Jennifer Lawrence Responds to Esquire’s Concerns About Her Drinking
Yesterday, Esquire blogger Ned Hepburn penned A Letter To Jennifer Lawrence About Her Drunkenness. Read it, or not. (“You’re lucky you’re a total stone-cold fox with a face like a million dollars and a better rack than a master carpenter.”) It fits into a wonderful Esquire tradition
of I have no idea. Anyway, we did not like this letter, and we do not like this tradition, and we are so pleased that Jennifer Lawrence chose to write back to her critic.
(If it wasn’t clear already, this letter was definitely not written by Jennifer Lawrence.)
Dear Ned,
Can I call you Neddy? OK, Neddy. Why don’t you have a seat? Why don’t I sit down, actually, too? Why don’t I poop my pants, actually, and then sit on your face? I see that your publication thought it was really hot — even better, that I was marriage material! — when I pooped my pants. Now that I got drunk I’m not hot. So I’ll try pooping again. It’s like a hotness reset button.
I just wanted to let you know I am so trying to keep track of what I do that makes men hard and what I do that makes them want to chastise me, but it’s a lot of work.
So, I heard that you heard that I fell down at the Oscars and then that you heard I was drunk when I fell down. (By the way, do you mind if I use words like “so” and “kinda” and “sure” and not complete sentences like “or something” in this like you used in the letter you wrote me? I mean, it’s not like I’d employ that kind of nursery patter to obscure something as powerful as say, misogyny, but I am feeling a little embarrassed, and stupid, and it’s just a little crutch. You understand.)
So. Neddy. Honey. Writer/Dude! You said, “Babe, let’s talk.” And by all means, let’s! And if we’re going to talk, can we talk about how you said “Babe, let’s talk?” If you weren’t a big, fancy writer for a well-respected men’s magazine that puts out a yearly “Women We Love” issue where every sentence begins with the word “because” and ends with a paean to a body part, I might think you were trying to be, like, mock retro, like, “Let’s pretend that we’re pretending to be ’70s and smoking our girlfriend’s Mores in a bathrobe with our dick hanging out,” or some other meaningless layering of irony popular with those who have no true instinct for how to use the English language. But that’s not you. You’re no amateur.
You know how I know you’re not an amateur? When you say, “Babe, let’s talk,” you totally mean it. You’re being cute — adorable, really — but you really think that you have some authority over me. And that makes sense. Because you’re a man. And I’m a woman and I’m young and I had the audacity to go out and get fucking wasted on the night that the industry I work in throws the biggest party of the year.
This letter is, in part, my attempt to wrestle with that shame.
Oh my God, I laughed SO HARD at your joke about The Hunger Games and how I should have “hit up” In-N-Out on the way. (Oh my god that is SO FUNNY. HUNGER? EATING! LOL!) I love the phrase “hit up.” It’s like something you’d say if you were in a frat, talking — not something you’d actually bother to write down, you know? And thanks for admitting that you get drunk sometimes, too, and acknowledging that it must be really hard to be a beautiful woman. It’s actually not that hard. And when it’s hard, I just think, “Shit, I am really good at what I do. At my job! Like, I would never commit the acting equivalent of writing a sentence like, ‘I’m assuming you know that half the youth of America live vicariously through your every charming babble in every interview.’”
And that takes away some of the sting.
I have one question. You say you don’t want me to be like Sean Young, but Sean Young and I really have nothing in common, other than we appear in films, have vaginas, and got drunk at the Oscars. I’m not trying to put her down, but Sean Young was never nominated for an Academy Award, and she certainly never won one. Again, not putting her down, but she was not a consistently critically-acclaimed actress and big-ass movie star, not this young, and not for any serious amount of time. Now, this is not a perfect analogy — surely you of all people will not mind — but telling me, “Don’t be Sean Young” is like me saying to Jonathan Franzen, “Don’t be Ned Hepburn!” Except that Jonathan Franzen would just say, “Who?”
But I digress. (Sorry, you don’t mind if I borrow this clever turn of phrase from you?) I guess I just can’t stop thinking about how much it hurts that one day you thought what I did was cute and then, later, when you found out I was drunk when I did it, you started thinking it wasn’t cute. I see that you praise my “face like a million dollars” and that you think I have a “better rack than a master carpenter” (is that because master carpenters build racks really well?) but I won’t settle for fickle attentions. When I was a little girl growing up in Louisville, I was looking up at the sky one night and I said, “God, please let my behavior always meet the exacting standards of a male blogger who doesn’t really understand how to use babble as a noun,” and at the moment, I swear, there was a shooting star. So. I know my dream is supposed to come true, Neddy. Your wish is my command. Or something. Thank you.
Love,
Jenny
Previously: When People Say Funny Things When Animals Attack
Sarah Miller is the person who wrote this letter and is also the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl. She lives in Nevada City, CA. Follow her on Twitter @sarahlovescali.