facebook twitter tumblr newsletter  Reality Fiction   In 2006 my
best friend Elissa had an everyday uniform of a deep V-neck
shirt, pigeon-colored toque, and a forest-green hoodie, and she
cited Brody Jenner as the main influence on her personal
sartorial style. We watched MTV online, affectionately trolled
each other’s MySpace profiles, experimented with men and alcohol
and other drugs. We were newly adults, newly university
students, newly Torontonians. We were young and in love with
each other, with our friendship, with the future we felt we were
promised.  Elissa and I lived together, those first few years in
Toronto. We sat on our couch or on our beds and watched Lauren
Conrad and Heidi Montag in HD, taken in by how beautifully their
lives were framed, even as their lives themselves were a banal
simulacrum of ours and other young women we knew. It’s not that
we felt more deeply than they did or that we were smarter than
they were; it’s that our lives were unframed and unconstrained.
It’s that we were lea