Helena Fitzgerald
LightNews LightNews
banner
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
Helena Fitzgerald
@hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
15K followers 890 following 3.7K posts
feelings, now more than ever!

wrote some stuff in some places
Posts Replies Media Videos
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
“you’re a real New Yorker if you’ve lived here more than ten years” “you’re only a real New Yorker if you were born here” no you’re a real New Yorker if you instantly knew what this means
a blue iMessage text that says “I’m gonna get out at 14 and get the bus instead of doing the Irreversible tunnel btw”
January 1, 2026 at 8:29 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
important also to know that I was wearing a CAPE
a blurry photo of a group of friends dressed up fancy leaving the metropolitan opera in nyc, in the foreground far right is a tall woman wearing very high black heels and a black velvet cape with a hood
January 1, 2026 at 6:09 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
it makes me cry every single year. merry christmas to one and all.
CHRISTMAS TREE * To be Brought down at last From the cold sighing mountain Where I and the others Had been fed, looked after, kept still, Meant, I knew — of course I knew- 'hat it would be only a matter of week: "hat there was nothing more to do Warmly they took me in, made much of me, The point from the start was to keep my spirits up. I could assent to that. For honestly, It did help to be wound in jewels, to send Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot. Over me then they wove a spell of shining-Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel, Amulets, milagros: software of silver, A heart, a little girl, a Model T, Two staring eyes. Then angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA (The children's names) in clownlike capitals, Somewhere a music box whose tiny song Played and replayed I ended before long By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come- No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn't bear, Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin Needles and bone. The little boy's hands meeting About my spine. The mother's voice: Holding up wonderfully! No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today's Dusk room aglow For the last time With candlelight. Faces love-lit, Gifts underfoot. Still to be so poised, so Receptive. Still to recall, to praise. - James Merrill
December 25, 2025 at 9:58 AM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
last week I was embarrassed to find myself weeping in front of arguably the most famous work of art in a museum full of famous works of art and completely unable to explain why even to myself. but I think this paragraph gets at it as well as I imagine anything could
Da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi
December 24, 2025 at 4:28 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
you ever read a novel that’s a straight-up masterpiece
the UK edition of Jeanne Thornton’s A/S/L (2025), an actual fucking masterpiece that made me cry like a teething baby
December 5, 2025 at 2:38 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
I’m so sorry but it’s kind of incredible that this particular stupid book came out the same week people happen to have been posting the cricket bat speech all over social media
a page with a scene from Stoppard’s The Real Thing: “Henry: Henry Shut up and listen. This thing here, which loo like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly... (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might... travel…(He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now, what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about…” the next page with the rest of the speech: “…shouting 'Ouch!' with your hands stuck into your armpits. (indicating the cricket bat) This isn't better because someone says it's better, or because there's a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It's better because it's better. You don't believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you on. You're a strange boy, Billy, how old are you? ‘Twenty, but I've lived more than you'll ever live.’ Ooh, ouch!”
December 3, 2025 at 5:40 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
is this where I share what happened today when I was looking up movies I could maybe go see in Paris next week
a listing for Ron Howard’s The Grinch but it’s in french so it says “Le Grinch De Ron Howard” and for some reason that makes it hilarious to me
December 2, 2025 at 10:47 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
time for the yearly reminder I see
the “small brain to galaxy brain meme” small brain: die hard is the best christmas movie bigger brain: Carol is the best christmas movie big lit-up brain: eyes wide shut is the best Christmas movie galaxy brain: the lion in winter is the best Christmas movie enlightened figure floating in illuminated space-time: Night of the Hunter is the best Christmas movie illuminated enlightened space figure with battle arms: FANNY ALEXANDER (this text cuts across the rest of the image and is much larger)
December 2, 2025 at 4:39 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
babe wake up there’s a new installment of the worst thing we’ve ever read
liv ullmann and erland josephson in scenes from a marriage (1973)
December 2, 2025 at 1:09 AM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
in my heart of hearts I believe someone had showed Teen Girl Squad to Tom Stoppard before he wrote The Coast of Utopia
the top of a page from the opening scene of Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia “…[they write better] Russian than I do — what a shame there’s worth reading (over his daughter’s protests) apart from — Daughters: Pushkin!”
December 1, 2025 at 8:41 AM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
the best thing by several miles. maybe bizarre that reading this was incredibly comforting at the time, but it really was.
a photo from the day with the Zoom squares in the background mercifully cropped out, showing half a page of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. It reads: …without being instinctive. All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. A man standing in his saddle in the half-lit half-alive dawn banged on the shutters and called two names. He was just a hat and a cloak tating in the grey plume of his own breath, but when he called we came. That much is certain—we came. ROS: Well I can tell you I’m sick to death of it. I don’t care one way or another, so why don’t you make up your mind. GUIL: We can’t afford anything quite so arbitrary. Nor did we come all this way for a christening. But we are comparatively fortunate; we might have been left to sift the whole field of human nomenclature, like two blind men looting a bazaar for their own portraits… At least we are presented with alternatives.
