This week, I’ve been hungrily flicking through Crunch: An Ode to Crisps by food editor, Natalie Whittle. I spend a lot of time thinking about crisps, ranking crisps, mourning discontinued crisps (wotsit wafflers, never forgotten.) My dreams are filled with salt and vinegar Discos and beef Hula Hoops and flamin’ hot Monster Munch and prawn cocktail Wotsits and crispy bacon Frazzles. A dog is not just for Christmas and grab bags are not for multiple people.
Why does Britain do crisps so much better than everyone else? I’m tittering writing that, knowing that plenty of people will be spluttering with disagreement. But my taste in crisps runs trashy - I’d take a Space Raider over a truffle Torres any day - and no-one does trashy crisps better than us. When we were in France this summer, my friends were in raptures over the french fry crisps and the bacon and blue cheese ones and I found them so elegant and regular shaped. Don’t even get me STARTED on the crisps in the States and those giant bags of Lays.
Back to the book. From the invention of the crisp, a subject of fierce debate - was it William Kitchiner in 1817, “the game chip” in the early 1900s, or the “Saratoga chip”, named for the swanky resort town, Saratoga Springs, that it appeared on the menus of? - right up to the crisp innovators of today, this book is full of tasty morsels, such as the origin of ‘the snack’ (“cities expanded, suburbs sprouted and office buildings filled with workers from the professional classes, who had set their watches by increasingly busy railway timetables”) and the (un)official British colour-coding system for crisps, where blue is cheese and onion and green is salt and vinegar and which Walkers has always - contentiously and confusingly - flown in the face of. There’s even a section on the Walkers website, where they state somewhat defensively: “We’ve no plans to change these designs, as they’re signature to our brand”.
A great present for the snacky gourmand.
‘Where is all the sad boy literature?’ by Katie Tobin for Esquire, is so timely and well-observed. One of the much reported publishing trends of the last few years in emerging literary fiction is the ‘sad girl’: young-ish, laconic, hates her job, low-key (or sometimes major-key) depressed, has bad and often abusive sex. (The authors usually cited here are Sally Rooney, Halle Butler, Melissa Broder and Otessa Moshfegh.) That’s not to say these books aren’t good. They’re usually pretty good! But where, asks Tobin, are all the sad boys?
“The male equivalent of My Year of Rest and Relaxation’s droll narrator? The modern-day Holden Caulfields? As far as the Internet is largely concerned, there aren’t any. Or at least very few of them receive the same hype as books by and about women. Perhaps it’s because there’s a certain stigma surrounding male vulnerability, but in contemporary fiction, the subject is wildly overlooked.”
Tobin notes that while there are plenty of recent, acclaimed books on young, queer men - she nods to Young Mungo, Call Me By Your Name, Memorial and Box Hill; I’d add in Rainbow Milk, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Martyr - there are hardly any by straight young men. (Fuccboi, which I haven’t yet read, is the only one I can think of - and if we go a little further back, Knausgaard.) It wasn’t so long ago that straight, almost always white male voices monopolised literary fiction: Roth, Updike, Self, Amis, Murakami, Foster Wallace and so on. But where is the new generation? An absence is as harmful as a monopoly.
“The epidemic of male suicide speaks volumes of a culture that frames masculinity as unyielding and immune to vulnerability. Fiction can offer a useful lens into that headspace, as an avenue by which we understand the lived experiences of others.”
Into the void, says editor Jamie Cameron, rushes the non-fiction content of Andrew Tate, Stephen Bartlett, Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk. Notes Tobin, perceptively:
“That’s where the big problem is, I think, in that there’s no mainstream literary framework for masculinity to exist outside of this brand of aggressive neoliberalism.”
But what if ‘sad girl’ literature doesn’t really exist?
In an equally prescient piece for The Guardian - not a riposte to Tobin (it was published before) - Phoebe Stucks argues that it is not a credible genre.
“Describing Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts as sad would be like describing American Psycho as sad. When I read Natasha Brown’s Assembly, I don’t find sadness. I find glittering, righteous anger. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist’s detached register carries anger and grief. Indeed, a lot of what we’re identifying vaguely as “sadness”, is rage.”
Stucks continues:
“Perhaps we aren’t able to identify more complex emotions, in particular those that are unpleasant, like anger, in these novels, because of our increasingly infantilised view of women authors. Everywhere we look, women are being en-cutened, via “girl dinners” (meals, but smaller), “hot girl walks” (walks), “girl math” (inaccurate calculations). What seems to have begun as a self-deprecating in-joke has risen in popularity alongside frightening and reactionary ideas about women’s roles online (the surging popularity of tradwife content for example)…. If things described as “girl” are cuter, smaller, sillier, then what does that mean a “girl novel” is? A novel, but not as important?”
En-cutened is a great way to put it.
So much food for thought in both pieces.
I love celebrity interviews from the 90s, and a celebrity reviewing an interview they did in the 90s feels too good to be true. This week in Interview magazine, Demi Moore annotates her 1996 cover interview for the same magazine. (You following? The title of this magazine never fails to confuse things.)
The context: Ghost came out in 1990 and was fantastically successful, catapulting Moore into stardom. In 1996, Striptease was released, with Moore playing an exotic dancer, a role for which she was paid the most in Hollywood history ($12.5million). The film bombed and Moore was cruelly branded “box office poison”.
Now, I know it was the 90s and misogyny reigned supreme, and I’m all for journalistic integrity, but the tone of these questions! I annoyingly can’t find the piece in full, but the excerpts offer enough: “You are not, and certainly have never been, a critics darling” he begins one question. “Who’s not getting the point here?” he asks, in another, somehow managing to sound both spiteful and bored at the same time.
I really admire Moore for her cordiality. Celebrities have walked out of interviews for much less. I actually wish she’d gotten angrier - both then, and now.
I almost didn’t go and see this, as it’s had such meh reviews - and I’m so glad I did, because it features some really powerful character studies.