Hannah Stella's next era

The creator opens up about navigating a personal situation in the public eye

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, by Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.

The TikTok x Substack alliance grows stronger every day. —Kate

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In July, 31-year-old creator Hannah Stella broke a period of TikTok silence to announce she and her husband were separating. This was big news for her over 167,000 followers who, if they were like me, discovered Stella's popular day-in-the-life-of-a-housewife videos but stuck around for her deep dives into history, pop culture breakdowns, product recommendations, and generous advice on everything from dating to personal style. Since the announcement, Stella has tried to balance her personal and candid content while respecting the boundaries of a sensitive and ongoing situation. 

This has come with some growing pains, like the time she coyly dueted a TikTok video posted by a creator her followers believed to be going on dates with Stella’s ex—the interactions are now deleted, and I’m mentioning it here only because it comes up briefly in our conversation. But this period has also come with exciting new ventures, the most significant of which is the creator’s Substack newsletter, Moxie.

The twice-weekly newsletter serves as an outlet for the longer-form thoughts Stella has about life that don’t feel right for a platform as broad and often contextless as TikTok. It’s where she first wrote about her breakup in honest detail, and is where paying subscribers can get even more intimate access into Stella’s thoughts, from what she’s reading to her musings on “outrage addiction.”

I was very grateful that Stella was willing to extend some of that honesty to me. In this conversation for paid subscribers, she and I talk about becoming a public figure online, how she handles being the subject of speculation and Reddit snark threads, and what this new era of Hannah Stella is going to look like.