Ever since I got the idea to start a snail mail club three months ago as a side quest, there has been a constant inner refrain of:

• Are you sure you should be doing this?

• Isn’t this something for younger people?

• What will your peers think?

• You’ve spent 20+ years as a women’s journalist and now you’re writing about…goblins?

Snail mail clubs are big in the US, less so in the UK, but a growing trend, nonetheless. Essentially, they are run by individuals or small teams of creatives who send off a hand-crafted letter every month to a subscriber. What you receive depends on the type of mail club and the strength of the creative. Some focus heavily on artwork, others on storytelling, but the overall motivation is part of a pushback we are seeing among people who want to spend time off their screens, to consume things not created by AI and to reignite that delight we once had in receiving a letter that isn’t a bill. There are mail clubs for people into cosy fantasy, nature, crime fiction, music, romance, food - quite literally everything.

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A few months ago, I didn’t even know these existed until my algorithm served me a video that explained a person’s mail club, and I fell in love with the idea. Not as a creator, just as a consumer. When it arrived, a spark ignited. It wasn’t just that it tapped into a deep sense of nostalgia, from a time when my friends and I used to exchange letters because that was the only way we could share long stories with each other especially over the holidays. I also felt this deep urge and need to create a world and write stories that I could send to people. For them to feel it with their hands. But - and there was a huge but - it felt like uncharted territory.

Given that my profession is a writer, you might be thinking Huh? What are you talking about? Let me explain.

I’ve been dabbling with the idea of writing in the fantasy genre for a long time now, but because most of my career is rooted in women’s journalism, as well as non-fiction books and fiction books, I’ve been feeling… wibbly about it. (Wibbly is almost certainly a word). On the one hand, I’m lucky to have the career I have, on the other, it feels as if there is less agility to move about and try new things.

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I also watched a lot of videos about mail clubs and the main impression I got was that these are run by young people. Not middle-aged people like me. Not only did it feel like perhaps I was treading into territory I shouldn’t and potentially taking away business from people who needed it more than me, but it made me wonder: well, hang on, why is no one my age doing this? What blind spot am I not seeing?

But also, while I am a writer, my work has always been promoted/published by a third-party. Media organisations, book publishers - even Substack has an inbuilt system. The idea of directly selling to people and having to create a shop felt far out of my comfort zone.

The deeper I got into the research - how much postage would cost, how would I print things - the more I convinced myself this was a terrible idea. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the algorithm would serve me a video on HOW TO MAKE YOUR MAIL CLUB A SUCCESS one minute to THIS IS WHY MY MAIL CLUB FAILED. One thing was certain, however - I knew I had to find an illustrator because while I love art as a hobby, I’m no professional. My strength was storytelling and creative direction, and I needed to find someone who could bring that to life.

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I wanted to create a comic-cosy fantasy world called Goldentown, in which there was a disparity between magical beings. My protagonist was going to be a goblin called Emerald who moves to the big city after outgrowing her sleepy shire, and I wanted to turn the idea of goblins being nasty little creatures on its head. What if everything we knew about goblins was simply propaganda pushed by people who had the most to gain from them being disenfranchised? I also wanted to make it humorous which is why Emerald is lactose intolerant - goblins are notorious for stealing milk, apparently.

But it still seemed like a reach. I wasn’t sure how to bring this to life.

Just when I was on the point of giving up, I came across my illustrator Emilia Proctor, literally as I was googling goblin art. (Her Etsy shop is called Goblin_Ems).

While I was furiously researching stationery, saying things like ‘hmm, I’m not sure if that gsm is sufficient’, obsessing over envelopes and trying to work out print costs, Emilia worked on the initial set of designs needed to promote the mail club. During this time, I almost disassembled because the inner monologue was unkind and blew with the velocity of a gale.

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As I explained my new project to friends and family - all of whom were very loving and supporting - and heard myself saying the words out loud: ‘I am launching a mail club that features goblins’ it sounded crazy. Also: if it failed, there would be a lot more eyeballs on it than when I was younger. Would the people I work with lose respect for me? For the first time, I could understand why people over 40 get more risk averse. You understand that failure is a lot more textured and nuanced than simply win or lose.

All of that quietened down when two things happened. The first, was that I wrote out a detailed story of the world I was building, a place called Goldentown which is semi-medieval, fantasy and magical. I asked my sister to look at it, and to pass it on to my niece who’d expressed an interest in reading it. My sister loved it, and caveated that she wasn’t just saying it to appease me, but that more importantly, my niece - a brutally honest 12-year-old - also loved it. This was the first time anyone had seen my work and I realised sheepishly - oh yeah, I needed feedback to mitigate the mad voices in my head.

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The second was when Emilia sent me the first sketch for the Goldentown mail club. I loved it, and crucially, it also made this real. More importantly, there was a slow-blossoming delight that this thing, that I created was taking shape.

Although the self-doubt was initially high, the little moments of wonder and delight that burst into being have taught me something about trying new things in my forties. Starting this mail club has paradoxically taken me far out of my comfort zone, but has also unexpectedly tapped into very old root systems of joy.

I cannot explain the delight upon seeing the first customers sign up, or how I felt when I saw the messages of encouragement in their sign-up sheet. Realising that people need and want escapism and whimsy and that it’s okay to provide that - not everything has to be so serious all the time. Learning how to set up an online shop after three days of losing my mind trying to figure it out. Figuring out how to import new fonts, emailing wholesalers for envelope orders.

But also realising that I’ve loved stationery and fantasy writing since I was a small child, and that actually, I’m doing the thing I loved from a very early age. No wonder the happiness feels so pure and uncut.

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While there have been moments where I’ve screamed into the void - realising I’d priced things wrong and would need a higher number of orders to break even - and I’m sure there will be some hidden surprises when I’ll pulling the orders together, I am so glad I pushed through the discomfort to see what was waiting on the other side.

Someone described this as a side quest, and I love that. While feeling sure of myself is a hard-won aspect of being middle-aged that I wouldn’t swap for anything, I do think creating opportunities for delight and new ways of thinking are crucial to seeing our world through new eyes. Well, in my case, through the eyes of a goblin.

Watch this space for how it’s going, and lessons I’ve learned!

Sign up to the Goldentown mail club - orders for each month close on the 1st of that month to allow time for printing and packing. The last date for the very first September edition is 1st September. I ship to the UK and everywhere apart from the EU, and shipping is included in the prices. Import taxes may be added however to certain countries which the buyer is responsible for.

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More from Poorna:

Recently, I came face to face (well, screen to screen) with an old, faceless enemy - white middle-aged man who tells me that the only reason I have the job that I have is because someone, somewhere had a diversity quota. For context, this was in response to a video I posted online, where I was referencing an event I had done, talking about my new book She Wanted More.

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In recent times, the well that keeps giving has been the manosphere, and it yields rewards on both sides when it comes to online engagement – those defending it and those against it – because it is hard to not be triggered by it. (Think about how many articles and notes were generated on Substack, for instance, when Andrew Tate joined the platform).

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Although there was an enormous spike in content around Louis Theroux’s documentary Manosphere in March – it was one of Netflix’s most watched shows and outperformed the Beckham documentary in its first week – in an attempt to keep those clicks coming, journalists are turning an eye to the femosphere. That isn’t bad in itself but the key concern in how it is being reported.

The femosphere is a term coined by Dr Jilly Kay who is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at Loughborough University and wrote a paper about it in 2024, and she used it to describe an online community of women who view men as irredeemable and problematic, and that they should be exploited for financial gain. I’d advise reading the paper as it lays out Dr Kay’s argument brilliantly – but to summarise, she says that the femosphere may seem like feminism but in actual fact, it has closer links to regressive right-wing ideologies that seek to oppress and hobble women’s progress.

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She writes that it is the darker side of reactionary feminism, which: “while it purports to oppose misogyny and the manosphere, it mirrors many of its regressive logics, and is characterised by an aggressive sense of fatalism, bio-essentialism, and a deep animosity towards liberationist feminism and any form of social hope.”

Dr Kay’s report makes perfect sense of a growing unease I’ve felt while watching TikTok videos that stray into this area, and upon reading the comments which seem cut from the same dehumanising cloth that shapes misogyny.

As a journalist who has heavily focussed on women’s journalism, part of my consumption of this type of content is to also weed my own garden. To make sure that when I speak or write about things relating to women’s equality, I am making sure to include the collectivism as well as the agency around individual choice – something that is missing from a lot of reactionary feminism, as well as neoliberalist feminism (which can crudely be summed up as the girlboss/corporate strand of feminism) because of the over-emphasis on individualism.

But all of this nuance is being lost in how the femosphere is being reported on because the average person doesn’t necessarily understand what reactionary feminism is, let alone how it connects to bio-essentialism (transphobia), and instead is being bundled up as feminism with a capital F, which is having a dragnet effect on other conversations around women’s equality, essentially devaluing them and shutting them down.

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While I hope journalists are not doing this on purpose, the habit of taking fairly complex things and shrinking them down so that the general public understand them, or by pandering to the most base emotions and amplifying things that rile people up so that they just keep consuming more and more content, tends to have terrible consequences that often create panic and fear. I’ve seen this most recently in how the cost of living crisis was reported on in 2024, and I see it repeatedly in the world of nutrition (remember when we all thought bread was the devil?).

One of the main bugbears around how the femosphere is being reported is the inference that it is an equivalent threat to the manosphere, and it isn’t. Although it has similar hallmarks – from the ‘value’ assigned to men to the fatalism (that there are no redeeming qualities about them), to the fact that like many manosphere influencers, the femosphere seems like a money-making venture rather than these women caring anything about the women they claim to be helping – the scale is incomparable from the number of social media followers to podcasts.

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That doesn’t mean the femosphere isn’t damaging, or that it isn’t growing, but the media attention on it only serves to amplify it faster and quicker than it should be – much like other forms of extremism which stems from fringe movements, it relies on creating a false sense of shock and fear making it seem like a bigger threat than it actually is. The harms – while concerning - are also not equivalent, when we consider that Tate has been arrested for rape, paedophilic images and trafficking, and that harms to women are often sexual coercion and assault promoted by other manosphere influencers, while the femosphere is all about how to get a man to pay for your meal.

The real harm however, is that the fear and worry about the femosphere is being used to shut down the legitimate concerns and conversations raised by women who are still working towards equality, collective action, advocating for women in the VAWG space (which is aimed at cisgender men who cause overwhelmingly cause these harms, not trans people) and trying to rework gender roles that place the burden of domestic care on women.

All of these things are tied to much bigger issues, such as equality of pay, basic safety, civil rights around reproductive health, and in the case of the domestic burden, preventing loss of life given that in the UK, the suicide rate of the sandwich generation of women taking care of kids and elderly parents is increasing.

These are the issues that are in danger of being squashed, silenced and shut down because people may perceive this in the same bucket as the femosphere.

And let’s get one thing clear - the femosphere is not equality, and it certainly isn’t even matriarchy which focusses on collectivism and social cohesiveness. It feels like patriarchy that has been shoved into a Trojan Horse and placed at the feet of women who will eventually realise it is a gift of slow death. Because what is the end point to hating 50% of the population apart from poisoning oneself with loneliness and misery? I’m not even talking about romance – the familial connections, the friendships, or the conversations you might have in passing.

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Moreover, it feels like an extremely short-sighted view. If the femosphere is focussing on rinsing men for money in the dating sphere, what happens when you lose access to youth and beauty privileges as you age? What happens if you decide a man is a financial plan and that man then dies, or becomes ill? And, like the manosphere which centres women so much despite claiming to hate them, the femosphere places men – who they supposedly despise – at the centre of their universe, rather than focussing on their own skills, achievements and longevity.

One of the flimsiest arguments around getting men to pay for things appears on a Reddit forum that has 82,000 followers. In an article titled ‘6 Reasons Why We Insist Men Should Pay For Dates’, they say that while men often push back by saying that if women want equality they should pay their own way, ‘you can still have equal rights and be treated by men’. It doesn’t actually give any reasoning as to why, just that you can. I’m not sure what the antonym of critical thinking is, but that’s a fantastic example of it. There is no thought beyond the individual, no sense of analysis of contributing to a system of inequity that their daughters might inherit.

That doesn’t mean to say that certain criticism of men isn’t valid, or that they are innocent victims in all of this. We live in a world where the numbers of VAWG crimes are horrendous, where rape culture is endemic, and where women are dehumanised by men on a daily basis. But it does make tackling these things infinitely harder when the media lumps together different ideologies under the same banner.

I know it’s only a matter of time before people will say we’ve ‘gone too far’ because of what they are reading about the femosphere and conflating that with feminism, when the reality is that when it comes to meaningful change to be treated as equal citizens, we are still not even halfway up the mountain.

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Credit: KTB Wedding Photography

Can I have one week? Is that too greedy?

They said ask for what you dream of the most. I didn’t want to ask for too much in case it broke the wish with its weight and longing, but I don’t think 168 hours is too much, when measured on the scales against the love I had for you, have for you, and will continue to have until the last breath.

What is a week, really? A blur of mid-week dinners and hurried lunches and breakfasts while standing up. The phonecalls that can wait because I’m busy, so busy. Watering the plants. Finding time (and failing) to stretch my limbs. The catch-ups and 60-minute work calls, and trips to the gym and a slug of TV and then it’s gone, dissolved along with the things I could have and should have done.

I could just steal that week from someone who isn’t squeezing the drops of sweetness from it. Someone who might be stuck on an auto-pilot, putting off each day as if there is an endless supply, or spending so much of their time worrying about their future that they aren’t even noticing the present passing anyway.

But if I could have that time with you, if no one else is using it, if we could tuck it into some pocket of time where no one will miss it, I don’t even want one of the good weeks. I’ll take the week when both of us were ill and by day three the dog was bouncing off the walls until you shivered into a jacket and walked her on the common, returning with diamonds of rain on your shoes.

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If I had the choice though, I would love the week when we stayed on the beach in a small hotel in Malaysia with a powerful ceiling fan and cheap beer and a proprietor that looked as if he was running from the law. The week that you proposed and it was just the two of us and our engagement was christened with a flock of hornbills cutting across the jungle as sunset dripped across the canopy. But I know to ask for that week is greedy.

Okay, okay. Your silence says it all, a week is too much. Can I instead have one day? No one will ever know it is missing. Think about how careless people are with 24 hours. A whole day spent working, slipping life force in between binary code and pockets of time between meetings. A day spent hoovering cat hair and snipping dead leaves and cobbling together a meal from whatever is not wizened and sad in the fridge.

I repeat my offer again. It doesn’t have to be one of the best days. It can be the day we spent in bed with thunder circling our fancy hotel room, trees kissing the ground while we watched Firefly and ate crisps and whatever else we could take from the minibar. Or the day we drove to the hospital to see my sister when she gave birth to Leela, and the gearstick of our car literally broke in two while we were on the motorway and it was held together by prayers and your meaty paw trying to clasp it together in one piece.

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I’ll even take a fight day. We didn’t fight often, I know. And perhaps that was part of the problem. I couldn’t bear to see you upset, you couldn’t bear to make me cry and we fell into the trap of keeping the most important words unsaid. But remember that day when you were coming back from a party, and you turned up six hours later than you said you would, with a dead phone, belligerent, the shade of some drug working its way through your body? The day I looked at you and felt as if you, my husband, who I loved above all else, were a stranger in our home? I hated that day, and yet if it was offered, I would take it.

You’re still silent.

Fine, what about an hour?

