I’ve been a little busy the past couple of weeks so no missive from me today. I usually set aside two hours a week to write this and add the images and links and so on, often it comes out as less, but even that has been a squeeze right now, so I will be back next week.
Instead I am going to share the link to my London book launch event. I will be talking to beautiful genius Monica Heisey, I am very excited (she is very funny so the event will be too). Please come if you can. And thank you so much if you have pre ordered a copy, or written me a blurb, or done something like post on social media already. It is quite strange having a novel coming out and I’m so grateful for any support, it really means the world.
And then I had two pieces out this week. One is an essay for Liberties I’m excited about, on humour and what I think it can do, and a caginess I have noticed in some conversations I’ve been having lately, and some other things.
The other is an interview with Nicole Flattery about her terrific book Nothing Special, which is out in the US this week. American readers of this substack you need to be getting to a book shop and buying this book. It has so much to say about social media and celebrity culture, but nobody in the book is sat around on the computer (except for a few sly moments in the early chapters).
It also says something very interesting about human nature and failure. A lot of the time at the minute, if a character in a novel is deadbeat or marginalised in some way, then the point of the book is that they ascend beyond this. This is actually a conservative message I think, although those books tend to be marketed as progressive or “challenging”. Nothing Special is very much going against the grain on this, and in a lot of other ways too. I love it! It got a brilliant review in the New Yorker this week, by Peter C. Baker (also a great writer).
Till next time xxxxx
P.S. Weekly flowers: