iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I think Maddie’s Secret compares unfavorably to, say, the Brady Bunch Movie, but I nevertheless enjoyed thinking about its limitations

It does not, however, precisely parody the style of Very Special TV episodes, unlike, say, The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), which might otherwise be Maddie's Secret's closest spiritual relative. The Brady Bunch Movie uses the exact visual grammar of the original sitcom, as well as its hokey, aw-shucks tone and earnest plotting to get its satire across. It's both a sarcastic rendition of the corny, flat style of the old show anda loving mockery of its foursquare values. But Early seems to be making a very personal film with a certainly lovely, distinctly Sirk- inflected aesthetic that is nevertheless somewhat at odds with the story being told.

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

as a bonus I have included Elizabeth Inchbald's September happiness-ranking diaries entries

1791. London; after my novel, Simple Story...very happy.

1792. London; in Leicester Square...cheerful, content, and sometimes rather happy....

1794. Extremely happy, but for poor Debby’s death.

1795. My brother George’s death, and an intimate acquaintance with Dr. Gisborne—not happy....

1797. After an alteration in my teeth, and the death of Dr. Warren—yet far from unhappy.

1798. Happy, but for suspicion amounting almost to certainty of a rapid appearance of age in my face....

1802. After feeling wholly indifferent about Dr. Gisborne—very happy but for ill health, ill looks, &c.

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

"I only occasionally find myself describe rooms in my novels not because I wish to but because I feel that I ought to, and then I stop and think, but I don’t care what’s in the room, and I let the spirit of Mrs. Inchbald carry me back out of the physical realm."

I think Austen is the GOAT (of any sex), but she did not write in a vacuum. As in the case of Burney, Austen’s comparison to Inchbald should be celebrated to their mutual standalone benefit. If the high-ironic style so often attributed to Austen is frequently indistinguishable from Burney’s prose, the idea that Austen invented imperfect heroines must, with A Simple Story, fall similarly by the wayside. Inchbald’s greatest merits exist not, as Strachey suggests, “in spite of” her “artificialities,” but in the depth of character her so-called artificialities allow—in the novelistic truths of her insights; in the psychological and philosophical dramas of her pointed parallelisms.

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

“like all ingenues, she is blonde and has precisely two enemies”

Jake might be described in modern online parlance as "an eater," someone who readily telegraphs a mighty appetite for pussy and food.
He openly lusts after Maddie (although he stops just short of offensive perversion), eats whatever she cooks with obvious relish, and instinctively shuts down her self-deprecating comments, seeing no faults in either her body or her cooking. He is beautifully paradigmatic of the oblivious partner of someone with an eating disorder: he can be easily dismissed and lied to without guilt, since he's too unobservant or stupid to realize he ought to hate her, as she hates herself.

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

btw come to the Mechanics' Institute in SF tonight at 6pm if you want to hear me talk about my latest book www.milibrary.org/events/34323

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

it’s finally here…at last, a really good screed

Cyril Connolly’s book Enemies of Promise

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

"They’re all done driving. They have a light that flashes, that beeps, that goes Beep Beep Beep. There’s a button on the bus. You cannot push it. Let’s look at it. So? So? So?" www.thechatner.com/p/dialogue-f...

dialogue from a recent walk in the woods with my two-year-old when a pair of fire trucks unexpectedly drove into the meadow

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

the rumors are true: I am employee of the month at my day job this month. It came with a magnet and a certificate confirming that I do happily go the extra mile

HERO program award baby. helpful effective reliable optimistic that's the Danny Lavery guarantee

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

a real publicity coup — Meeting New People has been named in the senior living residential newsletter at my day job. “all-around good guy” — the coveted Lynda C. blurb is mine.

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

saw a huge beehive melt off a tree and land on the street right before my book launch. not a ceromancer but i have to assume it was auspicious

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Barbara Foerster is here. she’s off the casserole list, she’s mad as hell, and she has no choice but to continue taking it for the foreseeable future

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

"Any friendship that comes together over a mutual dislike of a third person is the best kind. Don’t let anybody tell you different." www.thechatner.com/p/any-friend...

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

“I've ended friendships with women for switching to natural deodorant; for forgetting to eat lunch and getting too hungry to make a prompt decision about where to get dinner; for taking me to a local production of The Nutcracker out on Long Island and saying afterwards, ‘Wasn't that terrific?’”