What about one of the hours when our lives slid back into each other after being apart all day? When I’d come home and you would kiss me and tell me how you’d spent the day working and marinating fat stubby ribs, and did I want barbecue? And how I’d be delighted because to me, barbecue was always something I did at someone else’s house - a party, a gathering, and here it was, this special little thing in my back garden on a Tuesday, just the two of us.

Oh! What about the hour when you were finally free from heroin, and you could bear your skin to be touched again, and you let me cling onto you in the swimming pool like a koala? And I saw you close your eyes against the sun and smile, and I saw it for a moment, you in true happiness, sober, glad to be alive?

To tell the truth Rob, I would take a minute. Or even less. I would hold tightly onto the ten seconds it takes to say I love you and look into your eyes and feel everything drop away but that love and connection.

And even then, I would end the world for a second. One fragment to see you again, because I miss you and I love you and it never ends.

SEE ALSO:

Two things precipitated my decision to delete Whatsapp (and Instagram) off my phone while on holiday, an announcement that prompted 99% of people I told, to react with dismay. The first was a recollection of what holidays used to be like before Instagram, before Whatsapp, before any of the things that currently make us hyper-connected. (The reason why Instagram is bracketed is because it was less of a deal to delete than Whatsapp).

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I remember undertaking a sabbatical when I was 27 in 2008, travelling around India, and even stopping for a month to help launch the edition of Grazia, working as their features editor. (I had run out of money, and it seemed like a cool thing to do). Although the first iPhone had come out, they weren’t owned by the masses, and Whatsapp had yet to launch. Instagram didn’t launch until 2010.

The lack of connectivity and that lens, meant that everything could be experienced in real time, in one consciousness. The fresh fruit platters of papaya and pineapple that arrived every morning when I stayed in Mumbai. The way soft, amber light hit the archways of the fort I visited in Jaisalmer. Standing under a banyan tree, ridges of roots beneath my feet because I had shucked off my shoes and pressed my hands against the trunk. Other things, such as my writer’s block, the monkeys who tried to unsuccessful rob me of my handbag, a man who I kissed under the light of a crescent moon in Goa, whose name I don’t remember, only that my lips tasted of rum.

When I wanted to email someone, I had to try and find an internet cafe and pray through sweat and tears that the connection would hold. There was no data roaming, there was no data, period.

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I met my late husband at the tail-end of 2009, and while holidaying with him was one of my favourite activities because we loved a lot of the same things and he was wonderful company, part of that was because I didn’t have to share him with anything or anyone else. It could be just the two of us, in our little bubble. We got engaged in Malaysia in 2010, and although we called our families to let them know, I remember that day being one of perfection. We took some photos of the ring and that was it - the rest of it was spent drunk on love, and then on beers, writing out our wedding plans on a napkin while sitting at a beach bar.

The second was motivated by scarcity. The last two years have been very challenging money-wise, which has meant that holidays have been greatly reduced. What little time I do take as a holiday is therefore precious. When I took a short break earlier this year and splashed out on a luxury weekend, what should’ve been an immersive mental break, instead meant that I was absorbing dross and admin because of the immediate messaging pipeline of Whatsapp.

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For anyone who hasn’t seen The Mindy Project, it’s a comedy show by director and actress Mindy Kaling that came out in 2013 about a hot-mess gynaecologist living in New York. Whatever your feelings about Kaling (she is equally loved and criticised within my own community), her show was the first time I had ever seen someone who looked like me, did mad sh*t like me (maybe not cycle into someone’s swimming pool drunk, but close enough) and was figuring out her career like me and a lot of my friends.

Mindy Kaling in The Mindy Project

And it didn’t ignore outside realities, even when it was trying to be funny. In season one, episode 14, Kaling opens the episode with a scene at the Empire State Building, a place that both she in real life, and her character Mindy Lahiri thinks is the most romantic place in the world.

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The scene opens with Kaling’s character saying that she goes to the Empire State Building every two weeks to check out the queue (and scope for any prospective romantic leads), her eyes shiny with hope. She then gets pulled aside by security, and in a small office, the security guard asks her questions about why she’s there. What follows is a sequence of very funny lines by Kaling - ‘I’m looking for something explosive’, ‘I hope we’ll be together for eternity’. Then, she tries it on with the security guard peering at the badge on his jacket, asking: “Is there a Mrs Confederated Security Solutions?”

It then finishes with Homeland security storming the office, with her yelling at the security guard: “You could’ve just said yes!”

I’ve been thinking of this scene in light of Angela Nikolau, 33, and Ivan Beerkus, 32, who scaled the tower building to unfurl a banner that said: “When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace.” Beerkus then got down on one knee and proposed.

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Since then, reading various takes on social media describing them as hot baddies, and some of the comments by local authorities, has been unbearably jarring. They’ve been described as ‘daredevil climbers’ (they do similar stunts in other places), one piece of news commentary said: “they kissed the sky and then each other.” The couple have been arrested, but given the fairly lackadaisical, ‘look at those pesky scamps’ response to them so far from authorities, I don’t suspect much will come of it. There’s footage of an NYPD officer climbing the ladder to speak to them saying: “Hello, how you doing? Can you just stay where you are? You can’t be up here.”

A spokesperson for the Empire State building said the “unauthorised incident” had posed no danger.

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Being a UK citizen, I’m in no position to be commenting on race politics in the US, but it’s safe to say that not everyone gets a fair shake by law enforcement, yes? The US of course doesn’t have the monopoly on racial profiling - here in the good old U of K, black people are four times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person in England and Wales. In my own experience, going through airport security as a brown-skinned person is still a wheeze. You are never going to see us in a ‘nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday’ meme because we know that getting drunk and disorderly on a plane, pissing into cup holders and trying to jump the e-gates is not for the likes of us. We even for a different, quieter voice and it’s been that way since I can remember.

So can you imagine the scenario in which the two people who pulled this stunt on the top of that very building in that very city, were brown-skinned, and they weren’t shot dead by the end of it? Complete with a helicopter circling to take them out? Because I can’t.

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Credit: ITV

The reason I am so terrible at baking is because I do not possess the patience for it, nor the adherence to measurements. I end up mixing in butter that hasn’t properly melted, use the pasta colander for sifting because I’m too lazy to buy a proper one, and when it’s baking, feel the unholy compulsion to open the oven to check it is doing okay. I cannot resist the urge to TINKER, and in wanting to know the answer around whether or not it will be successful, I torpedo it.

I’m experiencing something similar with regards to wondering what kind of older lady I’m going to be. Despite the utter hypocrisy of telling people younger than me to have more chill about wanting to know which direction their life will take, it turns out I have little chill myself. Because I know what kind of older woman I want to be: someone who is wise, funny, holds her boundaries, is fierce but not mean, and has a banging fashion sense. I’m just worried about how I get there.

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Ever since I read that beautiful poem by about AI and how our usage of AI is eroding our conversations and connections with real people, I can’t stop thinking about how it has affected my life, and the lives of many others. How we are borrowing currency from our future relationships by shortcutting how we navigate life now, which I fear will leave us socially bankrupt in the years to come.

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A lot of the discussion around AI is currently framed in how people are losing their jobs to it, and that can be connected to things such as the unemployment rate, which is particularly affecting young people in the UK. I appreciate AI isn’t all negative - after all, when used as a tool, it can be enormously beneficial, in particular those with disabilities looking for more elegant, efficient solutions around mobility and communication. But what we are currently battling is the continuous shading between what is a tool, and what is replacement for the core, fundamental parts of how we interact and connect with each other.

Some of it is hard to quantify, but Shawn hit upon something in our blind spots because the overall negative collateral isn’t yet evident. How do you begin the count the tiny deaths in your social interactions that are due to AI when you aren’t aware of them? Whether it’s travel planning or asking for advice about your love life, it is perceived to be easier to ask a robot about the best thing to do rather than a human who has lived it and I’m not sure how we got here.

