All Those Freckles

There are people you’re fully allowed to hate without justification. Hitler, obviously. Men who imprison their partners and call it love. Easy cases. But there’s someone I keep finding myself defending, and I need to put this on record.

Lindsay Lohan. Yes, she snorts expensive drugs—honestly, who’s keeping score. She’s driven drunk, and I’m not going to claim I’ve never had three drinks in me and decided the drive home was probably fine, because I have and so has everyone reading this. Her last record was genuinely terrible and she’s gotten thin in a way that reads like a problem, not a choice. All of this is stipulated.

But think about what she gave us. The girl getting eaten alive by the Mean Girls clique before she figured out who actually mattered to her—that film still holds. The song she wrote to her estranged father, Confessions of a Broken Heart, which is devastating if you catch it in the right headspace. Freaky Friday, which should not work as well as it does. She was glowing in all of it, before everything went sideways.

And then there’s the Vanity Fair shoot. Those freckles—across her face, her shoulders, everywhere. Either that does something to you or it doesn’t, and for me it does something complete and slightly embarrassing. I’ve printed the photos. I’m going to bed with them. If the rest of the world has given up on her, their loss—she’s mine now. Nora, scoot over.