A grey Sunday in Sydney ...
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A grey, gloomy winter Sunday in Sydney, Australia. Dog walks, supermarket, nap, chicken roasting in the oven, gearing up for a new week, a week in which the television series based on my book, Fake, drops on Paramount+. In my utterly non-objective opinion, despite a few niggling issues (I’ve written about those niggles in an article for Good Weekend magazine to be published Saturday, July 6) the series is wonderful. Still … life goes on. People keep saying to me, “you must be so excited” … but the excitement belongs now to the production team, the brilliant people at Kindling Pictures. It’s their triumph now, not mine. For me, there’s a small warm glow: I wrote a book that had an impact. But, life goes on.
Meanwhile, a complimentary subscription to my new Substack newsletter for anyone who can work out what the words are on this old glass I found today in the mud at my regular inner-Sydney dog park/oval (which overlays a 19th century rubbish dump). For me, it’s really all about the blue … this blue/aqua colour … my photo editing skills are insufficient to give you quite the exact colour … but I’m intrigued by what alcohol or cordial might have been contained in the bottle these shards once belonged to. I can see the letters “… TONS” on the top shard and “… EDD …” on the bottom. Any ideas?
🎵Mood
A little something from the Fake soundtrack because this is what I wrote in the first article I ever wrote about my relationship with the mendacious fantasist “Joe”:
“… by the time we’d found the axe, it was the morning after the evening before and I was a bit loved up. The playlist I’d made had drifted through the night, through Peggy Lee’s Fever and April Stevens’ Teach Me Tiger. The high anxiety I’d felt about spending a weekend away with a man I barely knew had subsided. It was a crisp, lovely morning in June 2014 and we were brushing close. Easy then, to find comedy value in a horror trope. Besides, this man wasn’t an axe murderer. He was daggy and gentle and his green eyes twinkled.”
Vamp view
Hilarious! Dear friends, venture forth slowly if swear words make you tremble.
Reading*
A brilliant piece on the “shamelessness of mediocre men” from Annabel Crabb, IMHO, perhaps Australia’s most excellent interrogator of matters pertaining to women and gender. Australian specifics, universal issues: “… The horrible truth is that in the Australian legacy media landscape, there are too many stories of senior men who forgive themselves their own lapses of judgement, or forgive each other’s because they’re ‘good blokes’.”
Terrifying, what this article (also ABC online) reveals: “An investigation into the criminal use of surveillance devices has found they are being used by organised criminal networks to facilitate organised crime, and extensively by high-risk domestic and family violence offenders.”
In Christie’s online publication, the story (and video) of Picasso’s muse, Sylvette David. “When the paintings were exhibited, Sylvette became an overnight sensation and her home in Vallauris was besieged by photographers. ‘I used to hide in the cupboard,’ she says. She appeared in Paris Match and Elle magazine. Brigitte Bardot copied her hairstyle and the way she dressed; men sent her proposals of marriage …”
The horrifying struggle of a girl, a woman, living in a world that wants us all to be thin – “I Was Told No One Wants Fat Girls … Growing up, my body was a punch line.” In New York magazine’s The Cut, a philosophy professor describes a lifelong struggle with body-image image issues. “I … was so afraid of being sexually rejected for my fatness that I’d do almost anything to be smaller.”
A difficult story in The Sydney Morning Herald … the emotions that might overwhelm people who will never be grandparents. “As more and more of my friends become grandparents, I occasionally experience a visceral feeling that’s already familiar to me. It takes me back to the years in which I was grappling with childlessness – a sense of not belonging, of being left behind, left out, different.”
If, like me, you’ve been unsettled, transient, moved through many places (on your own), had to work hard to establish connections in new cities, you might already have embraced, over and over, a lot of these recommendations. Perhaps also if, for whatever reason, connections have been challenging to maintain, you will have incorporated these things into your life. But, if you’re new to transience and isolation and loneliness, I think you’ll find these ideas so valuable. I’d add, from my own experience, that the most important thing is consistency, regularity. Go back again and again even if you don’t feel like it … to that community garden, swim group, craft group, dog park, volunteer work .. whatever it is … regularity is the secret to forming friendships.
The grief of losing a child … in 1984, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey wrote to his friends about the death of his son: “They phoned the hotel about an hour later to tell us it was over, and that the kidneys were in perfect shape. That was about four A.M. They phoned again a little after six to say that the kidneys were already in two young somebodies. What a world. We’ve heard since that they used twelve things out of him, including corneas. And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree.”
