Ashley Reese Has a Bad Brain

“Fate doesn’t give a fuck,” writer Ashley Reese told me via Zoom this past April, and neither does her cat Walter when I try and pet him in her apartment on a warmer-than-it-should-be Monday evening in September. I’m here for the photo shoot for this piece and to get a glimpse of her parlor-floor/garden-level 1915 brownstone apartment. Trinkets abound: vases full of dried flowers, plastic sunglasses, Bed Threads bags filled with papers, a battered copy of The Guest, and a dusty unopened bottle of Lagunitas (one of her late husband Rob Stengel’s favorite beers) next to his ashes. One such totem is a plaster orange cat that Rob bought years ago. The cat fell off its shelf one day, and the tip of its right ear was chipped. Strangely, this figurine bears an uncanny resemblance to the real cat, Walter, whom Ashley adopted a month before Rob’s death, down to the same snip in the ear resulting from Trap Neuter Release (TNR). Ashley has learned to expect the unexpected.

Rob died from Peritoneal Mesothelioma, a rare cancer that forms in the thin tissue that lines the internal organs, on December 8, 2022, leaving Ashley a 32-year-old widow. In the ensuing couple of years, she’s been coming to terms with her new identity. The pair met on OkCupid nearly a decade prior, connecting over music and Game of Thrones. Their first date was on April 26, 2014, at a midwestern-themed bar in Williamsburg called Burnside, which no longer exists (“Another thing that was mine and is now dead and gone,” Ashley wrote in a Substack post from May). They married a month and a half before Rob’s death, in a backyard wedding that came together in just seven days, covered by Vogue.

Rob is very much still alive in her writing. Through her Substack posts, readers get to know and love him as she does. Despite never having met him, I now know Rob never kept multiple tabs open on his computer. He grew up in small-town South of Buffalo, in Western New York, and knew how to shoot a rifle. He pronounced “crayon” like “cran.” He studied at Brooklyn Law School and was interested in litigation. The song “Can’t You See” by The Marshall Tucker Band was on his driving playlist, and he found Lana Del Rey annoying. He loved Glacier National Park. His late-night order was popcorn chicken and fries from Crown Fried Chicken. And he really, really adored Ashley.

“I love writing about Rob,” Ashley said. “I love writing about how much I love this person. I love writing about how it feels to not have this person in my life anymore and how it feels to have a future that feels so murky at an age when all your peers are finally settling down and putting things together.” All millennials know the plight of watching everyone getting engaged, married, and/or pregnant through Instagram and questioning their own life choices. Ashley just has the added layer of widowhood.

Ashley’s friend and fellow writer Zeba Blay has known her pre-Rob, during-Rob, and post-Rob. They met on LiveJournal when they were 15 and have been in each other’s lives ever since. Rob was Ashley’s first real relationship, and Zeba had a front-row view of Ashley’s transformation from an “Accidental Virgin” (Ashley’s column at The Gloss, at the time) into a woman-in-love. “It was beautiful to see her find someone she could be her full self with,” Zeba told me on the phone. “They were a loving couple. You could see it whenever they were together.”

I first spoke with Ashley in 2022 for a story in The Cut about lovers’ tattoos, but I had been a fan of her writing long before. I was heartbroken at the time, recovering from the breakup of an 8-year relationship, and was moved by the subjects’ unwavering belief in love despite the losses they’d suffered. I interviewed Ashley about the tattoo she had gotten of Rob on her arm and appreciated how blunt she was about the horrors of watching someone you love die. Abigail Dunn, a fellow young widow and member of the weekly 10-15 person grief group that Ashley attends, also noticed her direct approach to taboo topics from the first session she attended. “Ashley immediately brought a fresh presence and a level of candidness,” Abigail told me on the phone. “A fearlessness to the way we talked about things.” Abigail’s husband, Steven, also died of a rare form of cancer in 2022, so they immediately connected about wanting to discuss what it was like to be a caretaker. “She is a really funny person, too,” Abigail added. “I actually find that when we get together, especially in person, we end up laughing most of the time, which you might not expect from two widows. But yeah, we're giggly.”