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

been rewatching Mikey and Nicky and the thing that's so good is you start out thinking Peter Falk is going to "be the reasonable one" and then 15 minutes in he’s strangling a diner owner for refusing to sell him half-and-half bc Cassavettes medically needs to drink cream

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

if you pre-order my next book, Meeting New People, from Barnes & Noble this week you can do so at a 25% discount. If you don't, nothing about your life will change, so you're pretty set either way www.barnesandnoble.com/w/meeting-ne...

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

also ended up ranking all the SoCal evangelical colleges along a pious/scholarly axis

You mentioned Lewis and it reminded me of the strange Anglophilic strain running through certain parts of SoCal evangelicalism. We had a surprising number of classmates who wore Rainbow sandals to class and longboarded everywhere, while also being super into Chesterton and Belloc. Of the major evangelical Christian universities in Southern California – I don’t count Pepperdine because they don’t require faculty or students to sign a statement of faith, besides which their chapel requirement is something laughably low, like fourteen hours a semester

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

between Walter Matthau’s face and Walter Matthau’s hair there is a gap of staggering antiquity….

Walter Matthau’s face in A New Leaf is like the picture of Dorian Gray: cunning, and old as sin, depraved and loveless and sinister, monstrous and melted, withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. He looks like if a very old ventriloquist’s dummy were given the same wardrobe and chance at life as Pinocchio. But Walter Matthau’s hair in A New Leaf looks like Dorian Gray, the man: unfaded, insouciant, youthful, exquisite

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

“the broccoli of lesbianism versus the bread pudding of fake faggotry” open.substack.com/pub/dmlavery...

And I think it’s most interesting when the justifications are dropped! What if someone’s interest in a sexual experience, that could not in real life include them, did not:

Heal your trauma
Help you navigate misogyny
Assist in identity formation as a gay trans man
Or do any good in your life aside from being you pleasure

Wouldn’t it be fun to find out? It seems like people often want to introduce virtue into this conversation, like “As a woman, you ought to be more interested in f/f. Only once you have finished the broccoli of lesbianism may you enjoy the bread pudding of fake faggotry.”

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Sleeping with men after having transitioned felt quite a lot like being Blanche DuBois at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire — more specifically, like being Marge Simpson as Blanche in Oh, Streetcar! — depending wholeheartedly on the kindness of strangers. It works!

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

rescuing gooners from themselves: dazed, blue-eyed, limpid, wearing hospital gowns, ready for rehab

It feels like a comrade-tinged inflection of that “aborted gf” meme: I would have been your brother-in-arms, anon, if I hadn’t been infected by the pornographic mind virus….we could have been so wholesome and sexually pure together…

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

my third novel is about a relentless string of friendship bust-ups. MEETING NEW PEOPLE comes out summer 2026

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

I just got tickets to tour my local wastewater facility if you even care

the tour includes strong odors and birds!!!

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

“If Pauline was still wearing brown, as she had been this morning, then Lucianne had better wear something blue, to heighten the charm of the difference between them. Luckily it would not matter what Katherine was wearing.” Women’s Hotel is out in paperback now, sequel is out next month!

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

"going to need to build up trust in my cartoon before i decide whether it's bad to bomb children every night" jesus christ

"“It has been a relief to me that we are setting the show slightly in the past, that we did not have to talk about any of that stuff on the show itself,” Bob-Waksberg told me when I asked him about Israel’s absence, “because the Jewish experience is so much more interesting than that.” He began breaking the show’s story in earnest in October 2023, and felt that if Israel-Palestine became a part of it, “that would be the headline.” The show only goes up to the year 2022. Of course Israel’s conflict with Gaza—and Jewish American attitudes and conversations around it—precede the current violence by decades, and Bob-Waksberg has not ruled out Israel as a topic in future seasons; he just wants trust in the show and the characters to be earned first, before these things can be isolated and misconstrued."

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

in the seven or eighth installment of "A Good Day to Join the Hittite Army" we finally meet the Hittites www.thechatner.com/p/a-good-day...

The last years had seen the end of the imperial postal service, among other things. This took some time to register, as no word of the end ever came. The great roads did not close but gradually emptied, depositing the last arrival unawares. The seas flattened. Ships left without returning. A certain sense of scale seemed to vanish. Durhumit and Hahhum went silent. Palaces shut down. Some of the smaller kings resumed their personhood, and whatever distant lands that made tin began closing their doors. The rain changed, but only just, and not in a manner that would have been easy to describe. Merchants ran out of a little bit of everything. Cities went defunct, self-selected for armageddon, and chose flooding. They foundered, becoming marine and salt-worn. Courts grew sullen, then slept, lapped by the moon, that sort of thing. Priests turned away women looking to dedicate their youngest sons to the gods, since they could no longer guarantee a favorable response.