Can a ketogenic diet improve mental health? America’s National Public Radio investigates. “Now, around a dozen clinical trials are in the works, testing the diet's effect on mental illness, most notably for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression, but also for conditions like anorexia, alcoholism and PTSD.”
Success with a wooden spinning wheel, “a menagerie of animals”, homemade crafts, teaching workshops – in The Guardian, how a Northumberland woman has become “the linchpin” of an online community. “It was a dark time … I came back healed”.
And you know you needed this, right!? In The Guardian (a question in Jessica Defino’s “Ask Ugly” column” from a worried person describing herself/himself/themself as “Lost in the Bush”), what grooming approach is appropriate, in the 21st century, towards pubic hair? And, quoting Defino: “In an effort to answer your other two questions – ‘Is my anus supposed to look like a naked mole rat? Are women actually doing this?’ – I polled over 14,000 people online through my newsletter, The Review of Beauty, and I have some beautiful news to report: the bush is back, baby.”
* NB: Given my newslettering absence for some months, some of these pieces might not be fresh, but I’ve been storing good stuff up! (I have SO much stored up!)
Food
Not food really, but wow, amazing (I’m reluctant to share because, AI is going to destroy us all in one way or another, yes, but, Nice Aunties is/are mesmerising).
Right, yes, food, in my real world: Diet: poor. Cooking: limited: Takeaway: lots. Wine: too much. Guilt and self-flagellation: huge. But: right now, an organic chook and community garden sweet potatoes are in the oven. Things are looking up. Next newsletter, I promise, I’ll test out a recipe for you. Thinking of this.
And, in the days ahead, I’ll be devoting myself to bowls like this.
Plus, for the (not-red-carpet) Fake launch Thursday … at this stage in my living room, this is looking likely, Lola going nuts with all the visitors.
(And, oh my god, this … a chocolate cake, a Devil’s Food Cake.)
Home
A fine house on a bend in the river in Melbourne … lovely! (and … I know they’re rare … I interviewed the locations manager for Fake … she had to find one … a behind-the-scenes glimpse … she letterboxed homes along Melbourne’s Yarra River to source a house for a scene … one generous riverside landowner came through with a location!)
And, this, also all about the water:
And, wow, the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley’s stately home: yes, I’ll take it, thanks. Lola and I will be very happy here. And, cold. And, weirded out.
But really, all I want is a cottage, in a forest, modest, like this.
Fashion
A blog post I stumbled upon, in the blog “TKIN: Philospher Encounter Modern Life”. A struggle with artificial fibres, disquiet over the environmental damage. “What can a person wear?” is its title. A quote from the article: “A few weeks ago I had a minor freak-out about my plastic clothes and the plastic microfibers. There are so many horrible things happening, but I think my brain fastened on this one because the causal link between me and the outcome is so direct: I wear the clothes, I wash the clothes, the tiny fibers fly out into the world and ruin everything. I could stop doing that.” And, bonus, an introduction to “Guppyfriend” bags.
And, how fabulous is this 1910 gown? – pink, but not pink at all, strong, up yours.
Oh, and while we’re drifting through that (not) idyllic pre-World-War-I era, this is lovely too (blues, they kill me, intoxicate me):
And, returning to 2024, buy less. According to a Guardian piece: “Australians buy more cheap fashion than any other wealthy nation, according to the Berlin-based thinktank Hot or Cool Institute, and need to reduce their clothing consumption by 74%.”
Socials
(via Twitter; not often I share something from a man of the church but this guy clearly rocks; here’s the story he, and many others, are cross about)
(via Twitter; David Baddiel’s new memoir, “a twisted love letter” to his parents, is out now)
(via Instagram Threads; um, forgive me if you’ve seen me share this elsewhere 🤷♀️ Anya is amazing – a “major” new talent, according to this review)
Stolen words
“I’d prefer to be naked but a muumuu will do. ... My current style is kind of bohemian and eccentric and all over the place, which feels appropriate because I don’t really know who I am most days (beyond a flesh-bound manifestation of love and stardust). I hate when I read an interview and the subject is like, ‘I’m very confident in who I am’ or something. How? How do all these people know who they are? Enough to be CONFIDENT in it?? I have no clue! Maybe someday I’ll figure it out but also I doubt it… The universe is vast and the possibilities are infinite.” – Dacy Gillespie, anti-diet and weight inclusive personal stylist via Jessica DeFino’s The Review of Beauty
There was a brewery in Eddington, Victoria (near Bendigo) - looks very much like “EDDI” on one shard and “TONS” on the other to me! (Love a good mystery to solve!!!)
Thank goodness you are BACK!!
Another great read, thanks Stephanie.