It’s been a busy week with a) my partner’s mom visiting us, b) me baking bread obsessively. If we are what we eat, I am mostly bread and wine at this point, very Eucharistic, I know.
I have been leafing through Christie’s real estate magazines and fantasising of all the gorgeous properties I am going to own at some point. It’s a good conditioning for the brain too: after a number of obscenely expensive castles and ranches a three million dollar manor seem cheap. Truly, nothing makes me more delusional than Christie’s advertisement. My only beef with them is that you have to pay for it. Who on earth would pay voluntarily to receive ads? Well, me. But who else?
I have barely been writing this week but spent a considerable amount of time thinking about writing. It’s all part of the process, I know, but knowing doesn’t make it feel any better. The secret I think is to expect a certain lever of discomfort and just go with it without making excuses. I am a master of that, by that I mean making excuses. I needed to by a new notebook desperately but my usual shop didn’t care a single one I deemed worthy of my ideas. I still have a very strong mentality that a good, not good, right notebook is going to fix my entire life. The power of smooth paper, am I right?
Short reads
I suddenly became a hit writer – but I felt my husband treated my career like an interruption of my domestic work
Can you rescue a writer with 1000 words?
10 things you should know about freezing your eggs
Sex toys, selfishness and why we won’t settle: life as a single woman, across the generations
Getting shit done doesn't make you a good person
Why having children made me more, not less, hopeful that we can fight the climate crisis
Books
My goal for this year was to read at least two books per week but I had time for only one short (96 pages) novella — a good one.
“Nothing but the rain” by Naomi Salman is a dystopian horror set in a town where it rains every day, and the rain washes people’s memories away. It’s beautifully written in a form of eery diary entries. It took me a lot of processing to enjoy the ending but I finally did. After all, that’s what I love about female dystopian fiction the most: the centricity of ‘human.’
Listen
Watch
I am still knee deep (season 7) in Grace and Frankie and it brings me so much joy I don’t want for it to end. If my husband turned out to be gay after 40 years of marriage, that’s exactly how I’d like to spend my remaining years.
Fredrik and I started watching Quicksand (lots of trigger warnings) today, and so far it gives me a huge amount of anxiety, but that’s to be expected from a Scandinavian show. We are on episode three and it keeps getting worse.