I’m Christina McDowell, author of After Perfect: A Daughter’s Memoir and The Cave Dwellers: An American Satire. I’m currently at work on Sycamore Island, my forthcoming novel. I was born and raised in Washington, D.C.—the backwoods of the CIA, to be specific. And yes, you read that correctly.

 

I recently moved to Capitol Hill—the Belly of the Beast—with my husband and young son. Though I’m no stranger to the epicenter of power (I grew up surrounded by both the loud kind—politicians—and the quiet kind—spies), I’ve never lived within the Belly itself, let alone steps from the Supreme Court. Right now, the world demands our attention—and for me, that means writing what I see, what I feel, and how it all connects to the stories we’ve inherited. You can’t understand the present if you ignore the past; they belong to the same unfinished story.

 

When I moved back to Washington during Trump’s first presidency, I returned as an insider turned outsider. As a child, when I wasn’t catching turtles down the creek from the CIA or hotboxing my parents’ car, I was being groomed—inside a colonial mansion around the corner from the Kennedys’ Hickory Hill estate—to believe that what was real wasn’t real, and what wasn’t real was.

 

You might’ve thought my father was a spy. Alas, no. When I was eighteen, the feds came, took him away for fraud, and our House of Cards collapsed. The reverberations of his incarceration—and my experience with poverty, depression, and addiction thereafter—left me with a profoundly altered lens through which I now view the world.

 

I never thought I’d return to This Town to stay, not after fifteen years in Hollywood, but I can thank my editor and my husband for that.

 

So.

 

Here we are.

 

This Substack is my lifeline.

 

In this space, my personal life collides with the political.

It’s part memoir, part protest, part satire, part prayer.

 

What you’ll find here:

• First-person essays on womanhood proximate to the Belly, on marriage, motherhood, friendship, and identity during violent political upheaval.

• The occasional tone poem or love letter to what still deserves to be saved (!!!)

• Reflections on power, resistance, institutions, and collapse (???)

• The occasional satirical story—maybe even a scoop if I’m in the right place at the right time. I’m not a journalist, just a relentless observer of American life. I have run into VP JD Vance, Dr. Fauci, ICE, the National Guard, and many more…

 

Whether you’re exhausted, outraged, hopeful, over the news cycle, heartbroken—or all the above, depending on the day—this is a place for you.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

Christina