Abundance and Gratitude
Shortcuts to happiness
How is it that someone with a condition as prone to pity as mine can feel such gratitude? Not the demonstrative kind. There is no one I am trying to reassure with my happiness, not anymore. The kind of contentment I’ve found myself enjoying in the usually unsettling lead up to publication can only come from the knowledge of its necessary transience. I’m sorry, dear reader, but to experience this kind of peace you must be more aware of your mortality, and for this, you must brush up against death.
As the seasons change, so must our feelings. Lately, I have been sitting in the little wild garden I love and watching the family of birds flit in and out of their shaded hiding place, the trees that delineate my garden from the properties behind it. Their secret language is ecstatic - a choral song of thankfulness. I wonder what they are grateful for? There is still abundance close by, the land not yet scarred by heat. The little bird feeder I tend has seeds, nuts, water, sourdough bread.
Above my head, planes, big and small, score a white line through the blue. I eat ice lollies and drink wine, serve dinner outside for one. Six months ago, such freedom and contentment felt impossible. It was winter, yes, but I was alone without sunshine, without birds and sky and vitamin D.
In many ways, I wonder if I should be less comfortable, that the ease with which I am going about my days these last few weeks is proof of my ineptitude. My agent has my new novel so I’m not writing until she tells me what to do. There is a delicious lightness to this purgatory - despite the stakes.
A Healthy Appetite is out in two and a half months. Next week, I appear in public for the first time and must convince people I am a serious author. As I write this, a spark of terror thrills through me. There it is, the necessary reminder of how fallible this tranquility is.
I’ve just started Sophie Mackintosh’s forth novel Permanence and it seems to me it carries much the same feeling as my days have: an ephemeral unreality. A longing for a state of bliss to remain unchanged, held between palms like a precious egg warming in the sun. With any luck, I will finish this gorgeous book before half term ends and remember these days as the beginning of something wonderful and dream-like.
Screen Saver 🎬
What I’m Watching
Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Season One - Now Streaming on Apple TV
Margo, named after someone’s grandma (mine, incidentally) but definitely not doddery, is the daughter of a former Hooter’s waitress (Michelle Pfeiffer) and a down an out pro wrestler (Nick Offerman, ladies and gentlemen!).
The series begins with Margo, quite predictably, engaging in extracurricular activities with her creative writing professor. At first, I thought: ‘Here we go again!’ To be fair, when I began this series I was fresh from reading and mostly disliking Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy. First there was Lolita, then came many inverted Lolita’s. Horny self-destructive protagonist’s wooing limping older men, only too happy to drop their marital and familial responsibilities for some fresh skin.
Thankfully, Margo flunks out of college and we swiftly bypass the icky angst and yearning. Why? She’s pregnant! Experiencing what one imagines to be an instant connection with the collection of cells gathering in her uterus, she decides to keep it, a decision that marks the start of said money troubles. Babies are adorable leeches, and so the bills quickly pile up without a job that will have her.
We move through the pregnancy months quickly to find Margo bug-eyed at a till attempting to buy diapers (which are horribly expensive, by the way). In a fit of inspiration, Margo decides there must be other ways to pay her bills, a role she can play from her bedroom with her loyal roommates help, for example. And here is a sexy alien persona born who, for a cost, will tell you what Pokemon your genitals most resemble and later, live in your phone.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles is about the fierce love a mother has for her child and what she will do to protect them. It’s also about non-nuclear families, their messes and triumphs. Plus, it taught me a thing or two about the breadth and scope of OnlyFans, which, it turns out, is not just feet picks after all.
Current Reads 📚
Hunger & Thirst by Claire Fuller - out now with Fig Tree
Hunger & Thirst is as compelling as it is drenched in terror. As a horror girlie this gave me everything I needed: bumps in the night; a haunting; a possession of sorts; a homage to all the horror movies and books I’ve loved before. But beyond this, it’s also a deeply moving book about friendship and it’s violence and legacy.
Sixteen-year-old Ursula is a child far from nurtured by the 1980’s care system in the UK. Her life has seen everything but stability, so when she’s offered a place to live for free at an abandoned-house-turned-squat she jumps at the opportunity. It’s a home, or at least, it looks like one...
Then there’s her burgeoning friendship with enigmatic co-worker Sue, who, although volatile, offers Ursula an avenue into family and acceptance. When Sue makes a dare one day, it’s the first step towards a dark, thorny path Ursula never expected she’d ever take.
Spanning decades, Hunger & Thirst had me utterly gripped, utterly heartbroken, and gasping by the last page.
I loved everything about it. Pick it up and find yourself thirsty and hungry too - just try to resist the flies okay!?