Under the paywall: prestige telly for frazzled minds; the Nigerian scammers known as the Yahoo Boys; the evolution of loneliness over the last decade; an interview with a best-selling author who wrote 7 novels before she was published; a beautiful piece of personal writing (will there ever be an edition of Bits without a beautiful piece of personal writing? Not on my watch); and the terrifying world of clipping farms.

Quick hits:

• More things we’ve been getting wrong about cortisol, truly the hormone of 2026 (sayonara dopamine, you had a good run).

• If Carlsberg made lint rollers.

• I lie awake at night thinking about the couples who live on cruise ships. There are so many of them.

• Tenderhearted by this quote from sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who had triplets (c/o Laura Freeman):

  “I am so deeply happy about the babies & want them with me all the time but I am also so deeply unhappy about not working.”

• Props to Rosamund Pike who paused her performance in Inter Alia to ask someone in the audience to stop using their phone as it '“breaks the bond”. (She didn’t single them out.) We have somehow normalised the engagement of personal correspondence at the expense of communal peace and/ or entertainment. Don’t even get me started on the people on the tube who take calls on speakerphone. I did not subscribe to your podcast!

• RT Sathnam Sanghera:

  

I went to Tracey Emin: A Second Life at the Tate Modern on Saturday (as recommended in Sophie Heawood’s Bits) and I was utterly captivated, particularly watching her 1996 short film, How It Feels. The exhibition, which brings together more of her works than ever before, is incredibly visceral: her blankets (she calls them blankets) about sexual assault and consent, and 2024’s painting, You Keep Fucking Me, not to mention all the self-portraits. (The nude polaroids of her in her studio, with that adorable little bob, I just loved them, she looks so gorgeous and creative and free.)

It’s about bodies and sex and assault and reproductive rights. The way she explores her abortion and her inability to paint for five years afterwards - it all felt simultaneously vulnerable and hardcore. There’s this sort of collective feminist catharsis to it - I’m not saying it was cathartic to make, I don’t think art is always cathartic, particularly ‘confessional’ art, but I felt washed clean by it.

I felt torn about seeing kids there. Emin’s work is complex and raw - if it was a film, it would be rated 18. I’m all for bringing children into adult cultural spaces, but seeing a small boy skip through the harrowing, evocative photography of Emin’s stoma after her colon cancer, as all these women moved through the passage with tender portent, as if we could feel the psychic weight of her stoma bag through her art, felt a bit weird. I can’t work out if this is terribly regressive and restrictive of me. If you took your kid and it was a positive experience for you and them, lmk!

I had the honour of interviewing Malala Yousafzai last Wednesday for How to Academy about her second memoir, Finding My Way. The book is so much more personal than I was expecting, a sweet ode to female friendship and a coming-of-age story. She writes about trying to have the ultimate student experience at Oxford (studying PPE, no less), while being financially responsible for most of her extended family both in the UK and Pakistan and heading up Malala Fund.

“People had been watching me my entire life, making sure I followed the rules, obeyed orders, stuck to the script. Since arriving at Oxford, I felt high on independence. Every choice, even the bad ones, belonged to me.”

She’s very candid in the book about how difficult it was to navigate her parents expectations: her mother (desperately homesick those first few years in Birmingham, unable to speak English and longing to return to the Swat Valley) was terrified about anything Yousafzai did that might make people talk back home, from choosing not to wear a salwar kameez at university, to refusing an arranged marriage, while her tutor had to send her father - “who treated our house like an art museum and me like the signature piece in the collection” - a letter to ask him to stop booking his daughter on paid gigs during term time, or Yousafzai would fail her degree.

Yousafzai writes about the social media abuse and death threats she receives daily, having to have Met police security accompany her everywhere she goes, weighing up whether to get married (having always witnessed it as the antithesis to education and freedom), navigating a diagnosis of PTSD (there isn’t a word for ‘anxiety’ in Pashto) and her devastation when the Taliban captured Afghanistan in 2021 and not one male leader - who’d all been dead keen for photo opps with her - would pick up the phone to help (rivetingly, or not so rivetingly, the female leaders did.)

At almost 29 years old - she was 15 when she was shot by the Taliban - she spoke thoughtfully and warmly about the woman and activist she has become, particularly when talking about the school for 700 girls she has managed to build on the rocky terrain where she grew up - something nobody ever thought was possible.

I was so pleased to be able to see Les Liaisons Dangereuses at The National, as it was written by my first ever boss, Christopher Hampton. When I first moved to London after university, I was desperate to work in journalism, but I couldn’t get an internship, and so I worked a year’s maternity cover as a PA to a screenwriter. I was a shit PA. I’m a very good touch typist (still am, hire me) but I was always forgetting my keys and I impounded poor kind Christopher’s car three times. Yes, three. Hire me!

Read more

I’m a forever fan of short stories, but they are particularly good for agitated minds. They are also famously hard to sell, which surprises me now more than ever, when we are told ad infinitum that our attention spans are shot to shit. (I only half believe this, btw. I think it’s habitual, rather than a permanent Great Human Rewiring.) For the same reason, I’m surprised there isn’t more of a yen for short films. (I adore short films.)

First up, Brawler. Steel yourself for Brawler. These tense, tender stories will sock you in the throat. The first one I finished with my mouth agape, like a stunned fish. Lauren Groff is a magnificent writer - I’m due a Fates and Furies re-read, and I must try Matrix now I’m a little more receptive to hist-fic - and this collection is brutal and poetic.

A teenage swimmer and petty thief cares for her germ-phobic mother, who lies dying on the sofa, too terrified to eat. (“Her mother drank nothing but vodka now; it killed the germs, she said.”) A young woman chooses university over small-town life, leaving her adoring mentally disabled brother in a facility. (“Joanie, whom he blinked at, trying to understand, turned her own face from him and began to walk away, fast and did not look back.”)

A tsunami swallows a woman’s husband and child, while on holiday. From the waves, she claims an orphaned child as her own - and returns to work on Monday, telling no-one what has happened. (“The edges of the second self were becoming vague and one day it would vanish altogether.”) A mother of young children flees her violent husband, only for her tormentor to catch up with her at the last moment. (“Always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind… She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind.”)

Brawler also has one of the most lyrical, expansive descriptions of death I’ve ever read:

“A slippage, a slickness, and even though it wasn’t taking place within her own body, she could see the slow and uncontrollable dilation downward and outward, into a vast sun-bright plain full of golden grasses swaying as though brushed by a great hand, and a horizon that didn’t stop in the vagueness that came at the end of sight, but pressed on into the palest and most fragmented of views.”

Sharp, unsentimental, glittering with violence and beauty, these timeless stories might be short - but they will stay with you far longer than most novels.

I didn’t realise that Jess Gibson was Margaret Atwood’s daughter until after I finished her debut short story collection, The Good Eye, and I’m glad of it. It would have inevitably coloured my reading of it. Although now I’ve told you, you will read it through the Atwood lens. (Sorry.) Reflecting on the stories, I can see a filial thread: they are peculiar and sly, with a sense of the uncanny.

The premise of The Good Eye is a persuasive one: that we all have a good eye and a bad eye. Examining something from a new angle can render it radically different: the beautiful becomes disgusting; the poetic is rendered banal. Or, as the blurb puts it (sometimes a blurb knows a book better than anyone) “the exalted disgraced, the genius an imposter”.

The stories aren’t a million miles away from Brawler: they’re surprising and unsentimental, but they’re also deliciously perverse. In ‘Pest Control’, the first story and my favourite in the collection, a psychic gets her revenge on a beautiful older woman she’s had a grudge against, since the woman dated her ex-boyfriend, an exorcist. (This is hard to describe, possibly to sell, but makes sense when you read it.)

“Even then '[Caroline] knew enough to spot a charlatan. She was a fucking psychic, after all. Oddly, it didn’t matter. The same slick charm that he turned on with clients made Caroline melt… It must have been some kind of turn-on for him: she was fresh out of college and still looked sixteen. Did you do your homework, young lady? Oh yes, teacher.”

Her writing reminds me a little of Jennette McCurdy - dry as a bone, vulgar, thrillingly well observed, sometimes disgusting, like the debonair man whose abscess bursts in his mouth. This is a perfect example of Gibson’s conceit: he’s suave on the outside (good eye), but rotting inside (bad eye).

There’s a foundation of mysticism to the collection - a clairvoyant who designs a house of glass for his wife and her girlfriend, while recuperating at some weird wellness lodge in a bygone era. Another woman who poisons her vile boyfriend after he demands her to cook a dinner party. In Italy, a Ripley-esque con artist befriends a rich older woman, but who is in control?

A deliciously satisfying collection which never quite dots the i’s - the discombobulation being key to The Good Eye’s appeal.

The last collection turns its eye outwards, to an expansive imagining of climate disaster. Juhea Kim is an advocate for wildlife conservation and her first short story collection (she’s previously published two novels) puts ecological disaster at the heart of most, but not all, of the stories: a biodome in near-future Seoul; an island made of landfill which tourists visit on day trips; a bio ark floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

In ‘Bio Ark’, the Earth has been abandoned and the only living humans have been on the Ark for almost 20,000 days. This is not a temporary living situation, many of the Ark’s residents were born on board. The Ark is as futuristic as you can imagine: there’s an Orgy Dome and a Fertility Temple; reading is considered too depressing; everyone is pansexual; the Ark’s CEO is the kind of Dorian Gray longevity bro that Bryan Johnson dreams of - no-one looks over the age of 25. There is nought to do on the Ark but work on your physical hotness and shag. It’s a mad, fun, nihilistic story.

In ‘Color of the New World’ [the book uses American spelling and so I shall too] the world is still going to hell in a handbasket, but we haven’t quite got there yet. California has “burned to a crisp” and Berlin is as hot as Baghdad. A painter meets an entrepreneur in the South of France who invents new colours, to cut through “the perpetual disorientation” of the new world. The result is ‘Knip’: a “blithe, seductive” colour that will unlock human consciousness.

“Leo is no longer smiling his concealing smile. His impatience shows. He has gambled years of his life to this sui generis endeavor; and the moment he shows anyone some animals in cages—a very nice plate-glass enclosure, by the way—they accuse him of barbarity. But what he is doing is far more humane than creating a single hamburger patty. This painter, with her penchant for deadly pigment, seemed to understand the trade-off between pain and beauty—that everything sublime has a price. He had found that sexy, along with her gameness. No he thinks she just sounds like an American. ‘This is consciousness itself,’ he says. ‘Don’t you understand?’”

Kim is an ambitious and relentlessly curious writer and I admire her scope. The stories overflow with ideas - they are sprawling, somehow fun in their level of total disaster. Some don’t quite work, which is to be expected in a collection this ambitious. ‘Biodome’ felt similar to Bio Ark, while others like ‘Notting Hill’ - where an irritating American moves to West London to live her best romcom life - lack impact when compared with the apocalyptic vision of the others.

Kim is strongest when she goes big on the disaster (I would have loved a whole collection around near-future Seoul: a dome, an ark, an island, etc.) When she imagines the most surreal, devastating planet we could live in. Not a reassuring premise - but then none of these collections are reassuring. Boy, are they compelling though. Snapshots of another world: rotating and rotting and birthing itself anew.

Under the paywall: a fantastic weekly podcast to add to your audio line-up; 3 intensely moving interviews about living with locked-in syndrome; a brilliant conversation on sex, bodies, fame and motherhood; the Sheinification of sustainable fashion; a gorgeous piece on grief and clothes; the biggest reader I know shares her top 5 reads of 2026 so far; and is Strangers the new Salt Path?

Quick hits:

• The Observer mag interviewed me about my perfect fantasy hour, my theory of making time for the things you want to want to do and why I’d be scared to live till 100.

• Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorised Musical Parody hits Edinburgh Fringe this August. This is such a smart idea. Please can someone report back! The last parody I went to was Jerry Springer: The Opera when I was 15 - The Diaper Man will haunt me forever.

• Why you might feel drenched in cortisol, but you probably aren’t (via Business Insider).

• The Guardian ranked Jilly Cooper’s bonkbusters. I’d switch Tackle! for Pandora and replace Jump! with Score! (so many excl points) because I think her pre-2010 novels are best - but it’s a good starting list for Cooper novices.

• Martha’s translated summer reading list is a generous, transportive guide for those wanting to read outside the box.

The best thing I read last week was Ann Patchett on her three fathers - a 2020 essay for The New Yorker (later published in These Precious Days) which passed me by until Johanna Thomas-Corr flagged it in an interview with the author. “My problems were never ones of scarcity” writes Patchett, of her family’s appetite for marriage - she and her sister married twice, her mother three times. “I suffered from abundance, too much and too many. There are worse problems to have.”

Her birth father never wanted her to be a writer, while her first step-father was desperate to be one himself - he wrote fifty terrible novels in his spare time that he would Fedex to her overnight. “This would be child abuse" says Patchett to her husband, “except I'm fifty-two.” Her second step-father - her mother’s final husband - is the most at peace. I aspire to be like this:

“When he read one of my books or came to a reading, he would give me a hug afterward and say, “Aren’t you a wonder,” which was also what he said when I picked up Italian food for dinner or helped clean out the garage. I heard him say it to his children and to his grandchildren and to my mother. “Aren’t you a wonder.” It was a statement, not a question, and, as many times as he said it, it never sounded like a stock phrase. It was as if he saw us separately, equally, and found the wonder in each of us… If he had any gaping holes in his life, I was never, for an instant, made to feel that they were mine to fill.”

It is droll, sharp, clean as a bone - with a wonderful accompanying photo of her with all three fathers. She whistles through what each man had to offer, how he shaped her life, how he exited it - and it has the bite I sometimes find lacking in a Patchett novel (or at least, Tom Lake.)

I was thoroughly entertained by Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s piece in The Observer mag on the importance of a name. He meets a group (which some former members call a cult) founded in the 1930s, the Kabalarians, who are paid to help people change, or choose, a name. For £100, they suggest that Denizet-Lewis - whose name they associate with “tragedy and losses” and “nervous disorders” - changes his name to Epifani, Angilberht, Fricor, Valmyre, Medias or Phidolin, amongst others, and his surname to Sartre, Gonsoulin or Demelville. What Angilberht Sartre has that Benoit Denizet-Lewis does not, I can’t fathom.

“Sigmund Freud wrote that a person’s name, was ‘perhaps part of his psyche’.”

Denizet-Lewis also explores the Dorian Grey effect (when people tweak their personalities to match their name), the symbolic extinction of a deadname, the names most commonly seen as lucky (Katie, Jack and Lucy), the names with sex appeal (Sophie and Ryan) and the “two-pronged identity exercise” of naming your child.

As someone with an unusual name (I once found a list that my father had written when my mother was pregnant; it included ‘Persephone’, so I think, despite the decades of creepy jokes about my box, I got off lightly) I love reading about names. Denizet-Lewis’s piece is tied to his his new non-fiction book, on our obsession with self-transformation - I bought it as soon as I finished the piece.

I can’t remember the last time three friends recommended the same TV show to me in the same week, let alone one as mediocre as Two Weeks in August. (Meow.) Leila Farzad and Hugh Skinner are genuises, and Jessica Raine is brilliant in this, particularly, but it was so bloated! It could done in 4 eps what it did in 8.

There were some deliciously snitty bits of dialogue, and on occasions it is both witty and moving (Skinner plays a gay man terrified of commitment, while Farzad is a glamorous, single woman who has built her chosen family to avoid the vulnerability of falling in love) but it felt like it didn’t know quite what it wanted to be, and there was a little too much grasping for White Lotus. If you want some light relief (also with shades of White Lotus) I recommend Your Friends & Neighbours. It’s excellent prestige drama.

For some distinctly un light relief - the heaviest non relief possible, really - I recommend Richard Gadd’s extraordinary new drama, Half Man. Gadd is the Emmy award-winning mastermind behind Baby Reindeer and I think this is even better. It’s about two Glaswegian “brother[s] from another lover” (their mothers are in a relationship), violent, witty Ruben and brainy, callow Niall. The show plays with time, shuttling between the moment they start living together at teenagers - 17-year-old Ruben, recently released from juvie for biting a man’s nose off, tearing Niall’s carefully blu-tacked posters from the wall in their shared room so they can “bring birds back” - and their 40s, at Niall’s wedding, when the two square off, in a barn, for one final reckoning.

The younger Ruben and Niall are played by Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robinson and the older by Gadd himself and Jamie Bell, who Gadd wrote the part for without knowing if Bell would even be interested. They are both exceptional: Gadd’s Ruben is captivating, all wounded pride, sharp tongue and barely simmering violence, an entire room shrinking as he enters; while Bell’s Niall is palpably anxious - it vibrates through the screen - deeply wounded, sexually confused and full of self-loathing.

But the younger two actors are equally brilliant - Robinson’s wide-eyed, dry-lipped fear and adoration for his older ‘brother’, who Campbell plays with a curled lip and spry walk, flitting between jovial and shockingly violent in a fraction of a second. The scene when Niall loses his virginity with Ruben’s ‘help’ is one of the most uncomfortable scenes I have ever watched on television.

It is a show about masculinity - how could it not be - but it is also a show about mothers and sons (I laughed out loud when I read Niall’s merciless mum described in The New Yorker as “very British” - no, she’s just mean) about nature vs. nurture (despite his multiple stints in jail, Ruben builds himself a much richer life than Niall), about queerness, inter-generational trauma, inherited rage, and the fine line between hate and love. So fine, sometimes, that there isn’t a line at all.

My book agent, Nelle, is the biggest reader I know: she’s on 66 books this year. By the time this is published, it will likely be 69. She keeps a rolling list on her Notes app of what she’s read on her phone, which sounds like an incredibly useful thing to do - whenever I come to do a books round-up on Instagram, I have to prowl round the house looking on various shelves and piles trying to recall when I’ve read.

