back up blog

"Laura," said the ten-year old. "Why can girls wear 'boy' clothes but it's weird if boys wear 'girl' clothes?" I don't know where the question came from, but it comes up more than you'd think - this idea of what it is to be "girl" and to be "boy". I didn't know how to answer it, not off the cuff that way, and tried my best to say something about fragile masculinity, finding my way to the answer the more I talked. The twelve-year old - the eldest of the three of them - patiently waited for me to run out of steam and then said: "I know the answer." "Go on, then," I countered. "I'm listening." She cleared her throat. "Well, for ages women have been thought of as like, weaker, haven't they? All through history men have been the strong ones and women have been like, less. Men have been above women for everything. Men thought they were more important." I stopped walking, be

Some writing advice. Some life advice. Some things I think about things – seventeen things, seventeen things that involve words and typing - that I share only for the purpose of sharing, because honestly, giving advice scares me and really, nobody knows anything. But, if you pushed me, this is what I'd say: 1. There’s a sort of weird audacity to telling stories. You have to think highly enough of yourself that you’ve got something worth saying, but also so highly – you’ve got to have such a fierce sense of self – that when nobody else is reading you don’t take it personally. It’s sort of a dance between daring not to give a shit at the outcome, and caring a whole lot about the process. 2. That’s because you are not your art. Your art is your art. Whether people say it is good or bad, that doesn’t mean you, yourself, are any better or any worse. You’ve still got to remember birthdays and take the bins out and pay the rent and not be a twat. 3. The art is nothing, and it is everythin

If you got cancer tomorrow, god forbid, and needed financial help, do you know what statutory sick pay is? £350 a month. Dunno about you, but that means I literally could not afford to be one of the one-in-three of us affected.  When Lauren got breast cancer, she had no choice but to become an entrepreneur in order to financially pull through. Chemo and business plans? Nobody tells you about that bit. About the cap you wear to freeze your hair follicles and how you might keep your locks but lose your house. About how even your vagina dries up from the chemicals that kill the cancer and murder any sense of yourself you once knew - even as you wonder if you should just put this all on a credit card. This is the realest fucking thing somebody I love has been through and it staggers me how if love could, indeed, protect her, Lauren wouldn't be enduring this in the first place. But it isn't and she is and so: Read her story. 

There will never be a time when that song comes on, the Sade,  when I won't feel you inside of me,  kneeling on the sofa,  your stomach pressed against my back,  your fingers laced around each other in a fist,  pulling through my hair,  just enough not to be polite.

Having a word for it contains it. That’s it, I suppose. The point of words. They help us pin down ideas, thoughts, feelings, so that instead of floating, circling overhead, we get to pull the thing towards us, put it in a frame, with a label, and look at it, study it, comprehend it through a microscope (of language). I have a poem by Wendy Cope in my bedroom. It’s on the shelf almost opposite my bed, so that I might see it in those particular moments where one is, indeed, in bed, thinking about… well, a rotation of “him’s”. The poem is called “Cures for Love” and goes: Cures for Love 1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter. 2. The easy way: get to know him better. When we know more, she’s saying, the mystery vanishes, and when the mystery vanishes our level(er) head resumes. That’s how it feels to have a word, now – like I have gotten to know the feeling better and so I am cured of the hold it had on me. It’s a word for the emotive souls out there. The ones who get told they “

Eat something green, he said. And don't work too hard. And, he added. Talk to as many strangers as you can. I knew what he meant. He meant the Old Me would've done that. That I could play pretend until it was real. I smiled in the coffee shop that day. It didn't make a difference - the fog wouldn't lift - but I saw how easily I might fool the world and its baristas. 

And I sat on his floor and I didn't think to care that nice girls don't sit on floors and I watched his face and I trusted him, is it. I trusted that it wasn't for him, what he was saying, it really was for me - that he knew there was a trifecta that exists for genuine discussion, a very specific trifecta of having felt his sweat mix with mine, and his grunt - such an audible, grunt! A groan! -   in my ear and all it took to get there: a few text messages too late at night, is the short version, a few months if we go back further, five years when I really sit down and comb through the filing cabinet marked how unexpected.  And because of that - because of the sweat and the grunt and the un-expected-ness of it, he knew to look me in the eye to make me hear what it was he was saying, and he knew that this time I might listen. I stood up again, wine in hand, to resume pacing from the glass separating us from the balcony and back again toward the kitchen, and when I said accept