“The Upper East Side east of Lex [is] a jumble of soulless apartment towers, tenements and more dry cleaners, Duane Reade drugstores, and Citibank branches than the economy could possibly absorb, even in the best of times. Madonna’s house falls on the dowdy side of the dividing line.”

—The Daily Beast, April 22, 2009

I, however, was giddy. It was Madonna! Madonna was coming!

I had to go check out her new digs. I made plans to go see the place the very first Saturday after I heard the news. Pictures of the interior posted online showed opulent accoutrements: chandeliers, Oriental rugs, staircases with pristine carved banisters. Perfect for Her Madgesty. I couldn’t wait to see what the outside looked like. I did some Internet research from my Madonna-adjacent headquarters at 84th and York. The address was plastered all over the newspapers, so it wasn’t hard to find. I jotted the coordinates down on a Post-It note and told my boyfriend about my mission. He gamely agreed to tag along (as if he had a choice).

I shrugged on my khaki trench coat, he his navy-blue windbreaker, and we set off, Post-It in hand, to check out Madonna’s magic kingdom.

We wound through the streets, past plain-looking groups of people wearing North Face fleece and brunching al fresco at cheap bistros on First and Second Avenues. After we had walked a few blocks, we stopped on an unassuming street full of unassuming townhouses.

“That’s it . . . I think,” I said, looking from my Post-It to the address across the way.

We stood, squinting in the afternoon sun at a big brick building four stories high. The plot of residential real estate was palatial by New York standards, but without context, it was just a brown brick box with painted brown wood accents. After all of the newspaper ballyhoo, it was a little underwhelming.

I was fascinated, however, by the two-car garage. I imagined shiny Benzes zipping in and out of there, her then-boyfriend Jesus Luz and her children inside the house, playing board games on one of those Oriental rugs, a piano tinkling in the background. The idea of Madonna setting up shop here—even if she were to turn the living room into a giant black-onyx disco, à la Confessions on a Dance Floor—felt cozy and familial.

My boyfriend and I stared at the place in silence for a few minutes.

“Well,” he said. “Wanna go get brunch?”

When I signed the lease on my Upper East Side apartment, I was in search of a home. Somewhere to hunker down—a private enclave to shut out traffic noise, my roommate’s chore list, and other people’s opinions. If Madonna wants a retreat, a tragically un-hip cocoon where she can be herself without anyone watching, Yorkville has that on lock. Around Thanksgiving 2009, I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn: a place thick with self-described artists and supposed rebels—young, doll-faced hipsters wearing thick smears of red lipstick and torn-up black tights.

But forget any cultural superiority I’m supposed to feel living in Brooklyn; during the time that Madonna and I overlapped on the Upper East Side, my heart swelled with a bit more pride than usual about the neighborhood that I called home. In fact, I hijacked my fair share of conversations to tell people, if they weren’t aware, that Madonna was my neighbor. I loved the area before, but now that she deemed it hers, too, it lent the entire area more legitimacy, as though the rest of the world had discovered how great it was to hang out that close to the East River. And it was great.

Sadly, I never saw Madonna casing out her new joint while I lived in the neighborhood, but I heard she recently put up an iron gate around the place to keep out peeping toms and the paparazzi. So much for mingling with the little people. Still, when I think back on my gem of a place on the Upper East Side, I’ll always think of Madonna—and the fact that she followed in my footsteps. Literally.

Conversations I Will Never Have With Madonna

Kate Harding

“SO, I SAID I’d write an essay about Madonna,” I tell my friend Anna, an editor who used to work at glossy magazines and celebrity weeklies, and thus knows from Her Madgesty.

“What’s your angle?”

“I don’t know yet. I was thinking of doing something about her ability to bounce back from failure-—”

“Reinvention, etcetera, etcetera,” Anna interjects, sounding relieved that she’s not the one who has to tell me, “Thanks, but we’ve already got something similar.”

“No, I know everyone in the world has written about her reinventing herself. I’m talking about maintaining your ambition and self-confidence in the wake of abject fucking failure. Like, Shanghai Surprise–level failure.”

Anna laughs. “I forgot about Shanghai Surprise.”

“Everyone has! That’s my point! But I don’t know—I feel like I have about two paragraphs’ worth of material on that subject, and then I’m back to not knowing what to say. Because my dirty little secret is, I just don’t have strong feelings about Madonna, one way or another.”

“There’s your angle,” says Anna. “That’s one I’ve actually never seen before.”

As a thirty-six-year-old feminist, I’ve come to feel the same way about Madonna as I do about porn. To wit, I get why some feminists will argue in favor of it, and I get why others insist it’s degrading to women. I get that it’s had a profound impact on our cultural expectations for women’s behavior and appearance. I get that its enduring popularity across lines of class, race, and sexuality makes it a rich topic, worthy of serious discussion—and I get that it’s really pretty weird for someone who writes about female oppression and empowerment to have no strong opinions on the subject.

And still, it’s just sort of . . . not my issue.

I’ve found that most people will accept that dodge when it comes to discussing porn; when it comes to Madonna, though, folks want answers. How is it even possible to be neutral about one of the most influential and provocative women of the last three decades?

I don’t know. Shrug.

In the interest of writing something more insightful, I visited Madonna’s official website, looking for anything that might inspire passionate engagement, or even reignite the sincere appreciation I had for Ms. Ciccone circa 1986, when “Where’s the Party?” was my favorite hairbrush-in-front-of-the-mirror jam. (Sure, I was eleven at the time, and my version of “losing control” was knocking back a Jolt cola and eating gummy bears until my stomach hurt, but when I sang “If you show me how/I’m ready now!” you’d better believe I meant it.)

Do you know what, out of all the elements of Madonna.com—photos and videos that once scandalized a nation, now-classic pop songs, a dissertation’s worth of religious imagery, etcetera—actually caused me to gasp?

