Welcome to the Cult of Perfect, where we explore the intersection of motherhood, public performance, and bodies, and try to figure out what our addiction to the idea of perfect says about us and the world we live in.
Who are we? 👯
writes the newsletter , hosts the Burnt Toast Podcast and is the author of the NYT-bestselling Fat Talk: Parenting in the age of diet culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America. As a journalist, Virginia has reported from kitchen tables and grocery stores, graduated from beauty school, and gone swimming in a mermaid’s tail. her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Scientific American and many other publications.She live in New York’s Hudson Valley with her daughters, dog, and too many houseplants. You can see more of her writing here, and follow her (and her plants) on Instagram. She is trying to unlearn that children’s toys need to be arranged in rainbow order but also sometimes puts things in rainbow order that in no way require it.
Sara’s writing about feminism and motherhood has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Glamour, Refinery29, and elsewhere. She lives in New Hampshire with her family, where she listens to podcasts obsessively while knitting. Feel free to check out her website to find more of her work, or follow her on Instagram, where she likes to rant about ads. She is actively trying to divest of her belief that The Perfect Sweater a) exists and b) will solve all of her problems.
Why have we joined forces? 🍪🥛🍪🥛
Sara and Virginia have spent the last couple years texting each other before the sun’s fully up about their compulsion to organize children’s toys, their need to inject the ideal blend of lightness and gravitas into high stakes emails, and their many conflicting desires to give less fucks while simultaneously pursuing perfection in a variety of life categories. Through her reporting on anti-fat bias, the fat liberation movement, and the way diet culture encourages us to conform to very specific body ideals, Virginia’s work interrogates perfect health, perfect bodies, and perfect parenting. Through Sara’s research on maternal ideals, domestic goddesses, and the performance of motherhood, Sara’s work interrogates perfect mothers, perfect homes, and perfect performances of gender. We’re always thinking about perfect, and are so excited to connect all the many dots with you all.
How do you join our cult? 🛸
For this special 12-week miniseries, paid subscribers will get six podcast episodes in which we talk about our own personal struggles divesting from various forms of perfection, interview brilliant people about how their work illuminates things like performative domesticity, pregnancy, and even “ideal” family structures. Every other week, we’ll host very fun live discussion threads. On these threads, we’ll pursue any and all tangents, reflect on the prior week’s podcast, and of course, respond to all your questions! We can’t wait.
By subscribing for free here, you’ll get weekly updates and episode previews, but to have full access to the podcast and our live threads, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber. It’s just $5 per month, or $15 for the whole miniseries.
