Molly Young Understands Her Role as a Critic
Molly Young Understands Her Role as a Critic
The New York Times conduit for books has met thousands of characters on the page and IRL. The one she knows best is herself.
NEW YORK CITY—An Abyssinian named Helen lives inside a 1400-square foot loft above a cabbage and fortune cookie distribution center in Williamsburg. Her silken coat and slender frame resemble those of a human fashion model. Sorbet green eyes and jutting ears amplify her haughty stare.
Compared to her cat, Molly Young is less the immediate image of someone with “critic” in her job title. Her voice is bright and youthful. Her desk is powder pink. She once said in an interview that her round and babyish features could use the toughening up of her favorite leather jacket and bold eyeliner. When she isn’t reading or writing, she’s surfing in a cropped leopard wetsuit, smearing lemongrass-passionfruit buttercream atop a white chiffon cake, or chasing down the latest coveted fruit. Implicit in her role of critic is being an expert or authority, and yet, Young delights in the diffidence of feeling like a novice. “I’m addicted to accumulating hobbies,” she said. “It makes me feel like a child.” Young is 35, a high school dropout, and a former disciple of a startup.
“The serious critic cannot be a monomaniacal controversialist,” said writer Daniel Mendelsohn in his critic’s manifesto for The New Yorker. Nor is their authority credited to a diploma hanging on an office wall. A serious critic—compared to a searching faultfinder or an Amazon reviewer—writes within two parameters: expertise and taste. Expertise, he argues, derives, above all, from their great love for the subject. Taste, he admits, is a mystery involving temperament or intellect or personality. (Nine years later, he revisited the topic for Town & Country to find that in ancient Greece, Plato theorized taste as an “ideal essence.”) The role of a critic then, as Mendelsohn puts it, is “to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” It is Young’s favorite definition of her occupation.
In 2021, Young became a book critic at The New York Times. For two years before, she was a literary critic at New York Magazine. The job and publication title changed faintly, but her responsibilities remained: to write book reviews, profiles, and essays about language and literature. She has reviewed words by Toni Morrison, words by Emily Ratakjowski, a 362-page federal aviation manual, and an explicit coffee table book of Playboy centerfolds. She has profiled Rami Malek, an Oscar-winning actor, and Happy, a fifty-year-old elephant at Bronx Zoo. In 2010, Young explored the psychological mechanics behind Hollister Co. as a victim of early millennium youth fashion. In the throes of pandemic-induced boredom, she banished furniture from her apartment to experience “ground living.” Since 2011, she’s contributed to GQ, Elle, n+1, and a city-forward media triplet: New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Young is more than a critic. She is, at her core, what every good critic is: a writer. And, what every good writer is: a reader.
Photo by Laurel Golio
The way expecting parents should child-proof their homes, literary critics should make their homes book-welcoming, she told domino magazine. Lining the uneven wooden floors of her “rare, rent-controlled, definitely under-code, definitely flammable” apartment are stacks of paperbacks, hardcovers, out-of-print finds from eBay, and new releases. Before the pandemic, she grouped each stack by release month. Two years later, they are now disheveled. Sometimes Young organizes books by color—a design trope and methodology she defends on behalf of those with a strong visual memory. She reads for up to ten hours a day.
“My earliest memories of being in the zone, whatever that means, are reading and making notations with a crayon or a magic marker or a pen,” she said. Young’s parents divorced when she was a child. Her father lived in San Francisco, where she took herself to the public library two blocks from his Victorian-style house and learned to navigate its aisles, check-out books, and make conversation with the librarians. These self-led excursions became her first spoonfuls of independence and mastery. Reading books became associated with happiness. As she grew older, she sought ways to recreate that feeling of being a kid in the library.
Her mother lived in Bolinas, an unincorporated coastal town twenty miles northwest of the city known for its unadulterated beauty and reclusive residents. “A peculiar place,” she calls it. “There’s a kind of tradition of keeping outsiders out, a pervasive benevolent xenophobia.” Its official site may state otherwise: “From a Prince and a President, surfers to shamans, Bolinas welcomes all manners of visitors,” but recommends you respect the locals’ privacy, and probably not bring your car, or your dog if he or she is not well-socialized. There is one access road and it is unmarked.
In San Francisco, Young rode the bus and played on city sidewalks. In Bolinas, she picked wild berries and stray kittens on bike rides to the beach. Her older brother skateboarded and her younger brother surfed despite being “the size of a flea,” she said. Her parents were hands-off. The life intel other kids gleaned from their home life, Young sensed she would have to learn on her own. She didn’t know about the SATs.