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I made the mistake of googling: ‘is time real or a concept’ and following a brief wander into the theory of relativity, quantum physics, the subsequent explosion of my brain, a cup of tea required to assemble the pieces of it back together, here we are, working with the basis of psychological time, that we measure and log events as they happen.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about time recently, after watching podcaster Steven Bartlett getting an utter drubbing for saying that a couple of glasses of wine ‘ruined three days’ of his life and that he ‘podcasted worse’ as a result. He then went on to describe the domino effect it had on his sleep, his eating habits, his gym-going, and how he was checking his fitness tracker and noticing with dismay his cortisol and dopamine levels.

Aside from the crime of trying to make ‘podcasted’ a word, the main problem wasn’t Bartlett trying to over-dramatise minor alcohol use (he wasn’t referencing an alcohol problem for context) but rather the endless raking over personal behaviours in order to achieve Maximum Optimisation of Life. The idea that every part of your life should be tinkered with and measured so that you’re living the best possible existence at all times.

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As someone who has stopped drinking, I fully understand the benefits that quitting has on pretty much every single aspect of your life. But I would also be lying if I said that there is anything in sobriety that can replicate the hedonistic, loose fun that you can have with alcohol.

In any case, this isn’t about alcohol use.

This is about Bartlett and his fellow podcast bros optimising their time to some unattainable degree framed as a new concept, which is actually one of the oldest concepts, chiefly the human folly of trying to cheat death.

It’s like the plot to a Disney film where a bunch of intrepid adventurers go into the Amazon to locate the pool to everlasting life, except way, way worse because they’re wearing tinted glasses, slamming down shots of pre-workout, going from a grey office to a grey gym, checking their fitness trackers and suffering a personal crisis because their dopamine levels aren’t optimal because they ate the wrong kind of almonds.

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Have your veins ever been filled with so much rage, you worry your epidermis will smoke from the inferno of it all? That is how I feel now, and not because we are in a time of a British heatwave. There are fans and ice cubes for that, and avoiding the sun between the hours of 12pm to 5pm which we don’t adhere to because our two states are denial and exceptionalism.

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On the subject of denial, let’s get into that, shall we? Having spent weeks, months, years being told the men are in a loneliness epidemic caused by women refusing to date them, that the futures of boys are in jeopardy because girls do better than them at school, that they feel disenfranchised because girls are afraid of them, and having almost believed that perhaps they were facing a gender-related crisis on par with the violence against girls and women, we in the UK had a hard, horrible dose of reality.

This week came the sickening news that three teenage boys who raped two teenage girls aged 14 and 15, have walked free with only youth rehabilitation orders, despite grotesque aspects of the case such as one of the attacks being perpetrated at knifepoint. The judge, Nicholas Rowland said that he wanted to avoid ‘criminalising’ the ‘very young boys’ two of whom were 14 and one 13-year-old, who laughed and jeered as the attacks were happening.

To understand the magnitude of this, context is needed. Court cases for rape are rare - only 2.6-3.6% cases make it to court and only 1-2% of rape cases ever result in a conviction. Annually, there are around 71,000 reported rapes, and when you consider 5 in 6 women don’t report it at all, and 7 in 8 men don’t either, that number is likely to be much higher.

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I learned this week that one of the reasons it’s so hard to get a conviction is because of the lack of evidence and because the experience is usually so traumatic for a victim they may pull out. It makes you understand the magnitude of what someone like Gisèle Pelicot went through, even though I don’t know that my mind can fully comprehend it.

In this recent case, there was evidence because the boys filmed the rapes, and posted it online.

One of the victims has said that the outcome was like a ‘rock straight to my face’ and in a poem read to the court, one girl said: “All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that comes.” Since the ruling, they have said they are worried to leave their homes because their attackers are still out there, roaming free on the streets.

The message from this case was two-fold and it was universal. The first, is that society has loudly again broken the pact to protect its most vulnerable. What incentive do you then give girls and women to speak up and come forward? You offer nothing - not justice, not her sanity, not her safety. And certainly not even your ability to listen to her, given how many men I’ve heard instantly leap to cries of false accusations when discussing other rape cases.

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The second is something we already knew: the futures of boys and girls are not considered the same. That the judge deemed the future of these boys as more important is obvious misogyny. But for him to not recognise that the future of these girls has been forever altered, and that whatever is left deserves protection and safeguarding, indicates that he never saw it as something of value in the first place.

In the last few weeks, and even months, as a result of publishing a book around women’s empowerment, She Wanted More I’ve heard a lot of this ‘what about men’ and ‘what about boys’ narrative, which is real when it comes to things like their loneliness, unhappiness and disenfranchisement. But where it has made me incandescent, is when it is framed in the context of girls and women.

That their woes is something we are doing to them, rather than it being the shit-paste of patriarchy that taints everything, that they gobble up and pass on down to each other in school yards and locker rooms and board meetings without seeing they are also poisoning themselves. We aren’t the ones feeding them that to them and we aren’t the ones who built the prison that tells them that in order to be a man they must never talk about their feelings and that monogamy is for simps.

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People assume that I must be unquestioningly sympathetic because I have spoken before in the men’s mental health space and because of my husband taking his own life and the high male suicide rate. And I do - of course I do. It is vital work. But I also refuse to go along with the narrative that somehow women have it easier because we talk about our feelings, as if we don’t carry the burden of caregiving in relationships with men who aren’t able to engage in mental health help due to gendered stigma.

The most valid and vital conversations around men’s mental health are the ones being had by those who are willing to take their own demographic to task and have difficult conversations, rather than jabbing a finger about how good the women have it.

Because when we consider that a woman is killed every three days by her partner or ex-partner in the UK, and that one in eight women take their own life due to domestic violence, I’d say we have problems of our own.

The framing of a narrative is crucial. Last week I had a woman in the audience of an event I was doing, ask me what my views were on: how girls are doing better than boys in school, and how inadequate this may be making them feel. Girls are doing better in school because they work hard, I replied. Not because of something they are doing to the boys. There is still rampant unconscious bias in how we teach girls STEM subjects versus boys. Is anyone talking about that?

But also let’s consider this. Are these girls coming up into a workforce that pays women the same as men? No. Do we live in a time when we have 50/50 of women on boards? No. When these girls turn into older women and it’s pension age, will they still have to work decades more than men to achieve parity? Yes. So what are the boys worried about? The world turns in their favour. It always has.

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There is no problem in talking about the issues that affect boys, but there is a problem when the very same people don’t seem to be interested in looking at it from both sides. It is interesting how the ‘what about the boys’ people are quiet in the aftermath of this ruling. It put me in mind of male model David Gandy who, a few weeks ago, went on the podcast Begin Again. Gandy is advocating for better male role models for boys, and how this is vital to counter the incel narrative, and that is important work. But what I couldn’t believe was the way he talked about how 60% of girls are afraid of boys in school, and how this makes boys feel bad.

Because if you are going to talk about girls being afraid of boys in school, you have to talk about the why. And in the UK, we are seeing the ‘why’ play out in real time. Beyond this court case, girls’ rights charity Plan International revealed that one in five girls receives unwanted sexual attention from the age of 12. This is a cultural sickness that is upheld by rape culture, and rape culture is upheld by jokes, by men staying silent and by people looking the other way, and by never considering what happens to the life of a girl or a woman after experiencing such a thing.

If 59% of girls have experienced sexual harassment at school and the rise in far right ideology thanks to the incel goon squad mean that girls are having to modify their behaviour around speaking up around boys, why are we not looking at both sides of this?

So let me ask a different question: what about the girls? Where does this leave them? What exactly is it that they are doing to boys as a demographic that makes them scared for their lives? Or makes them not want to speak up? What about their futures as they come up into a place of work, where they might be the only woman in a room, and how confident will they feel about advocating for themselves?

