Can a hare become a tortoise?🐢

On creating more meaningful reading habits. Plus: a gorgeous audio drama series, penis enlargement + the song that WON'T QUIT ME

I co-launched Book Chat the month before I launched this newsletter, in December of last year. Lord knows why I birthed two creative endeavours a few months before birthing a fleshy one, but I’ve always been an absolute fool an optimist. The two are inextricably linked, and yet it struck me last week, while recording July’s episode, that I’ve never talked properly about Book Chat and my reasons for starting both this, and that.

Over the last year, like many people emerging from the pandemic, I’ve thought a lot about how my work/life balance felt off. Over the course of my working life, I’ve never just done one job - I’ve filled every spare second to the brim, trying to prove myself to… myself. (I am my own boss, and I’m a HR nightmare.) It worked really well in my 20s, but when I hit my 30s and had 1-2-3 kids, I couldn’t keep up. (For me, it was having children, but it could be a number of things - death, divorce, infertility, depression, instability - that elicits a desire for change/ the attempt at balance.)

I didn’t understand the concept of matrescence. (To be fair, most people still don’t.) With my two blink-and-I-missed it maternity leaves (and we wonder why American mothers are in crisis) and a bracing stint of post-natal depression in the summer of 2020, I didn’t realise that this shit takes time. I gave my body and my brain so little time to heal, that five years later, I bear the physical and mental cost.

by Rebekka Dunlap for The New Yorker, 1997

The motto ringing at the back of every freelancer’s mind is always “make hay while the sun shines!” So to resist, can seem foolhardy. But half way through a difficult third pregnancy, I decided that I wanted to engage in projects that allowed me to take deep breaths, to allow my mind to bend and flex and unfurl. To loosen my own creative binds and quite frankly, cut through my own chaff.

Last year, I had a meeting with a production company who make two of the most successful weekly podcasts going, about doing a books podcast. God it sounded sexy! Giant team, perks ahoy. But I knew I couldn’t do it. I’d done a weekly podcast where I had to be on the ball, and in the feedback loop, and I spent most of my time a panting wreck. I felt flayed by the exigencies of young motherhood, and it was only going to get more intense when I added the littlest into the mix. So instead of joining a big shiny books podcast, flayed by the exigencies of young motherhood, I created Book Chat, with the novelist Bobby Palmer, whom I had met just once, but had good feelings about and now adore. (Not many people know that when Dolly and I started our trial pod, the precursor to The High Low, we didn’t know each other very well at all. But I knew in my gut she was both destined for greatness and would become one of my favourite people. What can I say, I’m a soothsayer.)

Book Chat is just me, Bobby and our dote of a sound engineer, Joel, and the most recent episode was recorded at 9pm, with constant interruptions from my eldest. It’s small fry in the audio world, but with its monthly (not weekly) time frame, it stands for something important, something that feels very hard won for me:

to

slow

the

fuck

down.

I know that quiet quitting was all the rage last year, but that kind of disengagement feels depressing and disingenuous. Rather, I wanted to re-engage, in a way that felt healthy. I think it’s possible - in that this is very much an ongoing project, and perhaps that’s the point, like the hedonic treadmill, there is no ‘end’ - to re-orient yourself within the confines of your job, or to feel empowered by the very act of attempting a re-orientation. To even consider that meaningful work isn’t just associated with volume and pace and newness, is a step in the right decision. (I appreciate that if your job is all about KPIs, this is difficult. It becomes a company-wide discussion and I know not enough companies are discussing what it means to work/ live/ think! in a sustainable way.)

Saying no to work that doesn’t chime with you creatively is great (but not always fiscally possible) saying no to events/ social plans that aren’t vital is great (‘boundaries' is a buzz-theme for a reason) but reconfiguring the parameters within which you make the creative work is possibly the most rewarding change of all and requires an outwardly small but inwardly radical re-set that I find less stressful to manoeuvre.

I think a lot about something Jia Tolentino said in an interview, I can’t quite remember when or where: that she wants her work to become both easier and harder. She wants the material conditions to become easier, but the work itself, to become harder. I wanted to bring the essence of that, to Book Chat. I don’t mean that it’s hard-hitting journalism, this show - it’s not - but I wanted to challenge my reading habits: to read books I might have been ‘daunted' by or to re-read those I’d disliked as a teenager (thinking that my adult reading brain might be very different) but outside of that challenge, I wanted it to be easy to make. The podcast was a route to create work out of my natural inclinations and interests, in a way that felt productive but possible.

I used to read new books almost exclusively. I receive about 20 book proofs a month and whilst I am so lucky to receive these (let’s have that on record!) they are something of a double-edged sword: if I don’t read them, I become haunted by their wasted creative endeavour (and paper). Book proofs can’t be passed on (as they haven’t been officially signed off by the publisher) which means they can’t go to a charity shop, which would loosen the albatross somewhat. But guilt is not a good creative motivator. Guilt is not a reason to consume literature! I wanted to create more meaningful reading habits. To intersperse the newness with books that had been biding their time, far from all the razzmatazz.

