Hello again,
Last week I had an essay up, about a type of person I think of as “life’s losers”. It was about the way a certain kind of woman feels much too “seen” by the nightmarish status seeking portrayed in Fleishman is in Trouble, and the men who seek meaning and direction by paying to support Andrew Tate. Both these types fall under a category I think of as “red rope around a bin”, by which I mean they would queue up at a red rope erected around literally anything - a bin, even - and clamour desperately to get behind it.
But it’s a type of person who exists in many other iterations too: the sort of person who would miss a close friend’s engagement party to go to an event where they might be in with the chance of meeting a minor internet celebrity; or who name drops constantly, especially when this relates to people they don’t actually know; disloyal people; people who are too concerned with the minutiae of arcane social groups they don’t even belong to; a person who can’t have a conversation at a party without scanning the room for better opportunities; a person who regularly changes their view about someone entirely depending on what other people think of them.
Someone who will invite themselves to a party and then be rude to whoever brought them, thinking this will bestow the appearance of social status, and not a bad reputation. Someone who joins in with an internet callout they don’t agree with, for the sense of being seen to be part of something righteous. Anyone who pretends to like work which they know is bad. Anyone who needs to be given the permission of institutional validation to say they like work which they know is good.
We all have a bit of this in us. But there are some people who are like through and through, all the way to their core. It’s turtles all the way down.
The reason I think of those with this mentality as “life’s losers” is that it seems to me to be choosing the life of a sidekick, a person always just on the outside, craning for a look in. To put it plainly, if you have to be told what to like, or what’s important or interesting, then by definition you aren’t really living your life for yourself.
But I was thinking about the opposite of this kind of person this weekend. I took the train to Paris for my birthday and went to one of my favourite places. The Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen.
This is a series of shops and stalls, some selling second hand clothes and jewellery, some set up like living rooms selling furniture. I love the different tastes and styles you can see across the different collections. One room will have zebra prints, white fabrics, mirrors and then, unexpectedly, a lot of bottle green furniture. Another will pitch dark, sharp, varnished black pine against sheepskin. There is a man who operates one stall who looks like he has been on one long night out for the past 4 or 5 decades. His stall sells a leather version of every imaginable item of clothing.
I love thinking about their lives. They all seem so happy and confident in their particular eccentricities. I don’t know if it’s really a job for any of them, it seems like more of a weekend pastime. And there is this sense of cheekiness and camaraderie among the people who work there, and those who shop there as well.
People who regularly go to second hand markets to genuinely shop love to argue about money with strangers and to spend hours and hours of their weekend hoking through stacks of weird, and quite possibly broken, trinkets to potentially find nothing of interest. And the commonality of this (I think it’s this anyway) translates to a strange type of friendliness and cordiality I don’t really encounter anywhere else. Everyone is always nodding at each other, pausing to say, “Yes, good one” about a stranger’s purchases, and checking they aren’t intersecting someone else’s particular route around the rails. It’s very bad form to cut in front of someone.
The stallholders at this market seem to have a lot of craic together. They have lunch and wine and cheese together on little tables.
And they all have their own brand of off-kilter banter. One, when I asked to try on a certain top, squawked: “That’ll never fit!” (He was right.) I bought a shirt and a black waistcoat from another. “They’re very clean!” he declared, as he handed them over. “Yes, very clean.” And he made a facial expression which told me they maybe couldn’t possibly be less clean.
One little pink shop (there are a mixture of makeshift shops with doors and windows and open stalls) I looked into had the calming warmth of a fairy’s den. I went in to take a walk around. There was a lot of pretty extraordinary vintage YSL and Dior costume jewellery (most of it priced at at least 5 grand) which I am very unlikely to ever see in the flesh again.
There was also a very funny argument happening, between the grumpy old man who worked there and a young Eastern European woman who was trying on a sequined dress. They were both speaking English and basically screaming at each other about the quality of the dress she was trying. And, when she took it off and changed back into her black tracksuit, they continued to row about various other items in the shop and then other historic collections in the abstract. I had the feeling they probably had this interaction every week, they seemed like they were best friends.
As she left a young-ish man asked the young woman who also worked there about the price of a dress on a certain mannequin. She replied: 53,000 euros. Again, where else would I see an exchange like this?
As I walked to the area beyond a row of restaurants, where there are more clothes stalls, I saw a man from one stall run-swaggering from his kiosk to his friend two kiosks down, holding two enormous wine glasses (one white, one red) and bearing a huge grin which conveyed an incredibly potent “bunking off school” energy. There’s one of life’s winners, I thought.
Till next week! xxxxxx
Some Things I Liked Recently:
This extract of Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, which is out this week and you should buy!!!!
My US book cover. I love love love it. I will share some links which you can use to pre-order it soon. I notice people are always apologising for promoting their books, but it won’t be me I’m afraid. I killed myself writing it, I want you all to read it, so I will continue to bang on and on about it until you’re sick hearing about it :) :).
Life's loser alert! "My routine looked drastically different from that of my roommates. I had a GPA to upkeep and an online internship. I wasn't out partying; I was home working most of the time, and it became difficult to concentrate on my assignments."
https://www.insider.com/nyu-student-hated-study-abroad-semester-florence-italy-2023-3
this concept really struck a chord - love your newsletter thanks for writing!
Hey Rachel, love your writing, I am looking forward to your book.