The Unhappiness Manifesto
Reviewing “Life Is a Lazy Susan of Sh*t Sandwiches,” by “I’ve Had It” podcast hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, prophets of the new misery gospel.
“Standing backstage at the Variety Playhouse, I almost shat myself,” reads the first line of Life Is a Lazy Susan of Shit Sandwiches, the autobiographical mission statement of I’ve Had It podcast hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan. This is the Bible of “immiseration,” a phenomenon professor Chuck Pezheski describes as an explosion of voices whose function “is to make other people miserable.” With woke out of fashion, endlessly complaining about the prison yard that is modern society has become the new elite signaling mechanism. If you’re willing to admit to finding happiness in this vale of patriarchal tears, Shit Sandwiches isn’t meant for you, but the book is more than a road map to a pose.
Welch and Sullivan are ubiquitous social media stars for the BlueSky/MSNOW set, dubbed the “two red state moms” who hit it “big” by Rolling Stone. Welch in particular has expertly deployed Trumpian PR tech on the road to fame, grabbing gazillions of eyeballs as the Skeletor-faced Mamdani supporter who calls MAGA supporters “psychopaths” and “religious addicts” and rips swimmer Riley Gaines as an “insufferable twat.” Sullivan is the ex-megachurcher who throws in barbs while mostly gushing and laughing at Welch’s viral antics. The schtick is polished and it’s not hard to see how they conquered the podcast landscape, but their relationship is a lot more twisted than either seems to realize, a political folie à deux story for the ages.
As a result, Welch and Sullivan have written an unintentionally fascinating book. Nearly the whole riddle of modern American political dysfunction is on display in these pages. It’s the Rosetta Stone of misery culture:
Told in alternating first-person chapters, Life is a Lazy Susan of Shit Sandwiches is the tale of two Oklahoma moms united by car-wreck marriages to dissolute lawyers — one an alcoholic, the other a sex addict — who came together in a friendship of opposites. Fierce, narrow-eyed Jen, who looks like the victim of a mad plastic surgeon who uses a Guy Fawkes mask as a model, is the Alpha, a self-described “dyed-in-the-wool Democrat in a red state” who grew up surrounded by “fucking crazy” Bible-thumpers. She’s the pithy secular Oliver Hardy to the more kindly Stan Laurel of Angie “Pumps” Sullivan, who was “raised to believe Jesus was my best friend.”
The Laurel-and-Hardy comparison isn’t flippant. Welch and Sullivan really are a classic American comedy duo. Sullivan, a former cheerleader and Homecoming Queen whose faith was undone by a calamitous marriage to the apparent Guinness record holder for stripper-bonking, plays the Middle American straight man to Welch’s progressive zingers. Welch made her own catastrophic choice in husband Josh. She fell “deeply in love” with the fellow atheist brimming with “supposedly ‘gay’ (metrosexual) attributes” like “statement eyewear,” and obsessed in conversation with “religion (bad), Republicans (worse), and the death penalty (don’t get him fucking started, sister).” She had less patience for his having “spent his whole life drunk” until 2002 and his “messy” money habits, sadly only discovered post-marriage.
The unlucky brides went for despair drives in Angie’s Suburban, which Jennifer nicknamed the “Petri dish” because it was always full of “rogue McNuggets” and other artifacts of that societal burden, parenthood. Angie describes the “Let’s burn” rides, which will be in the inevitable Shit Sandwiches Netflix series:
I would call Jennifer, and she’d answer on the first ring like she’d sensed my need in the ether. I’d say, “Let’s burn,” which was our code for “Let’s smoke cigarettes on our respective porches and talk about all the shenanigans our husbands have got themselves up to.”
This story is told well. I expected lazily dictated rants transcribed and broken into chapters by a poor unnamed editor, but Shit Sandwiches has the feel of being written throughout. Angie on her libertine husband: “Kirk gave me my three wonderful kids, and I will always be grateful for that, even as I prayed for a colony of fire ants to crawl up his dickhole.” Philosophy from Jen: “I think there’s only this life, and that life’s temporariness lends it beauty and pathos.” If this was just a story about two wronged women getting together and “kvetching about every little thing under the sun,” as they put it, it might have been classic American comedy, like Car Talk for wives to inadequate douchebags.
