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Dear Pepper is an advice-column comic by Liana Finck. If you have questions for Pepper, the advice-giving dog, about how to act in difficult situations, please direct them to [email protected]. Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Dear Pepper,

I write incessantly in my journal. It is easier for me to write my truth than to speak it. I like to imagine that I’m working toward writing a memoir concerning something no one really knows about (so, a confession, an offering of truth).

My worry: Am I really a writer, or is this consuming project just my form of therapy, a desire to show my real self and beg for acceptance and love? If that’s what it is, does it deserve to be read by others? It feels awfully self-serving.

Pepper, thanks for taking the time to try to decipher my question (even that is helpful!).

Kind Regards,
J

Dear J,

When I️ do what I️ define as “creative work,” I️ expend about ninety per cent of my energy staving off a terrible queasy feeling—an anhedonic sense of doom—that I’ve been trying to decode. So here goes . . .

It’s a feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing what I’m doing or why, which it sounds like you can relate to. It’s a feeling that I’m wasting time (lately, precious paid-nanny time.) To say that I️ don’t do well with uncertainty is an understatement. A coffee meeting without a definite purpose is enough to throw me into a days-long spiral of dread. In such instances, I forgive myself the dread spiral: I’m a draw-er, not a hanger-outer, and I’m O.K. with that. But when the terrible dread spiral stems from my work—the thing that’s supposed to make me feel safe and happy—I just don’t know what to do. So, on top of the dread spiral itself, I also feel shame.

How’s that for confessional?

To deal with the queasy feeling, I️’ve developed a very small arsenal of two tools that I hope can be helpful to you. My first tool is catharsis: to look straight into the darkness and attempt to define it. I do this by drawing and writing. Are these drawings and writings art? I️’ve learned that I don’t really care. That’s not my particular hangup, though my ability to make a living from them is.

My second tool is to get out of my own head so that the feeling recedes. Over the years, I’ve learned different ways of doing this, from sucking on candies to running to listening to podcasts to going to parties. (I️ dread a coffee date but I️ love a party—it’s such an efficient way of being social.) The ultimate distraction, of course, is children (or in my case, puppies), but I’ll save that for another column.

Even as a practitioner of confessional art myself—am I? Or am I just a letter-reading dog?—I️ can’t definitively answer your question about whether your writing is worthy of being read by others. But I️ can tell you that the feelings you describe are a dragon that stands at the gate of your work, and your task is to figure out how to engage with it: slay it, skirt it, soothe it, or ride it. I think all artists (and probably all people) eventually have to deal with a dragon or two. The point is to handle yours wisely.

Sincerely, sincerely, sincerely,
Pepper

Let’s say, for the sake of the following discussion, that we agree on the following:

1. Teen-agers have First Amendment rights.
2. Social media has become the place where people, especially young people, express their views.
3. Social media is very bad for kids.

The question, given these facts, is: How much are we willing to restrict the free speech of teen-agers in order to protect them from the ills propagated by social-media companies?

I posed this question a couple years back, when writing about legislation in Utah that would have placed a strict age restrictions on the use of social media. To enforce this law, Utah could have required people to verify their birth dates using government identification—a method that would have excluded from the internet’s public square not only kids but all sorts of adults who happen to lack government I.D. At the time I wrote about the legislation, I mostly agreed with arguments that were made against it by the A.C.L.U and the Electronic Frontier Foundation: although I would rather my own children not touch a social-media platform until they are sixteen years old—or ever, really—the encroachment on free expression was too egregious to abide. Utah passed the legislation, but a judge blocked its implementation pending the resolution of a lawsuit filed by a trade organization backed by giant tech companies.

This month, an even stricter law, the Online Safety Amendment Act, went into effect in Australia. It effectively bans everyone under the age of sixteen from the major social-media platforms. Social-media companies are required to take “reasonable steps” to follow the law; any company in violation of this will be fined roughly thirty million dollars. There are no penalties in place for users or their families, but everyone in Australia who wants to use social media could have to submit to a fairly onerous series of age verifications—for instance, uploading a video selfie that will be analyzed by artificial intelligence.

