Bits #16
Things to read, watch, listen to, chew over
While I was writing Tuesday’s letter I thought, this could land two ways. I’m pleased to see people take it in good faith - to consider what it is about Colleen Hoover’s work that makes women feel seen, what they might crave and why - unlike a lot of internet discourse when it comes to commercial fiction!
I do wonder if people will start to fatigue, once the next slate of movies drop. Because Hoover has been on a selling spree in Hollywood, with multiple different studios snapping up the rights to her books. On Wednesday, it was announced that Anne Hathaway is to star in the adaptation of Verity (clearly she was not put off by the intense backlash to It Ends With Us). And then I found out that Universal are adapting Reminders of Him. Hoover is kind of becoming the female Harlan Coben - except his films are only made by Netflix. I think this is just the start.
Some interviews I’ve enjoyed of late:
Emma Chamberlain for The New York Times by Callie Holtermann. Chamberlain came up as a teenage YouTuber, but at the age of 23, she’s fatigued of online life. “People are like, ‘Your job is to be on these platforms’… I get it. I don’t like a lot of these platforms. So I’m going to try to shift my job so that I don’t have to be on them.” Props to her.
Molly-Mae for Vogue by my Unreal co-host Sirin, on Love Island, fast fashion, motherhood - and being heartbroken. She’s so world-weary for someone in their mid-twenties. She’s a tremendously successful businesswoman, but I wonder if she’s actually enjoying any of it.
Richard Gadd for GQ by Hayley Campbell. I can’t think about Baby Reindeer without feeling intensely stressed. Not just for the subject matter, which is necessarily - intentionally - stressful, but for the binfire that came after, which was not. Unsurprisingly, Gadd - who just won 3 Emmy awards - is tight-lipped. Frankly, I’m impressed he’s doing any press at all.
Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem is a great documentary. Particularly if you are interested in the British media, lad culture, class, the nineties. Tick, tick, tick, tick! Very good talking heads in David Baddiel, Miranda Sawyer, Gail Porter. Excellent cultural nuggets, like John Major on telly, talking about the danger of “yobs” (aka, working class men who got drunk) in 1994. And unexpectedly moving in parts, like when Loaded editor James Brown breaks down while talking about numbing his feelings around his mother’s death by suicide, with cocaine and booze.
Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of my god, I remember that, how the hell was that ever okay moments: Gail Porter projected naked onto Big Ben by FHM in 1999, without her consent. Porter, then 27, went on Mind The Buzzcocks afterwards, and the way in which she was spoken to by her male hosts and fellow panellists, and the conflicted look on her face when they tell her if she won’t get her arse out she might as well leave - agony.
“You said that it did a lot for Gail Porter [being projected naked] but I read in the paper that as soon as it happened her name was crossed off the Live and Kicking list to replace Zoe Ball” one female broadcaster notes, in a chat show archive clip. (That was just the first hurdle in Porter’s broadcasting career. A few years ago, she revealed that her refusal to wear a wig after her alopecia diagnosis cost her her telly career, which resulted in her bankruptcy.)
These documentaries can be a little nostalgia-by-numbers (beginning: hilarious, middle: terrible, end: what have we learned) and it does hit some predictable beats - 100+ mentions of tits, lots of chat about being high - but director Gussy Sakula-Barry does a very good job at moving it beyond the oggy oggy oggy of it all to what happened next: revenge porn, incel culture, Andrew Tate. I’m probably an easy audience (like I said, tick tick tick tick) but I was gripped, the whole way through. Great music choices, too.
This is so brilliantly written and achingly lyrical. Raven Leilani for n+1 writes about the mindscrew of promoting her acclaimed debut novel, Luster, while mourning the death of her father and brother, 3 months apart.
“For a while, I struggled to reconcile both realities, the one in which we buried my brother some months after my father and the other in which my book had changed my life so radically that the weirder manifestations of my grief were sometimes happening on air.”
I recently wrote about how I loved Naoise Dolan’s novels, but possibly loved her creative non-fiction writing even more. I’d say the same of Leilani.
My husband remarked that it was if this piece had been written specifically for me. And it’s true, JP Clark on the truth about The Holiday cottage delighted me. I’ve always thought that that cottage - the platonic ideal of a cottage - was too good to be true and it turns out, it is. The cottage, located in a field in a Surrey village called Shere (considered one of the prettiest villages in England, with masses of other romcoms also filmed there), was built from scratch in one month.
The entire facade was built in 4 days. The inside was a shell: all those cosy cottage scenes were filmed in California, sigh. Clark is an interiors writer, but 20 years ago he was the village hairdresser, doing all the barnets of the local estate agents who were stressing about how many people were calling up trying to buy a cottage that didn’t exist.
“Being in the middle of a field it would have never have received planning permission from the borough, or the very strict parish council. Just getting a dormer window is hard enough, believe me I know!”
It can be rather unpleasant to have one’s bubble burst, but I love everything about this piece. Particularly when Clark warns the excitable Americans not to move to Shere in search of Graham. If you’re looking for middle aged men in lycra, however, you’re apparently in luck.
I went to see Heretic - and I might never recover.