Hello all, it always feels slightly absurd to write these letters in the times we live in, which has been the entire time I have written these. I truly do believe in finding pockets of joy, and also keeping your commentary to yourself when it comes to complex geopolitics. Nonetheless and as hollow as it sounds, I hope wherever you are when reading this that you are safe.
I don’t and won’t tell you where to spend money or energy. These are just links if you are at loss of where to support, and you can also check twitter for in real time comments from individual organisers seeking specific supports:
Donate to feed people at the Ukraine/ Poland border, evacuate families in Yemen, and support children seeking medical attention in Palestine
Reading // Long Form
I have devoured Vladimir and it was as rompy and as complex as I had hoped. Covers can be deceiving and although the faceless woman falling asleep in an inconvenient place is perhaps synonymous with younger sad girl / millennial fiction, Vladimir takes a refreshingly different approach. Amongst the impossible to navigate college campuses amid sexual assault allegations and ageing professors who want to remind you of how different power dynamics were in their day, namely that they didn’t have a name so didn’t exist, is a middle aged woman stranded between coasting and drowning. Julia May Jonas constructs believable women, morally obtuse and battered from life experience who were infinitely more interesting to me than the women of my own age i have read about recently. Prior to Vladimir I finished Mrs March which has an equally deranged middle aged woman gone rogue, and I appreciated both these woman for a foreboding glimpse into my own future.
I am also half way through Self Care by Leigh Stein, a perfect palette cleanser and my idea of a light read - whatever that really means. It is a darkly funny, satirical look at the girl boss phenomena. I say light because Stein’s prose are easy to absorb, no frills writing that leaves plenty of room for wit and humour, yet enough substance to the story to keep me engaged. It would be perfect for a holiday read. We follow two young woman on a quest to transform social media to become a haven of self care, self flagellation and self congratulatory online vulnerability. Its unnamed influencers could be any of the copious number you follow at present, and Stein’s self awareness is enough to let you know she isn’t mocking the individuals, mostly the system they exist in, and in part, the role we all play in contributing to them.
I was discussing with a friend recently how the nature of satire has changed in the online landscape we exist in, and the shift towards inherent distrust in the other, where almost everything is read without good faith. Although this book does nothing but forward the cause for internet fakery, it does demonstrate an ability to mock, at a distance, the absurd nature of internet culture that we all preside and participate in, without the cruelty and reactive nature of internet pile ons / cancellations / calling outs and ins or whatever terminology is now in vogue for describing interactions with strangers who disagree online. It also illustrates perfectly the benefit in long form cultural critique, 200 pages will always better encapsulate a point, particularly if satirical, than a tweet and in this case, perhaps even that is not long enough.
(I am now laughing to myself as I add the links for this book, and on searching self care as the title I am met with a barrage of titles including: self care for new mums,
Reading // Short Form
I sent an article to a friend about Inshallah, because it will always remind me of her, and immediately she replied, ah the love language of I saw this and thought of you. This week I read a piece on exactly that: The joy of 'Saw this and thought of you.
I am so excited for Angela Hui’s memoir coming out this summer, about growing up in the family business: takeaways. This piece for Time Out introducing their series on London’s takeaways, is a perfect taster (pun intended) of her words.
Back to some light relief, Amelia Tait finds out what its like to be a baby under the hot show biz lights: They have agents, do auditions and can still steal a scene after filling their nappies – meet the baby actors. It is as absurd and mildly bleak as expected.
One of my favourite internet rabbit holes is evangelical religion. I grew up catholic until my grandmother became too feeble to fight with me every Sunday about getting up early for mass. I find religion endlessly interesting as a paradigm in which people lead their lives. Although I am no longer religious, and haven’t been in my adult life at all, I find the particular flavour of American Christianity that bathes in western exceptionalism, wild. I’ve read a lot about Liberty university, including an essay in Molly Mccully Brown’s book that features the school, but i was enamoured by this vanity fair piece, chok full of salacious insider gossip and a peak behind the opaque, white, American curtain: Inside Jerry Falwell Jr’s unlikely rise and precipitous fall at liberty university
Cooking //
a new segment for this month, and as so many of you have enjoyed my instagram reels about my cooking endeavours, I thought this would be a good place to link and store the recipes I have cooked. as a PSA - I eat 95% vegan + eggs sometimes so these recipes reflect my diet, if they aren’t specifically vegan I just sub ingredients as I see fit.
