff. My mom is like that. She does an annual trip to like, Talbots, buys a few things, and is sated for another year. As for money itself, I don’t think so. Remember that study from 2010 that found happiness rose with income until $75,000, at which point it plateaued? The number always sounded low to me. Adjusted for inflation, that’s enough money for most people to be mostly fine, but enough can still feel precarious in America.
Anyway, that finding was debunked last year. Turns out that the group who plateaued did so not because they were finally satisfied, but because they were constitutionally dissatisfied, and $75k was the point at which the intractability of their misery became clear. As for the rest, their happiness shot up until they were rich, at which point the data got fuzzy because the sample size got so small. So while purchasing might be analogous to eating, purchasing power isn’t at all. Many of us want to eat and buy less, but nobody wants to earn less. Ozempic for hustling has no market.
Obviously, most people have an abnormal relationship with money because they literally don’t have enough. But even for the (surprising!) ⅓ of workers who are “very satisfied” with their pay, do they ever worry it’ll all go away? Would any of them say no to more? This, to me, is why a normal relationship isn’t really possible. There’s no pushing back the plate and patting your stomach. Hunger is as much informed by the contents of your pantry as by the contents of your stomach—that’s why I keep several emergency frozen pizzas on deck. I’ve never actually gone hungry in my life, but their presence alone staves off the animal panic that leads me to place a massive takeout order many times larger than the size of my stomach. But even this anti-panic measure induces panic. I nervously replenish the pizza supply before it ever runs low, which means I have like eight at any given time, which is most of my freezer space. I’d get even more if I had room. It should surprise nobody that my dad has like five refrigerators. I guess money is like that. Even if you’re full, you’re a little bit hungry forever.
Question: what is your frozen pizza of choice? For me, childhood was Jack’s, college was DiGiorno, and right now it’s Trader Joe’s.
M: Definitely the Bambino Pizza at Trader Joe’s, which is for children and reminds me of the hot lunch pizza at my elementary school. Liz is really into what we call “ham pizza”—Google is telling me the official name is Tarte D’Alsace. Jack’s pizza actually began as a family business in Little Chute, Wisconsin--a small town just outside my hometown of Appleton--and then sold to Nestle, so I grew up hearing local legends about the Jack’s pizza heir and how he lived in a giant house with an ice rink, but was otherwise a regular guy. Are you into a specific Trader Joe’s pizza??
E: I stock up on the Pizza Margherita with the fat slabs of mozzarella. If I had access to a Wisconsin FP aisle I’d lose my shit. My thirties have been all about accepting the fact that my favorite food is mediocre pizza.
M: Going back to Appleton, WI and how I’m from there, I’m desperate to ask you about “I MIGHT Boycott Bath & Body Works RANT?” which you reference in American Bulk.
E: Angela. Angela. It’s been 12 years! My friend Laura and I spent quarantine watching vlogs of her and her friend Judy driving to work. She once told this insane story about a sugar daddy who she never met IRL, but he decked her out in Vera Bradley and sent her kids to the Dells once a year, only to TURN ON HER and report all the gifts as income to Section 8. Really screwed her over financially. Angela is fun. Her politics are fine and pretty coherent, but her vibe reminds me of those aunties who do FB posts where the polarity seems to shift every sentence and you can’t predict what’s coming next. Like Police power has gone unchecked and we should abolish them…and replace them with an ARMED MILITIA. I’m so SICK of all these snowflakes whining about gender and bathrooms…let transgender youth LIVE!!! I just kinda love chaotic Midwestern moms. I don’t like Amy Klobuchar’s politics but I love that she ate salad with a comb.
Angela predated the Karen, an archetype that, as I say in the book, speaks far more to the general power imbalance between service worker and customer than it does to the specific entitlement of affluent white women. It was always about capitalism! Or I mean, call the cops Karens are a different thing and usually white, but a retail Karen can be anyone. You don’t have to be alienated from the indignities of the working man to act that way. Anyone who’s ever eaten at a Waffle House knows this.
