In October, in New York City, in my early but firmly established 30s, I made a harrowing discovery: I still cared about being cool. I knew already that I still wanted lots of vain, self-serving things, like the professional admiration of a certain kind of serious male writer, or for everyone I know to be aware of it when I manage to run for more than seven minutes. I want people to think I’m talented and nice-looking and fun, but I thought I’d left the need for cool behind.
There was a period in my late teens and early 20s when to have my photograph taken at a club night felt like the most important thing in the world. My life at the time had been swiftly vacated of meaning, structure and any events beyond partying: I had the feeling that nightlife could be a real community, that it meant something beyond getting wasted and finding someone to sleep with. I had the feeling that coolness was something attainable and tangible, that it could be the redemptive twist I needed after some difficult years. I thought that coolness could save me.
Twelve years on, years that encompassed a miraculous amount of change for me, I thought I had disinvested from that particular faith. Then I found myself in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a party that I was too old, too culturally clueless and eventually much too high for, nervously eyeing the guy taking photographs. Good God, I thought, it’s the Cobrasnake.
For a particular kind of kid from my generation, the Cobrasnake, real name Mark Hunter, was the party photographer to end all party photographers, the documentarian of a certain sort of mildly alternative, excessively physically attractive social scene. In my desperate, late teen years it was his photography that made me believe that there was a certain image I could distill myself into that would free and vindicate me. I thought my longing had to do with how distant the mostly American landscape he photographed was from where I sat, shivering, in a damp Dublin attic. But I recently discussed him with a friend who grew up only a couple of hours outside New York City, who told me he felt just the same about those photos despite the physical proximity, that the land of cool had been just as unreachable. There exists somewhere – or hopefully it doesn’t any longer – one picture taken of me and my best friend by the Cobrasnake at a night in Dublin, me wearing a pair of tights as a cardigan with something else stupid tied around my head, and I remember the cringing, blatant look in my eyes in the picture, saying “Am I sexy? Does everyone like me?”
Suddenly here he was in New York, and I felt as frightened and invisible and ugly as I ever had. I was visiting the city to celebrate the launch of my paperback in the US. I had come to see writing as a sort of gift I could give myself to evade these juvenile and unsatisfiable urges to be seen as cool. Surrounded by all the beautiful kids with their apparently carelessly assembled outfits and their jutting collar bones, I knew I had not lost the yearning after all.
Soon after that, I went upstate to stay with my editor, Jean, and her family as I worked out some edits on my second novel. I had partied for a fortnight, and as we arrived into the powerful stillness of her home I felt the grotty hangover slough off me and the nagging guilt for not being hot, for not being worthy of documentation, wane. For a week I wrote, calm and engaged and actually happy. I walked in my breaks, was warned out of woods by some hunters and listened to music that was not, and would never be, cool. In the evenings I got stoned and played Bananagrams at hilarious length, not sure if the words were really words. I made progress with my book, I ate vegetables, I laughed at their kid and felt admiration for their way of living – one which was rooted in action and conversation, rather than image and representation. A day before Halloween, I passed by a sign for a haunted house which said “GO THIS WAY” and I thought, well, sure, OK.
Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in London. Her novel Ordinary Human Failings is published by Vintage on 15 June, 2023.
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