Bits #53
A download, a drop, a deluge
Good evening! I’ve been remiss but now I’m BACK, with lots of recs. I’ve been interviewing people in the States, so I’ve been finishing work too late to go out but too over-stimmed to read, so I’ve been consuming lots of tv and pods - for you, of course, not me. As my toddler likes to say: buckle up, baby!
Below the paywall: Disney+’s chronically panned new drama All’s Fair (featuring Kim K in her first acting role); Alexa Chung’s sartorial nous; Lily Allen’s tour de force; a confronting piece on using work to escape reality; the never ending task of deleting photos from my camera roll; the best thing I’ve bought this week (and my fave thing to gift for under a fiver); and a round-table on modern feminism, biological essentialism and motherhood which made me angrier than the fire of a thousand suns.
Fun fact: Google was once called BackRub. (Even creepier than Prime’s penis logo.)
My new tip for starting the day right: Celia Imrie’s fart 💨 I didn’t watch Celebrity Traitors (I know, who even am I) but at 6.45am, every single day, I treat myself to this clip of her little pip. Bliss.
A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben about their novel, Gone Before Goodbye, for Southbank Lit Fest. I’m not a thriller girl, I’ve never read any Coben (watched plenty of it), and I thought a ‘collab’ novel just meant ghost-writing (answer: Reese’s plot, Harlan’s writing), but I guzzled this in one. Oligarchs, organ harvesting and AI - what’s not to like? Incidentally, I liked interviewing them both, too. That’s not always the case with famous people (wish I could name and shame, but - sigh - I want to remain employable.) Obsessed with this photo, taken from the side of the stage, where Reese’s hair frames Harlan’s face perfectly. A true collab.
I also really enjoyed launching my books ambassadorship with Vinted, where I get to prattle on about the joy in - and essential need for - secondhand books. As I told Fi and Jane last week for Times Radio, my favourite thing is when I buy a secondhand book and a little shopping list floats out. Combos like you could never predict.
Speaking of shopping lists, there’s a new edition of Pandora’s Box for Home, featuring the diffuse delights of chair legs, affordable cashmere and planters.
My favourite new pod is Bill Nighy’s ill-advised - "for people who don’t get out much and can’t handle it when they do” - where he takes on the guise of an agony uncle. He’s droll and elegant and wise, describing himself as a novelist who couldn’t write (and so he acted instead.) Parties are awful, he can’t stand clutter and socks should ONLY be black or blue. Sometimes it veers into Nicky Haslam tea towel territory, but he’s judgemental on the tiny and inconsequential, only - on the big things, he’s drily tender. “Just open up your heart and let him walk around there for a while” he says to a woman wondering how to connect with a friend’s boring husband. I love it. It’s the best thing to be commissioned this year.
Also great, Zadie Smith on the New Yorker’s Radio Hour with David Remnick (I have her new essay collection beside my bed, I’ll brb with notes.) “I think about the individual human capacity, and what the brain can take in - what my brain can take in” she says of her “2003 media diet”. (I mean, same.) She’s also vg on the slide of social democracy, noting that the “cradle to the grave” commitment was said not by a radical socialist - but by Churchill, in 1943.
Delicious interview with Gwyneth Paltrow in Vogue by Giles Hattersley, whose profiles I always love. He describes GP’s tan as “billionaire biscuit”, her tone, “dry as Ryvita” and says that “the easy read is that she’s controlling”.
“Paltrow’s ability to be savage yet hilarious, righteous but measured, is really something. Look, I tell her. [Amy Odell’s much discussed biography of Paltrow is] not all bad. The book also says that you invented ghosting, which is kind of boss.
“Oh, that is boss. I didn’t know that. Did I?” Yes. Apparently when you’re over people – lovers, friends – it’s finito. Texts on read. TTYN. “Oh, good. OK, I’ll take that,” she says, flitting her gaze to the middle distance and delivering the first madly bewitching grin of the day.”
Wish he’d asked her about that mean girls rumour, tho. (Google it.)
I’d never heard of John J Lennon before reading this fascinating interview with the incarcerated journalist in today’s Observer and I bought his new book as soon as I’d finished it. A contributing editor to Esquire, Lennon also writes for Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, and the NYT, all the while serving a 28-year-to-life prison sentence for killing a fellow drug dealer, when he was in his 20s. There are so many observations that stuck with me: Lennon has been married twice while in prison, and he believes that the appeal of an incarcerated husband is that “it’s a safe relationship that’s not controlling [for] women [who] may have got out of toxic relationships”; when you arrive in prison, you have to “show your paperwork” to prove that you have not killed a woman, or hurt a child; and he feels as guilty for his career as he is grateful. “What gives my life purpose may be the thing that causes [my victim’s] family that much more pain”.
I can’t stop thinking about the first thing Callum Turner said to his now fiancée, Dua Lipa, when he saw that they were both reading Hernan Diaz’s Trust: “So we’re on the same page”. I love that he said it. I love that he shared it with a national newspaper. God bless a man in touch with his inner cheese.
I was a lot more gripped by Raw’s doc on Jussie Smollett (the production company behind Tindler Swindler and Don’t F*ck With Cats) than the critics. Sure, it’s impossible to ‘solve’ - I still have no idea if Smollett’s telling the truth - but this bizarre case is stickier than the coverage suggested. ICYMI: here’s a recap of the Empire actor’s 2019 ‘hoax’.
Speaking of docs, I struggled to finish Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbour as I was crying so much, but it’s a heart-breaking, essential watch about racism and gun violence in America (and how benign its face might appear.) It’s about the fatal shooting of Ajike Owens by her neighbour, Susan Louise Lorincz, in Florida in 2023, and it’s told almost entirely through police bodycam and CCTV footage.
I’d never read a zero star review before this week, and now I’ve read two for Disney+’s All’s Fair, feat. Kim Kardashian in her first acting role. Personally, I’d give it a solid 2/5.