Over lunch at Andrew Edmunds - welcoming, elegant, tasty, quintessentially olde London - I perused the list, and asked her for her top 5 of the year so far. (This does not mean that they were all published this year.) She told me that this was her “worst nightmare” but reluctantly agreed, caveating by text, later, that “these reads have to have come out and cannot be advanced copies but this is still VERY HARD”.

Here they are. You’re welcome!

Read more

Mallory, a once-celebrated literary darling, is now facing irrelevance. Desperate for a hit after years of writer’s block, she becomes obsessed with Leo, a young queer addict surviving on the margins of London, and quickly convinces herself that his life might be the raw material she needs to resurrect her career. What follows is an uncomfortable novel about exploitation, cultural appetites, shifting vulnerabilities and the strange incentives of contemporary publishing, where suffering becomes content and authenticity is something to be extracted, packaged, and sold.

As ever, we’d LOVE to hear from you in the Comments. For those of you who like to read along, next month we’ll be discussing Honey, by Imani Thompson.

I feel it’s important to state that I’m writing this from the most idyllic scene possible.

It’s a real hotdog or legs situation. Meanwhile, I’m elegantly perspiring in the London heatwave.

Excited to get into this one. Lots of thoughts. First up, I keep seeing it compared to Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface. Do you think that fits?

I can see the comparisons. It’s droll, timely and sarcy - there’s a desperate author, a literary reputation at stake, lots of insider-y pretension (Mallory’s acclaimed novel is called Shallow Embers and someone is overheard at their house party saying, “Virginia Woolf was a fucking mood” which makes me laugh every time I think of it) - but it actually reminded me more of John Boyne’s novel, A Ladder to the Sky - which, if you have not read it, you should, as I think you would love it. That’s about a shameless young guy called Maurice who publishes a story he ripped off from an older celebrated writer, Erich - very Talented Mr Ripley. This story feels like the inversion of that. I preferred it to Yellowface. It felt fresher, more depth. You?

I will indeed be checking out A Ladder to the Sky. I agree to preferring this to Yellowface. There was a lot more depth - both characters were deliciously nuanced and the ending, though a little rushed, was a lot more satisfying. I read it cover to cover on a flight and boy, was it a page-turner. I really felt for the characters! I wanted them to be friends at the end.

Without giving too much away (or do we like giving things away? I vacillate on that), I do like that Leo wasn’t as naive as Mallory thought he was. Vulnerable, yes, and taken advantage of absolutely - but also aware enough to milk a situation. I will say that Mallory is so un-self aware, you can’t really imagine her being a wonderful novelist? Maybe that’s a failure of my imagination. I really liked the masterful character development of her hot husband, Ronan. Seemingly caring, slowly revealed to be coercive. And I loved the way her mother came through for Mallory. There were some really lovely moments of character development.

Agreed! I did not see Ronan coming at all. That was the one part I wished was explored a bit more actually. Mallory’s relationship with her husband, with her mom, and their relationship with each other. I actually found it quite hard to pinpoint what exactly was wrong with Mallory. How much of it was her vs. his influence on her? Can we talk about that a bit? What exactly was their deal?

I don’t think there was anything wrong with Mallory? Except some garden variety narcissistic tendencies, insecurity and writer’s block! I think Ronan was infantilising her, de-fanging her, trying to make her feel like she couldn’t cope, so that she would be entirely dependent on him. It’s like that Victorian short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. This woman is shut in a room with yellow wallpaper and told that she’s mad. It’s just Ronan’s form of coercion - the infantilising of her is a way of controlling her.

I thought so. I also get the feeling that their dynamic is the real cause of her writer’s block.

Oh totally.

I don’t think he ever actually wanted her to succeed, really. It’s clear he saw her as a threat - there could only be one star in the relationship and it had to be him.

It’s definitely the reason she hasn’t written for so long. The New York Times rave review of Shallow Embers that Mallory knows off by heart (lol) praises her “unhinged bravery” - in her desperation to find that bravery she decides to “go gay”, because “gay sells”. It’s mortifying, and shows the depths of her desperation. It’s not that she can’t write about a gay man, obviously people can write about different identities (imho, anyway) it’s how she comes to the story, which of course isn’t even her story, so much as it’s someone else’s life, and she approaches it without nuance, or permission. This bit made me laugh:

“I was - still am - up to date with queer trends and terminology. Of course I watch RuPaul and Queer Eye. Yas, mama! Slay! (I love Slay it’s so fun.)”

Soooo cringe! I usually don’t read books where the protagonist is a defacto “unhinged female character”. I just find it too hard, like I’m being chased by second-hand embarrassment on every page.

Hahaha, that’s such a good way of putting it.

And while I did feel a lot of that here, I also just felt so bad for Mallory - she didn’t have a soul in the whole world. I think the author did a pretty good job of creating that balance - a morally reprehensible character who’s motivations we can actually understand and empathise with. Like, who’s the real villain here?

It changes, I think, and that’s what makes the book interesting. Let’s talk about Leo, the struggling young drug addict and sex worker who Mallory ‘befriends’. He’s the queer anti-hero she’s been looking for. I thought Leo was a really well wrought character.

Every scene with him had me so anxious. It was so hard seeing him bounce from desperate situation to desperate situation. It just got worse. The scene also with his parents was just excruciating, knowing how much it took him to go back there and then to be rejected, but also understanding his parents. Seeing him through their eyes…

I agree, his wretchedness is painted so vividly. He’s in a truly desperate situation - when he gets a text from one of his abusive clients, who forces him to do really depraved things, my heart was in my mouth. But he never loses his irreverence - or, we later find out, is it something darker than irreverence? Mallory of course doesn’t see that, she just sees his surface and assumes his back story is super tragic. But then he reveals that his parents are “dead nice”, that they re-mortgaged their house trying to get him off drugs, that “I make a lot of shit up - to get what I want.” Mallory thinks that Leo is naive, but is it she who has been naive?

Definitely. Mallory has this strange sheltered quality to her. I wish we got more insight into what her life was like after living with her mom but before Ronan. But again maybe it simply goes back to that loss of confidence and ability to think clearly.

She’s someone that needs other people to feel alive, I think. Or maybe that’s unfair - maybe Ronan has just drained her of vivacity and integrity - was she with Ronan when she wrote Shallow Embers, do we know?

I believe that was pre Ronan. I doubt she could have created anything great under his thumb.

True. And maybe she had this really rich life before him. I don’t know if you have read any profiles with the author, but he’s a mental health nurse, who battled addiction in his youth and struggled with his sexuality - which might be why Leo is drawn so vividly. (Interestingly, Silver wrote YA books before he wrote this one.) He notes in an interview with Dazed, that both Mallory and Leo are looking for connection.

“There’s a shared understanding in the patriarchal heteronormative system that we live in where you feel shunned…. The point of the book is that these two people are reaching for connection, and actually, their pain is very similar. Mallory is being manipulated and controlled to uphold [her husband] and his needs and what he wants, and she’s looking for a way out. Leo is trying to come out of his situation, where he feels like the world has been against him because of his sexuality.”

So smart! And you can totally see this come across in the book, which is why I think they could have become friends! I could have sworn that’s the ending we were headed towards, actually.

Can we talk about the fake novel Mallory is writing to keep Ronan off her tail? The Air Between Us is written mostly with AI and thoroughly approved of by Ronan.

Mallory’s disgust for her beard novel really made me laugh. I think the reason Ronan waxes lyrical about it is - reading it every day when he gets home, like he’s checking her homework - is because he knows it’s shit. He knows that it won’t sell and she will remain powerless/ under his thumb and so he encourages her to keep writing it. They’re both playing a game the other doesn’t know about.

I thought that was a bit of cheeky fun. Lots of that in this book.

There is. I really like the way Silver writes about publishing. More and more books are using publishing’s weaknesses as plot point. Mallory’s agent Stan, who she reconnects with when she’s writing Leo’s story, ‘winks’ when someone asks him how he got Mallory ‘half a mill’ and says “it’s all about positioning. And timing.” And honestly, I won’t name names, but there are so many books about sexy, edgy, au courant conversations that I know - I know - have been published not because they are well-written but because they are well-timed. And that is publishing’s weakness. That it can’t just publish a great book by a great writer, there has to be hook.

I really enjoy books that explore the industry behind literature. In our last conversation, we touched a bit on how much of Yesteryear’s success has to do with the timing. It’s fascinating to consider the changing factors that go into a book becoming a hit! I guess that’s why you have some people bemoaning the commercialisation of literature. But is this a new thing, or do we just know more?

I think it’s a bit of both. Marketing has become more transparent and more aggressive because so many more books are being published than even 10 years ago - meaning it’s harder and harder for books to break through - and that’s why so many authors burn out trying to promote their work. In addition, we have a generally higher literacy of what will and won’t get published now. Even the lay reader has an idea idea about things being good timing or good optics, etc, which actually leads to a widespread cynicism that makes me quite sad. I believe in serendipity! Sometimes I wish we knew a little less about how the sausage gets made - in every industry. But then if we did…. we wouldn’t get great books like this, so ;)

That winky face is so Fruit Fly.

Isn’t it.

Under the paywall: a poignant piece on how childhood bullying imprints on your adult self; my latest haul of kids books for 7-12s; parenting as a French person in America; a sweet piece on the grief of adult friendship; the most healthy, helpful and not remotely restrictive cookbook I’ve ever bought; an interview with ‘the TOWIE jihadi’ that I think should be compulsory reading for understanding radicalisation; and yet another child star shares her appalling story.

Quick hits:

• Word of the week from Patrick Radden Keefe, via Louis Theroux’s pod: ensorcelled. Meaning to enchant, bewitch, captivate.

• Three new gizmos enhancing my daily life: a toothpaste squeezer, a cleaning brush for reusable cups and self-sealing toothpaste lids. I give such a good impression of being Type A. Just don’t ask me where my keys are, what my pin number is, or to update my phone.

• Vladimir Nabokov’s letter to his New Yorker editor in 1948 reads like a genteel version of Giles Coren’s furious letter to The Times subs sixty years later:

  

• Steven Bartlett is launching an AI-generated kids show, churning his Diary of a CEO episodes into business learnings for small people. Kids deserve so much better than podslop. Bring back Art Attack! (I can’t understand why no-one has.)

• I did not watch Eurovision this year (it’s viewing figs were paltry, with five countries boycotting) but the winning song, Bulgaria’s Bangaranga, has been living rent-free in my head thanks to my sister. The chorus is dementing and catchy as hell.

The best thing I read last week was Emily Stewart on the death of quiet luxury and the new dawn of gaudy (as embodied by Lauren Sanchez) for Business Insider.

“Tacky is back in a big way. Being loud and unabashed is cultural currency in a culture that prefers signalling vice over virtue. We’re living in a digital Gilded Age where greed is again good, and the only way to prove you’re a winner is to make sure no one can look away.”

Covering Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, the return of the McMansion and why people now want their plastic surgery to be visible (“the point of ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ is that people can tell you have had work done”), Stewart describes it as “the ‘80s, but with internet.” The nickname for this new age? According to Sean Monahan - who predicted and named both ‘normcore’ and ‘vibe shift’ - it’s boom boom. A witty, well-observed, somewhat depressing piece.

The best thing I listened to last week was Foundling, an audio doc series from Tortoise (behind hit podcast, Sweet Bobby) and The Observer (the former now owns the latter). In 1987, a ‘foundling’ (an abandoned baby) was handed into the police in Suffolk, after an 18-year-old nanny, ‘Jennifer’, found it on a verge in a carrier bag.

Journalist and host Lucy Greenwell was 8-years-old at the time, and her and her sisters have always wondered who had left the foundling - Jennifer was the nanny of their closest friends, so the story formed a big part of their childhood lore, in the way those stories do. And so a few years ago, Greenwell contacted the former foundling and now mother of two, Jess, to see if she wanted to find her mother.

What follows is a series of revelations both unsurprising (Jess’s mother was very young and had told no-one she was pregnant) and shocking (several twists that I won’t give away here) - I’m still enraged, as you suspect the host is too, by the lack of accountability regarding one extremely sad turn. Greenwell is an excellent host, navigating emotionally charged waters with eloquence and compassion. Highly recommend.

The best thing I watched last week was Off Campus, a TV adaptation of The Deal, the first in a series of five romance novels by Elle Kennedy. Now when I say best, I mean that I guzzled the whole thing over two insomniatic nights. And while I’m fascinated by the BookTok sports romance to streamer pipeline (specifically ice hockey, which has led to an ice hockey boom in the UK) - indeed fascinated by the rise in sports smut, full-stop - I sort of think there should be a parental control on steamy teenage shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty, Heated Rivalry, Pretty Little Liars, etc. A pop-up that reads, you are too old to watch this.

Because surely there’s something unseemly about 39-year-old me watching 18-year-old Hannah (a gorgeously open-faced Ella Bright who I last saw in, um, Malory Towers) getting her rocks off? Like I’m turning up to a campfire with my cassette player and a DASH Water, bleating “I’m a cool mom!” Surely someone should be stopping me? And yet… here I am.

That aside, I think this show is such positive entertainment for teenagers; I wish something like this had been around when I was younger.

Read more

Here’s an insight into the unwieldy process of assembling this culture round-up (probably why it never drops on the correct day). I don’t get FOMO about parties… but I do about print media!

Under the paywall today: two excellent pod recs for fans of Screen Rot, ICYMI and - dare I say it - The High Low; an ode to the stationary cupboard; how to hone patience in an instantly gratifying world; the stigma of widowhood; a tiny book I’m carrying everywhere (but not reading); and an excellent piece on the flattening of womanhood + some of my thoughts I had reading it.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been busily filming a visual podcast for Disney+, to accompany Season 2 of Rivals, based on Jilly Cooper’s ‘80s bonkbuster, Rivals. You’ll have no doubt read masses about the series by now - I can’t remember the last time I saw a TV series get 5 stars from The Guardian and The Telegraph (who to my great entertainment often work in parallel, loving what the other has loathed, and vice versa) - so I won’t wang on about what an utter delight it is, except to say for anyone unfamiliar, that it is a witty, saucy, camp and tender triumph, so lushly colour-graded compared to the grey-hued tone of 2020s cinema - with, in a smart evolution from the book, a distinctly feminist lens.

There are some exquisite scenes with wives-of-terrible-husbands Katherine Parkinson’s Lizzie and Claire Rushbrook’s Monica, that I will remember in much the same way I recall that deeply affecting scene with Emma Thompson on the bed in Love Actually, listening to Joni Mitchell, before she visibly pulls herself together and briskly brushes away her tears.

I was lucky enough to interview all the heavyweights, like David Tennant, Aidan Turner and Danny Dyer, as well as some of my favourite comic actors (all who gain layers this season) like Rufus Jones, Gary Lamont and Emily Atack, the gorgeous leads, Bella Maclean, Alex Hassell and Nafeesa Williams, and the writers and execs behind the show, including Dominic Treadwell-Collins, Laura Wade and Felicity Blunt (writers are my favourite people of all to interview.) Famously, Treadwell-Collins operated a “no c*nts” casting policy, and look, I can’t say that no-one is without c*nty moments, but I will say that they were an astonishingly fun and filthy bunch to interview (it’s the first time I’ve discussed labias and perineums in an interview) and all incredibly close, thanks to the exceedingly long 10 month shoot.

The drop schedule is slightly erratic, so for clarity: the first 3 episodes dropped on Friday, with one coming every week for 3 more weeks. After the 6 have dropped, there will be a 6 month or so break, before the second half of Season 2 (still being picture locked) drops towards the end of the year. The podcast follows the same format. You can find the podcast on Disney+, or, as they used to do in the old days… you can listen to it on your podcast app. I so hope you enjoy it.

I should really change my bio to “professional Alex Hassell interviewer” because the week after, I interviewed the actor who plays Rupert Campbell-Black for the fourth time, for the cover of The London Standard (formerly The Evening Standard.) I can’t remember the last time an actor spoke to me so thoughtfully and openly. Hassell is an uncommonly honest sort, who has as much interest in seeing others, as he does in being seen.

He’s also the first person I’ve ever interviewed who is, like me, intolerant to onions and garlic (he recommended a seasoning called ‘astefeda’, which I immediately bought off Amazon; in turn, I shared with him the name of my gastro). I was particularly struck by something he said on the reformation of his character. Famously, Cooper created her premier heart-throbas a villain, before falling in love with him herself, and thus redeeming him over the course of her books. Bolstered by 88-year-old Cooper’s insistence that he remained macho, Hassell says he had no interest in nice-washing RCB. upert is generous, charming, and (finally) capable of love, but he is certainly not nice.

“I love people who have foibles and they do things that f*** me off and I do things that f*** them off. That’s what being alive is like.”

I keep thinking about that line - that’s what being alive is like. I love it.

I had such a joyful evening interviewing 3 of the most talented debut novelists of 2026 - Madeline Cash, Stephanie Sy-Quia and Imani Thompson - for the inaugural Selfridges Book Club, curated by Under the Cover Books. Ochuko and I have already waxed lyrical on Lost Lambs (and I will be writing about Honey and A Private Man in my next books round-up) but all 3 novels engrossed me in entirely different ways - Lost Lambs for its dialogue and tender ingenuity, Honey for its sass and intellectualism, and A Private Man for its scholarship and lyricism. The event wasn’t recorded, but here’s a great interview with Imani for Vogue, with Stephanie for Sunday Times Culture, and with Madeline for LARB.

Anna Wiener’s profile of a Californian tween for The New Yorker, is an enchanting, evocative study of an inbetwixt age. My daughter recently turned 8, and I am seeing the first flickerings of tweendom: she rolls her eyes; she calls me bruh; she explains nonsensical memes to me. And yet in many ways, she is still a small child, with her tiny shoulder blades, her love of scented pens, the bunny she hugs at night (a misnomer as it is, in fact, a highland cow). And so I was utterly engrossed in Wiener’s piece about 12-year-old Mira and her friends, growing up in San Fran.

