On 'The Dud Avocado'

and the chronically online cult of curation

I touched the lime green spine and pictured myself on a train. I was standing in a Los Feliz bookshop fantasizing about my impending trip to Europe. I didn’t have any specific plans to ride a train, but I thought maybe if I had the perfect book, the kind whose cover folded satisfyingly over my left hand and could slip into my travel purse, a train ride would find me. Fantasies like this one have always had a way of falling around me, my head often operating like a snow globe. One shake and there’s no stopping the little bits of adventure from floating around until they settle back to the ground on their own time. 

I liked the look of this book that I had stumbled upon, with a doe-eyed blonde staring quizzically back at me. ‘The Dud Avocado.’ Naked on her belly, title across her bottom, forearms tangled under her chin. This was her cover, I assessed. But she didn’t mind if I looked. So long as I didn’t touch anything. I flipped the book over to make sure I knew what I was getting myself into. A free spirited woman in her early twenties, beautiful and brainy and adjective’d like countless other manic pixie dream girls throughout the history of media. I rolled my eyes. I flipped her back over, noting the author ‘Elaine Dundy.’ If this was another Holly Golightly or Penny Lane, at least she was written by a woman. And this girl didn’t look the tiniest bit tortured. There was no sex appeal in her blatant nudity, if anything there was a trace of humor. I decided to give it a chance. 

I proceeded to devour this book. As soon as my trip began, this enticing heroine took over metro rides and park benches. Her name was Sally Jay. She zipped through my brain during meals and muttered comebacks in my ear during conversations. We bumbled through Paris, together! Sally Jay was an aspiring actress, myself a(n aspiring) musician. She was young and single and I was a little less young and on a trip with my boyfriend, but I felt her splintering carefree demeanor and commitment to the here and now course through me. Her experiences may have been 70 years prior and fictional, but how many of the same cobblestones did we step on in our similarly weathered kitten heels. 

I found solace in her self-destruction, affection in her wittiness, but most of all I found resonance in the sheer serendipity of it all. This meeting was a chance encounter, a book that I picked up after stopping in a store that I usually walked past. Had I not just sat at a Parisian cafe similar to the one that she frequented, would I have found her lengthy descriptions boring? If I were a year older, would Sally Jay’s infamous lack of direction come across as grating? This book hadn’t been on my Goodreads wishlist or in my Amazon cart. Like every great love story, there was so much romance in the origin.

In the past year, I had read the same books that every other twenty-something year old Didion fan had read. I had watched what everyone else watched. As a consistent member of the cult of the chronically online, every trend I partook in had been hand selected by an algorithm that worked shockingly well. I liked Summer Fridays lip oil and listening to Mistki, and therefore I was likely to shop at Reformation. And I really did love Reformation. I was on a hamster wheel of consumption that reaffirmed aspects of my identity, as my identity then wrapped itself around those things. If this is your aesthetic [photos of gothic mansions and decrepit libraries], read this [Secret History]. I was a [fill in the blank] girl. It felt like who I was, what I liked, what I owned, somehow started online and ended there too. I was caring for a two headed snake that I couldn’t afford to feed.  

So ‘The Dud Avocado’ became a real-life affirming breath of fresh air. Its pages unfolded into me, its story providing depth that felt unique to a specific moment in time. My experience with it didn’t depend entirely on who I was (or who I wanted to be), it also factored in the when and where. A meet cute, budding into a promising relationship. 

Our relationships with art are just that, relationships. Reading ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ felt very different at 17 than at 23. I’m sure it’ll feel different again at 29. Watching ‘Someone Great’ was part of a lighthearted movie night with all of my roommates, except for the one going through a break up, who got a quote from it tattooed on her tricep the next day. Books and movies and stories and songs are made out of feeling, in order to make us feel something. The way these forms of art enter our lives play a role in the way they make us feel. We’re emotional beings, often at the whim of a million factors much more dynamic and evolving than the self our algorithms want us to be in order to sell us stuff. The algorithmic hands behind our FYP and explore pages tangle up identity and consumption in a way that doesn’t leave much room for art to enter our lives in more serendipitous fashions. Our deepest selves can’t be curated, too amorphous to sort into categories as rigid as the ones we see on social media.

I have been many things in the last few months. Impulsive, abroad, perhaps a little lost. I found reflection in Sally Jay’s lack of self-awareness, grace in her juvenile but well intentioned wisdom. Beauty in the whimsical way in which she entered my life. I didn’t find myself, but I found pieces of it. To me, ‘The Dud Avocado’ was a reminder of the way we’re often shaped by the art that we consume. But that doesn’t mean that we have to become it. We aren’t the things we buy, the things we read, or the people we watch. We just Are.