Welcome to Good Material.

If you like your essays personal and your humor dark, this is a newsletter for you.

Good Material is my attempt to make something - art, meaning, peace - out of the messiest parts of life. From ketamine therapy to getting Covid on a ship full of artists in the Arctic Circle to the LA fires, here you’ll find writing about chronic illness, the creative process, politics, literature, and what happens when your body crashes but your mind won’t quit. Not necessarily in that order.

If you’ve read just one thing I’ve written, it’s probably the viral Guardian essay “My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer.” Which happened just after my novel NSFW was published.

For an intro to the kind of thing you can expect on here, try the first installment of the Ketamine Diaries. If you enjoy, please subscribe! Subscribers will receive all new posts via e-mail.

Other things about me

I’m trapped in a love-hate relationship with Los Angeles, where I currently live. I’m happiest underwater or surrounded by books and dogs. In addition to NSFW, which was a national bestseller, a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and an Amazon Best Book of the Year, I’m also the author of the national bestselling young adult novel Hancock Park.

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For people who like their essays personal and their humor dark, a newsletter about the body and the world and what to do with either of them. From novelist Isabel Kaplan.

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Author of the national bestselling novel NSFW and the viral Guardian essay "My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I'm a writer." Happiest underwater or surrounded by books & dogs