234. READ. LOOK. THINK.

My beautiful UK cover 🍒 collapse of self-worth, Alan encounter, getting one's brain back, the house meal, drowning in slop

First things first, look at my beautiful cover! This is for the UK edition of Consider Yourself Kissed. I love it 💔 Remembering how much designers I worked with in advertising hated to be given little hints (and how counterproductive it can be to try and exert control over someone else’s creative process) I didn’t send over a folder full of inspo or a bullet point list of vibes. So I had no idea what to expect when I clicked the PDF on an email titled ‘cover’! I felt surprise and joy when I saw this satirical little bird looking out at me — huge thanks to designer Ceara Elliot. There are no pigeons (or even cherries) in the book! It’s more that it feels like me when I write: sort of sneaky, invisible, pest-adjacent, observing the world with my beady eyes, finding the interesting bits and having a laugh. And I love my title, so it’s nice to see it so huge. Goes without saying too that those quotes are a dream come true. You can pre-order CYK now in the UK.

READ.

'The market is the only mechanism for a piece of art to reach a pair of loving eyes. Even at a museum or library, the market had a hand in homing the item there. I didn’t understand that seeking a reader for my story meant handing over my work in the same way I sold my car on Craigslist: it’s gone from me, fully, bodily, finally.' The collapse of self-worth in the digital age.

'With a book this personal and seemingly off-the-cuff, readers are prone to veer into the para-social, earnest and dreamy and a bit out of touch. Of course it’s wonderful when a sense of intimacy forms between a reader and a text, but I know a little of what it feels like to be projected upon by a stranger with good intentions and strong feelings they think you’re supposed to hear.' Open letter to Deborah Levy.

'The need of “a free sister”, an adventurous girl to mind the babies for a few hours to get one’s brain back echoes like a black wind through the correspondence of mothers, through generations of women, each in their own privacies.'

I’ve been rereading Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald. Actually that was what I said to Alan Hollinghurst when it was my turn in the signing line at Foyles.

Me (as he autographed my Our Evenings): I cried for the last hundred pages of this.

Him (happily): Sorry!

Then: And, um, I love Offshore too!

Him (deeply appreciative just hearing the title): Oh yes.

That was it really. He has talked about Offshore again in the Guardian this week.

Another huge historic recc from me is the Tina Brown Princess Diana bio, which has been released on audio. It’s called The Diana Chronicles. A supreme ‘cleaning the house’ companion. I love that book.

LOOK.

Katy Hessel has written the amazing story behind this gorgeous image.

Beautiful and useful hooks, knobs and brackets.

Extremely fascinating episode of Esther Perel's podcast with Miranda July (in her first event after the publication of All Fours).

I must make this potato dish.

Joan Semmel, Secret Spaces 1976.

Tamar Adler on the house meal.

THINK.

"I don’t know. I didn’t know how it felt to be suicidal until my daughter’s suicide. I just want to sleep so I can dream about her.”

'People have collective power because they all agree on something, and from that point they can change the world. If you have individuals acting like screaming piglets who just want to be themselves, it completely screws democracy.'

'When nervousness and insecurity become the dominant mood of a society, anger is given licence to spread and grow. Mistrust has become a dominant feature of our everyday lives, as we find ourselves trapped in informational bubbles, in which disagreement and difference breed not curiosity and exchange but antagonism and mutual cancellation from inside an echo-chamber. It’s from this soil that the grandiose anger of social media warriors grows; the anger of countless virtual citizens trying to cancel out their own felt vulnerabilities and doubts, to brandish a clarity and certainty they crave but can never really achieve.'

'“We were raised in a generation of figure it out, do it yourself and own your own s---,” said a third woman. “You just figure out what you have to do, and you get it done.” She has no patience for what she sees as the preciousness of younger generations. Their self-diagnoses of anxiety. Their feelings.' What is it with [some!] Gen X women and Donald Trump?

'[O]ne woman said that the ritual of shaving her head every week made her feel not only powerful and healthy but as if her life was suddenly in perfect order.’

‘Every movie I watch now is a movie about an entire cast of people who seem not to have cancer, or, at least, this seems to me to be the plot. Any crowd not in the clinic is a crowd that feels curated by alienation, all the people everywhere looking robust and eyelashed and as if they have appetites for dinner and solid plans for retirement. I am marked by cancer, and I can’t quite remember what the markers are that mark us as who we are when we are not being marked by something else.’

Dead Internet Theory / "A old American women is making forest lion out of cauliflower and her neighbors looking at it. keep it detailed." Drowning in slop.

Jess

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