Hello. It’s been a bit.
I’ve been celebrating. I’ve been grieving. I’ve been creating. I’ve been perseverating. I’ve been traveling. I’ve been sitting still. I’ve been in a slump. I’ve been floating on air. I’ve been in the light. I’ve been in the dark. I’ve been feeling a whole lot.
Whenever I tell people I’m a screenwriter and they ask what I write, I answer with a shrug and an uptick in my voice: “Uh, dramedy.” It’s a weird little word, an oft-debated label that smashes comedy and drama together in both its morphology and its meaning. Portmanteaus often feel silly to me — I think too many years working in digital media permanently turned me off of “listicle,” and “cronut” always makes me cringe — but dramedy really does just feel like the perfect word. “I write all the in-between stuff,” I tell people. “The stuff that makes up real life.” After all, isn’t the most accurate portrayal of life one that mixes laughter with tears? In the stories I write, I strive to capture life’s happiest and saddest moments together, to bottle up that messiness.
Perhaps there’s a bit of irony in the fact that as much as I’m used to writing stories set in the in-between, I’m still actually not entirely comfortable with gray areas in my own life. I prefer clean-cut categories: good and bad, happy and sad. And yet, that gray in-between is exactly where I’ve been living for the last year.
It’s been a year of extremely high highs and extremely low lows. Since the last time I wrote this newsletter:
I got married!
Three people very close to me died, including one very suddenly the day after the wedding.
My first episode of TV aired!
I lost my job at Elite Daily in a mass lay-off.
I began developing a few different exciting film/TV projects!
The writers strike began… and continues on.
It’s been a lot. It’s been challenging. More than anything, it’s been confusing. How could I feel such joy, while also feeling such despair? How could I feel so sure about some parts of my life, and so lost in others? How could it all coexist so, dare I say, messily? This very same mess I’d been pouring onto the page all these years oozed out and took shape in my own reality.
The same way my brain craves discrete categorization, so apparently do the bigwigs running the entertainment industry — even despite the fact that our airwaves and streamers are filled with messy dramedies. That’s how we end up slapping the comedy label on shows like Barry, an intensely dramatic series that (spoiler alert) ended quite tragically and so would probably even qualify as a drama according to the ancient Greek guys who originally came up with all this. In my opinion, Barry and a lot of shows like it defy categorization, which is something I love in the stories I write and consume. So why was I resisting it so much in my own life?
The truth is, life is a dramedy. The good, the bad, the laughter, the tears, the grayest shades of gray… they all happen and, more often than not, they happen all at once. I’m learning to embrace that… or at the very least, to live in the moment of every beat of this story.
stuff i’ve made
My first episode of TV aired! I co-wrote the fifth episode of Season 2 of Work In Progress, which you can check out here. I wrote a bit where the cutest kid in the world does a Christopher Walken impression, and I don’t really know what’s better than that.
I’m pretty proud of this lil essay about teenage breakups on Ginny & Georgia that I wrote before I left Elite Daily.
stuff i’m thinking about
How much I love libraries.
We’re all girls when we’re online.
The allure of the YouTube video essay.
Looking back at 25 years of the seminal text The Care and Keeping of You… and looking forward.
How we have (and haven’t) grown up when the pandemic made time feel so malleable.
stuff i’m loving
As of today, it’s Day 142 of the writers strike and Day 69 of the actors strike (I don’t love this). The AMPTP and the WGA have returned to the negotiating table (I’m cautiously optimistic about this), but thousands of writers, actors, production workers, designers, assistants, and more are still out of work until a deal is made. There are a number of relief funds (this is the thing I love) that are offering aid and accepting donations, including:
Season 2 of The Bear. Talk about a dramedy! What a brilliant depiction of some brilliantly screwed-up family dynamics.
You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah. A Jewish coming-of-age story with a singing millennial rabbi? Yes, please.
So! Many! Books!
Mrs. Nash’s Ashes by Sarah Adler
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
The Daydreams by Laura Hankin
Better Than The Movies by Lynn Painter
Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan
With Love, From Cold World by Alicia Thompson
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Old Enough by Haley Jakobson
Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, obvi.
It’s Bi Visibility Week! Here I am being visible! 🩷💙💜
Thanks for reading! If you like The Pop, please like, comment, and share on social media, or forward it to a friend — they can subscribe at thepop.substack.com. You can follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here, and learn more about my work at sarahhallecorey.com. And if you have any thoughts or feelings to share, feel free to reply to this email.