“From Mira I learned… that Taylor Swift spends, like, thirty-five million dollars a year on her cats. I learned that Lucky Charms cereal is, like, seventy-five per cent sugar, bananas are poisonous to monkeys, and you should rinse Popsicles before eating them to avoid losing taste buds. I learned that you can kind of just say “slay” whenever, as filler, that you can address both your girls and your dad as “bro,” and that, at least in Mira’s telling, her whole life doesn’t revolve around her mom, but her mom’s whole life revolves around her. (“As it should be,” Mira said.)”

What felt so surprising - and reassuring - was while there are obvious nods to modernity (bubble tea, streaming platforms, slang like baddie and eats), it feels evergreen: the close physical proximity of pre-teen friendship; the simultaneous dismissal and need for your parents; the intense allegiance with a particular popstar (for me the Spice Girls, for them Sabrina Carpenter.) There’s a particularly compelling moment, when Wiener analyses how spending time with tween girls can make you revert into one: she starts to feel insecure around them, she wonders if they think she is a cool auntie, or a boring oldie. It’s a delicious piece, filled with optimism - maybe, just maybe, the girls are doing alright.

I recently discovered the newsletter, The Argument - this review of tradwife bestseller, Yesteryear, by the letter’s editor Jerusalem Demsas nails some of the niggles I have, but with much more clarity (although overall I enjoyed the book, while Demsas is less effusive.) It’s the smartest critique I’ve read on the book thus far.

“Most tradwives are not suffering from psychotic breaks; they are promoting a new social conservatism compatible with just enough female empowerment to allow them to pursue commercial success but not enough to cast off their central purpose as submissive wives and mothers. But if Natalie is just a crazy woman disconnected from her religious community, then what can she reveal or say about any of this?"

I’ve read 21 of the books in The Guardian’s 100 Best Novels of All Time - which was more than I was anticipating, given the typically esoteric nature of such lists: White Teeth; The Talented Mr Ripley; To The Lighthouse; Mrs Dalloway; Orlando (Woolf is the most decorated author on the list); Half of a Yellow Sun; The Turn of the Screw; Anna Karenina; The Colour Purple; Beloved; The Bluest Eye; Rebecca; Disgrace; Never Let Me Go; Frankenstein; Dracula; Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Jane Eyre; The God of Small Things; and The Great Gatsby.

Quite a few on there I’ve been meaning to read for ages and somehow keep failing to, like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Golden Notebook, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch and Crime and Punishment (kidding on the last one, have no intention, ditto War and Peace.)

What would I have added? Off the top of my head… Any Human Heart and We Need To Talk about Kevin (I can never understand why there’s so little contemporary fiction on these ‘best of’ lists.) WBU?

It’s had pretty mixed reviews (the general consensus being that Season 1, which I have not watched, is much stronger) but I devoured Season 2 of Lee Sung Jin’s dramedy, Beef. Oscar Isaacs plays Josh, a country club manager of 20 years (whose best friends are the people who pay him) and Carey Mulligan his wife, Lindsay, a bored and snobby British interior designer with terrible taste in cushions, clad entirely in Doen, clutching a pet pooch, Burberry (“honestly, they’d have never taken this shit at Soho House”).

The ‘beef’ in question is with two of the country club’s twenty-something employees, Cailee Spaeny’s Ashley and Charles Melton’s Austin, who are deeply and absurdly in love (they end every conversation with an agonisingly sincere “I love you so much”) and desperately broke. As often the case, the second half descends into farce - with a wince-worthy slew of evil Koreans - and Melton’s Austin is Joey-from-Friends levels of dumb (something I always found deeply irritating) but the series has interesting things to say on the precarity of American labour, their shockingly unaffordable healthcare and the manipulation of diversity (Austin is half-Korean only when it becomes useful for Ashley), while Isaacs and Mulligan sing as a husband and wife whose love has curdled into affectionate disgust and who know each other better than anyone else - and not at all.

If you need a fun, smart series to distract you from the slew of terrible true crime docs (don’t even get me started on the mistitled Should I Marry A Murderer) and you’ve already watched Rivals - then this is the badger.

I have two excellent pods to recommend this week, for fans of Screen Rot, ICYMI and - dare I say it - The High Low.

Read more

Since I was a small child, and first took the elephant’s trunk in my hand (how far can I take this metaphor), my life has been shaped by anxiety. It’s why I have always read excessively; books quell my quivering mind. Anxiety is not entirely bad. It can work in tandem with plenty of good qualities: vigilance, attentiveness, care, empathy. But it is a warning system that should be deployed in moderation. No-one wants to be fire-hosed in cortisol just crossing the road.

Journalist India Sturgis has spent the last 6 years writing this non-fiction book, with extraordinary care. I am thrilled that she has allowed me to extract some of the book, along with six of her learnings, exclusively for Books+Bits readers. I hope that those of you that need it, find it a salve. If you did, I’’d love to hear from you in the Comments. Over to India.

Subscribe now

It’s a grey and wet Thursday afternoon in North London when I see it. I’ve dodged sheets of rain to arrive in the waiting room of a psychotherapist, the latest person on whom I’ve rested all hope. I’m alone. A tea station is filled with optimistically coloured packets of tea, all greens and yellows. There’s a bin, empty and fluffed to perfection with a new plastic liner. It’s all awful. I’m awful. I’m out of place. I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t sit down and, if I were to, I worry about leaving a dent in the beautifully plumped sofa. My heart races. Nothing else moves. Nothing is possible.

Things are not going well. I haven’t slept in days. I’ve been trying and failing to ‘get better’ for months, if not years, and am becoming increasingly frightened by what is happening to my mind and body. Nothing so far has worked for any real length of time: not therapy, hypnotherapy, sleeping pills, telling myself how irrational I am being, or changing jobs. On a good day, I believe my husband will divorce me, my nine-month-old baby will be taken away, I will never work again and I have cancer. Standing in the waiting room, frenetically motionless, I look up and see a piece of paper pinned to a cork noticeboard. How do you eat an elephant? The answer to that question is the first thing in as long as I can remember to cut through, showing me a way out that I might actually be capable of.

How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

The saying, an ancient African proverb linked to Desmond Tutu and St Francis of Assisi, among others, was a miniature injection of hope. It was a parting of the clouds. It caused my shoulders to drop for the first time in weeks and something, albeit very small, to recede just an inch. Like all the best things, it’s simple and obvious: our largest, most daunting and impossible challenges are best approached bit by bit. To hear it then was deeply comforting.

To me, anxiety was an elephant in so many ways. It was a gigantic heavy beast on my chest, weighing me down, taking up all space in my life and trampling all over it. It was the elephant in the room, the thing eclipsing all else. How could I go up against something so big, so enveloping and destabilising? This, whatever this was, was bigger than me and no matter how hard I tried to control it, it seemed to be growing. I’d ignored it, got angry with it and tried to out-think it. This showed another way – a stealthier, slower route.

***

The day before my thirty-second birthday, I officially became one of the one in three people who will be affected by an anxiety disorder in their lifetime. A few weeks after seeing the elephant question on the cork noticeboard, I ended up as an emergency inpatient, which, in clinical terms, meant I was deemed a threat to myself. I had been admitted to The Priory in Roehampton, a psychiatric hospital in London, where I would stay for a month as an in-patient and two months as an out patient.

By this point, stress, anxiety and insomnia had percolated, fed off each other and imploded. I was going whole nights awake, in batches, and increasingly losing my grip on reality. I was terrified of not sleeping, something which (cruelly) became self-fulfilling as my nervous system revved into seventh gear, and was having intrusive thought about suicide and self-harm. In the weeks before I was admitted to hospital I had panic attacks quietly and alone at night in an upstairs bedroom so as not to wake my husband or baby.

What happened to me had been about seven years in the making, at least. This wasn’t a product of becoming a new parent, or due to post-natal depression, an instance of trauma or abuse. In some ways, at my worst, I believed that would have been easier. At least that would have been explainable, understandable, reasonable. How did someone who was fortunate and privileged in so many respects, who presented like a ‘normal’, functioning human being, get to such a state of mental disrepair? The word my new psychiatrist diagnosed me with would apparently explain everything: anxiety – a generalised anxiety disorder, to be precise, with chronic insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder and a side order of depression. From that moment, hospitalised and medicated, I gave in. I knew I was ill and was going to have to do something different, because carrying on was impossible.

***

So it was that I began a long and arduous journey back towards myself. It has been a road that has bypassed medication and psychotherapy; cognitive behavioural therapy; learning about anxiety as a clinical condition, how it winds around the mind and body (very helpful); art and drama therapy; neurofeedback; exercise (yoga, walking, running, cold swimming, among others); group therapy and social prescribing. I’ve learned more about breathing and carbon dioxide, and how breath-holding can affect our physiology when looking at screens. I’ve explored slowing down, the brain’s default mode network, how to approach the concept of ‘recovery’ and whether anxiety can ever really be cured. Incidentally, Rollo May, American psychologist and philosopher, who wrote the 1950 book, Meaning of Anxiety, speaks to this last point very well:

“Anxiety cannot be avoided, but it can be reduced. The problem of the management of anxiety is that of reducing anxiety to normal levels, and then to use this normal anxiety as stimulation to increase one’s awareness, vigilance, zest for living.”

At some point in all of this, when coming out of the real doldrums of mental health crisis, it occurred to me that I was in a unique position. Having worked as a journalist for well over a decade, I was well placed to interview world leading experts on anxiety. I’d seen anxiety from within, miserably up close and personal. And, having been in hospital for so long, I now had a number of supremely anxious friends who had fascinating and, ultimately, helpful insights into this horrific mental illness. At any given time, according to recent data by the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2023/24, more than one in ten of us will be affected by an anxiety condition, a figure that makes clinical anxiety more prevalent that diabetes.

Timely support and information about anxiety is incredibly hard to access if you don’t have money, insurance or the right people around you. Currently, there are 1.8 million people on a waiting list for NHS mental health treatment. Even if it was a drop in the ocean, I committed to putting some of what I have learned down on paper - in the hope it would help others with anxiety, or those close to them, as well as continue to help me, which it has. The result has been several years of work speaking to psychiatrists, psychotherapists, counsellors and neuroscientists as well as those from all different walks of life who have experienced severe anxiety, for this book.

In the spirit of its title - and for Books+Bits readers only - here are six of my personal favourite bites of the elephant, gleaned from experts and my own experience. Some are big, some are tiny, all can be useful.

1.) A Thought is Not a Fact

A mental pickaxe that worked hard against my insomnia when it was at its worst, was regularly and quickly challenging the negative automatic thought ‘I am not going to sleep’ with the statement, ‘a thought is not a fact’. You may have heard of this. ‘A thought is not a fact’ is a common cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) tactic and a method of thought-defusing. Despite its seeming obviousness – we all know (if we think about it) that thoughts are not necessarily facts – it has power. When I felt doomed and full of panic about not sleeping, I started to remind myself that this was only a thought and, even if I 100% believed it in the moment, it was still not a fact. The result was, and still is if I need it, minutely calming: a counter argument to the anxious status quo. It helps stop you leaning into such wholly negative spirals.

2.) Breathing

I realise how annoying this subhead is. We all know how to breathe. What I didn’t know was how quickly and dramatically we breathe can affect our physiology, right down to a cellular level, within seconds. A few minutes of low and slow belly breathing can relax you more fundamentally and faster than anything else. No one had told me that it’s the out-breath – not the inhale – that matters more for anxiety because it helps activate the vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in our body, which stretches from our face down to our colon and reaches out to almost every organ in the body on its way – and contains approximately 75% of parasympathetic nerve fibres.

One study by the University of South Carolina divided 20 healthy adults into two groups. One group was instructed to do two sets of 10-minute breathing exercises while the other read a text of their choice for 20 minutes. Saliva was taken from volunteers throughout and tested. The breathing group’s saliva had significantly lower levels of three cytokines – protein molecules that immune cells produce and secrete to communicate with other immune cells – associated with inflammation and stress.

Nowadays, if I feel anxiety flare episodically, I do a minute or two of slow, deep belly breathing (with a slightly longer out-breath) - or, occasionally, seven minutes before bed (ten minutes feels too long for me). For someone with a history of anxiety and catastrophic sleep patterns, this has become a useful tool.

3.) Routine

For some, having a routine and sticking to it can be the difference between putting stabilisers on an anxious brain or letting it freewheel downhill with its eyes closed. A routine sinks you into a predictable pattern of behaviour that is settling in itself. Anxiety loves uncertainty: What do I do next? What if it’s the wrong choice? Will I be safe? What if I do something wrong? What is X happens? A routine, even if small or not always adhered to, provides a counterpoint to uncertainty. It offers structure and comfort and prevents extra decision-making, which can be a balm. A routine allows you to make time for things that actually matter and it helps with sleep. Maintaining a steady rhythm was one thing my psychiatrist recommended in the early days post-hospital: take medication on time and stick to a routine, she advised. It makes sense to keep road bumps to a minimum during times of emotional upheaval or change in other areas of your life.

4.) Medication

While we are getting better at accepting the necessity of medication for stabilising mental health, especially when symptoms are severe, the thought of swallowing a pill that changes how you feel and how your brain actually functions feels unnerving – even for those without anxiety. What if you turn into a numbed-out zombie? What about side-effects? Putting on weight? Addiction? Dependence? What if it doesn’t work? What will your friends or family think?

Requiring drugs to feel normal can feel like failure on some basic human level, which is ludicrous given we take brain-tweaking medication unthinkingly and without stigma for far less: paracetamol, for one, which affects connections in the anterior cingulate cortex, brain areas associated with pain-signalling. Alcohol is another example of a brain altering substance we don’t think twice about.

For many, medication is vital and I can’t imagine how I would have got better without it. I remember being in the office of a psychiatrist being prescribed antidepressants for the first time and her calmly telling me that she wasn’t going to give me anything addictive, or that would cause weight gain or change my personality; it stumped me completely – I assumed all three were non-negotiable.

5.) The Everyday Big Three

Another of the most helpful bits of advice I received is that as a feeling, anxiety has three main day-to-day triggers. These are, in no particular order: hunger, tiredness and substance abuse (alcohol or drugs). When you are running low on fuel, are tired, or are depleted through reaching for artificial highs, your mind and body may be quicker to switch into anxious fight-or-flight state. If you’re in the throes of any of the above, your nervous system knows you are at a lower ebb and a predator would have an easier time with you. The trigger switch for survival mode is more sensitive than usual, which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view but it’s less useful when you’re watching reruns of Friends on the sofa after a late night and your heart explodes out of your chest every time a motorbike backfires. Not everyone is as sensitive, but realising that food, sleep or a hangover can impact nerves and how you feel to such a degree, can be useful.

6.) Saying No

For some, saying ‘no’ is as easy as putting one foot in front of the other – for those, I’d argue, less plagued by stress and anxiety. For the rest of us, articulating those two little letters can feel like nails on a blackboard. Saying yes doesn’t disappoint, cause conflict or tension, and is positive. It makes others happy and gets things done. But saying no is a well-known stress-management tool because it does a number of things: it stops you spending time on things you’d rather not; it is protective; establishes boundaries; increases confidence and the respect of others. Plus, the more we say yes the less we say no and, like a wasted muscle, the more difficult it becomes to use.

I attended one two-hour group therapy class about assertiveness where I had to practise saying ‘no’ in a role-play scenario with a partner, which was as horrific as it sounds. We were told two things: you always have a right to say no (even if it feels like you don’t or that it will come with consequences) and saying no doesn’t mean you are rejecting someone, you are simply refusing their request. There are, it turns out, a few ways you can coach yourself to say no better.

• The straight ‘no’ - ‘No’ is a complete sentence; it doesn’t necessarily require padding out with an apology, explanation or justification. Said alone it’s effective and unambiguous. Are you finished with that sandwich? No.

• The ‘no’ with a reason – A no with a short (emphasis on short) and genuine reason behind why you are saying no. Are you finished with that sandwich? No, I am giving the leftovers to my guinea pig.

• The broken-record ‘no’ – A personal favourite and something I use regularly with children of all ages. Repeat the same ‘no’ alongside the same brief refusal statement as many times as necessary. It doesn’t matter that it never changes. Eventually, the person accepts it or at least accepts that you aren’t going to change your mind. Are you finished with that sandwich? No. (Two minutes later.) Are you finished with that sandwich? No. (Two minutes later.) Are you finished with that sandwich? No. Etc.

• The rain-check ‘no’ – A soft no: a no with the possibility of becoming a yes. Are you finished with that sandwich? No, but circle back in five minutes and I might be.

• The Can-I-Think-About-It-No – Technically, not a no. You are asking for more time or information before giving your answer. Almost always acceptable, unless in a life threatening emergency, and people respect it. Are you finished with that sandwich? Mmmmmm, I’m not sure. Can I have a bit more time with my sandwich to think about it?

***

Today, I am significantly less affected by anxiety. I no longer have GAD, insomnia or depression. But I also know that anxiety is my Achilles heel: something I will always be watchful of returning. As I’ve come to see it, living with an anxiety condition is not an exact science or an easy ride and while dissecting things in the past or worrying about the future can be helpful, the present is the most rewarding place to live.

Mental health is never really about one thing (if only). It is not a Pilates class, probiotics, giving up booze, forgiveness or self-compassion, although all those things may help you. There is no magic silver bullet. More often it is a combination of little things, spread wide and far. An unhurried sea of change. It’s the many little bites taken when you feel well or hungry enough that can help you to feel better, and keep you well.

I had the most blissful time, digging into their recommendations. I am obsessed with Your Friends & Neighbours (and gasping for Frieay’s ep to drop) and have booked tickets to Tracey Emin (Sophie), can’t wait to watch Sentimental Value (Bobby), dig into the Diabolical Lies podcast (Annie), and read The Transit of Venus (David.) I love expanding Books + Bits beyond my own cultural diet - and I’m so grateful to these epic writers for manning the fort.

My list of culture recs from the 5 weeks I’ve been off bits is mad, so I’m going to go in easy, with about a third of it. More on Monday!