I miss the Great British staple: Greggs. No one here does sausage rolls I like so we’ve resorted to making our own. Recently the Lazy Cat Kitchen veggie sausage rolls - sub half the brown rice for lentils if like me, you are a non meat eater attempting to eat more protein so you aren’t hungry an hour after lunch
Tom, my boyfriend, loves to follow a precise recipe, something simple that he can see through from start to finish. After many years of misunderstanding the ways each other likes to cook, I think we are finally getting there. He likes order, and I like guesswork, he doesn’t enjoy doing two things at once and I have no patience for stirring or chilling. We both make a mess. Recently, he has been making naan breads and they are so fluffy, it will be hard to return to the supermarket versions.
We are also partial to any kind of sandwich/wrap with actually good ingredients and not falafel based (no offence to falafels but they are the only vegetarian offering in far too many situations. We have been roasting a whole cauliflower each week, this mob kitchen recipe (and the yogurt dressing) is delicious, especially wrapped in the aforementioned naan bread.
On that note, this is also the perfect time to recommend Nina’s Tiny letter, Comfort Food and Rebecca’s Dinner document as two food newsletters you need to read.
thoughts in progress //
I have found it harder to find words to talk about my realities since I have started writing for money in earnest. There is a self consciousness to my personal thoughts now, what if someone who wants to hire me reads this, sees me complaining about the state of my health or the ways in which I find existing hard. It feels pessimistic to think like this and yet I know friends who have been denied jobs for less, and have others who always google the candidates they are interviewing. It seems to come with the territory of writing online, I do not wish to reminisce with rose tinted glasses on the ways that writers before me, before the internet era, because what use does collective nostalgia bring us, except for erasing a more accurate history. However, there is something to be said about writing about the self to pay the bills. In the age of representation first, it is only normal if not now, entirely necessary, to have some personal connection that you are willing to admit to an editor if not to the internet at large, that relates to the subject of your story. So each time you write, you expose more of yourself to others, to both the people who thought they knew you intimately and the strangers who seek ammunition to take you down. My knee jerk reaction to anyone I know in real life, complimenting an article I wrote, is now just embarrassment.
The first person narrative, or speaking on issues that you have lived experience of, is not bad in and of itself, we know the media class is narrow, and not representative of the society it seeks to talk about, and that has resulted in near daily misrepresentations of individuals and groups. Even in the current context of this weekend, reporting of the atrocities taking place in western Europe fail to acknowledge the complex history of the group of people foreign correspondents have deemed ‘voiceless’, a phrase that deserves to be buried. Where issues arise, is when we move from acknowledgemnt of the expertise lived experience creates, the requirement to outline ones vulnerability / marginalisation in order to prove some kind of get out of jail free card. There is a deep rooted desire in writing to universalise a single experience to an entire group, and the same goes for readers who will shout: this isn’t what happened to me, so it must not be true/ you are misrepresenting me/ you are leaving people out. So many of these thoughts come back to the few that circle around my head late at night: There is no need for universality, and there is no reason to understand people in bad faith.
All of this discourse also tracks back to, you guessed it, the internet. The clickbait headlines, the twenty four hour doom scrolling and the ardent desire to flatten everything into a tweet. There is no room for nuance, and when it comes in the form of novel length threads someone will still be at the bottom replying to it as if the original poster has committed a crime. There is no space for disagreement, understand that two things can be true at once, or neither true at all, now there is only listing your illness in your bio as a qualifier to talk about all sickness or health. It is the nature of the industry, and it isn’t stopping soon, and I am still here, participating in, mining my trauma and others similar to me, for money to pay the rent. What I really mean to say is, I think the internet has made us all worse people.
That is all for this week friends, catch you on another part of the internet,
Hannah x