“Children’s books! She writes best-fucking-selling children’s books!” I holler angrily at my friend Gigi, who also happens to be my favorite local bartender and, in both capacities, often helps me work through writer’s block.

“Everybody writes children’s books now,” says Gigi. “Jamie Lee Curtis, Katie Couric, Julianne Moore, Kelly Ripa, I think. They have a kid, and suddenly they’re qualified to be authors.”

And there it is, the root source of my uncharacteristically strong feelings about something Madonna’s done: She’s encroaching on my territory! I was fine when her umpteen self-reinventions only involved pursuits I have no real interest in, like acting and Jewish mysticism and going to the gym. But writing? I’ve spent the last twenty years learning how to be a writer, and all I’ve really got to show for it is one cowritten book and a handful of mostly defunct blogs. Madonna has written more than a dozen children’s books in her spare time—like, as a hobby. I can’t even finish crocheting a baby hat.

Gigi brings me another drink before I can ask for it.

“Did you see Lady Gaga at the Grammys?” asks my hairdresser, Corinne, as she, in her words, “restores my natural blonde.”

“Naw,” I say. “I usually just look at all the dresses online the next day.” Also, I really hate making small talk into a mirror with a semi-stranger who’s touching my head. But, like having a genuine interest in awards shows and claiming with an exaggerated wink that I don’t color my hair, it’s expected of a woman my age.

“You’ve got to watch it on YouTube,” Corinne says, stabbing her paintbrush toward my reflection for emphasis. “She was exactly like Madonna from the high-ponytail-and-cone-bra era! It was unbelievable.”

“Yeah, I keep hearing that the new song is a total Madonna rip-off.”

It’s true that I keep hearing it, but I don’t actually believe it. I suppose I might have an easier time criticizing Lady Gaga for being derivative to the brink of copyright violation if everyone could agree on which song she supposedly plagiarized for “Born This Way.” But in addition to “Express Yourself ” (the most common answer), I’ve heard “Vogue,” “Ray of Light,” “Like a Prayer,” and “Deeper and Deeper” mentioned—plus TLC’s “Waterfalls,” for that matter. Let me just throw a crazy idea out here: It’s possible that Madonna songs are not quite as distinctive as her most devoted fans seem to believe they are, yeah? Who’s with me?

As it is, I’m of the opinion that “Born This Way” does sound something like the Platonic ideal of a Madonna song, but not like an obvious retread of any particular one.

I mean, I don’t know. Shrug.

“But you know what?” says Corinne. “They asked Madonna about it the next day, and she said it was all done with her blessing, and she thinks Lady Gaga is great.”

“Well, that was gracious of her,” I say.

What the fuck else was she going to say? I think.

This, how The Queen of Pop actually feels about an heiress apparent to her throne—one with a stronger voice and even more pronounced flair for the outrageous, no less—is something that interests me. So naturally, I’ll never find out. Madonna is nothing if not a smart businesswoman, and the smart business move for a living legend is to humbly accept credit for a modest influence on your young successor and gratefully characterize any imitation as homage—even if “humble” and “grateful” belong in air quotes, and everyone knows it.

If I could talk to Madonna off the record—and if I were the kind of person to whom she’d tell the truth—I’d like to ask her about that. I would also ask:

• Does it kill you that Sean Penn is this big Oscar-winning star and director now, and everyone’s pretty much forgotten about him hitting you with a baseball bat?

• Honey, what is going on with your face? Is it reversible?

• Would you have wanted kids if you couldn’t afford round-the-clock nannies?

• Let’s be real: A ghostwriter does the children’s books, right?

• Will you buy me a house?

Madonna probably wouldn’t like me very much.

But those are the kinds of conversations that might make me like her—or at least hate her enough to write a witty anti-Madonna screed in half the time it’s taken me to get this far. I think I’d find her interesting as a person, but that’s exactly how I’ll never know her. And as a celebrity—i.e., a persona developed specifically to disguise everything human about her—she just doesn’t turn my crank. I don’t want to be her (I can’t sing, I’m terrible with children, and sacrificing the quiet comforts of anonymity so completely would be my worst nightmare), or fuck her (I’m straight), but neither do I want to destroy her. And aren’t those the basic options, when it comes to super-mega-giganto-stars?

What does it mean when we say we “love” or “hate” celebrities we’ve never met and never will? Either we identify so strongly with them that we imagine our own scarred and blemished skin glistening with reflected glory, or we decide that their very existence is such an assault on our values, the entire world would be improved by their absence. And the pedestal of superstardom is held precariously aloft by those two pillars; being neither “loved” nor “hated” is what drops one into the nobody-space between them. Madonna’s career has survived nearly thirty years not just because she’s a beautiful, ambitious woman with a knack for creating absurdly catchy pop songs, but because she infuriated Christians with her blasphemy and atheists with her woo; conservatives with her out-of-wedlock firstborn and progressives with her sketchy transnational adoptions; homophobes with her embrace of the gay community and the gay community with her embrace of reportedly homophobic Guy Ritchie. Etcetera, etcetera. The lady has a real talent for pissing people off.

And still, my envy of her publishing career notwithstanding, I don’t hate her. Nor do I love her. The best explanation I can muster for my immunity to her provocations is that their cumulative effect reinforces how little I actually know about a woman who’s been a regular presence at the periphery of my life since I was eight years old. One side effect of frequent reinvention, after all, is that the original model grows increasingly unrecognizable relative to the current one. Perhaps that was Madonna’s goal all along, to erase any stray remnants of her genuine self that her public—loyal fans, passionate enemies, terrifying stalkers, and flattering admirers alike—might grab onto and greedily claim for their own.

I mean, I don’t know. Shrug.