Below the paywall: the importance of reading beyond your years as a young person; things I ate, saw and marvelled at in Paris; a book and a podcast de-mystifying death (and the concept of ‘a good death’); some recent books, crafts, family movies and a museum I’ve loved doing/visiting with my kids; and why there are no new ideas (and that’s a good thing.)

Quick hits:

• Fun fact from Lettsom Gardens: until 1752, the year started on the 25th March in the UK. The Calendar Act of 1750 reset it to January 1st. I can’t stop thinking about what carnage would ensue, if that happened now.

• Not so fun fact from James Marriott: Keats was just 25 when he died, after an unimaginably horrible life. What magical odes might he have written, if he’d lived to 50?

• Enriching fact that reminded me of the importance of the good news movement: as of April this year, 29-year-old engineer Harry Blakiston has fixed 74,000 windows in Ukraine with his shatterproof sheets.

• App I am newly obsessed with (and I hate apps): Yuka, c/o my friend, Sarah. Use it to scan foodstuffs and beauty products and it will tell you where something is excellent, good, bad, etc. So many surprises await you! Thrilled that my beloved True Dates are as angelic as they look.

• Hog Fathering’s extremely time-consuming wellness diet (as seen in GQ) is living rent-free in my head. I wish it would leave.

My friend Monica was talking to me about the ‘French Kevin thing’ the other weekend, whereupon I stopped her with a - sorry, what ‘French Kevin’ thing? (the pronunciation, of course, is the rather elegant Kevuh) - whereupon she directed me to a 2022 piece for The New Yorker by Lauren Collins about the spate of Kevins born in France in the ‘90s. It turns out that from 1989 to 1994, Kevin was the most popular boy’s name in France (peaking in 1991) but now it has fallen out of favour, and the Kevins are being treated like Karens. It’s a very fun piece with, as per all Lauren Collins pieces, some riveting French history.

“Their name was once extremely popular in France but has come to suffer a bad reputation, conjuring, for its detractors, as Fafournoux once explained, “car-tuning fans, reality TV, tracksuits—clichés of the beauf, preconceptions that hurt. (Beauf, short for beau-frère, or “brother-in-law,” signifies “an uncultivated, vulgar, narrow-minded and phallocratic man,” according to one leading dictionary, and is a whole pejorative universe in itself.) Like to-go coffee or athleisure, Kevin strikes certain French people as a gauche Anglo-Saxon import.”

My favourite podcast of recent times is Slate’s ICYMI with Kate Lindsay. Slug: “we’re online so you don’t have to be”. Highlights include the episodes with Scaachi Koul on her profile of Lindy West (and the madness that ensued after she published it) and Alex Sujong Laughlin on how “lip filler accent” is invading TikTok. I am highly allergic to audio preambles and non-specific waffle, and this is a tightly edited, waspishly eloquent dream. I plan to continue noodling my way through the back catalogue, while reading Koul’s first essay collection - which I bought off Vinted after listening to her on the pod and am hugely enjoying (has shades of Samantha Irby.)

Doing the viral rounds is this New Yorker profile of Sam Altman by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, featuring an intensely creepy AI gif. The journalists reportedly interviewed Altman 12 times for the piece (what the hell do you have left to say by the 10th round?) but it’s really about what everyone else thinks of Sam Altman, rather than what Sam Altman thinks about anything. The basic gist, of course, is will Sam Altman use AI for nefarious means, or will he stay true to its philanthropic ambition, with which he and Elon Musk conceived it? (Musk left a while ago and is obvs suing him.) In a baffling coup, Altman was ousted as head of OpenAI for 5 days, and it’s really about why that happened, how he got back in, and what that means.

Like most people I know, I find AI nebulous and ominous but this is a really interesting read, not least for what it reveals about the how delicate the moral lines are around corporate interests and science. So many geeks lured in by enormous pay cheques; so many of them now running for the hills. Or Google.

In April, I had the pleasure of collaborating with the heritage beauty brand, No7, who I have loved and trusted for as long as I can remember, on their new range, Prime Forever. It’s designed for skin preservation and protection and their message for the launch was all about preserving the moment - which MORE than appeals to me. I turn 40 next year, and I’m beginning to spend proper time, in a way I never have before, quite honestly, reflecting on how I manage my work life and my home life; how to give the best of me to my 3 small children (who need me more, not less, as they grow older) and not burnout at work. It’s something I have been really struggling with for the last few years and which I am dedicated to changing. You can watch the video below (shot by the wonderful Alicia Waite) and if you put the sound on, you can hear the poem I wrote for No7 - an ode to slowing down.

If you like live interviews and live in London, here are 3 I’m doing over the next few months that I’d love to see you at!

• On 29/05 at St James Church Piccadilly, with Elizabeth Strout, re: her latest novel, The Things We Never Say

• On 03/06 at St Martins-in-the-Fields for How To Academy, with Malala Yousafzai, re: her new memoir, Finding My Way

• On 01/07 at Waterstones Trafalgar Sq, with my fave Bobby Palmer, re: his new novel, Main Characters.

The Devil Wears Prada was always going to be a tough act to follow, but I’m an easy crowd, which means I loved it. Sure, there’s no way on earth that Andy would live in an apartment that lush on a Vogue Features Editor salary (nor would she go to Milan Fashion Week) and her love story was unconvincing, but a Dior-clad Emily (now divorced, with twins, dating a fake-tanned technocrat played by Justin Theroux) and a sage Stanley Tucci (still worrying about the chowder) were predictably delicious. And that’s just it: I want predictable and I want delicious.

Miranda’s journey of vulnerability was very 2026, but I’m always down for a shattering of the armour (“I wanted more fashion, less woke” remarked someone to me who did not) and I tittered at the cameos, featuring the likes of Tina Brown - who wrote a very funny piece about her experience on set. (Related: Osman Ahmed’s slightly more serious and also very good piece for her letter, Private Parts, on interviewing at Vogue and being told she should work at Vogue India.)

The main question I had afterwards was: how much did Diet Coke pay for that product placement? Followed by: how much did Dior pay for that product placement? Followed by: was it more awkward for Meryl Streep being on the cover of Vogue with Anna Wintour given that Streep has always rebuffed Wintour’s invite to the Met Gala, or for Wintour, given that Streep is literally playing her?

My husband and I went to Paris to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago, and we stayed in a jewellery box of a hotel that I have been telling anyone who’ll listen to visit. I’d picked up a flyer the last time we went to Paris, 3 years ago (we usually visit in December, for our snogaversary - infinitely more important than one’s wedding versary) and it’s been on my pinboard ever since. I booked it, curious to see if it was as adorable as it looked online. Reader: it was.

Read more

For our twelfth edition, we’re talking about Yesteryear, the debut novel from Caro Claire Burke about a tradwife influencer and mother of six, Natalie Miller, who sells homespun produce (made in China), candid lifestyle videos (cut by a producer), true love (her dumb husband Caleb can’t keep it in his pants) and help-free mothering (two hidden nannies) to an audience of millions, who hate-follow her every move. But one day, Natalie wakes up in 1856. How did she get there? And what happens now that she got what she ostensibly wished for - the true, tradwife experience - and it’s terrible in every conceivable way?

As ever, we’d LOVE to hear from you in the Comments. For those of you who like to read along, later this month (this one is a week late - it should have come out in April!) we will be doing Kin, by Tayari Jones.

Ochuko! Is Yesteryear the most hyped book of 2026?

Yesteryear is absolutely the most hyped book of 2026. Might be just my algorithm but it is everywhere.

No, it’s not just your algorithm. It’s No.1 on The New York Times bestseller list - insane for a debut - and the atuhor just appeared on Seth Myers - again, vanishingly rare for a debut novel from a non-celebrity. I hope Caro Claire Burke is pinching herself, because it’s truly an insane achievement.

Let’s get into it. I want to start with how I felt about the book. Each time I read a book, I write down a rating, which is often subject to change after it’s been digested a bit. On a pure reading-experience level, this was loads of fun! I absolutely sped through it. I love a nasty protagonist, so I really enjoyed being in Natalie’s head, although I was let down by how one-dimensional she seemed to be. Lots of missed opportunities there, but we’ll get back to that. Parts of the middle lagged for me, and I could have done without quite a few bits. I genuinely did not see the end coming, though, so that was delightful. What a twist!

Where I’d rate this book lower, is in the context of what I believe it’s trying to do. I can’t take this seriously as a commentary on tradwife culture because every single character is a caricature—the “bad” ones especially. There is zero nuance in any of them, the motivations are incredibly simplistic, and it’s just not real. You know how we do this thing where we look at people whose lives we disapprove of and go, I bet they are secretly mean and miserable? If I were to read Yesteryear as a commentary on tradwives, that’s what this book would feel like. So I’ve decided not to! What do you think?

I think that this book has an excellent premise and stone cold perfect timing - with all the dialogue around tradwives, and how they intersect with America’s rollback of abortion rights, the resurgence of purity culture, MAHA’s conspiracy theories around birth control - but I agree that I wanted to see more character development. What moved these characters? They were entertaining as hell but it felt purely entertaining.

There’s a lot of chat at the moment about books being written just so that there is some IP to sell to Hollywood - books written to be movies - and what’s interesting about this one, is that Burke has said that while she was writing the book, Anne Hathaway bought it, and then Hathaway helped her finish it, and so this is a book that has been if not written then finished, as a movie. I’m not saying that means it’s bad - it’s not, at all, it’s funny and snarky and clever and timely and I think it will shine as a movie - but I do wonder what the book might have been like without that interruption.

This! The books-to-movie pipeline is so fascinating to me. And I agree - now more than ever, books are being written with IP potential in mind. It’s worth interrogating what that’s doing to literature.

In this case, I think it means you have tons of cinematic moments - I mean you can see this all on screen, can’t you? Hathaway in her pioneer dress with a Joe Alwyn-type Caleb chopping wood nearby - but I did want to see more about why Natalie is a crappy mother. I like seeing terrible mothers in fiction, but why is she a terrible mother, and beyond plot point - or Instagram potential - why did she have six kids, if she hates raising them? Was it just for the content? I just wanted to scratch at that, a bit more. Ditto Caleb. Has he always been a soft boi?

So, I’m Nigerian. My grandmothers had nine and seven children respectively, and while they would both tell me not to do that (!), I do take issue with the framing of large families as inherently abusive. It feels like a uniquely Western lens, one I’m more fascinated by than offended by. Because I find the author incredibly intelligent and articulate, I was really looking forward to seeing that tension explored in the book. I wanted to understand it.

Kids are a lot of work (she says, propping her eyes open with pen lids) but, like you, I don’t see large families as inherently violent or creepy or weird - my mother was one of seven and I’m one of four.

The argument that large families are hard on mothers makes complete sense to me - it’s true. There’s no version of my life where I’m having five kids. But I find the idea that it’s inherently detrimental to the children, to have lots of children, I do find interesting. I have a whole country’s worth of lived experience that suggests otherwise. That’s why I was hoping to come away from the book with a deeper understanding, and I didn’t quite get there. But maybe my expectations were misplaced. It’s probably unfair to expect a cultural manifesto from a novel that wasn’t trying to be one. And to be fair, as a piece of fiction, it was superb.

I’m flipping through the book and landed on a moment where Natalie reminds herself to adjust her expression to something more “normal” while speaking to Shannon. It’s not an isolated instance - there are a few moments like that. Paired with how little genuine warmth she seems to feel toward anyone in her life, or even people she encounters, it makes me wonder if we’re meant to read her as someone with actual behavioural issues.

I feel like we’re just meant to read her as a narcissist? A terrible internet person? It’s sort of amazing to me the ire people reserve for tradwives. Speaking of, Yesteryear is widely interpreted to be a novel about Hannah Neelman, the wildly popular Mormon influencer known as Ballerina Farm. She’s a blonde, beautiful, conservative Christian mother of nine - and a lightning rod for controversy, whether it’s over raw milk or competing in a beauty pageant 12 days after the birth of her 8th child. I started the book thinking it would be a satire of Ballerina Farm, but Natalie mistreats her family so much, and is filled with such violent zeal (she is religious, that part isn’t fake, she notes how much she hates being “waterboarded with modernity” - good phrase - at college) that I wondered if it’s actually based on Ruby Franke? There seems to be more commonality, there.

Because yes it’s about the yearning for all things retro (see: another debut novel, time travel is en vogue) but it’s also about the collusion of the performance of motherhood and child cruelty. So I’d have liked to have seen that explored. And I’d like to have seen a bit more about why these women - like Neelman and Nara Smith - are so appealing, beyond their good looks. Is it because they seem so fecund, and there is still something mystifying about birth, or rather a women who feels able to do it so many times? It’s not just hate. Natalie is powered by hate, and receives in turn hate-follows, but I think there’s more to it.

Natalie didn’t read like a real person. Neither did her husband. And that was a real weakness to the book because nothing real or interesting could be learnt from them. Let’s talk about the other women for a moment. I found Natalie’s decades-long obsession with Reena genuinely hilarious, but also slightly unsettling. What do you think that was really about? I think Reena is a stand in for all of us.

Yeah that was a good pivot, bringing Reena back as the ABC anchor. I liked that. I guess it’s Burke’s way of showing that Natalie longed to be liberated from the life that she had chosen without feeling like she made the choice. Speaking of all of us, what’s the general consensus on Goodreads and BookTok?

Goodreads is overwhelmingly positive, while BookTok feels more mixed - though still largely in its favour. It’s an undeniably fun, pacey read, and in many ways feels genuinely original. More than anything, people seem to be responding to the gotcha of it all.

It’s a good twist!!! I didn’t see that coming. I don’t want to give it away, even though we usually do spoilers, because it’s so pivotal.

I agree, let’s leave it for people reading who haven’t read the book, to discover. I think ultimately, that there are so many more interesting questions here than the book can answer. Maybe that’s the real takeaway: that we don’t fully understand who these women are or why they choose this life, and in that absence of understanding, it becomes easier to project our worst assumptions onto them and treat that as truth.

I think I do actually understand a little about why women might choose this life. I think it’s partly due to rampant ahistorical nostalgia, whereby some people genuinely think things were better back then. Tbf they probably were better days for some men, pure warrior cave man stuff, but they sure as hell weren’t for women. And the novel does show, albeit vaguely, how much it sucks to be a pioneer woman - things are scratchy and itchy and painful and the household labour is exhausting. But I think there’s something more subtle about this righteous individual, now. You know what does explore that desire - and how that desire curdles - very well? The Real Lives of Mormon Housewives! It is the richest text. Let me just sneak a lil trailer in here…

Hahaha you are obsessed, I can vouch for this. I also found myself wanting more from the past sections. I understand why they had to be more contained, but each one felt slightly cut short. I kept wanting a deeper look at her relationship with the kids in particular - there was something there that never quite got fully developed. And I might be misreading this, but was there a shift where she suddenly started enjoying sex with her husband?

Yes! Because he was rough with her! He wasn’t ‘feminised’, like he was in the present day. He was in control…. and abusive. Which I think is interesting: Natalie thinks she wants to be this all-powerful influencer, but she ends up losing all respect for her husband. And then in 1856, that flips…

That actually makes it even more confusing. He was manhandling her, he hit her, there was no affection - nothing that would suggest intimacy. And then we’re told he could barely perform before? It completely pulled me out of the book. The whole turkey baster, no-sex setup was wild.

I don’t think she wants intimacy. I think she wants dirty hot sex. She wants to see her husband as someone… dangerous. Not someone she can bend and whittle to her grid’s advantage.

Just to do a swerve, Caro Claire Burke, wrote a brilliant piece for The Guardian, about the tradwife:

“The tradwife did not “become popular” at a time when women were, as so many have claimed, at a breaking point in trying to manage their work and personal lives. The tradwife came after the women had already been broken” - [italics mine]. “By the time Nara Smith was making homemade bubblegum in couture, and Hannah Neeleman was competing in a pageant 12 days after her eighth birth, the wage gap had been stalled since 2002, and the childcare crisis, which had been quietly bleeding women for decades, shifted into full hemorrhage.”

She also notes - and this is so interesting:

“Following the election that handed Donald Trump his first term, The Handmaid’s Tale surged in popularity, and would eventually sell 3m copies over the next two years.”

I follow the author on social media, and she’s great - sharp, thoughtful, very precise in how she articulates things. She recently shared that she’d spent the better part of a decade being rejected by publishers, and that this is her big break.

That series of screenshots she posted, like 20 e-mail rejections in a row? That was generous of her to share that, so helpful for budding young writers.

And what a break to have! Sometimes it really is about timing as much as talent, and this feels like the rare moment where both align. It also feels, in retrospect, like a build-up. She found her audience on TikTok through her tradwife commentary, and the book lands almost as an extension of that - like the long-form version of a conversation she’s been having for years. A perfect storm, not just for her, but for readers who wanted this moment captured and interpreted. Which is probably why I’m placing so much weight on it. I keep coming back to the same question: will this be the book people read years from now to understand this moment?

Oh man, I am so intrigued to see how we think of tradwives full stop, in 10 years! Will the term still exist? Will there be a gazillion of them? Will they still be as popular as ever? We’re in a feminist backlash right now, but I think when the culture swings back around again, tradwives might take a hit. Last question for you: will you be watching the movie?

You bet I will! I’m sure I’ll love it even more, then.

David Nicholls, as you will definitely already know, is the acclaimed author of six novels - One Day (which I have read more times than any other book), Starter for Ten, You Are Here, The Understudy, Us and Sweet Sorrow - and the BAFTA-winning screenwriter of multiple hit TV series, including the Patrick Melrose novels, Far from the Madding Crowd and Cold Feet. He is known as - and this is his official title - The Kindest Man in Publishing.

Under the paywall: the diaries that he is pressing into everyone’s hands; a film without a plot; actors on their favourite films; a debut novella that moved him; postcards from Madrid; and the artists he’s listening to on repeat.

Over to David!

The last novel that I absolutely adored has the feel of a 19th classic, despite being published in 1980. Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus is an epic love story, following the fortunes of two Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they fall in and out of love in post-War England. It’s a big, wild drama, something like an old David Lean film, rich and densely written, sometimes melodramatic, and ultimately heartbreaking. It’s been many years since I’ve been so swept away by a novel.

