Origins

Polly vs. Molly vs. Heather

Minuet (2020) Flora Yukhnovich

‘Heather Havrilesky’ did a podcast a few days ago and the interviewer asked her why she wasn’t just known as ‘Heather,’ implying that she should simply combine Ask Polly and Ask Molly into one cohesive entity under her own name. He may have used the words “conglomerate” or “empire.” The whole thing had a very high capitalist taint to it, which is usually the case with these soft boys who peddle emotional pap to soothe other soft boys, their minds groping like those claws at the top of automated prize machines, fumbling clumsily for some soft thought or feeling and coming up empty, time and time again.

So let this serve as your semi-annual reminder that I am Polly’s evil twin, and I made up the Russian-matriarch-with-bourgeois-delusions-of-grandeur name ‘Heather Havrilesky’ in the middle of a sleepless night after one too many tequila Negronis, which I do not recommend, Campari being the absolute most disgusting liqueur on the face of god’s lush green planet full of lushes. Aperol is different, of course. Its bitterness is more natural, its sweetness less medicinal, its red-orange glow less lurid and sickly, conjuring lava lamps and the glowing cocaine-adjacent high of DayQuil.

Here’s how it all began: Polly’s brilliant and blindingly hot acquaintance Choire made her famous by publishing her asinine advice using her actual name but obscuring her last name, mostly to protect our father, who is now a retired foreign dignitary but spent several murky years as a CIA agent based in Montana and Singapore. I hated that my least talented sister — who is also, adding insult to injury, my biological twin — rose to widespread renown on the back of her unremarkable optimism and disappointingly average fixation on ‘joy.’

Ever since we were very small, Polly would prattle on to me about joy, joy, joy. Listening to her blather, you’d almost start to believe that joy is piped into every person, place, and thing on Earth like raspberry jelly into countless fat donuts, and all you have to do is go around squeezing and prodding the earth’s various donut people and donut places and the gooey, disgusting ooze of JOY will spurt out all over your face. Yeah, you’ll murmur, that’s how I like it, possibly because you’re a worthless brainwashed twat just like my sister.

Not my oldest sister, Dolly. She’s a real estate mogul in outer Mongolia, currently determined to turn the land of yurts and yogurts into a goddamn icy wonderland vacation destination for the burgeoning demographic of goat-humping billionaires and their chip-sucking AI compadres, most of whom are now outfitted in various rubbery humanoid forms roughly resembling sex dolls except with more visually compelling and vibration-imbued holes. Dolly knows exactly how to festoon the pedestrian tastes of these glorified goat humpers and rubber-hole thumpers with signifiers of wealth and status in just the way they like it, throwing lavish welcome parties for new guests featuring enormous goat statues made of ice that vomit caviar into tiny buckets. “The new rich like action,” she texts me in the wee hours, “Everything needs to move and buzz and blast open like a Jerry Bruckheimer film set after a mid-day cocaine bender.”

“They also like vomit in buckets,” I text back.

“More than you can ever know,” she texted back.

I love Dolly. She’s the talented one. I’m just a hack but at least I recognize that. Polly, on the other hand, walks around murmuring about her drearily unoriginal, disgustingly sweet ideas like some unholy, rapidly-melting Oprah-mixed with-the-Dalai-Lama McFlurry.

Anyway, one afternoon I was sitting through another dull luncheon with my horrifically self-involved aunt Betty and my sister Polly, who was whining about the fact that some horny investigative reporter from the New York Times was stalking her and was about to blow the lid off her whole insipid-advice-peddling scam by revealing her true identity to all. That’s when I invented the name ‘Heather Havrilesky.’ What a stroke of genius! I mean, have you ever heard a name that’s so striving, so faux-English-Garden-amid-Saint-Petersburg-deep-freeze? It trips off the tongue like slaughtered peasants falling lifelessly down the Odessa Steps to the Black Sea.

Polly just sat there and stupidly nodded her perfect face — she is astonishingly beautiful, the mirror image of her gorgeous twin — but offered zero thoughts, zero angles, her claw-like mind grasping for some idea, some concept, some strategy, to no avail. So I filled in the gaps, just like I always did back in boarding school in upstate New York, where the ugly rich scampered about like Lyme-infected ticks. I suggested that we hire a believably unattractive, middle-aged dolt to trudge around repeating Polly’s sound bites and pas-très-bon mots and taking the occasional badly-lit selfie of her unremarkable face and posting it on Instagram with a few fatuous words about how the struggle is real but she’s back on her bullshit, gurl, etc etc. Absolute child’s play. Black squares, pussy hats — give her the full Monty of stale-cracker clichés and watch the witless white wretches fawn and fumble to touch the hem of her deeply unflattering skinny jeans.

Now ‘Heather’ charges us exorbitant fees just to pose next to gardens and pottery wheels, cocking her oversized anvil of a head at dipshitty angles so the world can coo over the bestest of best lives she’s living in some backwater southern town that no one’s ever heard of. I mean ultimately no one really cares who ‘Heather’ is or what she thinks about anything, they want me, the hack, and Polly, that empty husk, they just don’t realize it consciously.

But if they did know us, if they could see me with their eyeballs? My god. My searing charm and unbearable hotness would melt their brains like honeysuckle-and-honeymelon-scented candles in a Wolf convection steam oven. But I’m no idiot. Solid, sustainable brands are crafted out of mediocrity and déclassé ambition. Look no further than the billionaire bobbleheads gearing up to raw dog their rubber AI wifeys on a quick vacay to the rarefied hinterlands of outer Mongolia.

“Bali and Dubai and Istanbul are out, Mongolia is in,” Dolly texts me. “The nouveau shitheels want aged bourbons and waist-deep snow in the wintertime, and the Alps and also the Himalayas are too democratized now, what with austerity and the unionized sherpas and unsightly Tibetan prayer flags draped all over everything, their flat Crayola colors flapping in the freezing wind. And then your floor-length lambskin coat smells like propane at the Met gala and Ari won’t deign to cast her eyebrow-less face in your gaseous direction.”

“Tragic,” I text back.

“Look for joy today,” Polly texts me. “It’s hiding everywhere.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I text back immediately.

“Your brain is hiding somewhere, why don’t you look for it?” I text back a few hours later.

“I hate your boring guts,” I text back the next day.

“Get stuffed” I text back the day after that.

So no, I don’t think we should combine resources and let “Heather” be the singular voice of our multifarious personalities and wildly disparate IQs. I think soft boys should keep their bad ideas inside their pants with their limp dicks and leave us the fuck alone.

Anyway. I ate a lot of pumpkin seeds yesterday so if this dispatch is slightly more upbeat and optimistic than you’d prefer, blame my newly realigned and reorganized microbiome for that. I’ve never lived this way before, sober and stuffed full of insoluble fiber, so don’t blame the player, blame the game.

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