A Day In The Life - Whitney Mallet

This month we asked Whitney Mallet, the founding editor of The Whitney Review.

It takes about 17 minutes to walk to my office. I love that I can walk there. My office is in the garment district, smack between Port Authority (the bus station) and Penn Station (the train station) and Madison Square Garden (the sports stadium and concert arena). This is an insane ambience to get to experience everyday. A space of transience. A window into industrial economies of performance. I feel so lucky to regularly absorb New York’s most unsavory urban spectacle (I chose an uncharacteristically wholesome pic). Also there’s a post office attached to the Beaux Arts train station that’s open until 10pm at night—perfect for mailing out issues!

Today I got breakfast with Maya Martinez at a diner nearby called Tick Tock. Maya is one of my best friends and favorite writers. I’m so excited to see her because I haven’t since she went on tour to promote her book Theatrics. For the next issue, I asked her to review Practicing Dying by Charlotte Northall, which Pilot Press is billing as an addiction anti-memoir. Over waffles and omelets, she explains the author’s point of view on 12-step programs versus Buddhism.

For a year, I ran The Whitney Review out of my bedroom. Then our first office had no windows. Now we just moved to our second space. This is the first day, my editorial dream team Mekala Rajagopal and Morgan Becker came to see the new spot. The carpet is red because it was formerly a Christian Louboutin workspace. You know, red because red bottoms. Bonjour!

By 6pm I’m usually rushing off to some event that I feel I must attend. I love live stuff and absorbing ideas and being in the mix. Tonight I went to Mast Books to see Olivia Kan-Sperling in conversation with Jamieson Webster about hysteric literature. They touched on why we want characters to have rich inner lives. Really, it’s a good question; we usually take for granted literature should have this without asking, why? Both Olivia and Jamieson’s respective new books are reviewed in the latest issue of The Whitney Review. I was shy to say hi to Jamieson because the review of her book is a bit bitchy. The reviews are all by different reviewers, and I think it’s okay for not all of them to be positive. I have an impulse to uplift and cheerlead, but I also feel there aren’t enough venues for criticism (literally why I started a literary criticism magazine). At the same time, judgement is deeply interpersonal and subjective.

Alex Auder invited me to join her and friends at Il Buco (kind of a fancy restaurant!) so we could chat with Marianne Vitale about plans for this salon series we’re putting together in Paris (October 21 to 24). Alex lives in Philadelphia but was in New York to support her friend’s fashion show. The crew included actor (also an author and translator) Molly Ringwald who I chatted to about Tony Tulathimutte’s newest novel Rejection. Alex (the one flashing her boobs) is the best because she’s effortlessly chic at the same time as being a clown. She gives access to the decadent highly envied inner sanctum of artist-celebrity while also skewering its stank. The circumstances which forged her uniquely delightful personality (she’s the daughter of two Andy Warhol collaborators and grew up in the Chelsea Hotel) can be read about in her memoir Don’t Call Me Home.