All the Lives I Want Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers

"Alana Massey's prose is to brutal honesty what a mandolin is to a butter knife: she's sharper; she slices thinner; she shows the cross-section of a truth so deftly--so powerfully and cannily--it's hard to look away, and hard not to feel that something has shifted in you for having read her." -- Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams From columnist and critic Alana Massey, a collection of essays examining the intersection of the personal with pop culture through the lives of pivotal female figures--from Sylvia Plath to Britney Spears--in the spirit of Chuck Klosterman, with the heart of a true fan. Mixing Didion's affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard. But it is, above all, a paean to the celebrities who have shaped a generation of women--from Scarlett Johansson to Amber Rose, Lil' Kim, Anjelica Huston, Lana Del Rey, Anna Nicole Smith and many more. These reflections aim to reimagine these women's legacies, and in the process, teach us new ways of forgiving ourselves.

Signed with Grand Central Publishing since June of 2015, Alana Massey is a writer whose work covers culture, labor, identity, and mortality. The popularity and substance of her writing has earned her the attention of publications like The Awl, The Columbia Journalism Review, and Forbes, who have all published profiles of the author. Massey counts authors like Leslie Jamison, Molly Crabapple, Heather Havrilesky, and Rebecca Traister as admirers of her writing, in addition to her sizeable Twitter following that has tripled in size each of the last two years. Massey's essays, criticism, reviews, and reporting appear regularly in publications like The Guardian, New York Magazine, Elle, The Atlantic, Hazlitt, Buzzfeed, and more.