Are you a hoarder or a purger?

On book ownership + curation. Also: the joy of Nick Cave's newsletter, a pod about missing people in Japan, and congrats to Mr Pickles! 🐢 ps - I wish you well

Every couple of months I plonk about six stacks of books outside my house, with a sign instructing people to help themselves. It’s almost always groups of women in their twenties who cross the road to sift through the stacks, and I love watching them stagger away together, with armfuls to share.

I regularly edit my bookshelves because I am lucky to be able to buy lots of books and get given lots of books, and my storage capacity is finite. My book ownership is necessarily kinetic, because unless I want piles of books sitting around (which I don’t, I hate clutter), new ones can only be admitted to the shelves when the existing occupants bravely move on.

nb: these are not my book shelves. look at all those gaps! (Ph. by Eva K.Salvi)

My system is not ruthless, but it is strict: I only keep books that I love and want to read again, or press into the hands of friends; books I consider seminal - so that doesn’t mean I have to love them, but that I want my children to have the option of reading them, because I think they Say Something Interesting; books I have not yet read and want to; and non-fiction books that have informed my work and/or which I think will be helpful at some point. I’m neither a hoarder, nor a purger - as with many cultural debates, I am a fence-sitter. I own a lot of books by general standards, but I think it’s pretty average by journalistic ones.

Several months ago, journalist Rhiannon Coslett wrote about why she doesn’t hold on to books. “I find the idea of hoarding [books] rather sad” she wrote. While books “can feel vital and precious”, owning a lot of them can work as a “stand-in for your personality” - as if “simply owning a lot of books makes one '‘know things’”.

Reading this, I thought of woman of the hour Gwyneth Paltrow’s fascinatingly named personal book curator, Thatcher Wine, a ‘celebrity bibliophile’ who will custom dye your book’s dust jackets in any Pantone colour you wish, so that they may better blend in with your room’s chosen aesthetic. “Why settle for books that a publisher designed?” he questioned, to which I can only respond, “because they… published them?” I thought next of the actress Ashley Tisdale, who, after being roasted for revealing that she sent her husband out to bulk buy 400 books before their AD home tour, retorted:

Touché. It’s indubitably true that a lot of people acquire and/or hold on to books that look good and/or make them look good (I use the word ‘good’ to mean many things: smart, cool, curious, quirky, etc. Whatever you want to be seen as, basically). For all my pruning, I’ve held onto I Love Dick, a book that I didn’t ‘get’, because - duh - the title is I Love Dick. (Several friends have confessed to doing this exact same thing, with the exact same book.) Some people are going to read the books they buy, and some people (with more disposable cash than the previous people) are going to buy loads of books with absolutely no intention of ever reading them.

Anyway, the response to this personal piece - which was more about the provocative headline, not of the writer’s choosing and swiftly changed - was one of hopping outrage. This distracted from the interesting and prescient point on the idea of ownership and identity and the increasing need to divest ourselves of stuff. A valid argument: most of us own too many things, for sure.

Dwelling on this particular point for a moment - I think that the absence of things can say as much about you as the bounty. Whether you subscribe to Marie Kondo’s controversial ‘one book’ policy or like to hold on to every book you’ve ever read, your approach to curation/ anti-curation says something about who you are, the way you want to live, and what you believe in. (How could it not!)

In truth, I’d like more bookshelves - I’d love a wraparound library with those ladders that go up and up and me in the middle at a circular table - but I also know that being forced to consider each book before admitting it the fold, allows for a more meaningful relationship with the books that I do own. It also allows me to see more clearly see what I want to read next. That said, if I woke up tomorrow to find all my bookshelves wiped clean, I’d be utterly devastated. Partly for sentimental reasons, and partly because I have an appalling memory, and many of my books are filled with scribbled notes and many pages folded down. (I caught my daughter carefully unfolding the pages of a book the other day and almost screamed.)

Owning lots of books is a joy. But getting rid of books that you can’t really recall and have no intention of ever reading again is also joyful, like doing a big closet clear-out. Is that curation - or common sense? In the words of the novelist Charlotte Mendelsohn, speaking on Radio 4, “books are my brain’s external hard drive”. And who wants masses of crap - hundreds of pictures from a trip to Corfu in 2004 - on their hard drive? Like Mendelsohn, my memories are outsourced to my books. They reside between those folded pages, waiting to be downloaded.