Ashley is funny and warm and hopeful. She joked about how much of a ham she is for the camera as she welcomed the photographer and me into her home. As we took in her space and small-talked about the Apple watch (once Rob’s) that tracks her sleep and workouts, Ashley was flexibly oscillating between “serving” and candid poses, turning her freckled cheeks and brown eyes toward Meghan’s lens. Ashley knows how to rock a print, and for both stories I’ve worked on with her, she’s worn a whimsical Samantha Pleet get-up, which perfectly projects her affection for fantasy and magic. She watches a lot of local news, loves to dine alone at her favorite local restaurant, Harts, and is often at parties with cool NYC people you’ve probably stalked online.

Zeba told me she sometimes frets that Ashley’s energy and charismatic presentation might be misleading. “If I go on Instagram and see Ashley make a post about being at a show or on a trip, I'm always in the back of my head thinking: She's doing this while in incredible grief. She's doing this while thinking about Rob and wishing Rob was here,” Zeba told me. “We see certain people in our lives who are going through it, but because they seem resilient — especially Black women — It's like, ‘Oh, yeah, she'll be fine.’ Like, she is good on a certain level. Sure. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't still need support and that this still isn't incredibly difficult for her.”

Born November 14, 1990, she grew up as an only child in Los Angeles, California. As a teenager, she spent copious hours on the internet reading fanfiction and blogging on LiveJournal about Harry Potter, crushes, and important high school events like Evan Spiegel’s (yes, Snapchat Evan, the one now married to Miranda Kerr) epic 300-person party. In adulthood, she became a journalist in New York, using her developed blogging muscles on articles in Jezebel, The Gloss, Rookie Magazine, and viral tweets (she currently has 82.3k followers who are quick to engage with her, whether they agree with her takes or not…).

Ashley started Bad Brain, her Substack newsletter, in March of this year. After being in “new media” for nearly a decade, tired of the instability and stress of the industry, she missed traditional blogging. She wanted to rekindle her love of writing, a love which “kind of dissipated” when Rob got sick. Her writing is droll, random, deadpan, poetic, and often makes me cry, but readers won’t just find content about grief. Ashley interviews Girthmasterr — a top Onlyfans performer from Australia — about his “massive dick” after tweeting that it was “quite literally the size of a bottle of wine,” and shares her thoughts on the upcoming election accompanied by expert analysis honed during her years covering politics as a columnist. She muses on weight, friendship, love, motherhood. “Be ready for some grief shit one week and talking about fucked up Harry Potter, fanfiction, smut the next,” she said. “It's like, ‘Do you ball?’" A multi-hyphenate, if you will.

In recent years, there has been a surge of young widow influencers and a proliferation of online communities for widows seeking support, such as @hotyoungwidowsclub, @widowedandyoung, and @spilledmilkmamma, among others. While many of these accounts are much-needed support for grieving individuals, there are certain pages more in line with grief-as-branding-exercise. Ashley sometimes has conflicting feelings about leaning too hard into the label herself. Still, ultimately, she thinks it’s more important to be a resource and pillar of support for her fellow suffering sisters. “This isn't a fun, cute thing that I'm taking on, but it is a part of my identity,” she said. “So it's for me because it's real, but I also think of it as for other widows to find me.”

She’s recently been inundated with good, optimistic-about-the-future type news. Her book deal was announced in June. She’s writing a memoir, “Accidental Virgin,” a project that’s been in the works since 2017, but the scope has changed. Before Rob started chemo in 2019, they froze his sperm so that Ashley would have the option to conceive their child through IVF at some point in the future. A future she’s anxious about but hoping to embark on in the next couple of years. And mostly, she’s been working on accepting the phases as they come, including embracing her anger: “I am mad and upset and bitter about the fact that someone I love had to suffer for months and months. I'm bitter about the fact that I'm 33, and after meeting this person when I was 23, I'm alone now. I'm bitter about the fact that if everything goes well, I might have to raise a child alone. I'm bitter about the fact that my friends can have a lazy afternoon with their partners and boyfriends and that I can't anymore." As Ashley says, fate doesn’t give a fuck.