I’m currently working on an adaptation of Sue Townsend’s comic masterpiece, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ - a dream job for me, though a large part of the process means reading the source material over and over and over again. But an incidental pleasure has been the coming-of-age films that I’ve been watching for inspiration, specifically from an adolescent male point-of-view.

Rushmore is an all-time favourite of mine, my favourite Wes Anderson I think, less mannered and chilly than later films, and I’ve also loved revisiting Richard Ayoade’s excellent Submarine from 2010 (adapted from Joe Dunthorne’s wonderful, Mole-esque novel). It’s a film that draws a lot of inspiration from an all-time top-ten favourite of mine, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows; so beautiful and moving and with one of the all-time great final shots.

As a kid, one of many misguided aspirations was to work in an electronics store, pointing out the features of TVs and cameras and VHS recorders, and I’m going to slip into that mode now and bore-on grimly about my projector, which has transformed the way we watch films at home. I love the ritual – the hassle, others might call it – of setting up the screen and the speaker, focussing the projector (an XGimi Horizon, thank you for asking), closing the shutters and pressing play. It gives a sense of ceremony to watching films and no, you can’t talk or eat, and no, I am not going to pause it once we’ve started.

I’m a little hesitant to recommend this, because it’s a film that’s almost entirely without plot, but I loved Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, a meticulously reconstructed, almost real-time enactment of a taped conversation between two friends, Ben Whishaw as the artist Peter Hujar, Rebecca Hall as friend and writer Linda Rosenkrantz. It’s a brilliant snapshot of NYC in 1974, a touching portrayal of friendship and, incidentally, incredibly stylish.

Read more

The award-winning DJ, broadcaster and author, Annie Macmanus - aka Annie Mac - needs no introduction. Considered a national treasure both in her native Ireland and her adopted home of London, she is a fount - a literal fount - of knowledge on music, books, film and more. She also has an impeccably dry sense of humour, as you’ll glean from her recs.

As regular readers of Books+Bits will know, you do not get a lot of music in these weekly round-ups. Thanks to Annie, today you get tons: old names, new names, iconic names. Plus, loads of journalism recs, podcast recs, comedy recs, film recs and a pudding that she would make for you if she had you round for a dinner party which she won’t, because dinner parties stress her out. Featuring, amongst others, Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, Stevie Wonder and Justin Bieber, this is another gem in a series of total gems.

Over to Annie <3

I have been a judge on the Women’s Prize this year. It’s been a sort of brain experiment, reading that much fiction (60- 70 books) in such a short time. My brain feels like it has expanded. Doing it at the same time as trying to finish my novel was what you would call in non-literary terms a head fuck, but I loved the reading so much.

I have found that I am able to sort of ingest books now. I fly through them. I have reestablished my old habit of going to the park just to sit on a bench to read. The long list is fantastic; such a brilliant range of writers, lots of debuts, some really small presses, some established writers, some word of mouth successes. The hope is that the prize shines a light on these authors, and gives them a path to writing as a full career. Here’s our longlist. The shortlist is being announced at 2pm this Wednesday.

One of my fellow judges, the hilarious and brilliant Cariad Lloyd, turned me on to the podcast, Diabolical Lies. Two extremely smart and well-informed friends Katie Gatti Tassin and Caro Claire Burke (the author of the upcoming tradwife novel, Yesteryear) dissect culture and politics through the lens of feminism - it’s my new favourite listen.

The episodes are remarkably well-researched and the rapport between the two women is so natural, easy and funny. You laugh a lot and you learn a lot. Some great episodes to start with include ‘Why America Can’t See Gaza’ and ‘Jeffrey Epstein & the Ordinary Misogyny of “Extraordinary” Men’.

I get so much joy out of the comedian Kyla Cobbler. If you’ve seen her live, or you follow her on Instagram, you already know. If you don’t, then expect a sound as fuck Irish woman pontificating about how it feels to be a woman, endorsing witchiness, natural faces, sturdiness and strength. I love how she angles her camera below her face, doesn’t wear make up, presents herself in her raw brilliance. This post killed me. (Ed’s note - am dying. My legs are also triple crossed.)

I host a literary salon at the London Irish Centre in Camden, which is deadly. About 300 cap, good Guinness, book chat and live music. I had Katriona O’ Sullivan on last Thursday. Katriona’s memoir, Poor, was in the top ten bestsellers lists in Ireland for three entire years, and was recently adapted into a play which is now playing at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. The live music was provided by a lovely Dubliner called John Francis Flynn. His voice is BEAUTIFUL - the Guardian described it as like, “old leather, blunt yet sincere, holding his notes like bagpipe drones, resisting all weathers”.

I’ve been listening to his two albums a lot recently and have become hooked on this one song called ‘Come My Little Son’. Written by Ewan McColl (Father of Kirsty and writer of Pogues song, ‘Dirty Old Town’) the song is written from the perspective of a mother telling her son why he doesn’t see his dad. Spoiler Alert: Dad’s working building motorways in England. I don’t know whether it’s because I am a mother of sons, or because my own father worked in England when I was growing up in Dublin, but the lyrics make me BAWL every time I hear it.

We have another literary salon happening on the 25th June, featuring two excellent Irish writers of literary fiction: Wendy Erskine (author of The Benefactors, which is longlisted for the Women’s Prize this year); and Eimear McBride, whose debut novel, A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing, won the Women’s Prize For Fiction. The event’s just been announced - can get tickets here.

Bieber at Coachella was cute. Good art should be divisive and I think his performance was artistic, especially in the way he handled playing his older songs. Sitting at a desk scrolling through YouTube on his laptop and bringing up videos of his young teenage self singing and then harmonising and ad libbing along with his younger self in the video. A sort of pop star version of Doll Therapy, played out live in front of millions.

I liked what Blindboy said about it, that his performance asks questions of what a live performance should be. Definitely more interesting than rolling out the choreo and playing Beauty And The Beat, as a thirty-two-year-old father of one.

I loved that he got Billie Eilish up on stage, and seeing her transformed into the Belieber that she once was. Fun Fact: Billie came on my radio show nine years ago when she was fifteen, and requested we play ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ by the Baha Men because it was ‘a bop’. It was the first iteration of the word ‘bop’ I had heard and she had to explain what it meant to me. [Related listen: The Town on the Bierbernomics of Coachella.]

And if you want to feel life-affirmed at any point…

Read more

“In the next 100 years, up to half of the world’s languages will die. No funerals will be held; no cemeteries will fill. Some languages will leave behind dictionaries, novels, hours of radio; others will leave nothing save for a relatives turn of phrase someone still remembers with affection. It is not the norm across human history for languages to disappear so rapidly” - How To Kill a Language

I have long marvelled at the work of Sophia Smith Galer. Her ability to see the good, not just the bad, in technological innovation; her dedication to education; and her nimble mastering of so many different platforms - from the BBC to TikTok. A journalist, content creator and author, Sophia runs a social media consultancy, a scriptwriting app for journalists, and hosts the podcast, Word for Word with Sophia. She is also a passionate advocate for language diversity - most recently in her fascinating new book, How To Kill a Language, in which she charts the death of languages around the globe, known as ‘linguicide’.

As soon as I opened the book, I knew I had to get her on Books+Bits. And Martha, who writes a newsletter with a focus on translated books, was the perfect writer to interview her. Last week, Martha had (in her own words) the complete pleasure of chatting to Sophia about our relationship with modern languages - and what we lose when languages become extinct. It’s a joy to host their conversation here. Over to Martha.

Sophia, your book is about how to combat ‘language death’, or linguicide, and resisting monolingualism - which often means English. Why is English seen as a ‘super language’?

The world’s moving towards lots of ‘super languages’ which, in their dominance, relegate other languages. The theme that English has across the book is that it is associated with progress, and there is an economic incentive to learn and be good at English. People want to go to find a better life for themselves; no one wants to rob anyone of that opportunity. My argument is how can we make sure people don’t lose things that are really important to them in that process. It’s very hard to reclaim and revitalise languages once they’re lost.

In the book you make the point that everyone is capable of being multilingual. It took me back to school, where the discourse was you have to be ‘smart’ to do a language. What’s the danger of holding ‘languages’ up as not only this inessential thing, but this elite thing?

I had to do PE my entire school life because it is considered such an important part of my wellbeing - but we have the opposite attitude to language! It’s a big problem in the UK [and] since the Labour Government dropped the obligatory language GCSE in 2004, we have had a massive decline in language takeup at schools. If you’re a monolingual English speaker, you’re not necessarily going to suffer for it, at least on the face of it.

It takes me back to who is celebrated for being multilingual. People are always impressed with the languages that I speak, but there are lots of people in the UK who are extremely multilingual, but they are not impressed because they have been told [that their spoken] languages hold no value.

There is this prevailing idea that certain languages are ‘worthy’ and others aren’t.

In the UK our curriculums are so restrictive, which is why I love moments of flashy multilingualism that inspire people to see that you can learn a language without an education system. So when you finish watching Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl and think, Wow - I’d like to learn Spanish, specifically Puerto Rican Spanish - you can!

Some languages have more resources than others, but we can all go on our own private language journeys - it is deeply fulfilling and fun. We know that children are more likely to want to learn languages if they see multilingualism. There are loads of personal benefits to multilingualism, it improves our cognitive skills, but more widely, it’s the other people that we can help. My mum was able to give my Nonna dignity at the end of her life with her experiences with the NHS, that otherwise would not have been given to her. And you can’t see dignity represented in a tidy statistic.

Your book is inspired by your Nonna. When she was dying, you realised that the language that she spoke, dialët, was dying with her. Dialët is a variety of Emilian, one of dozens of languages - not dialects, languages - spoken in Italy, many of them unrecognised by the Italian state. How do we not know this!?

It’s mad! The world has been very neatly presented to us with borders. [But] languages don’t care about borders - they predate them. Obviously, languages are influenced by borders. Nation states will create laws and systems around languages. But that was never the norm - [borders themselves] are only a few centuries old. Within Italy, there is no national conversation about [these indigenous languages.] So if it’s not even spoken about at an institutional level in Italy, we’re not going to hear about it abroad.

When the last chapter mentioned the bells being rung out in La Serra for the death of your Nonna, I was in tears. You say your relationship with dialët as an act of “palliative care” now - what does that look like?

A lot of people are telling me they’re crying reading the book - imagine writing it! I will not have done my job properly as an author if I do not make you feel my loss. Palliative care with a language is dignifying it, letting it turn up in my life as a language of value, but not make any unrealistic claims about my relationship with it. In my blood line, I’ll be the last to have even heard it.

You also explore the impact monolingualism has had on science - causing vital errors and delaying discoveries. The world’s biodiversity hotspots host more than 70% of the world’s languages, so when those languages die we risk losing invaluable information about our natural world. I think there is a misunderstanding that language loss is individual; but your research shows that it is communal and elemental.

It’s really difficult to quantify what gets lost [when a language dies]. Broadly, it’s this sense of cultural resilience, wellbeing and then there’s a sociopolitical and economic impact; can everyone be understood, vote, receive medical care without issue? Initially, there was only research into different human languages simply for science. Thankfully, the field of linguistics is a lot more inclusive now.

Writing this book took me into really remote, rural areas, or deep into the archives - sometimes both. When I was researching for the dialët chapter, the historian Marco Tambruelli said to me that he felt that every year he was having to go deeper and deeper into the mountains to find speakers fluent enough to do his investigations. And when that generation goes, so will the languages.

One of the biggest contributors to linguicide is colonialism, but linguistic nationalism is not a thing of the past: Trump and Farage use terms like ‘English Only’ and (incorrectly) claim that “no one speaks English anymore”. Why are ethnolinguistic policies so attractive to polarising figures?

The tell is in how they always describe it - which is that they say it is ‘unifying’. That was the major rhetoric around Italian nationalism concerning the language. It’s the major rhetoric around Trump and his executive order about English. It’s trying to get everyone to assimilate into one identity. In trying to establish nation states around single languages, you are trying to establish that in order to be a citizen of somewhere, you have to be, think and feel the same way. Multiple languages, for people who want to hold control, are dangerous.

What do you think the future holds for us if this linguistic misinformation continues to get amplified?

We will see a lot more grandchildren in my position who have not maintained languages that they have close emotional ties to, [known as third-generation language loss]. There will be division because of what people feel like they have lost. The targeting and misinformation around foreign languages is a dog whistle. It’s a dog whistle for saying that not only do you speak a foreign language, you come from a certain place and look a certain way.

Something I loved is when I’ve seen you mention footballers who are so much more popular because they are multilingual.

Yes! Those clips go viral because people are seriously impressed!

@barclayswslFootballer 🤝 Translator 🔥 What can’t Lucy Bronze do? 😮 #barclayswsl #bwsl #lucybronze #mayraramirez @Lucy Bronze

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

@neo16cristh#CapCut #cristianoronaldo #cristianoronaldo7 #poliglota #idiomas #portugal🇵🇹 #soccertiktok #qatar2022 #foryoupage

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

There is a myth to perfect bilingualism and fluency. It’s quite rare that humans can have maxed out, perfect skills across languages. I used to always say I couldn’t speak Italian, but when I started getting in touch with it, I realised that for a language I don’t speak, I understood all of it. I’ve later learned that I am ‘receptive bilingual’ because of what I had been raised around. I think lots of us have linguistic identity crises, but it’s not really a conversation that’s held. It’s quite rare you see language discussed on a panel show, or even as a news item. So, of course, you don’t necessarily think, Oh, that could be me!. But with the power of TikTok, I can plant the seeds of those thoughts into people’s minds.

Your work on TikTok is super impressive. I wondered if you ever found there was a conflict between your journalism and your TikTok, given that a lot of people cite the latter as erasing the former?

I come from a school of journalism which I got introduced to at the BBC World Service, where your journalism is ‘audience first’. So rather than you, the journalist, deciding the format, you think about what format is most accessible. The signs were very clear quite early on that vertical video platforms were becoming some of the fastest growing sources of news. And with vertical video, I have control. If I pitched to a newsroom about ‘receptive bilingualism’, no one would have gone for it. But I knew it would be a video that would go viral - so I could just research, publish and benefit from the engagement. The most liberating and exciting thing about vertical video is that I can self-commission, and I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission.

Labels are important. I saw on your Instagram Stories last night, you were frustrated for being mislabeled an ‘influencer’. What is the difference - because the lines are so fine, these days - between content creator and influencer?

“Journalist and TikTok influencer” was how I was described at a conference I did yesterday. And I thought, you wouldn’t call Victoria Derbyshire a journalist and TikToker?! But you do with me, because I have built a big following. I identify as a journalist and creator. The language content I have made over the years is totally unattached to the journalism jobs that I have held. It has been independent content I have made to engage and entertain. It’s important for me to say I do traditional journalism and I make independent content that has nothing to do with journalism! If you tell people I’m an influencer, I don’t think they are going to be able to visualise the body of work that I’m known for.

I know you’re a supporter of the benefits AI can bring. The book mentions it quite sparingly, was that a choice?

I was deliberate to not focus on technology. I of course bring it up, but the fact that some languages haven’t been digitised or documented enough to provide satisfactory data for AI is bigger than an AI problem. It tells me a language wasn’t valued before technology developed. This inequality then impacts every tech innovation we experience: the digital revolution, the social media revolution, now AI. AI exacerbates existing inequalities - it’s called ‘garbage in, garbage out’ [known as GIGO]. In my book, I try to lay out what those inequalities are. My biggest worry is that there are big tech platforms trying to create resources in endangered languages and they are not involving linguists and speakers, and are producing inaccurate tools.

You also make several stylistic choices in the book which I really admired and learned from. For instance, your Author’s Note, where you mention that you will not be italicising words in other languages because “languages belong to all of us”. What is the impact of italicising words in other languages?

I think you ‘other’ a word by italicising it. You cannot help othering some words, because they are in different scripts. But with italicising, I didn’t want them to be othered and I wanted the reading experience to feel like a big blend, which is how it would feel to a multilingual speaker - words in other languages are not italicised in my head.

You conclude the book by putting the onus onto the reader, and remind us that one of the most helpful things we can do - one of our most effective acts of resistance - is to learn another language. What advice do you give to someone who might be intimated about learning a language?

The best linguists are not clever, or special, they’re shameless. They know that the only way to improve is to make mistakes. People think that because I make videos or I’m on TV, I’m a really confident person. But I’m not! I was so terrified during my year abroad where I had to endlessly put myself in those situations where I’m constantly having to talk to strangers in my second or third language. You need to adopt the position that making a mistake is not only fine, it’s good. Be shameless, give it time and don’t let anyone else judge your ability. People will always have opinions, and part of the shamelessness is not caring what they say.

You are currently mapping all of London’s languages - how many languages are you at so far and what’s the process of research like?

I don’t want to share until it’s official - but it’s more than what it’s currently recorded, which is three hundred languages. It’s really time-consuming. There is lots of data already at my disposal. Lots of emailing to schools, police, NHS. I have a public survey, where we got over a thousand people to contribute to that. And there has been some investigative work, because based on London’s migratory history, you can make some safe assumptions about languages that should be here in theory, but they’re not in our data. That could be because they’re not here, or because they’re of a certain age and they’re not coming up in the data. For each language, we identify an area I can pinpoint. The map needs to exist to validate London’s multilingualism. [Linguist] Ross Perlin, who mapped New York’s languages, came to London after he won a prize and said that someone needed to map London’s languages - so that’s why I’m doing it. I can’t wait for people to see the map, and my book.

My second guest is one of the funniest and filthiest writers I know. Sophie Heawood brings equal parts irreverence and pathos to her work - so that you often find yourself snorting and weeping at the same time. A journalist of top pedigree and a celebrity interviewer par excellence (Mark Wahlberg, Lily Allen, Emily Blunt, Jessica Chastain - to name a random handful), she is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Hungover Games, and has written about everything from single parenting to growing older to the appeal of romantasy.

