missed connection no. 21

the poetics of McGriddles buns

welcome to missed connection where each month i write a letter to a stranger (usually about books)

Dear Alissa Nutting,

Do you remember the first time you felt like the most horrifying and dank corners of your personality could possibly be seen, accepted, and perhaps even loved? Mine was an otherwise unremarkable day during my senior year of college. I read your Grub Street diet in the gray-carpeted library on my favorite floor which was underground, where the vibes were a bit more institutional than collegiate. You wrote, “McGriddles buns have all these little syrupy dots on them, and I meticulously eat all the brown dots out of each bun,” and “because I have unfettered access to a self-serve cola fountain, I probably drink about a dozen Diet Cokes.” I had never felt so, for lack of a better word, seen. People probably think the “dozen” is hyperbole but I know it is not. I’m not getting into Diet Coke discourse here because I don’t need to prove myself to the internet but 12 is a perfectly reasonable number of fountain diet cokes to consume when given the opportunity.

College was also a period in which I spent an ecstatic amount of time plotting my next go ‘round in the Cookout line. Have you ever been to Cookout? It’s a fast food franchise that only really makes sense in suburban areas with close proximity to large football schools. They offer what’s called a “Cookout Tray” in which their guests may select, from the comfort of their cars, one “main” (such as a cajun chicken sandwich or 2 beef quesadillas), two sides, and a drink (I usually opted for the “HUGE tea” or a milkshake) all for the incredible price of $4.99. According to my research you can make around 54,000 possible combinations¹ from the Cookout Tray menu. This was thrilling to me. Did I “enjoy” going “out” to “parties” in college? I guess. Sometimes. Did I go because I knew the Uber would take us by Cookout on the way home? I looked forward to that the whole night. I spent many many enjoyable hours on sticky porches clutching a lukewarm can of Miller Lite to my flimsy, flammable going out top, and counting down the minutes until it would be appropriate to casually say, “Anyone want to go to cookout?”

That’s my story, Alissa Nutting, and I was delighted to read yours. After inhaling your Grub Street, I read, in quick succession, Tampa and Unclean Jobs and Made for Love. As delightful as a bag of cheese bugles and an ice cold fresca. Somewhere in there I decided I might like to be a writer. Maybe it would be a way to find a space in the world for my weird angles. And it would be something I could do while consuming Totino’s pizza bagels in the privacy of my own domicile, perhaps even simultaneously.

As a thank you for this I wanted to share with you the most singular, strange (extremely complimentary) book I’ve read in recent memory: Us Fools by Norah Lange. I was sick over the holidays and spent much of the time reading formulaic mysteries that made my brain feel as smooth as a jar of Duncan Hines icing. This book reached out its hands, grabbed me by my ears, and shook me out of that. Us Fools is about two sisters, Bernadette and Joanne (Bernie and Jo), living in the midwest on a struggling farm with their mythical, flawed parents. It’s the eighties when the story begins and these girls are coming up in near isolation during the farm crisis. Things are…not great. Bernie narrates the story and spends a lot of time being terrorized by her older sister who she reveres and yearning to be an adult in a city, a particularly endless kind of wanting that almost every kid who grew up farm or farm-adjacent can relate to. But then Bernie is an adult, in a Motel 8, and is she okay? Time in this book does something strange. It folds in on itself. A single event no longer than five minutes or so is returned to over and over, picked at like a weird mole, and then two years fly by in less than a sentence. It is one of those novels that resists being read quickly partly because the passage of time feels overwhelming. Is that too obvious to say? That time feels overwhelming? Of course it does. Nothing is as anxiety-inducing as contemplating the impeachable passage of time. To think about time is to think about death and this story is doing that, taking its delicious time inching toward the end, dread getting under your fingernails like Cheetos dust or glitter. And then there is the food. The food is what grounds this story, makes it feel like you are living within it. Here are some highlights: off brand cereal notable in its sugar content (high), white wine in pint glasses, lentil soup that smells like dirty diapers, a particularly memorable omelet described as “growing a mustache,” cheese and bean burritos as more of a complete diet than a single food. Food is scarce and then a comfort. It makes you feel like you know these girls, know what they smell and feel like. I liked this book because I am finished reading it and I still don’t completely know what it meant, but I miss it. It feels like it’s continuing on, somewhere separate from me. The point of the story is the story. Soup as a unit of time. Sisterhood as a country, a sometimes violent one. Trash as treasure.

Thank you sincerely for your stunning, revelatory, life-changing writing. I wish you the warmth of one thousand diet cokes in a large and ice-filled cup.

Stuart

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Thanks for reading my monthly letter to a stranger 💘 You can find my other letters and interviews with writers and other people I adore here. Last year I wrote to a crush, my digital doppleganger, and a tattoo artist, among others. Thank you so much for reading! I love you!

1. The correct combination is 2 chicken quesadillas + corn dog + hushpuppies + a large diet coke