Sex Change and the City
Girl, Haunted by Georgia Mills
This was sent out as part of today's full Hell World newsletter which you can read here. Steve Coy writes about pop-up pop-art and the antisocialism, infantilization, and conflict avoidance of the current state of sloptimization.
Luke O’Neil
There's also an excerpt from my new book about going to another kind of museum. Read it here.
Luke O’Neil
Everything doesn't have to be awful all the time. Things can still be fun. For example this funny and moving new anthology edited by pals Niko Stratis and Tuck Woodstock featuring dozens of great LGBTQ+ writers on the HBO classic series Sex and the City.
Tuck explains a little more about the book:
Sometime in 2023, back when Twitter existed, Niko Stratis and I began joke-tweeting about making an all-trans zine of Fast & Furious-inspired content. By the end of the year, our joke had escalated into a 160-page anthology titled 2 Trans 2 Furious, which somehow won a prestigious literary award despite mostly existing as an excuse for our friend Mattie Lubchansky to draw Vin Diesel animorphing into a car.
Elated by our success in the niche field of Trans Shitpost Publishing, Niko and I promptly founded Girl Dad Press, a “trans press for all freaks,” and began working on our second collection: Sex Change and the City. This all-queer, mostly-trans anthology includes thoughtful meditations on the shame of secret relationships, the grief of losing a family member, the confusion of young adulthood, and the rage of middle age—as well as comics, poetry, a role-playing game, something called Mr. Big’s Phalloplasty Emporium, and multiple pieces of Steve/Aidan slashfic.
When describing the book, I often emphasize the sillier moments: Mad Libs, self-insert fanfic, a photo of an ass tattoo, an A Christmas Carol/Sex and the City mashup starring Caitlyn Jenner. But in truth, I’m impressed by the vulnerability, growth, and heartbreak that many contributors wove into their essays about a 25-minute sex comedy. A prime example of this is Georgia Mills’ sharp, feverish essay Girl, Haunted, which has indeed haunted me since I first read it a year ago. I hope it haunts you as well. –Tuck Woodstock
Order the book in the Girl Dad shop and get 10% off with the code HELL.
Read a recent Hell World interview with Mattie Lubchansky here.
Luke O’Neil
And one with Niko Stratis here.
Luke O’Neil
Support this newsletter with a subscription if you can please and thank you. Here's a coupon for literally 50% off one year. What a deal!
Girl, Haunted
by Georgia Mills
In the Sex and the City episode “My Motherboard, Myself” (S4E8), Carrie’s computer breaks and Miranda’s mother dies.
Each of the women respond to Miranda’s mother’s death differently: Carrie lashes out, Charlotte sends flowers, and Samantha shuts down. When Carrie tearfully breaks the news over breakfast, we see Samantha go someplace else. She dissociates; her eyes unfocus. During sex, she loses her orgasm (“in the cab?” Carrie chides later), and in Samantha’s distress we see something deeper: her fear of death, under her sex-fuelled zest for life.
Rewatching Sex and the City, I’ve been thinking about the work that it takes to become the person you want to be. Throughout the show, Samantha occasionally shares details about her life before moving to New York: serving dilly bars at Dairy Queen when she was fifteen; getting an abortion alone in college; how her mother was saddled with “three kids and a drunk husband” by the time she was Samantha’s age.
Samantha’s past is buried underneath her glamorous and professional exterior, whereas Carrie lives as though she’s still the younger version of herself: the Connecticut teen who dreamed of moving to the city. She parties until dawn and loses track of time, romanticizing New York and Mr. Big, coffee and cigarettes. Time and time again, Carrie is rescued from her mess—breakups and financial issues and fights with friends—via magical thinking and impossible HBO luck. “In real life, the city would eat her up,” my friend said as we sat outside a coffee shop in sweats on a Sunday, dreading the workweek.
I feel embarrassed when I act like Carrie, giving my inner teenager access to my bank account and body, letting her drive the car towards shiny lights and buzzy thrills. Waking up hungover at 23 from tequila, and the recollection of what she drove me to, the mortification that comes the morning after crying in the back of an Uber for reasons only she knows, I don’t (ughgod), holding onto the side door and seeing stars, stumbling up the stairs home in a tangle of jangling keys and earbuds and heel straps and text messages, laying on my back on the cold linoleum floor, eyes closed, breathing. I never really find the feeling that I’m looking for on a restless night out. I’m seeking to soothe pent-up frustrations; to exorcise the banal demons (“nobody talks about backing up; my computer died”); to distract from the fact that being a writer with a column is an unreal dream, that it takes two jobs and weekly therapy and expensive chemical face wash to “keep it together.”