In high-school, Young made zines—small-batch, self-printed booklets—about the topics that occupied her time, like “punk shows in Berkeley, thrift shopping, figuring out what feminism was, and making ‘art,’” she said. She built websites to publish her writing online—“decades before it was worth reading.” Like most creatives who make it to the top, Young has been doing the work long before it became the work. When the woman who ran the Urban Outfitters blog discovered her musings, she offered Young her first writing gig for the then-niche retailer. “I got paid like forty dollars per story,” she said, “which I was over the moon about.”
Young pulled out of formal education near the end of her sophomore year. Her off-beat high school didn’t include American history or Old English literature in its curriculum, and she wanted to read Shakespeare, the transcendentalists, and understand what the government did, she said. “I knocked on my principal's door and said, ‘Just FYI, I will not be coming back next year,’ and he said, ‘I will make a note of it.’”
She took a job at a streetwear store selling shoes to skateboarders and moved into a studio apartment in San Francisco. She read six hours a day and supplemented with classes at a community college. Two years later, she took the SATs and called universities to see if any would consider her application without a high school diploma. All of them said no except for Brown. “They were like ‘Do you have a GED?’” she said. “I was like, ‘No, is that going to be a problem?’” Again, they made a note of it. Young graduated with a literary arts degree and moved to New York City, where she got a job washing dishes—an activity she finds relaxing—at Liquiteria, a juice bar in the East Village that’s since closed. She scratched her way up one byline at a time for publications like Vice, The Believer, Maxim, and Spike Jonze’s blog “We Love You So.” In 2010, Refinery29 named her one of “4 It Girls of Tomorrow.”
Photo courtesy of Molly Young
In today’s age of intense entrepreneurship, the art of being discovered is elusive. David Haskell is the Editor-in-Chief of New York Magazine. A Times writeup of his appointment in 2019 describes him as “the sort of professionally omnivorous, type-A New Yorker who might merit a feature in this magazine’s pages.” (He is also a gallery-represented sculptor and part-time whiskey maker.) In 2011, like a model scout eyeing a lanky fourteen-year-old with high cheekbones and clear skin, Haskell, then deputy editor of the magazine, spotted Young’s early online writing. He asked her to meet for coffee and when they did he told her, “You’re not there yet, but I think you can get there and I’m willing to help,” she said. “Which is so generous.”
Young’s first big feature was “A Lifetime at the Ansonia,” for New York Magazine’s home issue, about an apartment on Broadway and 74th and the man who has lived inside of it since 1974. Both were relics of the city’s past, a time when the basement, now parking lot, was a sex-crazed bathhouse, and rent cost the equivalent of a month’s groceries today. Characters like him were dwindling in Manhattan, getting priced out by younger minimalists who might keel over at the sight of his oval-shaped room “jammed with souvenirs from trysts, crimes, and celebrity encounters.” He was an amateur Egyptologist and had pet pigeons, Young said, “a fascinating mythical creature.”
Some writers report on events an audience is grateful to never have to experience: war zones, belligerent political rallies, a bad restaurant. Young is a writer who finds herself under circumstances an audience can only dream of: in Milan with Donatella Versace, at home with Kim Kardashian, watching a Broadway play with Paul Rudd, sharing a beer with Zac Efron.
Photo by Meredith Jenks
In 2020, she spent three days with Nick Kroll in Los Angeles hiking up Griffith Park and hanging out in the “Big Mouth” writer’s room where she heard the word “nut” used as a verb nineteen times in one sitting. Kroll told Young he was barely five feet tall when he entered high school, and that being short and enduring rejection from a bevy of girls weighed on his confidence but gave him material to pursue standup in college, and years later a wellspring of ideas for “Big Mouth’s” inception and its five seasons. (A sixth is on the way.) When writing a profile, Young says, you want to get as much time as possible with the person of interest, and choose an engaging activity to quell boredom and provide external stimulation. Her favorite approach is to shadow the person at work, where they are least likely to be able to put up a false front, she says. “It’s a time when you can see them at their most unselfconscious.” But sometimes an interview winds up being breakfast in a hotel lobby and she has to make it work.
