The Anti-Influencer Influencer Manifesto

To quote Sofia Loren, everything I am, I still owe to spaghetti.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t want to Influence your life. Why wouldn’t you want to model your own existences on the circus in which I toil? You, too, can bathe chickens, struggle with ennui, and parent children to whom gravy is considered a beverage.

Look, at least let me make my pitch.

I said that this Substack would become more than a “mommy blog,” not simply because I find the term insulting (I’m a professional writer. I get paid for this), and because the world needs more than just another funny parent with mild mental health issues, but because we all deserve an antidote to the rest of social media, where everyone is reading ingredient labels and talking about thigh gaps and panicking about grocery prices — or, my recent favorite, complaining that body image standards have loosened while bemoaning the declining confidence of American women.

I should note that I don’t fault large-scale influencers like Ballerina Farm or Nara Smith — there’s not a single human among us that wouldn’t make toothpaste from scratch in an evening gown if we were somehow able to — it’s the first-line enforcers of influencer culture. The lackeys. The girls circling the periphery that hope that one more Internet diatribe against seed oils will somehow get them a shift polishing Smith’s forest green Kitchen-Aid. They’re on TikTok, they in glossy Internet magazines, they’re selling nutritional supplements on Twitter.

They’re peddling anxiety. And I already have enough of that.

When I started the backyard homestead project, it was in part because I no longer trusted the government to save me in the event of an apocalypse, and now I have children so I can’t follow my original plan, which was to get bitten by the zombies right away and ride it all out, biting people until someone found a cure frozen in the depths of Antarctic ice.

But there was also this question in my mind about what constitutes a good life. I know I talk ad nauseum about the “second chance” I was given, but beyond that, the year we decided to put down roots in Nashville — making a permanent decision not to return home to the Chicago suburbs or to Detroit, where my family lives — a few influential figures in my life passed away, some suddenly, some not. They passed closely enough together, though, that I couldn’t help but compare things — funerals, obituaries, what people said about them, wrote about them, and remembered about them in the days and weeks after their lives ended.

What is a good life? Or, maybe more specifically, when I go, what will be said about me? How will my family live out my legacy? How will my friends remember me? It all seemed more important than petty squabbles on the internet or the contents of a nutrion label. If none of us leave here without making an impact — if we all make tracks in the snow, so to speak — what is here when I’m gone?

It led me to think about my grandfather, who died when I was just six — a complex character, though I remember him really fondly — and my grandmother who died a while later, when I was already an adult. I can’t say I truly knew either one very well, even though I spent considerably more time with my grandmother. What I do remember, though, is that in the time they spent together with me, there was warmth, and kitchens, and gardens, the smell of four o’clock flowers and figs, the feel of plush emerald green 70s carpeting and of dried fresh pasta nests and of pizza dough.

Every time I see someone online begging to RETVRN to some time where life was simpler and children were cleaner and women were quieter, I don’t think about the 1950s, I think about an Italian kitchen, which is seldom clean and almost never quiet. And I’m home.

That feeling of “home” was what I remembered best about the people I loved. Those moments where I felt like I belonged, but also that I was loved. Even if it wasn’t shown in a particularly traditional way.

Italians are a pretty realistic bunch about death. The funerals are big, and you’re judged by how long the car line is from the church to the cemetery, and how much pasta’s leftover for people to take home at the luncheon that inevitably follows your awkward gravesite commission to heaven. But no one tries to paint you in a better light than what you were; people usually know you had your moments, but they also know you made great fettuccini, and they’re willing to forgive your fistfights because you had the best basement wine. No one is perfect, but Italians won’t only say the nice stuff about you when you pass, and they won’t rewrite your biography. If you alienated someone in life, you meant it. It wasn’t a game. And they knew. And they probably did the same thing.

And that’s what I want. The good to outweigh the bad. When people think of me, I want them to think of a feeling of warmth and home and fresh pasta and thick figs and fresh eggs. The good life. She lived the good life.

So how do I do that in the middle of a major American city? It turns out, its easier than it looks, if you’re not too worried about the things everyone tells you to worry about. I like urban living and its proximity to public transportation and strip mall ethnic food and a variety of casual experiences with crime. But to quote Sofia Loren, everything I am, I still owe to spaghetti.

So this is my pitch to you: come live the good life with me. Learn how to garden, how to cook, how to love fiercely, and fail hard, to raise interesting children and entertaining livestock, prepare nourishing meals, prep optimistically for the end times, develop those grandma skills and rich people habits that will earn you the good obituary — you know, the one with the big glossy photo and the pull quote.

And I’ll see you at the funeral.