The stable life that Samantha has built for herself allows her to live comfortably, and she works hard to take care of herself. She knows how to play the game to get what she wants. She owns an eponymous PR agency and a loft in the Meatpacking district. (“See, New York? We have it all,” she toasts over a bottle of champagne upon moving in.) When Carrie needs $30,000 to buy her apartment because her building goes co-op, Samantha offers to loan her half the money.
Over martinis and chocolate cake with the girls, Samantha declares that she’s never cried at work. Carrie says that she cried to her editor when she missed a deadline—she claimed to be having problems at home, but in reality, she was sunning in the Hamptons.
“That makes the rest of us look bad,” Miranda scoffs.
“Oh boohoo, it was 80 degrees and sunny,” Carrie says, shoveling cake into her mouth.
Carrie obsessively labors over her relationships, feelings, and memories. She splays out on her bed, writing about her experiences, reliving moments alone in her room. Her life is still my fantasy. It’s easier, in that it takes less effort, to let yourself be driven by your emotions, without doing the work to resist your impulses. (Sending a stream of texts in an anxious moment; staying out too late.) But indulging in this way of being doesn’t feel cute or fun anymore—letting myself live like Carrie, in the real world, creates a vicious cycle of regret. Chaos and drama, forgetting bill payments and birthdays.
Through Carrie’s neurotic personality, I see a baby woman searching for a magical concept of love in a princess dreamworld. This is why, when her sense of reality is shattered—by a broken computer, a broken heart—she wants time to stand still for her sadness.
Five more minutes, something I’ve always said. I just want five more minutes.
Carrie’s constant rumination contrasts Samantha’s fear of slowing down. Samantha lies about her age; she gets plastic surgery. She loves work and sex and parties and being present in the moment. She seems to have a pervasive awareness of time passing, and a deep fear of looking in the rearview mirror, of pulling over. When Charlotte says that she wants to quit her job to have a baby and volunteer at her husband’s hospital, Samantha tells her to be “damn sure before you get off the Ferris wheel, because the women waiting to get on are 22, perky, and ruthless.” Imparting this wisdom is Samantha’s way of mothering her friends. Underneath her advice is her fear of powerlessness, of getting stuck in a mediocre life. “You have to grab 35 by the balls,” she says on Carrie’s 35th birthday.
Miranda’s mother’s death comes suddenly and unexpectedly, with lots of realistic practicalities attached. The day of the funeral, while Miranda is shopping for a “shitty black dress,” a matronly saleswoman informs her, unsolicited, that she’s been buying the wrong bra size.
“I think I know! What’s best, for me!” Miranda snaps at the woman now tugging expertly on her bra straps. Then, after a pause, she blurts out an explanation: “I’m sorry. My mother just died, and—”
The saleswoman’s face folds knowingly as she wordlessly embraces Miranda, who melts into her shoulder. Through the screen: the stillness of a moment that feels good and heavy and long, like a warm nap. Close your eyes, stay forever (five more minutes).
At the funeral, while Charlotte and Carrie say all of the right things, Samantha can’t summon the words to acknowledge the death at all, awkwardly complimenting Miranda and looking around uncomfortably in her seat. During the service, she breaks, locking eyes with Miranda across the pews, mouthing “I’m sorry” as she begins to inconsolably sob.
Samantha’s emotional turmoil in “My Motherboard, Myself” reminds me of a previous episode, “All or Nothing” (S3E10). Sam gets the flu and insists that Carrie come over to make her mother’s “cure-all” childhood concoction: Fanta and cough syrup blended over ice. In her feverish state, Samantha cries over not having a boyfriend to fix her curtain rod. (“We’re all alone, Carrie.”) She’s crying for longings that she didn’t know she felt: for what her mother wasn’t able to give her—a stable home and a solid foundation—and the particular sadness that comes from craving a deep comfort that you’ve never had, as an adult in your own apartment.
Later, when she’s feeling better, Samantha brushes her crying jag off with a joke about how sick she was, her voice as taut as an old movie star’s. I wonder if that’s what it takes for her to be the woman she wants to be every day—her sense of reservation, a lack of emotion. To not be like her mother.
After her emotional exorcism in church, Samantha comes during sex.
“You have to confront the ghost, acknowledge its presence, then release it,” she says earlier in the season, when Miranda thinks that her apartment is haunted. “Everybody knows that.”
Georgia Mills is a writer based in Toronto, ON. More importantly, she’s a Carrie sun, Charlotte moon, and Enid rising (IYKYK).
My new book is shipping out this week. Order it now!
We made a zine to celebrate Luke O’Neil’s new short fiction collection featuring illustrations from inside the book! Order the book today: it's SHIPPING! orbooks.com/catalog/we-h... @lukeoneil47.bsky.social
— OR Books (@orbooks.bsky.social) 2025-09-25T18:51:19.996Z
Come hang out in NYC on November 12 and in Boston on November 8 at the Sinclair. More details on that one to come.
