The Ego Trip

Continuing our occasional series of “Woman on Unlikely Pilgrimages” (see Daphné Tamage on the trail of John Fante, or the same en français), today we bring you Hadas Weiss on a very different sort of trail. Hadas is an anthropologist and the author of We Have Never Been Middle Class: How Social Mobility Misleads Us (Verso, 2019). But we know her mostly from Twitter, where we lurk under an anonymous identity you will never in a million years succeed in sniffing out (it’s obvious enough anyhow that we are not Alice from Queens). We have long delighted in what we see from Hadas there, which we suppose would have to be categorized as intelligent shitposting. And for almost as long we have wondered how she might sound in a longer-form essayistic vein. We knew full well that all too many Twitter geniuses have floundered and sputtered when coaxed over to Substack (early on, Substack’s founders did much in the way of active coaxing). Was Hadas’s Twitter persona, as they say, but a bit? Or was it a proper authorial voice? This was a question that could only be resolved by testing, so that is what we did. And we think you will agree with our finding: Hadas has a voice. —The Editors

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1.

How far would you go to escape bad news? The answer for me was about 300 kilometers, by foot. And not just any walk, either, but a pilgrimage. The pilgrimage, if you’re Christian or living in Europe. The Camino de Santiago is a network of roads leading to Santiago de Compostella in northwest Spain, whose cathedral holds the relics of St. James the Apostle. Hundreds of thousands walk it every year, following in the footsteps of its medieval pilgrims, minus the poverty and hunger and dying along the way.

The bad news I was escaping was about my book manuscript. For months, I’ve been receiving a disheartening stream of rejections by agents. Finally, I’d given up and sent it directly to a few publishers willing to consider unagented manuscripts, where it would languish in slush piles. My confidence having taken a blow, I was anticipating rejections from them as well. Sitting around waiting for them wasn’t doing much for my