back up blog

I teach creative writing, and often what happens is that my students repeat my words back to me and I don't understand that it was me who said them first and it's a headfuck. I love teaching. I love communicating knowledge and I love using my skill with words to package information in a way that lands with the other person. I sort of took it upon myself, at the end of last year, to help one of the girls I used to nanny with her 11+ because I could so clearly identify where her boldest missteps were and part of me thought  maybe I am interfering too much  and then her mother cancelled her tutor and asked me to come over instead and you know what? She aced the exam and I know I played a part in that. After, when she called me to tell me how good she felt about what she'd done, I cried. She's working on a novel and she FaceTimed me on Easter Sunday from a walk on the Devon coast to show me some goat poo. That child reminds me to be love. Some people have comme...

Of course, it was Valentine's yesterday. How could we have missed it. I almost put a question mark there - you know, after that last sentence - but it isn't a question so much as a knowing eye roll. An eye roll with enough cynicism to prove how, like you, like them, like everyone with a Twitter account, above it all I am, except I don't mind, not really. I quite like love, and I reckon we've got a hold on all the ways it shows up for us. We know love is romantic, but also platonic and familial and sexual and sometimes, I suppose, more of a fondness than a love, but love is as good a word I know for fondness. For caring about another person. Maybe it's as simple as love is... remembering to give a damn. I wrote two things on two separate postcards over the new year, and one of them was "Love Fiercely". The other was "More, whilst also enough", but we're not talking about that right now. We're talking about love. About remembering to give a...

There’s a quote about how, if you keep moving forward step-by-step, one day you’ll look back and see that you’ve scaled a mountain. This February I am looking back, and it is from the highest height I never thought I would reach. At the beginning of 2016, I moved to London. I had undiagnosed depression in my bones, a book on the way, and nowhere to live. I stayed with friends for a few weeks, sharing beds and making do with couches and blankets and then, for four weeks of consistency, sub-letting my brother’s place where I distracted myself from feeling rootless by talking to the cat and swiping on Bumble. I knew I wasn’t okay. I’d been isolated for much of the previous eighteen months, travelling from Italy to Russia to Bali to India. All I had known is that I wanted to live as cheaply as possible and write a book. What I hadn’t understood is that a nomadic life with laptop in hand isn’t as good for the soul as the articles online has suggested. I wrote a book, and then I sold it, but...

An incomplete list of some things I call my 2017 achievements: - saw my first ballet, from the really cheap seats all the way at the back. - cleansed, toned and moisturised every morning, and every night. - bought furniture. - threw a really very good Christmas party. - refused to save the candles for best. - called my mother. - called my father. - interviewed a celebrity. - deleted Facebook. - stopped nannying. - maintained a relationship with the girls I used to nanny - and their mama. - took a month off. - bought £300-worth of sex toys all in one go. - went viral online for falling over. - said out loud that I want a baby. - received a case of wine. - got offered a horse and cart at the entrance to Soho Farmhouse. - went swimming in the ladies pond on the Heath when we had the heatwave. - went home for Easter. - went ginger, and on purpose. - hosted an event about mental health. - did my first lit fest. - took a day trip to Oxford. - saw Titanic at the Royal Albert Hall with a l...

To begin is to break your own heart. To choose means to  not choose  all those other things. Before you begin, the possibilities are endless. The way your one true love will look, how your first novel will sound on the page. Before you begin, everything is perfect, because before you begin it’s a world of imagination painted in only your best and most favourite colours. Beginning is a pull into the real world. The real world is hard. It is beautiful and surprising and sometimes, at noon on a Tuesday on the roof of an art gallery, you will drink a glass of wine and look at the view and wonder how you will ever leave this spot, this moment, because everything is as right as it could be. But the real world is also never enough money, and never enough time, and never enough talent, or recognition, or love, or contentedness. The real world is compromise. Compromise. I read somewhere that compromise is “halfway happy”, and that is what beginning is. Halfway happy...