“Can I observe some side of this person or catch them observing themselves in a way that is new? Can I gather things that aren’t on the internet?” Young asks of herself. “I try to be a good listener and create an environment where they feel comfortable—same as I would when meeting anyone in life.” To Versace’s Italian headquarters at Via Gesù, she wore an unwrinkled, unstained outfit “with as little distinction as possible.” To her own city hall wedding in Manhattan, she wore a white pantsuit with pink pom-pom kitten heels. Young is not a fussy person despite being a fussy-person stereotype: a woman, a critic, a cat owner, a bicoastal elite.
Unlike reporting a story, which requires physical logistics—a person or experience or book to analyze, interviews to conduct, and legal documents or academic research to steep into—writing an essay is purely mental. “It’s tying your brain to an idea, problem, or argument, and seeing what comes out of it,” she explained. They’re two distinct muscles and she enjoys exercising both. Young wakes up early to write, breaks often for snacks, and does push-ups when frustrated. She keeps a large ball jar of tea beside her during the day. When the tea is gone, so is her will to write, usually around four in the afternoon.
“It’s a lot easier when it’s not your job,” she said on a podcast in 2013 when asked how she juggles a full-time job at Warby Parker and writing à la carte—something she did for six years. “I think it’s so much easier to write when it’s an illicit hobby that you have to sneak in because then there’s a perverse pleasure in writing rather than a dread of it,” she told the hosts. “When it was my full-time freelancing job, I dreaded writing.” Young joined the glasses retailer in 2011—with less than fifty people on staff— after meeting the founders at a party who said they needed someone “to do writing.” Their creative vision: literary, quirky, and fun. “Warby Parker is the person you want to sit next to at a dinner party,” she was told. “They are funny and smart, and they get up to do the dishes.” It was her job to dispense that voice onto everything: the website, a bookmark, an email receipt.
By the time she left in 2017 as Director of Copy, Warby Parker was a hot spot for visually impaired, stylized city folk. The company 10X’d their headcount and graced lists praising corporate innovation and social responsibility. “The only credit I can give myself is recognizing that the founders were smart, and not only that but good, kind people,” Young said. “If the CEOs are good and kind, the culture and people are typically good and kind, too.” She says she “squirmed in” the same she did to get into Brown—leading with curiosity, working hard, and welcoming serendipity. “I look back on my life and there are so many instances where things could have gone completely sideways if it were not for one filament of good luck,” she said. Budding creatives often tolerate their nine-to-fives but Young felt lucky for hers. Warby covered her health insurance and informed and supported her writing. Her contract included two weeks of paid leave for reporting.
Photo by James and Karla Murray for 6sqft
In “Garbage Language,” for New York Magazine, Young executes a thoughtful takedown of office vocabulary: sync, target, circle back, and deep dive. Noun displacers and verb abusers and battle metaphors she encountered in her start-up years. Other corporate musings she’s covered: becoming a manager, the hidden dichotomy of the executive assistant, and losing a work husband.
Most essays Young writes are about a topic she’s been privately fixated on for months, or even years, she says. In 2020, with ample time to fixate, she produced two zines: The Things They Fancied—“about the frivolous habits of the moneyed class, spanning several periods of history”—and Sleepy Hollow Motor Inn—“about a homicide, the wreck of RMS Titanic, a geodesic dome, an old Cape Cod motel, a rare blood disorder, and two pandemics over time.” NPR and Vanity Fair put them on their recommended reading lists. Goodreads reviewers wrote “Every sentence is a delicious morsel” and “I could read her prose all day long” and “The amount of zest the writer put into writing it made it extra zesty…” and “Very satisfying.” When her subject is niche, Young writes masterfully for a general audience. There is a story or a subtle lesson or, at least, a lot of cool, distilled research to entertain a group larger than herself. When her subject is universal, she writes at a level of depth that burgeons the subject into niche territory, like six-thousand words on the human emotion of disgust. Her essays mimic the zines she scraped together growing up. “I have exactly the same mind as when I was a kid,” she said. “I’m just a scaled up JPEG by 300%.”
