When Rachel Elizabeth calls me to chat, she’s sitting on the floor of her living room—one I’ve seen a fair amount already due to my penchant for her TikToks. She explains that she’s positioned herself comfortably and casually on the floor to try to avoid “looking like we’re on LinkedIn”.
This funny, hyperspecific turn-of-phrase is exactly what I have admired about her since I first found her work years ago. Both Rachel Elizabeth’s more official poetry and prose, as well as her comedic, culturally sharp presence on TikTok and Twitter, are equal parts funny, sexy, reflective, and vulnerable without ever seeming overwrought or played-up.
What she’s best at in her short-form digital writing and work is her near-pastiche of modern digital language; Rachel Elizabeth has the capacity to take the soul-sucking notions of hyper-labeling and trend-ification, and turn them into something sparky. Her dream man is “a sadistic game show host Bill Hader”, her dream woman a “Strega Nona lookalike to tie me to a hand-crafted, oak dining table while preparing a hearty beef screw i will reluctantly eat later”. Her trend predictions aren’t soulless stares into the consumerist void—there are no gua shas and quirkily shaped ice trays in her round-ups. Instead, she tells her readership to watch out for “paul giamatti thirst”, “wellmaxxing” (as in the water sources in the ground, not Goop), and “wraithcore”.
When the topic of inspiration arises, Rachel Elizabeth’s answers are varied and delicious. Her comedic role models include Maria Bamford, Gary Goldman, Chris Fleming, Eddie Pepitone, Rachel Sennott, and Helena (@/freshhel) of Twitter fame.
Rachel Elizabeth’s longer form writing, which can be found at her Substack “Hot Ghoul Diaries”, range from collections of poetry to carefully inventoried lists and thoughts on lip gloss and candles to the titular “Hot Ghoul Diaries”, where Rachel Elizabeth gives us an hour-to-hour peek into some of her days, a practice she tells me was inspired by Alex Dimitrov’s NYC Diaries.
Her essays are often funny, but they’re more frequently moving and lived-in, intersecting somewhere between Rachel Elizabeth’s deeply felt and earnest interior space and an exterior landscape that is in the aesthetic realm of a vague, modern, deconstructed Americana. Rachel Elizabeth covers her thoughts on Dr. Pepper, erotic spankings, and grief, often all in the same poem or paragraph.
What’s remarkable about Rachel Elizabeth’s work is their ability to make the mundane sort of magical, the titillating sort of mundane, and everything sort of funny. Her poem “When I Call You My Former Lover” opens with the sentiment, “when i call you my former lover/it sounds like the whole thing happened in France/and not in the back of an Arby’s parking lot”.
Rachel Elizabeth says that she writes with this exact homespun pervert folksiness in mind:
“People need to romanticize average shit more. I think average shit is beautiful. I think mediocrity is a virtue, I guess […] I’ve just started writing about things that feel naturally beautiful to me, and thinking way less about the aesthetic. For whatever reason, I do find getting fingerbanged in a shopping plaza outside of a Jimmy John’s to be what I find fun to write about.”
But the spaces she writes about are also the very same spaces in which she creates — Rachel Elizabeth’s work feels personal while still maintaining a romantic sheen because of her capacity to truly write what she knows. Oftentimes, her writing occurs where the stories she tells do as well:
“When I started writing poetry, it was like everything had to be written under this tree outside my grandfather’s. Now I’m at TGI Friday’s typing something up on my phone and eating a quesadilla alone. […] I feel like my poetry is best when I’m driving to Target, and there’s all these assholes in Carhartt jackets that are definitely project managers that haven’t lifted a finger in their life, but are cosplaying as janitors. If I want to write bullshit on a napkin and then put it in my notes app and screenshot it and post it as if it is some New Yorker or Paris Review worthy poem, I’ll do that because everyone else is kind of insisting on themselves in similar ways.”
One of her largest poetic inspirations (though she’s quick to note she is not a fan of the man himself) is Charles Bukowski. She loves that his work is “crass and dirty”, which brings us to a specific and important theme in Rachel Elizabeth’s writing that gives it a particular flavor. Much of Rachel Elizabeth’s work is about the prominence of kink and sadomasochism in her life, and her strong identification with sexual submissiveness. One can follow trails of breadcrumbs of how she feels about all of this in a larger cultural context in some of her work without even talking to her. In her essay “she always loved the villains” Rachel Elizabeth writes:
“As someone who has spent the majority of adulthood as a fat, closeted queer, heavily traumatized, submissive woman, I have always felt alienated by both heteronormative environments and mainstream feminist spaces. The former cast me out like a leper and the latter shoved a one-dimensional view of liberation down my throat so hard, I began to wonder what all the fuss about rough sex even was.”
