Mandy Brownholtz, Writer & Editor

💭 Thoughts on choosing your own perspective, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, and less algorithmic aesthetics.

Mandy Brownholtz is a writer and editor living in Baltimore, MD after calling it quits with NYC last year. Currently working as the Managing Editor of CREEM Magazine and Co-Director of Audiofemme, Mandy’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Insider, and elsewhere. She is the author of a self-published novel called Rotten. In her free time she likes to bake complicated recipes from the New York Times, eat hot dogs at Camden Yards, and look for John Waters at Club Chuck.

🎯 Current focus

I just got my first ever bartending job, so I’m excited to learn that craft and to have somewhere to go, to break up the minutiae of the work from home lifestyle, which has a way of making me a bit agoraphobic. Hopefully it lends itself to a book or story someday. Maybe I’ll make some new IRL friends. The possibilities are endless!

💸 Finding joy and choosing your own perspective 

This is going to sound crazy, but I’m trying to find joy in being frugal these days. The economy is trash and it sucks, but how much it has to suck is a matter of choice––are you going to be positive or negative? I’m going to the public library, which I think more work from home people should do instead of going to the coffeeshop so maybe they’ll stop cutting the budgets so much. I’m getting creative with my cooking, inventing dishes with what I have on hand so nothing ever goes to waste. I started watching football because I got sucked into Papa Johns being 50% off when the Ravens win. So much of these circumstances are out of our control, but we can choose our own perspective on it. 

📚 Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life

I read Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life over the summer, and it’s been living rent free in my brain ever since. It was so emotionally powerful. It made me cry like…a couple of times, which is rare in a book. I hope I write something half as good someday. I’m reading her latest book, To Paradise, right now (borrowed from the public library, naturally), and it just doesn’t hit the same way. I love when I get to witness an artist capture a bit of un-re-creatable magic and commit it to the page, film, music, what have you. It speaks to human potential in a life-affirming way. 

🤠 Seeing work come to fruition in real life

One train of thought I’m focused on currently is to remember to GO OUTSIDE!! I recently went down to Austin for SXSW, and it was a breath of fresh air. I think when you work from home and you spend the whole day on Zoom in your yoga pants, it can be difficult to remember that you’ve accomplished anything or made any sort of impact on the world at large. Getting to see work come to fruition in real life keeps the existential doldrums at bay. 

👜 Less algorithmic aesthetics, more personal style

I don’t work in the fashion industry, but I enjoy fashion and pay attention to it. I’m obsessed with content creator / fellow Mandy / fashion critic Mandy Lee. I hate that social media has made it so we all have to dress and look the same way, and ascribe to the same “aesthetics”-- mob wife, clean girl, whatever other drivel the algorithm is forcing down our throats. Mandy is always promoting the cultivation of personal style and rewearing/reusing items you already own, which is so important in this day and age. Less algorithm, more personal style.

🔊 Passive consumption of media 

I still try to be intentional about physically reading books, and I avoid TikTok like the plague because it makes my brain feel like mush. I work for a print magazine so I’ll ride for print media always and forever, but I think passive consumption of media [i.e., listening to podcasts] is the future. People simply want to consume media while they’re doing something else.  I’m so eager to start creating audio content at CREEM, at Audiofemme, anywhere I have a creative voice. 

🧢 Baseball caps FTW

One thing I can't live without, and why? Definitely baseball caps. Gotta keep the sun off my 30-something face! So should you!

💅🏽 Skims as a masterclass in celebrity marketing

A few marketing campaigns that recently cut through the noise for me were all Skims! Certainly Kim Kardashian doesn’t need my free publicity, but that marketing department gets it right. I have a conspiracy theory that they have some sort of backroom arrangement with like, TikTok, or something, because somehow they’re always able to predict exactly what celebrity content we want to see – the besties from White Lotus, Usher before the Super Bowl, Kim Cattrell just…always. HOW DO THEY KNOW? I’ve got my eyes peeled for a Da’Vine Joy Randolph campaign since she’s having such a moment.

Follow Mandy on Instagram & Linkedin and buy her book here.

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