I had the best time going through Sophie’s recs - I love running this guest series so much! It’s such a joy to be solely in ‘receive mode’ for a bit. As ever, I’d love to hear from you in the Comments. Sophie might even pause her Coachella livestream to come join us.

Under the paywall: why SNL UK is better than the American version; some saucy writing (and a saucy product); wine (something you never see here as I know jack sh*t about booze); a gorgeous piece on being a young glamorous divorcee; music (also something you never see here); masses of TV recs - I felt a palpable itch to turn on the telly; the best charity shop in London; memories of Coachella, including the time she offended Paris Hilton (she still feels bad about it); and her thoughts on the most chattered about film of the now: The Drama. (I’m going next week. Ditto, Tracey Emin.)

Over to Sophie.

I recently interviewed Harry Styles for Runners World (along with Haruki Murakami - what a gig) and while I’d like to say it’s the greatest Harry Styles interview of all time, it’s sadly only the second greatest. Because this one is the best: a Youtube conversation between him and comedian Brittany Broski, whose ‘Royal Court’ videos are hilarious. Somehow she gets more out of him in this absurd fake castle quiz set-up than the rest of us do in heartfelt conversations.

All I can add is that he’s an absolute darling but no, I don’t know why he has an Australian accent now. Still, “this is the most i’ve heard this man talk in YEARS,” as one of the comments says, so maybe the Aussie thing is helping.

I had a strong reaction in my guts to the Tracey Emin exhibition at the Tate Modern, which is on until 31st August. Of how important she is, of how much she has given to the culture, of how writers like me are able to document our own lives in the way we do because she went first. The shit she got for it all, the ridicule from critics, mainly men.

I gasped at how beautiful her naked crotch looks after in the series of photographs she took of it after her genitals have been removed during cancer treatment.

The exhibition made several of my female friends cry, and I’m sorry to be so gender essentialist but I think you’d be hard pushed to find a bloke who gets this show like women get this show. There’s a video in it - not a new one but it got me all over again - called Why I Never Became a Dancer. At the end of it she remembers how the boys who had all slept with her chanted ‘Slag, slag, slag’ at her on a Margate dancefloor as she danced so freely, a fifteen-year old girl dancing away from them all and their smalltown lives. The entire show takes you somewhere way beyond humiliation, to a land of post-humiliation glory that few of us have entered.

Her final words in that video are “Shane, Eddy, Tony, Doug, Richard… this one’s for you.” A powerful line that has stayed with me, under my breath, like a sarky mantra. This one’s for you, I mutter to myself, as I go about doing things, working on things, that aren’t going to please everyone.

The Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, on until 4th May, is excellent too, and I’m dying to escape London to see Fry’s Popular Delights in Essex.

Speaking of Freud, Bella Freud’s podcast, Fashion Neurosis, is the only podcast which makes it impossible for me to follow my own stupid rule about listening to them rather than watching the video. This is because Bella, great-granddaughter of Sigmund, gets all her interviewees to lie on the couch while they’re being analysed by her, and the camera gazes down upon them from the most unflattering angle you can imagine.

Honestly, seeing supermodels describe how secretly shit they felt in the ‘90s really does something for me. Probably because supermodels all made us feel shit in the 90s too, even though we loved them. They were a lot like our families in that regard.

But!

Bella’s interview with Riz Ahmed the other day was on a whole other level - subjects included daytimers, which were the parties he used to bunk off school for on a Friday afternoon, organised especially so that girls with conservative religious parents could actually get in, and how he’d wear clothes with green and white (like Stan Smiths) as a nod to the Pakistani flag. How much he argued with the teachers at school, and if they kicked him out of the room he took that as a sign that he’d won, because they had no argument left to counter him with. (There’s something really fascinating about that particular level of confidence, I think.)

And then - oh my God - the bit about him learning sign language for a film and what communicating bodily instead of verbally did to him, how it connected his body to other people’s bodies to the point that he would cry while signing.

I’ve been watching Your Friends & Neighbors, a TV series that scores very nicely on my ‘Can I do something else while watching this but only to a certain extent? gauge. What this means is, the show needs to be ever so slightly silly so I can watch it on my laptop while chopping vegetables, sorting out a pile of laundry or going through old paperwork to chuck out - but not so silly that I don’t need to look at the screen at all. It needs to be mainly well-written and well-acted telly because nothing kills my boner quicker than a naff script.

Your Friends & Neighbors is 70% compelling and 30% lol, a warm thriller-ish about sexily middle-aged Americans who have made big money and built perfect family lives and are now watching it all fall apart. A divorce drama, a midlife crisis drama, a therapy drama that turns into a crime drama: all my favourite things.

Plus it has Amanda Peet in it, who should be in absolutely everything, and in fact is in hardly anything, but then that’s why she’s Amanda Peet. In fact, I would probably watch Amanda Peet even if our screens were somehow reversed and it was her slicing the courgettes and sighing through old tax returns.

If you haven’t heard anything about Your Friends & Neighbors, that’s because it’s on Apple TV, a broadcaster who sadly haven’t found any way to market their excellent TV shows to anyone. It’s sad, really - if only they had some way of telling us. Maybe even some kind of digital communication device that lived in all of our pockets and talked to us all day long? Ha - crazy idea. So I guess we’ll just never know.

I only found out about Your Friends & Neighbours because Amanda Peet was so brilliant on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, telling the maddest story about how she had a temporary separation from her husband, who makes Game of Thrones, during which he dated her doppelganger. Yes, her husband went out with the woman she always gets confused for - and somehow their 20 year marriage survived.

Now for some British telly. Our very own version of Saturday Night Live - which is broadcast live on Sky TV and NOW TV on Saturdays at 10pm - has turned out to be brilliant. This couldn’t be more welcome news. It’s so sharp! The writers are so clever! It has really sharp teeth and doesn’t shy away from anything. In fact, it’s better than the American version, which I never found all that funny, even when I lived in LA for several years so knew my way around all the references. Guest hosts so far have been Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan, Riz Ahmed and Jack Whitehall.

Read more

I have always been interested in our shifting cultural ideas around happiness - I must have read twenty sunshine yellow-jacketed books on the subject when writing my essay collection - particularly the pervasive (pernicious?) idea of happiness as a static state. What if that place… doesn’t exist? What if we focused on peaks of joy, instead? What if instead of maximising, we satisficed?

Through her incredibly popular Substack, her podcast, her work as a divinity professor at Duke University and in her books, Bowler interrogates the idea of a meaningful life, not just for ourselves but for others, too. I value her work so much. And if you don’t take my word, take another great thinker Oliver Burkeman’s, who calls Bowler’s work, “profoundly wise [and] large-hearted”.

In a lovely moment of serendipity, I reached out to Bowler’s publicist to ask if I could extract some of Joyful, Anyway - the first time I’ve run a book extract on Books+Bits. Unbeknownst to me, I sent it to an expired e-mail address, and so I never heard back. Weeks later, I checked my Instagram inbox and found a message from Bowler, who had no idea I’d already tried to get in touch with her. So here we are: with Bowler and her publisher’s kind permission, I’ve extracted a short chapter called ‘Hungry, Hungry Hippos’ (which I adored on sight) and part of a chapter titled, ‘Is This It?’. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did - and if you did, I’d love to hear from you in the Comments.

Hungry, Hungry Hippos

My sisters and I used to crowd around the red plastic game board of Hungry Hippos pounding the black handles with our fists. We added marbles and more marbles so that the tray was swimming with them. Our hippos—mine named Henry—opened their mouths to swallow as many as possible, as fast as possible. We screamed. We pushed each other off.

We always wanted more. These days, I look around and all I see are hungry, hungry hippos. We want and we want and we want. If we were making Christmas lists, we would only write, More!

The Portuguese have a wonderful word, which like all wonderful words from other languages can’t be translated exactly. The term is saudade. It means “a somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness” or “an indolent dreaming wistfulness” or “the memory of things lost” or “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.” In musical form, saudade infuses a style called fado. In fact, most cultures have a music centred on longing—Americans have the blues, Japanese have enka; it’s flamenco in Spanish, rebetiko in Greek, and ghazals in Urdu. Around the globe right now, there are people hunched over a guitar, a bouzouki, or a harmonium sining about what they want but somehow can never have.

We flutter without landing. And that’s the way it’s always been. Even in the fourth century Saint Augustine spoke of this perpetual yearning as being innate in everyone. The writer Glennon Doyle beautifully described the ache as a deep and ferocious call from inside and outside of herself which she experienced as an inescapable force of “lovepainbeautytendernesslonginggoodbye.” Perhaps if we reached for a single word for it, we might turn to the German playwright Friedrich Schiller who called it Sehnsucht: a deep, bittersweet longing—often for something lost or never fully possessed, like a spiritual home. That’s who we are; humans are the species with a hole inside us.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca considered this kind of feeling a curse, saying that “though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.”

But who do I know who feels like they possess the world?

Don’t we always feel a gap in our lives? At this moment aren’t we all missing someone, managing a loss, or struggling to achieve something just beyond our grasp? Someone at the peak of their potential has been laid off from their job. A young family suffers a miscarriage. A grandmother sees her children and grandchildren moving far away. A single mother is acting as teacher and physical therapist and caregiver to her child with special needs. Who hasn’t wondered whether they were ever going to find that sense of purpose that should give meaning to their life?

This ache may not dominate our existence; we carry on—of course we do—and succeed sometimes, we enjoy pleasurable moments with our friends, find nourishment in poignant memories, but there always remains a strange restlessness in us that can’t be snuffed out. Fulfilment is too fleeting and we are bothered by the realisation that maybe these are the good old days.

Modernity tells us that we have infinite choices, that progress is mandatory, and that we have the power to make ourselves into something sparkling. But we know that’s not true. If the universe has our back, why do I wake up in the morning with a pain in my lumbar region?

No self-help manual, or scheduling software, yoga class, or vision board, no hours of manifesting, self-medicating, or assertion training will ever fix us. No matter how we visualise our day, curb our emotions, or strive toward our “best life now”, we cannot overcome the problem of finitude. We are never enough for ourselves and we always want more.

This is doubly painful because we feel ashamed of our inability to feel grateful. This guilt, argued Kierkegaard, only spirals into self-hatred for all the ways that we often undermine our chances to live a good life.

We are, as the poet Goethe described, a “troubled guest on the dark earth.”

Is This It?

We plug along and we make our plans. We make more with less—but still, we know:

A small void lies in each of us, and it acts as a perfect echo chamber.

Hope. Fear. Possibility.

There is a longing that rings through us. Is it anxiety? Is it a malaise? Can it simply be solved with some psychological strategies and a little more self-care? Or is this soul work?

As I always do when I can’t seem to stop chewing on a question, I turned to research. I went looking for thinkers who had offered their own answers and, after asking around, a name surfaced. You should talk to Father Ron. He knows all about this. Plus, he’s Canadian. So I reached out to this mysterious Father Ron to see if he might be willing to tell me about his work on longing. It turned out his books have sold a million copies, so he was not so mysterious after all.

Father Ron Rolheiser stared back at me over Zoom from his office at the Oblate School of Theology, a seminary not unlike my own. He was nearing eighty years old and fending off advanced colon cancer, and I was not about to waste his time. I jumped in immediately.

I asked him about the ache.

“It’s the most basic thing about us,” he said bluntly. “If you allow me to get philosophical for a minute, remember Descartes’s famous line: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Saint Augustine argued that’s not true. I desire, therefore I am. We wake up aching. Just look at the way babies wake up crying and you’ll realise that we never really stop for the rest of our lives. There’s always something missing—that’s the deepest truth in my life. And I think it’s the deepest truth in everybody’s life whether they admit it or not.”

Sweet mercy from on high. If I wasn’t already sitting, I would have needed to sit down.

I explained how the entire premise felt difficult to admit—that I thought life would feel more meaningful by now, especially given what I had survived. That I had seen too many women weighed down by the cost of being good. That even though I openly despise toxic positivity, I usually lie to people about how terrible I feel. That I keep meeting people who believe that they have cracked the code to happiness and that I am always too tired, too sick, or too overwhelmed to achieve that kind of perfection. And that the things I actually accomplish feel too small to count, especially against the losses that keep stacking up.

That I don’t want to ache at all.

“Well,” Father Ron said, pausing thoughtfully. “I think a lot of people think it’s only a downside. But, in fact, that energy, that perpetual disquiet, that inchoate feeling… it is also divine.”

“Wait, say that again?” I asked.

“We are all made in the image and likeness of God. So, that feeling isn’t a mistake. There’s a fire inside of us. But it’s also a divine fire.”

“So, that feeling I have that I want to swallow the whole world sometimes?” I said, half embarrassed.

“Divine.”

“The feeling that I am never, ever at peace?”

“It’s a holy longing.”

There is that “Sehnsucht” feeling—a bittersweet, almost addictive yearning. Life longings.

As C.S. Lewis has Psyche say in Till We Have Faces, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing.”

It is what Henry David Thoreau summarily called our “quiet desperation.”

I hear the ache repeat the same question, day after day.

Without an answer.

Is this is? Is this it? Is this it? Is this it? Is this it?

“I guess,” I continued slowly, “that makes me irritated by all the false advertising I’ve been served about being spiritual. I was always taught that faithfulness is the absence of all this longing.”

There’s a hole in your heart, sure, but that’s what God fills. And the more religious you are, the more you know that. Or at least that’s what I was promised.

For the last hundred years in particular, there is a particular tone that has overtaken public discourse: absolute certainty. Raw confidence has become the gold standard for moral superiority. You are as good as you are certain. Just take a look at the nicknames of the culture warriors of the last century: The Religious Right. The Moral Majority. These are dramatic statements about righteous people with nothing missing, nothing broken.

I had honestly never imagined that this ache was not a sign of my own weakness. There were moments during cancer when I felt briefly, temporarily whole. But when that feeling left me, I have been lightly haunted by guilt ever since. A better person, a better Christian, a better woman should not need, should not hunger. She would be at peace, right? […]

The ache cannot be ignored. Distraction of anger can only get so far… so I suppose I would have to be more honest about what I need to grieve. Mourning is the terrible process of allowing reality to wash over you again and again.

What do you do when nothing can change but everything must? I will need some help, but at least I know where to start: say yes to the dark unfinishedness of this symphony.

Turn your face towards the ache and say yes.

The ache? Yes.

The longing? Yes.

The grief? Yes.

The holiness of all this want? I’m not sure how, but yes.

My first guest never fails to delight me with his weird and wonderful recs. My Book Chat co-host (icymi, we did Wuthering Heights before everyone else) and the bestselling author of novels including Isaac and The Egg and Main Characters (out July), Bobby Palmer. As those who read this letter regularly know, I am ALL about the high and the low, the chic and the vulgar, and Bobby ticks all those boxes - and more. Over to Bobby!

Under the paywall: wild and unadaptable book recommendations; a revolting kids book I can’t get enough of; my favourite new music podcast; the longest audiobook you’ll ever listen to; films, chocolates and smoked fish of a Scandinavian persuasion; hats for kids and trousers for grown-ups; Disney’s animatronic curse; delicious coffee; and the greatest TV show you’re not watching and have never heard of.

I recently took myself off for a solo afternoon cinema trip to see Sentimental Value. (Anyone with very small children will know this to be the ultimate indulgence: it’s hard to find the time to watch a full film alone, let one that’s a) in Norwegian, b) subtitled and c) two and a half hours long). I loved it, having recently gobbled up director Joachim Trier’s loosely-linked Oslo trilogy: cult fave finding-oneself drama The Worst Person in the World; uber bleak Oslo, August 31st; and the thoughtful, youthful Reprise. I think the latter is my favourite, because it’s about self-important young male authors butting up against the real world… if the sko fits (that’s Norwegian for shoe.)

Fun fact: before he was a director, Joachim Trier was a two-time national skateboarding champion. Which would make for the coolest pivot to becoming an Oscar-winning director in history, if it weren’t for the fact that Steve McQueen had already won the Turner prize as an artist over a decade before 12 Years a Slave.

There’s performative reading, and then there’s my two-year-old, who likes to match her book to her outfit even though she can’t read. Performative illiteracy? (Editor’s Note: I call it, books ‘n fits.) Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is her current modish accessory of choice, but she hasn’t listened to the corresponding episode of Book Chat because it isn’t a) sung in rhyme or b) performed by squeaky-voiced talking animals.

The best book I’ve read so far this year is Chloe Benjamin’s Under Story – her first since The Immortalists and one which does something so unexpectedly bizarre and brilliant halfway through that I couldn’t help but love it. It’s also the second book I’ve read in the last few months which has the author wondering “What’s underneath Antarctica?” (the other being Sequoia Nagamatsu’s High How We Go in the Dark). Two could be a coincidence, but three makes it a trend – and with the success of Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, it definitely feels like there’s a sub-genre brewing.

I’m very much enjoying the Esquire UK rebrand – and as a man who has started to dread the moment when the barber uses a smaller mirror to show me the back of my head, I was particularly fascinated in this piece by Tom Nicholson on the rise of the anti-balding treatment industry and the miracle drug which might actually be able to do what was long thought impossible: to bring back the hair men have already lost.

“Thanks to advances in science and medicine, the battle against hair loss has become an all-out war. The stigma that used to hang around toupees and transplants is crumbling; for many men now, they’re just another supplement, baldness just another problem to be hacked. There’s a new wave of interest in drug treatments that offer a way to make your body do what you want it to, to stop it betraying you. And the bald men are mobilising.”

In what hair I do have left, I’ve been using Wavy – and while I can almost guarantee that the Books+Bits reader has no interest in “looking more like Bobby Palmer”, I can attest that it’s a curl crème which works incredibly well for those with hair which naturally falls somewhere between “bushy” and “dragged backwards through a bush”.