When I ask her about her relationship with kink and sex specifically in her writing, Rachel Elizabeth notes that any of feelings of shame they experienced around sex were introduced contextually in young adulthood instead of entrenched in childhood:
“I was absolutely raised in a hellish household, but the one thing I was lucky enough to have were parents that taught me not to be ashamed of my sexuality. I think ironically when I got to college and took my first feminist theory and there were these discussions of patriarchy—which is obviously very real—but there were also these discussions of what kind of sex you ‘should’ be having. That was the first time I ever thought I should be critical of what I was doing. Like, maybe it’s not okay that someone’s calling me a dumb little slut, or whatever, who knows? […] But the more relationships I had with men who made me feel safe, the more I was able to just be like, “Oh, I feel like me when I’m being submissive.” And that’s just kind of how it is. And I kind of stopped viewing anything I did as really radical.”
This retreating from considering her sex life as something radical feels as if it’s become a sort of modus operandi in her writing in general. Rachel Elizabeth’s whole thing works because she seems to write and create with an intuitive earnestness, even in digital spaces that so often attempt to squash such attempts. Her insistence on treating the portions of her life that she writes about with genuine emotional curiosity, hand stuff in Jimmy Johns and all, while refusing to make sweeping statements regarding kinky sex or modern girl poetry, makes her work feel earnest instead of performative.
At one point in our chat, when I am feeling infected by Rachel Elizabeth’s creative, free-flowing, playfully earnest brain, we bond over the peculiar desire to be objectified, but less as a sex object and more as a tchotchke. “I want to be a trinket,” Rachel Elizabeth says. I tell her I’ve had the exact same thought. A tiny glass figure on a desk. “I hope that’s coming for you,” she says with a solemn nod, before specifying that she sees me specifically as a Sonny Angel.
The diagnosis, specifically coming from her, feels much more potent than any astrological chart reading I’ve ever been given.
*
One of our profile segments on High Femme is a rapid-fire question and answer at the end of our conversation. Thank you so much to Rachel Elizabeth for being our first profile and being so game!
RAPID FIRE QUESTIONS WITH RACHEL ELIZABETH:
HF: What’s your biggest time suck online?
RE: Looking at reels of clean countertops.
HF: Favorite curse word?
RE: Cunt
HF: Favorite perverted thing (it can be art, an object, a person, a sex act, whatever)?
RE: I like any situation where I feel like I am being pressured to answer something, but I can’t get the words out because I’m too horny. I dated this guy for a while and we would be fucking and he would ask me a really simple question, sometimes it was even a math problem. I feel like I love any rhetorical question in bed, you know what I mean?
HF: A sex discourse you wish you could ban?
RE: Oh, all of it.
HF: Favorite book from childhood?
RE: Stella Luna and The Series of Unfortunate Events.
HF: Song of the spring? (Editor’s note: This website took a second to get launched! This was a reasonable question at the time!)
RE: For a second, it was “Cardinal” by Kasey Musgraves from Deeper Well. However, I listened to Cowboy Carter this morning and I’m obsessed with the song “Daughter”. So either of those.
HF: Do you call it a journal or a diary?
RE: I call it a notebook. Not to be so like, “I’m different.”
HF: Person dead or alive that you would ask to dinner with the sole purpose of getting to throw a drink in their face?
RE: Probably my dad. He’s dead. I hate him and I love him. I miss him and I’m also happy he’s gone. I would probably throw a drink in his face and then be like, “Hey, do you want to talk about some movies that I watched?”
HF: Ideal nap length?
RE: I would have to say I’ll have a thirty minute nap.
HF: Best time to write?
RE: I find myself writing the most when I’m driving to Target.
HF: Worst place to edit writing?
RE: Probably my bed. I just can’t think straight in my bed. I do it there because I want to feel glamorous and beautiful, but it just ends up with me jacking off to someone who has my number blocked now.
HF: Any opinion on any movie ever?
RE: I think Home Alone 2 is an incredible film. And I think it is very much kind of in that pre-9/11 canon because in what universe now could someone lose their boarding pass and be led onto a flight? I feel like people slept on that movie and it should be on Criterion.
