back up blog

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.

I hung out with the girls used to nanny, because I love them and miss them and they teach me so very much, and the seven-year old fell off her scooter on the way to the cafe because of a Very Big Stone. She cried, it was the end of the world, and then we decided to take the stone home to (wash, first, and then) keep on a shelf, so that we could show it who the boss is. And you know what? Ain't that just it? You can get tripped up and be afraid, or you can get tripped up, wrangle the motherfucker that dared, own it, and then take it home to draw a moustache on in Sharpie, next to the word "LOSER". 

The message said, "I wonder about what you wrote, in your column, about the guy you dated who wanted to be friends - did it work? How did you do it? I'm in a similar situation, you see..." I didn't know how to write back that the man who "just wanted to be friends" sat across from me drinking wine and talked about how he thought what we'd like in the bedroom might "match", and who looked at my bum when I went to the bar but wanted me to know about who he'd been sleeping with. The man who "just wanted to be friends" stayed out until 2 a.m. in hotel bars and pressed his body up to mine, and my resolve was weak and I so desperately wanted to be the friend, you see. So desperately wanted the sense of self it takes to say you did not dent my fragile heart because I forgot that the biggest sense of self would be to admit it and walk away. When will I learn that I have nothing to prove? I wanted him to change his mind, I suppose. I did a...

And the music plays and the moon peeks through and the darkness of outside means we see ourselves so very clearly in the giant glass doors. We play the song again and again and again, and we stretch and we spin and we kick and we do everything else we've seen on the television, on the internet, in that music video about loving deeply and wholly and for a very long time. I don't know much about romantic love. Not really. I'm trying to love myself into the answer and the question, I know that much. But with you three girls, in that house at the top of Islington and that song playing for the fourth time in a row. Well. My heart grew a size in a way no man has ever encouraged, and I overflowed in gratitude that three children who don't belong to me could remind me what it is, indeed, to love.