Hello!
How are we all?
January has started to feel like a real endurance test over here. In the last week, we’ve had enough snow to make it impossible to get my little car off the lane, the boiler packed in - on a morning it hit minus 7C, no less - and, two nights ago, we had power cuts.
Every year that we live here, I feel a little more of my former soft, city-self dissolving. I am very good at lighting a fire now. And I knew to charge the ‘good’ torch earlier this week, just in case.
I am also now the proud owner of the most unaesthetic-yet-practical boots ever, after spotting them on a – very chic – woman who runs a writer’s retreat in the Scottish Highlands. Now that, to me, is the sort of person you want to get your winter-footwear ideas from. Anyway, if you, too, live somewhere that is frequently either wet, muddy, or very cold, you will not regret getting yourself a pair.
And now on with the less prosaic recommendations…
Reading/listening/scrolling…
You Could Be So Pretty, by Holly Bourne. Perhaps the first YA book I’ve read since I was an actual YA, I finished this dystopian-style story about beauty standards at the tail-end of last year and it’s one of the most memorable things I read in 2023. Even as a grown-up feminist, it occasionally stopped me in my tracks to reconsider things many of us just accept as normal: the pull of social media likes, expensive silk pillowcases to prevent wrinkles… Set in a world ruled by a Doctrine that decrees the battle for equality over and won, it tracks an unlikely friendship between Belle - a ‘Pretty’, on account of her skill at applying her Mask, doing her daily Body Prayer, and posting regularly to the Ranking – and her classmate Joni, an ‘Objectionable’ who chooses to do none of these things. What I loved most about this playful-but-pointed book is how it is something of a paradox: It is clear-eyed about what has not changed for women, making the case that, if anything, beauty standards are more punishing than ever, yet its very existence, as a mainstream feminist story for teenagers, is a clear sign of progress. (At least I hope it is).
Help Yourself, by Curtis Sittenfeld. I struggle with short stories. I rarely find them as satisfying as a novel. But maybe I’ve just been reading the wrong short stories, because I really enjoyed this collection from 2020. White Women LOL, the first of the three stories, is particularly sharp. About a liberal, white, midwestern mother who goes viral after asking a group of Black people to leave her friend’s birthday party, assuming they are gatecrashers, it has as much to say about the ways we live out our lives online as it does white privilege.
No One Talks About This Stuff, edited by Kat Brown. Paying subscribers might have heard me mention this one before. This collection of 22 essays about ‘almost parenthood’ is out in March (or July in the U.S.) and I found it very moving, galvanising and - occasionally - even funny. It connects the dots of such a broad range of reproductive experience: childlessness, late miscarriage, early miscarriage, IVF, donor conception, termination for medical reasons, egg-freezing, adoption. I’m so glad a book like this can now exist.
The late Benjamin Zephaniah on the enduring grief of male infertility.
This gorgeous story about a single woman’s decision to have a baby with her gay best friend is as quietly romantic as it is inherently logical. (Though it is perhaps one to skip if other people conceiving with relative ease is not what you need to read right now).
One of my favourite-ever newsletters
returns, with a two-part interview with Cheryl Strayed full of wisdom on parenting/ being parented, and keeping love alive in a long-term relationship.Greta Gerwig’s Desert Island Discs (the music choices are irresistibly joyful).
Sophie Cliff’s manifesto for more joy in 2024.
Ayo Edebiri’s red-carpet game.
Why don’t we know more about post-partum anxiety? (Spoiler: Society’s ideas about mothering and a lack of research might have something to do with it).
‘The birth of my daughter, the death of my marriage’.
‘When I stood on the scales and saw the number, it did feel like my future was being taken away from me’. A very honest essay on weight, egg-freezing, and BMI cut-offs.
This prose-poem, over at
This podcast series, from The Atlantic, all about time: time management, productivity, rest, leaving work at work, making memories, the universe… If you liked Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, you’ll love this.
The dinosaur t-shirt to toxic masculinity pipeline. I’m still thinking about this funny and thought-provoking conversation between Laura Thomas and Kirstie Beaven, editor of Sonshine magazine, about raising boys for a more equal world.
In the restful houses of women who live alone.
And finally: Robbie Williams songs….ranked!
Other joys…
Warm feet when it’s -7C. Re-watching Succession and taking it in turns to pause it and explain to each other exactly why it’s so good. This Christmas-morning cocktail. Taking down the Christmas tree and packing away all the paraphernalia before New Year’s Day. Snowman construction. Playing Snakes’n’Ladders. How much our cats love life when we light the fire in the living room. Gin with champagne. (OK fine, it was Cava). Nutella cheesecake. Sticky, sugar-soy-Sriracha mushrooms. The return of Gladiators. Getting predictably, unashamedly, into The Traitors. £1 daffodil bunches. Actually doing something you’ve talked about doing for ages (in this case, joining the local running club). The first green nubs of iris reticulata appearing by the kitchen door.
Until next week,
Thank you so much for sharing my prose-poem.
Sorry for slow acknowledgement - my January has also felt like an endurance sport, though for different reasons. At least spring is in sight now. Literal/metaphorical! X
Really appreciated the link about postpartum anxiety- I very much felt like I had my 6 week appointment where they ranked my depression level as mild and within a normal range of what to expect after the huge change of having a baby, and I never really felt all that depressed- what I was was extremely anxious for the first couple of months. Oddly going back to work and having my husband be at home with her for one month before she started coming to daycare at the center I worked at with me was what helped me the most. I have always struggled with anxiety to a degree- I have been to short term therapy a few times over the years to develop better coping strategies, but nothing prepared me for the intrusive thoughts and fears of being a new mother to a baby that I had wished for for so long. I definitely obsessed over her breathing (so much so that we actually put her in her own room at 2 months old and moved her out of the PackNPlay we had originally had in our room which seemed counterintuitive but I couldn’t sleep well when I was worried about every noise she made when she shared our room). But once she started daycare I became the more low key mom in some ways- I never worried about her scratching herself at school or when she had little falls while learning how to walk. It’s so interesting to see how our brains work- I still have anxiety of course, but my anxiety about my 4 year old is so different than it was when she was a newborn.