If we are expanding that to the other conversation that has dominated headlines in the last year - what about women who statistically experience more loneliness than men? Which isn’t to say the loneliness of men doesn’t count but perhaps rather, we can talk about how this thing of loneliness affects us all, not just framing one side against the other, except in the very real statistics about which side is the perpetrator of violence towards everyone, not just women?

No one is saying the livelihood and happiness of boys or men doesn’t matter. Or that all boys are rapists. Most boys I imagine want to goof off with their friends, impress each other with learned statistics and play games. But there is a reason why the UN sanctioned the Day of the Girl as a vital moment of raising awareness around child marriage and the millions of hours girls spend doing chores in comparison to boys, and the Day of the Boy is a lovely, nice to have around their wellbeing. The stakes are different, they just are.

Regardless of the disparities, our fates are entwined. I believe fervently that the key to boys and men being less miserable and more happy is if they are just allowed to be themselves and don’t feel they need to fit a particular mould. My friend told me about this one boy who goes to her daughter’s school, and every Christmas he knits little presents for his classmates and they all love them. It made me cry. There are some weeks, like this one, when my faith in the next generation is literally held in the hands of that little kid and his knitting needles, and it feels precarious.

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So I wonder and I ask again: what about our girls?

I wish for them a version of what I wish for women every day, of every year. I wish they get to be children for as long as possible. I wish for them to whizz down the hill in their bicycles. To lie under the sun in a park watching clouds and birds wheel overhead. I wish for them never to know the touch of hands they didn’t invite. I wish they never feel the kind of stare that makes them anxiously tug down the hemline of their skirt. I wish they carry that unmatched, unbreakable spirit they have when they are five straight into adulthood and beyond.

I wish that little girl laugh that contains the highest note of what our world could be until it teaches them otherwise, could last forever. I wish that they are just allowed to be, with a future ahead of them - as bright as sunshine, as soft as feathers. Because their futures don’t matter more, but they matter as much. And can we honestly say, in the aftermath of this week, in the wake of Epstein this year, that we live in a world that truly believes this?

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Hi everyone,

Now that I’ve finally submitted the draft for my novel (out in 2027), and published my non-fiction She Wanted More, I’ve got time to dedicate to helping people with writing.

I have just opened up my calendar for more 1-2-1 sessions and coaching from next month, but I appreciate not everyone can afford these. As a trial, I am going to run a Substack Live every month where people can submit their questions via email on the Substack app ahead of time, or can ask questions during the live.

This can range from basic writing questions about articles, Substack posts to anything to do with publishing books.

The first one is on the 16 of June at 7pm GMT and will be available for people to watch back afterwards if it is outside of your time zone.

Make sure you save the date and submit your questions if you can’t attend the live.

xx

When my husband Rob died ten years ago, I remember one coherent thought floating through the murky soup of pain like alphabet spaghetti: you cannot choose bitterness.

I’m not sure what prompted that moment of lucidity - one might call it a higher power, another might say it was the fierce part of my brain fighting for air amid the drowning - but I remember thinking you’re right, you’re right.

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Because it was very easy to choose it. It was easy to lean into the volume of what I’d lost and to wander the rooms no longer occupied by him. It was easy to look at my friends, and how quickly they moved back into the comforting grooves of their lives that looked the same after they attended the memorial, and resent them for it. It was easy to want people to make me laugh and at the same time think how can you laugh when my life is in flames? Every time someone got engaged or married, or had a kid, I could have compressed that news and feathered a shitty nest filled with shitty thoughts about how terrible my life was and how those other people had NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER THOSE LUCKY F**KERS.

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But I knew that was a dangerous path. I knew that path led to sitting alone in a room, maybe with an occasional visitor burdened by obligation, sans light, sans joy, sans everything. And I also knew that this shiny future I felt I was being denied, wasn’t real. In a hypothetical world where my husband hadn’t died, we still would have had all the issues that brought us to separation, and I still wouldn’t have had that version of reality I felt would fix everything.

That seedling of thought around bitterness has sprung up into an ethos, but there are still times when I find it challenging - especially when it comes to work and other things.

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Let me preface this immediately by asserting that I understand diet culture does a number on us all regardless of gender but that this disproportionately affects women. I shouldn’t have to expand on why but I once had to explain to a male fitness influencer who felt very confident educating women about periods, but rejected that women have more pressures placed on their aesthetics because it is how patriarchy grants them status and value.

A man is valued for his brain, a woman is valued for her body. At least that is the message soldered into us from the time we were babies where the boys were handed a hammer and we were handed a hairbrush.

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While I have heard men utter all kinds of fat-shaming, diet-culture things over the years, it is often aimed at other people. Women of course have the propensity to fat-shame other people, but the way they shame themselves especially around food borders on an epidemic.

(For the sake of level-setting, I’m not including people with eating disorders in this as that is a much more serious topic, and one that I am frankly in no position to be discussing.)

At 45, there are things that I am becoming less and less tolerant of. Women of a similar age will know exactly what I mean. The things you kept quiet about. The things you laughed off. The number of times you clenched your hand into a fist and pressed the fingernails so tightly into your palm, four crescent moons appeared in the flesh.

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For me, women talking badly about their own bodies is one of them. Another is berating themselves about food if we’re sharing a meal together at a restaurant. Given that I work with and spend time with women of all ages, and of all backgrounds, it amazes me how the phrases are always the same:

Wow that has so many calories in it!
I’m trying to be good
That’s so many carbs!
Would it naughty of me if I ordered dessert
Would it be naughty of me if I order bread
That’s huge! I don’t know if I can finish it (goes on to finish it)
*Tries a sliver of cake* I’m being so bad today!

The women who say these things deserve more than this. And I could go the rest of my life without hearing any of these ever again.

Part of the reason for me writing this piece is to quietly urge women who do this, to start a journey that might help them to stop, whether that is anti-dieting, mindful nutrition - whatever feels right for you. To find some sense of compassion for themselves rather than getting people to co-sign their shame.

I am not going to agree with you that you’re bad because you took a biscuit or two. It doesn’t make for great conversation to hear about the things you’ve eaten in the last 24 hours and that’s why you can’t order the fries even though you really want the fries. I’m about to start working with The Felix Project, a charity that tackles food redistribution for people who are going hungry, who otherwise would be eating food from rubbish bins and this kind of thing is getting harder to listen to.

And because I’ve looked into the future - namely my parents’ generation - and it isn’t going to end unless you end it.

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Some of them are knocking on 80 and still shame-eating chocolate behind the shed, talking endlessly about fat and calories and ‘oh I really shouldn’t’. I still have conversations with loved ones including my parents who talk about how ‘tired’ they are and I ask them what they’ve had to eat and they reply ‘a piece of string and an apple core’ and seem mystified as if they don’t understand how food works as a fuel source. Which is mad because clearly there was a point when they understood how food worked because they fed me.

Most of them have crumbling bones because they didn’t know about osteoporosis and prevention, and instead of pouring their energies into this, the fixation around food continues and I’ve finally realised that for them, it is never, ever going to stop. They were the ones subjected to the onslaught of 80s and 90s diet culture and I don’t think anything short of therapy or reprogramming their brains is going to break the circuit where they can allow themselves to have a piece of cake without uttering a single negative word about it.

Another part is self-serving. Before I came to a sense of neutrality around food thanks to weightlifting (and that still took a long time), I too was complicit in a lot of mad shit. One of the worst was the no bread years during the early 2010s because we were told bread was the devil, especially gluten and if you ate so much as a breadstick you would instantly go up two sizes. I don’t think I was able to eat a single piece of bread without mentally flaying myself during that time.

