Happy school holidays to all who celebrate! (And three cheers for The Lionesses.) This week my extremely online husband introduced me to the term, humidititties. It’s when you look like you’re breast-feeding, but you’re (I’m) wearing a tank top and it’s a heat wave.
So many great profiles this week. LONG LIVE THE PROFILE. When they’re done well—thoughtful, curious, collaborative; sensitive but not fawning and with mutual respect—there’s nothing more joyful to get stuck into.
Also under the paywall this week: a fresh take on the demise of dating; a piece about the eternal thirst for teenagers (and baby tees) in American popular culture; how not to be an ass in your book club; deleting your second brain; and pet peeves in fiction.
The best thing I consumed this week was Liberty Lost, recommended by my podcat guzzling friend, Camille. Thought the Magdalene Laundries were a horror of the past? It turns out coercive maternity homes are still quietly operating in Evangelical America. In Wondery’s jaw-dropping audio doc, investigative reporter T. J. Raphael speaks to the women forced by their god-fearing parents into Liberty Godparent Home in Virginia as pregnant teenagers, only to have their babies removed, against their will, once they were born. The series opens with Abbi describing her traumatic wedding day aged 16: she walks down the aisle with her 18-year-old boyfriend and her 11-day-old baby, only to place her baby into the arms of the couple adopting him. How utterly appalling. To have the forcible removal of her baby, framed as a celebration. I learned a tonne listening to this. Did you know that evangelical Christian pastors weren’t against abortion until the 1970s? Lest you be under any illusion about the state of womanhood in America, this is an essential listen. Further listening, this episode of The Newsagents, ‘A war on women’.
My oldest friend took me and my son to Jurassic World: The Experience and I was so impressed. Plenty of things in London are over-priced and over-hyped —hi, Madame Tussaud’s—this is not. There were huge dinosaurs roaming around lush forests and paleontologists holding blinking baby dinos that you could pet. You could put on rubber gloves in order to squelch vast dino poos, dig for fossils, and scan eggs in giant incubators to see the different species of dinosaurs growing inside. So realistic was it all, that another friend of mine messaged to ask me if they were real. “A real baby dinosaur?” I replied. “Yes!”
This poem by Loryn Brantz from her book, Poems of Parenting. Lol, true.
Late at night
I look at photos of my kids
They are so cute
So precious
So pure
I hear a cry in the dark
And I think
Omg shut up I’m trying to look
At photos of you
For any readers into fashion archives, I recommend the Gianni Versace exhibition in South London. It’s not big, but it is visually delicious: I involuntarily squealed with delight when I saw Elton John’s shirt collection from the 90s, below. (The two were close friends). And all those LBDs were so current! If I was a stylist, this is what I’d be dressing all my popstar clients in 90s Versace.
This profile with Caroline Darian for GQ is an extraordinary piece of journalism by the magazine’s Features Editor, Oliver Franklin-Wallis. I recommend it with caution, as I would recommend anything regarding the Pelicot case. Darian is the daughter of Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot, and she has written two memoirs about her experience of discovering that her father abused her mother for decades, and, she later realises, her. Darian is candid, furious and by her own admission, broken by the last few years. The saddest part of the interview is where she reveals that she and her mother have largely ceased contact. (Pelicot was not happy with her daughter’s memoir; Darian did not feel supported by her mother when it was revealed that her father had also abused her.) Pelicot is now writing her own memoir, and Darian is supportive. “I think she needs also to write her own story.”
Another profile I thought was just brilliant (and must have made every editor working on it, sob) was ‘Everyone Wants A Piece of Pedro Pascal’ by Karen Valby for Vanity Fair. Pascal, an actor known for his openness and vulnerability, shares that his mother died by suicide when she was 24. Valby responds that her mother died by suicide when she was 18. And then this sweet and tender moment happens:
“Pascal has a tattoo of his mother’s signature on the inside of his right wrist. I have a tattoo in honour of my mother on the inside of my left. As a goodbye… we touch our griefs against each other’s for a moment.”
I also really enjoy stories where someone has not hit success until well into their thirties. The famous example of this, of course, is George Clooney, who became famous at the age of 34, with ER.