The act was passed a year ago in Australia’s House of Representatives by a vote of 101–13. And polling conducted in the past year shows somewhere between sixty-seven and eighty per cent of Australian adults support the bill. At the same time, less than half of the Australian public believes the ban will be effective—and, according to a recent poll published in the Sydney Morning Herald, fewer than a third of parents plan to enforce the ban in their households, by deleting the relevant apps off their children’s phones. What this means is that many young people will be able to get around the bans, for example by using virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, which can make an internet user appear to be in a different country. Early reports indicate that kids are fooling the age-recognition software with sophisticated techniques such as drawing on facial hair and substituting celebrity photos for their own.

What seems most likely: the law will not be rigidly enforced, as teen-agers and social-media companies figure out ways to circumvent the ban, but the social norm established by the law and its robust popularity among politicians and voters will lead to a significant downturn in social-media use by minors nonetheless. Not every fourteen-year-old is going to draw a moustache on their photograph or get a fake I.D.—and the law should be easier to enforce among younger kids, which may mean that in five or so years it will be rare to find a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old in Australia who has ever posted anything on social media.

This seems like a pretty good result—if you believe, as I do, that social media is obviously bad for children and adults alike. But it returns us to the question I posed at the start of this column, which has a particular relevance for Americans, who live in a country founded on the principle of free speech. The civil-libertarian argument against laws like the one that Australia has passed will probably win out in this country, if only because it happens to be aligned, in this case, with powerful domestic tech companies. That argument is simple, but bears repeating: we shouldn’t place arbitrary age limits on who gets to express themselves in the digital town square, and we shouldn’t require everyone who wants to express their opinions online to submit to an I.D. check. As a journalist, I’m also aware that, for many people, social media is a source of news. It may be a toxic and wildly imperfect alternative to legacy media, but I don’t think we should use government force to effectively reroute children to more traditional sources of information.

In my column on this subject two years ago, I compared the attempt to restrict social-media use to adults to earlier efforts to do something similar with tobacco. The remarkably successful fight against youth smoking did rely, in part, on a shift in social norms; it also depended on a variety of legal restrictions, and heavy taxation—and I did not, at the time, see what equivalent measures might be taken with social media. Ultimately, I thought it might just come down to parents holding the line.

I’m less pessimistic now. One of the recurring themes I discuss on “Time to Say Goodbye,” the podcast I host with the Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper, is what a good life looks like today. When politicians, especially liberal ones, discuss the society that they want to help bring into reality, what are the shared values that they imagine will hold people together? I’m not talking about kitchen-table issues, as important as they are, or even about tolerance and equality. What I have in mind is a vision of how Americans should live on a daily basis in a time when technology runs our lives. The Times columnist Ezra Klein addressed this recently in a piece about the “politics of attention” and the question of “human flourishing.” He concluded, “I don’t believe it will be possible for society to remain neutral on what it means to live our digital lives well.”

I ultimately agree with Klein that we will not be neutral forever, even if our courts make an Australia-like ban nearly impossible. But I have come to believe that, in the not too distant future, the concerns of crusty civil libertarians such as myself will be pushed aside, and a new set of social norms will emerge, especially in the middle and upper classes. The signs of this quiet revolution waged on behalf of internet-addicted children are already all around us. School districts around the country are banning phones from the classroom. “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, which directly informed the new law in Australia, has been on the Times best-seller list for eighty-five weeks, and has inspired little acts of tech rebellion by parents around the country.

The nascent anti-smartphones movement in America is decidedly nonpartisan, for the most part, and this contributes to its potential and also to the vagueness of its outlines. It also has taken place almost entirely at the local and state level. More than thirty states in the country now have some form of cellphone ban in their schools, which should be applauded. I believe that teen-agers should have the right to post their opinions on social media, but I don’t think they need to do that in the middle of geometry class. If this means that First Amendment rights are further restricted in schools, that may be a compromise that free-speech absolutists have to accept.

What world will this revolution bring about? And how long will it last before a new set of online distractions replaces social media? Social movements are never clean and surgical; social-media companies will not be the only casualties. If there is an emerging national morality to the anti-smartphones movement, it’s one that feels suspicious of technology in general—it reflects not only a worry about the effect of tech on children but also a deep displeasure with how adults conduct their business and their leisure. And as long as we cannot tear ourselves away from Slack, Instagram, or gossipy group texts, the rules that we socially dictate for our children will be compromised and incomplete. Australia’s ban might be seen more fruitfully as a restriction not on children but on their parents: a comprehensive and wide-ranging demand that the state lay down rules Australian parents cannot enforce on their own.