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A lot of work has gone into repairing my relationship with food. Part of that is that I do a lot of sport, so I see food as an extension of optimising my training. I need to be fuelled and I do need to make sure I eat enough protein to repair and recover from training. I eat what I want, and because I use moderation as a guideline, I don’t tend to binge on things because I’m not in a state of restriction. I do not ever say things like ‘I’m being bad or good’ when it comes to food, I try not to freak out about high calorie things on the menu. I do have a rough idea of calories I need at a maintenance level per day, and I generally stick to that over the course of a week. I try not to view that with any more emotion than I would filling a car with the amount of petrol it needs for the size of its tank.

I generally have a good relationship with food, but someone using diet culture language while we are in a restaurant tests it big time. It’s also impossible to listen to it and for it to not taint the meal we are having, like finding a hair in the soup.

These days, I don’t tend to share meals with new people I know who do this but there are exceptions. Work meals in groups are always fraught with at least one person making a comment, as well as gatherings that include friends of friends.

It’s harder with older friends and family because even though I’ve told them I don’t like it, they aren’t thinking about me when they talk about how many calories something has. They are thinking about their own relationship with food, and I have a small amount of empathy for that because I used to be them.

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It’s not impossible to eat with people who might be tracking their macros but it is all about their delivery of the information. One friend just says it matter-of-fact and that’s it. She doesn’t follow it up with any further explanation around weight loss, she never says she is ‘trying to be good’ because truly it is none of my business, and I also don’t care to know. I have never had to explain this to her, because her relationship with food is neutral and rooted in sports and athleticism.

Newer friends get one roll of the dice in a restaurant and that’s it. If I sense a strangeness around food then it’s not a dealbreaker - we can do many other things aside from eating.

These rules may sound severe, but I know what it’s like to eat with people who really like food, and it’s anything but miserable.

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It isn’t just about the food itself but everything that surrounds it. The friend who gets excited about the menu beforehand. The ‘can’t wait to try…’ messages. It’s the deliberation of who is sharing what, or if sharing is even happening at all. It’s the clapping of hands as something arrives and it looks better than your imagination conceived. The little ‘grunf’ when you eat and it’s perfect, just perfect, this moment in time where company meets food meets some small little pocket of your soul that finds pleasure in this. It’s the debate of whether there is room for dessert, or whether you might walk around and find dessert on the way home.

This turns the sharing of food with people we don’t probably see as much as we’d like, into what it should be: joyous. I just don’t want to waste anymore time on diet talk. And I wish we could allow ourselves that joy a little bit more. To get to a place where that negative voice gets a bit quieter. Where calories on a menu are just numbers not attributes. To eat the chocolate chip biscuits, to savour that last lick of cream, to lose ourselves in hot, pillowy bread, without a side order of shame.

It tastes delicious, I promise you.

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My internal voice has a volume of around six out of ten, and depending on the state of my mental health, sometimes I can (thanks to therapy) reduce the volume on certain things even more. On any given day, that will be around saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, accidentally tripping over my shoes or worrying about whether or not a friend is angry at me. But usually it’s about a variety of different things.

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In the last week or so, my internal voice has been loud and refuses to be turned down, and it’s been focussed on one thing: whether or not to blow my life up and engineer a significant, dramatic life change for a year that will alter how I work, how I live and will most likely take me away from my friends and family, most of whom live in England. I haven’t quite worked out the details yet but I would like to give up the responsibility of having a flat, have the freedom to move around (if I wish), work periodically as I go, reduce my costs, spend time with family, learn how to grow things and do something that makes the planet a bit better by contributing to a local community, perhaps.

Although culturally and ethnically I am Indian, I have never lived for more than a year or worked in a place that wasn’t the UK, my home country. Like a lot of people, I don’t love change, and I like my routine. I also have a life I like, in a home I love, so I am not trying to escape my sadness or unhappiness. But something - in a very loud voice - is telling me that it is time for a change, time to shake things up and it’s getting harder and harder to ignore ever since I wrote a piece about the people who took a ‘gap year’ in their forties.

I just look around me and I think there has to be more to life than houses and cars and status and grinding and buying more and more shit and seeing Christmas advertised in the supermarkets from September. I don’t have kids but I do have bills, and increasingly I’ve been feeling trapped - as if I am just living to work. Every time I close my eyes a new season has begun and I’m having the same conversations with the same people about the same things and fuck me there has to be more to life than this.

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As I constantly bat between the pros and cons, what has emerged is a surprising realisation around how much more risk averse I am in my forties, than in my younger years. It has forced me to interrogate it, and sift out what is actually warranted worry, and what is a mental block, because I think it is actually connected to much bigger things. Also an inventory: have I always been risk averse? What are the risks I have taken and the lessons learned? How has ageing bettered or worsened my perspective of it?

Granted, we lose more of our gray matter as we age, which has an impact. A 2016 study by NYU found a direct correlation between this and risk. Lead author Ifat Levy, an associate professor of comparative medicine and of neuroscience at Yale University said: “…the decrease in gray matter volume in a particular part of the brain – posterior parietal cortex – accounts for the increase in risk aversion observed with age.”

But another part of it is also that we tend to start making decisions based around losses, rather than gains. While I can comprehend why that is - health and finances are important - it also makes me think about the quality of life. If we are living in a way that is conserving or preserving at the expense of wonder, discovery and mental expansion, what is it exactly that we are trying to protect? Moreover, it makes me understand perfectly how our lives shrink as we get older, and we become more reticent to learning things. And while I might not know what my older age exactly looks like yet, I do know that I absolutely do not want it to go down that path.

Back to blowing my life up - I’d like to walk you through my thought process and how I think it might be possible. Hold on for the ride!

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A few weeks ago, a woman posted on the Threads platform, something like: I think everyone in their 40s should take a gap year if they could.

Something about the arrangement of words struck me – perhaps it was the words ‘gap year’ rather than sabbatical, which has always implied a return to the work one was previously doing, or an escape from everyday life. I don’t know if I hallucinated this (thanks, peri-menopause) but I swore the woman went on to elaborate that being able to do so might mean a reset, a chance to think about the things that are really important, during a stage of life when it is easy to get stuck into old ways of thinking, and conversely, when there is still more time, scope and opportunity to course correct, rather than waking two decades later to a life of regret.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

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A couple of days ago, I wrote my own post on Threads asking if anyone had done it, and could they explain how they have done it. I expected a handful of replies – I didn’t expect 500+ and counting.

Some of the replies were probably along the lines of what some you are thinking as you read this piece. Who can afford to take a gap year in their 40s? What kind of privileged bullshit is this? Are the people able to do this mostly childfree?

But the vast majority – and I would venture to say around 80% of them were from people of all walks of life, with kids, without kids, who shared their stories of how and why they did it, and what they did. A gap year doesn’t automatically mean travel or backpacking - more on that later.

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It goes without saying that of course this comes with a level of privilege. If you are a single parent, and/or someone working multiple jobs to pay for the basics, this is going to sound ridiculous and it may be anger-making. However, while it’s hard to say definitively, the majority of responses didn’t indicate that the people who had done so, came from wealth. My observation was that most people saved or downsized - and not just in terms of their housing, but what they spent their money on.

While I’ll break down some of the common responses, there was one overwhelming pattern in many of the stories, which I think is worth paying attention to. The idea of a gap year, sabbatical, career break, reset - whatever you want to call it - may seem dreamy, or even wishful thinking. But for a significant number of people, this wasn’t the case.

For them, it was non-optional. Either it was caused by burnout - years and years of graft and endless bullying of one’s own mind and body - until the person physically and/or mentally could no longer do anything. Or it was prompted by bereavement, or serious illness such as cancer. Stress and mental ill health is still the biggest reason for sick leave (in the UK) and I don’t think we talk about it enough.