The metre-and-a-half wide frame has hung empty above my bed since July. I paid a man to hang it. I'd harboured, to begin with, reservations about how my feminism and my employment of somebody else to execute the job dovetailed awkwardly, but after I hit myself in the face with a hammer one night, not understanding the difference between a nail at 45 degrees into a diving wall and a drill with a spiral anchor into a brick wall, I decided the most feminist act would be, in fact, to use my hard-earned feminist money to feministly delegate somebody better qualified to help me out - who yes, just so happened to be a man. I have never looked back.  The room needed something above the bed - that's why I got the frame and had it hung - but I couldn't rush to fill it. It needed to be right. I didn't want a generic Ikea print: they can satisfy the dead area behind the door in the living room because that is a neutral space. Bedrooms - bedrooms must be ...

We went to see  The Death of Stalin  on Friday  night, reunited as we were after three weeks apart and many utterances that we'll never go that many nights without each other again. I lived in Russia, once. I lived many places before. Once. But it was Russia I thought about, for reasons obvious, as I sat next to an Italian who laughed louder than anyone else in the knee-to-knee, packed-in-tight cinema, and who, in the quiet bits, used a stage whisper of a voice to say,  "Baby, what? What did he say?"  It's a trait that is partly endearing and mostly embarrassing, and  that  reminds me of taking thirty-one Italian teenagers to see  The Lion King  at the Lyceum Theatre the summer I got my nose pierced, desperately trying to make them - the Italian teenagers - understand that talking that way, the whole way through, isn't how it is done in England, where even our standing ovations are polite.  The film made me think of t...

I’ve been wanting to say all kinds of things for ages, now, but I do this thing where I think I have to be a brand and have consistent messaging and purpose and that I mustn’t waste a drop of this finite creativity that I’m a fool – a damned fool! – if I don’t monetise, because it’s better to be profitable than popular. And, you know, it is. I have strangers approach me on the street to tell me they love my Insta-stories, but videoing a lip-synch to Bug-a-boo doesn’t pay my rent. It’s tongue-in-cheek and fun self-promotion, sure, but god am I exhausted from the endless ring-road that is shouting about my work. Here, Twitter, Instagram, emails, events: like me, like me, like me . I suppose because my work is me. I am it. There’s no distance between who I am and what I make. That’s the thing they don’t tell you about working for yourself, about being a “media-luvvy”, about making money from being you. That it is entirely possible to become bored of talking about you. I explicitly rememb...

I wanted a record, somewhere, that this is what I wrote the afternoon before my second book came out, and that I stood on a chair to read to a room full of people I love. A first book party felt huge. This second one almost more so. * (FYI writing this speech felt like writing my Oscar acceptance speech, except that I knew I’d won.) (Prepare yourselves for some words about my ~feelings~.) This time last year, I was sad. I felt like the saddest girl in the world, actually. Now I know just how common depression is, but last March - when I finally got diagnosed with an illness I reckon I’d had probably six months before that - I was the most isolated, and empty, and lifeless I have ever been. I didn’t want to die. But. I sort of... couldn’t see the point in living. The lesson of my life is letting myself be loved. And being sad – having depression and anxiety – was the ultimate lesson in what it is to accept love. I wouldn’t survive, I knew, if I didn’t let myself be loved. When I was in ...

I saw you, and you looked happy.  She wanted you in a way I never could. She nuzzled into your neck, lips-to-skin not enough so pressing her cheek to yours, her arm to your body, the length of her leg to the length of you.  When I had done that, I didn't mean it.   I tried.  I wanted to.  I wanted the mis-matched pieces to fit, because I wanted to be part of a two. I don't now. But back then, I did. I wish I had been kinder about explaining that it wasn't you. That is was the maths of it. The equation of our parts. I wish I'd been kinder in general. Because, that's just it: you are kind and gentle and sensitive and I treated you as "not enough", somehow, because you weren't what I needed in those moments, what I'd imagined, and I knew that if I came over to say hi you'd continue to be kind and gentle and sensitive and that, truth told, I don't deserve that.  Not from you. Not when she looked so happy, too.