Tonight, I'm Someone Else: Essays by Chelsea Hodson

“As I gradually restore Words Like Silver to its archive of reviews written between 2011 and 2024, I'll aim to first and foremost make my reading history explorable by publishing the blurbs and short reflections as books cross my mind, with the goal of eventually transferring and fleshing out the original WLS content. For now, please enjoy this brief spotlight.”

A highly anticipated collection, from the writer Maggie Nelson has called, “bracingly good…refreshing and welcome,” that explores the myriad ways in which desire and commodification intersect.

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.



Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre—including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission— Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship. Both tender and jarring, this collection is relevant to anyone who’s ever searched for what the self is worth.


Hodson’s accumulation within each piece is purposeful, and her prose vivid, clear, and sometimes even shocking, as she explores the wonderful and strange forms of desire. This is a fresh, poetic debut from an exciting emerging voice, in which Hodson asks, “How much can a body endure?” And the resounding answer: "Almost everything."

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God, this book made me sad.

Normally, if I find a book to be deeply unsettling, I dislike it — but there were so many individual pieces of these essays that I loved, and therefore find Hodson to be a valuable contemporary voice.

My opinion of this collection varied intensely depending on the individual story or essay. As a whole, Hodson’s observations are piercing. Some were gutting and emotional, rendered in a lyrical way that felt structurally similar to Iain S. Thomas’s viral collection of poetry, I Wrote This for You.

Her subject matter felt more similar to Patti Smith’s Just Kids: a brash venture into new adulthood, trouble provoked by an incessant romanticization of shitty experiences.

I could see readers I know loving the collection for its brazen truths and beauty; I could see readers I know hating because it was provocative for the sake of being provocative.

For context, I tend to be a relatively delicate reader. I’m an optimist, and softer than I'd like. I read about pain and grief and all (particularly in the context of 2019 being an awful year for my family), as long as they’re rendered with elegance and a bit of hope. I don’t do well with hopeless. I don’t do well with seeing the world as something that beats you down, even when it does.

Hodson was elegant too, but in a biting way. She made navigating young womanhood feel bleak, but had this way of spotlighting individual moments that oddly meshed with my reading style and love of detail.

She puts it best in her own words, about how she observes:

It’s such an individual way of looking at the world, even if it’s not my favorite.

Her essay format felt scattered and not at all cohesive. It was all very momentary. They were more like vignettes. Certain stories were composed of individual lines, broken up by asterisks, the literary equivalent of scrolling through my phone notes. Related, in a way, in that they were all meditations composing a period and topic in my life — but completely different from each other. In some essays, I loved it and in others, I found it lacking.

Although I think I’m a little too soft to have read it — Tonight, I’m Someone Else resonated but also made me go a little dark, which is not what I needed from my weekend — Hodson’s prose was so well constructed that my copy is now composed of a series of underlined lines. Her word choice appealed to me, and her chosen moments were spectacularly vivid. The genuine moments of reflection more than made up for the few areas of the collection that felt overly affected. Those articulations, with their speechless quality of containing intense humanity, made me mark the book as noteworthy. (I also just really want to talk about it with more people, because it made me think about a lot.)

As a character, Hodson is a complicated figure. She uses the word “longing” constantly, relishes intense emotion, pursued a string of toxic relationships (!), as well as had an indistinct notion, philosophically, about what she was meant to want from her life. She was especially curious about femininity and womanhood, and how she interacted with men to either become more or less of herself. Those particular discussions of hookup culture, relevance, interchangeability, feeling — those made me think that a lot of girls I’m friends with would enjoy reading such a specific take on romantic (or even purely sexual) relationships. Some of her tendencies, both personal and relational, were flat-out painful to read.

Hodson’s clearly smart, and decisive, and divisive. She talks a lot about desire, and is scathing with her opinions. She’s one of those people who, if I met her in person, I probably wouldn’t like very much at all — but I appreciated her voice and capability.

But as I mentioned, the lines! Tonight, I’m Someone Else is shrewd and brutal. It’s beautiful without being lovely. It’s overly abstract at times. Aggressive. There are some stories to love and others to hate — a balance some readers might look for in their book choices and others may reject. It’s morally blurry.

I don’t think I’ll ever reread it, but found so many good lines in it, and I’m glad that I read it. If you’re a young woman who feels relatively blunt, a little toughened up, and pretty free with yourself, you’d probably love the observations. If you love finding beauty in the minute — even in this sharp way of Hodson’s — you’d probably like it a lot too.

Excerpts