A vision of a better digital life shouldn’t just focus on children, but also on workplaces and adult social norms. We all need to put down the phones and make efforts to move the public square away from private technology companies that incentivize cheap engagement. The scope should also be widened to include prescriptions on what we should do with all our newfound time, especially with our children—because, I think, our aversion to social media and phones really stands in for a broader discomfort with how scheduled, atomized, and expensive their lives have become. ♦

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Photograph by Grep Hoax

Patricia Lockwood joins Kevin Young to read “In the Waiting Room,” by Elizabeth Bishop, and her own poem “Love Poem Like We Used to Write It.” Lockwood is the author of the novels “No One Is Talking About This” and “Will There Ever Be Another You,” along with two poetry collections and a memoir. She has won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and she’s a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.

Every memory palace should have a damp basement
with frozen pipes and mouse bones,
shreds of pink insulation, you dare not enter.
Every memory palace should have
my childhood basement, at the dead end of Elm St.,
with its soft beams and dirt floor
where we stored a mannequin named Greta
who scared us to death every time we went to reset the hot-water tank.
Greta, purchased from the Lazarus department-store
closing sale, 1996. The same store where my feet
were measured by those amazing people
who used to kneel in front of you
to press a big toe against the leather and tell you to
walk around a little, see how it feels.
Everything khaki and ketchup red; frosted glass, pastel floral.
Santa Claus lived there, at the top of the staircase,
and I sat on him, suddenly aware of how grubby
my winter coat was, and my fingernails; how crooked
my gaze. Greta watched—flawless, in her prime
in the newest sweater and pantyhose and pencil skirt,
not knowing she would be purchased by_us_
for $40. Not knowing she would end up
in the muddy basement of a farmhouse,
naked, dismembered, her breasts bared for no one
but the spiders, the red efts, the plumbers,
her arm lying beside her, her hand
with three missing fingers that were
kicking around somewhere upstairs—

I have no memory palace.
I have tomato-paste cans bloated
on a sagging plywood shelf.
Memory: the botulism exhibit. Lockjaw.
A declawed cat. Come, and you’ll trip over a cement statue
of a cement bag that got wet before it was even opened,
all its creases preserved perfectly—

when I look back
there’s an axe in my head, and tarp draped over it.
There’s a white mask hanging on the wall
and no eyes, just holes with more wall looking out,
so angry it’s frozen in a red smile, guarding
what can neither see nor hear.

This is drawn from “The Near and Distant World.”

Forest Whitaker’s “Waiting to Exhale” is perhaps the quintessential “chick flick”—and an ideal case study for all that the cinematic subgenre can do. The “chick flick” often concerns heroines in the midst of personal transformation, and it’s capacious enough to enfold romantic comedies (“You’ve Got Mail”), tragedies (“The Notebook”), friendship fables (“Beaches”), and mother-daughter dramedies (“Terms of Endearment”). Its conventions are cosmic: the serendipitous, life-altering “meet-cute” is sometimes a literal collision, if not a metaphorical one, and chance encounters have a way of adding up. Well-placed songs provide relief; mood and weather mix, as in “Moonstruck.” “Exhale,” about four women friends who support one another through a series of interpersonal crises, fits in the matrilineal musing, the music, the camaraderie, the pathetic fallacy—when one character finally ends her sexual dry spell, rain falls in the desert. These movies show women exploring their options, taking steps to pursue goals and love connections. In Whitaker’s film, the protagonists are in different stages of nursing grief and developing new relationships. Because change is an act fraught with anxiety and confusion, the quartet spends the movie processing with one another, rhapsodizing, backsliding, and searching for moments to release—to let themselves breathe.

In February, New York’s Metrograph theatre hosted the Divorced Women’s Film Festival, screening “Waiting to Exhale” along with other cinematic depictions of dissolution, including “The Age of Innocence,” “The First Wives Club,” and “The War of the Roses.” Haley Mlotek, the program’s curator and the author of a book on the sociocultural impact of no-fault divorces, explained that the movies she chose “are classics not because they are reflections of life, exactly, but because they can be visions of our feelings.” Her selections center on women with emotional foresight who are also on the cusp of realizing what they truly want. As a divorced woman in her mid-thirties who was about to make a career pivot, I could relate to those characters in flux. I went to see “Waiting to Exhale” just after Valentine’s Day.

