Best things in life (almost) #14
Best things in life (almost) #14
Exploring the emotional strain of the two-week wait, the perfect perfume - and mundane love
Hello, hello 👋
I hope September has been gentle on you so far. Personally, I like the sense of returning order that comes with this time of year – after everything sort of falls apart in the dog days of August. This disintegration is often for very enjoyable reasons – parties, people to stay, last-minute trips, bank holidays, making the most of the weather – but I’m now more than ready for a return to routine. In particular: quiet days at my desk, early nights, and reading in bed.
This said, if back-to-school season has been hard on your heart, here is a piece of mine you may have missed.
Also, before we get into this month’s bundle of recommendations, a reminder: on October 8th I’m doing an in-person event to celebrate the release of the paperback of my book Life, Almost: Miscarriage, misconceptions, and a search for answers from the brink of motherhood. I’ll be chatting to Tom de Freston, author of Strange Bodies – an extraordinary memoir about art, grief, and recurrent miscarriage from a partner’s perspective – at Caper Books in Oxford, hosted by Miranda Ward, author of Adrift: On fertility, uncertainty and the wilderness of the body.
You can get your ticket here.
Reading, watching, listening, spritzing…
No One Tells You This, by Glynnis MacNicol. My ability to finish a book has definitely been a casualty of the great, late-August scattering, but I did manage this well-crafted, cliché-free memoir/meditation on living a life for which you’ve been given no template – that is, being a woman over 40 who’s not married and doesn’t have children. (I listened to the audiobook). Her new book sounds great too.
(NB. Not to be confused with No One Talks About This Stuff – an excellent essay collection about pregnancy loss, infertility and other forms of ‘almost parenthood’, which I’ve recommended here before. You can find it, along with all my previous book recommendations, here).
I also went to see Camille O’Sullivan perform this week. It’s quite hard to do justice to what a Camille show is like – it’s more than just beautifully sung covers, from Radiohead to Jacques Brel. It’s emotionally raw, unpredictable, funny and sad – and, often, cathartic. Sidenote: Going to this gig meant I still had the shadow of a venue stamp on my hand for the first schoolrun of the year, which a) made me feel very cool and b) could not be a poorer indicator of my true personality or how I usually spend my Sunday nights.
‘Women trying to conceive can find themselves stuck between two lives’ – this, on the psychological strain of the two-week wait, is excellent by
(Cosmopolitan)