What makes the book crazy is the subplot about Angie’s evolution from religious/right-wing wrongthink to Jennifer’s left-atheistic politics and outlook. Both describe this process in great detail. Neither sniffs the obvious irony of Jennifer evangelizing and converting Angie from one form of exacting “purity culture” to another.
Angie describes her upbringing:
My family attended an Evangelical megachurch, the kind where they sing Christian hymns, and the preacher delivers hellfire-and-damnation sermons about Jesus. These sermons were designed to terrify us into being good Christians and to control our behavior when we weren’t in church. I grew up in purity culture, which promulgates the idea of sexual abstinence. It meant girls didn’t wear skimpy clothes or stay out late, doing things like teenage drinking or anything that might threaten their precious virginity…
As her life travails accumulate, Angie becomes disenchanted. Her primary complaint seems to be God allowing the existence of her philandering husband (“Wasn’t Jesus supposed to protect me from this crap?”), but she has other, odder thoughts:
Yes, I grew up believing in a certain skinny thirty-three-year-old carpenter who died for my sins, and, yes, sometimes I questioned some of His decisions, like why were there so many wars in God’s name? Why did kids get cancer? Why did I have to pay for Wi-Fi on flights when I’d already paid for an overpriced ticket? Why did Trump exist?
I can see complaining that some megachurches spend too much time preaching what Jennifer describes as the “prosperity gospel,” and too little teaching the actual gospels, but emerging from a life of religious immersion to complain about WiFi surcharges and the existence of Donald Trump (in that order) is beyond bizarre. Not to Jennifer, who breathlessly details how she helped pull Angie out of her childlike religious state. In one section, “Pumps” says to Jen, “Did you know human beings used to be nine hundred years old?” Jennifer replies:
“Angie,” I said slowly, like I was talking to a toddler. “Girl. That never happened.”
“Yes, it did,” she said, a slight adolescent lilt to her voice. “I learned it in Bible study.”
“This is objectively and verifiably false,” I continued. “Modern man lives longer than ever before because of two things—filtered water and access to modern medications.”
“But there was no disease in the Garden of Eden!” she chirped, a competent attorney who was nevertheless taking these age-old tales at face value.
We’re re-living Inherit the Wind, bursting the ancient misinformation bubbles of True Believers. A few paragraphs later, after explaining how difficult it is for her to “coexist amongst people with views that seem diametrically opposed to my own,” Jennifer exults that Angie “could evolve,” like an Australopithecus Oklahomus:
And yet . . . I know people can change. Angie did. I always knew there was more to Angie than her terrible politics. And I also believed that she could evolve. I saw her heart and her kindness. The purity culture of her youth had brainwashed her into seeing the world one way. When I say “world,” I mean the heteronormative, Christian megachurch in Oklahoma. I still struggle to balance my compassion and empathy with the more pressing need for allyship and speaking up.
Jennifer complains about “evangelicals” who get “biblical panties in a twist trying to save you,” but zero irony alarms ring as she pushes Angie from “heteronormative” purity culture to the equally inflexible liturgy of “allyship.” She even speaks in the language of Christian evangelists, who’ll insist they’re not converting anyone, merely awakening you to the presence of God’s love already within. Jennifer’s version: “Inside [Angie] was a whole other person, like a Matryoshka doll, one who knew the lack of universal healthcare in this country was a tremendous problem…” In another section, Jennifer exclaims, “Her metamorphosis took place over many conversations.” It’s My Fair Lady with two Oklahoma moms, with Jen as impatient Henry Higgins and Angie the desperate-to-please Eliza.
Once you become conscious of the creepy reverse-evangelism plot, it blots out the rest of the story. Apart from the shared marriage disasters, the friendship works because Jennifer is a born proselytizer-of-banalities and Angie is a natural reciter-of-same. Angie stresses in her opening chapter what an obedient Christian child she was, someone who believed Christians just “did what they were supposed to do,” which in her case meant going upstairs every night and doing her homework to “the familiar sounds of my parents watching TBN or GOD TV.” But after meeting Jennifer, she stopped believing in the afterlife. “I can’t say what I believe in anymore, except Rachel Maddow,” Angie says.