M: The bulk of Angela’s Bath and Body Works saga went down at my childhood mall. I’ve been in that Bath and Body Works and witnessed people quoting the video to each other and asking associates for Peach Bellini candles, as if on a pilgrimage. The general lore is that there was a manager named Jen, but nobody remembers Angela ever shopping there, let alone pitching a fit. The story itself isn’t very plausible. It makes me wonder why Angela chose to make up this story, which is a fantasy of being a good customer who is betrayed by Bath and Body Works. What need is it fulfilling for her?
E: !!! Like most people, I took Angela’s Shakespearean retelling at face value, assuming that how she acted on YouTube was how she acted to Jen. She actually says in the video that all this is just her inner monologue and she was pleasant to Jen IRL, but nobody believed her.
But ok, what if she’s telling the truth? What if she actually wasn’t rude to anybody, not notably so anyway, and this incandescent rage was only aired in the aftermath, in this public video? Many people are too self-conscious to pull an I was told by Applecare in the store, but they have no problem doing so in the reviews, which Angela’s video essentially was. User reviews have a lot of utility in managing choice overload and cutting through the lie of advertising. But our outsized sense of what we’re owed as consumers has turned reviews into slop. For every measured, helpful assessment, there’s one that’s just a guttural scream.
I think Angela’s fantasy was justice. It’s completely insane to ream Jen’s ass for an honest mistake, especially when the collateral is a Winter Candy Apple 3-wick. But I do see why Angela was frustrated and why the opportunity for catharsis was so tempting to her. If you’re annoyed in a non-consumer situation, you just kinda have to swallow it. There’s no customer survey for getting cut off on the highway, or getting caught in a snowstorm, or your dog eating a balloon and having to go to the emergency vet. Review culture offers a sense of justice to life’s little indignities, if a totally corrosive and misguided one.
M: What’s it like to write about your own family?
E: My dad has read it and is proud. My grandma doesn’t want to read it, but she’s proud too. Things used to be a little touchier. When the book was about to go to press, my dad said I needed to use a pen name or he’d sue me. It was an empty threat, but I understood his concerns—it would be terrifying to have your kid write a book about you! I think he feared it would be like “Woke Daughter Cancels Rich Dad.” But then he read it and dropped the name thing. I worked pretty hard to be humane in the book, to the point where I cut some parts whose illustrative power was outweighed by the degree to which they’d humiliate or villainize their subjects. Avoiding the villain angle was especially important. IMO you’re only ready to write about a source of ~trauma~ or whatever when you don’t see them as a villain anymore, or at least, when you have the capacity to empathize with their circumstances. I see this a lot in contemporary memoir, just like Hmm, I’m not sure you were ready to write about your ex. They want me to hate the person more than they want me to understand them. Not to say you must always nuance yourself out of a genuine and fair character judgment—some people really are that cartoonishly cruel. But a lot of times, it’s more complicated, and if you’re going to write about them in depth, they shouldn’t only be the person who wronged you. If you write about people in a way that is complex, sympathetic, and above all, interesting, then they’re more likely to make peace with you blowing up their spot. 🛒
¹if my desire for them has even held out that long…
²trip is with current gf and also gf-in-the-book who is now my ex-turned-friend. I also live, by choice, with another ex-turned-friend. This is TV Dinner exclusive tea and I plan to one day elaborate further, perhaps via ragebait-y personal essay a la The Cut or similar.
American Bulk is available now from your local library or indie bookstore of choice, as well as your childhood Barnes and Noble that’s somehow still alive and slinging books, Starbucks-associated lattes, and wax seals in 2025. This is a great read for anyone interested or experienced in dysfunctional midwestern families, hoarding disorder, retail jobs, and Costco as a religion. Read an excerpt here.
As Ever, Miriam 👯
I’m back with a new queer author interview. Today we’re talking to my friend, Faythe Levine, the author of As Ever, Miriam. Faythe is an amazing writer, filmmaker, and artist and one of my favorite people to talk to about literally everything. Her new book revisits the letters between Charlotte Russell Partridge (1882-1975) and Miriam Frink (1892-1978),…
Purchased and already hooked
The best frozen pizza I've had in my life was Heggie's (per googling, a MN brand), purchased twice at the west side Woodmans in Madison, Wi. Genuinely felt like crying the first time I had it. Best eaten with goat cheese curds melted on top.
As a connoisseur of online reviewing I can't wait to read the book! Great interview.