Young’s best friend is Alice Gregory, a writer and critic—also from the Bay Area, also living in New York—with a resume not dissimilar from her own, if writer’s had resumes, which they do not. (They have sparsely designed websites that let the words do the talking.) The two met as children and have been inseparable since. Young says Gregory is the best writer she knows, which is significant coming from someone who’s read a lifetime’s worth of literature but is not yet middle-aged. Young’s partner is Teddy Blanks, a graphic designer and video director. Together, they run an online store called YoungBlanks. Items for sale: one yellow mug (“Thinking Cup”, sold out); a “bucolic” candle named after Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous description of his mother’s fatal freak accident (“(picnic, lightning),” sold out), also esteemed in this McSweeney’s list. More items for sale: a long-sleeve tee, a crewneck sweatshirt, iOS stickers of Renaissance painted emojis—most of them disapproving—aptly named “Rejoinders.” (A rejoinder is defined as an especially sharp or witty reply.) Each product is brainy and creative, a tangible inside joke the couple has let the public in on but designed and made well to be loved by those who only want to have a little fun. YoungBlank’s most prized creation: “Periodic Table of NYC Trash”—“a scientific array of the world’s finest waste” wherein common city objects have replaced chemical elements on the periodic table. (H) is for hairband, (Dn) is for Dunkin’ Cup, and (W) is for Wasabi Partition, the grass-like sliver of plastic that divides fast casual sushi from its condiments.
Young has lived in New York City since 2008—the first half in Chinatown, the second half in Brooklyn. There exists an extroverted anonymity available that sustains her desire to observe the world at its fullest while being left completely alone. In 2018, Young co-authored “D C-T!” (The City!) with illustrator Joana Avillez, a devotion to her adopted home. The book pairs illustrations of iconic city scenes—like a boy shouting at a pile of rodent-infested trash—with gramograms like “S-L-I-F!” (“It’s alive!”) for readers to sound out. The wordplay is a gracious tribute to William Steig’s 1968 classic, “CDB!” Young has claimed to be a bad strategist—a mediocre performer in escape rooms and a blindsided victim of common movie plot twists—but her attitude towards problem-solving is always “game.” In her letter of recommendation for escape rooms, she calls them “a thrilling substitute for therapy” that “reward sheer effort like nothing else.” She has written crossword puzzles for Kinfolk Magazine and The New York Times.
Photo courtesy of Molly Young
Photo courtesy of Molly Young
In her monthly newsletter, “Read Like the Wind” (begun by Young in 2018, acquired by New York Magazine in 2019, now with her at The Times), Young deposits book recommendations for subscribers, and in return, subscribers, or any person with the URL, deposit their recommendations for her in a public Excel spreadsheet titled, “Tell Me What to Read.” There are dedicated columns for both parties to add notes: “Tell me that Babbitt isn’t The Great American Novel,” one contributor wrote. “Humiliating I haven’t read this,” Young wrote back. On several occasions, she’s thanked the phantom crowd for suggestions she would never have stumbled upon on her own. In 2010, Google estimated there were close to 130 million books in the world. Adjusting for twelve more years and English language is… still a lot of books. Young has read an impressive amount of them. In a recent interview, she told The Times that she began to feel like a critic in her early 30s. “Something clicked,” she said. “I was finally able to discern what I felt was good from what I felt was less good…”
What makes good writing, according to Young, is precision. “If I feel like every word is considered, I can trust the writer as a companion on whatever little voyage we’re about to take together,” she said. Some staple companions: Zadie Smith, Barbara Browning, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. “Read Like the Wind” features fiction, nonfiction, and “hybrid.” She described A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa as part literary analysis, part memoir, and part fiction. “Discipline doesn’t matter as much as the practitioner,” Young says. She and Blanks are working on a screenplay together. He has screenwriting credits. She does not. “The day I have a consistent personal brand is the day I should lay down and die,” she said. “What fun is that?” Sometimes, inconsistency is a brand in itself, like Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe or the Cheesecake Factory menu: 250 items with nothing in common except the fate of being washed down with a dense slice.
In a New York Magazine review of Katherine May’s 2020 memoir, Young writes “like meditation or free-range jogging, Wintering is both meandering and disciplined.” The author is in Iceland seeking solace after falling ill and, as a result, depressed. “You apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?” May argues. Young wonders if by writing through her misery May hopes to (a) wrestle control of her condition, (b) step away from it, or (c) manufacture a second type of misery—the misery of writing. She provides a brief history of seasonal affect disorder, translates the untranslatable Finnish words talvitelat and sisu, and explains that where she is from, San Francisco, does not have a winter. “Instead, the weather is mildly uncomfortable all year round, except for sunny days deposited irregularly like rat-food pellets in a science experiment.” Young’s sense of humor is rousing at best, factual at least. Like most of her critiques, she leaves the audience with more knowledge than opinion and without categorizing whether a work is good or bad. She shepherds them towards their own interest or disinterest, just as Mendelsohn says all great critics do.