Jennifer both does and does not notice that Angie has merely switched televangelists. “Of the two of us, believe it or not, she is the big political junkie,” she says, “monitoring twenty-four-hour news cycles on MSNBC like her life depends on it.” Jennifer spends much of the book detailing devotion to a catechism of postmodern whateverisms, talking about how she “felt a moral calling to support marginalized groups” and denouncing “half-assed” devotion:
Nothing sticks in my craw more than half-assed, cherry-picked allyship. For instance, if I go to a party thrown by a close friend — who happens to be gay — and everyone in the neighborhood shows up to get their IG snap. Meanwhile, I know for a fact that some of those same ass-lickers vote straight red down the ticket, even though that vote means the potential elimination of gay marriage or other discrimination protections. I’ve always found this hypocrisy breathtaking.
When I joined an apocalyptic megachurch in San Antonio in the 2000s for the book that became The Great Derangement, I remember being awed by the cynicism of using the pulpit to push Republican policy aims. What I’ve Had It gets up to is even weirder, since the whole faith is really based around hating Trump and “the ones who elected Trump.” As Jen says, “We can bond over the things we can’t stand, like… MAGA Republicans.”
It’s abundantly clear throughout the book that both authors, but especially Welch, are blessed with excellent business sense (that language is ironic, as we’ll see in a moment). “Don’t get me wrong. I’m as vapid and shallow as the next person,” writes Jennifer, referring to her home design business. “I sell overpriced furniture and pick out statement chandeliers for the one percent. It doesn’t get shallower than that, but having money gave me emotional freedom.”
Some would read that and wonder at the absurdity of Welch also showing up at Zohran Mamdani’s victory party and bleating about the hopelessness of life in America, a country “closing the door on fixing the planet.” I don’t see it that way. Welch is an excellent salesperson, and what she’s selling is Everything Sucks Derp Trump! religion wrapped in a thin skin of intersectional gibberish. That this requires pretending I’ve Had It! isn’t a classic Horatio Alger success story shouldn’t be held against her. It’s part of the schtick, and the schtick works.
The idea behind immiseration is that all wealthy societies go through cyclical periods in which the educated and upscale have too many kids for too few mansions and sinecures. This forces wannnabe aristocrats to “invent other high-status virtue-signaling modalities” to mark them as different from the plebes. Once it was Romans eating civet and peacock brains, now it’s “luxury beliefs” like the end of “biological sex,” America deserving 9/11, and the new progressive answer to purity culture, the metaphysics of which are that everything and everybody sucks, and nothing (not even Van Gogh or Stonehenge) has any value but My Political Needs.
Welch preaches hard: “Even if you won the lottery and paid off all your student loans, your car, and your mortgage, then went on an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Maldives, you might only be happy for a nanosecond,” she says, claiming it’s just “human nature.” Sullivan says she traded the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for the “trinity of my three kids,” but Welch stomps on the eternal truth that parental love all by itself can make life worth living. She goes into detail about the “hard-hitting” and “thankless” misery of having to mother a “crying whelp” twenty-four hours a day. Having kids “only exacerbates your existing problems,” she writes, in a chapter called “Having Kids Won’t Solve Your Problems.”
Welch is so caught up in the faith that she had to check herself in the middle of praising the Obergefell Supreme Court case legalizing gay marriage to issue a statement reminding the reader that marriage is historically repressive. “Not that the institution of marriage is historically so great for straight women,” she wrote. “For most of recorded history, women were the property of their fathers and then their husbands, no better than a pair of goats or a featherbed…”
We conclude with the matter of these two authors being “blessed” with business acumen. They wouldn’t appreciate the compliment.
In recent years it’s become fashionable to think that wokeness-or-whatever-we-called-that peaked in 2020, in the summer of Floyd. In those years it became common to cancel or castigate people for microaggressions, the term invented to capture the strange idea of bigotry without unkindness. I get that Welch and Sullivan are joking above, but I’d bet they’re not kidding about wishing for a world free of people trying to be nice in the wrong way, like that poor sap of a UPS driver. Misery culture never went away, it’s just rebranded, this time as an evangelical religion whose first conversion manual is now on sale — God help us.