In one of the stories in her new book Artless, New York-based writer Natasha Stagg writes about a long journey home from a party. The character’s Uber driver gets distracted reading a gossip website on his phone and misses the turn towards Brooklyn. As Stagg's character loops around lower Manhattan, she starts thinking about how we’re all misdirected by our hunger for gossip. The theories and metaphors traded at cocktail parties are just a pretense because ‘the real action happens on the highway, in cars heading home to outer boroughs, a recap of everything that was missed while we were being handed champagne flutes‘.
Stagg is well versed in gossip (a chronicler of her city and its downtown scene, she cites name-dropping as one of her favourite pastimes) and it’s part of what makes Artless so enjoyable to read. The collection of stories and essays includes the obvious fodder – the party recaps, the celebrities behaving badly, the artists behind the scenes – mixed in with more relatable details, like her decision to quit social media or the exhaustion of the ‘creator economy’. Yet this gossip, thanks to Stagg’s intellect, does not feel like a misdirection. Every anecdote in Artless is a puzzle piece clicking together to create a comprehensive picture of some broader question: a story about the last China Chalet party turns into a think piece on our post-pandemic social life, a burnt-out church sets off thoughts about the complexities of enjoying work by cancelled men, and that absent-minded Uber driver triggers questions about our obsession with representation.