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

“I’m flattered, Pilot, but I’m a married man.”

big old ship has a sign reading PILOT NO TUG

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

flow chart guide for figuring out if you’re in a flow chart

flow chart asking if you’re in a flow chart (does it show steps in a process? can you see arrows visualizing a sequence? baby you’re in a flowchart)

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Women’s Hotel, Christmas at the Women’s Hotel, and their six mothers and fathers

Armistead Maupin, Rachel Ferguson, Barbara Pym, Maud Hart Lovelace, AA World Services, Luigi Villari

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Barnes & Noble is running a preorder sale for the Women’s Hotel sequel…it’s mellow and melancholy and a trifle funny, and you’ll enjoy it. www.barnesandnoble.com/w/christmas-...

preorder code at Barnes & Noble for my next book (PREORDER25)

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Captain Jack Aubrey you go to hell and you stay there for this one

from The Wine-Dark Sea, he makes a “bery nicey” pun after seeing the Berenice when he needs rescuing

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

turned in the manuscript for my third novel this morning. MEETING NEW PEOPLE, a Nora Ephron-style parable about friendship breakups, aging with and without bitterness, and very good recipes delivered with an irritable, hostile spirit

“I feel sorry for you” is what people say when they’re so angry with you that they’ll never admit to being angry ever again. You’ve lost all of your sightseeing privileges to any of their private feelings. They’re going to control themselves and maintain perfect composure in front of you forever. It’s just awful. It’s considerably worse than getting yelled at. The only thing you can say in return, when someone tells you they feel sorry for you, is that you actually feel sorry for them.
Which is an unsatisfying thing to say, because they got it in first, and it makes you sound like a little kid copying her big sister. But it’s still the only thing to say.
So I told her, “Well, Susan, I actually feel really sorry for you,” and we probably ought to have ended the conversation there, because nobody was going to say anything coherent or sensible after that.”

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

book's got lunch in it too, in case you don't like breakfast

screenshot from Women's Hotel of Elizabeth Watson Perkins' record-breaking lunch cadging from like six different churches. even potted shrimps from the Universalists. it was the 50s!!

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

beep beep. man with a baby coming through

driving a very real tiny pink car with my son

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

"Once again Charlotte Brontë has prefigured the moral panic about 'butch flight,' only where 'the Catholic Church' takes the place of 'medical transition.'" The Reluctant Ecumenist: Nobody Resents or Resembles Nuns More than A Charlotte Brontë Heroine www.thechatner.com/p/the-reluct...

"Lucy Snowe" has what I'd call a "Noble Savage" view of Catholics

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

“No, it’s not IBS Cheesesteaks. It’s IB-apostrophe-S Cheesesteaks.Totally different.”

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

oh Lucianne Caruso, I missed you

"It was tiring but gratifying work; counting money as it came in was a very different undertaking to counting money as it went out, and Lucianne had been making money frequently, consistently, and with tremendous relish for more than two months now. And she was in love, or something very near it, which far from making her indifferent to money, had instead sharpened her appreciation and avidity for it."

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

first pass pages, baby! get ready for the Christmas spirit an the Women's Hotel...not now, obviously. In late October, when it's reasonable to think about Christmas, and the 1964 World's Fair, and Dick Buttons' Ice-Stravaganza, and the difference between the best furniture and the merely good...

title page for the next book: "Christmas at the Women's Hotel, A Biedermeier Story"

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

“somebody told me that you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year” can be dated to the jazz age

1927 cabaret song called “i’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the prince of wales”

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

I’m in LA this weekend for the book festival — come by tomorrow at noon if you want to chat about Women’s Hotel!

Panel is tomorrow at noon in the Ray Stark theater at USC

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

lately i’ve been doodling a nemesis for Little Orphan Annie, a straight-haired girl who never solves crimes and lives with her family named TWO-PARENT ANNIE

little orphan annie has pluck, a red dress, a dog named sandy, and grit. anne has two parents who live with her

2-parent annie has a blue dress, her catchphrase is “‘sblood” or “Yoicks” and she always follows the law

LOA says leapin’ lizards and hates the New Deal

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

People driving feel like tyrants and kings, so it’s harder to get a friendly word. A train’s the best combination of freedom and dependence, if idle conversation’s what you’re after. www.thechatner.com/p/twelve-hou...

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Danny Lavery @dannymlavery.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki also a strong frontrunner in my books for looking like a colorized version of a World War One-era soldier

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