When “Exhale” premièred, thirty years ago today, I was six, and far too young to watch it, so I experienced it as a mystery of language and gesture and unspoken reference. Then, the film’s milieu was my mother’s: full of romantic crosstalk, long-distance phone calls, rueful rhythm and blues, and the kinds of brilliantly made-up faces I associated with Fashion Fair Cosmetics, where she was a counter manager. In the interim between her years as a thirtysomething and mine, the movie has existed as an artifact of the relatively edgy “it’s the” nineties, and, owing to its Grammy-winning, multiplatinum soundtrack, a hallmark in the history of tie-in marketing. Babyface, who produced the album and wrote or co-wrote all but one of its songs, did so after reading the screenplay; an intergenerational all-star cast of soul, R. & B., and pop acts like Houston, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan, Brandy, and TLC, underscores the narrative.

Adapted from Terry McMillan’s best-selling 1992 novel of the same name, “Exhale” is equal parts “women’s picture,” a.k.a. weepie, Black women’s “chick flick,” and precursor to sitcoms like “Girlfriends” and “Insecure.” The film, which inaugurated a spate of adaptations of other McMillan novels, also marked a watershed moment in the representation of the Black professional class. The subject of talk-show chats, watch parties, and discussion dinners—organized and attended by the likes of Gayle King, no less—when it premièred, the film became as much a sociological phenomenon as an artistic one. In a 1995 story for the New York Times, the reporter Karen de Witt declared that “ ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ the movie, is rapidly proving to be ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ the event,” and quoted a woman who said, of the collective filmgoing experience, “This is our ‘Million Man March.’ ’’ As an adult, I’d rented and streamed the film alone; at Metrograph, I got to see it for the first time with other people.

“Exhale” begins with a radio d.j. chiding his listeners for being slow to determine their New Year’s resolutions. Then we hear the voices of four women making promises: to ignore her mother’s advice, to start a catering business, to “whip something” on an ex, to lose weight. The d.j. poses a question: “Do you know where you want to be tonight . . . and where do you want to be next year?” Savannah (Whitney Houston) is the first friend we see, driving along an empty highway, at precisely the moment she’s crossing state lines into Arizona. A voice-over imparts her inner monologue: “The deal is, the men in Denver are dead. No wonder I’m changing towns again. It’s gotta be better in Phoenix.” The desert vista stretches, its ochre sand shifting into a dissolve transition, and you can imagine Savannah as the lead in some kind of outlier Western: a drifter, she’s been shot down, bang-bang, but in Nancy Sinatra’s sense of the phrase. Chanté Moore’s “Wey U” plays on the radio, scoring a montage of the women’s physical and existential check-ins. We drop into their minds, too. Bernadine (Angela Bassett) is scattered, making a to-do list of all that needs to be done for her husband, John (Michael Beach), and their two young children. Robin (Lela Rochon) bemoans her attachment to the wrong men, while Gloria (Loretta Devine) sulks about missing quality time with her teen-age son, Tarik (Donald Adeosun Faison). The story follows the women over the course of a year, as they endure setbacks and entanglements of all sorts—but, ultimately, their romantic triumphs and disappointments are subordinate to the platonic bonds they share.

The film’s best-known set piece comes after John announces to Bernadine that he’s leaving her for his (white) bookkeeper, after she’d sacrificed her own dreams to help him with his company. Intent on payback, Bernadine strips all of his clothing from the closet and begins tossing them into his BMW, power-walking between the closet and the vehicle in just a robe and a negligee, carting each load of belongings in a child’s wagon. All the while, she recites a litany of domestic slights, revving herself up for the natural conclusion of this ugly expungement. Pantomiming John, she screams, “I need you to be the fuckin’ background to my foreground!” At the end of her soliloquy comes the coup de grâce: She strikes a match, lights a cigarette, and tosses a flame through the car’s sunroof, then observes the steaming pile of Italian suits and ties, a funeral pyre to an eleven-year marriage. She saunters off, leaving the fiery wreckage behind her. Whitaker’s blocking is sublime—it seals Bernadine’s shift from dutiful wife to a woman prioritizing her single self. When I watched that scene at Metrograph, the entire theatre clapped and cheered.