I’ve been getting really into narrative non-fiction, especially on audiobook, and I’ve found that my prerequisite is an author taking on a BIG subject and giving it the epic, sweeping treatment, ideally over hundreds of pages or countless hours of narration. I loved the confidently beefy Mafia: A Global History by Ryan Gingeras and the mighty The Plantaganets by Dan Jones, although first place must go to Patrick Radden Keefe’s stunning Empire of Pain, about the Sackler dynasty and the untold horror they inflicted with their stewardship of the US opioid crisis.

Read more

When I was first approached to interview Nelio, I’ll admit my interest was piqued by his age (then 21) - and then I read the first 10 pages of Lázár and was thrilled and astonished by the writing. So much was packed into just one page! And yet with the lightest of touch. Never in a million years would I guess it had been written by a teenager. He is already being compared to Thomas Mann, who I am yet to read, but have been told is like Germany’s Franzen.

Inspired by his own family history (his aristocratic grandparents fled Hungary for Switzerland in the late 1950s), Nelio has written a tender, poetic, bawdy, visceral novel - with notes of magical realism - which tells the story of modern Hungary through three generations of Lázár men (Sandor, Lajos, Pista) and a half dozen brutal regimes (the fall of the Habsburg empire, authoritarianism, Nazism, Stalinism and Communism).

Lázár is an extraordinary, masterful novel, with a gorgeous cover, and interviewing Nelio - who is so vivacious, curious, and modest - is a highlight of my year so far. This is the first time I have worked with a videographer (thank you, Peter!) and he’s done a brilliant job. I interview authors pretty regularly but I’ve never shared one in full here. I’m thinking of sharing more videos, going forward - so if you would like to see more of them, let me know! Apologies also for the flares of aggressive traffic (god bless Central London) and for some of the typos in the subtitles. I lack the technical know how to correct them.

Speaking of: I need to carve out some time for a longform project I’ve been trying to break the back of for a while, so I’ll be taking a little break in April to focus. But while I might be ducking offline, Books+Bits is going nowhere.

I’ve been beavering away, commissioning writers I love - best-selling authors, award-winning DJs, comedians and memoirists - and the roster is looking so delicious, it’s more than likely you’ll never want me back. (I’ll still be editing, and popping in and out of the Comment section.) I am so excited to see my guest editors spin their magic!

On with today’s recs.

Under the paywall: books for when it’s all too much; how Gail’s became a political lightning rod; the latest teeny tiny fiddly thing to bewitch my household; K-Pop and the Hybe megalodon; befriending my vagus nerve; Barry Keoghan and social media abuse; why not all celebrity activism is made equal; 3 great things I bought last week (including the best gift for a toddler); and my thoughts on the Louis Theroux’s Into The Manosphere doc (a cool month after everyone else.)

• Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing J.R. Thornton, the author of the deliciously compelling new novel Lucien. It’s about two Harvard roommates - charismatic, wealthy, bon viveur Lucien, and shy, working class art prodigy, Christopher (who Lucien renames ‘Atlas’, because it’s ‘sexier’) who collaborate on an art forgery scheme. It’s got shades of The Secret History, Catcher in the Rye, and The Great Gatsby, and it’s fascinating on intersectional privilege (the knowledge barriers and social cues that come with wealth) and absurd Ivy League idiosyncrasies - yes, there really is a club at Harvard called The Hasty Pudding Club and yes, it really does cost $5k to join. I think it’s going to be a beach hit of the summer.

  

• The next evening, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nelio Biedermann, whose novel, Lázár, has been translated into 28 languages. Nelio is just 22, and this isn’t even his first novel - he wrote his first when he was 16. It’s a lyrical, visceral, magical novel - poetic and bawdy; absurd and tragic - about an aristocratic family, the Lázárs, and 100 years of punishing Hungarian history. It’s based on his own family and it has the lushest cover I’ve seen this year. The interview was filmed by a brilliant videographer and I’ll be sharing a video of the interview on Books+Bits later this week.

  

• I was interviewed by Jess Cartner-Morley for her piece on how smart became cool, for The Guardian. It’s a pithy title for a rigorously reported piece, about how despite living in a period of anti-intellectualism (or perhaps, because of) pop culture has become interested in all things clever. She writes:

  “The cultural heat runs counter to the general direction of travel. Long-term studies show sustained declines in reading across much of the anglophone world. In the UK, a survey by the charity the Reading Agency found that leisure reading among adults has fallen steadily over the past decade; in the US, the National Endowment for the Arts has reported a sharp drop in literary reading since the early 2000s; in Australia, similar trends show fewer adults reading books regularly, particularly men. Faced with this decline, the book industry is using fashion as a lever with which to exert counter-pressure… And so reading is more visible than it has been in years.”

• I’m used to reading podcast reviews by the beady-eyed Times columnist James Marriott, so it was fun to listen to him on the mic for once, hosting an eloquent, pacey, fact-filled jaunt into how reading made our brains for the BBC. The premise of this three-part audio series is that many people are struggling to read (a desperate Marriott even got rid of his smartphone) and that reading has lots of benefits. But what are they? And are they really at risk, if we don’t read? It’s not remotely didactic and has some brilliant talking heads like the novelist Naomi Alderman, who I could listen to all day.

• Favourite thing I read last week was this *specific* paragraph from a piece in The LRB by Andrew O’Hagan, sent to me by a reader:

  “A couple of hacks I know who worked for the Express years ago were determined to get the words ‘moist gusset’ into the paper. They’d put it into their copy and, every time, the sub-editors would catch it at the last minute and take it out. Eventually, on an especially busy day, they invented a Swedish playboy called Moi St Gusset and wrote a piece for the social diary about his late-night frolics in Mayfair. Bingo. The piece went straight in and everyone got ten years of laughter out of it.”

  Adore, obviously.

• Incase you are interested in my baking, here is a bunny I made my son for his 3rd birthday. (Last year’s Gruffalo was better.) Two notes: cake bandages are a revelation and modelling chocolate is so much easier to work with (and tastier) than marzipan.

  

• This is a brilliant piece by Zeynab Mohamed on her Ramadan beauty rituals, a pleasurable, bonding activity with her mother and her sisters - which she is also conflicted about.

  “In between the layers, we talk, we pray, we laugh, accumulating more hours together. Time not everyone gets. I feel lucky. I feel grateful. I mumble extra prayers under my breath, just to make sure that gratitude is acknowledged. Somewhere along the way, skincare—and beauty more broadly—has become entangled with Ramadan in a way that feels… commercial, and very off. It’s become a conversation about consumerism, about self-optimisation, about having more. “Ramadan skin”, “what you need”, “must-haves”. Entire routines built not around faith, but around fixing and buying. I’ve participated in it myself—written the articles, made the recommendations, sleepwalked into endorsing the idea that Ramadan requires its own curated shopping list. A new moisturiser for dehydration, a mist for long fasting days, an essence to revive “tired” skin—as though tiredness isn’t simply part of the fast. As though it isn’t meant to be felt. As though it’s not a lesson—to come out the other side changed.”

• 3 things I observed last week that made me feel like my (a) mum:

  1. beige leggings - I did a double take on multiple occasions in town last week, thinking ladies were just prancing around without trousers

  2. a man doing incredibly extravagant leg swings around a lamp post by a pedestrian crossing while ‘warming down’ from his run, almost kicking me in the face multiple times, as I waited for the light to go green

  3. that every single drink from Joe & the Juice costs a tenner. What? WHAT!? Never again will I worry about the price of this Substack.

• It’s a slips-down-a-treat 7/10 for Nicole Kidman’s new thriller, Scarpetta. In no particularly order: liked the stuff on AI Griefbots; Jamie Lee Curtis is a stand-out; I thought we’d moved past naked murdered women on screen (tell don’t show, people); I can’t look at Simon Baker without thinking of Andy’s withering line to him in The Devil Wears Prada, “I’m not your baby”. Satisfying in the moment, but might not remember it by next year.

• It’s a 9/10 absolutely gripped for Louis Theroux’s latest documentary, Into the Manosphere, which by now you’ve read 87 pieces on, but here goes anyway because this is one of the areas of modern life I am most interested in - and not just because I have two small sons and in my most anxious moments worry that they might steal my mic and start podcasting from their bedroom.

Read more

For our eleventh edition, we’re talking about Good People by Patmeena Sabit — a polyphonic, community-driven mystery centered on the death of Zorah Sharaf, an Afghan American teenager who is found drowned in a canal at the wheel of her family’s car. What follows is less a whodunnit and more a chorus: dozens of voices - friends, neighbours, teachers, journalists - each offering their own version of the Sharaf family, their daughter, and what might have happened. The Sharafs are loving, oppressive, aspirational, dangerous. Zorah is a victim, a rebel, a problem, a projection. And somewhere between gossip, grief, and judgment, a story begins to form.

As ever, we’d LOVE to hear from you in the Comments. For those of you who like to read along, next month we will be discussing the extremely hyped Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.

Hi Pandora! I read most of this 400 page book in a single night. And you know what? Totally worth it. One of the best bookish all-nighters I’ve ever pulled. How did you find it?

I thought it was brilliant. I think I’m still in shock at how good it was? And one of the most heart-breaking books I can recall reading. I read a proof which doesn’t have any author endorsements on it and only received a finished copy a day ago, on which I can see blurbs from Ann Patchett, Khaled Hosseini and Paula Hawkins - so the ultimate endorsements for both thrillers nuts and literary fiction fans - and I’m glad I didn’t see these, that I came to this debut completely blind and without expectations, and was utterly blown away by it.

Shall we kick off with the structure? This is a polyphonic book, a bit like Lincoln in the Bardo (only in that respect, mind) with a ton of different voices, I couldn’t name them all if you asked - and what’s fascinating is that none of the Sharafs themselves have a voice. Their whole life story since they arrive in America fifteen years ago is told through this community - this loving, claustrophobic, generous, protective Afghan American community that the Sharafs are enmeshed in, and also this new American community that they have moved into - neighbours, school friends, teachers. Did the fragmented story-telling work for you?

Well, to start with, as a thriller nut myself, I actually forgot I was reading a thriller. I mean, not to knock the genre, but this was so much more than that. Amusing at first, and then ultimately heart-rending. You know, I loved the structure of the book. For some reason, I was reminded of Hernan Diaz’s Trust - the element of hearsay and gossip, with a challenge to the reader to decide what is to be believed. So yes, it worked for me because ultimately it allowed the book to be a story about much more than the Sharafs, but about media, culture, and community.

How have I still not read Trust? Taking this as yet another reminder to do so. What do you make of the idea, that I read in The Guardian, that it’s good for people who can’t read anymore, because many of the chapters are a page each? I was too invested not to read it all at once, but I can see how it would work quite well reading a page per night; really allows the disorientating, who-to-believe-ness of it, to slowly build and percolate.

I can see that. It was just so quick to read and so engrossing. There are not many books of that length I could read in a sitting, so, like I said, the format did lend itself to quick reading. But that’s not to say it’s in any way dumbed down, because it is not. The pages may go by fast, but it requires quite a bit of discernment and dot-connecting for readers to actually enjoy it.

Oh it’s not dumbed down at all. It’s so nuanced, so thoughtful, despite there bein so many characters they all had their own idiosyncracies and contexts that coloured in their differing viewpoints - why one people believed one think, thought this thing, etc. What I think it does spectacularly well, this technique, is enforce this idea of the unreliable narrator. Everyone has a different story of the Sharafs. Most of all, Zorah. To some, Zorah is a nasty narcissist, who never cared for her family and drained her parents dry. To others, like her school friends, for she was trapped within an intensely patriarchal set of rules, she could never join sleepovers, had to swim in different clothes, couldn’t talk to boys. Her religion marked her out. So who do we believe? Was she a dutiful daughter who fell briefly off the wagon, or was she a black sheep from the moment her dad got rich?

This is one tension I never resolved in my head, nor did I care to, because the answer is most likely none of the above. When you exist in a society where there are such stark generational differences, and you are being assessed by people with very different worldviews, you yourself are more a mirror than a person - a mirror of other people’s beliefs and biases. And since all of this is told in hindsight, it’s exaggerated. She’s either an angel or a demon. We are often not rational about those who are tragically deceased. One perspective we didn’t get, and I would have loved, is that of her boyfriend, because that was a context in which she would have existed without the interference of her other worlds. Actually, I wonder why the author didn’t include that.

That is so true. I don’t think you could ask 75 people about a person, let alone a young person, and the answer not to come back inconsistent as hell. I agree, I would have loved to have heard from the boyfriend. Wasn’t it fascinating how different the perspectives were on him? His boss described him as a waster, shallow, no moral compass; while his uncle and aunt remember him as a good boy, a hard-working boy, who was in America undocumented and got sent back home after getting caught up in the Sharafs nonsense. The Sharafs and their community see him as the architect of Zorah’s downfall. But his family see her as the harpy who lured him to dash himself upon the rocks.

Soooo classic though, right? One really important theme here is how to be a young person in a community that feels like heightened surveillance. Because I do think different cultures have different levels of inherent moral policing, and for different reasons too. I know my mom is less worried about whether me wearing shorts is actually indecent than about what the aunties who might see me would say - and how that would reflect on her. And not to knock my mom, because she’s my best friend, but it’s so cultural.

You’ve put that so beautifully and with such clarify. “Inherent moral policing”. It happens to most of to a degree - my mother, traditional, Catholic, strict about a lot of things, and to this day not one of us has a tattoo because we are terrified about how disappointed she would be. But obviously this policing is very mild compared to what Zorah is navigating.

In societies like that, young people are forced to live more fragmented lives as a means of survival. But as you said, it’s everywhere, not just in communities like Zorah’s. I listen to a lot of true crime, and it always starts with, “Oh, my kid could never, would never.” And then you go to their school and their friends, and it’s a completely different story.

Absolutely true. Onto another tension that I was super interested in: the tension of the Sharafs going from penniless - eating potatoes every day for years - to multi-millionaires, where Zorah tells Rahmat she wants a BMW with a bow on it for her birthday. And that, of course, chafes. Everyone muttering about how rahmat needs to get a proper job segues into everyone muttering about how Sharaf has forgotten his roots, he’s buying a Christmas tree like he’s a Christian American, flashing his cash. He has gone from tragic to garish. To me it reads like he works super hard and he’s really generous to everyone in his community, and Maryam has sacrificed herself entirely at the altar of wifehood and motherhood - although that’s not to say of course that it’s not hard for Zorah, growing up in America with its very different cultural codes - but do you think every reader is gonna read them differently, depending on where their sympathies lie?

I’ve seen similar things happen in my communities, both at home and abroad. Poverty and wealth, particularly in contexts where there is a lot of the former and very little of the latter, can really mess with so many dynamics. Depending on where you fall ideologically, immigrants tend to be painted as either angels or demons, but either is dehumanizing in itself because no one is both. The community was not sinless; in fact, they had much blame in the family’s downfall. But isn’t it fascinating that the sin which the media condemned them for was not the sin of which they were guilty? What they were actually guilty of is something more common and benign: envy, judgment, falseness, sexism, and hypocrisy.

That’s sort of where the thriller aspect comes in, right? Except - I don’t think it’s a thriller! It’s sort of framed as a whodunnit, but it’s not? It’s more. the story of a family tragedy and the forces that shaped it.

Exactly. The point was never what happened. But what could have happened and why. Although I’m curious, what do you think happened? Then I’ll share my theory.

I am desperate to tell you what I think. Except… I don’t think we should ruin it. I know! This is a spoiler-heavy zone! But I really want the reader to go through it all for themselves. This book is worth it. (Plus: I don’t know what I think. It’s driving me a bit nuts trying to figure out a conclusion. Pls Whatsapp me your opinion.)

Haha, that’s a fair point, I agree that it’s worth the reader getting there themselves. And yes, I will message you my take!

What did you find most compelling about the book? It feels - and I can’t really describe this - like such a weighty book. Like a psychically weighty book. I really just felt in awe of it. I was so desperately moved, that at times I couldn’t bear it. Did it break your heart?

It is exactly that which I found most compelling - the complexity and heart of the story, delivered so bravely. And now that I think about it, perhaps the reason we never hear from the Sharafs is because the author wanted to use them as placeholders of a sort. This could be many different families, and maybe that’s the point. Everybody with their high morals and good intentions, ultimately leading to death and disgrace.

That’s a neat idea. I hope we will get to read an interview with the author, to hear if that was a motivation for her. Were there any characters you were particularly drawn to, or intrigued by?

Omer, for sure. I really couldn’t get a read on him or his relationship with his parents, or his life, in fact. But he did seem somewhat lost and every bit as tragic as Zorah. Reading the book, I thought: this is not someone who recovers from this. You?

My god - when Sayed Nawab and his son beat up Omer because Rahmat turned down their marriage invitation for Zorah because Sayed’s son was so nasty. And Sayed screams in front of 50 of their friends that no-one else would want Zorah, she is so dirty and defiled, he was taking her as a favour. And this is a teenage girl, it was like daggers to my heart reading that. She will never, ever be forgiven for these teenage aberrations - failing at school and lying about it, moving in with a boyfriend granted not small errors, but in the grand scheme of life, forgiveable. Omer has never really fit in, he has no friends, the only memory of him that’s remotely positive is his schoolfriend saying he once came over to look at his extensive collection of trainers - and he really does everything in service to his parents, to his baby siblings.

I think Zorah was the single person in Omer’s life who did not want him to be different from who he is, and that’s particularly hard for him, now that she’s gone. Interestingly, we do see his quiet stubbornness peek through at certain times. For example, when he decided to focus on his car business, against his parents’ wishes, and when he refused to leave the house while they were being harassed by the media. Like all of us, he is layered.

And he is now being positioned as this dangerous brown man who might have committed an honour crime. It’s so unfair. This is just one of the many, many ways that this book is so powerful.

Totally. This book is so smart because, while the Afghan community does not blame the family for Zorah’s death in that way, they blame her from a different, opposite angle. Of course she ended up that way - they were too lenient with her. Isn’t that such a sharp trick?

