No, I'm Not "Alice From Queens"
I'm getting a little sick of having to say so
For a couple years now, I’ve been “accused” of being behind the AliceFromQueens Twitter account. At first, I found this kind of amusing, and it’s not the only account I’ve been accused of running before. (That actually happens pretty frequently.) The rumor has grown big enough that I sometimes get emails haranguing me for tweets sent from that account; OK, that’s fine, whatever. But as time has gone on, I’ve gotten more and more annoyed by it, particularly as there’s been a percolating conversation about anonymity and pseudonymity and alts - I stick my neck out already, under my own name, and so getting hung for that and potentially for things said by an account that’s not me and getting no credit for my career-long dedication to saying controversial things under my own name…. I don’t know, I’m just unwilling to leave it hanging out there anymore. It’s not true that I run that account, the constant suggestion otherwise is quite annoying, and it undermines my integrity in that I made a commitment to people not to use Twitter ever again. I know that, on the internet, giving conspiracists evidence that something isn’t true just eggs them on, and for that reason I’ve been really very hesitant to publish this. Certainly the people who are committed to this idea will simply take my denial as proof that the accusation is true. But I’m going to throw this out there anyway.
I don’t tweet. After I had my scandal where I falsely accused Malcolm Harris on that social network, I knew that I no longer had any right to use the service anymore, and it was very clear that Twitter mixed with my personality and mental disorder very poorly. Leaving the service permanently in 2017 was part of a much bigger set of very necessary life changes that I dove into with purpose and a profound sense that I was out of chances. And along with everything else I did and have done, the way I treated Harris is still something that I feel guilt and shame about every single day, almost six years later, so it’s not hard to stay away. I’m also just happier and healthier without Twitter, genuinely. I read tweets sometimes, in order to remain abreast of what’s getting argued about, but I don’t tweet, and my life is better for it.
The account that’s associated with this newsletter is an automated feed - or, that is, it was an automated feed before Twitter broke IFTTT integration. Since the API or whatever was changed I’ve gone back and forth with the friend who started it about what to do with the account - it’s a bit much to ask him to regularly keep up with tweeting the links on a small account when Twitter throttles engagement to Substack links anyway - but for now there’s no real plan and he’s just tweeting links when he remembers to or when I remind him. I don’t even have the login credentials myself.
But, time to reveal my tawdry secrets! I do have a secret Twitter account, and here it is, @fdbreads. Knock yourself out. I use it to keep abreast of what’s going on in the world of media and politics, which I find necessary as media criticism and politics are major elements of this newsletter. I check it three or four times a week. I’m sure sharing it here will prompt some people to follow it, but there’s simply no reason to do so - it never tweets, replies, retweets, or favorites. It exists only to aggregate together a bunch of other people’s tweets in one place, which helps me pick up on what people are arguing about. It’s simply much more convenient to have one centralized feed than trying to pick through individual Twitter accounts. That’s the sum of my Twitter engagement.
I have no beef with the AliceFromQueens account and I have zero interest in starting any. I will admit that part of my annoyance here is that I just don’t see anything of myself in the AliceFromQueens account. Whoever is running it clearly has different views, conflicting opinions, and a distinct voice from me. To pick something that’s a little frivolous but a bigger deal to me than I’d like to admit - the AliceFromQueens account is really into Twitter, to the extent that they have gotten media attention by complaining about being “shadowbanned”:
The thing is, even when I had a Twitter account, I was notoriously disdainful of Twitter. People would routinely (and quite reasonably) ask me why I was on there at all when I was so dismissive of the value of Twitter. I think Twitter has been bad for human beings and worse for journalism, writing, and media. And I just would never put myself in the position of seeming to care about a Twitter account, even pseudonymously. No offense to anyone, but it’s unthinkable that I would tweet something like this. I would never betray that kind of investment in a social media network; it would be too contrary to my sense of myself as a precious snowflake Serious Writer who’s above such things. The account also routinely defends TikTok; I think TikTok is the devil. There are more examples than that.