In a 2024 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Bassett said that the grandeur of that moment was inspired by her own mother. Over the decades, her interpretation of a woman scorned going scorched earth has found its way into the work of filmmakers such as Tyler Perry; unsurprisingly, it’s also become a meme. To my mind, this sequence initiated a new strain of American Kabuki theatre, one different from the dialled-up, campy performances of Bette Davis, in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” or Faye Dunaway, in “Mommie Dearest.” Bernadine’s strain of Black feminine righteous indignation and disappointment was also distinct from the often comical ferocity of the Blaxploitation heroine. It was less lyrical and more melodramatic than that of the women in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” which was adapted for PBS’s “American Playhouse” program in 1982, after its Broadway run. Nor did it resemble the upper-class animus of Dominique Deveraux (played by the inimitable Diahann Carroll) on “Dynasty,” or the maternal dressing-downs by Phylicia Rashad’s Clair Huxtable on “The Cosby Show.”

What that “Waiting to Exhale” scene did differently was this: it presented vernacular anger on an operatic scale; it was “Porgy and Bess” at the multiplex. It treated rage as something to be reclaimed. Bassett transmits the surreal shock of learning that her vows were spoken on shaky ground—and makes over-the-top seem properly modulated. That bold, extravagant sensibility has shown up ever since, in such films as Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman,” Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade,” and music videos by Kelis, Taylor Swift, Summer Walker, and Lily Allen. There were lots of movies about female revenge in the nineties, from “Thelma & Louise” to “Set It Off” to “Eye for an Eye,” but none conveyed that wrath in a way that felt as febrile and visceral. The shot of Bassett’s smoldering walk from the barbecued Beemer represents a dashed decade of the character’s yuppie (Buppie) aspirations. It became a crucial image in a taxonomy of feminine fury.

But the grandiosity of “Waiting to Exhale” ’s most famous moment overwhelms the movie’s subtle introspection. It’s only occurred to me on recent viewings, including that screening in February, just how thoughtful it is, and how intent its makers are on staging their characters’ contemplation. A few weeks before the Divorce series, I saw Kathleen Collins’s film “Losing Ground,” from 1982. It could have been on Mlotek’s list; in fact, it offers a kind of skeleton key to understanding an underrated aspect of “Exhale” ’s legacy. “Losing Ground,” one of the first feature films directed by a Black woman, is a rom-com about the foibles and discoveries of Sara Rogers (Seret Scott), a Black philosophy professor studying religious ecstasy and “ecstatic experience” one summer in New York. It’s a scintillating season: when she’s not in the library, she flirts with a fellow-aesthete, tries her hand at acting, and considers reconciling with her smug painter husband. Following Collins’s lead, Whitaker, McMillan, and her co-screenwriter Ronald Bass dramatized a cohort of women seeking ecstatic experiences of their own. How to live is a topic of constant discussion, and these conversations are the catalyst for the inching progress they make by the story’s end. It’s no coincidence that the film is bookended by New Year’s Eve celebrations, which naturally invite reflection. The closing scene, in which the four embrace as fireworks go off, punctuates all of this onscreen thinking with external action to match. Along with “Losing Ground,” “Exhale” belongs to a subgenre of intelligent women’s pictures about transitions: John Berry’s “Claudine,” John Sayles’s “Lianna,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Barbra Streisand’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces.” For at least one movie patron in 1995—the woman who mentioned the Million Man March in her Times interview—going to see “Exhale” was a proxy for political gathering. In 2025, it’s a reminder that lots of revolutions have to start somewhere internal first.

The state border that Savannah crosses at the start of “Waiting to Exhale” is the first of many dividing lines: an either-or choice between old habits and new ones. There’s a weird chime between that opening sequence and Houston’s last days, after she’d wrapped filming a “Sparkle” remake in Detroit, in late 2011. Flying would have brought her home to her norm too soon, so she chose to travel by car back to Atlanta, in order to extend the good feeling of working on something creative. I wonder what Houston thought about during that long drive, and what she envisioned for herself. “Waiting to Exhale” was the second in a series of blockbusters she appeared in, which represent only a sampling of what she could have done. Her filmography is peppered with what-ifs, including an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s “Tar Baby,” which she was set to star in back in the eighties. Her death a few months after that ride home meant an adaptation of “Getting to Happy,” McMillan’s “Exhale” sequel, could not move forward. Midway through the original film, during Gloria’s birthday party, the women sit around smoking, listening to Franklin’s contribution to the soundtrack, “It Hurts Like Hell,” and questioning one another about heartbreak and art. There’s an ashtray of stubbed butts on the coffee table. “Why do they write these damn songs?” Savannah asks. “To make you think and believe and dream you could feel like this?” ♦