November 29, 2025 at 7:02 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
anyway I also think about Henry Carr in Travesties saying “where did you get it?” basically every single day of my life
a piece of a speech from Tom Stoppard’s TRAVESTIES “When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour-weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that kind of thing; but if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you've got a chit for life? (passionately) Where did you get it? What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist”
November 29, 2025 at 6:29 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
every single I’ve ever written or tried to write has had this piece of text underneath it. I’ve heard this in the background every time I’ve tried to meaningfully put words together since I was maybe thirteen years old
a section from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing: Henry: It's to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It's what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy... we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other: What selves? What's left? What else is there that hasn't been dealt out like a deck of cards? A sort of knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous abour what's shared - she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends… the rest of the same speech from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, plus the excellent deflating punchline after: …a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she's everybody's and it don't mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it's held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it's gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain. Pause. Debbie: Has Annie got someone else then? Henry: Not as far as I know, thank you for asking. Debbie: Apologies
November 29, 2025 at 5:52 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
a screenshot of a page from The Great Gatsby. It reads: “He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with extreme prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
November 22, 2025 at 11:02 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
I’m in London right now and, awake at 3am, at once overjoyed at the results and crushed not to be in NYC celebrating with everybody, I was like “ok where can I go to celebrate and who can I celebrate with”
Google Maps screenshot of Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery
November 5, 2025 at 1:42 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
here’s me today after riding a bike on a busy street with lots of cars for the first time and getting through it without incident
two shots from A Muppet Christmas Carol, with captions. Gonzo, a blue muppet with a big purple nose, dressed in Dickensian coat and hat, is saying “and Tiny Tim, who did NOT die”
October 18, 2025 at 8:35 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
here’s me getting up and going on a 12-mile bike ride today despite not having been on a bike in the better part of a year (it was so great)
Marge Simpson lifting a big bar of weights under the caption “me after telling myself a fascist worked out this morning”
October 2, 2025 at 2:13 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
been thinking about this passage from Almodovar’s memoir a lot since I read it last year, no particular reason
“Before a dictator is ousted or dies a natural death, the oppressed people can wait for years, with champagne chilling in the fridge to celebrate when the dictator dies. Years of internalizing the change and quietly preparing for when the moment comes.”
August 30, 2025 at 3:41 AM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
is this the sign from the universe I need to just get the tattoo already
a shot from AFTER HOURS (1985), a white man with brown hair stands jn front of a dirty bathroom mirror and looks at a graffiti drawing on the wall next to him that shows a shark biting a man’s dick
July 30, 2025 at 12:24 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
once again, Griffin Dunne is not the viewpoint character or the hero in After Hours, Griffin Dunne in After Hours is the villain, the punchline, the cop from wicker man
charlie kirk’s pathetic baby tweet about being scared of NYC
July 30, 2025 at 12:19 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
I’m dealing with it really well, thanks for asking
a blue text reads “I need to watch something that makes me not look at my phone, like SORCERER or CLUELESS”
June 25, 2025 at 1:57 AM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
had to just do this and make myself stop thinking about it, I stand by this but I’d also stand by like five other alternate versions
NYT Reader’s Choice best movies of the 21st century ballot: Yi Yi Pain & Glory Mad Max Fury Road In the Cut Drive My Car Before Sunset Collateral Beau Travail There Will Be Blood Magic Mike XXL
June 24, 2025 at 3:38 AM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
no more posting about any of those “writing routines of famous writers” unless it’s Edmund White’s
“he wrote: “I thought it was quite normal to take a break from writing at two in the morning, saunter down to the piers, and have sex with 20 men in a truck”
June 4, 2025 at 12:51 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
if you inherited a movie theater, what’s your first double feature?
poster for Claire Denis’s BEAU TRAVAIL, a blue background with a shirtless tanned white man wearing green army cargo pants, 2/3rds of his torso is in sunlight and his face and shoulder are in shadow poster for Steven Spielberg’s JAWS, a turquoise blue ocean with a woman swimming along the top and a gigantic shark rising up beneath her, text says JAWS in red
May 19, 2025 at 6:47 PM
hellafitzgerald.bsky.social
a corduroy blazer that my mom bought my dad when they were first dating (mid-80s), in the 90s she borrowed it from him and wore it all the time, several years ago I borrowed it from her and continued the tradition
a white woman with her light-colored hair pulled back wearing brown pants and a dark corduroy blazer over a white sweater, taking a photo of herself in a round mirror behind which we can see a couch, a chair, some lights, and various framed artwork same woman, hair down, a closer-up photo taken with the front-facing camera turned toward her, here you can see the blazer is brown with a sort of checkered pattern
April 30, 2025 at 6:12 PM