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The burnout stories hit me the most because the lesson in them was clear. Learn how to adjust your pace and have a searingly honest conversation with yourself about what you think is non-optional. Because the chances are, you don’t yet know what the word means. I think the reason why this lesson hits so hard for people in their forties is because there is a persistent sense of denial around how much energy one has (that includes mental energy) and a reluctance to admit you can’t do as much as you used to. And your forties is when your body and mind pulls the handbrake because the signs it has been giving you so far in gigantic neon letters, doesn’t seem to be working.

The reason why I think I’ve been fixating on the gap year concept is because at the end of last year, I found myself very close to burnout. Towards the end of it, I felt like a house that had no working lights in it, save for one small, dingy room. It frightened me, and made me wonder why and how I had let things get to such an awful level where despite everything I know about mental health, I had ignored so many warning signs and told myself I had to keep going.

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More broadly, I also keep thinking a lot about mortality. I’ve heard this is common for people who hit the 45 year mark. You begin to really think about the choices you are making, and get real with yourself about the consequences.

Here is what I learned from everyone’s stories:

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Last night, as I was disobeying yet another bedtime rule of no social media after 9pm, my head felt like hot garbage. Specifically, Andrew Tate-related. I had been scrolling on Substack, reading post after post on Notes – absorbing all the upset, sadness, fury, anger which my algorithm has fine-tuned to my sensibilities and what I want to see. I’ve also posted about it - and that was perhaps a mistake because it attracted a smattering of people yowling about censorship.

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I haven’t read any of the articles – sorry, I don’t want to. There’s nothing that I want to read that will make sense of this, and make me feel better. And even though I have never bought into the ‘Substack is a Utopia’ partly because I’ve worked for tech companies before and I know what drives them (money), I’ve always believed that Substack was better than the rest. Somewhere that felt softer, sweeter and driven by people who like to read and write.

And now, I’m not sure. Someone said that if Tate got removed, that would be censorship, and while my id urged me to call them a ‘fucking idiot’, my super ego knows that part of the societal pact is to not harm each other, and curb views that are misogynistic, racist and antisemitic, and yes, such views should be censored. I especially don’t want young people reading that crap – did no one learn anything from Adolescence or Manosphere?

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Anyway. The point is, I’ve voiced my discontent and now I have to remove myself from it because otherwise, I will keep consuming it until my head resembles a landfill and frankly, I have better things to do. While it’s important to know about what Tate is doing on here, and frankly I find it mind-boggling that people still don’t know what the manosphere is, I can’t let it consume me because that is how he wins. So! Here’s how I plan to use that mental real estate instead.

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve done a lot of press and publicity for my new non-fiction book She Wanted More, and one of the most common questions asked is: what thing surprised you most through researching and writing the book? To recap, the book is a mixture of my own experience and musings, alongside interviews I conducted with women of all different ages including Marian Keyes and , research, studies and an anonymous survey I conducted of 1,000+ women.

What surprised me most was uncovering the myth of grandmotherhood. I wasn’t seeking it, I didn’t ask direct questions about it, and yet there it was, pervasive and recurring, from the interview I did with my own mother to the flashes of personal accounts in the survey. It appeared in several interviews. And it probably surprised me more because it was also in my blind spot. But once my eyes were open to it, I was shocked and slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t realised it earlier.

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My mother’s interview was the first I conducted, and I started with a very open-ended question that wasn’t leading her to any particular subject. I said – is there anything you feel quite strongly about, that you would like women to know?

She answered without pause: “Your role as a grandparent should be when you want to do it, not that you have taken on this additional responsibility which stops you from enjoying your life. But a lot of women seem to be taken for granted, and it is women who take on a major role in looking after the grandchildren. I get the impression that it’s dumped on them without asking. Maybe their children now find it difficult to get child-minders or make alternative arrangements. But grandparents now feel they can’t say no because otherwise they’ll feel laden with guilt. And that’s not right - it’s got to be at our convenience as well.”

The reason it took me by surprise was because my mother’s role as a grandmother isn’t at all labour intensive, so I knew she wasn’t talking about her own experience. My niece lives abroad with her parents, and while my mother likes to take care of her while she’s here, both her and my father’s lives haven’t changed much. When I pressed my mother further, she said it was based on what she had observed.

The mythical core is that grandmothers don’t really have their own identity outside of their relationship as it relates to their status as a parent, and a grandparent. Because a story springs up even in the absence of one, their identity is tunnelled out and replaced with what people assume they must want, ranging from being perpetually delighted to do childcare, and always being around to help out, even to the detriment of their own needs and wants.

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A good example came from a woman who took my anonymous survey who said that although she doesn’t live in the same city as her grandchildren, when she does visit, she is immediately thrust into helper mode. Which for the most part she doesn’t mind, and loves spending time with them, but being reduced to a glorified nanny without being asked what she wants to do doesn’t make her feel great, and doesn’t allow for her to do the things that make her feel like a person. In her case, her adult child didn’t consider that maybe she’d like to spend some time with them alone, and that would’ve been something she would have appreciated - but felt unable to vocalise it in case it reduced the access to her grandchildren.

The things underpinning this myth range from what a grandmother looks like to what she is capable of – which often looks like frailty and dressing in a particular way. Red Riding Hood’s bedridden grandmother was one of the strongest archetypes embedded into us from a young age. Stereotypes include: baking cookies, knitting, being terrible with technology. There is an endless conveyor belt of Christmas films that come out every year that underpins these aspects of grandmotherhood.

What is most offensive about this isn’t just the stereotypes. Maybe you’re reading this, knitting needle aloft, with some cookies in the oven and you’ve accidentally butt-dialled your family Whatsapp group. All of these things are fine individually, unless they are assumed, or grouped together to rob someone of their nuance and individualism, because then assumptions are made about what they are capable of, and that eventually leads to a self-sabotaging narrative that feeds itself. I had to confront the ways in which I had stereotyped my own grandmothers and truthfully, I saw them as benign, sweet women who only came alive in our presence. I know.

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It’s the way women are worn down into a gummy, unrecognisable version of themselves. I hadn’t even realised it until I’d finished writing the book. Where their individual desires are so decentred, they are not even on the map. Where what they are is a boiled down version of a shorthand that attempts to further shrink women so that their opinions and needs don’t get in the way of what everyone else wants. And where they are made to feel tolerated, so that in this precarious sense of self, they might agree to things in order to stay relevant and within the orbit of other people’s lives.

Janet Street-Porter got pilloried online for saying that grandmothers were being taken advantage of by their children, and while her writing is deliberately incendiary, I’d like to avoid the same fate. Also, because I’d like to believe that most people are not knowingly taking advantage of their mothers. But it does feel as if there are close parallels with the conversations that were necessary around identifying the difference between the institution of motherhood, and motherhood as an individual and collective experience. In other words, the myth of motherhood.

In the same way that most mothers adore and love their children, most grandmothers feel the same about their grandchildren. But loving them doesn’t default to endless labour and sacrifice, and if the same energy isn’t expected from grandfathers who get to play golf and tinker about in the garage, then it does merit discussion, otherwise it’s just a rerun.

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Some women want to do a lot, some not so much. Some have to navigate tricky relationships with their daughters and daughters-in-law, and some don’t live in the same country as them. Where it becomes a problem is when there is an expectation, which women feel they cannot say no to, because it’s expected of them, in the same ways that mothers are expected to be continuously enchanted by their children, do the lion’s share of domestic labour, and feel enormous amounts of guilt around not doing enough.

Dr Judith Edwards, a child and adolescent psychotherapist wrote a brilliant-sounding book called Grandmotherland: Exploring the myths and realities, and looks at how the role has evolved. She also breaks down systemic inequalities, and individual realities. One of the most interesting things she covers is the breakdown that might occur in the relationship due to people simply not understanding one another or there being a breakdown in expectations, and how this is to the detriment of children who benefit enormously from having grandparents in their lives who they have a positive relationship with. On a podcast called The Systemic Way, Edwards says that a lot of people think the relationship is ‘about doing. Actually, it’s about being.’