Also, this is not how I write. Here’s from a post:
The short of it is that I’d hit a wall with a novel I’d started writing. It was a political thriller, set in the present, about a young woman in New York City with a pseudonymous Twitter account. Let’s call this girl, who is single and tutors rich kids for a living, Celia.
Celia’s pseud account is a simple pleasure for her, the purest lark. She posts photos of her meatless meals, and the books in her lap; she insults Elizabeth Warren, and effuses over Bernie Sanders. When she needs an ego boost, the books in the pic rest on her bare legs, sometimes her bare stomach, and her replies and DMs fill with offers of love and money from men around the world.
Meme work is Celia’s strong suit, however. Her Adam Sandler memes are funny but it’s her Sanders memes that make her pseud account a dim star in the Extended Bernie Twitteratic Universe. Big “dirtbag” accounts periodically share one of her sardonic or adorable graphics. For a day or two, in secret, she tastes Virality, with stresses and joys. She gains a few hundred new followers before her pseud returns to a more comfortable obscurity.
Late one summer night, with Celia asleep in her apartment, New York City is visited by a spectacular act of political violence. Wild “unconfirmed” reports electrify social media through the wee hours, and some turn out to be true. By the time Alicia wakes up, the website of every national news outlet features the “apparent NYC terror attack.”
Setting aside the immediate question of who Alicia is - “the purest lark,” “meatless meals,” “she tastes Virality, with stresses and joys,” “the wee hours,” the very phrase “pseud account” - not, not, not my prose style, not my authorial voice. Those distinctions are subjective, but I’m very deeply invested in my self-conception as a writer and would not publish work that I did not think reflected that self-conception, under my own name or any other. I’m far too pretentious and arrogant for that.
There’s two pieces of “evidence” that people point to that I run the AliceFromQueens feed. The first is that, a few years ago, I posted on Facebook that I’m not AliceFromQueens. Someone commented “this sounds like exactly something AliceFromQueens would post,” and I jokingly replied with a gif of a kid raising his eyebrows. The fact that a denial that something is true is represented as proof that that thing is true… well, that’s the internet. The second thing they bring up is that, back when I was doing a Substack of the Week for the Digest posts, I recommended the AliceFromQueens Substack. CHECKMATE. As for the first part, you can click above and see the Facebook status for yourself. The gif was clearly a joke, not an admission. I don’t know what else to say about that part.
As far as the theory that I was promoting my own secondary Substack on my primary Substack, none of it adds up. She had posted a few times and I had enjoyed what I read, and I also had this weekly slot to fill in my Digest section that I was having an increasingly hard time filling. At no other time did I link to her work, despite the fact that the mailing list for the Digests is far smaller than for the main newsletter. Nor did I ever share that Substack with the thousands of people I’m connected to on Facebook. So if I was trying to get attention for the AliceFromQueens newsletter, I was doing a shitty job of it. Besides, what exactly would be the profit in me starting a second paid Substack under a pseudonym, writing five or six posts, and then pausing payments after letting it lay dormant for months, as opposed to just writing here and continuing to hustle for more subscriptions on a newsletter that’s already very successful? As this newsletter has vastly more followers than that other one, I would in effect be investing just as much time and effort at a far lower per-word rate in compensation and for far fewer eyeballs. Why would I do that? Why would I post an interview with my dad about baseball when my baseball-indifferent dad died in 1997 and when I’m on record as hating what’s happened to baseball? I would never disrespect my father’s memory by pretending to have conversations with him or by tweeting about supposed interactions I’ve been having with him, not even using a pseudonymous account. Nor would I deliberately link to an alt account I was trying to hide from other people! It makes no sense.
Finally, there’s this. On June 15th of last year I had major shoulder surgery at New York Presbyterian - Brooklyn Methodist Hospital.
I was at the hospital early in the morning and unconscious due to anesthesia from, I believe, around 8:30 AM to around 10:00 AM, then in a recovery room for about two hours, then took an Uber home. For several days afterward I was in great pain and doped up on pain pills, unable to write. Yet AliceFromQueens tweeted dozens of times on the 15th and in the ensuing couple of days, including while I was on the operating table:
It’s not me, you guys. Please, get a grip, get a hobby, and leave me alone.