Turning 36 and books books books
Thoughts on sliding ever closer to middle age (someone more snappy than me dubbed it the 'millenopause') and books I've read lately
Guys guys guys, I have been away so long. I missed one Sunday and that turned into two, then I told myself I'd send out a Substack on Wednesday, then I didn't, then I got anxious and squirrelly in my head with no clue what I would write about and every week that passed I felt a little more guilty and despondent. And now I'm back! Yes, somehow I've scrambled out of my slump to say: hello! I'm sad I was gone so long.
Oh, and I turned 36 yesterday. Gulp. Do you know what that age signifies to me? It was the age that Princess Diana was when she died. And Princess Di - I was a big fan, even wrote to her once and received a sweet reply from one of her ladies in waiting - was a grown-up. She was a mother, a divorcee, a royal, a titan that strode the globe in fabulous outfits with coordinating hats. She was an adult. Thirty six is an adult age.
Do I feel like a grown-up? In some ways, you know, I do. I pay my bills. I (mostly) open my mail. I get my work done. I make decisions. I am self sufficient and self reliant (perhaps a little too so) and I am sensible in ways I never was before: I know I need my sleep and eating vegetables will make me feel better and regular exercise is important and sometimes it's best to bite your tongue even when you want to let rip. I feel a damn sight more grown-up now than I ever did in my twenties, bouncing from one thing - a job, a flat, a pack of pals, a boy - to the other.
But I also feel shockingly un-grown-up. I don't think my flat is the flat of a grown-up - what with my flatmate and the unhung pictures propped up against the walls. I don't have children. I don't know about bath time and the school run and what it's like to look ahead, plotting out the coming years with a little person uppermost in your mind. Sometimes all I want is for someone older and wiser to tell me it's all going to be ok. (It's a running joke with my friends that I end many conversations with, “but is everything going to be ok?” My friend Jennie's response is always: “Oh no, absolutely not, but I do think we will have lolz.”).
I'm disarmingly free of any kind of responsibility - no partner, no boss, no kiddies, not even a pet. Sometimes there's a thrill to the freedom of being untethered. Everything could change in an instant. I could up sticks and move overseas (I've done it before), meet a great love, embark on a wholly different career... the potential of a life change is always exciting. But sometimes it's not. I find myself see-sawing between the joy of who knows what happens next and, at the grand old age of 36, the desire for a few anchors.
Some food for thought! Anyhow, I am on a reading jag at the moment. I love books, I love reading, I love how a good book can open your mind and broaden your experience and give you a good time all while doing it so why, why, WHY do I so often scroll instead of read? Particularly when scrolling has the exact opposite effect - it rots my mind, narrows my experience to a bubble decided by an algorithm and, Lord knows, I wouldn't call an Instagram binge a good time. So I really am trying to read and here are three books I've galloped through lately, any of which I think would be a good pick to accompany you on your summer holiday...
Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
I stayed up until two in the morning reading this book. It really is something. It's about a toxic relationship to end all toxic relationships and I just found it unputdownable. It is told from the perspective of our young woman narrator - we never learn her name but we learn everything else about her, trust me. She encounters a man who she finds shockingly attractive - "Nobody who was like that, who looked like that, lived in Dublin, or Ireland, I thought. Nobody so beautiful could live with us" - and the book is about their love affair and the many twists and turns it takes and - spoiler - it isn't headed anywhere good.
There are moments of cruelty that are so realistically told yet make you gasp out loud and there is a hell of a lot of sex. After I finished it, I felt like I'd endured some sort of blunt force trauma to the head. And I was reeling, sending long voice notes dissecting the book to a friend who has also read it. I think the masterful thing that Nolan has done with the book is make it so compelling, so addictive, that the experience of reading it mimics the experience of being in a terrible relationship you refuse to get out of - the book is harsh and grim in parts and yet I couldn't stop reading it and I felt that was similar to the no-name narrator's experience of her relationship - she knows it's going nowhere good and is, in fact, a disaster, but she cannot bring herself to get off the train.
I am aware that this all sounds quite grim. I was urging a pal to read it and when I told her what it was about, she said: "I feel I want a book that makes me feel hopeful about humanity?" But listen, it's a brilliant, brilliant book, I'm obsessed, and I recommend!