When I put some feelers out for anonymous accounts, much like the answers around parenting, a lot of it was love mixed with fear and challenges. There were also complete extremes from someone writing in to say: “Most grandparents I know are like me. They will do everything to spend more time with their littles.” To another saying: “I have many friends whose lives are taken over by the care of their grandchildren. But I’ve noticed these are friends are not confident that if they said they couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to help, it would be perceived as selfish!”

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A number of women said that helping out was hard but that they loved it and appreciated they wouldn’t be kids forever. While others struggled with communicating their concerns. “I did feel taken advantage of when I cared for my first grandchild if I am honest. It felt expected and they would go out partying after work and leave her with me longer.”

Others said they have communicated clearly when they aren’t available and set expectations from the beginning. “From the minute my three daughters were considering a family,” said Shanthi*, “I made it clear that they must only have them if they were in a position to afford to look after them without my help, but I also said that I would be happy to help two/three days a week if required.”

Jane* said that competing with the other set of grandparents can also be hard, as you may end up agreeing to things that you might not have done. “My son and wife have very different expectations to mine as a new parent…they’ve already booked us in for three nights in August when the baby will be 14 months, for example. Sounds like a lot, honestly, but the other grandparents are SO “yes, go away for 3 nights” (and that’s now, at 9 months) so it’s hard! I think it’ll be fine once it gets into a proper rhythm and I know exactly what I’m doing.”

But overall, I got a sense that women were starting to become increasingly aware that saying no to things or being able to do the things they love didn’t make them selfish, it made them better grandmothers. (Again, very close parallels with motherhood). “I so often see grandparents who look after grandchildren while their parents work and they look exhausted and miserable,” wrote in Ellen*. “I think I am a responsible grandmother, am very interested in my grandchildren’s lives, love sharing holidays, teaching them things etc. I think it makes me a better grandparent to them by not looking after them every day.”

There is a final reason why deconstructing the mythology around grandmotherhood is very important, and may merit a spin-off Substack. What about the women who aren’t grandmothers? Where is their place in society? Most of these women will have experienced a sense of isolation and an erosion of community the first time round, when it came to not having children. Having spoken to a number of women including about this, it appears there is a second wind in one’s 60s, around grandmotherhood that raises the same issues.

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One of the key issues I address in She Wanted More is around motherhood, and it being so inextricably linked to what we are told is a woman’s purpose, and how that is problematic for everyone. In the baby boomer generation, for instance, motherhood was not presented as a choice. It was something everyone had to do, when clearly some were not suited for it at all. Therefore, extracting what a woman’s sense of purpose and worth beyond motherhood, benefits everyone. It allows those who want to be parents to occupy it, and it creates an alternate path for people who are childless by circumstance or childfree by choice to not feel invalidated.

Devolving grandmotherhood from a woman’s purpose doesn’t devalue the joy and pride a woman has from being a grandmother. Rather, it allows her to see herself as a whole person who has as much right to enjoy the things she likes doing, alongside what she perceives to be her responsibilities.

She Wanted More is out now! Get your copy here.

MORE FROM POORNA:

“Will you write about this – us?” Henry* said, while standing in my living room, hair mussed from sleep, as he picked up a notebook emblazoned with the title “Be careful or I’ll write you in my novel”.

I looked at him, so fattened on love and desire, that it had blown out my ability to see clearly, and I said, ‘of course not’. This was the first man I’d been in love with since my husband died, and every nerve was a bonfire of feeling. I couldn’t imagine us not being together, let alone for anything to transpire between us that might result in jagged words. I didn’t know that Henry used words like ‘ethical non-monogamy’ and pretended to be a seasoned expert when he was like a man who taught himself how to lift weights without asking for help and then wondered why he had a back injury.

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That was five years ago, which I feel is a respectable time-frame to be able to write about the one and only time I was in a non-monogamous relationship. Partly because all sorts of feelings have been stirred up by the use of the phrase ‘one-way monogamy’ thanks to the broken little boys documentary on Netflix, and partly because I’ve just seen Lily Allen live in concert where she performed her entire West End Girl album in order, from brownstone to Duane Reade bag with the handles tied.

I haven’t yet read Lindy West’s memoir about her polyamorous/non-monogamous marriage, but it sounds like it’s along the same lines (husband asked for it to be opened, then broke the rules).

It got me thinking about double standards, shit communication and men and control and monogamy.

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Hello all! As You Were Saying with Poorna Bell is entirely reader-funded, and your support would be hugely appreciated. If you are thinking of upgrading to a paid subscription, now is a great time because as of 10th March, monthly subs are going up to £7 (currently they are £5.50) and yearly subs are going up to £65 (currently they are £50). Thank you s…

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The other day, when I was staring into the abyss after a major global conglomerate asked me to do an International Women’s Day event for free, I thought about how I might explain this situation to an alien newly landed on Earth.

“Wait, so let me get this straight,” they might say, “women don’t get paid the same as men, and you have this day/week/month to try and close this gap among many other things, and on this day, they want you to work for free?” And I would nod, and say yes, yes they do.

Then they might say, “hang on, why don’t women get paid the same as men?” And I’d ask what their species’ life span was because this could take a while, and they’d say: “well, when will you get paid the same as men?” And I’d say IN 2056 APPARENTLY AND NO, I DON’T KNOW WHY IT CAN’T END SOONER.

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And then we might go onto other topics, and I might tell them about the things that we celebrate that shouldn’t have needed to be celebrated in the first place such as the first time women in the UK were allowed to run more than 6km (1975) to women’s boxing only being added to the Olympics in 2012. I might watch its eyebrows shoot up (if it had eyebrows) when I explain things like only 5% of women hold leadership positions in tech companies, or that in certain parts of the world such as Afghanistan, you can’t hear the sound of a woman’s voice in public. And they might go: “what is wrong with them?” And they would be correct. Because how in 2026, given what we know in terms of equality, are we still having to have conversations about this? Why hasn’t it just been sorted?

I’ve had the alien conversation in my head around so many different things. Higher rates of fatalities among Black women when giving birth. Women’s healthcare being decided by men. Abortion being made illegal. Women not being able to run in the dark. Not being safe in their own homes. Being made to feel weird about the choices they make in their lives where it concerns their safety and bodies (marriage and children). I’ve even had the conversation around school uniform and girls being made to wear skirts. I tried to have a conversation around the Epstein List but my brain just broke.

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While there are many reasons as to why these inequities exist, and why in certain parts of the world basic civil rights don’t exist at all, I kept coming back to the idea of gratitude, and how much people trade on the hope that women are just grateful to be in the room at all.

Because when I get asked to do something for free and am told there’s ‘no budget’, I realise that paying women is not a consideration because really, we are not that far removed from when we weren’t allowed to take part at all. I realised that even in 2026, people still just think we want a seat at the table. I don’t just want a seat at the table, I want the whole damn meal too.

Of course there are exceptions. I do a percentage of pro bono work for people throughout the year, and I don’t charge people if it’s an opportunity to directly promote my work. But being asked by a corporation to work for free? As if I’d say yes because I’d be so grateful for the opportunity? I don’t think so. My mortgage company doesn’t take gratitude, and my water bill isn’t paid with good vibes.

It occurs to me how much of the world operates on the assumption that women like to do things just because they are asked. Whatever world order existed that somehow convinced women that their success was handed to them by others, or that they didn’t earn their place, or that they should be happy to be asked at all (all things I’ve had said to me over the course of my career by the way) is no longer something I am going along with.

Call it middle age, call it middle rage. I am done with accepting scraps. I am done with being asked to starve while everyone else feasts. We are not grateful, we didn’t get here by chance, we have earned it. We have done the free work. Now pay us.

My new book She Wanted More - Reimagine your Future and Live By Your Rules is out! Click here for where to buy.