Thus far, I’ve done a total 180 on Wuthering Heights 20 years about reading it for my GCSE, wondered why the F it took me so long to read A Visit From The Goon Squad (I think I thought that if it won a Pulitzer it would be too intellectual for me which is a bogus attitude I have tried to shed this year) and guzzled entire canons by authors I’d only ever ambiently heard of, like Armistead Maupin, whose Tales of the City books I am now obsessed with.

I don’t always love what I read - Orlando was a slog - but I love my TBR pile becoming older and (quite literally) more storied. Books published 20 - or 200! - years ago are free from publishing trends, and hype, which gives your consumption of them as close to a blank context as possible.

This month’s episode is one of my favourites: it’s with two Annies whose surnames end in an X. Niche, likely a one-off. Bobby introduced me to the Wyoming Stories of Annie Proulx (did you know Brokeback Mountain started life as a short story in The New Yorker? I did not!) and I furthered my reading of Annie Ernaux (who recently won The Nobel) with A Girl’s Story. Ever wary of cannibalising my own content, I won’t relay our thoughts on the books but if you like either book, do have a listen to the episode. (Warning: there are spoilers.)

I appreciate that it not always possible to flex the rhythm of your job, but it definitely is in your reading life? (For me, the two are intertwined.) Ditch the book that you felt you ‘had’ to read; pick up one that’s been on your shelf for years, but never felt like you; re-read a book that you hated 10 years ago, and see if your reading self has changed. Come to the book with no expectations. Savour every page, like a Worther’s Original, for say the first 30 pages, before you write it off. Slowwww it down. And turn the page.

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BITS

• This week’s ASMR comes via textile designer and repair specialist, Alexandra Brinck. Watching her meticulously repair a tiny snag in a cashmere jersey feels like a bubble bath.

• How chewing gum lost its cultural cachet by Michael Waters for The Atlantic is the kind of niche read I love. Gum sales are down 42% in North America since 2018. (I’m not sure of the Brit stats). Waters gives lots of reason why, but one he doesn’t give - and this is certainly the main reason that I chew a lot less gum - is the omnipresence of coffee. People (I) spend so much time drinking overpriced caffeinated beverages that gum isn’t getting its masticatory moment in the sun. Thoughts?

• This essay on penis enlargement in The New Yorker has gone viral, obviously.

  “The surgeon clicked open a briefcase containing three translucent sheaths: Large, Extra Large, and Extra Extra Large. The device felt stiff to Mick’s touch, but Elist told him that over time it would soften to the consistency of a gummy bear”.

  Gird your loins, etc.

• I’ve never read any Laurie Colwin, but this excerpt from Happy All The Time on @bestbookspassages reminds me that I must. I love reading about people’s idiosyncrasies. Even off the page, knowing something highly specific about a person (they like to write in a 5B pencil, they will only wear navy socks with polkadots, they won’t talk to anyone whose name does not begin with an A) makes me like them more. The weirder the better.

  

• This new pod series from Brock Media, Never Told, is such a gem. Eight writers perform a short story or personal essay, including ‘The Woman Inside My Head’, from one of my fave storytellers, Emma Jane Unsworth (Adults, After The Storm, Dreamland). I’m really enjoying dramatic audio at the moment - I was most recently obsessed with People Who Knew Me - and this series is beautifully soundscaped.

• Have replaced the wine with matcha bubble tea in a can. Really not sure if I like it, but somehow can’t stop buying it.

• Proof that the comments section is occasionally the best place to hang out online, I loved this recc from a reader of the Maybe Baby newsletter - a pitch-perfect essay for the New York Times’ Modern Love column, on why imaginary love is still real love. Weepy stuff.

• This TED talk by economist and journalist Angus Hervey on why we are so bad at reporting good news, is food for thought. “When we only tell the stories of doom, we fail to see the stories of possibility”. Further reading (if I may): my piece on the good news movement, for The Guardian.

• This short story by Allegra Hyde for Harper’s Magazine (not to be confused with the British fashion mag, Harper’s Bazaar), titled ‘Labor Pains’ is a terrifying and funny cli-fi story about everyone being allocated new unpaid jobs, with no benefits, to help re-build the planet.

  “All across the world, the new workdays began. People rehabilitated rain forests and un-kudzued meadows and collected plastic bottles from beaches and decontaminated oil-spill sites in estuarine deltas via bioremediation. They nursed starving polar bears back to health. They speared invasive lionfish and restored coral reefs. Sometimes they grumbled—they were tired and dirty and bored by the tedious labor—but grumbling was part of working.”

• Sure it’s cheesy, sure they’re richer than Croesus and sure there’s an argument that it’s trying to woke it’s own wrongs, but I am so enjoying the new series of And Just Like That. I really like that these women in their 50s are being given the same sort of internality that women in their 20s and 30s are on screen. SO SUE ME! I think we have this idea that by 50 you’ve surely got it all figured out and this show emphasises that we have the capacity for change and renewal at any age and if Miranda Hobbes can pack up her whole life and follow a lover to LA, why can’t we? Also! Carrie discovers how hard it is to monetise a podcast and tbh I find that very validating.

• Ending on the earworm that will not leave me. Remember this corker?? Send help 🙃