back up blog

Episode 5 of The Becoming Podcast is "Becoming Chelsea Fagan". Chelsea is co-founder of The Financial Diet , a site dedicated to talking about personal finance - because let's face it, nobody else wants to. Fun, engaged, and whip-smart, Chelsea has an unmistakable voice and is one of my favourite ever Twitter follows. Here, she discusses financial security, being a former "hot mess", betraying feminism and freaking people out by talking cash. Wise and insightful and frank things Chelsea says include: “During one era, I was fired from every job I had” “I think it has to be less about career and more about being able to take care of myself..." “I felt like being financially supported for a while was a betrayal of feminist values” “Sincerity is not the internet’s language” “It’s really hard to be cool or disaffected about money…” “If you think about a choice you made, or something you did, and you don’t want to talk about it… it’s so important to look at why”

This is a blog post about seeing myself called a “cum dumpster” in ten different languages, on fifty different websites, right beside years-old photographs of me taken in a bikini, lifted from the archives of my Instagram. It starts with a 6 a.m. email, read in my best friend’s bed in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. “They want to serialise the book!” I whisper, wide-awake with a body clock set to London. She rubs her Eastern Standard Time eyes and rolls over. “That’s great,” she begins, hoarse with sleep. “What… what does that mean?” Serialisation is when a newspaper – their features pages or, if you’re really lucky, one of their glossy weekend supplements – print a section of your manuscript. I’d had my fingers crossed that it might happen. What I wanted more than anything was one of the red tops to pick it up – one of the tabloids. I wanted a paper that middle England reads to talk about BECOMING. An “every woman” paper. I’d already written for a glossy mag and a fancy broadsheet about it. Ta

photo via  @amyadventures_   “Laura,” my brother said, reappearing after a brief absence. “Dad’s taken all your mates to the pub. You might… well. Come on.” I understood the spaces between his words but I didn’t want to leave. Because. Because, if I left it would be over, and it was everything I wanted it to be – had dreamt it would be, for farther back than I can remember – and to stand there, just a few moments more, meant it was still happening. I was still on the third floor of Hatchard’s Piccadilly, booksellers to the Queen, surrounded by piles of a book that I wrote. If I lingered a little longer, I was still at my book launch. * I don’t know what I am proudest of, the book or that one hundred separate bodies approached me over the course of the night to say, “Wow. You know so many incredible people!” That is true – I do know so many incredible people. I know so many incredible people that the girls from the publishing house told my parents, book parties aren’t normally like this