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Is “I wish you well” the new “fuck you”? (Whispered from under a sleek curtain of Mean Girls hair.) That’s a rhetorical question incidentally, the answer is obviously yes. If you too were glued to the boujiest trial of all time, may I recommend this piece which posits that it was GP’s best role since Shakespeare In Love. “What we’ve been seeing is essentially Gwyneth Paltrow’s greatest hits,” says Bob Thompson, professor of media studies at Syracuse University. J’adore it all.

Mr Pickles is a dad! At the youthful age of 90. Mr P is a teeny tiny radiated tortoise (a critically endangered species) who lives in Houston Zoo with Mrs P - with whom I feel great affinity, having also recently birthed my own spring tiddler. I only wish I had also named him Jalapeño.

The three baby Pickles: Jalapeño, Dill and Gherkin.

I don’t like listening to music, most materials make my skin itch, loud noises make me jump a mile and I once shed a tear for Tulum airport, after my husband was rude about it. I can’t quite bring myself to describe myself as a ‘hispie’, but nevertheless, like 15-30% of the population, I am a highly sensitive person or HSP - the “missing personality type” explored by Rhik Samadder in his extremely funny and thoughtful piece for The Guardian. (His Tulum airport was a bit of corn that he named Corny.) It was nice to a) feel seen and b) discover that I’m not the only person who feels unaccountably sorry for inanimate objects.

As the host of The Missing - s5 coming soon! - I was interested to listen to The Evaporated: Gone with the Gods, about the long-term missing in Japan. Officially, 80,000 people go missing every year - although the real number is thought to be thrice that - with many of them deliberately disappearing, or ‘evaporating’. There are even ‘night moving services’ that help you erase yourself from your life. Co-hosts Shoko Plambeck and Jake Adelstein are a good hosting pair, exploring this cultural phenomenon with sensitivity.

I sent this piece on “Eldest Daughter Syndrome” by Maybelle Morgan for Refinery29 to all the eldest daughters I know (inc. my own sister) and they all agreed vehemently with it. Older sissies, go get yourself some validation.

Episode 5 of Book Chat has dropped, on Memorial by Bryan Washington and The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Bobby and I discuss Memorial's literary take on the 'meet the parents' romcom and why Mitsuko is one of the best characters ever written; and why The Virgin Suicides' big themes - adolescent mental health, the male gaze, the American Dream - still feel as prescient today.

This piece on what we don’t understand about postpartum psychosis by Jessica Winter for The New Yorker is devastating and enraging. Most enraging is that being poor and non-white makes someone more likely to be charged in cases of filicide while being “white and affluent” sees you likely to be exonerated because “you talked to doctors about it [and] you had the resources to seek treatment”. (Further reading: Inferno, by Catherine Cho.)

I’m a huge fan of Amy Powney’s sustainable fashion brand, Mother of Pearl and enjoyed her new doc, Fashion Reimagined, which follows her ambition to create an organic and traceable clothing collection, “from field to finished garment”. If you have ever worked in fashion, you will know what a Herculean feat this is. It’s also a deeply personal journey for Amy, as she tries to marry her upbringing as the child of environmental activists, with being a designer in one of the world’s most polluting industries. (On Sky Docs and NOW tv from 9 April).

The Closet Has Teeth is a seriously good (and graphic) short story by former religious minister turned sex counsellor Finn Dearheart, about his time as a closeted gay man, for Roxane Gay’s newsletter The Audacity.

“We escape the closet in our own time. But the closet has teeth, and it chews men to pulp. Some of us make it out but forever carry the marks of teeth and nails”.

I loved Ruby Tandoh’s piece for Vittles about when Sainsbury’s introduced branding. Until 1950, supermarket packaging did not exist. Housewives were served each item from a different counter, by a different salesperson. (A single egg, plucked from a basket!) The piece moves through each design era and its cult items and considers the role of nostalgia, when we look at past-times design. Epic archive pictures, too.

Dolly and I are both have a special place in our hearts for musician Nick Cave’s newsletter, The Red Hand Files, where he adopts the mantle of philosopher/ agony uncle. This recent letter is both a masterclass in how to respond to criticism gracefully, and a moving piece of writing about shucking off a past self in order to find hope.

“When did you become a Hallmark card hippie? Joy, love, peace. Puke! Where’s the rage, anger, hatred?” writes Ermine, from Grand Marais, USA

To which Cave replies (this is just the first para):

“Things changed after my first son died. I changed. For better or for worse, the rage you speak of lost its allure and, yes, perhaps I became a Hallmark card hippie. Hatred stopped being interesting. Those feelings were like old dead skins that I shed. They were their own kind of puke.”