Yes, it is. That scene with the Nawabs, incidentally, really stayed with me. When afterwards, one of the aunties observes, that Omer is basically unconscious, Maryam is sobbing over his body, rahmat is bloody and dazed and furious and Zorah is standing there, outside the room, looking completely unbothered. BUT THEN MAYBE SHE WASN’T! Maybe that was just ONE sour auntie’s view! it’s almost impossible to get a handle on this book, it’s so shape-shifting, I have no idea what’s true or not. All I can say is: read it. It’s phenomenal. I think it should have been long-listed for the Women’s Prize.

Oh, it so should have been! Two great debuts in a row, Pandora. We’re on a roll!

I first heard of The English Understand Wool when David Nicholls chose it as his favourite book of 2024. (You should read that letter! It includes book recs from best-selling authors like Coco Mellors, Dolly Alderton, Nick Hornby and Candice Carty-Williams.) He described it as:

“A delicious, spiky, twisty little story told in the voice of an other-worldly, eccentric 17 year-old girl. To say anything more would ruin it but I can add that it’s published in a beautiful hardback edition by New Directions, and that it’s an absolute blast.”

And I remember thinking, interesting title, like the premise… and promptly forgot all about it. Cut to: a few weeks ago, when a load of readers in the comment section of this letter told me I should read it. (You guys are the handiest.) It’s rare for a book to arrive at me twice, as it were, and so I immediately bought it.

I was initially quite puzzled by De Witt’s novella, which is not a bad thing. It’s a large shiny hardback, like a children’s book, and it looked like it had been published 75 years ago (indeed, the cover art is a 1962 painting, ‘Boston Cremes’). It’s only 69 pages long (oi oi) (forgive me) and is published by indie publisher New Directions as part of their ‘Storybook’ collection, which means, I discovered upon Googling, that it’s designed to be read in one. Obviously, I complied! I only had to top up the hot water once. And then compounding the slightly puzzlement, there is an author’s note, where De Witt gives her blog address for people to buy her a coffee, which is unusual in a book that isn’t self-published, but makes more sense when you read about how fraught the publication of her last novel, The Last Samurai, was. (I just bought it.)

All very interesting - and it turns out the novella was, too.

Our unnamed unreliable narrator is the 17-year-old only child of an eye-wateringly wealthy globe-trotting couple, Maman and Daddy (who is always ‘on business’.) When they aren’t at their 20-person-staffed riad in Marrakech, Maman and our narrator travel between the Outer Hebrides (for tweed), London (for wool) and Paris (where Maman’s tailleur, who she met in Bangkok and then set up in a Parisian atelier, is stationed.)

Our narrator has been raised to appreciate the finest things in life and to understand that there is nothing worse than being mauvais ton (French for bad taste), which runs the gamut from garish decoration, to a lack of knowledge, to social gaffes. Many (most) things are mauvais ton: not knowing about food, or wine, or music, or tailoring; raising your voice; taking a phone call in a public place; getting emotional; asking the staff to work over Ramadan.

“Mama was exigeante - there is no English word - in matters of protocol. Lunch, tea and dinner were served formally. English was spoken if my father was present, French if we were alone.”

“One must not expose adults to childish prattle. [Maman] insisted that I should learn bridge at the age of seven because one cannot always assume that a child can be out of sight.”

“It is important to play tennis. If one is invited to a château or country house one must not put one’s hosts to the nuisance of arranging entertainment, one must be prepared to make up a party.”

Our narrator is quietly enjoying her refined, rareified, exquisite life - entirely unmoored from the real world - until one day, when Maman disappears from their London hotel. In an instant, our narrator is told she has been the victim of an enormous, historic crime, and is given a new name, Marguerite, and a $2 million book deal, to “tell her story”. I’ve put that in inverted commas, because it becomes clear that the publisher doesn’t really want her story, so much as the story they’ve assigned her. The story that will sell.

Clearly, it is all incredibly mauvais ton. And it is up to ‘Marguerite’ to show them this. And that’s all I can say, without giving away the entire conceit.

“New Yorkers are extraordinary. One has a business matter of some delicacy to discuss, a personal matter so fraught it cannot be resolved over the telephone, and the New Yorker’s immediate instinct is to arrange a meeting in a crowded place where anyone might overhear.”

I’m wary of the idea that writing is (always) catharsis, but having had her own terrible experience, I’m sure there was a certain amount of satisfaction for De Witt, writing a book about publishing sharkery: the enforced victimhood; the commodification of female pain; the emphasis on emotion over fact; and of course, the contemporary obsession with true crime.

The most delicious part is not just our narrator’s horror at her editor Bethany’s mauvais ton (“hideous garments”, “inexplicable shoes”), but how Marguerite is constantly underestimated and manipulated, on account of her being seventeen, and it is her very seventeen-ness that allows her to get away with a slightly unrealistic but perfectly legal heist, that will put a massive great grin on your face.

Part of the charm of The English Understand Wool is that it feels like it could have been published 100 years ago. There is no mention of school or teenage friends or mobile phones - our narrator wears silk d’Orsay heels and practises the piano every day, like she is an C19th heroine. (I remain riveted by the title; did De Witt choose it because it is exactly what a commercial publisher would not have choosen? They’d have called it something like, In Bad Taste.)

This is such a funny, weird and unique little book. It’s prim and spiky, snobby and honest, and immensely satisfying. At under 70 pages, it’s calling out for you to read it. Quite frankly, it would be mauvais ton not to.

Big Nobody is my favourite novel of 2026 and yes it’s only March, but I feel confident it will remain in my top fistful. Alex Kadis is a former music journalist and editor at Smash Hits (a magazine I adored as a kid) and her debut tells the story of 14-year-old Connie Costa, growing up in East London in the late ‘70s, dying to escape her abusive father and her large, enmeshed Greek Cypriot community.

In some ways it’s a female Adrian Mole (I’m so excited for the adaptation!): Connie dreams about her crush, Vas (“a hint of a moustache on his top lip - classic Greek boy geek chic”); Marc Bolan (whose poster talks to her); David Bowie (his poster also talks, but he can be quite snide) and platform shoes.

In other ways, it’s a heart-breaking account of trauma and grief, as Connie lost her beloved mother and two younger brothers in a car crash several years earlier. Thanks to what is clearly PTSD-related memory loss, Connie can’t even remember her mother’s name. Her father, who she refers to as The Fat Murderer, was driving the car.

They live together, an unhappy duo, in an “Armageddon shed”, alongside Connie’s “Well of Shame” - a nebulous thought locker into which she attempts to stuff all her pain and fury, alleviated only slightly by her secret stash of Texan Bars, Curly Wurlys, Rolos, Mintoes, Fredo the Frogs and Walnut Whips.

But to its skill and credit - because it never comes at the expense of the grief - Big Nobody is also hilarious. It’s like Nina Stibbe crossed with Caitlin Moran. The humour is vulgar, tender, energetic and observational; the writing richly descriptive: one man has a “horrible fat oleaginous rodent face”, another is a “mono-browed turncoat”, a third has a “pink velour belly”. The Fat Murderer’s best friend, snaggled-toothed Peter Pervy Roy, “wore trousers so eye-wateringly tight that they squashed his knob and bollocks into a weird flat patty”. She knows a lot of loathsome men and she loathes all of them.

Connie is a charming heroine - bombastic and insecure; grieving and horny - and Kadis has done something rare and special: she has created a teenage heroine that adults will not only want to read about, but root for. (Again, v. Adrian Mole.) Her depiction of the ’70s will be deeply nostalgic for readers who were teenagers in the ‘70s - Sunsilk conditioner, Drambuie, The Osmonds - and she writes about her Greek Cypriot community with affection:

“Because the Greeks had to do everything back to front and arse upwards, Greek Easter wasn’t at the same time as normal people’s Easter. It arrived two weeks after everyone else’s on the first week of May… a special Greek Freak Fervour saved especially for the consumption of shedloads of incinerated meat.”

Respect:

“Nothing escaped [the aunties] X-ray vision. But then, Greek Cypriot women’s intuition was on a whole other level, evolved from a lifetime of affecting acquiescence to the patriarchy. They were world-class experts at second guessing their petulant and demanding menfolk. They missed nothing."

And fury:

“‘My dad hits us,’ said Vas, matter-of-factly, still keeping his gaze fixed ahead.

‘Well,’ I said, “that isn’t going to hurt much. Your dad’s the size of an Oompa Loompa.’

‘Ha, yeah…’

‘All our dads hit us, that’s practically the law in Cyprus,’ I said. ‘But you really don’t get it.’

‘Get what, Conno?’

‘[My dad’s] just a nutjob. That’s all. Especially since the… you know.’ It was the best I could offer.”

Life improves vastly for Connie when she discovers sex - “it made me feel like I was one half of something. That was nice” - and when the young adults in her community begin to let her in: Mario and Adonis, for example, didn’t want to be a perfect couple with a baby before the age of 20. But he’d knocked her up, what could they do?

Her friendship with Vas is the pure, golden, beating heart of the book: they set up something that they call ‘The Mind Gift’, which involves leaving one another with a thought or a quote that they find meaningful. It might be a poem, or a lyric by Bob Dylan or Pink Floyd, and these small entreaties become unspoken mottos for hope, and survival: Vas is desperate to study English Literature, but his violent father wants him to join the factory; Connie wants to become a session musician, but The Fat Murderer wants to ship her off to Cyprus to get married.

At eighteen Connie find herself accompanied by “an urn of emotional ashes” that is now threatening to “spill over. I was taking great care not to let that happen. And then The Fat Murderer cracked the vessel open with four one-syllable blows.”

I won’t say anymore, except to say that Big Nobody is a bildungsroman of the best kind: funny and filthy, shocking and hopeful. If you want a taster before buying, India Knight recently ran an extract, on Home.

And now for two books that didn’t hit the spot for me, but might for you. No judgement here! Actually, that’s not true, if you like the second book I’m a bit concerned in the way Daily Mail readers are about underweight celebrities.

Read more

If you have the means, please do upgrade to a paid subscription. For accessibility reasons, I will always make sure at least 50% of Books+Bits is free, but given that I spend half my working week tip tapping away on this silly little blog of mine, paid subs are always gratefully received!

God bless for this immaculate reminder.

I remember reading both interviews at the time of publication (The Sunday Times Mag’s A Life in the Day slot is a forever favourite of mine) and snorting with laughter each time, for very different reasons.

Best line in Tom Hollander’s:

“If my girlfriend is there we hold each other in different positions. If she isn’t I wrap my arms around the pillow and continue listening to the bad news.”

Best line in Orlando Bloom’s:

“I spend a lot of my time dreaming about roles for myself and others - for minorities and women. I’m trying to be a voice for everybody.”

Another interview that tickled me this weekend: a Q&A with author Sarah Perry in The Guardian mag. Some of my favourite answers:

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

I’m monstrously judgmental. It’s like talking to the pope.

What is your most unappealing habit?

I still have a habit of wiping my nose on my sleeve.

Have you ever said ‘I love you’ and not meant it?

All the time.

An interesting (and encouraging) piece by Rebecca Solnit on why despite the ‘failure’ of #MeToo, the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the Epstein revelations, the women’s movement is not dead. Absolutely worth reading in its entirety (bolding, mine.)

“There have, for example, been countless obituary writers proclaiming that #MeToo is over or failed, and I’m not sure what that is based on - the assumption that all sexual abuse should have ended and, if not, feminism of the #MeToo subcategory did not succeed? Is any other human rights movement measured by such criteria? Did anyone think the civil rights movement should be judged by whether it terminated all racism for ever? The perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s often both an impossible standard and a cudgel used to bash in what good has been achieved.”

Enormous fall-out last week from this interview in Interview magazine (never not confusing) with a bunch of young hot finance bros, with the vg title: The Finest Boys in Finance. The interviews themselves aren’t particularly interesting (they work 50 hours a week, they wear sleeveless jackets) but apparently it violated an inviolable Goldman Sachs code: NO PRESS. Nevertheless, this video made me laugh. I really don’t understand how I found it, incidentally, because I haven’t been on Instagram for about 2 months, and I don’t have TikTok. The zeitgeist will always find me!!!

Two words I learned from an old video with my verbivore pin-up, Susie Dent: apracity (the warmth of the sun on your back on a winter’s day) and confelicity (taking joy in someone else’s good fortune; the opposite of schadenfreude, basically.) Expect to see both of them on here - apracity quite niche, but I’ll do my best - soon.

Speaking of words, lots of old favourites (japes, scads, fetid) in ‘Stay Classy’, a hideous and hideously good piece by Andrew O’Hagan on Prince Andrew for The LRB. I’m not sure I’d have sought it out, but The LRB sent it out via their newsletter and I was immediately locked in, thanks to O’Hagan’s spry writing.

“With some people, money and sex are the only truths. It’s the ultimate delinquency to believe that gratification itself is power.”

Read if you can bear.

I wasn’t massively into Vladimir as a book, but I thought the TV adaptation was just brilliant. Rachel Weisz is perfect as our unnamed unreliable narrator, and so is John Slattery, actually, even though he’s like Hugh Grant (or like Hugh Grant was before he freaked me out forever with Heretic) and plays the same role ad infinitum. What really makes it sing, is Weisz’s very Fleabag use of the fourth wall - which so rarely works, but absolutely does here.

Vladimir is a deliciously twisty amorality drama, about a university professor (Slattery) who has been struck off for sleeping with his students, and his wife, who doesn’t really care - they had an open marriage, she sees the students as grown women with agency - but is being told she has to care, in order to keep her job, which annoys her more than her husband’s actual affairs. They have a very nice life and an extremely nice house and a very irritating daughter and everything was just fine until this semester.

The phrase “it was a different time” is evoked enough times for you to realise that it’s being used as a sort of satirical hinge. While all this to-ing and fro-ing is going on about whether or not she is going to do a mea culpa by proxy, or admit she knew all along and didn’t really care, she develops a sexual obsession with a hot new literary professor named Vladimir, played by Leo Woodall. My friend found him unconvincing in the role, but I thought he was great: young and groovy on the surface, struggling with a depressed wife, a demanding toddler, loneliness and a tricky second novel, underneath. The ambiguous ending lends itself to a second season (crossing my fingers) but it’s also fitting for a book/ series that is all about the grey area. Proper prestige telly, 110% recommend.

I found this interview on Culture Study with Dr Nina Bandelj about the emotional over investment of modern parenting, completely fascinating, particularly the bit about how we value children, socially, has changed dramatically: once they served us; now we serve them. (Incidentally, if you are interested in the “neoliberal intensification” of parenting, as critic Jacqueline Rose puts it, then I strongly recommend Rose’s book, Mothers.)

“There’s a pervasive feeling that none of it is optional — and that being a “good parent” now means bending our time, money, identity, and sanity around our children, no matter the cost. What’s more, it often comes with a feeling that we should be doing even more than what we are already doing! But it hasn’t always been this way. If today parents labor for their children, only about a hundred years ago, children worked to substantially contribute to the welfare of the family. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer wrote a brilliant book about the changing social value of children and how, at the end of the 20th century, children went from being “economically useful” to becoming “emotionally priceless.” Cultural values changed, and labor laws enshrined them, so increasingly the emphasis on the vulnerable and fragile nature of children prevailed.”

I may have to re-consider my rapturous review of Love Story after reading Daryl Hannah’s devastating op-ed for The NYT. It turns out every single thing - bar none - that we’ve seen on Love Story in regards to Hannah, is false. I really can’t work out why, either. Of course there is always going to be some artistic license, but making up that Hannah gate-crashed Jackie O’s funeral and then compared the death of her boyfriend’s mother to the death of her dog, feels as bizarre as it is mean a detail to include.

“I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s. It’s appalling to me that I even have to defend myself against a television show. These are not creative embellishments of personality. They are assertions about conduct — and they are false…. I know that as an actress I will be in the public eye. I’ve endured a number of outrageous lies, crappy stories and unflattering characterizations before. I chose not to battle them but to focus on my work and respect my loved ones by keeping my private life private. But my silence should not be mistaken for agreement with lies.”

Speaking of Love Story, props to Massimo Dutti for this immaculately timed campaign/ homage to CBK. And while we are on her style, this piece for The Cut made me lol - those hairbands are AGONY! It’s the tiny damn teeth, boring into your skull. As a kid, I could never manage more than an hour in one.

I’ve said this before, but I very much use my children as a vicarious outlet through which to enjoy whoopie cushions, fart machines, fake cow pats, etc etc. (BUT NOT FART SPRAY. I am still haunted by some I bought on holiday aged 10. The smell - I’ve never got it out of my olfactory memory, it didn’t even smell like farts, it smelt like digested regurgitated festering ancient ruins.) My current favourites are a joke loo roll (the loo roll is real, it’s just covered in jokes) and my daughter’s daily joke calendar. I skip into her room each morning to see what joke the day has brung. (How is brung a word, it’s ridiculous.)

Another shout-out for How To Fail (I go through phases with podcasts and I’m deep in a HTF phase right now), and this delightful episode with Rosamund Pike. I interviewed Pike about 7 years ago for ELLE. She always gets referred to as an ‘ice queen’, or an ‘English Rose’, but I find neither to be accurate - she’s offbeat, droll, intellectual, deeply curious; but she also has a clarity and conviction to her which gives off the impression that she doesn’t suffer fools, or obsequity. (She doesn’t.)

I liked what she had to say about breaking off a big romantic love; that when it ends, as horrific and devastating as it is, “You think, I’m free, in a sense, and there are so many other templates of what life might look like”. (She’s now happily unmarried.) I particularly liked her response when host Elizabeth Day asked her if she ever felt cool. “I feel cool all the time!” She said that feeling cool, to her, is about independent thinking (her sons are called Solo and Atom) and feeling truly embodied as a person. A very galvanizing listen.

I do not watch the Oscars because I do not have 897 hours to spare, but I do like to peruse the fashion! Like is the wrong word, Timothée Chalamet’s suit - isn’t the point of bespoke tailoring that it fits? - will confuse me for the rest of this year, and I swear Getty Images exists just to do everyone dirty. But here are my faves.