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Ok, so this is a very different book. Definitely no overt sex in this one. It's far more genteel - in fact, I found it, in parts, just a little too twee for my tastes. But it was also written in 1922 so I'll let it off the hook. It's a book about four dissatisfied women in London who chance upon an advertisement in The Times for a vacant small medieval Italian castle in Tuscany to rent 'to those who appreciate wistaria and sunshine'. The women - who don't really know each other but club together to cover the expense of the holiday - go off and under the Tuscan sun they are transformed and redeemed. I won't give it all away but it's a book about, I suppose, the magic of a holiday and the possibility of change. It's beautifully written and, at times, moving. She again and again writes about how when you look at people with love, they behave lovingly. And isn't that so true? Haven't you found that you are your best self when around people you love? It was also quite funny to read a novel where Hampstead the area is viewed as a part of London occupied by the shabbier end of the middle class. Ah, how times have changed.
Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key
I'm half way through this book - in fact, I'm about to go lie in the sunshine and finish the rest of it - and I love it. Key is a poet and this book is a memoir framed around her love of the Joni Mitchell album Blue. Key grew up longing for romantic love and believing that that kind of love would shape her life. She is now in her forties and so far, she has not really experienced that conventional love and this memoir is about what it's like to live a life in the absence of romantic love. Again like Acts of Desperation, I feel this synopsis doesn't really 'sell' the book and yet I loved reading it and it articulated so many things I have felt. It's a really brave book - she really puts herself out there in a way I respect deeply. Also, she articulates so many things I have felt but haven't put into words. For instance, how it feels to think you'll forever be living in house shares because you haven't teamed up with a romantic partner to split rent or stump up a deposit for a home together:
"When I visited my friends' homes, I couldn't stop myself from projecting my visions of home into their environments. I would mentally place my ornaments on the mantelpiece, consider which of their artworks I would keep on the walls, swap their colour schemes for mine. In these spaces I felt a new discontent with my situation, how rickety it made me feel to rent, and how frustrated I was that I couldn't work my interior visions on a grander scale. I wanted my friends' domestic lives more than I wanted their relationships, or at least my desire for romantic love was displaced by my desire for their homes, which felt like a less painful thing to focus on."
I also love how she writes about the difficulty of speaking to people with children when you don't have them.
"I lean heavily on being an aunt, of course, taking on conspiratorial whispers about difficulties with food, sleep, tantrums, or telling stories of how my nieces and nephews came to be given their names. But it doesn't feel good - it's a kind of appropriation that isn't an accurate representation of my relationship with them: those difficulties and decisions aren't mine to speak of. It's an inauthentic accounting for myself."
Ooh, and
has a Substack called which I have, of course, subscribed to.If you have any book recommendations for me, please let me know.
Some things I’ve written: this fun feature about going to Instagram school and trying to learn how to be an influencer (spoiler: I didn't take to it). I also wrote about how I decided to splurge the cash and go to see Taylor Swift - am sure the Telegraph readers have taken great pleasure in dragging me to hell and back in the comments over that particular decision. And finally, I'm doing a fun series for that publication where I interview someone who is doing an interesting career about what it's actually like to do the job - the first one was a pilot, the second was a vet, and basically, it's a dream of a job because it satisfies my nosy nature and I have forever been fascinated by what people actually do in their job each day. There are some really interesting professions coming up! And finally, the next Substack will be out next Monday because I'm going to be away but I think it will be a good one! I've got high hopes that it will be a good 'un!
Thank you, as ever, for taking the time to read this Substack. I really have missed writing to you. Until next time xxx
Happy birthday, Isolde! I also had my birthday on 2nd of June (turned 42), and as I reflected on the year(s) passed too, I can confirm without a doubt that it's all going to be ok. Not just ok, it's going to be better with every year that passes!! You'll get to know yourself better and better, you'll know what kind of lifestyle you want and dare live it, you'll know what you can't accept and you will reject it without any second thought. You'll care so much less what society tries to impose on us, laugh in its face and confidently live life on your terms! It gets better because you care to impress less, you'll care to fit in less if it means ignoring what feels good for you.
OK, sermon is over... I too am shocked that Diana died when she was just 36?!?! What? I was definitely not grown up (although already divorced) at 36...
If at least 4 other people comment that they feel shockingly un-grown-up as well, I think we have to re-evaluate what that means because WE can't ALL be feeling un-grown up at the same time, can we? Then to be grown-up must mean something different altogether. Right?